//------------------------------// // War Machine // Story: Born in Equestria // by Winston //------------------------------// Born in Equestria 1. War Machine Gentle flaps softly sustained the feel of floating calmly on the morning air. Serenity lay like a quiet veil on the moment. Rainbow Dash didn't want to be lulled into the pleasure of the flight. There was nothing to enjoy. This was the most sad part of the course of events these things always followed, this beauty that existed only as the calm before the storm. One last false taste of the joys of peace, an elysian field growing with sweet pure grass right up to the cliff over the edge of which one would fall headlong into the depths of hell and plunge into pandemonium, where she and the other pegasi flying with her, all in tight formation, were headed, and where they all knew they were going and just kept right on towards it anyway. This was a horrible thing they were doing. All of them could feel it. Nopony ever liked these flights. It always started loud and ended quiet. The weight of her armor was there like a blanket, wrapping in plates around her chest and belly, across her back, coming up around her neck and down her legs and covering her joints in chain mesh. It had heft, but not so much that it was a serious encumbrance. It was just ominous more than anything, right now. They pressed forward through the air, every one of them carrying the awareness of their steel carapace. Where they were headed was already in view. Most of the flight there had been at a steady easy pace, and low, just over the treetops, down near the ground where the air was thickest, making it easiest to fly in and the most oxygen rich. It prevented fatigue so that they could go in fresh at their peak combat performance. Here at the last approach they would veer up a few hundred feet to come at their target from above, swooping back down on it, and their advance would accelerate until they were plunging rapidly into the pitch of battle. Other formations, other pegasi, now visible as dots in the distance, were doing the same thing from different directions, all converging with coordination onto this town, all adjusting their own paces now using signaling lights carried by flight leaders to flash terse indications back and forth to each other so that all would begin their assaults at the same time. Sometimes when they approached a town there would also be a loose, disorganized column of panicked runners, griffins fleeing before it all started. When that happened, they always let them go. They were smart to take their last chance at escaping, but it was a hard thing to happen to them either way, and Rainbow Dash always felt sorry for them. They were leaving everything behind, making the tough choice to save their skin at the cost of everything else they had. There wouldn't be anything for them to come home to again. There wasn't a column of refugees running out this time, and it meant things were going to be bad. It either meant that they were all staying because the whole town was battening down to mount a defense, or they somehow had advance warning and the ones who were going to leave already had and any who stayed had extra time to fortify. Either way was ugly. She wasn't so sure it made much difference all in all, though. The towns always fell, struggle however hard they might. The Equestrian army was larger, better trained, well equipped, and increasingly battlehardened as time went on. At this point they were steamrolling north, day by day, closing in on the end of the war and flattening out the last desparate defenders. Both sides smelled the blood of the final kill approaching, and it was making them both more and more vicious. This town was one more step on the way. Anything that could have happened here today was going to be ugly. She braced herself for it. The sky they steadily pressed on through was still quiet and serene. The violence weighing on all of their thoughts, the task they all knew was coming, still lay under that veil of the blue morning sky, warm and clear and inviting. Liar. She wanted to accuse the sky. You know damned well you should be washed in red stains, not resplendant in clean, pure blue. Can't we at least be honest about this? But she knew that the thought was unrealistic, self-centered and conceited, and this was true honesty of the bluntest kind, this ultimate indifference of the universe to life or death. It was time to pull up for the final approach. The formation of pegasi rose up in a gentle slope, gradually picking up their pace as they followed the timing of their flight leader. This was the point of commitment to attack, no turning aside, no more waiting. A hit of adrenaline ran through Rainbow Dash as the sense of inevitability set in. Warmth and a heavy heartbeat in her chest, butterflies in her gut, tension like tightly wound steel wire in her muscles... Energetic readiness for the terrible work just ahead spread through all her being. At the crest of their rise, Rainbow Dash and all the other pegasi reached back and opened their right side saddlebags. This was the moment at which they were trained to make ready with weights. She dug her muzzle in and found the loop of cord, attached to the end of a chain, carefully positioned to snake out of the saddlebag easily. She bit down and pulled it all out. The chain towed out behind her, and a round steel ball fell out at the end of it. It trailed at her side, hanging down. Every pegasi in her flight held one of their own similarly. The dive started. She tilted her wings, subtle motions pitching her forward and angling her back down towards the earth, aiming at the first row of small buildings marking the outer edge of the town. There was already motion happening below them. A row of griffins was flighting from the ground, rising to meet the advancing pegasi. They seemed to have some cohesion as a group, but no armor, and what weapons they had were inconsistent griffin to griffin. Definitely not part of the army. Local volunteer militia. They could stick together, at least, so they'd drilled a few times, but odds were they'd never seen an actual fight. Like everything else that day, this was going to be ugly... Extremely so for them. The flight of pegasi just kept moving faster and faster, flying razor straight, flapping hard and using the gravity assist of their height to push for speed. The griffins flapped furiously to pull themselves up to meet them. Rainbow Dash stared at the line. It started small, each griffin looking tiny, but they steadily got bigger and bigger, more distinctly detailed, angry glares and hateful eyes more defined. Oh yeah. They'd kill every pony there, if they could. No doubt. Probably have a feast of horsemeat after they did, too. Their bad luck, then, that the flight they were taking on was made up of Advanced Combat Fliers, considered the most elite forces of the Equestrian Army. The griffins were closing in, rushing up as the pegasi were rushing down. Neither side wavered. Right as they were closing on each other, for a second or two Rainbow Dash could see the griffin dead ahead of her, still staring forward, intently focused, singling her out, telegraphing his target like a fool. All the griffins were doing that. With well practiced timing, she whipped her head back, around, and forward again in a circular motion, pulling on the cord loop in her teeth, swinging the weight around behind her in an arc. Just as it was swinging forward again, she veered the slightest bit off the to side, still flying forward just as fast as ever but moving out of the way of a direct collision with the griffin, who was too slow to correct his trajectory and catch her. He caught the steel weight instead, right in the middle of the sternum, slamming into him with the force of their combined momentums in opposite directions. Something cracked and loose feathers burst from his chest in a cloud, floating in the air. The griffin spun around out of control, and the chain was pulled tight. Dash held the loop of cord loosely in her teeth, and when it was yanked from her mouth, she just let it go rather than lose any momentum trying to keep hold. The chain tangled around one of his forearms, with the weight pulling him downwards. Well, he could go ahead and keep it. She had another one. The griffin reached up and tried to grab his chest. He flapped weakly, little crippled half-flaps, and made a weird gurgling noise while his eyes slowly half-shut and rolled back. He lost his lift and slowly began falling, and picked up speed as gravity took hold and plunged to the ground, still spinning crazily and trailing feathers and heavy droplets of blood. All the pegasi did this, each one picking off whatever griffin had been approaching them. They struck them in passing and kept moving. The formation never broke or slowed down. They just screamed right through the line of griffins, focused on nothing but reaching the earth. The ponies that had lost their weapon, like Rainbow Dash, lit on the ground when they reached it. The ones who'd managed to hold onto them wheeled around and kept a few feet up in the air, covering the landing of their flightmates from any leftover griffins. After it was clear that they were all dead, disabled, or running away, the remaining airborn pegasi circled back around and landed, restowing their chains. The flight regrouped on the ground, quickly accounting for all of its members. Some had their sides splattered with streaks of blood, and a couple had small griffin's feathers stuck to their armor, glued down by the sticky red liquid. Not a single one of them paid the least bit of attention to it. They'd seen it all so many times before that getting a little blood on yourself was of no note. This was nothing. They'd all be much, much dirtier by the day's end, that was assured. They were off to a loud start. For the first few blocks of their advance into the town, there was fighting in the street every inch of the way. It seemed like there wasn't a building or tree or even a rock that a griffin wasn't trying to hold from them. They jumped at ponies, clawing at their armor, sometimes managing to leave a few superficial scratches, sometimes more serious gouges or bites, before they were bucked off and beaten savagely until subdued. It was slow, at first, but after a while resistance thinned out and they had firm hold, and their sector was met on either side by other groups of ponies, closing any gaps in their area of responsibility in the encirclement of the town. They could call the perimeter under control, and the first objective of the day was thus accomplished. Rainbow Dash had been on the front line pushing the whole time. When their flight leader finally called it enough, she was sweaty and hot, having just spent the last minute or so grappling with a particularly angry griffin, both of them struggling as hard as they could until Rainbow Dash had found just enough of an advantaged position to get a forelimb around the back of the griffin's neck and pound her in the face with the other forehoof, then bounce her head off the pavement a couple times, leaving her black-eyed, bloodied and stunned into dizzy drunken-seeming semiconsciousness in which she could finally be tied up and taken prisoner. Though the danger in the fight was very real, somehow Dash found that couldn't look on the griffin with anger once she was under control. Rainbow Dash understood her. Anypony would have done the same, fighting for home, trying in desparation to resist the invader overrunning the streets of her neighborhood. Dash just hoped she'd get some medical attention for the severe concussion she almost certainly had. It bothered her that she wasn't so sure about how good the chances were that would actually happen. For her own part, Dash was overheated, she felt like she was burning up from the intensity of the fight. She needed to cool out and recharge so she pulled back for some water. It was in a cluster of barrels that had been brought in by the earth pony reenforcements following on hoof just after the pegasi initial landing. Earth Ponies. Some of the pegasi laughed at them, said that any pony without wings would never be a real soldier. Dash didn't, she thought they were alright. Not too many of them may have been cut out to be the kind of hardened, first-wave warriors that some pegasi were... But there were some that were very respectable on the field. Even the ones who weren't so bold, well, they were still good at cleaning up the mess and making the supplies get there. They supported everypony, and that was something that had to be appreciated. One of the barrels had been tapped and drained out into a wide, shallow container, open for drinking out of. Rainbow Dash gulped down water until her stomach was full. She would need it. It would make her have to pee pretty bad, probably, but that was better than dealing with getting dehydrated. The town was full of houses. They had bathrooms. Technically, they weren't supposed to help themselves to the use of any of the facilities in the private residences they searched and secured, laws of war and civilian's rights and all that... But who was gonna say anything? It was just taking a leak, a reasonable, harmless enough thing. It's not like she was looting. She splashed some water up onto her face and let it run down, feeling it drip off her chin before she shook her head and the liquid flew off in a million little tiny sparkling droplets. In that quiet interlude, Rainbow Dash had a brief thought, a notion of looking forward to after this was all over and they'd cleared up the site and she was relieved from the field to go back to camp. She'd strip off all this armor, and the cloth linings beneath it, dumping the clothes into a pile of dirty laundry for washing later, and once she was naked she'd feel the refreshing coolness of the sweat starting to air out from her coat and skin while she walked to one of the shower stations, where she'd stand for a good relaxing few minutes under the stream of water. The gentle massage of the falling rivulet would melt out some tension while the liquid melted out the splashes of blood and the leftover salt and grime of the sweat and hard work of the day. The feeling of gritty, greasy, dirty, would be gone, replaced with the distinctive and incomparable sensation of clean. Back in the civilized world, a shower was easy to take for granted, but here it was a treasure, and those little bright points had to be taken where they could be found. It was something, at least. The anticipation of that little thing would get her through the day here as much as anything else. Dash started back towards the forward positions again. The day was only just barely starting, they would probably start sweeping everything clear house to house soon. If the day's start was loud, the volume would only get cranked up from here. She kicked the door open, turned around rapidly, and trailed the other two pegasi into the house, taking the middle while they broke to the sides and visually swept the corners. "Clear left!" one yelled, immediately followed by "Clear right!" from the opposite direction. "Three middle!" Rainbow Dash reflexively yelled back. "... Think they're down. Not moving," she elaborated. Saying they were 'down' felt absurd, given the circumstances - none of the three were touching the ground, exactly - but it was the standard field terminology for their condition, so she went with it. The other two pegasi turned to look. "Well buck," one of them said quietly. "... Yeah. I'd say they're not gonna be much of a fight." The three pegasi stared straight ahead into the center of the house. Three griffins were hanging, with ropes tied around their necks and heads cocked off at funny unnatural angles. It was an adult female and two young children. Rainbow Dash was jarred a bit, but not very surprised. There were always a couple of these, the stories always went around after every major battle for a town. It was a family. The female, the mother, hanged her children and then herself rather than let any of them be captured alive. Dash had never been the one to find this kind of suicide before, though, to be the first to see it fresh in person. She would have preferred not to have been this time... Or any other time, either. On a scale from zero to all bucked up, this was right up there at the top. Dead kids. What the buck. They didn't say anything about dead kids when she signed up. Still, though, no time to stop and gawk. The three of them quickly checked around all the corners, verifying there were no live griffins still hiding. In a small semi-isolated area in one far corner of the house, there was a small basinet, swaddled up with soft blankets, in the middle of which was a smashed egg. Yolk and slimy transparent albumen were spattered everywhere. Rainbow Dash cringed in her mind while she looked in the pile of now hollowed shell fragments, not wanting to see but knowing she had to. She couldn't see anything but thin yellow fluid left from the destroyed yolk. Probably an infertile egg, then, she assumed. She hoped as hard as she could it was infertile, at least. Maybe it was easier that she couldn't tell one way or another. If she was looking at dead kid number three, she didn't want to know. She turned away and pushed any further thoughts about it out of her mind. They wouldn't do any good whatever the case. "Well, they're not going anywhere. We gotta keep moving," one of the other two pegasi said. "House is clear. They'll get somepony to cut 'em down later. Next one, let's go." On the outside of the doorway, one of Dash's squadmates hung a red colored flag, the signal color indicating to the earth pony troopers coming in behind them to do the field support that there were dead bodies in the house. Some corpspony would deal with the dirtywork of cutting down the griffins and moving their bodies to the field morgue. She wished there was a way to warn them about what they were going to see, but the system wasn't that specific. Sorry guys. The three pegasi left, back into the street, to advance to the next house and repeat the process all over again, and again, and again, for hours. Some houses were empty, some had griffins still in them, cowering, hiding, desperate. Some of them were subdued and taken prisoner, with looks of terror on their faces, no idea what was going to happen to them at the hooves of the ponies. Some fought and were killed - stabbed and bled to death, or crushed under vicious blows from powerful equine hind legs. More red flags left on doorframes of cleared houses. More blood accumulated on Rainbow Dash's armor, random spatters and splotches and splashes that built up seemingly organically, like weeds in a field in summer cropping up over time. She didn't think much about it consciously, other than to notice at one point that her hooves were picking up an even staining of dull brick red, and that it was spreading in sticky clots up her fetlocks, matting them down and drying the hairs together into crusty strings like a mane hardened by too much gel. It was a reminder that she was letting those fetlocks get too long, she should cut them. They were supposed to be kept short per army regulation for sanitary reasons exactly like this, but out here trying to live in the field nopony was really calling them out on it and it tended to get overlooked in favor of more important things until there was a good reason to think about investing the time in trimming them down. Every house, every griffin, was harder than the last one. Every one they bound up struggling and turned over as a prisoner, every one that died fighting them, drained her a little more, numbed her, made her feel a little more dead inside. The day dragged on and she ached and her vigor wore away and she hated it more and more. She just wanted the day to finally be over with an intensity that grew in proportion with her fatigue until it was nearly unbearable. She just wanted an end to the constant advance, leaving the wake of dead bodies, the fresh blood collecting bit by bit on her armor, and the suffering all around her. She knew that the other two pegasi in her squad felt the same way, but they kept going and she kept up with them and none of them said anything. What good would it have done? This was how it always was. Dash just kept moving forward, on and on. Even when she had almost nothing left, she kept that shower in mind, after this would all be over, clinging to it, the anticipation of the feeling of it and how it would be the same feeling of pleasure no matter how bad this got. It couldn't take that little bit of the future, that little bit of something, from her, so she kept pushing herself forward no matter how exhausted she felt. She kept going because it was all she could do. This was how it always was. It was always hell. Sheer hell. Why were they doing this? She knew why. She'd known why this whole time, this whole wretched war. She'd known why, in this sense of an abstract notion that griffins had incurred into Equestrian towns, that the Griffin Kingdom rulership was actively fostering these raiders, these acts of war. Ponies had died at the claws of the griffins. For her friends. For her family. For everypony she loved. That's why she was doing this, so they could have a safe Equestria to live in. But the longer she did this, and the longer the day wore on, the more tenuous that intellectual rationale felt, however valid it might be. The blood all over her hooves, though... That was tangible, in a crimson growing deeper and deeper, more and more real, staying with her even when everything else, all the distant concepts and notions of why, fell away, turned grey and ephemeral, unreal, transparent as a pane of glass. Everything else faded, except that she knew that now griffins were dying at her hooves, hers and those of the ponies she fought alongside. All the larger reasons, the sense of this in some kind of big picture... They'd never existed. All that existed was that she was here in the middle of the crucible, the heat of the battle, and it was a fight to the death, her or them. Some part of her knew that the next day after this was all over, then retrospection on all of this, when that big picture came back a little, would bring in a flood of emotion and probably she'd cry her eyes out, in her tent back at camp, somewhere in private where nopony would see her, thinking about what she'd done, the lives she'd crushed out. But all of that was very abstract. It was for the future. All of that was just some picture, some unreal disconnected thought, not linked to what was there in front of her moment by moment. She had to get through this if she was going to get to enjoy her shower. Nothing else mattered. Nothing else existed. It was the worst imaginable hell, but the only way out to something any better was forward, to push through it, until it was over. The day was finally over. They'd cleared the town successfully, as expected. There wasn't ever really a question, only a matter of time. Rainbow Dash stood there just outside of town, alone. Dead bodies lay prone on the ground. Buildings had caught fire and burned, the light wooden construction typical of the griffins going up like matchsticks and then quickly sputtering out when the blazes ran out of fuel. They tried to not let it happen, but collateral damage was a fact of life in this vicious reality. Nopony was crying over it too hard and nopony would get in any real trouble. But it was over now, and everything had finally become still again. The motionlessness was eerie. That silence, the silence of death, stretched on while she stood and watched, with nothing to break it. The day was fading. The glow coming from the west felt like it would be a sunset that lasted forever with no end, the sun sitting low in a rich red like a pool of blood on the horizon for all the rest of the eternity in which those bodies would lay still, never move and never make another sound. This was the culmination, the days work she'd done well and seen to the end. She'd stilled them to a silence so profound that no noise could ever fill it again and bring back the voices and the stirrings that were gone. She stood alone in the field, knowing somehow that she was a million miles from any living thing, surrounded by motionless cold bodies, random plucked clumps of feathers tinted with drying blood, the charred remains of the town's buildings now burned out and collapsed into embers and ashes and faint hazy smoke still lingering. The silence of it all stabbed through her heart, and ran cold in her arteries and veins and echoed in her ears like the most deafening explosion. It always started loud and ended quiet. God, it was so quiet. Rainbow Dash woke with a deceptively gentle return to lucidity, seeming calm. She stared into a dark wall of night, through which her eyes could just barely make out the features in the dark bedroom of her house over Ponyville, the house she'd just come back to live in again after three years away. The images she'd just seen were fresh, haunting and unsettled, flooding through her mind more and more clearly the more she returned to a waking state. A strangled scream welled halfway up her throat, and she tried to let it out, even just a little, but nothing would come. She felt paralyzed, until it died away unexpressed. A dream. That's all it was, she realized, though it had felt so real that it took a few moments to reconcile that fact. This was only her second night home, it still felt disorienting and freshly unfamiliar. But it was real. She was here, home again, at last. The horrible things she'd just seen were all just a dream. It still hurt. It still felt like agony. Her eyes watered and tears built until they broke free and rolled down onto her cloud pillow, and she was finally able to sob, softly, with her chest gently racking in and out while she drew ragged breath through clenched teeth. She lay on her side, legs drawn in and wings held tight against her back, curled up into a ball, and cried, thinking about all the things in her dream, and about the way she'd seen herself in it, the war machine that she'd spent the last three years as, and how it was a dream but not just a dream, because she'd seen all those things up close all too vividly too many times and every one of them was a real thing she would have to live with carrying in her head forever. Her mind burned with it all the rest of the night until the pale light of dawn finally started to come in through the window. She started her third day home exhausted and upset before she'd even gotten out of bed.