The blue pegasus mare sat on the ledge of her penthouse patio, saddlebags on her flanks, with her forehooves atop the meticulously hoof-beaten steel railing. She leaned over the railing and looked out at darkened and deserted streets of Canterlot. She knew the Ministry would be on top of her in a matter of hours, and her sense of self-preservation told her she probably needed to flee. Friendship was indeed magic, and the loyalty old friends had shown to tell her she was a wanted mare defied even the most stringent of security clearances. But as she looked down at the city she grew up in; one that had changed so much in the last decade, she recalled all the memories of her time in Canterlot, the good and bad: and began the train of thought to where it had all gone so wrong.
Fleetfoot had always thought of herself as good pony. What she had done, she told herself, was for the betterment of Equestria. Betterment of herself was part of the plan too; after years with the Wonderbolts, she had attained a taste for the highest quality and most expensive of things. But she figured that she had earned that right from years of service as a Wonderbolt – for service to the Crown, for Equestria, and for valour. She had practiced this argument with herself enough that she was able to abruptly cut off lines of questioning within her. It also allowed her to preemptively derail the metaphorical train laden with the topic, even if subconsciously knew it was just her meagre attempts to avoid having to justify the entirety of her actions.
The mare nonchalantly hopped up onto the railing and balanced on the narrow railing, before rearing up, and executed a head first dive with forelegs extended before her to minimize air resistance. She experienced a familiar thrill in her few hundred foot plummet, the worries plaguing her pushed from the forefront of her mind as adrenaline kicked in, her heart rate increasing, and her white mane coming unkempt in the slipstream. She had missed this feeling. Fleetfoot waited until she was approaching a dangerously low altitude before fully unfurling her wings, making instinctual minute changes to attitude and began a smooth Wonderbolts-style level out at a few dozen feet, street lamps zipping by her. This stunt would normally be considered highly illegal in the sprawling metropolis that was Canterlot, what with traffic and the disruption it would have caused; but at this early hour of the morning, nopony cared for those that would were tucked away in beds or at desks elsewhere in the city. As it was, Fleetfoot’s plunge only garnered the attention of a few distant streetgoers. With powerful and experienced strokes, the Pegasus quickly gained altitude, as the heart of the city faded behind her to be replaced with the more dimly lit suburbs, illuminated in amber tinges by the streetlights. She turned her head to see the distant and magnificent Royal Castle magically floodlit in the dark and cloudy early morning.
Fleetfoot blinked and quickly averted her eyes, her night vision now properly wrecked and afterimages from the brightness temporarily staining her retinas. Staying her course, the mare quickly exited Canterlot airspace, bound for anywhere but there; which was an issue. to be resolved She was a planner, yes, and she knew she should have thought this course of action through more, but fear of incarceration was a powerful motivator to forego planning for unpredictability, if only temporarily. And using that very same argument, Fleetfoot knew she had erred in her own planning that resulted in her profiting from the war. Didn’t it always seem that hindsight was twenty-twenty?
The pegasus cruised easily through the cool night air, enjoying the kinaesthetic pleasure of the air through her mane, as well as the sensation of her feathered wings pushing down against the air to keep her aloft, making good time in a south-easterly direction. She raised her left foreleg to consult map of the sleek blue Pipbuck attached to it, took note of the early hour of the morning, and set a course for the distant Mareami. It was far enough away from the main economic hubs, and there was (likely) little Ministry presence there that would need to be avoided. Probably.
The former Wonderbolt’s ears twitched, a roaring din quickly rising above the sound of the slipstream and the sound of her beating wings. Looking up from her pipbuck and searching the skies for the source, she quickly noticed a streak of light darting through the dawn sky a few miles off. She squinted, and saw a long fat cylinder with a pair of wings and rear stabilizers attached flying quickly past, a rocket motor shooting a plume of fire out behind the rocket. It could only be a zebra strategic missile, for the first time targeting the Equestrian capital. She observed the missile arc its way over the center of Canterlot, the population no doubt in the middle of the peak early morning rush to get to work, before abruptly plunging downward towards the ground, disappearing behind the skyline in its terminal descent.
She hovered, transfixed, as a flash of light was visible even in the distance from her vantage point, throwing up unseen but doubtlessly existent shrapnel, as a plume of smoke began to rise; making the site of impact for all to see from miles about. It took the sharp crack of the explosion a couple of seconds to reach her; but even as the crack faded from her ears, she could hear more distant rocket motors reaching a deafening crescendo as they whooshed by her.
This time, though, at least one of the Princesses had been alerted to the attack (or perhaps Celestia had been watching over the city as she began to raise the sun), and reacted commendably quick; a bright blue shield was abruptly thrown up from the Royal Castle to encompass the entirety of Canterlot and the surrounding suburbs, resulting in the incoming high explosive rockets exploding uselessly against the barrier, the explosions redirecting shrapnel outwards from the impenetrable barrier. By now, Fleetfoot had recovered enough of her wits to vacate the immediate area and climb to avoid the incoming volleys of missile.
The sounds of periodic but frequent explosions had grown less pronounced as she put distance between herself and the capitol under bombardment as the morning sun moved higher into the sky. It was unprecedented to attack Canterlot because of the strategic unimportance of the metropolis militarily. To attack Canterlot meant certain retaliation against Roam, as per the Communally Assured Reciprical Existance (CARE) policy. For a strategy in place in the event of the end of the world, one would think that it would not be used to justify attacks on a civilian population, even if. Ponies were supposed to be the one with the moral high ground in this war, after all.
Politics between Canterlot, the Ministries and the High Command of late had been messy. Not to say that they were ever straight forward – pony politics were and always had been notoriously just the opposite. But as of late, rash illogical decisions in upper leadership positions (including that of the Royalty) had been edging on the side of overly provocative to even outright scary. Seventeen years of hostility, and the two sides were no closer to resolution of what was just an overreaction of a rash international incident; now both sides had hooves on buttons, ready to balefire each other to oblivion. The tide of the war was in the favour of Equestria, with its technological advances, and it was likely only a matter of time until Equestria would win. This probably meant that attack on Canterlot had to be desperation. If this was any indication of the state of the Roam Empire, it would probably be for the best if the Equestrian Government stopped adding fuel to the fire.
The pegasus became slowly aware she had been absentmindedly looking down at the ground, having been left to her thoughts. She turned her attention back to reality, and took note of the mornings scattered cloud cover far below her, and she took a brief moment to marvel at the beauty of the lush green forest beneath her. It was not something new to her: she’d seen many different and distinct regions of Equestria when flying over them for events or part of deployments with the Equestrian Pegasi Corps, each interesting in their own way. But there was something about looking down on it from so high that made it seem almost prettier, the finer details dissapearing at a distance, appearing to be a shaggy carpet of green.
Out of the corner of her eye, a distant metallic something gleamed, not far below the altitude she was at and at least a dozen miles off. She turned her head and searched for it, finding a dark trail of burnt propellent and following it to the point of origin: a zebra missile. It was likely simply an off-target missile that the zebra systems engineers had accidentally improperly programed or had malfunctioned; as it was nowhere near anything of importance. This thought was emphasized as the missile abruptly dived towards the ground in the middle of the forest. She looked away, gazing forward at the path ahead.
Just prior to the zebra missile hitting the ground and lighting up the sky in massive explosion, expanding outwards in sphere for a good quarter mile, before receding and imploding into a billowing mushroom-shaped cloud.
Fleetfoot’s training took over, and the mare shielded her eyes and face with her forelegs, the perceived thermal energy intense against her blue pelt; her wings making one hard downward stroke and immediately snapping shut, tucking tightly against her body. She as she began falling, screaming obscenities. So the bombs had finally fallen. That had escalated quickly. The game was over, everypony had lost. She needed to get out of the air now and find shelter from the blasts. If the pegasus had her wings fully extended at this proximity to the blast, it was likely that the overpressure from the detonation would dislocate or even break her wings, and that was far more an imminent threat than the radiation. It wasn’t to say that radiation couldn’t kill; judging from the rapid clicking of her pipbuck, she was receiving a rather large dosage, given the lack of shielding or even cover, that would eventually accumulate to fatal levels; but Royal Equestrian Wonderbolt Academy emergency medicine classes had taught her that modern medicine could cure radiation, but it couldn’t cause broken wings to set in free-fall. So she proceeded to pray to Celestia as she fell, before the overpressure from the balefire explosion buffeted her hard in freefall for several seconds, accomponied with a thunderous roar, knocking the wind from her, before both abruptly receeded.
Seizing the opportunity, the blue pegasus regained a flying posture and spread out her wings, and shot at the ground as fast as she could; flaring hard before impact with the ground. She folded her wings, and took stock of her surroundings: she had landed in the middle of a forest, somewhere beyond Ponyville. She lifted her foreleg to look at her pipbuck. but the electromagic pulse from the balefire bomb had knocked out her pipbuck, which would require a specialist reboot, making position checking impossible. Se couldn’t stay where she was. Ponyville was out of the question, given the balefire bomb detonating not far from it. Multiple flashes of light and deep, distant rumbles reinforced her point, in addition to the flames of the burning forest miles distant.
As she started to move, she found herself unwilling to go anywhere immediately, falling back on her flank to look up at the sky and the distant black mushroom clouds rising high into the sky. Tears began to gather in her eyes as realization set in. She had a hoof in this. She had contributed to the end of the world and there was blood of millions on her hooves. She’d run, thinking that the Ministries had wanted her, yet she had inadvertently saved herself from destruction she had deserved.
She sat and pondered her situation, her past, her future. And the tears flowed freely, quiet sobs wracking her body as her one outlet for the grief and devastation of the loss of everything: materials she had had, ponies she had cared for, her livelihood: gone up in a cloud of ash – or in the case of Canterlot, a cloud of pink mist. The train of thought idly digressed to ponder the fate of Cloudsdale, before Fleetfoot reluctantly accepted that it would have been a primary target and likely ceased to be anymore. The realization that the skies had darkened; cloud cover encompassing the entire horizon was dully acknowledged by her overstimulated mind. Fallout from the detonations must have already begun to gather in the sky. That was fast, though she couldn’t fault the pegasi for their lack of interest in clearing the radiation-laden clouds in this instance.
Canterlot, Fillydelphia, Baltimare: all the economic centres of Equestria would now be aflame, as the thick torrents of billowing black smoke in the far distance showed that they doubtlessly ceased to exist as they did. The zebras were not the sort to botch up an attack like this. She knew this first hand from experiance derailing and countering zebra military effors; and she was also confident that the Equestrian balefire response would have inflicted more devastation than the zebras had managed to inflict on Equestria, as per CARE . That left her with nowhere to go.
She could continue towards her original destination of Mareami. Escaping the Equestrian Government was no longer the reason to get there; it was the hope that its relative lack of importance didn’t make it a target. She had nowhere else to go, nowhere to be. She needed shelter to wait out the immediate fallout from the bombs. It also appeared the long-jeered survival and Chemical/Radiation training she had received back at the Academy would actually save her life.
The dark grey pegasus colt lifted his head up in a daze, giving the memory orb and recollector sitting on the floor before him an odd look, and preceeded to rereading the terminal journal entry written before him, before collecting his thoughts and regaining situational awareness. He began to search the little cottage he had stumbled into for something additional to help explain what he had just seen. There was a thick film of dust over the contents of the room (as well as the bed) from at least a hundred and fifty years of neglect, a trail of hoofprints from his initial search of the room; but his second, careful inspection through the shack yielded nothing of value. Slightly dejected by the lack of forthcoming answers, the colt made his way over to the recollector, and moved it and the orb with it into his saddlebags, before moving out of the small structure, mind actively wondering what had happened to that dark blue mare.
Fallout Equestria: In Her Shadows