//------------------------------//
// The Fighting Second 
// Story: Blackacre 
// by Princess Woona 
//------------------------------//

21 December, Y.C. 969
Hayseed Swamps

“Donner! Hey!”
The pegasus looked up from the various books on the table, each covered with planform drawings of dragons and tiny squiggles of text. He only got a few hours’ spare time, and to spend it studying for his spotters’ proficiency tests… well, any distraction was welcome.
“Gun!” he shouted, recognizing his wingpony’s voice. “What’s up?”
A tan pegasus shot into the tent; Donner’s expression fell the moment he saw the look on her face. Gun was short for Gun-Shy, itself a nickname bestowed in irony on the pony who, despite being an ace at the bombing range, was almost pathologically quiet in social situations. For Gun, being flustered was a state of being. Here, though, she wasn’t just flustered; there was anger and something more.
“Ponyville,” she said, wide-eyed. “The negotiations. The bombs!”
Donner was at her side in a flash. “What?”
“The Mane!” She shook her head. “You haven’t heard?”
“No,” he said with a snap of his head. “What the hay happened?”
“Came down in flames over Ponyville,” she said. “Crashed into the stage, took out the radio tower. Lost contact.”
“You’re kidding,” he said, more out of reflex than a belief that she could be anything but deadly serious. “Do we know…?”
“No,” she said slowly. “Lost contact. Last transmission that came through said she was coming down hard, on fire.”
“On fire?” Donner frowned. She was a helium ship; a fire would have to burn through half the ship to take her down, and that didn’t seem likely. Like all other pegasi, he had no love lost for the Army’s airships, but he knew the Army techs were good; equipment failure didn’t seem very likely.
“The flames,” started Gun. “They… they said they were green.”
“Green?” he echoed. Now that didn’t seem like equipment failure, not in the least. Green flames meant magic… or dragonfire. And if there was dragonfire —
“We need to gear up,” he realized. “Do we have orders?”
“Not yet…” 
“…but we will.”
She smiled thinly. There was a reason they were wingmates. “Let’s go.”
The camp outside the tent was not unlike a beehive, with ponies and pegasi running back and forth, occasional shouts of confusion cutting through the air. As much as he wanted to go find a radio and demand to be filled in, he knew he couldn’t, at least not just yet. If Gun was right, someone — or some thing — had just attacked the Mane. Airship or not, it was as much a part of the Royal Army as he was a member of the Air Patrol.
No one had given any orders yet, but everypony was moving to deploy. Ground crews scuttled back and forth with pallets of supplies, crisscrossing the thin layer of fresh snow with dark brown tracks, while just above them pegasi skimmed towards the prep zones, warming up their wings and shaking out their hooves.
The camp was a semi-permanent one, little more than an assemblage of tents pitched around a central landing clearing. The landing’s elliptical shape was roughly marked off under the layer of snow by small piles of stones. Pegasi didn’t really need a formal field, but it was useful to have a designated path so that, if they needed to come down under fire, the point defense unicorns would know where not to aim.
The field was framed on either side by a pair of stables. Even calling them that was generous; they were little more than several dozen equipment sheds arranged in a pair of long curving rows around the ellipse, mated side to side so they would keep each other warm. Not that they were much warmer than the outside, but the leather harnesses would freeze under a certain temperature. Icing was a big enough problem in the air; no need to deal with in on the ground, too.
Barely heated or not, all of the stables had their doors open, big wooden panels flipped up to face the landing zone. The snow had started to pick up, and they provided some measure of protection to the pegasi scurrying about under them.
“Base coat,” said Donner, shrugging off the utility cloak most of them wore on the ground and turning to face the inside of the stable, away from the landing field.
“Base coat,” echoed Gun, helping him into his flight suit. Dark blue and thinly padded, it would keep most of him warm at altitude, while allowing him enough maneuverability to stay safe. He stepped into it, pulled it up and strapped it on, snugging it to his much paler blue flanks; she crosschecked it with a tug, and he wheezed audibly as she pulled the straps tight.
“Harness,” she said, handing him a spidery web of well-oiled leather. As he did up the surcingle he noticed Gun glancing over the equipment rack.
“Full kit?” he asked.
Donner caught her eye. You didn’t suit up a full kit for a patrol. Or even for short-ranged combat operations. No, the only possible reason for a full load-out was if they were planning on flying a long distance and possibly fighting once they got there. And of all the potential deployments they faced, only one sprang to mind: Blackacre.
“It’s far enough away,” said Gun, pulling down a second set of thick leather straps. That’s what he liked about her; they didn’t so much communicate as think the same thing in parallel. He struggled into the breeching and wrested his tail into the crupper dock, pulling the whole assembly forward to mate to the breastgirth, the sturdy band around his chest that kept it all together.
Full kit wasn’t comfortable, but it wasn’t very uncomfortable either, which was the key part. The series of straps would keep the bulk of his load from shifting around; though that wasn’t usually a problem, after a few hours in the air, he would undoubtedly get sloppy, and he would rather have the straps cut into his flank than suddenly have part of his cargo roll off one side and yank him into a tailspin. It only took one slip… flyers rarely made that mistake twice.
As he secured the slack on the straps, Gun ran her hooves over the taught leather, feeling out any imperfections and giving the straps one last tug for good measure.
“It’s snug,” he declared. “They feel good.”
“Looks good,” she said, hefting an oblong package, a standard-issue emergency supply pack. He knelt down to let her hook it to the flat of his back; it fit right between his wings, flanging a bit before and after them. Once the remainder of the equipment went on, the pack would be virtually indistinguishable from the rest of him, and quite difficult to get at. They were, after all, emergency supplies; they would save his bacon in a forced landing behind enemy lines and would give him a bit of insulation, but in flight it was dead weight.
Not dead weight — an insurance policy. And it was one he would be happy to pay the premium on today, given where they were probably going off to.
“Hey,” said Gun, snapping a hoof at him and flapping a large swath of rubberized greyish fabric. “Main coat.”
“Right,” he said, nodding by way of apology.
“I don’t suppose you caught a look at the weather while your head was out there on deployment already,” she muttered, wrangling the fabric over him. It was a waterproof top coat, thicker and heavier than the normal ones that just had insulation.
Judging by the greyish hue of most of the other flyers gearing up at the stables, most of the other pegasi seemed to have made the same call. A few had gone with normal coats, perhaps banking on it not being too snowy; a few had gone for the heavy coats, with both waterproofing and an extra layer of insulation.
For now, though, the waterproof coat was a safer bet, something both he and Gun silently agreed on. They didn’t know what they would find out there, and he would rather not take the chance. A normal and waterlogged coat would act like a wetsuit to keep him warm enough — but he would rather be warm and dry than warm and pruney.
Despite the flurry of activity, the stables were fairly quiet. Aside from the few words exchanged between flyers and their wingponies, the air was dominated by the snapping of buckles, the squeaking of well-oiled harnesses, the clanking of metal tanks. They didn’t need to say much, because what was there to say? If radio from Ponyville was out, there wasn’t anything new to be learned. Leave the speculation and hypothesizing to the strategists and talking heads; their job was to gear up and get ready for… well, whatever it was that had just attacked them.
“Main tanks.”
“Main tanks,” said Gun, passing him a quad of weighty panniers. Donner arranged them on his back with more than a little difficulty. A standard pack harness wouldn’t fit around wings; their main gear was stowed in four smaller saddlebags that rested alongside the fore and hindquarters, leaving the center flank free for complete wing mobility.
“They full?” he asked, more to satisfy the checklist than anything else. “They feel like it.”
“Should be,” she said with a nod. “Checked them this morning.”
“Huh,” frowned Donner. “Feel a bit… oh. Frozen.”
She rapped a hoof against one of the rear panniers; it rang hollowly. Oh well; his body heat would melt them soon enough.
“Good thing I didn’t top them off,” she shrugged. “Wings up?”
He obligingly raised his wings, giving her a chance to connect the quick releases from the fore pair to the rear pair. The tanks were designed to keep him going, with water and high-energy hay slurry for twenty hours of near-nonstop flying. Only about half of that energy would go towards increasing his range — the rest would go towards offsetting the weight of the panniers themselves — but without them he would be limited to relatively short-range hops between known stopping points. With tanks, long-distance travel was feasible. It would be grueling endurance work, but as long as he had food and water, he could do it.
In a way, the tanks almost made things easier; by constraining the motion of his hooves and giving him more mass, it would be harder to drift off course or be buffeted by winds. That killed his mobility, of course, but for long-distance flying, where you could generally signal your turns fifteen miles away, that didn’t matter.
Usually, they would only gear up for long-distance flying on, well, a long-distance run, where they didn’t expect trouble. If they ran into something, though, the quick-release was critical. On pull on the yellow tab and he’d drop tanks, shedding anywhere between a quarter and one full half of his fly weight, suddenly becoming a nimble and exquisitely deadly flyer. At the end of the engagement, the tanks could usually be recovered; if not, they were disposable anyway.
Gun rapped on the right rear tank as she checked it, filling the stable with a liquid warble.
“This one’s not frozen,” she said with what Donner knew was a smile. He didn’t care; by the time he started getting hungry, they would be long thawed. No, if one of his were still liquid, that meant there was a chance that hers were too — and she liked to take a few sips off the top early. Well, that was good; they could use a bit of luck right about now.
They finished up the preflight with the most important part: a full standard loadout, clipped around a collar band and stabilized with light ties to the surcingle. Between spare knives, darts, small explosives, and smoke grenades, to say nothing of the twin blades in cross-sheaths on his chest, he was equipped with enough new and interesting ways to cause pain to take out a half-dozen ground forces or go toe to toe with a handful of hostile flyers.
He was also well-prepared defensively: the lightweight combat helmet trailed a set of flexible segments down to the equipment on the back, secured to his neck with a dozen thin straps. His hind legs were covered by wide double-segmented vambraces and each had a pair of thick spats; they weren’t particularly flexible, but they turned a simple buck into a deadly force. The bracers on his forelegs were slightly thinner, and rather than spats he had a pair of gloves — at the moment, they were tucked into the collar; he needed hoof mobility to run the last few checks on his equipment.
“Looks like you’re good,” said Gun, looking his gear over one last time for good measure. “Set me up. Base coat.”
Donner pulled the second dark blue garment from the storage rack, gave it a quick once-over for tears, and, with no small difficulty in kneeling, laid it out.
“Base coat.”
As he helped Gun gear up, he could hardly help but to feel a quiet pride at the other pegasi doing the same outside. None of them had received orders, and yet here they were, loading out. It was partially disconcerting, in truth, but mostly it just felt right. Whatever had happened in Ponyville, it would affect them here. They needed to be ready, and by the looks of grim determination around the camp, they all knew it.
Hell, it would affect everypony, everywhere. Whether he liked it or not, the Mane was Equestria’s largest airship, and you didn’t just blow one of those up — especially not with the Princess on board.
Donner paused for a moment, halfway through rigging a pannier. Princess Celestia would have been on that airship. He had no doubt that most of the crew would have died; if it was in flames, they wouldn’t have made it to the parachutes. Pegasi could only bring so many ponies off at a time, and very few unicorns could teleport themselves, much less bring anypony else with them, much less get from a moving object to the ground….
He shook it off with the slightest rattle of his combat knife in its sheath. No, she would have escaped. Somehow. If the Princess were injured, surely they would know about it. They would have to.
He started at a sharp sound.
Gun clapped her hooves again.
“Equestria to Donner, Equestria to Donner, come in, Donner. You there?”
“I….”
“Hey!” she snapped, grabbing his breastgirth and shaking him. “Are you with me?”
He took a breath.
“Yes.”
“Good.” She smiled slightly; she could never stay angry for too long. Probably one of the only reasons she still tolerated being his wingpony. Gun’s wings fluttered up. “Drop releases?”
“Right,” he said, moving to secure the lines connecting her main tanks.
A few cross-checks and two bandoliers worth of armament later, she checked out complete. They gave each other a once-over, making sure the last few trailing bits were properly tucked away.
“You’re loaded up.”
“You too.”
Closing the stable door, they managed to maneuver outside: the gear might be good for distance flying, but between spats, panniers, and various other accoutrements strapped to their bodies, they were about as ungainly as a carb-loading walrus. They started waddling towards the center of the landing field, where perhaps a dozen other flyers were already suited up and waiting.
“Looks like we got here just in time,” said Gun softly, jerking a head towards the command tent just beyond the field, where a trim pegasus was walking towards them, his deep red and entirely outsized moustache quivering at each step.
“General on the field,” somepony called, and with a jangling of metal the field snapped to attention, or something resembling it.
Major-General Stanhey stepped to the lip of the ring and glanced his troops over.
“I’m glad to see you all here,” he announced. “I will be brief. Ponyville has come under attack.”
Heads twitched as quiet mutterings spread through the crowd. They knew the Mane had been damaged, but to flat-out call it an attack, without even the barest attempt at a hedge?
“We don’t have much information at the moment,” he said, holding up a hoof. “But we do know that innocent civilians have died, and I’ll be damned if I’m just going to sit here.” He smiled tightly. “Judging by your gear, you feel the same way.
“Fortunately for all of us, General Batchall agrees. We will be deploying, effective immediately.”
More murmurs, but they were almost pro forma at this point. They expected this, sure as the sun would set in the evening and rise the next day — or, at least, as sure as it could be. With Celestia on the Mane….
“Sir,” offered a colonel in the front row, a shock of electric purple mane sticking out from between the segments of her drab helm armor, “what’s the policy? Containment?”
Various of her wingmates nodded in agreement. The Badlands might not look that big on a map, but there was a lot of contested border there, and all of it was mountainous. Mountains meant easy hiding places, meant ambushes, even from the air; none of them was looking forward to fighting dragons, especially not on their own turf.
“Yes,” nodded General Stanhey, “after a sort. You won’t be fighting dragons — at least, we don’t think you will be, not today.”
The colonel frowned. If not dragons, then…?
“You’ll be deploying to Dodge,” he said bluntly. “From there, you will regroup on base, drop tanks, and set a perimeter. The Second Wing is already on station in Appleloosa; you’ll be integrating into their command structure until we can move our own personnel down. You’ll be patrolling from the Ghastly Gorge to the railroad out to Baltimare; I suspect you’ll take the eastern half of the patrol route, though I wouldn’t rule out joint wing operations.” He gave a wave back towards the command tent. “Again, I would come myself, but we’ll need a day or two to prep for a move, and we can’t guarantee this weather will hold. Most importantly, right now we need flyers more than we need commanders.”
They nodded understanding of the orders, but the underlying why was as clear as day. After a few tense moments, the colonel spoke up again, a purple lock of mane fluttering slightly in the snowy breeze.
“Sir….”
“The Fourth Wing will remain on station in Hayseed,” said Stanhey smoothly, “and will take over the eastern Badland patrols.”
“Understood, sir,” she said with a crisp nod. “But the Badlands border doesn’t run up to the Baltimare railroad.”
“No, it doesn’t,” he said flatly. “You’ll be running CAP over the Blackacre border.”
The crowd gave him blank stares. When he spoke next, it was with carefully-chosen words.
“Without further contact from Ponyville, it is impossible to formally attribute responsibility for the destruction of the EAS Mane and the murders of her crew.”
They understood, each tensing up as the full impact of his words hit home.
Murder.
“Reports say there’s a blizzard blowing in from Horseshoe Bay,” said General Stanhey, raising his voice to ensure everypony heard him. “It wouldn’t be much of a deployment without the first big blizzard of the year coming in to see you off. You’d better outfly the weather.”
“Sir,” asserted the purple-maned pony, “we’ll outfly Celestia herself.” She paused, meaningfully. “We’re the Fighting Second.”
“Damned straight you are,” said Stanhey with a firm nod.
He gave them one last look.
“Go.”
As one, the pegasi of the Second Air Wing crouched slightly; like a hundred coiled springs they shot into the air. A few flaps to rebalance themselves, a few more to bring their hooves up under them, and then they were off, streaking west like a thunderhead of grey. Their cloud rippled higher, gaining altitude at cruising speeds, each individual pegasus operating in perfect sync with the rest of their wingmates.
None of them had signed up to fight their own kind. None of them wanted to fight dragons, either, but they would do that if they had to; the notion of attacking part of Equestria itself was… distasteful.
More importantly, though, none of them were about to stand by while someone killed their own, killed civilians — or tried to kill the Princess. Whoever was responsible would pay, of that they were sure. Didn’t matter who they were. Didn’t matter where they were. They had attacked Equestria, and now Equestria would strike back.
With a bit of luck, the bomb had left survivors.
The Fighting Second would not.