10 December, Y.C. 969
Canterlot
The night was about as cold as it looked — and with the view out the tower window half-blocked by icicles, that was saying something. Snowflakes swirled gently outside the Castle Tower, the night wind blowing them off the rooftops below; it was too cold for anything fresh to fall.
Aspia shivered slightly. The door was only opened a crack, but that was enough, as wind whipped around her. She took another sip from the mug of hot chocolate she clasped in icy hooves. At least she had that to keep her company; it was her third this night. A pity it was almost gone.
She briefly considered going back down to the kitchens and getting more, but dismissed the notion. That would take at least ten minutes, maybe fifteen depending on how well the kitchen staff had closed everything up. And those were fifteen minutes she couldn’t afford to lose. She had already been waiting here for hours, and with her luck the moment she left, he would show up.
Absently, she realized she had no more feeling in her right hoof. She stamped it a few times to get sensation back, recoiling slightly at the echo. At this hour of the night, the tower would be empty — that was the entire reason for being here, or at least a good part of it — but the noise was still uncomfortably loud.
All right; one more mug. At least going downstairs would keep her awake. And besides, he was already four and a half hours late. What were the chances….
A shadow slid across the door. She whirled, tensing up as it came in for a rough landing on the lip of the balcony outside — and caught herself as she recognized his brown-flecked mane. Putting the mug to a side with a sigh of relief, she pried open the door, dropping little bits of caked ice to the ground.
“General,” she called over the wind. “Glad you could make it.”
“Glad to see you,” said William Batchall, stripping off his flying helmet and feathering his wings with a little shake. “Damned glad to see you.”
Stepping inside the council chamber, he took a few sniffs of the air. “Is that chocolate I smell?”
“Was,” said Aspia apologetically. “Sorry, Billy.”
The moment he was inside the room, she slammed a shoulder into the door. Its hinges squealed, but it shut; almost immediately the room felt warmer. Not that that was saying much — with the big hearth unlit, the only heat came up through the floorboards below — but it was a fair sight better inside than out.
“Could really use some of that,” muttered Billy, shaking off the last of the ice from his wings. “Cold outside.”
“I can tell,” she said with a nod. “I had more, but that was four hours ago.”
“Sorry,” he shrugged. “Headwinds coming over Foal Mountain.”
She raised an eyebrow. “You took the long way.”
“Wasn’t about to go over Saddle Lake,” he laughed.
“Fair enough,” she conceded. After all, Saddle was uncomfortably close to Blackacre — and though Billy could take care of himself quite well, thank you very much, it wouldn’t do to have the head of Equestria’s Air Patrol flying by night so close to enemy territory.
Not enemy, she reminded herself. Just… not quite friendly.
“Believe me, if I could have put this off until tomorrow, I would have,” he said. “Like that,” he added, clapping a hoof.
“Let’s make this quick, then,” said Aspia, gesturing to the large council table, where a set of charts had been laid out for the better part of the night. “The last update Baltimare sent up said no change at the line.”
Billy snorted. “It’s not what’s at the line that I’m worried about.”
“Be my guest,” she said, waving a hoof at the map.
He tugged at the straps of his saddlebag; with a good yank it slid off, bounced once on the floor, and slid a few feet, its surface entirely coated with a thin layer of ice.
“Well.”
“Yeah,” he said, cracking the shell with a quick chop and opening the worn leather straps. “Fun trip. Remind me never to night fly again. I’m gettin’ too old for this.”
“You’re the one who said you needed to be here now.”
“I know,” he sighed, pulling out a set of charts. He smoothed them out on the table, laying them next to the bigger ones.
“Reports from the east side of the line are clear,” he said, waving a hoof up and down the mountain range that separated the Hayseed Swamps from the Badlands. “Ditto reports from Appleloosa, double ditto from the San Palomino Desert.”
“That covers the east and the west,” said Aspia, glancing at her own set of maps. “You’re missing a big chunk there.”
“I know,” he said. “We don’t have eyes on the Macintosh Hills between Appleloosa and Dodge.”
She frowned. “There’s personnel in the area.”
“Sure is,” he agreed, “just not enough of them. Barracks at Dodge are ancient. We’re doing the best we can to convert them, but they won’t be complete by year’s end. Another month, at the very least.”
“What are you working with, then?”
“Ground observers, mostly,” he shrugged. “Can’t risk pegasus flights during the day. We’re allowed to patrol our own border, but if we suddenly have a constant watch….”
“Of course,” she nodded. They couldn’t risk tipping off the dragons; things were touchy enough as it was. “Nighttime stealth flights?”
“Can’t do it without the proper equipment,” he said, shaking his head. “Need grooming facilities to keep feathers in trim and get the right masking. We’re downwind most of the time, but we’ve got to mask scent, and the only way to do that is with magic, so that means more ground support for unicorns. The supply train only gets bigger.”
“Right,” she said. The difficulties here were apparent, and she had no doubt that he and his staff were doing what they could. “So where does this leave us?”
“With spotty coverage of the most critical part of the line,” he snorted. “If the dragons are moving out to Blackacre, regardless of their intentions, they’ll cross between Appleloosa and Dodge Junction. We learned that the hard way the last time around.”
“And without proper coverage, they can do it without us knowing.”
“I wouldn’t go that far,” he cautioned. “But we wouldn’t get much by way of warning until it was too late.”
“Damn,” she said, shaking her head. “That’s a problem. But — go back a moment. Reports on the other parts of the line say things are continuing on the way they always were. No change.”
“Right,” he agreed. “That’s the key. Everything’s going fine. The dragons know Blackacre is a big, big thorn in our side right now. The way winter’s going, we’re going to have to get through to our stocks in Appleloosa somehow. All the dragons need is a quick surgical strike on the warehouses: take out the guards and sequester the goods, take out the railroad bridge over Ghastly Gorge and the road bridge north of Dodge, and you’d cut off access to those stocks, except through Blackacre.”
He shook his head. “We’d have to negotiate. They could extract concessions without breathing a single fireball. It wouldn’t take much to bring Equestria to its knees, and they know it.”
“And I know it,” said Aspia irritatedly. “Believe me, I know it. What’s your point?”
“Sixteen years ago, they fought for three years. For what? A standstill.” He spat. “And now, they can take what they wanted in three weeks. And we’d have to give it to them. And they know it. Don’t you think it’s just a little bit odd that they’re not moving troops into position?”
Her eyes flickered in the candlelight. “Damn.”
“Yeah,” he agreed. “Someone’s going through a hell of a lot of trouble to make sure it looks like the dragons are playing nice, when by all rights they should be building up forces, poking around the edges, seeing how far they can push us.”
“Which means they’re building up for a covert strike.”
“Which will probably come at our weakest point.” Billy smacked a hoof on the map, roughly between Dodge and Appleloosa. “Right here.”
“Damn,” she said again. “Looks like we need more intelligence.”
“Damned right we do,” he agreed. “The moment I figured it out, I pulled in my top scouts. Spent the last day and a half going over everything with them: windage, range, lay of the land; hell, we even talked about what the local rivers are like, in case we need to break out some subs.”
Aspia rolled her eyes. Using submersible scout posts to spy on dragons — who, after all, breathed fire — had seemed like a good idea at the time, but she couldn’t recall a single instance when it had actually worked. Then again, during the Dragon Skirmishes, it seemed like nothing had broken their way.
“Conclusions?” she asked.
“We can increase patrol range easily enough,” he said. “Run more patrols out of the advance posts in southern and western Hayseed. If they go on a straight line in and out, instead of running a circle, they can get closer in to the mountains while staying covert.”
He pointed to a pair of lines on his own charts. One of them was a loop, representative of current patrols; another was mostly a straight line, out towards the mountains and back. Both were the same length, but the latter brought the patrol pegasus a lot closer to the mountains than the first.
“We also need more night flights,” he continued. “High altitude flyers with good binocs. If they are trying to mask movements, then they’ll have a normal presence out towards the border lairs, but the farther in we look, the fewer we’ll see, because they’ll all be moving up to the front.”
“How can they do that without being seen?”
“Our best guess is tunnels,” he said. “With the right kind of diet, dragons can keep their smoke down; if they tunnel up at night, we won’t spot their fires.”
“That’s a lot of digging.”
“Might be able to see tunnels, but that means high-altitude day flights.”
“Risky,” she said, considering it for a moment. “Might be worth it.”
“Might be. I would do those one at a time, though; they wouldn’t be regularly scheduled. I’ve got a few candidates lined up. Either way, we’re going to have to increase night flights and effectively double low-altitude day patrols.”
“Sounds like you need more personnel.”
Billy cocked a smile. “It does sound an awful lot like that, doesn’t it? Third Wing’s currently on alert status up near Neighagra; I activated them when we moved the Fourth down to Hayseed.”
“How convenient,” she smiled. That was Billy, always thinking ahead. “How soon can they be in position?”
“Four days,” he said with a nod. “I’ve got the orders drafted; just need the royal go-ahead. But this all isn’t the main problem.”
“Dragons building up forces in secret isn’t a problem,” she deadpanned. “That’s a good one.”
“If we have both the Third and the Fourth in Hayseed, then that leaves… well, not much. First is here, Second over in Las Pegasus, Fifth in Manehattan, and Sixth of course back at Cloudsdale. If we activate more of them, that leaves the borders undefended.”
“Were we expecting company?” she asked wryly.
“No,” he conceded, “but I don’t like it. I want to deploy a wing to Appleloosa — a full wing, not a recon division — but pulling Las Pegasus to do it means leaving the western half of the San Palomino Desert undefended.”
“Leaving a hole in our lines for the dragons to go through,” finished Aspia. She eyed the map for a moment, noting the positions of the little blue boxes with three cross marks under them, each marking a single Air Patrol wing.
“How about a chain deployment? Manehattan to Canterlot, Canterlot to Las Pegasus, Las Pegasus to Appleloosa?” She traced the route out. “Yes, that would work. Keeps us from moving troops over… Blackacre.”
“That’s what I’m thinking,” nodded Billy. “Trouble is, at that point we’re mobilizing more than half of the entire Air Patrol. We can get away with one wing. We’re already calling the Fourth’s activity ‘exercises.’ We can probably get away with two wings. Call it a big exercise. But that means mobilizing the First, Second, Third, Fourth, and Fifth.”
Aspia sighed. He was right, of course. They had seven wings, and mobilizing five of them would be difficult to justify. The Sixth Wing was far and away the largest; called the War Wing by some, it only deployed from Cloudsdale in true emergencies. The Seventh ‘Wonderbolt’ Wing was mostly an exhibition and honor guard, but they had a full set of personnel. She would have to do the math, but mobilizing the first five wings would indeed only be about half of total Air Patrol personnel.
She restrained a snort. Only.
“That’s going to be a problem,” she said, shaking her head. “The Princess will not be happy.”
“Nothing much we can do about that,” said Billy with a helpless shrug. “We’re in the very lucky position of being able to reposition our forces before we start shooting at each other.”
A moment of silence.
“This is a chance we need to take.”
Another pause, longer this time. Shadows danced on the map as the candles wavered in the ghost of a breeze.
“Will it come to that?” she said, almost in a whisper.
“I don’t know,” said Billy. “But with dragons….”
He shook his head.
“We can’t afford to take any chances.”