Final Solution

by Luna-tic Scientist


13 - Threefold Law of Return

=== Chapter 13: Threefold Law of Return ===

Technician Valith glanced nervously at the squad commander. His goggles, their reactive lenses currently clear, itched where they sat across his muzzle, but he resisted the urge to push them up onto his forehead and scratch vigorously. Should have put them away, but they always get scratched in the tool case.

The commander glared back, her normally slight frame bulked up to giant proportions by the armoured suit she wore. Her faceplate and muzzle guard, complete with its servo powered jaw and jagged, diamond-faceted metal teeth, were folded away, making her head look like an afterthought amid the swell of fullerene metalloceramic plating that made up the suit's shoulders. One thick-fingered arm made a cutting gesture and, below that, the suit's fighting claw copied her movements. That particular military horror, projecting from her waist on a long, multiply jointed armature, looked like it had come from a five-tonne lobster.

Valith followed the mirrored cutting surfaces with wide eyes, ears twitching as the curved pincers closed abruptly with a nasty metal-on-metal sound, then swallowed heavily. "Lieutenant Tuthi, this one is sorry, but the dropshuttle has failed its self-test. It would be dangerous--"

"Tuthi knows that, idiot!" she snarled, "This one can read a status report. What is wrong with it?"

Keeping a precarious hold on his tool case, Valith tapped a command on his bracer, accessing the internal network's reporting systems through a short length of fibre optic. Damned designers, they never put these things in easy places, he thought, trying to relieve the ache in his arm from holding it up so high. The data cable vanished into a small port above his head, just behind one of the magnetic nozzle clusters. Both awkward and nerve-wracking, reaching it with a standard interface cable meant holding one's head directly in line with the pitted, high temperature ceramic surface of the thruster. It was all too easy to imagine a careless pilot flicking the wrong switch and sending a pulse of celestia-hot plasma to really ruin his day.

Finally, the dropshuttle's computer completed the exhaustive security checks required before any device was allowed access to its internal systems, letting him into the maintenance modules. Reams of densely worded text scrolled up the small screen, and Valith quickly scanned it for signs of the problem. If this one could hook it up to a proper hardware interrogator, it would be easy, but no, they want it done right now. He struggled to ignore Tuthi, a task made more difficult by the attention of a small flock of gryphon troopers, all watching him with every evidence of malicious pleasure. They stood there, all fully equipped, waiting for the order to board the aircraft.

Valith's ears went back. Ah, crap. Half way down the engine management report was a whole section of bright red text, flashing with warnings. "The magnetic flux sensors have picked up some subcritical quench points in the superconductor banks," he announced in a small voice.

"So? Can the Technician fix it? This one is supposed to be part of this shift's reaction teams, in case it had escaped Valith's notice." She tapped one metal-shod paw on the fused stone slabs lining the hangar floor; a hard, angry sound like that of a weapon being cocked.

Not in this ship, Tuthi isn't. He narrowly avoided the impulse to say that out loud. A quick flick of a claw brought up the manuals for the dropshuttle; the resultant bewildering array of icons laid ghostly patterns across his whole field of view. "Yes, Lieutenant, this one understands... it will take at least two kiloseconds to de-energise the banks and purge the defects, then a recharge will--" He lost the battle to hold on to both his tools and stay connected to the dropshuttle, electing to drop the heavy case on his footpaw rather than risk damaging the expensive diagnostic gear it contained. The sudden impact made him gasp, but Tuthi had already stopped listening. Thank the Maker for safety boots!

"This dropship is Valith's responsibility! His dereliction of duty will not go unreported--"

There was more, but Valith ignored the threats and promises of retribution, clamping down on the anger that made him want to shout back at the Lieutenant. Yes, it is, but only with the help of the crew servitors! All the procedures existed for operation without the creatures, but they were so useful, and were such an integral part of the unit that it was rare to even practice without them. No one is prepared for this. More taps narrowed the number of instruction sets to a manageable level, and Valith used this as a way to maintain focus. His eye drifted to the reel of heavy superconducting cable he'd have to get connected to the dropshuttle to allow the stored power to be drained safely, and he groaned inwardly. The thing easily weighed ten times what he did; something else a pony could have done with only a thought.

"Understood, Lieutenant," he said stiffly. "May this one have some assistance in connecting the charge cable?" He gestured to the fat drum of slick, paw-thick wire, its black and gold length coiled up like a giant constrictor snake around a pregnant cow.

Tuthi hissed something that was probably insulting, then turned to the line of gryphons. "Sersjant! Delegate a team to assist the Technician." She snarled the last word, voice and face filled with contempt.

Damn arrogant troopers! Struggling to prevent his own lips from pulling back from his teeth in a snarl, Valith trotted forward, followed by a pair of suddenly far less amused gryphons. Reaching into the rear pocket of his waistcoat, he drew out a pair of heavy gloves and put them on.

Gripping hold of the reel's forward strut, he heaved, only to be rewarded by a tiny twitch of movement from the oversized drum. There was a sigh from behind his left ear, and a set of scaly talons pushed him roughly to one side. He stepped back, too relieved at not having to move the cable to pay any attention to the looks of disgust that passed between the pair of gryphons. Muscles, only really visible at the neck rings of the armoured troopers, bulged and with a squeal the drum cradle started to move on its silly little wheels.

"The auxiliary power connector is next to the port side hinge for the rear ramp," he said, waving a paw at the dropshuttle before reaching for the control panel in the maintenance alcove. A few taps opened a connection to the Pit's power storage systems, a mind-numbingly large array of superconductor coils buried deep under the primary hangers at the bottom of the main shaft. Protected by a huge thickness of armourcrete, these provided enough energy to charge all of the various airtrucks and combat vehicles, without having to rely on the Hive's main power centres. The actual amount of energy was something Valith tried not to think about; it was best expressed in terms of kilotonnes, rather than mere joules.

This system, with all its interlocks and power controllers, also provided a safe way to drain the much smaller banks of the dropshuttle; fully charged, there was enough energy in the aircraft to slag the inside of the hangar a hundred times over. Trotting back to the gryphons, Valith, after a considerable effort, locked the connector in place and started the de-energisation process. Nodding his thanks to the troopers, who departed without a backward glance, he studied the repeater display on his bracer. The process was completely silent, despite the half gigawatt of power flowing through the cable, and Valith sighed, wondering what he could do to look busy, lest he attract Tuthi's ire once more.

Another check of his remote display and a quick calculation gave him the amount of time remaining for this operation. Huh, not as bad as this one thought, even without the crewponies. At least it might get Tuthi to calm down a little. He jogged over to the lieutenant, standing quietly in her peripheral vision until she turned. Valith lifted up his bracer and--

The world went white for an instant, then darkness fell.

===

It was like opening the door to a furnace; a sudden torrent of power that filled her from hooves to horn tip. There was more, much more, than she could hold, and Fusion funnelled the excess into that seemingly infinite reservoir that resided somewhere outside the mere physical realm. The energy buoyed her, the tickle of grass underhoof fading as her whole body lifted off the ground without a single wingbeat. Normal vision was useless under the onslaught of her power, so it was by shadow sight that Fusion took them all to the first teleportation target--

~~~discontinuity~~~

--a deeply forested valley under a low, cloudy sky, abruptly lit to stellar brilliance by their arrival. Pony shapes fell away from her, wings pumping to increase the speed supplied by laggard gravity, arrowing to the nearest ridgeline and out of sight. Her power built further, and wisps of steam starting to curl up from the nearest trees, but still she waited, watching as the others vanished in little pulses of pastel light amid the darkness of the shadow world.

Still at her left side was Redshift, curled into as compact a ball as he could manage while wearing the purloined Security barding; she held him safe within a carefully maintained bubble that protected him from the dangers of the energies she was holding. To her right was a shifting patch of darkness, the exact opposite of what she had become. The power flowed over and past this shape, a black, pony-headed comet in a universe made solely of light.

At the back of her mind was a gathering fatigue, something stealing into her bones despite the sheer, luminous power that was filling them. She'd felt this before, not directly, but via a sharing proxy, and knew the dangers of waiting too long--

~~~discontinuity~~~

--light, the hard brilliance of a nuclear explosion, washed over the expanse of the farm, waking the herds of cattle and sending them lowing and bellowing in panic. Unmindful of the stampede, Fusion opened her wings and reared in the air; brush discharges tens of lengths long danced from her primary feathers and filled the sky with a crackling roar. She felt hot, like she was working hard at the height of summer in high humidity, the steady upward creep of her body temperature making her head fuzzy and her thoughts swim. Like an imprisoned beast, all teeth, claws and hurricane fury, finally seeing its opportunity to escape and rain bloody murder upon an unsuspecting world, the power beat against the cage of her mind. Fusion pushed it back, trapping the energy in short-lived thaumic cascades that fed back upon themselves, confining and concentrating it still further

She reached for the final pattern that would take them to their target, but the form would not stabilize; each attempt fuzzed some part of the complex and sensitive pattern, rendering it unworkable or lethal. Every effort brought with it a finite chance of disaster; the imprisoned beast not some raging carnivore, but the massed, writhing grubs of a parasitic wasp made from phosphorus, eager to consume from the inside and leave her a gutted shell, fire bursting from every pore and orifice.

Darkness lent in from somewhere close by and, for a moment, Fusion felt a thrill of sheer terror, imagining a distant Dog-made machine, attracted by her actions and turning its attention in her direction. Let me, came Gravity's thoughts, a cool wash of the night air after a blazing summer's day. Without hesitation, Fusion released the failed pattern, returning her attention to the demon caged within her head. There was the touch of familiar magic, cradling and enclosing her, then a sudden, wrenching push--

~~~discontinuity~~~

--an intolerable glare, too bright even through the closed lid of her remaining eye, washed out the whole world. No longer dark, the shadow universe sparkled, every atom and molecule within a kilolength reacting to the thaumic gradient and singing its presence with luminous joy. There was a moment of perfect clarity, and Fusion let her mind race out into the cluttered chambers that surrounded the vertical shaft that plunged away a few lengths to her front. They teemed with life; the bipedal shapes of Dogs, all locked in whatever position her arrival had found them in, filled the rooms and corridors. Further away were the winged forms of gryphons, a few scattered about the shaft, but most packed into one of several tight little roosts buried deep in the walls.

Behind her, no more than a leap away, crouched the sullen black shapes of a pair of Security aircraft, identical to the one Gravity had dealt with back at the institute. With them were more Dogs, most in their asymmetric-limbed powered armour, and a veritable flock of gryphons; all were rendered glacial by her accelerated state, locked in attitudes of surprise. Paws were just starting to come up to cover eyes, and heads turning away in a desperate effort to shield themselves from whatever had just appeared in their midst.

I can only see one pony.

Gravity’s presence was like the soothing caress of water after a hard gallop, her mental tone one of eagerness and excitement at fever-pitch that washed away some of the fuzziness invading Fusion's thoughts. The white mare signalled her agreement back along the sharing, allowing her disembodied attention to fly towards that lone member of her own kind. It was a grey mare, alone in a small chamber, deep in the bowels of the base. She was lying on her belly, awake despite the time, her head raised and looking straight at Fusion.

The look on the mare's face was one of dawning horror, frozen in place by the accelerated pulse of her own thoughts, and Fusion felt a ripple of guilt run through her mind. She will try and stop us, no matter the personal cost. Something sharp and burning, like a needle of iron at red heat, started to move through her vitals. Even at this speed, her magic still needed effort to keep it in check. Soon it would eat her alive.

Fear struck at Fusion; the deep terror of failure, of coming this close and endangering so many ponies for nothing. There's too much, I can't-- She pulled back, returning to her body and reaching inside the cage, tormenting the beast as much as she dared, whipping it into a fury. She was still in the same position, wings flared and balanced on her hind legs, as when she'd teleported in, the slow claws of gravity yet to pull her to the ground.

Her thoughts returned to their normal tempo and Fusion pawed the air, lightning arcing from hoof to horn to wing, stroking the flanks of the vehicles and the walls of the hangar that had once held Random and the corral's foals. She screamed as she landed, her bellow caught by the confined magic and twisted. High pitched and as loud as a jet engine, her voice rang out across the hollow core of the base, in time with the explosive slam of her hooves striking deep scars in the concrete.

Finally free, all the barely controlled power rushed out in a single thaumic shout. The arcane shockwave was a bubble of rainbow light; far too bright to look at, it rolled out from her body, passing through air and concrete with equal alacrity.

===

That damned useless tech was here again, standing at her side with a relieved look on his face. Tuthi ignored him for a moment, then turned. It took no effort at all to maintain her annoyed expression. He lifted his bracer, pointing at some set of numbers which were far too large to be good news, when his face, body and the whole rest of the hangar behind him was lit with a burst of brilliant light.

For a moment, she thought that there had been an explosion, but it didn't have the blue-white electric hue of a superconductor quench, or the thermal slap and ruddy bloom of a fuel-air detonation. Instead, it was the fine, pale yellow of a noonday sun, as if one of the heliostats had suddenly turned its beam in her direction. No, not bright enough; it's like celestia itself has fallen into the Pit. The thought was fleeting, and her gaze was captured by the sight of the tech's eyes, harshly illuminated by the glare and vanishing behind the suddenly mirrored curve of his goggles.

In those distorting lenses was a shape, the eye-searing brilliance of a magnesium flare moulded into the form of a servitor, its front hooves off the ground and wings open. Silent lightning rippled from horn and feathers, not the slow strobe of cloud-to-ground from the belly of a carefully controlled storm system, but the frenetic grasping claws of discharges from the top of a tesla coil. To each side were other pony-shapes, almost invisible in the glare; one was huddled in a compact bundle, wings drawn up over its head, the other upright and alert, with what could only be described as an expression of unholy joy on its muzzle. The view was painfully bright and Tuthi clenched her eyes shut, one paw slapping the emergency helmet seal control while the other groped for her laser. The motion was only half complete when the shrill warble of the thaumic attack alarm came through the speakers in her neck ring, just before a wall of rainbow light rolled over her.

Her suit suffered some kind of seizure, the electromuscle bands either locking solid or flexing wildly, tipping her forwards to slam muzzle-first into the hangar floor. It was only by luck and superb reflexes that she'd managed to close her helmet in time; even so, the impact made the world spin and gave her an instant headache. In complete darkness -- the smart display had failed completely -- Tuthi's legs and arms drummed against the concrete, the rapid thrashing of the spasming muscle bands bouncing her around like some mad robot.

She'd trained for this, letting herself go limp except for a clenched jaw, cheek muscles bulging to keep her mouth closed and avoid biting off her own tongue. It was impossible to control a malfunctioning suit though strength alone; no Person could ever match the synthetic musculature, so you just rode it out and prayed to the Maker that the system would recover before you lost consciousness. If you did try to fight it, then the suit would happily rip tendons and dislocate bones.

Through the sudden, random wrenchings came noise. Not the racket of her own armour pounding the hangar floor, though that was near deafening, but the sound of gunfire and the harsh cries of gryphons, of metal striking metal and the rushing roar of superconductors failing. Helpless to do anything but listen, Tuthi and her suit writhed in electronic agony

A seeming age of violent motion came to an abrupt halt and her visor lit up, displaying a depressingly long row of red icons. It was the work of a moment to interpret the list -- thaumic defences offline, arcane early warning not responding, thaumokinetic manipulator damaged, reactor scrammed -- it went on and on, a litany of mechanical and thaumic woe, but it was the last one made her pause. Backups only, but perhaps... Tuthi cleared the warnings, leaving only the battery and magazine indicators, then thrust down with one arm, flicking herself over.

The suit responded sluggishly, pushing her over to land on her tail and against something hard yet squashy. Still rebuilding its internal routing systems; must have been a massive TMP. Every single one of her crystal thaumic systems was dead and refusing to recover, and the armour was in failover mode, but that was fine. Have we been hit by Arclight? Her laser was gone; the optical waveguide had sheared off during her suit's seizure -- no doubt smashed to fragments by some flailing limb -- so she made the gesture that linked the rotary cannon to her left paw, letting the armature extract it from its housing along her spine so it could mirror her movements.

Kicking off backwards, she stumbled over the hard-soft object, turning the tumble into a roll that left her lying on her belly behind the body of one of the gryphon troopers from her squad. Something angular had punctured his armour just above the breast bone, carving a wide slot that passed right through his body. The exit was a like a giant mouth, ringed with the jagged teeth of sundered metaloceramic plates, a wound far too large to be any conventional weapon. Eyes wide, Tuthi hunkered down, letting the rotary cannon on its stub arm nose over the side of the corpse.

A camera feed from the axis of the gun showed her the nature of the battle; the lights in the hangar, and even in the Pit itself, had been extinguished, leaving the scene illuminated by the flash and flicker of magic amid the invisible roar of railgun fire. The weapon the enemy had used was immediately obvious; there was a splinter of darkness, wreathed with eye-achingly deep indigo light, a light so close to the end of the visual spectrum that it might as well have been in the ultraviolet, drifting about the hangar.

The thing would move with casual slowness, then abruptly blur into invisibility with a crack, before returning to its mistress' side. It was the dark pony, of course, the subject of the frankly unbelievable briefing they'd all received a fraction of a megasecond ago, that had been standing next to the white one. Guess that means they both got out. It stood there, with splayed legs and a lowered head, looking like it was being pressed back by a fierce wind. Light, the same colour as that surrounding its weapon, made hard-edged curves and quarter domes between the pony and what remained of the reaction teams, flaring in time with the arc-welder glare at the tip of its horn and the sparking streams of projectiles striking that impossibly strong force field.

Did we get one? The white pony had collapsed; a heap of snowy feathers and bone-pale armour plates anointed by pastel mane and tail, all the magnesium-glare gone. Little flecks of something black peppered its colourless form; under the hard, monochromatic lighting it was impossible to tell what it was. All that magic was coming from the dark servitor, a horrible, painful, chaotic dance of geometry and fire that filled half the hangar. Its mouth was moving as if talking, and its head kept turning to glance at its fallen partner. Even one is enough to hold all these ones off! Terror paralysis gripped her with all the power of a giant's paw; in the confines of the muzzle guard her mouth opened, an action mirrored by the fighting mandible that gave the suit its monstrous look, and she screamed at her own body, but it just wouldn't move.

Still frozen, Tuthi watched as the dark figure took a step backwards, closer to the lip of the hangar and the drop into the Pit. The fire redoubled, and she suddenly realised that the creature was close to the end of its strength. Old memories of the limits of servitor magic, from the few training courses a student operative was required to take, reached forward in time and wrapped themselves around her hindbrain, and she finally found the strength to twitch. The bigger the field, the harder it is to maintain.

That was enough. With a whimper, she pointed her paw at the downed servitor, aligning the rotary cannon's reticule with its belly, then clenched it into a fist. The gun roared and bucked, not the juddering of some small automatic rifle, but the high frequency buzz of two hundred rounds a second that would have pushed her across the floor, if it wasn't for her firm grip on the gryphon's corpse.

Something must have alerted the creature, because the flicker-flash of violet light extended to cover the other pony. Ammunition and battery counters dropped at the same precipitous rate, but her target took a staggering step backwards, then another, its rear hooves a paws-width from the edge. Missiles from some source burst high on the curve of the violet field; they had been fired wild, their sensitive targeting systems affected by the local thaumic gradient, but the magical defences were a large target compared to the servitor, and missing was well-nigh impossible.

Despite the obvious power raging throughout the hanger, the servitor was in trouble. Its flanks, hidden under midnight plates of armour that must have come from some unfortunate security pony, heaved like great bellows, while wings half emerged from the carapace plates to thrash the air in some ill-prepared attempt at flight. It staggered, a groove appearing in one flank as an invisibly fast fragment made it through the defences and shaved off a line of chromatophore.

"Damn you, why won't you just die--!" she screamed into her muzzle guard, voice choking off when the pony lifted its head and smiled, lips pulling back from large, square herbivore teeth that the twisted illumination seemed to make as jagged as a mouthful of fangs.

===

The ring of titanic flood lights that encircled the shaft exploded as the thaumic wavefront washed over them, plunging the sector Security Hub into darkness. The magic, coupling to the kilolengths of cable that laced the base, induced wild, megavolt surges that ran rampant through network switches, computronium farms and communications arrays, trashing every semiconductor junction they could reach. Surge arresters designed to manage an electromagnetic pulse damped down the voltages, but had little effect when the arcane bubble rolled over them and created more surges in the protected zones behind them.

Close to the epicentre of the pulse, whole lengths of cable, much of it only designed for lighting and low power applications, simply burst into flames under the influence of the sort of current usually only encountered in lightning strikes. Fire systems, simple things that consisted of chemical foams stored under pressure in fusible tubes, fought the blazes, but these were only placed at the vulnerable nodes within the wiring loom. Tens of thousands of small fires ignited and burned without restraint, mostly behind walls and in cable runs, spewing dark smoke and combustion products into now pitch-black corridors and work rooms.

Within these suddenly toxic spaces, the occupants -- large numbers of analysts, data controllers, internal security and investigation personnel -- found themselves struggling to remove ubiquitous communications devices that had flashed into incandescence. Burned, blinded and choking, they fought to open doors with unfamiliar manual controls, only to find that, when they did, conditions outside were no better. Further away, things were not so catastrophic; portable comms units, and other devices without long conductive connections to act as antennae for the pulse, merely crashed and rebooted. Out here, emergency lights, all self powered, came on in moments, leaving the People blinking in surprise at dead displays, the work of kiloseconds gone into electronic oblivion.

Vibrations, subtle at first but with ever increasing strength, started to ripple through the floor, turning confusion into fear.

===

Gravity was looking at the security base through the medium of Fusion's shadow sight as the pulse went out, and felt nothing but intense satisfaction. The complex, sparkling swirl of eddy currents cascading through every conductive object lit up the interior of the structure with strange webs of crimson and lilac. Short-lived tendrils of light played out from the rapidly advancing wavefront and, where they touched, the glows of stored power went dark. Crystal thaumic systems fared no better; although they were not sensitive to the sustained electrical assault, the other properties of the arcane shockwave destroyed them just as thoroughly.

All that remained in the upper levels on their side of the shaft were isolated pockets, those few electrical systems that had been protected by layers of foil and woven copper, and the golden wing-bars of squadrons of gryphon troops, swirling and agitated like an ant's nest accidentally kicked by a careless hoof. My turn now, she thought, pulling away from the sharing and the enervating weakness that permeated all of her sister's thoughts and feelings. There was no reply, and Fusion's shadow sight, with its extra sensitivity to all forms of stored energy, faded, replaced by normal vision. Fusion herself sank to the floor, wings splayed and lather spotting her white flanks, breathing in great, gasping breaths.

In the sudden silence and darkness there were yells and harsh gryphon calls, coupled to a sudden panicky drumming of paws or talons. Alarmed, Gravity glanced at Fusion, slumped and moving weakly, then her head snapped around to look at the assembled Security soldiers. There were at least a dozen, most wearing that lumpy powered armour she'd seen in the depths of the institute, and probably three times that number of gryphons, all equally dressed for battle.

Everyone was moving. The suits seemed much slower than she remembered; there was none of the insectile speed that she associated with the bulky machines. Several had fallen over, toppled like felled trees, or were vibrating and gyrating as if in the throes of some frantic madness. The gryphons, blessed or cursed by being mere flesh and blood, were having no such difficulties. The cat-birds scattered, hunting for cover around the bullet shapes of the Security dropshuttles, pulling forward their shoulder mounted weapons as they did so.

Gravity, her blood up, spared Fusion another glance and manifested a quarter dome of violet light, centred upon herself. The first strikes, from a gryphon who'd taken roost clinging to the joined landing gear of the right-most shuttle, impacted without her really feeling them, spraying the hangar deck with metal splinters and the rolling thunder of explosive ammunition. The mare reached out and sent one of her weapons in the soldier's direction.

The slender knife-missile, dark fullerene-metal composite glowing violet with its coating of impenetrable magic, flicked out with a railgun crack, then returned to her side and spun fast enough to blur into a cone of sooty shadow, shedding a haze of atomised blood. The gunfire stopped and the gryphon, looking confused, lost his grip on the strut and fell solidly to the deck, bright carmine erupting from wide slashes in his torso. There was another moment of shocked silence, then the rest of the avian soldiers opened fire.

Gravity grunted; this was like being pelted by pebbles in a stinging stream. She felt for Fusion, struggling to rebuild the sharing without the other mare's cooperation, while sending her weapons out once more. A half dozen were felled, the flying knives taking zigzag paths between targets, but the additional distraction did nothing for her accuracy. Their armour was tough stuff, equal to her weapons, which required the full measure of her new strength to propel them fast enough to assure penetration. Many hits were merely glancing, the wickedly keen, force-field honed edge of her knife missiles turned aside, and only threw the troopers back to strike walls or floor, things their armour was superb at surviving.

A line of green light, bright enough to compete with her own magic and leave spidery afterimages across her retinas flashed out, slashing through the space between her head and wings. It sliced through her layered defences without hindrance and Gravity ducked, but the beam swept sideways, cutting clean across her chest just below her throat. She recoiled, ears back, braced for the sudden, paralysing pain that would come with the laser strike, the image of a bloody Lilac so strong that it made her heart leap.

There was nothing, just the eye-searing brilliance of reflection and the sudden stinging slap of vaporised metal oxides striking the sensitive, unprotected tip of her muzzle. Redshift, you genius. A knife-missile flashed out, propelled by all of her panicked strength, and the laser winked out.

The chaotic rattle of gryphon firearms was augmented by the harsh, ear damaging buzz of one, then several, of the Dog's rotary cannon. The pressure became insistent, a fire hose of force that made her grip on the knife-missiles falter. "Talk to me, Fusion, please! Tell me you are alright, I can't do this if I don't know you are safe!" she shouted, voice lost amid the scream and continuous roll of detonations. Should have known that jumping straight in would be stupid; why should the Dogs keep the hangar in the same state as when the foals were here? There was a movement from behind one of the corpses, a cylindrical bundle of tubes that could only be... she took another step backwards, her weapons falling to the floor, and reached out to enfold her sister in what little strength she had left. I'll run, we'll think of another plan. I--

Something struck her on the flank, a stunning impact that the armour turned aside, and Gravity staggered sideways, standing over her sister and a trembling Redshift, crouching down to reduce the frontal area she needed to defend. The fire intensified, the very air in front of her face distorted and curdled by the quantity of high velocity metal and ceramic that was exploding into vapour no further away than the tip of her muzzle.

I'm here. Don't retreat. Fusion's mental voice was weak and hesitant, but getting stronger. I'm ready to start the next part of the plan.

A vast relief filled the blue mare, and she straightened up, looking back through her layers of force and telekinesis, her lips curving into a wide, crazy smile. Fusion's magic reached out, folding around herself and Redshift; there was the sensation of concentration through the sharing, of a complex spell being assembled. Just a few more moments...

Remember why we're here and who the enemy is, Gravity. Give the gryphons a chance, if you can. Fusion blinked out, dropping out of the sharing, and the Security hub, in a pulse of white-gold light.

Gravity nodded, though her sister could neither see nor feel the gesture, and made no attempt to rebuild the communion. She pulled her defences still further in, shrinking the force field and allowing many of the wild shots to fall past her and on into the shaft, then reached out and kicked with immaterial hooves.

===

Something struck Tuthi, a fast-swung invisible sledgehammer of force that turned the world into a violet-tinged tumble that seemed to last forever. The hangar bay spun around her, the heavy shapes of the other members of her squad taking similar trajectories, as if they were seeds cast from some ancient farmer's paw. She sailed past one of the gryphon flysoldats, his wings fully extended and twisting, the feathers fanning and biting an unexpectedly fast airflow. She met the other soldier's gaze for a frozen instant of time, trying to communicate her desire to be caught, but there was nothing but panic in his eyes. They drifted apart, pulled away by her undiminished velocity.

Time telescoped so that it seemed she had all of infinity to twist in the air, get her paws underneath her and land safely but that, like everything else, was all an illusion brought on by the brain's frantic grasping for any opportunity to save itself. She caught the leading edge of one dropshuttle's horizontal stabilisers, the vehicle itself knocked on its side and spewing dark smoke from a gaping wound in one flank, clean across the middle of her back, a sudden wrenching impact that bent her like a bow and made her teeth snap shut on the end of her tongue to flood her mouth with the taste of old iron.

Something snapped in her chest, just where ribs ended and belly began. Tuthi fell to the ground, struggling to breathe against stunned muscles and a sharp pain in her right side, like a hot knife was being twisted in her lungs. Inside the confines of the helmet she coughed and spat, warm liquid running down the underside of her jaw to soak into the suit's neck seal. Damaged or not, some part of the suit's systems responded, spraying cool water over the inside of the muzzle guard to clean the bite controls, inhaling the bloody water to stop it from obscuring her vision.

# Warning: automatic rescue systems active. Tenazine infusion started. #

The pain just went, washed away by a wonderful fuzziness that spread from her right to envelop her entire torso, followed immediately by an incredible clarity and sense of power. Unnoticed, the suit stiffened and contracted, holding the bones still and preventing any further injury. All fear washed away by the chemical cocktail, Tuthi snarled something indistinct, then came up onto her knees, clenching her paw into a fist and punching it at the shimmering shape of the servitor. The cannon roared--

# Ammunition feed failure. #

--then died, the few rounds serving only to attract the creature's attention. That violet-wreathed head snapped around, and light flared about her chest.

Alarms shrieked and the urgent babble of the suit's advisory system became incomprehensible; error after error tumbled out of the speakers in her helmet, the desperate words running together as the gunshot crackle of fracturing armour ceramic became deafening. Her visor displays flickered and failed, then returned a low resolution contrasty mess, showing nothing but flares and shadows. There was a sudden acceleration, strong enough that her vision blurred, then all motion and gunfire stopped.

She was suspended, half a length off the ground, staring into the grinning face of the servitor, the bright point at the tip of its horn the only light source she could see. Another rapid blur of motion and she was spun around and pulled backwards, facing what was left of her squad and the other reaction team that shared the hangar, only visible as vague shapes in the darkness. The sudden movement did something in her chest, and she grunted as some of the pain leaked past the efforts of her suit's medical systems.

"I bet you can't see anything through that. Let me just..."

The words were distant, muffled by the padding and hermetic seals, and Tuthi was too busy trying not to vomit from the new pain and the movement that had catalysed it, to pay much attention. Good as the purge systems were, this was not something anyone wanted to try outside of training, and she had no desire to drown in the contents of her own stomach.

There was a sound like the breaking of a perfect crystal, accompanied by a flash of violet light that was inside the suit's helmet. More liquid, warm and smelling of rusty iron, flowed down the side of her throat. There was a sudden wrenching sensation, like someone was trying to unscrew her head, and her helmet was pulled away and flung high into the air. Gasping, ears ringing from the sudden change in pressure, Tuthi looked blearily out at the remains of the reaction teams, fearing the worst, squinting as she tried to locate soldiers she'd worked and trained with for tens of megaseconds.

Bodies, shattered and sliced, lay scattered about the hangar deck, each within its own spreading pool of dark liquid. The real wall of the hangar... Tuthi squinted, trying to resolve the starfish shapes half way between floor and ceiling, just starting to leak something viscous, then her mouth dropped open. All true; this one thought the briefing had to be wrong. She tore her gaze away from the suits that had been thrown so hard that they had splashed, eyes searching the floor for any survivors at all. There were gryphons, dazed-looking shells of their former selves, that staggered drunkenly in small circles or cradled twisted limbs while hunched against the wall or dropshuttle.

Only one of the armoured People, unidentifiable without the tagging systems in her helmet, still moved, holding a severed arm with bemusement and looking between it and the stump it had come from, as trying to work out how to reattach it. The fingers, held rigid by electronic rigor, were clenched tight around the grip of the trooper's stubby, wide-mouthed antipersonnel laser. That could have been Tuthi. There was little blood; automatic tourniquet constriction of the electromuscle bands had seen to that. She looked away, teeth clenched. "They will kill the pony's entire family line for this," she choked out, ignoring the little warning stabs from her chest.

"They have already tried that," the pony whispered, so close to her ear that Tuthi could feel the breath. "I saved you, because you were the one who decided it would be a good idea to shoot at my sister. Just look at what happens when you hurt one of mine." Violet light closed around the other suit, effortlessly lifting it in the air and out over the lip of the hangar.

Tuthi growled, a low warning rumble that turned into a cough, filling her mouth with bloody phlegm. "Don't you--" The nimbus vanished and the suit dropped out of sight. There was a moment of silence, then a dopplered scream that cut off abruptly.

"See?"

She twisted, trying to snap her teeth shut around the creature's muzzle, but only found the hard surfaces of its muzzle guard. With a sudden jerk, the pony pulled her out of reach, then shook her violently. When the world stopped spinning there was more blood in her mouth, and fragments of something hard and jagged. Tuthi spat in the direction of the servitor, spraying it with blood and broken teeth.

"Are you ready for your flying lesson now?"

There was a flicker of motion in the deep shadow under one of the dropshuttles, an unfolding and twisting that was barely visible in the harsh light around the pony, but Tuthi recognised it nonetheless. This one is dead anyway, but at least she might see the servitor go first. "No, not just family," she said loudly, the last word ending in a gasp, "the pony's whole corral will be euthanized--" She broke off, silenced by the thunderous howl of the paired rotary railguns in the belly turret, sparks and explosions tracking out towards the servitor. Too soon, idiot! She cursed whoever was operating those guns; even one of the cannon could out-shoot both reaction teams combined.

The creature whinnied in surprise and darted sideways, then the world blurred one last time.

===

The turret, a squat thing that Gravity could have sworn wasn't there when she first teleported in, exploded in a shower of armour fragments when the suit struck it, the still running feeder chutes spraying hundreds of shiny, needle tipped cylinders across the already cluttered hangar floor. She wasted no time, and clipped off the landing gear with brief flashes of violet light, letting the heavy machine slam down on to the concrete. There was a yell from somewhere inside the dropshuttle and she nodded, paused to orientate her defences towards the yawning expanse of the shaft, then started to pull the aircraft apart.

Armour, great plates of the stuff, were cut from the hull and dropped in a haphazard pile. Made of thaumically aligned single crystals of metalloceramic laced with fullerene strands, and thick enough to shrug off impacts that would smash a power suit to ruin, it sliced as easily as cloudstuff under the single atom thickness of Gravity's pulsing force fields. Behind the hull were machines; generators, laser optics, ammunition storage, and a whole host of less identifiable items. The mare cut and pulled, taking only moments to expose the crew deck to the hard light of her magic.

Cowering in one corner, nursing a badly burned arm, was a Dog. He was leaning against a console, staring at her with wide, frightened eyes, his mouth opening and closing but no words emerging. "Nice try," Gravity snarled, pulling him out by one ankle to dangle a length above the ground.

"No, please! This one is only a tech--" His arms came up, paws held protectively in front of his face.

"I don't care what you are; you work for them, the monsters that maimed my dam and tried to cut up my sister while she was still alive!" Gravity was shouting now, and swung the Dog out over the half kilolength drop to the big doors below.

"Valith has a daughter, p-please, don't kill this one," he wailed, voice high and near unrecognizable, tears running down his muzzle to drip off the tip and down into the pit.

Gravity stared at him, suddenly aware of her audience of shocked gryphons. The terror in his voice finally penetrated her anger, cooling the white heat of her rage to something closer to that of liquid helium. Fusion and Spiral warned you about this. Don't let your emotions make your decisions. She nodded, pulling the Dog back in and depositing him high up on the slick top of one dropshuttle. He whined pitifully, paws scrabbling until they found purchase on a gap between two buckled plates. "Sit," she said, with a mirthless smile, "stay."

There was the sudden thunder of detonations at close range, and the immediate and immensely bright, blue-white, flashes of some explosive she'd never experienced before. They burst across the whole arc of her field, a geometric array of submunitions that would have filled the hangar from floor to ceiling and wall to wall if it wasn't for her magic intercepting them. Pain lanced through Gravity's head and she fell to her belly, stunned, amid the blood and wreckage, all defences failing in an instant. More shots followed, the normal crack of supersonic ammunition, passing through the space she would have occupied, had she remained standing.

Behind her, the gryphons shrieked, scrambling for cover; the sudden, predatory noises reached deep into her hindbrain and screamed warnings down her limbic system. Gravity's mind snapped back into focus and she blindly reached for some of the wreckage and rubble, pushing it out towards the opposite side of the kilolength-wide shaft in a continuous, hypervelocity jet.

The shaft was filled with the continuous thunder of irregular shapes accelerated to several times the speed of sound, the individual cracks merging to turn the whole structure into one huge organ pipe that sang a horribly loud song of destruction. Dust obscured the opposite wall as Gravity bent the rubble jet, directing it over each of the large hangars she could see. She spared no effort for defence, pouring her power into stopping any more missile launches, or whatever it was that had attacked her.

All the easily available ammunition was depleted within a few seconds, but by now the air in the centre was thick with hot, turbulent dust. Her view of the other side was completely obscured, and Gravity paused, sweating heavily, while she swept the inner surface of the shaft for any signs of movement. More of those Security aircraft, she thought, but nothing moving... yet. The range was long, but they had the same high density armour as the airtanks had, if not the thickness of the stuff, and they were visible as little knots of deeper darkness in her shadow sight.

Relaxing slightly, she inhaled deeply, muzzle wrinkling at the horribly strong scent of offal and explosives, but relishing the cool air as it passed over her overheated body. Climbing shakily to her hooves, she built another force field, a small one this time, just enough to cover her from any long range fire, then turned to the rest of the hangar. The ache in her head faded, and she marvelled at how fast her strength seemed to be returning. "Gryphons, who leads you if the Dogs are not around?" she said in a scratchy voice, then picked up one of the dropshuttle armour slabs and started to slice it into strips the length of her body.

No one moved, apart from the occasional unintentional wing flick, and Gravity grunted. Time is growing short; got to keep the Dogs occupied... still, it is what Fusion wanted. "I have no fight with your kind. If you want to leave you should do so now. Things will only get messier from this point."

One of the gryphons stood up and took a limping step towards her. "I am sersjant Eystein Koll. We cannot go; the Masters will empty the roosts and throw us at you, just as a distraction, if nothing else." His voice was flat, like he was just relaying a routine report, but there was pain and hopelessness in his eyes. "I have friends down there... I won't leave them."

"Then I will--" Kill you all. Gravity completed the sentence in her head, feeling sick. "Of course they will," she murmured, looking back over the inside of the shaft. With shadow sight the dust was no hindrance, and the agitated swirl of the gryphon roosting barracks was clearly visible against the thaumically empty backdrop. Their communications are gone... I suppose no one has reached them for orders yet, but they will. The bright glimmers of each gryphon clearly showed the layout of their roosts; they had stayed confined, only starting to venture near the exit tunnel. Perhaps that is their only way out?

"So much to do," Gravity whispered, sweeping the whole structure with her shadow sight. I have bloodied them, but there are far more here than when Fusion talked to Random. They will reply in kind, and I have to keep them here. Ears folding back and heart rate accelerating, the mare licked her lips, shifting her weight from hoof to hoof in an unconscious desire for motion, while she studied the base.

The dense support members were obvious, an airy lattice of steel bones overlain with thick, metal fibre and fullerene reinforced concrete that lined the central shaft and penetrated deep into the ground. Half a kilolength down from the surface, where the shaft apparently stopped, wasn't a section of floor, but a huge set of doors, cantilevered out from the walls and covering a cavity filled with... Shapes, things with densities that far exceeded mere structural steel, moved down in the darkness. Compact, thick-hulled spheroids and longer, cylindrical forms, dark and without any sign of magic, they no doubt moved by technology alone.

Within the worm-chewed volumes surrounding the empty core were a multitude of compartments and isolated spaces, places that were accessible through only a few routes and separated by heavy walls. This place is built for war, and to take damage, Gravity thought. Damage to one area is blocked by those barricades. She traced the shapes, locating things that were different and might be important to the Dogs.

Gravity snorted and shook her head. Despite all that had taken place, really very little time had passed since Fusion's attack, but already there was a response. The chaotic swirl and boil of gryphon motion condensed into purposeful movement, a scattering of golden points issuing forth from the deep-set barracks and flying down their exit tunnels towards the main shaft. Scouts, I think, while the rest prepare. Someone must have finally remembered them. Our battle is not with you, the blue mare thought, but with your masters. Standing at the lip of the hangar, head out over the precipice, Gravity took a bundle of her armour rods and balanced them in mid air, angled to point at the barracks entrance, then pushed.

The silence was shattered by the explosive crack of metal accelerated to obscene velocities. The armoured portal -- designed, she suddenly thought, to keep the soldiers in, should the Dogs have trouble with their slave army, rather than to protect them from an outside attack -- to the first gryphon roost exploded in a cloud of pulverised concrete peppered with shards of burning metal. A wave of darkness expanded out from the impact point, the little golden lights of gryphon wings extinguished as their exit tunnel collapsed. The majority recoiled and resumed their agitated swirl, seemingly trapped in their roost.

Gravity turned her attention to the other two barrack roosts, examining their construction for the brief moments while she prepared the next batch of projectiles. It is true; they are isolated, she thought, there are very few connections to the rest of the base... truly designed to keep them away from the Dogs. Gryphons were moving in each of these, but not as many as she had imagined, and far fewer than in the first. Still no communications, she suddenly thought, they really do obey orders, just like us. The next sheaf of metal rods left her side, accelerating to several multiples of the speed of sound before they had travelled more than a body length.

Sersjant Koll flinched, foreclaws clamped to each side of his head. "What did you just do?" he shouted, fumbling for the weapon slung between his wing roots.

Gravity pulled the stubby gun free and hurled it over the edge. "As far as I can tell, your kind are housed in isolated sections of this place. Is that right, that the only exit is into the shaft?" She kept her attention out into the void, watching for any movement in the hangar bays on the other side of the shaft. I can't believe I got them all... There were a few golden lights still among the deep shadows, and she sighed quietly. She hefted another bundle of projectiles, throwing them into those bays, aiming for the heavy masses of the dropshuttles. When she had finished, there were fewer lights.

Koll opened and closed his beak a couple of times, shaking his head as if to shed some annoying insect. "Yes," he said, far louder than he needed to. "What did you do?"

"I have sealed them in; no one will get out to die in some pointless show of force. Your friends are as safe as they can be." She stared at him for a moment, then raised one wing and gestured to the dust filled emptiness. "Far safer than you are. Leave now, get as far from here as you can." The mare cocked her head to one side, refolding her wing under the carapace plate. "Tell every gryphon that you see that there is another way; the rule of the Dogs can be broken." And I intend to smash and stomp and kick, until those that survive, until every Dog on this world, trembles at the mention of my name.

"How do I know you didn't just kill them all," Koll said, voice harsh and angry. "Why should I trust you?"

Gravity nodded and threw another bundle of projectiles deep into the base, breaching deep protected compartments one after another with long streams of fast metal, then turned her head to look at the sersjant. "You're still alive, aren't you?"

===

The gryphons had just cleared the lip of the shaft, some under their own power, some carried in makeshift slings, when an object, dark and blocky, fell past the lip of the hangar like a bird with its wings closed. A few levels further down, blue jets of plasma speared out from its underside, arresting the fall with a suddenness that must have left the occupants bruised and stunned, and filling the complex with a shrill shriek. Lines of bright incendiaries spun out from a turret on its dorsal surface, the scream of the paired rotary cannon competing with the railgun crack of Gravity's attack. In the dark of the shaft, all the lights extinguished and any glow from the moons or debris ring obscured by billowing clouds of pulverised concrete and condensed metal oxides, the flash from the ammunition was a regular, staccato flicker in the gritty fog.

There was no glow of thaumic systems, so Gravity followed it by the drive plume and the feel of moving mass. The lack of the smartest parts of their targeting systems, coupled with the rapid plummet in an attempt to get within range before she could respond, did nothing for the aircraft's accuracy, and impacts blasted across the whole side of the shaft. The mare flinched at the closest shots, her own force field pulsing violet as the stray rounds struck it; the impacts enough to make her grunt, carrying far more power than those from personal weapons, and she shot back with a spray of small metal fragments.

Golden sparks flashed over the half-hidden shape and the guns went silent and the drives flickered; the vehicle staggered in the air, spinning and tumbling, the high-pitched whistle of plasma becoming erratic. Within moments the increasing gyrations brought it into contact with the side wall of the shaft, and it crashed through into the office spaces beyond. Blue-white light flashed, startlingly bright, and the floor of the hangar, a body length of metal-reinforced concrete, jumped under Gravity's hooves. A ringing silence descended upon the complex, punctuated by the random detonation of ammunition in the crashed airtruck, then a fifty length patch of shaft wall erupted.

Blocks of concrete and metal, some bigger than the original airtruck, blasted out from the wall trailing lines of pulverised stone, bouncing off the opposite side before raining down upon the doors at the bottom of the shaft. More noise from above, hard to hear against the crash and rattle of falling rock, made Gravity look up. The mare grinned savagely, then tossed her head, horn slashing a lurid violet line through the air. More of her collection of projectiles vanished, not a loose pile of fixings and pebbles like the first time, but length-long strips of high density fullerene reinforced metal armour cut from the vehicles in the hangar with her.

In the airspace above the shaft there were a series of near-simultaneous flashes, the blue-white of failing superconductors, then half a dozen vicious detonations sent visible shock waves through the dusty air. Ears and body protected by spells she'd learned for the dangerous environment of a satellite kinetic launch facility, Gravity stood at the lip of the hangar and screamed out into the fogged, lightning illuminated air, unable to contain her excitement. Eyes wide and wings flared, she pawed the ground, surrounded by a halo of violet magic. "No more Masters, do you hear me? No more!"

Each word was punctuated by another push, another metal bar accelerated to a kilolength a second and aimed at some feature in the complex. The seconds ticked by, but in total it had been only a few hundred seconds since she'd arrived at the sector Security hub.