Final Solution

by Luna-tic Scientist


26 - A defence in depth

"It's all we have, Fusion," Backdraft said, turning away from the distribution point. Behind her, ponies were accepting portions of the pelletized food supplement passed from telekinetic grasp to telekinetic grasp. All looked happy, even though the actual amount was small, their nostrils flaring at the scent of the stuff. "The most compact food source we could rescue. You should eat some yourself -- wild greens like the material we've been collecting won't keep you going for that long, not at the amount of effort you are expending."

"It comes from the dogs; I don't trust it," she said, snorting in a vain attempt to blow the tempting odour out of her nostrils. The smell was doing something to her stomach, and it produced a loud gurgle.

"Ponies start eating the stuff as soon as they are weaned; we've been doing it for generations. There can't be anything harmful in there. Talk to Spiral; she'll tell you what’s in it. Just micronutrients and a bunch of medicinals wrapped up in a food-base." Her ears flicked back for a moment and she shifted her weight from hoof to hoof. "Things that control our breeding cycle, too," she said, voice a low murmur. "It's not an issue at this time of year, but as spring rolls around we'll start to get urges..." Backdraft smiled slightly at Fusion's furrowed brow. "Oh, don't worry, it's nothing you can't ignore with a bit of willpower." Her smile faded. "Of course, now's not the time to get pregnant."

"No, not really." If that's all there is to the dogs' food, then why do I want to eat the stuff so much? Is it just a holdover from the Blessing? Pony eats food as ordered, pony gets a happy jolt? "I want full effort towards a more permanent food supply, as soon as we have everypony even halfway settled."

"Oh, absolutely. This stuff won't last forever, and we already have foraging parties stripping the local valleys." She gestured to the other end of the valley, where a distant flight of ponies were carrying a bundled mass of vegetation towards one of the herds. "There's not much useful forage out there, but I thought it was best to give as many ponies as possible something useful to do. Keeps them out of the way of the medics. What do you intend to do now?"

"Having a single base was a mistake; in any case, a pony isn't supposed to live underground like a dog. We must disperse into self-contained units and hide. The dogs have no satellite surveillance for the moment, but Ellisif tells me they will be sending high-altitude aircraft to hunt us. We'll have to hunt them in turn."

"And by definition revealing our positions." Backdraft's gaze wandered, lifting up to the sky, still awash with dirty-brown clouds. "A stochastic defence... we could probably widen those odds. Have you spoken to anypony with weather team experience? There're a lot of things they can do with clouds other than just move them about."

Fusion nodded following her gaze. "This has crossed my mind... I'll see what Ellisif says, before I--" Send her off to die. She shook her head. Stop that! It was all her idea. "We need to hide from more than just the optical. Perhaps combine that with something for infrared and radar. Then there's magic... What will we do if they have ponies on those aircraft?"

"I think you know the answer to that, Fusion," Backdraft said gently. "If we can, we rescue them."

If we can. "That won't be clean... the pair I pulled out of the Security Hub repair crew are not doing well." She sighed, ears drooping. "This is going to be very hard," she mumbled, turning away and heading for the group of gryphons that marked out the presence of Ellisif. Halfway there, she turned and looked again at the food distribution point. The line of ponies was longer, if anything, many still flying in to receive their portions, or taking extra away for the injured. Her stomach twisted, a sudden spike of hunger that caused an involuntary step in that direction.

What if it's the other way around? What if I'm wrong and it's something missing, something that we can't do without and which is only supplied by that stuff? Am I going to get sick because of my paranoia? She hesitated, unable to move another step, then wheeled and trotted smartly towards the gryphons.

===

Redshift stared out across the treetops. On the horizon, to the south of the ruins of their old base, was a patch of cloud amid the dirty overcast that looked out of place. It expanded as he watched, horizontally and vertically, glimmering with faint pastel shades.

How do they even do that? There was the characteristic flicker of cloud-to-cloud sheet lightning, making the whole horizon flash for a moment. The shadow sight view was even more interesting; the cloud, still spreading with unnatural speed, was infecting its neighbours, like mould growing through a slice of discarded apple. The glow was far more apparent in this view, a great mass of swirling colour shot through with hundreds of points of light from the weather team building the thing. One of the points, far brighter than the others, sat at the centre, linked to the rest with near invisible strands.

He frowned, trying to count the number of wing and horn lights. I can see Fusion, even if I don't know what she's doing... but how many weather ponies were at Naraka? That can't be right... there are too many of them. He opened his eyes, sweeping the valley and half expecting to be the only pony present. The scene was as he remembered; gryphons -- so many gryphons! -- being shouted at and organizing themselves into teams or squads or whatever they were called, interspersed with little clusters of ponies helping to assemble and move all the injured and gear.

An illusion, something to fool the shadow sight... it would be easy enough; a network of simple spells tied into patches of water droplets, all moving to make the light shift. If the locus is properly compact it might look like a pony. He snorted and stretched again. It wouldn't fool anypony who got close, but if you were more than a hundred metres away... His mind started to gallop away with the idea, suddenly jealous of the pony who'd come up with it. Lightning. They are generating ionisation to interfere with radar -- and I bet infrared is no good through thick, cold clouds.

"We each have our own tasks to perform," he muttered, eyeing the next set of gryphon weapons he was supposed to be modifying. Along with the gun harnesses, there was the armour itself, with associated command collar and display visor, some bulky things that looked like they clipped over the full armour and contained big batteries and a miniature electrothermal turbine, and an interesting set of cylinders that one of the gryphons had called quench-missiles.

Redshift pulled one of the torso-sized drive units from the pile, letting his magic sweep through it. What had Adigard called it? A 'boost suit'? There had been an element of disdain in his voice when he said the name; not popular with the troops, apparently. The superconducting batteries were not charged -- the same as everything else, a 'safety feature', apparently -- so he pushed a little power into the coils and fiddled with the computronium nodes until they accepted inputs from the chest pack

"All pretty straightforward," he said, earning a reproachful glance from one of the working ponies. Right, back to work. The more kit we can make, the happier Ellisif will be... and I'll have less chance of being shot when they inevitably want me to fix something. Sighing, he reached for another of the shoulder guns and closed his eyes.

===

Adigard flinched at the alien touch that oozed over his armour and between the feathers of his wings and neck, coating every pinion, every errant hair, with a white-gold glow. He strained against the touch, but it was like being coated in elastic, if that elastic was backed by steel. Wings effectively paralysed, he made an effort to hold them still and not try and fight that light-yet-immovable force. The air around him stilled, despite the fact that they were still moving forwards, as the glow radiated from his body and linked him to his nearest neighbours.

All around were gryphons, packing tighter and tighter into a steadily reducing volume, slotting into a hexagonal, globular array around the white glare of the pony. Light from her horn flared like from an arc welder, a hard, actinic brilliance that left dark streaks where his visor's anti-flash defences were triggered. The nearest gryphons, all clad in hastily fitted armour and ensconced within the same golden glow, were now close enough to touch, and there was a palpable feeling of being next to something incomprehensibly powerful, like the Maker itself was present and--

~~~discontinuity~~~

---flicker of light and air as the landscape changed, rocks swapping for low rolling farmland under a clear sky, the sun up near the zenith--

~~~discontinuity~~~

--the numinous feeling vanished as a slap of warm, fast air made the flesh around his beak tingle. A hard shove, like the push of a rocket pack, threw him away from his flock-mates and Adigard instinctively flared his wings, twisting them in the airflow to bring himself about and slot in at the apex of his fire-team. His aiming reticule came alive, filled with unfamiliar targeting reports from the bulky launcher slung between his forelegs, its seeker heads picking out the shapes they had been programmed to kill.

There was a lot of activity below; the wide, flat armourcrete apron was littered with military vehicles being shuttled between armouries, launch pads, charging stations and the hardened shelters that protected the elevators leading down to the buried hangars. The fat, lenticular shapes of airtanks vied with the blunt arrows of carriers and, further away, in a little section all on their own, were two pairs of Arclight aircraft. Things were already moving, the reaction vehicles with crews already on board and drives kept warm, blasting dust from their undersides as spears of plasma scorched the ceramic landing surfaces, while air defence turrets blew off their weather shields to expose laser mirrors and the stubby honeycomb of swarmjet launcher cells. Dogs, reduced to the size of insects by the range, were just starting to run, heading for aircraft or the dubious shelter of bunkers.

There was another flash of white-gold from the pony, now hovering at the centre of an expanding cloud of gryphons, and an impossible wave of rainbow light rippled out from her, bathing the base below in strange hues. Without any fanfare, the drive on every ship that had managed to get airborne suddenly died, dropping the heavy airtanks back to the apron with enough force to fracture ceramic and buckle hulls. More lights, a hard, near ultraviolet glare, and the suddenly visible streaks of hypervelocity projectile fire reached out to touch a dozen of the turrets and ground-to-air launchers. Simultaneous explosions flared, the blue-white lightning flashes vanishing under the orange-yellow of secondary detonations as ammunition and backup power sources cooked off under the kinetic strikes.

The ground felt like it was tilting, despite the horizon remaining perfectly level, the whole world curving inwards to place the other pony, the one Fusion had called her sister, at its centre. Darkness congealed around her, as if the sun had gone in, and there was a pulse of something, not the brilliance of a plasma bolt but a subtle twisting in the air, that travelled from Gravity and struck the middle of the armourcrete apron. The bend in the world followed that patch of distortion, producing odd flutters in Adigard's middle ear, and he flinched as the flat expanse of fullerene and metal fibre laced concrete shuddered and pulled inwards with a great spider-web cracking, stretching and fracturing towards a building distortion at the centre.

The unseen tilt abruptly started to seesaw and the patch of apron, nearly fifty metres across, surged inwards with an appalling, grinding rumble to form a compact asteroid-like sphere, shrouded with a skin of dust that clung and pooled on its cratered surface like water in an ocean. This only lasted for an instant, then the force vanished and the mass, thousands upon thousands of tonnes, fell down into the pit that lay below the armourcrete cap. A breath later the ground shook, jolting aircraft and knocking a few running dogs off their paws. Gravity vanished, reappearing over the centre of the hole, and the wedge-shaped shockwaves of hypersonic projectiles reached in to strike at targets deep in the heart of the base.

I did wonder how she was going to get us inside. Buffeted and half-deafened by the crack-crack-crack of random junk thrown at railgun speeds, Adigard squinted and turned away as a buzzing, crackling ball of light materialised next to Fusion, the ghost of its terrible temperature reaching through the small feathers of his throat to stroke at the flesh beneath. The ball turned into a streak, fast but not the subliminal blur of Gravity's hurled projectiles, and flicked out to strike one of the Arclights, great lumpy things made pregnant with the bulge of their thaumic suppressor, amidships.

It disintegrated with a hot flash, the blast knocking the adjacent unit sideways and fragments punching holes through its thin hull, just before a second plasma bolt finished the destruction. Fusion had already turned to the remaining pair, and Adigard just stared at the rolling barrage of kinetic strikes and star-hot accelerated plasma that systematically flattened or dug out every defensive emplacement around the base in a matter of seconds.

They barely need us at all! he thought, brain sluggish from the flashes and concussions, then blinked as the pair disappeared abruptly and didn't reappear. Oh, right. Gotta have something to go home to. In his ear the launcher burbled happily, a score of targeting boxes bracketing a row of airtanks and attack carriers. Other, ghost-like icons, marked out the intended targets of the second launcher they'd salvaged; the units were talking to each other and had decided on a target list between them.

Beak open in a savage smile, Adigard screamed into the slipstream as he dived, holding down the firing switches.

===

Vanca, standing at the centre of the empty firing range, stared at the servitor, a grey mare that called itself 'Merlon'. The creature stared back with a level of directness that felt... disrespectful, even though it had been nothing but polite. Orgon's personal servitor... it almost reminds this one of Fusion... She shook her head, then glanced towards the firing points where a group of Security's scientists and her own minder, the same Agent Lilla, were huddled around some hastily assembled monitoring equipment. "Let Vanca see it," she demanded, pointing at Merlon.

There was a delay, not long, but very noticeable when there should have been immediate obedience. "Yes, Academician."

There was a glimmer of pearly light from the servitor's horn, little more than would be seen if the creature was only employing routine telekinesis, then a sharp flash-bang that made Vanca blink and her ears ring. "Unbelievable!" There had been a slight sensation when the pony had disappeared, almost like a breeze had ruffled the fur, but only on the side facing the spell. Was that gravitational shear? It would make sense, considering the amount of exotic matter required to hold open the throat enough to allow something as big as the pony throu-- Her eyes cleared, darting from side to side. "Pony? Where did the stupid creature go--"

"Here, Master," came the diffident voice, from right behind Vanca's head.

She whirled around, lips drawn back in a snarl, her paws up and curled into claws. "Very funny," she said, her frantically beating heart slowing slightly, turning the open-pawed slash into a push that did nothing to move the solidly-built servitor. "The magic... how complex is it? There is nothing like it in the servitor thaumic libraries. This one has questioned ponies from a wide range of specialities, and none of them could even offer a hint as to how it was done." She leaned forwards, jabbing at Merlon's shoulder with one claw.

The pony looked at her for a moment, with that same flat gaze Vanca had seen in the eyes of Security troopers. "Master, it has an almost fractal complexity. There is none of the modular design used in other magics, so I'm not surprised that the spell has never been discovered before." Her ears flicked back, only for an instant, followed by an expression of sadness, then she took a step back, out of range of Vanca's prodding digit. "It is... all or nothing." Her lips quirked in a slight smile. "I can see the failure modes; if you are almost there it will kill you and maybe take you somewhere. Further away from optimal and it does nothing. A little like nuclear weapon design; precision is the key."

"Disruption is straightforward?" Vanca took a few quick steps to the monitoring station and its attendant scientists, pulling a harness glittering with faintly glowing gems and crystals. Holding it awkwardly in one paw, she fiddled with the dismounted control panel, grunting with satisfaction when pulsing lights rippled over the device's surface. "Fusion and the other pony were able to escape from inside a thaumically shielded chamber."

The pony's ears went back again, and she shifted her weight from hoof to hoof, looking at the harness with an expression of distaste. "Passive shields operate using a boundary effect. The wormhole bypasses normal space-time."

"Obviously," Vanca said, waving a paw in the air and making the harness rattle. "What about this active field generator?"

"That is from an Aegis power suit..." Merlon looked thoughtful, then reached out with her magic to pluck the thing from Vanca's grasp. She started to breathe heavily, the muscles on her neck standing out like cords. "I can work through it, with enough effort. Teleportation is out of the question."

"The field effect is similar to that of Arclight, in a way," Vanca muttered, eyes turning distant and shutting out the world, "but not quite. The range is too short. We already know that these fields provide little defence against the rogues." It should be possible to extend the range, at the cost of--

"Is your plan to use this field generator as a test bed for alterations to the Hive's Arclight units? I imagine that a significant area could be covered... a sort of teleport denial system."

Vanca glared at the servitor, then its words penetrated and she found herself nodding slowly. This creature is smarter than most of the students Vanca has had. "Yes, that is a very good idea." She turned, scowling at the other scientists. Smarter than those idiots... perhaps working with it will not be an unpleasant experience. "Well? What are these ones waiting for? Bring the field tuning kit here, immediately."

===

A pulse of rainbow colours flooded the darkness of the cell, and the lights, already dim, went out. A moment later they came back on, but far dimmer and reddish in hue. Waking from a fitful doze, Scalar lifted his head, trying to taste the magic, but there was nothing but ragged pain from the centre of his skull and a pervasive odour of gryphon. "Damn you all," Scalar whispered, pushing at the pain but getting nothing back except a sudden faintness and a roaring in his head. There was a series of distant thumps and the floor vibrated under his belly, then a few more, fainter and randomly scattered. Ears twitching, he got to his hooves and walked unsteadily to the thick, transparent wall that served as a door, pressing his face against it, trying to see into the opposite cell.

Elliptic was still laying where she'd been left. Scalar squinted, straining to see even the slightest sign of life. "Come on, show me something!" He held his breath, letting it out explosively when Elliptic's chest, a patchy mix of shaved skin and blood-stained fur, rose and fell ever so slightly. "Still alive," he whispered, the knot in his stomach untying slightly. There were more vibrations, and a sudden sense of lightness, like in a fast dive. The feeling fluctuated, accompanied by a deep, basso-profundo scream and an unnatural sensation of weight before the lightness returned.

"Are you up there, Grav? Have you found me?" he whispered, ears and eyes searching the blank ceiling. The odd sensations vanished for a breath, then the whole cell shook, as if it had been picked up and dropped. Scalar staggered, wings flicking out, then fell as they failed to open, sharp pain biting into the joints around the metal cuffs that restricted their movement.

Dazed from the impact, Scalar lay there gasping, inhaling great draughts of the suddenly smoky air. He sniffed, then sneezed; the smell was coming from an uneven crack down the side of the transparent door panel, rather than the ventilator. In fact... there's no air coming from that grill. He stood again, leaning against the door. It gave slightly and he looked appraisingly at the frame. That was a very big jolt -- has something shifted?

He wheeled, lashing out with both hind legs, then choked on a scream at the sudden twin spikes of pain that lanced up his fetlocks. The door rattled slightly, but nothing more. Hobbling, barely able to stand, he moved to the door and leaned against it. The little crack was slightly wider and he pressed his muzzle to it, inhaling deeply. There was only the smell of more smoke and the faint sound of pops and bangs. Gunfire? He closed his eyes, trying to switch to shadow sight, but there was nothing but pain and darkness. No gravitic fluctuations, no more rainbow lights. If the sisters were still here, there would be far more than just a few gunshots.

"I'm here!" he screamed, flicking his head around and slamming it into the door, rewarded only by a dull thump. "Don't leave me!" Something warm and wet trickled down Scalar's cheek; gritting his teeth he pulled his head back and did it again.

===

Adigard scurried into the scant cover offered by the landing legs of the next airtank on the apron. Explosions cracked all around, filling the air with flashes of heat and the visceral thump of shockwaves. He reached back into one conformal pannier, pulling out another charge. One quick motion exposed the adhesive layer and the thing, one of many the ponies had synthesised out of little more than plant material, air and rock, was shoved deep into the guts of the tank, up the landing leg bay and past the arm-length of metalloceramic armour.

He snapped his beak at the other two in his fire team, who were currently keeping watch on the dogs' sporadic attempts to drive them away from the aircraft. The pair, both Naraka natives who'd been given a little military training at the Eugenic Board site as a form of testing, were frighteningly keen. They didn't have real names, but odd collections of syllables that sounded a little like numbers; Ein-fimm-tveir and Atta-prir-sjau, or something. The shots weren't very accurate, and seemed to be mostly small-arms -- then the three turned and galloped away. There was a solid whump from behind and the shock made him stumble, then they were behind cover again, this time amid the ruins of the hardened elevator's topside port. He glanced back, grinning at the slumped shape of the airtank, smoke billowing from its internals.

There was a double beep in his earpiece. "Time to go, chicks!" he shouted, taking a single bound then unfurling his wings. All around, other teams were doing the same, converging on the raw wound in the centre of the apron. Skimming the battered armourcrete, Adigard swerved around a burning attack carrier, black smoke belching out of the wing-mounted lifter fans, then jumped off a twisted mass of reinforcing beams, the ends distorted like they had been light construction plastic. He dove into the shaft below.

The floor, almost half a kilometre beneath him, was choked with rubble from the collapsed roof. The sides of the shaft were pockmarked with blast craters and stained by plumes of rising smoke and flame. Through the haze, green laser threads reached up towards him, lighting the dirty air like he was falling through a sunlit ocean. A flick of his eyes and a twitch of his foreclaws, curled up around the twin control sticks on his chest pack, set the fire selector and ammunition type, and he pulled the trigger.

The gun bucked against his back, a sharp vibration that made Adigard's vision blur, then part of the shaft wall disintegrated in a rolling barrage of flashes as the explosive rounds found their mark. A quick glance showed the same scene playing out across the whole volume; the others were firing too, silencing every hostile they could find. His eyes lingered on several objects; there were burning, falling shapes that shed feathers and greasy smoke as they tumbled.

A flare of wings scattered dust and rubbish as Adigard landed next to the half-buried entrance to the armoury and loading bay, a great set of slab-sided doors that were wide enough to take a pair of heavy loaders.

"Good, that pulse did its job," Hallkel said, nodding at the blast doors, still retracted into their housings.

Adigard nodded. "Wouldn't fancy trying to cut them with this stuff." He trotted forwards, helping the breaching team hold the cutting charges in place while another gryphon applied blobs of quick-setting adhesive. A nod and he scuttled back, ducking around the revetment. A brief pulse of light outlined the explosive tape and the door fell inwards with a sharp crack and a clatter. "Sweep for any surprises," he muttered into his throat mic, jumping forwards and gliding into the empty space beyond. “Stay frosty, chicks.”

Other than machines and a light haze of smoke, the place was empty. Mechanical arms tipped with grasping mouthparts designed to connect to ammunition bays on airtanks were folded against the ceiling; great square conveyor-tracks ran from them to the storage bays themselves. Starkly lit, these fanned out from the antechamber and down independently hardened tunnels filled with the reticulated complexity of the automated retrieval systems, just visible past heavy shutters. Through his visor, the place was filled with the thermal glow of the machines, but there was no flashing highlight that screamed 'body temperature'. There was a pattern of fading paw-prints across the floor, all converging on a door about large enough for an aircar, tucked away between two of the loader arms.

"We got hostiles," he muttered, a waggle of his wings signalling his wingmates to stay close. The infrared paw marks vanished into a dog-sized door next to the main one, a flimsy internal thing marked 'maintenance'. Shoulder gun already displaying its CQB reticule, Adigard pumped his wings once, then lowered his head to lock the rigid crest of his helmet against the primary load-bearing spar that ran like a spine down his armour. His gun knew what to do, pulling back and locking solidly to his back plate. A twitch of the trigger fired a spray of surface-fuzed explosive rounds at the door.

Wings snapping shut, he smashed through the disintegrating door on the tail of the detonations, blowing through the light composite like it wasn't there. Adigard landed a pace inside the threshold and immediately jumped to the right, clearing the way for the rest of his fire-team. The defensive move, designed to evade any shot aimed at where he would be, was unnecessary; at the back of the engineering bay, surrounded by weapons and the parts of weapons, were three dogs. The most threatening thing they held was a metal bar, and that was dropped the moment Adigard came through the door.

"These ones surrender!" one of the dogs, a heavily-built individual wearing an equipment harness festooned with an entire workshop's supply of small tools and parts, said, raising his paws. "None of the weapons in here are operational."

Adigard snapped his beak, the gunshot crack making the dogs flinch, and relaxed slightly. "We've secured the arsenal. Three prisoners," he muttered into his throat mic, "engineering staff by the looks of it."

There was a pause, then Ellisif spoke in his ear. "Are they of any use?"

His eyes flicked to the wall screen, currently displaying a frozen error message, shot through with great strips of dead pixels. "Perhaps, if we can get past the doors. We can't use the auto retrieval systems; the pulse fried everything in here. Doesn't look recoverable; all I can smell is smoke." He remembered the heavy doors leading off to the individual arsenals. Not going to open them in a hurry. "Going to need a pony or two in here."

"Get them to tell you where the strategic weapons are, then kill them. We have no time for prisoners."

Adigard felt a shiver run down his spine. "These are non-combatants," he subvocalised, beak barely moving.

"How much mercy would the dogs show you if your situations were reversed... no more masters, remember? Get what you can, then kill them before the ponies arrive; I'm going to break the crystal now."

Stupidest low bandwidth comms ever. "Yes, ma'am." Oh well. He waved the other gryphons forward, then pointed at the dog with the extravagant equipment vest. "You. Where is the strategic containment bay?"

"Rutting, Maker-damned traitor!" the dog snarled. "This one will never--"

Adigard swept his wing out, knocking the dog over, then planted a set of talons on his chest. He leaned forwards, feeling ribs flex under his weight. "You have very few choices at this point." He removed his talons, using them to twist the dog's head, forcing him to look at his fellow engineers. The other gryphons held them fast, the nearest with his paw gripped in a beak.

The engineer just snarled. "Fine. Have it your way." Adigard nodded to his squadmates, then stared down at the dog, willing him to change his mind. There was nothing but hate in his eyes. There was a gasp from the other prisoner, then a disjointed gabble, a near incomprehensible plea for mercy, that rapidly dissolved into screams and nasty snapping noises.

===

Vanca, paws busy with the guts of another field generator, snarled when her comms unit chimed. Ignoring it, she continued working, making delicate adjustments to the anti-thaumic effect. A magically active crystal -- a simple thing that had been ripped from the lifter drive of a commandeered float platform -- served as a test subject. It hung at the centre of a little cage made from twisted metal, levitating under the command of a scab of electronics taped to one surface. Careful empirical experimentation had matched the thing to the amount of concentration Merlon had said she required to cast the teleport spell; the pony itself had gone, summoned to other duties.

"Academician Vanca, has this one called at an inconvenient time?" Orgon said, his face appearing on the wall screen opposite Vanca's work station. There was a shuffling from behind her as the other engineers and scientists in the room -- Vanca had never bothered to learn their names -- tried to look more alert and busy. She snorted, curling a lip in their direction.

"Does the Strategist want Vanca to complete this work or not? She is not able to work any faster." Vanca straightened up, glaring at the screen. "Unless Orgon could return Korn to her? Where is this one's Student?" Vanca felt a pang of guilt. The last she saw of Korn, he was taken away by that Salrath. Dead, probably. Burned with the rest of Naraka.

"Student Korn was still at Naraka when the rogues attacked. He is presumed lost, along with several hundred other People." Orgon's face showed just the right amount of sympathy, something Vanca didn't believe was even slightly real. "There is something else of greater importance. The World Court used the Hammer to strike at the rogue's base; this one wants to stop them from trying again."

Trying again? Vanca's brow wrinkled and she breathed in sharply, looking down at her suddenly trembling paws. "It didn't work. The servitors are too mobile."

"Yes. These ones have no absolute proof, of course, but the Arclight base at Bakot has just been hit by a thaumomagnetic pulse, followed by gravitic disturbances that look remarkably similar to those employed at your Institute. There is worse." The screen split and a series of maps and graphs appeared, pushing Orgon's image to one side. "This is the telemetry from the kinetic strike; tell this one Vanca's conclusions."

The screen was cluttered with data windows; multi-dimensional plots backed with the shadows of tabulated numbers vied with little squares of looped video. The most prominent of these was a wavering, blurred shot taken from some high-altitude aircraft or drone, showing a point of scintillating light bursting free of a cloud bank and vanishing into the blackness beyond. Nothing happened for a few breaths, then successive pulses of light blanked the view. An energy weapon... the servitor was returning fire. The power required-- She pushed the interesting train of thought to one side. It didn't work, so it seems unlikely that is what Orgon is interested in.

Vanca scanned the rest of the data with narrowed eyes then shrugged, stripping off the manipulator gauntlet and stepping over to the wall screen. A few waves of her paw shifted the data around, enlarging the ground track error plot. "One point two kilometres... is this correct? The Court tells us the targeting error on a Hammer strike is less than twenty metres." Orgon stayed silent and Vanca stared at the trajectory curve, setting the virtual cube spinning with a claw twitch. Why is that not linear? Another manipulation extracted the moment-by-moment changes in velocity, presented as a stacked series of vector arrows along the projectile's course.

"The servitor was trying to change the impact point," she said softly, eyes flicking to the projectile's internal fine guidance logs. "The weapon has a lateral dV capacity of almost one kilometre a second, yet all of that was expended in the opposite direction." Another adjustment, removing the effects of the guidance system. Random bumps appeared in the vector plot, high in the early trajectory of the projectile; not the spikes of sensor noise, but oddly shaped regular signals. Further down, at the original point that had attracted Vanca's attention, the vector arrows jumped in length, showing an unsettlingly steep curve. The power levels are very high, but the growth can be accounted for by the reduction in range, perhaps... Perhaps not. There is that plasma weapon. The pony managed to maintain containment at great range. TC4668 was always good at energy manipulation. Vanca shifted the plot, expanding the upper reaches, higher up than the debris ring.

On the other part of the screen, Orgon straightened up. "What is that?"

The sampling rate of the accelerometers wasn't as high as it might have been, but what they showed was clear. Near-perfect exponential peaks with sudden cut-offs marked out the derived changes in velocity, scattered all along the upper reaches of the projectile's trajectory. "That is the signature of someone conducting an experiment..." she muttered, waving Orgon's image further away along the wall screen and out of her direct line of sight. "...and not really knowing what they are doing." Her paw stabbed out, a claw leaving coloured rings on the screen. "Until here. This is where the pony finally understood what it was doing. Its control gets better very quickly." The claw dragged a line over the velocity vector plot. "Too quickly." She stepped back, turning to look at Orgon. "This one thinks it would be a bad idea to use the Hammer again."

Orgon stared back at her, face blank, then his ears went back for just an instant. "Orgon doesn't have that much influence with the Court. How much can the rogue shift the trajectory?"

"More research is needed," Vanca's lips pulled back from her teeth in a humourless smile. "but the program may go over budget." She sighed and slumped, leaning heavily against the screen and staring at the vector plot. "Enough. This one would advise against another kinetic strike in the strongest possible terms."

===

Redshift, his muzzle resting on Doppler's back, breathed in deeply, filling his mind with the warm, lemony scent of her fur. He watched through half-lidded eyes as a pastel stain spread across a cloud mass to the north. Sparks of light danced through the towering mass, filling it with colour. "I can't believe I've really got you back after all that has happened." Under his touch, she shifted, twisting to look at him with large, liquid eyes. "Can you ever forgive me?"

"For making me think you were dead? For nearly driving me into fugue?" She looked stern, then snorted gently. "It's hardly you I need to forgive... but I can't blame Spiral, either. Fusion, perhaps... but would that be fair?" Her ears folded back, tears starting to run down her cheeks. "I understand why she did what she did... but it's hard, so very hard. How many friends did we lose when the Masters raided our corral, or hit our refuge?"

"Too many," he whispered. "But we got out. You, me and Shock."

"Yes, we did. From the corral, to Naraka, to our nameless refuge to here. At least we're better off than poor Spiral and Trocar... I'm not surprised they're keeping a low profile. I couldn't even find them to offer help." She sighed, then gestured at the same cloud he'd been staring at. "You think this will work where everything else did not?"

"I think so. It's very clever. They can't hit us if they can't find us... and they can't nuke everywhere."

Doppler shivered, turning away and moving one of her wings slightly. Under it was Shock Diamond, too large to really be sleeping like that. She stared down at him, as if trying to believe that he was real. "Can't they? You must have heard the stories from ponies working the mass drivers. I really hope so. I don't ever want to go back to the Master's service."

There was a flutter of wings, the downdraught shifting the dead pine needles, and a red-coated stallion landed next to them. "We've got to go, 'Shift. The gryphons have found something they need your help with."

Like what? he thought. A score of ponies have gone already... what is it they need me for? I've trained plenty of-- He froze in the act of standing, ears drooping. It has to be that. I'm the only pony who's played with one. "Okay. Let's get this over with." He bent down, nuzzling behind Doppler's ear. "Be back soon."

"Redshift, when you get back you will teach me that teleport spell," she said sternly. "I will not have you going to places I cannot reach."

He flashed her a grin and the other stallion's horn glowed scarlet as he pushed--

~~~discontinuity~~~

--a long jump, dropping them out over a rolling hillside dotted with trees, barely visible under the sudden shock of hitting air made nearly solid. "Steady, let's not die before we get--"

~~~discontinuity~~~

--smoky air, redolent with the tang of explosives, burning plastic and blood. A deep vertical shaft, lit by red-tinged sunlight coming in through a ragged hole high above. Redshift flared his wings, dumping the excess velocity from the jump, then landed and stumbled, eyes darting, the force field enchantment already half filling his mind. A familiar gryphon was waving him over to a heavy set of doors set in the vertical concrete cliff, so he bounded over the rubble, landing next to Adigard. "Is this place safe?" he demanded, hopping from hoof to hoof as his ears twitched and strained for the slightest threatening sound. There was a rattle of gunfire, muffled by intervening rock, and he flinched.

"No, Redshift, it is not," the gryphon said, sighing. "Speed is the key here. The dogs have a tendency to nuke the places we go, so if you don't mind...?"

He nodded, following the gryphon into a smoke-smelling room with mechanical equipment on the ceiling and walls. On the floor were several patches of blood, spread about by countless claw, paw and hoof prints. The rusty-iron smell made his nose twitch, and Redshift swallowed hard. Not enough for a pony or a gryphon. He fixed his eyes on Adigard's armoured rump, following the gryphon through one of the doors, ducking under a sudden stream of crates and boxes that floated in the opposite direction, all controlled by an unfamiliar mare with a very focused look.

More ponies were working inside, helped by three times the number of gryphons. The soldiers were pulling deadly items -- packs of missiles, explosives, angular things too big to be anything other than vehicle-mounted weapons, and endless bundles of mass driver needles -- from the automated retrieval system's inner workings and stacking them ready for the ponies. The air, still filled with smoke and the scent of burned plastic, was lit with the concussive thump and flash of teleports. They pushed past them all, ending up on one of the system's spur lines, interrupted by a heavy door, already breached by perfect force field cuts.

"Fortunately that pulse knocked out the passive shielding, otherwise I'd not be of much use to you here," Redshift said, staring at the layers of crystals embedded in the thick armour ceramic. There was a faint sense of repulsion from them, and they made using shadow sight a little uncomfortable, but nothing like the flash of pain that normally accompanied the examination of such things. There was no magic inside the room, but there was...

Redshift hissed, taking a step backwards, his eyes going wide. "You have to be joking!" The chamber inside was not large, barely the size of a corral shelter, and was subdivided into thick-walled hexagonal cells. At the centre of each was a small cylinder, tethered to the wall by a slender cable. Forcing his legs to move, Redshift took a few hesitant steps into the room, head dipping to examine one of the objects. "Very lucky that shielding was in the walls," he murmured, "although I guess this room would block the gamma flash."

"So it is what we thought it was," Adigard said, looking satisfied. "Can you move them?"

"The laser confinement traps only have a limited lifespan... it's a security thing, I think. If the power fails then the speck of antimatter will hit the wall and... poof."

"Poof. Right. Ellisif said you defused a nuke at Naraka. This is no different. Easier, surely."

Redshift lifted his wings, shrugging helplessly. "Yes, but... I need something to power them; I can only keep a couple running -- and you don't want me to lose concentration if I am!" He backed away from the gryphon, then danced forwards a step when his tail brushed the rear wall.

"Ah, I can fix that. I've had them bring them here." Outside there was a squeaking; the sound of wheels on gravel-littered concrete. A heavy trolley nosed around the entrance, pushed by a pair of panting gryphons.

Redshift stared at the flattened ovoids, stacked three deep on the trolley. "That will do it," he said weakly. His horn lit up, pulling out the first bomb casing. There was the familiar taste of conventional alloys, mixed in with the bitter tang of beryllium and the alien flavour of the lithium-6 deuteride main charge. All those strange isotopes... The antimatter traps were simpler, little self-contained bundles of superconductors and solid-state lasers, all designed to levitate an infinitesimal speck of something in a vacuum so good that it could only be generated at a high-orbit wake-shield facility.

"Right... let me see..." His magic penetrated the first antimatter containment unit, the detonator, and deftly modified the computronium security modules.

===

Redshift kept his eyes closed, holding one of the antimatter triggers while he slotted a second into the beautifully machined cavity designed to accept it. The pathway was highly constricted, routed between polished bundles of fine tubes shaped in careful curves, but magic made it an easy, if fiddly, task. It went home with a nearly silent click, power and control feeds mating with their connectors to the rest of the bomb. Power flowed into the trigger and he slowly released his hold on it, reducing the amount of energy he supplied until it was completely self-contained.

"I want to go now," he said to Adigard, who was still waiting by the door, "the dogs must be planning something for us."

"Nearly finished... the other ponies are nearly done emptying the armoury of everything useful. They tell me that there's nothing coming at us from any of the mass drivers, no sign of a low altitude hypersonic transit and the power core has not been tampered with."

"What about the tunnels? There's no way to--"

Adigard made a slashing gesture with one foreclaw. "Which will take at least two kiloseconds to get here; the speeds are just not high enough. The longer you stand here talking--?" He cocked his head, opening the raised claws to brush against the bomb housing. "I want you to set the next one to destroy this base. Maximum yield."

Relief and dread in equal measure flooded through Redshift. "At last." He closed his eyes, shadow sight taking away the harsh lighting and confined space, replacing it with darkness and jewel-like glows. He focused on the final trigger, then froze. Right there, at the limits of resolution, where individual thaumic devices merged into the general background glow, were two sets of winglights. I'm going to kill those gryphons, he thought, them and every other being on this base. It's funny... I've never seen gryphons with anything other than golden winglights.

===

The trigger was as easy to place in the final bomb as all the others, and the experience he'd had converting the nuke from Naraka made bypassing the security and rigging a basic timer the work of a moment. Right, that's it, then. Redshift felt Adigard's eyes on the back of his head and looked around. "It's ready," he whispered, dropping his gaze to the gryphon's taloned foreclaws, currently encased in wicked-looking segmented gloves. It's one thing to defend yourself, but we attacked them this time... I don't think this is right. I was told to help, but does Fusion really know what Ellisif is doing here? He felt a powerful urge to jump back to their improvised base and talk to Doppler or Fusion, or anypony, and ask their advice.

"Then do it. The other ponies have started to ferry us back; a hundred seconds should do it."

Redshift shuddered, closing his eyes. About a megaton. No need to reduce the yield on this one. Perhaps I can just... "You go," he said softly. "I'll set it when everyone is clear." I'll say I made a mistake, or I was surprised, or perhaps a dog came out of hiding and disabled it. It's not like I've put in any anti-tamper functions; One thing this world doesn't need is a sensitive nuke. Adigard was looking at him again, this time with narrowed eyes. "If I make a mistake there will be little warning. I might get out, but anyone left will die. I won't have that hanging over me." Redshift straightened up, staring back into those alien eyes.

There was a pause, then Adigard nodded. "We've cleared out all the upper levels, so you shouldn't get any visitors." He listened intently to a voice in his ear, the whisper of the suit-to-suit comms faintly audible in the quiet of the armoury. "That's the last of us leaving now." He backed away, trotting away towards the surface. "Don't wait too long!"

Redshift didn't reply, just switched to shadow sight and watched him leave. In the depths of the shaft, ponies were winking into being and snatching small groups of gryphons before disappearing again. There were a few other gryphons in the base, along with a multitude of crystal thaumic devices, many showing an irregular flicker he associated with damage. I hope all of ours got out, and those that haven't... it's not fair that we can't save them. None of this is their fault. As the ponies came and went, he counted the lights in the deeper parts of the base, again spotting the odd-coloured pair.

The last of the gryphons in the shaft were taken away and he was all alone. "I'm not going to set you off," he told the bomb, "just leave you in a rigged state. That will be warning enough." The teleport spell built in his head, but the strange, pastel-shaded winglights gnawed at his memory. They're almost the same colour as... as... "Sweet Maker; those aren't gryphons, they are ponies without horns!" They are the same colours as Scalar and Elliptic-- He inhaled deeply, the escape pattern vanishing. They said you were dead. "No, the dogs said you were dead!" he snarled, a plane of violet light lashing out at the thick floor.

Sweat soaked his flanks and turned to ice as he tunnelled, pulling out irregular chunks of armourcrete and throwing them behind him. The base was laid out like the spokes of a wheel surrounding the central hub of the main shaft; large wedges of the wheel were taken up by hangars and the arsenal he was just leaving. There were a couple of tunnels connecting the blast-proof and reinforced sub-complex to the rest of the wheel, and Redshift broke into the closest, identifying it by a tracery of flickering lights in his shadow sight, only a dozen breaths after he started to work.

He ignored the darkness and thick, smoky air, pushing the first back with a conjured globe of white light and the second with a field only permeable to oxygen and nitrogen. More magic followed, a luminous barrier-field that floated like a egg-shaped dome over his body, built as he galloped down the tunnel. Doors and rubble did little to impede him, and were smashed aside by the battering ram of his will. Where necessary, Redshift made new holes in walls or floors, in one case dashing through a chamber filled with dead computers and confused, choking, dogs. He ignored them and they all recoiled back, falling over in their haste to get out of his way.

More corridors, bare things with thick walls that forced him to slow his head-long charge when he punched through from one to another. The floor suddenly dropped away and Redshift flew, trailing a contrail of thick, cold cloud, across the empty core of a deserted barracks-roost, the cylindrical wall lined with small hexagonal cells like he was in a beehive. His magic flashed again, a rapid-fire slash of force field and telekinesis that shredded bedding, personal effects and armourcrete partitions alike, opening a hole to the next slice in the pie surrounding the central shaft.

Breathing heavily, his steps starting to falter with the fatigue building in his chest, Redshift swerved, turning outward and toward the tantalising hint of maimed pony in his shadow sight. There was another door ahead, a heavy thing, and he slashed at it, cutting armoured panels from the heavy frame. A push and it blew outwards a moment before he leaped past, into a space lined with narrow transparent doors. A dog was right there, no more than ten metres away, stubby, wide-barrelled weapon already up and aimed; he swerved, wing out and telekinesis pushing with all his might at the corridor wall.

Blinding green filled his eyes and something tugged at his ear, a stinging, burning nip that was noticed but caused no pain. Wings half out and legs pulled up he dove for the floor, magic flicking out to strike the figure and throw it further down the corridor; the dog's weapon flew free and it sprawled, moving sluggishly. Blinded, Redshift fanned his wings and made an untidy landing by shadow sight, colliding heavily with the left side of the corridor. Wheezing, he staggered, homing in on the winglights. There were two sets, one dim and stationary, the other moving frantically. Dim sounds reached Redshift; incoherent screaming and faint, heavy thumps.

"Get back!" He took a deep breath, then coughed, struggling to locate the door by its faint impression on the shadow world, then opened his eyes, squinting past the slowly fading laser afterimages. Magic flashed, a perfect force field slice, then three more, and he pulled out a thick plug of the transparent material.

The pony inside jumped through the gap, barging past. "My mate, Redshift, get her out! I think she's... she's--" Scalar's voice choked off and he lurched to one side. "Rutting, filthy dog!" he snarled, striking out with forehooves against the prone figure, trying to drag itself away. Redshift turned, focussing on the cell holding Elliptic, but couldn't stop watching the other stallion. Scalar reared over the dog and came down heavily, stamping, smashing and grinding; the dog let out a short, sharp scream then fell silent, but Scalar didn't stop, even when his legs and belly were stained carmine.

Redshift gently pulled Elliptic off the floor, holding her at his side. Eyesight almost fully returned, he stared down at her head, unable to look away from the burned and chipped stump of her horn. Elliptic still breathed, but shallowly, and she felt loose and unwieldy. "Scalar," he croaked, "I've got her and she's alive. We've got to go."

The stallion swayed on his hooves. "I..." Some of the wild fury left his eyes and he seemed to see Redshift for the first time. "You saved us," he whispered, sagging. "I thought we were dead."

"We were told you were, just before--" Redshift reached out, obscurely glad that he didn't have to physically touch the other pony's blood-stained coat, and picked Scalar up. "Later." The teleport pattern formed, but only slowly, and he fought back the fuzziness in his thoughts.

"You're hit," Scalar said, eyes fixed on a point over Redshift's right eye. "You're bleeding."

He looked up, flicking a strangely light ear forwards. The upper half was gone, the fine, tufted point bitten to a perfect semicircle by the laser. There had been little cauterization and blood was soaking into the fur. Doppler's going to kill me! he thought, then smiled at Scalar. "It's worth it. Come on, we don't have time for me to bleed."

"I can never thank you enou--" Scalar said, folding one wing over Elliptic, tears starting to roll down his muzzle.

~~~discontinuity~~~