“-injuries estimated in the dozens in this latest riot, with no report from the Federal Government as how to stem the violence. As rushes continue on food stores in Brooklyn and Queens, Governor Esteban has issued a statement justifying the continued state of Martial Law across the entirety of the Five Boroughs…”
The television droned softly in a corner of the office, pouring out an endless prognosis of chaos and confusion. If you looked down on the text scroll at the bottom, on the micro headlines that simply couldn’t be fit into news reports at the moment, you got the impression of the last gasps of breath before flatline. Starvation in New Delhi, mass suicides on the slopes of Fujiyama, an anti-pony pogrom in San Francisco. Reports of sanctioned (and unsanctioned) hunting squads not only slaughtering newfoals en-masse, but having to turn their guns against angry citizens: people driven mad by want of food, water, ammunition, medication or compassion.
Earth was resisting the infection of invasion like a body rallying its immune system against a virus, and with that came the symptoms of disease: fever, sweats, irritability, rashes and nausea. It was an orchestra of decay, playing a slow, morbid liturgy as Death ride ever closer on his pale charger, implacable and unstoppable. The only options were to beat the disease, or kill themselves in the attempt.
“Next, our evening movie, Osmosis Jones…”
At the far end of the room, dwarfed by vast, thaumaturgically-reinforced plate-glass windows, a lone mare worked in the dim light of a world on fire. The Eighty-eighth floor of World Trade Center One, Freedom Tower, granted a birds-eye view of the riots, flickering flames, and the stroboscopic heartbeat of police sirens, coursing through the veined streets like pathogens and antibodies. Converted from a former CEO’s corporate eyrie, the room was far from opulent. It had been decently furnished in better times, with vaguely modernist black spheres hanging from the ceiling, but a tasteful display of wealth and prestige. Now, this throneroom of capitalism was a recluse’s den, evidenced from a small fridge in one corner, the walls plastered with reports and plans, and the multitude of computer monitors displaying far too many unread messages.
An exhausted PHL guard was passed out on a mattress in one corner, but the other occupant, the mare, kept on working, consumed in her work, her desk space cluttered with papers and empty coffee-cups. As she pushed herself onwards, fuelled by more caffeine than was healthy, the TV continued to broadcast the slow-rolling apocalypse, live and uncut. The horror being reported was almost enough to make her want to shut off, but news was news. And what kind of a leader would she be if she tuned out reality?
‘Signed, Lieutenant Colonel Cheerilee Cherry, Deputy Commander, Ponies for Human Life...’
Sighing, Cheerilee sat back in her chair, having finally finished (in triplicate) the forms authorising Elsa Erklass’s two young charges to be expedited to ‘true’ Equestria at the nearest possible time. Despite Discord having closed the portal joining the two allied worlds, Doctor Whooves had been able to keep up a regular line of communication through use of the TARDIS as a cross-dimensional shuttle. It was cumbersome, but it made co-ordinated battle-development possible, and allowed for vital personnel to be transferred between New York and Canterlot.
Clearance to ride was Top Secret of course, given that the TARDIS itself was considered too important / dangerous to reveal to the general public, hence the need for Cheerilee to sign off on every authorised passenger, minimising lost payload space that could be better used on essential cargo transported in the ‘magic blue box’. Food and ammo and raw materials went both ways, with Equestria ‘exporting’ back duplicates mass-multiplied either by Discord or the Mirror Pool.
‘And then there was that little girl…’ Cheerilee thought to herself, remembering a strange little munchkin that had accompanied Discord as a passenger on one recent occasion. ‘Like something out of a Tim Burton movie...or the Exorcist.’
She shuddered, visualising the disturbing child, pale-skinned and dark-eyed, her head craning around as if everything was a new experience for her. She never ventured far from Discord, always having a pale hand in his paw or riding on his head like a hat, it was even stranger watching the Draconequus dote on the strange little girl was particularly off putting. Cheerilee loved kids, but she had been under too much stress to try and comprehend that particular guest, and in truth had been glad to see ‘Lil’ Erma’ return to Equestria. It wasn’t that the child was unappealing, but there had been something ‘off’ about her.
And regardless of appearance, the child was definitely not ‘human’.
‘Most disturbing of all was that Kraber liked her,’ she sighed. ‘What was even weirder was that they seemed to get along so well… Discord never told me where she came from either.’
She sighed, and tried to turn her mind back towards her work. Outside her office window, the night sky was just beginning to tilt towards the dawn spectrum, throwing the skyline of New York City into shadowed relief.
Cheerilee’s head ached something fierce. Not just from the coffee-fuelled strain of an all-night debriefing with the Snow Maiden, but from the effort she was making to master the magic bestowed on her by Zecora and Sparkler’s runic ministrations.
‘Coal Embers was right in suggesting I force myself to carry out simple day-to-day tasks without using my mouth or hooves. It hurts, but it’s good endurance training.
Focusing, she turned her attention (and the pen) back towards the next stack of paperwork: the matter of charging the Last Scions of Adlaborn’s living expenses to the PHL’s credit accounts.
‘With any luck, Eadmund and Lucie will be away from the front before the invasion starts. They might be children in nothing but name only, but after everything they’ve suffered, I’d rather see them as far from the coming battle as possible. Elsa though… she wants to stay, to fight, and I’d be happy to have her...’
That lit a fire of conflict in her breast. Cheerilee was happy that the doe (in truth, now a young human woman), was still alive and now actively helping them...
‘The Snow Maiden didn’t get her title for nothing: the scythe she cut through North America’s newfoals in just a fortnight is a testament to her skills and magic.’
...against that though was a growing sense of unease. The meeting with Elsa had thrown some of Cheerilee’s private feelings and doubts into sharp focus.
‘Why is it that I felt more at ease around that brutalised, war-torn ‘heir without a crown’ than I did around ‘Luna’?’
She frowned to herself, remembering her brief meeting with the lunar alicorn after Boston, a mortal mare beholding an immortal demi-goddess, anointed by moonlight, resplendent in armour, crowned with the glory of battle.
“A Princess,” she hissed, feeling a vein throbbing in her brow. Elsa had been an equal, a fellow exile, but Luna was a tragic reminder of the homeland Cheerilee had forsworn. And it was only now that the former schoolteacher was beginning to put a name to the feelings that the Night Princess had engendered in her soul.
Not yearning, or regret, but loathing…
*CHA-CHARRRR-CHaaa*
The sound of nasal snoring snapped her mood back the other way, and she found herself stifling a giggle at the sight of the unconscious Private Shepard laid out on her makeshift bed, a smile on his face. The poor teen had gatecrashed Elsa’s ‘unmasking’, rushing in when the chill of her magic sept out of the office and into the hallway...
”Hold fire!" Cheerilee yelped as the door was kicked in, startling everyone inside as the teen rushed in, weapon raised. Seeing him drawing a bead on Elsa she thrust up a hoof and roared aloud. “Weapons Tight, Private!”
"Ms Cheerilee! Are you... okay… uh..." Shepard’s voice trailed off, falling silent as finally processed the sight before him: of the pretty platinum-blonde girl he had just admitted into the office, now clad in a sheer, curve-hugging dress of blue, flanked by two adolescent reindeer that he was sure had not come past his checkpoint outside the door.
"I'm fine, Private Shepard." Cheerilee said, before coughing indiscreetly. “Ah, Adrian, you can lower the gun now.”
Silence reigned for a second, and Cheerilee raised an eyebrow as Shepard continued to stare at Elsa, who herself seemed to be more than a little self-conscious at having become the soldier’s focus of attention.
She saw the first hint of mutual blushes, and could not hide a smile. "How rude of me, introductions are in order. Private Shepard, this is Elsa Erklass, Snow Maiden of Vologda and heir to the throne of Adlaborn. Elsa, this is-"
"Adrian!" the youth stammered, flicking the safety on his rifle and swinging the weapon onto his back. Cheerilee could already envision Marcus palming his face, muttering under his breath about the blatant failure of discipline. "Adrian Shepard. Ice- I mean, nice to meet you!"
Elsa blinked as Adrian thrust his hand towards her a bit too enthusiastically, both their blushes coming into full bloom as she gently took it into her own. "Hello, Knight Shepard."
"They look quite smitten,” Cheerilee heard Eadmund whisper under his breath. She could see Lucie was giggling as well, covering her mouth with a delicate hoof as Adrian continued to try and win Elsa over by pure dorky charm.
It was working: Cheerilee had seen a fair few schoolyard crushes in her time as a teacher, and from the sheer awkward goofiness in the room she was immediately classifying this as a ‘Code Dinksqueak’ - mutual crush at first sight.
To say the two were ‘quite smitten’ was an understatement.
“The Princess and the Private.,” Cheerilee smirked, laying the last expenses form to rest and chuckling softly as she approached the bulletproofed expanse of her window, overlooking the East river and Brooklyn. “Cute.”
Her mood sobered as she lingered at the window. Standing there, staring out into the morning, she could almost imagine the pink glow that heralded sunrise was the light of the Barrier marching across Long Island towards her.
‘It will be, before long...’
Not for the first time, she wondered what her life would be like if she never came here, if Equestria never made contact with earth.
“Hm. I suppose I could be flirting with Big Mac… or trying to…” she muttered to herself. “Along with every other mare in town...”
She frowned at the thought of Ponyville’s ‘#1 hunk and gentlestallion’ (as Gabby Gums had once dubbed Big Mac). Though there might have been the spark of something there, Applebloom, Sweetie Belle, and Scootaloo had made things extremely awkward thanks to that whole ‘love potion’ fiasco. Cheerilee had never been so embarrassed before in her life; the memories of what happened between herself and her ‘schmoopy doopy sweetie weetie pony pie’ felt so…
Wrong.
She shuddered involuntarily. To think that mere fillies had created a poison that was just as strong as any ‘Want-it, Need-it’ spell, out of everyday ingredients. It was horrifying if you took it out of context.
“Big Mac…”
Yes, she did once have some small feelings for him. Were it not for the Crusaders’ intervention, given time, she might have even persuaded herself to pursue him.
“I would probably have ended up making myself look like an idiot,” she mentally groaned, her own hopeless attempts at flirting bubbling up from the depths of past memories. “I’d probably do something silly, like faking a swoon or something whenever he sang…”
Shaking her head, she banished the thought, focusing on the relationship she was in now. A very small part of her was in truth glad that this war had happened, as horrifying as that sounded. Without Celestia’s pogrom ‘in defense of the pony ideal’, she would have never met Marcus...
“Paris, the city of lights, of romance, of l’amor…”
How she’d gotten to Paris was a story unto itself. She had signed up for a tour of the various educational systems across Earth, a project that the Equestria Board of Education had promoted under the banner of peace with their bipedal neighbors, before the Queen herself scrapped the scheme.
By that time, Cheerilee had already visited various schools across the English-speaking world, and was trying to go a little further. Her Prench had been good enough to get her a secondment with the French Ministry of National Education, Youth and Sport, and she’d spent a month in her first billet, the Lycee Lakanal, when the message arrived from the local consulate...
‘Return to Equestria at once. Arrangements will be made for your evacuation...’
The Consulate ‘suit’ who’d delivered the message implied that mankind was agitating Equestrian nationals, and pointed to the (then) ongoing Three Weeks of Blood as proof. However, despite the evidence of humanity’s less-than savory qualities, Cheerilee had long nurtured a gut feeling that the Equestria she grew up in as a foal was slowly withering away.
That, and it had been hard to see humans as the agitators in this case. Every act of violence humans had committed so far could be traced back to a response to Equestria’s over-eager and suspiciously ill-informed and insensitive promotion of ponification, and Cheerilee hadn’t been able to much blame them - having seen newfoals with her own eyes, she knew for herself how unnerved they were.
So she’d declined the offer of an immediate evacuation.
The next day, the Barrier and consulates sealed themselves off entirely, leaving countless ponies stranded on earth.
Little more than a week later, the Barrier had begun to expand.
A month after that, Celestia had formally declared war.
Cheerilee had spent those weeks self-quarantined within the Lycee’s grounds. For a brief time she had lost hope in her entire species, hearing reports of forced ponifications, and Celestia’s ambitions to wipe mankind’s entire existence from cosmic memory. All of it had served to crush her spirit.
The announcement of war from the Tyrant had shaken her out of that funk. Within hours, a glut of newfoals had poured out of the Paris consulate and seized first the Ile de Cite, and then the city center. By the end of the day they were throwing out scouting missions to ‘rescue’ any ‘captive’ ponies. Whether the ‘captives’ liked it or not.
And sure enough, they came for her. Her very presence brought the screaming might of the EUP down on an innocent school, on her pupils. Some students had been potioned before her eyes when the first pegasai came hurtling out of the clouds. The luckier children screamed at the sight of what had been classmates moments before, able to tell, with that peculiar intuitive sense that children had, that the things that emerged from the potion were not their friends.
Those screams had been the galvanic spark for Cheerilee. Put simply, she died in that instant, and came back changed.
A lot of what followed was a furious haze of red, purple and black in her memory. Blood, potion and ash had all blurred together into a single sinkhole of rage. At some point she remembered bucking something hard enough to pop said ‘something’ like a ripe pumpkin.
She’d nearly lost herself to the pull of that fury, almost gone beyond the event horizon and immersed herself in a black hole of unending murder. The mere fact that the newfoals were preying on children drove her on to attack any one of them that dared lay a hoof on a student. She could not remember how many she’d maimed, or killed.
‘At some point, I lost a chunk of one ear, and most of my tail. I got fixed up, but I still don’t remember how that happened...’
One memory remained clear however, and in it she had somehow salvaged her identity out of that rage, found something to anchor her sudden determination to not see an entire species be herded blindly into that good night.
‘Marcus.’
It was her first glimpse of him, a rifle in his hands, pointed between her eyes, in the particular kind of tired, angry mood that she’d later learn meant all the difference between ‘kill’ or ‘capture’.
‘And they say relationships built on survival situations never work out. Hah! Proved that wrong!’
She’d been saved when two of her students, Jeremie and Aelita, hurled themselves in between herself and Marcus, screaming her innocence. At last, Marcus had lowered the gun. It was not exactly an ideal ‘meet cute’ scenario, but it was one that Cheerilee was glad had happened. Not just for her sake, but for Marcus’. If the timing had been seconds off, and he’d executed her before the kids could have defended her, well… knowing Marcus now as well as she did, she suspected that the regret of killing a potential ally would have weighed upon him for the rest of his life.
Eventually, they’d both found common reason to be glad of that meeting. After all, it brought them together.
‘It took a long time,’ she thought to herself, ‘I suppose I was a bit smitten with him myself after he carried me to the evac. After he checked in on me. Protected me.’
He’d been like that with most of the people in his care, actually, including keeping enraged soldiers taking their grief out on pony civilians. It was that compassion, over which he wore his pain as a mask, that prompted her to follow him into hell, to fight within the PHL rather than just support the war on the sidelines.
From that their friendship had grown. A period of heavy post-battle drinking one night (when both of them were desperately seeking comfort from their demons) had led to some very awkward petting, and then some very rough kissing…
Embarrassment, shame, reconciliation, affection, love… it all flowed from that one night.
Face flushed, she remembered the night they realised what they shared was ‘special’; Marcus was laid up with injuries so severe he was under restraint to deter him from trying to leave the infirmary. Unable to roughhouse away their stresses, they’d defaulted to conversation, talking about everything that came to mind. Their childhoods, families, friends, hometowns, hobbies, and many more.
And then, in one magic moment, they both realised they were enjoying this more than they would mere physicality, were happy just in each other’s company.
It had been a transformative moment, and not just for them.
‘Lyra. Brave, sweet, quirky, amazing, depraved nymphomaniac Lyra; a mare that might as well have saved the world...’
She remembered all too well the Ambassador's attempts to gain Marcus’ favor, and then eventually falling back to a defensive proposition of a foursome in a desperate attempt to salvage a relationship. Bon Bon’s response had been to face-hoof herself harder than necessary, while Marcus had flushed brighter than thermite. He’d had to drag a laughing Cheerilee away by her tail, unable to make eye contact with a hopelessly optimistic Lyra.
A smile growing at the memory, Cheerilee closed her eyes and focused mentally on a specific set of visual cues, a basic cantrip that had been passed around Equestria for centuries. With a magic hum, the runes under her coat activated, lending her enough energy to take the edge off of the fatigue. Between the effects of the spell and plenty of coffee (the Almighty Bean!), Cheerilee had effectively forsworn sleep for the past week. The medics had advised she not keep it up however: sleep (and more specifically dreaming) was a pretty essential part of basic bodily mental maintenance.
“Just a few more days,” she whispered to herself. Just a few more days until the invasion. And then, with the fateful day passed, she could sleep again. Either in her bed, or in her grave.
‘Besides… from what Elsa’s told me, there’s something afoot in the Dreaming, and I don’t entirely trust the implications...’
Now feeling somewhat better than death warmed over, she trotted over to the door to her office, dimming the lights and making one last check on Adrian before opening the door.
“Ah, Miss Cherry. I believe we need to talk!”
Only to run into one face she really didn’t want to see.
A bronze Earth Pony mare stood before her, clad in a modified suit of Lunar Guard armour, chemically washed to strip away all decoration. Except for a small crescent-moon clip holding back her mane, her entire appearance, from attire to expression, was fierce, precise, and no-nonsense.
“Bittersweet,” Cheerilee replied, forcing a smile to her face and unconsciously straightening her own kevlar stab-vest. “What a pleasant surprise.”
Bittersweet Harshwhinny, Chairpony of the Night Court, Leader of the Equestrian Resistance...
And a major thorn in Cheerilee’s side.
‘My opposite? Or my counterpart?’
In truth, seeing Harshwhinny in the flesh was less like meeting her opposite, and more like looking into a mirror. They’d both been hardened by their lives and the choices they’d made, and wore that hardness like armor.
‘More alike than different’, as Lyra once said.
“Cheerilee,” came the older mare’s nodded greeting.
“This is a pleasant surprise,” she replied curtly, before pointing with a hoof in the direction of the lifts. “Would you care to take tea with me, Harsh?”
“That would be delightful,” replied Harshwhinny, lips pursed as if the very notion had soured her tastes.
The Equestrian Resistance spied on the PHL. And the PHL spied on the Resistance. Everypony knew this. Everypony pretended that they didn’t, and the youngins and trickle of new recruits quickly learned the unwritten rule to not question the pissing-matches that went on above their heads: there were more important things to focus on than the love-hate relationship between the two HQs, like winning the war. So officially the two organisations were hoof-in-hoof, struggling together.
That passive-aggressive awareness still made itself known in subtle ways however. The fact that Cheerilee would not, under any circumstances, host Harshwhinny in her own office, was one of them: it was too much a risk to welcome the Resistance’s leader amidst reams of sensitive information.
Instead, negotiations took place on one of the highest floors, in a debugged and thoroughly-warded observation room that overlooked the city. Aside from several chairs and throw-rugs laid around a lonely coffee-table, there was no other furniture in the cavernous space.
Just two mares, conversing over drinks.
“Strange, isn’t it?” mused Harshwhinny as they sat themselves down. “That two Earth Pony mares have become the senior-most leaders of Equestria’s free citizenry. One in the eye for the ‘mud pony’ bigots.”
Cheerilee did not respond, instead letting her runic-magic speak for her, struggling to hide her concentration as she levitated the teapot and poured a careful measure into both awaiting cups.
“Impressive,” Harshwhinny murmured, not even showing an iota of surprise. Cute. “Three lumps please.”
As Cheerilee continued to prep the drinks, she watched the other mare quietly out of the corner of her eye. She herself was sitting with her back to the window, so that Harshwhinny, facing her, had no option other than to take in the sprawling human metropolis. The city and world that Cheerilee spoke for in this meeting.
“So,” commenced Harshwhinny, accepting her tea with a murmur of thanks. “How are preparations on your end for the coming action?”
“They’re proceeding smoothly,” Cheerilee demurred, sipping from her own cup. She took her tea with neither milk or sugar, finding that the fiercely bitter taste of the unadulterated leaves kept her sharp. “How about your own arrangements?”
“Likewise.”
“You have the resources to assist us, as promised?” Cheerilee said. It was a redundant question: she knew already that the Resistance was simply modifying their longstanding plans to attack the Throne from within. “When we do this… there’s no going back.”
“Don’t doubt our commitment,” Harshwhinny snorted. “You’re not the only side in this war with gifted speechwriters. ‘This is not our last chance, this is our only chance, etc’... I couldn’t agree more.”
Despite the friction between their respective leaderships, both the PHL and the Resistance worked well together on the operational level. Having over two million ponies under her direct command and five million more supporting those operatives made Harshwhinny too valuable an asset to ignore.
And humanity needed those seven million sets of hooves. With only little over one million ponies to their own name, most of whom were no longer able to pass as Equestrian civilians, the PHL’s entire ability to wage war or conduct espionage on the far side of the Barrier depended on the Resistance.
Depended on their safehouses and underground railroads. On their network of spies and informants. On the tightly-bound network of cells that Harshwhinny and her staff had cultivated across the entire nation. There was a Resistance presence in every city from Vanhoover to Baltimare, and by liaising with them, the PHL had access to those same assets.
Resistance assassins eliminated Equestria’s military and government hierarchy. Resistance commandos demolished bridges and derailed trains. Their free-roaming ‘Directorates’ cultivated saboteurs within the armaments industry and reported back on troop movements and government decisions. Their governing council, the Night Court, judged ‘traitors’ and ‘fascists’ in-absentia (under the laws of pre-war Equestria), and used the threat of ‘sanction’ against those found guilty to blackmail funding or intelligence from notable ponies within the Empire.
It was a system that worked, and in truth, that was what irked Cheerilee. The mare sitting opposite her was not some jumped-up bureaucrat who had been in the right place at the right time to claim power and credit. Harshwhinny had been driven into hiding after publicly denouncing Celestia, and was subsequently elected by the Resistance’s membership to chair the Night Court.
Recognition of the Night Court by the United Nations meant that Harshwhinny was here, not as a resistance leader or a figurehead, but as a Head of State, the recognized and rightful Premiere of the Free Equestrians, legitimately elected to lead the pseudo-state that was the Resistance.
In return, the Resistance had promised to support operations against the Crown as part of a unified command, but in truth had brooded and plotted and played their own game, knowing that nobody beyond the Barrier could enforce control over them. Always assisting when asked, and yet always with a slightly forced smile on their faces, despite owing their original training to the PHL and mankind…
Cheerilee hated that. Hated that mankind had chosen to negotiate with even a ‘remnant’ of the home she had once known, the land she had taught herself to loathe. It rubbed at her like a fragment of glass caught in the tread of a tire.
She rubbed at her bleary eyes for a second, realising that she hated herself for the same reasons. The mare across from her was not the enemy…
...and yet she was at the same time. There was never any clear-cut black-and-white in the war. Harshwhinny wanted to rescue Equestria, whereas Cheerilee wanted to save mankind. The two goals were NOT mutually interwoven though, and seeing Harshwhinny face-to-face reminded Cheerilee all too much of the more ‘distasteful’ decisions both of them might have made or considered, especially in the light of Lady Elsa’s little insights on the whole ‘Last Train’ affair.
‘It’d be so easy to just lock Harsh up, and substitute her counterpart from ‘True Equestria’... a little training-up is all that would be needed to support the charade, and then we’d have a loyal and pliable mare in charge of the Resistance. Not this creature who wanted to...’
...protect, sustain and restore her nation. Restore its honor and standing, even though, as far as Cheerilee and many more were concerned, that hellhole was way beyond saving.
Always the shades of grey. Always the mindgames. Always the little, worrying realization that innocent people and ponies alike would suffer even in the event of a victory...
“I want to see with my own eyes,” Harshwhinny suddenly said, breaking the uncomfortable silence. “I want to see this ‘unsullied’ Equestria.”
“Something can be arranged…” Cheerilee answered, immediately vowing to herself that Harshwhinny would never see the inside of the TARDIS. “I’m sure we can arrange for a diplomatic visit by one of the… the Princesses.”
“No,” Harshwhinny shook her head. “Do not attempt to rephrase my words, Ms. Cherry. I wish to SEE Equestria itself with my own eyes, not have a mockery of Luna paraded in front of me.”
Ouch, Cheerilee winced to herself. Hearing the reports of ‘Princess Luna’ plunging into the fray in Boston must have tugged at Harshwhinny’s heartstrings something fierce. The Chairpony of the Night Court was famously loyal to the deposed Lunar Princess. Those confused first reports must have seemed miraculous, as if Luna herself had broken free from her stone imprisonment, burst forth with all Power and Glory.
To then learn that it was not ‘her’ Luna, but another, an alicorn who had neither known of Harshwhinny’s plight or shared in the trials of the Resistance’s early days… that must have burned deeply.
“Show it to me,” Harshwhinny repeated herself. “Let me tread hoof on Equestrian soil, and know in my heart that this is not a trick, or a ploy to bypass everything that we’ve built in the past half-decade, a scheme to overthrow and sideline everything we did in Luna’s name…”
“No,” Cheerilee said simply.
“Excuse me?” Harshwhinny asked, and for the first time she showed a little fire. The words came through gritted teeth, her eyes narrowing.
“I am not authorized to facilitate interdimensional permits,” Cheerilee lied blithely. “And, on top of that, opening portals to Equestria is not easy. You’ll just have to trust us.”
“You mean trust you…” Harshwhinny hissed. “You, the mare who was pushed to the head of the queue on no grounds other than romancing the Commander?”
“He’s a Colonel,” Cheerilee corrected bluntly. They locked eyes for a few seconds, before Harshwhinny daintily wiped her mouth with a napkin.
“Get it off your chest, Cheerilee Cherry,” she said quietly. “Give me a lovely dose of vitriol. Enlighten me as to why you object to my very existence?”
Cheerilee felt a low growl building in her throat, but she bit it back.
“I have been the second-in-command of the PHL since its creation,” she answered evenly. “I was Lyra’s number-two long before Marcus was promoted to leadership, or before he and I entered into a relationship. I was the one who sent ponies to their deaths while Lyra planned Grand Strategies with the governments of this world, the one who made sure everything ran smoothly behind the scenes to support all current and future endeavors. I fought on the ground and survived, held weapons that were created by joint minds of ponies and humans alike. I have gained more political and military experience than entire national administrations, and have successfully integrated groups that have been at each other’s throats for hundreds of generations, across boundaries of race and religion.”
‘Marcus was so proud on the day I made the Taliban and ISIS cry ‘uncle’...’
She laid a sole hoof on the table, as slowly and gingerly as if it was a loaded shotgun.
“I have earned my position, Ms. Harshwhinny.”
“As have I,” was the non-plussed response. “Might I speak now?”
“Please, do so.”
“You ran away, Ms. Cherry, stayed away when you could have come home to fight the Beast directly. Most ponies in your faction only fight for humanity because they were trapped on the far side of the Barrier when Celestia sealed the borders. But I don’t begrudge them on that. I know that you have a core staff of loyal and dedicated fighters, but can you tell me just how many of them have expelled all love of Equestria from their hearts?”
“Are you saying that the ponies under my command don’t care?” Cheerilee asked. “That if they were with you, they wouldn’t want to help? Don’t insult them so.”
Harshwhinny sneered. “You only need look at the demographics after the Barrier closed to see the truth in this. We smuggled at least one hundred thousand ponies back into Equestria, most of whom joined the Resistance, while only a fifth of that number went the other way. All of which, I will stress, we aided in the transfer of. Even Princess Luna fled at our encouragement, to lead a government-in-exile…”
“So you say.”
“I do. I served beneath the Princess, I was her right-hoof mare. I still serve her. But then she was disposed of by the Tyrant, because your precious Colonel failed to protect her, and now I find myself in her place.”
“What the hell would you have wanted us to have done?! Kill ourselves in a brave, noble suicide charge?!” Cheerilee argued.
“You could have done anything other than leave her behind…”
"Facing the Queen is suicide, Luna knew that and sacrificed herself out of the greater love in her heart…”
Another pause, punctuated by angry breathing, and Cheerilee saw a dark fire seething in Harshwhinny’s eyes as she invoked the Night Princess’s name. She herself had often wondered what Luna had desired on Earth beyond political amnesty. An alliance? PHL membership? Representation as a government-in-exile? No-one and no-pony knew the truth. Now she could see the same questions burning in Harsh’s eyes, and felt a moment of pity.
“For her sake, for Princess Luna’s sake alone,” the older mare said at last. “I’ll give you that. She had a heart as great as a mountain, as great as the moon!”
“So what are you?” Cheerilee demanded. “Another patriot to a vanished ghost of Equestria, to a memory confined to history?”
“I’m here as the recognized representative of the millions of ponies beyond the Barrier who still have freedom of thought. Have you forgotten about them?”
“No. But I have billions of humans to deal with, compared to your millions, and it is nothing short of a truly herculean task keeping everyone’s heads above the water when our resources are dwindling away day by day. I haven’t forgotten; my greatest responsibility is to the people that I swore to protect and defend.”
“And I am the same: we are the same, Cheerilee, we want what’s best for the people and places we love and are trying to save. Most ponies simply want to see Equestria rebuilt and restored, a land that lives up to its ideals. Three hundred million of them, whom I am here to speak for. You think I am just a desk-jockey, a pencil-pushing bureaucrat? Please take your head out of your plot and look at the scars on my body, look at the lines in my face. I have had to weave Canterlot nobility, Manehattan money and the pegasi-supremacists of Canterlot into a single functioning political body. I have lived in exile within my own homeland for years, surviving assassination attempts and smear campaigns alike… I have fought hoof-to-hoof with brainwashed elite troops and newfoal thralls, have planted explosives and seen the widows and orphans I create howl for the loss of the loved ones killed on my order.”
Again, Harsh became the mirror into which Cheerilee gazed. It always gazed back...
“We are both here because we earned our positions, Ms. Cherry. And even if I were just a face behind a desk, I would be here for the sheer merit of having been democratically elected by the Free Ponies I represent.”
“Always the ponies, always Equestria first. Pony supremacy under another name. You’ve shown no care for anyone beyond the borders.”
“Do you truly believe that?”
“Then where are the griffons? The zebras? The diamond dogs? Any other survivors of Celestia’s purges?”
“We have them within our ranks, but we sent most your way for the sheer fact that they cannot hide easily within Equestria. And I repeat that we bear no grudge against mankind. I’m friends with several humans for Luna’s sake, the men and women who taught our founding members the arts of resistance!”
It was too glib an answer, too easy. And yet, like all of the great lies, founded on some truth. Harshwhinny leaned across the desk.
“And until just a few weeks ago, yes, we were making plans. I’ll happily admit it.”
“In the event that mankind lost?”
“Yes, because then we would be alone. Humanity trained us in our early days, humanity was invaded and oppressed against its will. Humanity has been brutalised and tormented by Equestria… and until the Barrier stopped, humanity was on the verge of collapsing. What choice did we have except to prepare a contingency plan, to strike before Celestia conquered Earth and redeployed the entire EUP into the homeland!?”
Again, silence. Harsh straightened her mane and coughed. “You no doubt know of what we attempted. The contingency we tried to enact before Boston?”
Cheerilee nodded.
“That was our all-or-nothing attempt to save Equestria and humanity. To break Celestia’s hold on the armed forces and cut the body off of the snake.”
“And then you would have deployed those same troops along the borders.”
“Yes, and I say so with pride. I would not have raised a single hoof against mankind, but I would not in my darkest nightmares behoove a hostile Army of Occupation upon Equestrian soil. If I could have worked my will, we would have consulted with mankind, accepted Equestria’s guilt for starting the war, and released all appropriate figures for trial. But we would not be subjugated or enslaved through economic reparations either. We are the ponies of Equestria, not spoils of war!”
The energy, the fire, seemed to suddenly go out of her as she sighed, “But that option is gone now. So here we are, still struggling together. But you have won, Ms. Cherry…”
“We’ve not won anything.”
“No, in this battle, between you and me right now, you are the victor. Equestria lies open before mankind’s vengeance. My only option now is to try and minimize the damage.”
She looked across the table, suddenly pleading. “I’ve seen what the HLF do. I’ve seen humanity’s tendency for punishment. I ask you, if the HLF crazies attack, came flooding over the border in your wake, could you stop them from indiscriminately killing everypony in sight?“
“Of course. We do so already on Earth.” Cheerilee frowned as she thought about the rogue group, not allowing even a flicker of uncertainty to show. “But I can’t say it wouldn’t be entirely unwarranted on their part…”
“Fair enough. You have me - my homeland is the aggressor. But what of the innocent? Will your victorious troops distinguish between government and governed when they enact their vengeance. I have seen plenty of your allies history in the…”
“Samizdat?”
“Yes. I paid especial interest to the conduct of the Red Army during the fall of Berlin, and the actions of the US Armed Forces in Vietnam. Fascinating reading. Isn’t it interesting how the victor never has to undergo a War Crimes Tribunal, despite whatever acts of rape, murder and atrocity they deal out?”
Uncomfortable truths were still truths, Cheerilee had to admit.
“I want the settlement of this war to be fair, not a punitive treaty that will cause undue suffering,” Harshwhinny said bluntly. “I don’t want you to destroy Equestria, to collapse Canterlot-”
“I make no promises,” Cheerilee said. “And even if I would… I doubt that the team would listen.”
“Can you not control your own troops? Will I live to see a Sack of Canterlot, the burning of Appaloosa, and a Rape of Ponyville?”
“You won’t see that,” Cheerilee said. “They’re not there to pillage. It’s just that…” she was silent for a moment, collecting her thoughts. “In the event that Canterlot falls from the Canterhorn, or whatever other catastrophe might happen, they’d consider it an acceptable loss if the Barrier fell.”
Harshwhinny could have asked why. She could have argued. She could have made arguments.
But she did not, instead sipping her tea and saying, softly. “An eye for an eye and a limb for a limb, and thus we all end up blind and crippled?”
“It isn’t that,” Cheerilee said. “It’s simple wartime pragmatism. You’ve talked yourself about the widows and orphans you made, now think about the ones we’ve lost. Canterlot is a marvel of Equestria, that’s indisputable, but those on the mission will likely be considering their friends and families they’ve lost, and the ones they have left, moreso than the place they invade. They won’t go crazy, but they won’t be gentle either. In war, there are casualties! And compared to what Equestria’s done, it’s not an eye for an eye.”
There was another long pause after those words.
“Casualties…” Harshwhinny repeated, gazing into the depths of her teacup. “Let’s talk about that. How many humans are dead, or ponified? Two billion?”
“More than that… So many gone.”
A terrible weight had fallen over the table now. A mantle of sadness and grief.
“The same number of souls have been snuffed out on Equus, a full third of the planet’s population” Harshwhinny sighed, the broken and tired soul coming through her professionalism. “I am, at most, President of the rubble… but that rubble is my soul. I was born to it, and I still love it… and I would see it rise again, stand tall and accept responsibility, but will we even get that chance?”
She pulled a scrap of paper from her saddlebags and pushed it across the table. It was a copy of the United Nations treaty recognising the Equestrian Resistance as the legitimate government of Equestria, and declaring it a party in any post-war reconstruction of the nation.
“How long does this paper hold up against that fire? Especially now that you have another Equestria, an unsullied Equestria on your side? Will we be ignored? Will our Equestria be annexed under another Celestia, another Luna?”
“That is not up to me. I met many human political leaders who look to the PHL with respect, so by extension they would look favorably upon the Resistance,” Cheerilee idly commented, before leveling a hard stare at her. “But after what happened a couple of weeks ago, they were informed of what happened with Maud and her connections with the Resistance.”
“Are you not going to comment on the hypocrisy of how we all spy on each other?”
“No. If there is one thing that every president, premier and prime minister understands, it’s that spies are part and parcel of international relations. But what Maud did was nigh-unforgivable, and the extensive damage she wrote off as collateral nearly cost us dearly.”
“Us too,” Harshwhinny nodded, and for a moment, the two mares found common ground. “All that effort, all the ponies we manipulated, the operatives we lost, the assets we’ll never be able to use again, all thrown away. We had such a great plan! And….”
Cheerilee finished for her, hissing with sheer venom. “She sold us all out. Just so she could rescue her sibling; even if Pinkie’s salvation meant leaving the world to burn, she would have done it so long as she and her sister were left to roast marshmallows in the flames.”
Harshwhinny nodded, “She was the lynchpin of our plan - if she’d co-operated, we would have won… I think. And, that is an odd visual metaphor… But I will stress that Maud betrayed us just as much as you. Neither myself nor her handlers were aware of her dalliances with the Empire, or the HLF, or her designs on any of us. And I suspect you’re as much in the dark as to the full ramifications of that incident as we ourselves are. There’s so much we just don’t know!”
“Not anymore,” Cheerilee muttered, even though she suspected Elsa had not shared everything that had transpired on the Last Train with her. “All of us should have known better than to recruit the family members of the Elements.”
“And what of Big Macintosh?”
Cheerilee flinched.
“Big Mac is a realist, unlike Maud. He still hasn’t lost hope that maybe Applejack can be saved, but I can safely say that he didn’t join us because he wanted to ‘save Equestria’s soul’...”
“Ah care about my sister, if there is a way to save her, then it’s all good. I’ll help her get better, like any good brother should. But if comes down to the wire, then you do what needs to be done. I don’t want her to live like this any longer.”
“Are you sure this is what you want? You don’t care about the rest of Equestria?”
“Hate to say it ma’am, but yeah. Equestria is dead and gone.”
Cheerilee had been somewhat taken aback by his bluntness. He’d clarified:
“Well… it is, as we knew it. Cheerilee, I may not look it, but I’m a thinking stallion. I’ve got a lot of time for that during farm duties, or on train trips, or when I’ve been forced to make my lil’ sis run the farm… sad thing to put that much on the barrel of a lil’ filly,” he said. “Guess you’ll be havin’ me do the same?”
Cheerilee nodded slowly, reluctantly.
“Thought so. Better’n the other place that’d have me do that. Thing I’m gettin’ at is I don’t like the future. Think about it - ‘Questria as we knew it is dead, either way. ‘Specially if you win.”
“Are… are you mad at us?”
“If Ah was, I wouldn't be here. Celestia wins, I stay - it’s nothing more than a corpse that can move and talk, and the best thing to do is put it out of its misery. You win, ‘Questria’s just gone. Not gonna see the Summer Sun Celebration, not gonna be… well, just won’t be like what we knew. Don’t know how long it’ll be before somethin’ grows out the forest we burnt down. Or even if anythin’ can. Ah’ve been through hell, Miss Cheerilee. Ah’ve been treated like horseapples by my sister, had to make my lil’ sis get to work and take over a farm, been forced away from that same farm, seen mah granny die, watched mah home turn into Tartarus, had to install a totem-prole to oversee newfoal slaves in the orchards… and Ah hate those things, they just ain’t right. Never sleep next to a totem-prole, Miss Cheerilee. It’ll do… things to ya.”
She decided right then and there that he didn’t need to know the truth about totem-proles.
“Ah had to hire buckin’ zombies ‘cause them PETN threatened to sue me if Ah didn’t, only for ‘em to be paid wages that wouldn’t buy a donut hole, ‘cause it was for the war effort, and we had to grow some food, even if we couldn’ meet quota. Had to be a buckin’ slavemaster. Aaaand they’re prob’ly dead by now. Told ‘em all to work themselves to death so they wouldn’t take me to a brain butcher while I was goin’ here.”
“What possessed you to do that?”
“Well… honestly, Ah just don’t care anymore,” Macintosh said, and he was… he looked empty, which was frightening on the biggest stallion in Ponyville. Like a plushie that had lost all the stuffing and just hung, deflated, over a mattress. “That’s what Equestria is now. I… Ah’m just hollowed out.”
He had then fallen asleep in the office, and nobody had the heart to move him or Carrot Top till the next morning.
“He has given up on Equestria as well,” Cheerilee said after a moment, “Along with a few others, you can’t tell me there hasn’t been a few in the Resistance as well?”
“Some, not many,” Harshwhinny frowned, her eyes drifting over to focus on the city below as her ears drooped. “Usually they look around at the ponies around them, normal truehearted ponies who want to fix what went wrong, and rethink their condemnation. Only the most disturbed decide they’d rather sink the whole ship rather than course-correct.”
“And what happens to them?”
Harsh looked back across the table, eyes narrowed. “A good organization knows how to make use of its psychopaths and nihilists. The Directorates have benefitted greatly from their sorrow… and dealt with them in turn.”
“The more you claim to be different...” Cheerilee said quietly, wondering how many of those ‘disturbed’ ponies might have been of use to the PHL. “I mean, I know you’re democratically organized and your internal courts punish thuggism, but…”
Her lips pursed and she shook her head.
“Go on,” prompted Harshwhinny.
“Don’t you feel like you’re just dressing up a corpse in borrowed clothes? Your little pocket-democracy still adheres to the myth of an ‘unsullied’ Equestria. You’ve taken Celestia’s society and covered it up with Luna’s colors.”
“What else would you recommend? And dare you say the same to your newfound ‘allies’ from the other side of space?”
“Rebuild,” Cheerilee said after a moment. “Restructure and teach everypony the danger of the world rather than have them wander through life without a care. Nightmare Moon, Discord, scores of ancient ‘treasures’ and ‘relics’ that we found to be more of curses and danger than any right to be, including the very root of this entire war… and teach them to stop depending on the Alicorns to have all the answers.”
For so many long centuries, ponies had been sheltered under Celestia’s wings, too warm and content to spread their own. If forcing them to fly meant burning down the nest, then maybe that was a price worth paying…
“Here’s a challenge for your dream future-state. Strip away all that ‘Lunar Republic’ nonsense that your conservative backers ache for. Dump the diarchy altogether. Relegate all the art and culture that idolizes the alicorns into a museum and stick a great big sign on the door saying ‘this is how we fucked up so badly’, so that nopony can forget the folly of a system that places absolute trust in what should be a figurehead throne. Then build something else in its place…”
Cheerilee stood up from her seat, walking towards the window and placing a hoof on the glass. “As for the other Equestria, we have no right to dictate any terms to them, only warn them of the danger. They haven’t fallen, but all it took was a single ancient evil with little power to overthrow us.”
Equestria-that-was had died a slow death, the old death of a creaking juggernaut long afflicted with the thin-blooded disease known as ‘Royalty’. If fighting what they might become gave this ‘unsullied’ Equestria a much-needed shot of antibodies, then fine, so long as they understood the plaque latent within the Throne of Canterlot...
Cheerilee turned back to her. “Do not think they are coming because of your Equestria. They are coming for the humans and the ponies that fight by their side. They are coming to protect themselves from the Tyrant and her slaves from their evil.... ”
That was another little lie tossed off the top of her head. She doubted an idealist like Celestia-that-was would see this coming attack as anything less than a liberation of the millions of ponies still trapped within Equestria, their minds constantly barraged by propaganda and psychic assaults...
‘If anything, Celestia and Luna would probably establish a reparative council containing a mix of ponies, humans, and maybe Discord too… that seems to match her ideals of ‘balanced harmony’... but would human technology, chaos magic, and a few decent ponies be enough to turn Equestria around sufficiently that it never came back to bite everypony in the plot?’
Still, better an Equestria under the thumb of a human or Draconequus than an idealistic alicorn. Equestria as a country would suffer some definite losses but Equus as a whole would be better off with its sole superpower under lock, key, and gunbarrel.
“Excuse me?! It that what you’re saying? To throw away twenty centuries of our history and identity, as if it was the wrapper off of a hay-burger!?” Harshwhinny snapped, thumping her hoof hard on the table.
‘Oh yes, a greasy scrap of pretty paper wrapped around something inherently bad for you, to make it look presentable and palatable…’
“You don’t know what it’s like in Equestria,” the Chairpony railed on. “Those who still have liberties find them withering further on the vine with every day, all while we’re being bucking replaced by those newfoal creatures, and-”
“And everyone would be better off if we’d never become the undisputed hegemon of the world,” Cheerilee replied, rapping her own hoof. “If we had no powerful alicorn to guide us along a set path, then maybe we would be better off. The biggest change in Equestrian history came when the three tribes came together on their own, but all it took was one generation of Discord’s rule to scare us cowering into the benevolent tyranny of the immortals, too terrified to every attempt another paradigm shift! Maybe we would be worse off governing ourselves, but at least we would have the freedom to choose our mistakes. Maybe we wouldn’t be in this mess in the first place!”
She paused to catch her breath and shoved her mane back into place. “We also know about your issues, I have read the reports from your side, backed up by our own scouts within the Empire; we know that things are getting worse by the day. And I also understand that you think that we’re a lost cause.”
Harshwhinny actually looked surprised when Cheerilee didn’t spit the last two words out maliciously or put any emphasis on them. It was a sore point between the PHL and Resistance command, not helped by their mutual paranoia which had been sharpened to fine points over the past few years. The fact that both of them had their own games within games, plots within plots, hardly helped.
The actions of Maud Pie - i.e, selling out everyone and everything for a chance to save her sister, including Equestria, sentience itself, the universe - had done nothing at all to help this.
“Now. You agreed with me earlier,” she continued firmly. “This is our only chance. I’m not selling out humanity just to minimize collateral damage.”
“Do the ends justify the means here?”
“In this case, yes! I don’t like that argument, but what else can we do?! Politely ask the Empire to stop exterminating all humans?! Swear at them if that doesn’t work?! Write a petition?”
“I know the kind of personnel you plan on deploying. Some of the most violent, most psychotic humans in your ranks. You’re even bringing that maniac Viktor Kraber, for Luna’s sake! He was once a member of the bucking HLF, with more death on his hands than any other being aside from the Commander or the Knight themselves! If he lost, his plan b would be ‘Fight the entire pla-”
“It… actually is,” Cheerilee admitted.
“What?” Harshwhinny asked.
“I asked him, and he said, matter-of-fact, if the stealth failed, he’d fight the entire planet till the Barrier fell,” Cheerilee explained. “For once, I don’t mind giving him the weaponry to make that feasible. He could plant nukes across Equestria, if we had any left in reserve, and I’d smile as he pressed the detonator.”
Harsh’s scowl could have turned fresh milk to cream cheese, “...and let’s not even talk about those Dragons of the East, whose modus operandi is to leave scorched Earth behind every engagement!”
“I didn’t hoofpick them for subtlety,” Cheerilee said. “I know what it looks like. I know what they can do. And that’s exactly the point.”
“...explain.”
“I wanted ponies and humans who’d survived enough that it was a certainty that they could continue surviving. While the subtlety of the Blue Spy or Heliotrope would be good for what you want, I was looking for, as you said, soldiers that would be able to take ‘fight the entire planet’ as a plan B. And they are good - Kraber is a ‘tamed’ cannon. He won’t shoot ponies for the hell of it, or attack foals or innocent civilians. I have his word, and it’d kill him inside if he did. As for the Dragons, they are the best team in the entire Earthsphere; they have never lost a single member and performed deeds on par with Colonel Renee and Major Bauer. And like Kraber, they aren’t loose cannons either; their civilian casualty count is as low as they can bring it.”
Cheerilee massaged her forehead with her hoof. “Dammit. There is a reason I used these criteria. Pulling this off with these men and women is our last chance. Maybe yours as well. If we don’t do this, who knows where you’ll end up?”
“...What are you getting at?” Harshwhinny asked, narrowing her eyes.
“I don’t mean to insult you, or denigrate your work, but… for Luna’s sake, for the sake of the human God, for the sake of Lyra, if only because so many ponies here swear by her name… forget this jurisdictional pissing contest for a second. Forget the rivalry. Forget the spies, forget Maud, forget anything between us. Just think about it like this: if humanity loses, and every pony in the PHL is killed… you said it yourself, without the PHL, the resistance is effectively alone. And whatever uprising you have planned will lose its backbone. What could you accomplish all on your own, when the the majority of the population is either brainwashed or too scared to say anything? When the newfoals vastly outnumber the natural-borns? With totem-proles getting more extensive and intrusive?”
“Even so… we would go on fighting if that happened,” Harshwhinny replied. “It’s not as if we’d want to reintegrate. In time, Celestia’s bloated carcass of a government will collapse under its own corruption. Somepony has to be there to pick up the pieces.”
“Harshwhinny, I respect your cause. But it can’t last. Celestia, psychopath that she is, can wait you out, and she’ll kill as many of her own as it takes to whittle down your strength to nothing. You’re not a young filly any more, and she’s the Evermare! Your time and your ponypower will run out eventually. And I doubt she’ll leave the youth of Equestria unindoctrinated, if there’ll even be a generation born after this one...”
‘And that’s putting it gently,’ Cheerilee thought. Harshwhinny was proud, but if she had read human history as well as she claimed, then she’d have known of the ‘cursed soldiers’: those members of the Polish Resistance who’d tried to fight the postwar Soviet annexation of their country. It ended in blood, mud, and bullets, a twenty-year grind into the dirt under the weight of the Russian Bear.
‘A resistance can’t survive with an aging membership, ponies that should be in the old folks home. Without new blood they’d soon be unable to attack high-profile targets, reduced to attacking less and less important facilities, eventually reduced to raiding the most remote of outposts for food... And then… then they’d be nothing.
And that doesn’t even factor in the sheer ponypower that Celestia could concentrate on them when she’s done with us, forcing them further and further away from opportunities of effectiveness, probably into inhospitable and uncolonized areas on Earth…’ Not a pleasant thought.
“No, the reality will be for you if we lose is nothing more than a slow death,” Cheerilee whispered as she sat back down, a haunted look on her face. “We’re already on our last legs, trying to bring so many fighters across several hundred miles of forests and cities to keep the tide of Newfoals from sweeping across the country. That’s why I’m bringing the personnel that I have selected - I know they’ll be effective. It will be a lot harder for you, but you may have a chance.”
“A chance?”
“If we lose, then your Resistance MUST last long enough under the Tyrant’s rule, to see a new Earth.” Cheerilee looked at her with a crestfallen expression and added, “And you may be able to stop this nightmare before it begins all over again.”
“Wh-what…. what do you mean ‘new Earth’… all… all over again? This isn’t going to stop?” Harshwhinny choked out, the color draining from her face. “Sweet Luna, I’ve heard the rumors… about “spreading the harmony” to those untouched. I didn’t, couldn’t even imagine…”
Cheerilee grimly replied, “Believe me, they will. The Tyrant won’t just stop with Earth and humanity. She and her newfoal armies will travel across the multiverse, adding on more to their numbers. A massive, unstoppable army made up of the inhabitants of dozens, if not hundreds of universes.”
She let the implications sink in.
“There’d be no humans left on our side, who understood her objectives from the start. Only us…” Harshwhinny realised.
“Yeah…” Cheerilee snorted. “If we lose and it spills over onto yet another Earth, you might just get a second chance, but only if you were willing to play Lyra’s role, Bittersweet.”
She laughed and rolled her hoof. “Heck, you’d probably be able to recruit any remaining PHL ponies and go into hiding, if you could promise them a second crack with yet another Earth at their side, you know, do things right from the start. Vive la Resistance!”
That at least got a brief chuckle out of Harshwhinny, before the elder mare’s ears pricked.
“I appreciate the vote of confidence Cheerilee,” she said, suddenly seeming fired up. “But Luna willing, we won’t need it. We’ll sling our last shot in tandem with you.”
Cheerilee blinked, and then craned forward. “I beg your pardon.”
“We finalised our battle-plans before I left Equestria, in case I was captured or lost en-route to here.”
“So what’s your strategy? While we beat them with a stick, you pull the rug out from beneath their hooves?”
“That is correct. We don’t need to win, just confuse them enough for your forces to break through and turn the tide… with our backs to the wall the Night Court held an emergency session last night - we were barely able to scrape together a quorum, but we had just enough to pass a resolution: we’re committed to support this attack, all the way. And if a million or even seven million of us die, then they’ll be seven million arguments to the whole world that we were not just Celestia’s lackeys!”
She slammed a hoof on the table.
“I loathe your march on Equestria, Ms. Cherry, and I quiver at the thought of what you’ll unleash on our ponies, but Luna help me, if this is our only chance to end this war in the coming weeks then I’ll give it EVERYTHING WE’VE GOT!”
The sound of her roar prompted somepony to kick the observation room’s door open. Both mares spun to see Shephard and an Earth Pony mare run it, weapons in their grasp and fire in their eyes.
“Lieutenant Colonel!” / “Madame Chairpony!” they shouted in unison. “Are you alright?”
“Not this again,” Cheerilee growled, only to hear a sudden snort of braying laughter coming from her side. “Bittersweet, are you… are you alright?”
“Oh...fine...just fine…” Harshwhinny wheezed. “They’re like peas in a pod! Hah! The right hoof doesn’t know what the left hoof might be doing, but they still walk in step!”
She motioned towards the pony, a creamy mare with a short bob-cut mane of powder-blue, who possessed the coldest, deadest eyes Cheerilee had ever seen outside of a taxidermists display. They just looked frozen.
“Stand down, Coco. It’s quite alright…”
The dead-eyed mare nodded curtly, and turned away, not even sparing Shepard a glance.
‘Coco Pommel’, Cheerilee thought to herself, figures and facts coming easily to her mind. ‘Directorate Assassin, former assistant and ‘handler’ to the now deceased Suri Polomare...’
She vaguely remembered Suri, an arrogant, thoroughly deplorable Empire triumphalist with a bevy of disgusting rumors of plagiarism to her name, who nevertheless had been ‘persuaded’ to channel profits from her fashion-shows to the Resistance’s cause. She’d been a classic case of the resistance taking a bad pony and turning her baser qualities to some normative ‘good’… admittedly a nice exploit of the greed and corruption the Tyrant Sun seemed to cultivate in any pony under her command.
Suri’s recent death was officially reported as a ‘severe allergic reaction’, but now Cheerilee had doubts. But if the fashionista was getting bold, and Coco was needed elsewhere…
She shivered at the implications. It was, as they had agreed, the practicalities of war. Cold and ruthless.
“Seabreeze!” Harshwhinny called out, seemingly to the open air. “You can join Coco, if you wish.”
A ventilation grill dropped from the ceiling above the table. The duct it covered was tiny, barely six-inches square. Not even a foal could fit inside of it.
But what emerged was no foal. A tiny blue equine floated out of the gaping hole, born aloft by a pair of delicate gossamer wings. A penny-sized backpack between his shoulderblades hummed, and Cheerilee felt a weak trill of runic-magic as the fey sprite rode forward on a miniscule jet of thrust.
“Cheerilee,” Harsh said, eyes wet with unshed tears. “Meet Seabreeze.”
The creature landed on the Chairpony’s outstretched hoof, concern shining in its own oversized eyes, and it (he? she?) crooned something in a tongue that was foreign to Cheerilee, a matchstick-thin hoof extended in a gesture of comfort.
“What…” she swallowed. “What is it?”
“He,” Harshwhinny replied sternly. “Is a Breezie, a distant cousin of ponykind. And of Equus’s surviving species, Seabreeze and his kind are perhaps the most endangered…”
“I’ve, not heard much about ‘Breezies’ before,” Cheerilee stammered. “I thought they were just a bed-time story for foals…”
“Most many of you did think that!” piped up a tiny, strident voice, and the schoolmare-turned-soldier realised that the diminutive creature was now talking to her. “But the Fallen Sun knew, and so did her demons of ‘Magic’ and ‘Kindness’. When they besieged our home, denied us the pollen we needed to live, no-pony came to help us!”
He pounded his hoof on Harshwhinny’s. “Except for this mare! She sought us out, brought soldiers to drive away the Fallen Sun’s army, brought mages and medics to care for our survivors, brought us to her base to keep us safe!”
The backpack Seabreeze wore hummed again, and riding on its faint beam, he floated up into Cheerilee’s face, a look of utter indignation on his face.
“You didn’t know we existed, I don’t blame you for that. You fight with bravery and courage, and the very winds sing songs of your courage. But remember this, huge-ling! The Equestrian Resistance might be ‘a corpse dressed in the Moon-Maid’s clothes’, but it made a difference for us, and for many!”
Cheerilee’s eyes flitted to the air-duct, a passageway so small and inaccessible that she doubted anypony had bothered to ward it. Then she looked back down again, and saw two thimble-small pouches carried alongside Seabreeze’s barrel. Not large by any size, but just big enough to carry a few pinches of pollen.
‘Or arsenic, or hydrogen cyanide,’ she thought to herself in passing, mentally nodding on the implications and uses this small being could bring.
“I see your thinking!” Seabreeze snorted. “You think I am a perfect little spy, a pocket assassin! You think Madame Chair saved us just for our tiny size and foreign magic! You think I not thought this myself, you think you outsmart me?!”
He shrugged, “Maybe, maybe.”
Cheerilee had to resist the urge to snort and blow the little fluff-ball away. Then he jabbed a hoof. “The Fallen Sun wanted us for that. Wanted us to sneak and scurry at her whim, like whispering little birds, stinging and dying like little bees!”
Wings not even stirring, he drifted back to Harshwhinny, who was staring down at the table. “This mare asked nicely, and gave those of us who did not want to fight a home far away from the Fallen Sun. Her ponies carried my and my child to safety, became friends that held me when my wife did not survive the journey!”
He flitted forward again, and she suddenly saw contrition in his eyes as he feigned a mid-air bow.
“You are a pony of many sides, Cherry-mare. Teacher, Traveller, Soldier, Leader. So is my Boss.”
He spun again and kicked at said Boss. “And you are being stupid, Bittersweet! Stop nursing wounded pride and hold your head high for what you’ve done right! A great hero sits across from you, not a common grub or some imperial lackey! You two should be like sisters! This crazy argument is bringing out the worst in our greatest heroines! Now grow up and play nice, both of you! This is your greatest moment ever!”
Seabreeze nodded his head firmly, lips pursed, as if to punctuate that statement, before drifting away towards Coco, landing neatly in her mane and wrapping his hooves around one ear in a hug. For a second, Cheerilee saw a flicker of light in the hollowed-out mare’s eyes, and a genuine smile about her lips.
‘I wonder if he slipped something nasty into Siri’s tea. Allergic reaction my hoof.’
“What was all that about,” she said aloud, once Shepard and the Resistance pair had left the room.
“Seabreeze is my conscience,” Harshwhinny explained. “He works best with Ms. Pommel, but I like keeping him near to me when I’m making big decisions. I trust him for his forthrightness and clear sense of right-and-wrong. He’s blunt, but he’s a real braveheart.”
She pawed at her cup for an instant, and then slumped slightly. “If it wasn’t for his persuasions, I’d have never come here to speak with you. Just hidden away in my grotto and brooded for an Equestria that was… and which could never be again.”
“...”
“We’re monsters, Cheerilee. I admit it,” she whispered. “We’ve murdered, exploited, blackmailed and extorted. I’m no more an avatar of ponydom’s best than Celestia is…”
Cheerilee felt a sudden pang of sympathy. “Your people…”
“They want me to take over as Head-of-State postwar,” Harsh sneered. “A Chancellorship, or mayhaps a Presidency. But I’d not want it, and would only take it if all of Equestria ordered me to.”
She shook her head. “I just want to be at Luna’s side when she comes out of that statute. She might be thousands of years old, but there’s a vulnerability in her that is... so tender and endearing. I don’t want her to ever be alone again. She was trapped on the moon for a thousand years, mentally browbeaten by her sister, put in a world she didn’t understand, exiled… Equestria has had enough of mad alicorns, and while I understand your reservations, I’ll be damned if I’m not there to offer sympathy to a broken mare.”
There was love here, though whether it was romantic or maternal Cheerilee could not tell. But the yearning look in Harshwhinny’s drifting gaze was true and honest.
“I want to retire too,” the schoolmare answered at last, lying down in a more comfortable pose on the couch. Shunning her magic, she grabbed her mug in one hoof and threw back the cooling dregs of the tea. “Have a little house with a picket-fence and do my best to help some war-orphans.”
“Is the Commander present in your dream?” Harsh asked, neither with snide or sneer, but with a faint smile. Cheerilee nodded in response, and was strangely glad to see the Resistance mare’s smile grow larger. “That sounds like a smashing idea. I can think of more than a few ponies who’d need similar counselling after the last trump sounds on this war.”
“Like Coco and Seabreeze?” Cheerilee asked, one eyebrow raised.
Harshwhinny did not answer, instead turning to gaze in the direction of the door.
“Those two have volunteered to be in the strike force, you know…” she whispered at last, pulling several sheafs of documentation from her saddlebags. “To support your invasion as an allied battalion, marching under your orders.”
She pushed the first stack of paper across the table. A folded map lay neatly atop it.
“This contains all our intel on the machine that Celestia uses to project the Barrier. Specifications, thaumodynamics, security, and of course, it’s location. If you want to roll an army in Equestria, this is your first target. It took some of our most reliable and apolitical fighters to win this info. Besides Seabreeze and Coco, securing the data took two griffon ‘amblin’, one of our better combat-mages, two earth pony commandos, a pegasus weather-meister, and a former zebra legionnaire. Half of them died in the process. And the survivors, they saw enough that all they can do is keep on fighting…like Kraber and your Dragons.”
“Well, Lyra always said we’re more alike than unalike,” Cheerilee admitted as she reached for the documents, almost expecting Harshwhinny to snatch them away. Having pulled the stack safely across to her side of the table, she glanced at the others, each some two-inches thick.
“Are those your battle-plans?” she asked. “Your instructions to the cells and Directorates?”
“Yes,” Harshwhinny confirmed. “Have your people go over them and make any changes required to better sync with the invasion plans. If I return home safe, we’ll distribute them as a final update of the standing orders.”
A long hush followed as Cheerilee realised that Harshwhinny, Bittersweet Harshwhinny, was effectively suborning her forces to the Allied command. If this all went off without a hitch...
She picked up the nearest pile and skimmed it. Page after page of marching orders and targets, all neatly prioritised and notarised.
“This is…. this is huge! How many of your assets are you deploying?!”
“Everything.”
“What?” the burgundy mare gasped.
“Everything and everypony is being thrown into the fray,” Harshwhinny said faintly, pouring a fresh cup of jet-black, unsweetened tea and pushing it across to Cheerilee. “To deter suspicion of coming action, no alterations will be made to our current operational timetable until T-minus 2 hours before the invasion launches. But then...”
“Your people strike?”
“Yes. Four thousand critical ponies within the EUP and the War Ministries will be liquidated by the Directorates in those two hours. Besides Breezie infiltrators like Seabreeze, our agents are already in place, either as members of the target’s personal staff, households, or families.”
This was the sad state of Equestria today, when even parents, children, siblings and friends were ready to turn against their own to bring down the tyrant. Despite that knowledge, Cheerilee could only accept the proffered drink, silent and aghast, as Harshwhinny continued to explain.
“A further sixty thousand secondary targets will be incapacitated or placed beyond communication, by means of sabotage or distribution of false orders bearing the Tyrant’s seal. At the same time a number of strategic junctions on the rail-network will be demolished, while public uprisings kick off in towns that house key government facilities or military barracks. We’ve got linesmares and stallions in place across the nation ready to cut all the major telegraph lines. Cloudsdale will find the weather factory shut down, the storm reservoirs breached and sabotaged, and we’ve infiltrated enough pegasi into the stratospheric bureaucracy to stalemate attempts to weaponize the weather against your beachheads. Plus, we’ve laid enough hexes on major transportation hubs that attempts to assemble a counterstrike will be a disaster. Typically, we only use ‘dark magic’ to divert attention, but I don’t think anypony will mind an offensive use here.”
“How strong are these hexes?” Cheerilee asked.
“I suspect a strong enough unicorn will be able to break through one,” Harshwhinny said. “But then, we didn’t cast them for strength. We were going for quantity here. Anyone can break down one thick wall, but not just anyone can break a lot of thin ones. Besides, we set a lot of them on railroad bridges. A locomotive has very little innate magic and will be unable to breach a hex readily, and deconstructing dark magic will take a crucial time. Every little delay, every late or diverted supply train and troop transport, plays into the plan.”
Alarm and despondency, confusion and chaos. Little seeds sown all across Equestria, little neuro-inhibitors stymying the nation’s immune system. An army needed more than troops to fight: it needed supply-lines and logistics and a chain of command. Without those vital organs, all that was left was a rabble, and it seemed the Resistance was pulling out all the stops to cut the Empire’s nerves and tendons.
“Any cell-members without specific roles are to fall back to safe-houses after sabotaging whatever they can at their places of employ,” Harsh continued. “Once barricaded in, they’ll use our stockpiled radios and communication crystals to broadcast ‘in the clear’, warning civilians to stay indoors and keep safe, announcing that Equestria’s liberation is underway. Every city, town, and village will be confused, isolated, and out-of-communication with Canterlot, and using what few weapons we’ve made, we’ll hold the garrisons prisoner by tying them down in localised peacekeeping…”
She smiled, the grin appearing vicious and predatory. “And we’ll kill newfoals, kill them by the thousandfold! Every dead slave or soldier multiples the controlled anarchy we’re aiming for, enough confusion to cripple the Empire’s ability to respond to the invasion. For one day, we’ll shut down this abomination that calls itself Equestria, throw open the doors and lay out the welcome mat for your forces. Celestia keeps the key under a flowerpot by the back door.”
The feeble joke was not enough to stem the awesome mental imagery coursing through Cheerilee’s mind, upon which she was beginning to assemble a tidal wave of tanks, aircraft and infantry advancing without resistance.
“Is that everything?” she croaked.
“Near enough. Beside the voluntary battalion we’re contributing to the actual invasion, we’ve got an entire Directorate under orders to seize Canterlot’s cultural heart as your forces advance, safeguarding what treasures we’ve not already recovered ‘for the nation’. They’ll fly UN flags from the roofs of secured museums and galleries, to deter attack.”
Cheerilee continued to skim the pages, her pulse quickening. Two to seven-million ponies, striking at once as the invasion’s vanguard. It was at most, a mere percentage of Equestria’s population, but like a single mistimed spasm at just the right time, they might just stop the nation’s heart…
It was staggering. All the more so that Harshwhinny was willing to share it with her and ask for input.
“This, this could work,” she said at last. “You really could sweep the rug out from under them while we batter them on all sides.”
“That was my hope…” Harshwhinny said wearily.
“But why?” Cheerilee demanded. “Why all the arguing and shit-slinging we’ve gone through. Why didn’t you tell me all this from the beginning.”
“Might I share a secret with you?” Harsh smiled wanly. “You’re much like myself... or how I remember myself. I might be a proud, headstrong foal, but I hoped that if I pushed you hard enough, got a good look at the heart of you… I might finally see myself there too, and know where my loyalties lay…”
“And what did you see?”
“A proud, headstrong foal of course, same as every!” Harsh snorted, yet smiling. “But she’s got many admirable qualities, and her assesment of the situation is true. You’re right, Cheerilee. Equestria is lost, so now all I can do is maximise our efforts, and minimise the losses.”
Cheerilee wanted to say something, say that Equestria would survive in some way, even if in a barely recognisable-state, but seeing the all-but broken mare in front of her, the only word that came to her mouth was.
“Thank you…”
No response was forthcoming. Instead, Harshwhinny had turned to look out across New York. Another silence, more comfortable than the last, settled over them. Cheerilee begged to be excused for a moment, and when she came back she found that her counterpart had stepped up to the window, and was tracking the ascent of a passenger jet lifting off from JFK.
“It really does overshadow Manehattan, doesn’t it?” the Chair of the Night Court said aloud. “Quite, quite beauteous.”
“I know,” Cheerilee admitted. “But there are times when I still pine for… the home I knew.”
They shared a silent nod, before Cheerilee proffered a piece of paper, identical to that which she had signed off on Eadmund and Lucie’s passage to Equestria. “Here, and my apologies for withholding it earlier. We are a mirror to one another. Seabreeze saw it too - what he said about you… is true of me as well.”
“What is this?” Harshwhinny asked as she accepted the paper.
“A waybill of transit, authorising you to cross over into ‘True’ Equestria. On their side it counts as a 24-hour pass. Go see it for yourself, remind yourself of what home was, and what it might be again with some effort.”
There was only one thing that Harshwhinny could offer in response. “Thank you.”
They smiled wanly, before the older mare accepted the waybill and stared down at it. “I… I don’t know if I could ever look at Celestia the same way, not after what she had done to the dragons, the minotaurs, the reindeer, the griffons… and… and...”
“...and the breezies?”
“Yes, them too.”
Frowning, Harshwhinny looked out towards the sea. “You’re right of course. Whatever shape Equestria takes after the war, it won’t be the same. Even our most ardent royalists want to see the power of the throne curbed, and over the years we’ve managed to round out a rough idea for a constitutional monarchy… a reigning Alicorn princess as the figurehead of a republican government. It’ll be different, but it deserves a chance.”
“So now we just need to win the war, and win that chance…”
“Indeed. And then we’ll see about finding you that little house with the picket fence,” Harshwhinny smirked.
“Eh, it’s not that important right now,” Cheerilee laughed nervously, before runically lifting another bottle from her bags. An amber liquid sloshed inside, and Harshwhinny’s eyes widened.
“Is that what I think it is?”
“Sweet Apple Acres Best Reserve, 2nd Year Anno Harmonia,” Cheerilee confirmed. “Big Mac brought it with him. The last remnants of a brilliant era…”
She poured them each a shot. “What shall we drink to? Earth? Equestria? The Lunar Republic?”
Harsh sniffed appreciatively at the cider. “How about to everything they’ve done to us and our friends, for all the lows that they’ve made us sink to, and the highs to which we might aspire.”
“Sounds good to me...to our friends.”
“To friendship… as the youngsters in the Resistance say, it’s bucking magic.”
“Wise words! Ha!”
With a truce of sorts won, the two mares looked out, into the cold light of a new day.
TO BE CONTINUED…