28 June, Y.C. 970
Ponyville
“How do you feel, boy?”
The younger pegasus shot back a grin, readjusting the heavy leather straps that dug into his emerald flank.
“Like a mean green fighting machine, sir!”
The brown pegasus gave a curt nod, looked around once, and leapt into the air. He circled the spot lazily, scanning the wings of pegasi splayed out to all sides, countless splotches of every color imaginable, each loaded to the brim. They wouldn’t be flying for too long, nor would they be going too far, but at this point the more time they spent on the ground the better. Each wingflap was calories, and his troops needed every single one.
He caught the eye of one of the few dozen pegasi who wasn’t carrying a weapons load. The signalpony raised a horn to her lips and let loose a blast; picked up by the others it echoed down the valley.
In unison, twenty thousand wings unfurled.
William Batchall raised a clenched hoof in the air, and the signalpony let out another blast. He pumped his hoof three times in the ancient signal to take to the skies.
With a powerful lunge the signalponies took to the air, screening units right behind them. The heavy battle pegasi were airborne the next second. Making height, Batchall led them to the east.
A few seconds later and they had reached what would be combat height for this operation, high enough to see the river snake through what was now the Remaregen ford below them but not high enough to see beyond to forest to the east.
The east. Always into the east.
Batchall had been first to lift off, but he wasn’t foolish enough to lead from the front. He drifted upwards, letting his wingleaders maneuver below him into fighting positions: commanders above and heavy pegasi in a sheet formation below, screening units darting about between the wings.
This was not a tactically optimal formation. He knew it, Pommel knew it, and everypony in the formation knew it. They would be largely exposed to incoming fire, and without much discretion to move their wings outside of their zones, commanders would not have much flexibility in reacting to specific threats. Tactical or not, however, this was strategically optimal.
Ten thousand pegasi stretched from here to White Tail, a sheet of them, the formation stretching from one horizon to the other. Ten thousand pegasi, who had spent the past seven days resting, recovering, and preparing themselves.
Ten thousand pegasi, each loaded down with as many K-bombs as they could carry.
Preparing that sheer number of bombs was an operation in and of itself. Though it took a good portion of the strategic reserves to meet the bill, they had enough of the raw petrochemicals on hoof to prepare everything. The forges pressed out casings twenty-four hours a day; the moment they were cool enough to handle, they were filled, fitted with detonator cap, and stockpiled.
The process didn’t end there, though. Once stockpiled, each unit was carefully gone over by an armorer unicorn, probing the internals for weaknesses and ensuring quality control. The last step was the most tiring for them: each one was infused, magically charged in a manner not unlike that of a battery. They couldn’t do this with conventional weapons, because compound explosives wouldn’t take a spell. Liquids, on the other hand, held a charge for weeks; at night, the K-bomb stockpile had started to glow.
Every pony in the Army had been pressed into service. Earth ponies made them, unicorns charged them, and now pegasi were going to deliver them. The production had literally gone faster than they could keep track of; best estimates put their seven-day production run in the hundred and twenty thousand range. Even a single K-bomb was sufficient to cause major damage if left unchecked; none of them really knew what effect the infusion would have in combat operations.
Then again — no one was really sure what a hundred and twenty thousand normal gelled kerosene fire bombs would do.
It was morning on what promised to be a bright and temperate summer day. They were flying into the rising sun, but that only made the sight more impressive, exposed steel glittering in the air among the countless splotches of color. They were lit up as bright as day but it didn’t matter; it wasn’t as if anypony was going to miss their formation. The sun wouldn’t interfere too much with visibility, either; they were all equipped with flash goggles, which worked well enough to block the sun’s glare while they were looking down.
Besides, it wasn’t going to be a clear day for much longer.
As the last of the wings rose into position, Batchall took a moment to revel in the power of the Air Patrol, ten thousand of Equestria’s finest, each heavily enough armed to destroy a small town. They weren’t just going to bomb Blackacre back to the stone age; they were going to grind it to ash.
Below him, one of the lead signalponies rose up to within earshot, flapping hard to gain altitude even despite his light armor.
“General!” called the signalpony. “Sir, all wings report in. Withdrawals in the dozens.”
Batchall nodded. Despite all the preflight checks, sometimes a pony just had to bow out of a mission — sudden-onset illness, an unnoticed split hoof, a tree branch that fell on somepony — at the last minute. These things were rare, but they still happened. Dozens of no-flys would normally be grounds for scrubbing the flight, but with a force this size, that still only meant fractions of a percent. Nothing was going to stop them.
“Sir,” called the pony again, “we’ve got it spotted. Duke calls approaching range.”
He licked his lips. Time to go. “Headings to zero niner zero, spread to attack formation.”
“Copy, zero niner zero and spread.” The signalpony turned downwards, relaying orders to the other runners. Not that they were needed, of course. Everyone knew their part. Actually giving the orders was a formality at this point.
“Coming in low into the rising sun,” murmured Batchall to himself, reciting the header on the mission brief. “Ho! Rider!”
The signalpony popped up. “Sir?”
“At about a mile out, go for psy ops.”
“Copy, prep, one mile, drop dazzle and put on the music.”
Batchall smiled to himself. His aides had been thoroughly confused at that set of orders, when it came time to type them up. When it came time to scare the hell out of the slopes, there were a lot of choices, but he was fond of Buckner’s eighth. Besides, the boys loved it.
Far below, the charred earth seemed to come to a head. Here was where the battle lines had been drawn, was where the forest had been burned away, a swath of land almost as barren in reality as it had been on the map, a thick line of no return. Spread into wide vees the main force was low and close, and the red line was coming up fast.
General Batchall backed off a bit, rising up so his voice would carry at least some distance. The steady thrumming of wings would be overpowering in the thick of it, but that was what the signalponies were for.
“All flyers all flyers,” he called, loud and clear so there was no mistake, “commit, commit, commit. Drop dazzle and put on psy op; make it loud.” He paused for the slightest of moments. “Let’s dance.”
The line of pegasi at the very front of the formation pulled their ripcords in unison, unfurling short bits of fabric that trailed from their wings. They weren’t long, maybe only a foot or two, but they ran the length of the ponies’ wingspan like textile trailing-edge flaps. On the top side, they displayed wing and unit stripings for identification, something that would come in useful with so many ponies in the air. The line behind them reached back and pulled their cords. Then the ones behind them and the ones after, a rapid sequence as the formation rippled.
And the scorched earth below rippled back — for the underside of the flaps was a metallic weave, reflecting the sunlight to the ground in thousands of columns of ivory and gold. Each individual pegasus might not contribute much, but with enough of them together… well, if they had to fly into the sun, they would turn it against the enemy.
And then — a sound.
It came from everywhere at once, an elegantly simple pattern building to a block fanfare, the richness of the sound pouring out over the formation to the ground below from a dozen linked pony-mounted transceivers.
For an instant, Batchall imagined what it would look like from below, looking up in confusion and terror from a spider hole. In a matter of seconds, the sky had gone from rosy blue to shining sparkling white, a thousand pinpricks taking their turn at blinding anypony below with constantly moving streams of sun.
And then that sound would hit. It would start as a faint tingling, a something just outside perception, snaking through the trenches and the trees. They would pop up to see what was happening — or not; it made no difference. It would grow louder, starting from a faintest murmur but drowning everything out in a matter of moments, accompanied by the steady downbeat of ten thousand wings.
And then the first of the bombs hit.