Onboard the Invisible Hand, the medical bay was once again a hive of activity. Medical droids were, for the second time in a very short amount of time, swarming over General Grievous. The cyborg was being systemically taken apart piece-by-piece and refitted with fresh white durasteel armor and new cybernetic limbs. His damaged circuits were being replaced, his neck joint already back up to regular operative status.
“Status report,” Grievous demanded over the whirring of droids and the sound of fusion torches.
“Sir,” said a hologram of General Kalani, held conveniently for the immobile cyborg by a nearby MagnaGuard. “Per your orders, our other ships were sacrificed one-by-one to the Republic fleet to give your armies on the surface time. The Invisible Hand is our only remaining capital ship in the system. What is your command?"
“Break orbit immediately and head for the nearest hyperspace jump point. Take us back to Separatist space.”
“And what of our armies on the planet?” the super tactical droid asked.
“Send a signal instructing them to do all the damage that they can,” Grievous answered. “And be sure to wipe all information from our groundside databanks. Then leave them.”
“As you wish, General Grievous.”
On the surface, in the city of Canterlot, Republic forces were pouring in. Liberated from the campaign in space by Admiral Tarkin’s destruction of most of the Separatist battle fleet, fighters and bomber-craft were unleashing hell against the ground-bound droid army. With their air cover destroyed, their leadership seemingly fled, and no shield to protect them, the super battle droids withered under the heavy firepower of the Grand Army of the Republic. LAAT gunships, more than a few fresh from battles in other parts of Equestria, made landings all across the devastated cityscape, depositing fresh clone troopers to reinforce the few surviving pockets of resistance or air lift the survivors.
It was from the passenger compartment of one of these gunships that Princess Celestia watched white-armored clones and their heavy air support take back her city one block at a time. With the droids now apparently lacking central leadership to direct them, and bombs and lasers raining down continuously on their metal heads, they simply could not stand. Within a very short amount of time, the pitched combat had been reduced to a mop-up operation. Celestia knew she should be feeling relieved, but looking out on the smoking ruins of her beautiful capital all she felt was a profound sense of sorrow.
Well, that and tired. Very, very tired.
“Master Kenobi?” she asked in a weak voice.
The Jedi Master, like the solar princess, was lying on a medical stretcher, curious patches of what the humans called “bacta” applied to his wounds, just as they had been to her own. They felt gooey and cold, but they made the pain of her injured wings go away. Her broken front right leg, heavily bound and bandaged by a field surgeon, was another matter.
Obi Wan turned his head to her. “Yes, your highness?”
“Can you please ask the pilot… to take us to see the survivors?” she managed. “I need to see who is left.”
Kenobi looked up meaningfully at one of the clone troopers, who nodded and entered the cockpit. A few moments later, he emerged again and shortly thereafter the gunship changed course. It headed for the silhouette of Canterlot Palace, one of the few structures left in the city that was mostly intact and not on fire.
As they approached, Celestia spied a small clustering of temporary shelters in the ruins of what had so recently been a picturesque garden used for diplomatic talks and parties of the nobility. The gunship sat itself down next to these large field-tents. The solar princess attempted to rise, only for her three weak legs to collapse out underneath her.
“Somepony… please help me up,” she groaned.
“Ma’am, you’re in no condition to be walking,” the clone in a medical uniform declared firmly.
“I… have to,” she breathed heavily from even her minor exertion. “I’m the princess… it’s my duty… to see to the welfare… of my subjects.”
“Ma’am, you’re not getting up from there until I say so,” he said adamantly, folding his arms.
Her purple eyes switched targets, looking to Obi Wan with a pleading expression. “Please… my people…”
Kenobi looked sympathetically at her. “Doctor,” he said to the clone. “Could you at least have someone pull her on the hover stretcher? Surely that won’t exacerbate her injuries too much?”
“I don’t know,” the clone said, putting a hand on his chin thoughtfully. “I’ve never worked with her species before, I wouldn’t want to take too many chances, especially this soon.”
“Please doctor?” Celestia’s pleading gaze turned to him.
After a moment, he sighed. “Alright,” he conceded. “But hover stretcher only. You’re not to set one foot off of it, is that clear?”
The solar princess nodded.
So it was that the exhausted, injured form of Princess Celestia was carried about the de-facto refugee camp on a floating stretcher guided by two clone troopers. What she saw there was enough to break the last shred of her composure.
Dozens. Of all of Canterlot’s many thousands of inhabitants prior to the battle, there were about six dozen left alive. Seventy-odd ponies out of a population that had exceeded fifteen thousand before the battle began. Most of the survivors fell into one of two camps: those who had been extremely young and had sheltered in the palace before the battle started, or wounded members of the Royal Guard that had managed to escape the notice of the prowling mechanical executioners, usually by virtue of being in a pile of dead ponies or destroyed droids. A handful had been plucked from the few hold-outs that had still existed when the Republic’s reinforcements had arrived. These had hollow, haunted looks in their eyes.
In one of the medical tents, the solar alicorn had found none other than her sister. To her infinite relief, Luna was alive and somewhat conscious. To her horror, the night princess’ horn was gone, reduced to a burnt stub sticking slightly out of her forehead. Medical personnel affixed a bacta patch and wrappings to the wound even while she was there, but that did nothing to dim the white alicorn’s horror.
To lose one’s horn was perhaps the ultimate injury that could be inflicted on a unicorn or alicorn, save perhaps death itself. Even that was debatable, as more than one crippled unicorn throughout history had chosen to kill themselves after facing the prospect of life without magic. Ignorant ponies, especially of other tribes, scoffed at the idea, but for a unicorn to lose their connection to magic was often likened to cutting out part of the injured pony’s soul, part of what defined them. Worse still: a lost horn broke one’s power forever. The horn itself might be regrown with time and special potions, but the essential magical circuits it hosted could never be replaced. That was why such a punishment had long been favored by cruel tyrants who ruled over unicorn subjects. Those who feel afoul of their masters had their horns cut off, their ability to tap into the universal field of magic that flowed through all things torn away for all eternity.
Now, this awful fate had befallen not only her nephew, but her beloved little sister as well.
It was too much. The utter ruination of her country by orbital firepower. The burning of her beautiful capital city. The deaths of so many innocent ponies, many near and dear friends or even distant relatives of the princess. The sheer cruelty beyond anything she had ever seen from Count Dooku and General Grievous, the heartlessness they had shown when attacking the weak and helpless. And now her precious sister, long lost and so recently restored to her, had been mutilated beyond all hope of recovery. Even for a mare of her famously composed nature, it was all just too much.
Princess Celestia wept openly.
At around the same time, six ponies emerged from the roaring bonfire formerly known as the Everfree Forest, coated from head to hoof in sweat and ash. As soon as they had seen the ponies of Ponyville to safety they had rushed straight for the Tree of Harmony and the chest within. Its power had been enough to undo Tirek, perhaps it might have been enough to do the same to the Separatists. But they would never know.
Lacking any protections, Grievous’ orbital bombardment had turned the once-lush forest into a nightmarish death trap. Choking clouds of smoke rose miles high into the air, making any attempt at aerial navigation impossible. They had had no choice but to go in on the ground, trusting in magic to shield them from fire and memory to guide them. Destiny, some had dared to think, might be on their side, as it had been so many times before.
It was not to be.
The tremendous explosions that had rocked the forest had done more than set off tremendous firestorms. They had shattered the ground itself, opening deep fissures in some places and sending pillars of earth jutting skywards in others. Streams and rivers had been broken, diverted, or swallowed by the earth itself. Ponds and small lakes had been boiled off or filled with ash and muck. What small dirt paths had existed were now nigh-indistinguishable from the hundreds of impromptu trails carved by the panicked animals as they fled for their lives. Flaming debris, ash, and smoke was everywhere, further obscuring the trail. In the end not one of them had been capable of locating the pathway to the old palace, and at last the flames had grown so hot that even Twilight feared her magic would be insufficient to shield them.
When the six broke out of the inferno at last, they all beheld a sight that none would forget until her dying day. Canterlot, the city of royalty, the home of the eternal sovereigns and beating heart of the nation… was a smoking ruin. Dozens of pillars of smoke rose high into the air, blending with those coming from other areas to form a vast hazy cloud that blotted out the sun itself. What little could be seen of the sacred place from where they stood was empty, blackened rubble where once beautiful white marble had stood. Death and destruction had come to Equestria, as never before.
Princess Twilight Sparkle sank to her knees, hot tears pouring down her cheeks as she sobbed in wordless despair.
She had failed.
Several hours later, Princess Luna wandered through the desolate streets of Canterlot. She took in the empty shells that had once been elegant buildings, the streets now filled with craters and rubble, and of course, the bodies. Bodies everywhere. Thousands of them. Droids and clones and ponies alike littered the streets and homes of the city. Many had been burned beyond all hope of identification by blaster fire or one of the innumerable fires that had swept the capital city during the battle. Others were in pieces, their blood staining what was left of streets even blacker than they already were.
More news had flowed into Canterlot in the hours since the Republic’s arrival had routed the droid army, little of it good. Across the nation, almost every city or town of any serious size had been subjected to droid attacks. Manehatten had been burned entirely to the ground, those inhabitants that had not managed to flee butchered to the very last. Vanhoover had suffered a similar fate. Fillydelphia and Stalliongrad were scarcely in better shape, their infrastructure and population gutted in a similar manner to Canterlot. Dodge City had also been mostly butchered, though its inhabitants had impressively managed to defeat the few hundred B-1s sent to destroy it on their own. Los Pegasus was the largest city in Equestria to remain mostly intact, due to the timely arrival of Republic air support before most of its attackers reached the city itself. Baltimare, similarly, had been spared the worst by the comparatively small size of its attacking army and the arrival of the Republic’s reinforcements.
To the far north, the Crystal Guard under Princess Cadence had been routed in battle with a droid army, though their sacrifice enabled much of the civilian population to escape into the wilderness. The alicorn princess herself had remarkably survived, albeit heavily wounded and buried underneath a pile of her own dead subjects. Traumatized and seriously injured, she had been taken into an orbiting Star Destroyer for intensive care – temporarily, Commander Cody had assured her, though Luna was not sure if she believed him. The again, she supposed that it didn’t much matter what she believed anymore.
Closer to home, Ponyville had been unceremoniously burned to the ground, though curiously an extremely large number of droids had been found scrapped just outside its borders. That mystery had been solved when, miraculously, a passing gunship had located Princess Twilight Sparkle and her six friends right outside the massive hellstorm that had been the Everfree. Once picked up, she had explained what had happened with Discord and Ponyville’s population. The draconequus’ apparent demise was another bitter blow in a day already full of them, though praise all the gods his sacrifice had not been in vain. The full amount of Ponyville’s civilians had been located cowering in abandoned mines to the south, hungry and scared but otherwise intact. The six ponies that had restored her had been apparently making an attempt to reach the Tree of Harmony to retrieve the Elements, but had been unable to penetrate the raging firestorms that had gripped the Everfree.
To put it simply: Equestria had survived the apocalyptic droid invasion, but it had done so at the cost of being virtually gutted. The nation’s strength was gone, the Galactic Republic in a position to demand virtually any terms that it wanted. The diarchy would have little choice but to submit to anything that was asked of them, lest they be left on their own to face another Separatist attack. They could not survive it, and both sides clearly knew it. Indeed, the Republic’s bargaining position was so good that had Luna not known better, had she not witnessed for herself the viciousness with which the Jedi and his clones were attacked by the droids, she might almost have imagined that the two sides had been in cahoots to bring about this very outcome. After what she had seen in Grievous’ dreams, after Admiral Tarkin’s strong-arming, Luna did not trust the Galactic Republic or the Jedi very much. Still, submission to it was better than death for all.
As she wandered through the devastation that had claimed fair Canterlot with a discreet pair of clone troopers in tow, Luna found more and more that she hated herself. She was a princess, it was her duty to protect her subjects. In this duty, for which she had been granted her throne in the first place all those years ago, she had failed, and failed utterly.
Luna had joined her sister in cowing to a display of force by Admiral Tarkin. Granted, she probably would have done otherwise had she known that there was a Separatist fleet in the system as well as the Republic one, but she had still done it. The principle was there. Her own weakness and cowardice in the face of terrorism made her sick.
Further, she had sympathized with a madman and a murderer, rather than scorning him with righteous hatred as her first inclination had been to do. On that basis she had even wanted to throw in with him and his, despite what she knew. Now, the idea of siding with that genocidal beast made her want to vomit out her entire stomach.
Finally, when the chance had come to strike back at the invader, she had failed. Her magic had been too weak, her skills too limited, her strategies unable to counter him. Grievous had bested her in combat and crippled her magic. Yes, she had defeated him at the last second, but it had not been of her own strength, of that much she was sure. And the battle would still have ended in the total annihilation of Canterlot had the Republic not intervened.
The question, of course, was what else was she to have done?
Even if she could go back and do it all over again, how was Luna to have acted differently? She would still be powerless against orbital bombardment, still be too weak to simply dispose of Grievous and endure the consequences. Admiral Tarkin, if he had not been bluffing – as he now rather implausibly claimed to have been doing – could have rained death on her lands with impunity if she had refused to turn the cyborg over. What then? Would she simply have traded a Separatist invasion for a Republic one? Could she have resisted that any better? She doubted it.
Could Luna, knowing what she now did, have somehow won the Canterlot battle? Somehow defeated Grievous earlier, or even repulsed his armies? She knew the answer as well as anypony: no, she could not have. Even with everything she now knew, even should all of the demented cyborg’s plans have been laid out in advance for her, the dark alicorn simply didn’t have what it would have taken to defeat the droid army without Republic help or spare her capital city. Grievous could have given her a guidebook explaining his moves step-by-step and a week to prepare, and Canterlot would still have fallen. Because of her. Because she lacked what it would have taken to defend it successfully.
The princes of the night gritted her teeth as she strode among the ruins, her conscience lashing her over and over again for her many failings. She was the ruler, therefore she was responsible for what had happened. No circumstances could ameliorate or in any way excuse her failure to adequately shield the nation. All the dead and injured and displaced were her fault. Period. Her weakness and failure were to blame for all of this. No matter what seemingly logical arguments could be made otherwise, Luna knew the truth of the matter in the depths of her soul.
But what, her logical mind argued, could she have done? What could she do in the future to make sure nothing like this ever happened again? The answer to the former question she did not know, but the latter had an obvious solution.
If she was to prevent this from ever happening to her beloved Equestria again, Luna would need more power.
Onboard the Invisible Hand’s observation deck, as the ship cruised through the depths of hyperspace, Count Dooku knelt before a hologram of Darth Sidious. The Sith Lord had his arms folded across his chest as he gazed down at his apprentice. His eyes, as ever, were invisible beneath his hood.
“Lord Tyranus,” the cloaked human said after some time. “Is it finished?”
“It is, my lord,” Dooku answered, his head bowed. “The operation went as you commanded. The aliens’ civilization has been utterly devastated by our droid armies. General Grievous performed his role well, slaying many of them and burning their cities in his quest for vengeance. We were then both able to escape capture and enter hyperspace. Our ship will return to Separatist space very soon.”
“Very good,” Sidious. “What of those creatures that survive?”
“Though they do not yet know it, many have taken their first steps down a new path this day,” Dooku smiled. “Through us, the seeds of darkness have been planted in their hearts.”
“And in time, those seeds will grow into crop that will be of great use to us,” his master finished.
Dooku nodded.
Sidious laughed.