//------------------------------//
// TRACK ONE: Queen - Don't Stop Me Now 
// Story: Banish! 
// by Neon Czolgosz 
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My name is Gilda. A lot of people say to me “Where the hell did you come from?” and that really itches my gizzard because I’m from a little town called Griffonstone which firstly sucks and secondly doesn’t exist right now because of the big glitch, so I don’t want to talk about it. It’s the ponies fault, but good luck getting those shiftless pastel weasels to do a damn thing about it.

...I’m getting sidetracked.

Okay let’s try this again. My name is Gilda, Gilda Redbeak. Discord cast some quantum endongler spell on my brain to let me record my thoughts so I can play them back, and apparently that’s important with all of these universes collapsing against each other so we don’t forget which one we’re from, since the one we’re from technically doesn’t exist right now. I don’t understand any of it, and I don’t see what I can do to help, but since that whole ‘collapsing universes’ thing I just said about turned my pastry cart into a quantum speck, I’m officially unemployed. 

I have nothing better to do. I’m just along for the ride.

Right now I’m in the back seat of an F-14 Tomcat fighter jet armed with twin autocannons, air-to-ground missiles, and a burst laser. I’m controlling the human pilot with a mind worm, and he’s just broken off from his fighter jet formation to intercept an air convoy made up of an Airbus A390 SkyLab flanked by four AC-130 gunships all flying at 30,000 feet. I’ve got to get into the SkyLab and rescue Trixie and Discord before either a radical pro-pony terrorist group shoots me down, the human commander takes remote control of this fighter, zombots hijack the plane to gobble the passengers, or all those things at once. 

If you had talked to me a week ago, I’d have said that at least half and maybe all of the words I just said were made up, and I’d have been much happier for it.

A voice crackles through the radio. “Captain Barnes, you are not cleared to approach the convoy, change course immediately, I repeat, change course—”

“Don’t listen to any of that,” I say, switching it off with my non-mechanical arm, “keep going forward, just ram this thing straight into the docking bay on the big one. Get real close and blow the doors open.”

He might even make it. The Skylab is a big bastard. I’ve seen smaller battleships. I just need to get close enough for my grapple pistol to hit. Between that, my wing boosters, and Sick Sour, I can take care of the rest.

Something goes clonk against my fighter, punching a watermelon-size hole in the wing and sending us into a sidespin.

“You know what?” I tap the pilot on the shoulder, “Screw what I just said, take evasive maneuvers and then go straight for whichever one of those dorks was dumb enough to shoot at me.”

“Roger that, ma’am.”

He banks and then turns to the closest gunship as red-hot tracer rounds cut a path through the air towards us. In seconds, we’ll be too close to the gunship for the others to fire on us. Two more rounds cut through us, one into the body of the fighter. Alarms screech on the cockpit panel. The pilot takes a dizzying spin, flying upside-down above the gunship. If I’m a second too late, I’ll miss, and I won’t get another go. I look down, and see the cockpit of the AC-130 below us.

I press ‘Eject.”

We scream into the gunship cockpit in a flash of rocket boosters and shattered glass, my pilot crunching into their pilot and killing them both, only saved myself by the last of my shield charms, and as I grab the co-pilot with the robotic limb where my left arm used to be and level the Sick-Sour at his helmeted face I cannot hear the words I’m shouting at him over the howling of wind and flames.

The cockpit glows orange as the high-energy shields burst into life over the shattered windows, restoring the pressure. 

“Where the hell did you come from?” he screams at me.

I pistol whip him and spin him around, choking him from behind. “You’re getting me on that other airy-plane, or I’m gonna blow your head off!”

“What are you?”

“This is my gunship now, and we’re going to fly it onto the SkyLab!”

“That’s impossible!”

I pistol-whip him again. “Shut up! I eat impossible and crap misfortune! You’re gonna come out into the plane with me and tell your humans that if they don’t blast open that SkyLab docking bay with their big-ass cannons, I’m gonna put a bullet in their pilot and send this whole thing crashing into the sea!”

He tries to protest but I push him forward and force him to open the door out into the cabin. “Alright, assholes,” I say, pushing the gun into the pilot’s temple, “here’s what—”

The cabin is a bloodbath. Half a dozen corpses are spread across the floors and draped on the walls and guns. There’s five creatures still alive in here, all decked out in red. P.E.R.

Two are ponies.

“Hey, you’re the other assholes.”

The dive to the side saves my life as a nasty bolt of magic shears through my hostage’s chest. From my side I fire one shot from the pistol straight through the unicorn’s face, and scramble behind a set of ammo crates belted down to the bed of the cabin. Half a dozen shots plink off the ammo crate, until one of them screams to stop shooting before they set off every rocket on the plane.

They take a second to regroup, and as I hear the sounds of combat knives being unsheathed I take out my own and slash through the canvas belts holding the heavy ammo crates in place. It slides down the cabin and takes out two hijackers with a nasty crunch. A third, human, leaps at me with a knife in hand. 

I parry the first swipe, and that’s exactly what he expected, clearing my knife-arm with his free wrist, pinning it down, and driving a knee into my belly. My robotic arm comes up and seizes his hand an inch before it drives his knife through my throat, his fingers popping like chicken bones. It shocks him long enough for me to unholster the Sick Sour and put four rounds through his chest.

The moment I roll out from underneath him, I see the last remaining hijacker with her back turned to me, fiddling with one of the gun emplacements. I grab the last guy’s knife and sling it at her neck. She stumbles for a second before collapsing, but not before setting off the gun. Then, the whole plane shakes. I run over.

Out of the gun porthole, I see a cable running through the sky, running from under the gun barrel to a grappling hook studded deep in the hull of the SkyLab. I turn to the last hijacker, and wave the pistol in her face.

“Why the fuck did you do that?” I screech.

“You have failed... race traitor,” she gurgles, “Ponification for the Earth’s Rebirth still lives. Eques—Equestria will be ascendent...”

I hear another set of explosions from outside the plane and look outside. The other three AC-130s have all fired grappling hooks into the Skylab.

“Why the fuck did they do that?” But I couldn’t get an answer out of her on account of her being dead. 

My head stays clear enough for me to re-sheath my knife and grab some spare rounds for the pistol from the bodies, and then I start flailing and panicking. Without a pilot, this A-130 is gonna either split off or tear the SkyLab apart, and either of those are gonna leave me, Trixie, and Discord in a whole world of ball-cheese. 

I flex my wings. If I can detach the grappling hook from the gunship and grab hold, that’s an instant one-way ticket onto the SkyLab. There’s an eye hole every meter in the steel cable. I clip a carabiner through one and to my webbing, just in case. Now to detach it...

The control panel is a holographic mess in orange and teal, spewing out a billion warnings. Before I can make sense of one, half a dozen more pop up. I think the hijackers might have brought the grappling attachment with them, they don’t exactly strike me as standard issue for a gunship.

“Tensile strength exceeded? What the cloc does that mean? Why are you telling me this? Oh!” I see a little red button in a corner, and the part that’s not covered in giant flashing warning boxes reads ‘Detach.’ I check my wing boosters one last time and press it.

My claw goes straight through the hologram. And again. And a third time.

“Freakin’ work you big glowy pile of afterbirth!”

I look around in panic and frustration, and see the body of the nearest hijacker. She’s wearing fingerless gloves. There’s an idea. I grab her hand, take out my combat knife, and hack through her wrist. It puts a nick in the blade, but between my childhood butchering skills and my new robot arm, I sever the hand real quick. I sheath the knife, splay out the fingers, and press the longest one onto the little red ‘Detach’ button. It goes ‘Bloop!’ and turns green.

A dozen floor bolts snap at once.

The entire gun emplacement detaches, taking me with it. I don’t have time to drop my jaw as I’m pulled from the gunship. It slingshots towards the SkyLab as the gunship tumbles downwards behind me.

“I did not want this!” I scream as I’m flung through the sky, attached to a 300lb cannon and several hundred meters of high-tension steel cable.

Everything goes black and crunchy when I hit the SkyLab— 

I snap to attention as my robotic arm injects epinephrine directly into my bloodstream. That crash should have killed me, but I’m still alive and sitting on a giant pile of wet, kinda-squishy things. The emergency lighting comes on inside the plane. I’m in a cold storage room, sitting on a gigantic pile of chilled fresh salmon. A force shield covers the hole that I entered the plane through, cannon-first, and hundreds of fish spill down to bounce against the shield.

I sigh. “Mare, of all the days to land on infinite salmon...”

I get to my paws and stretch my neck, feeling the metal bolts inside it click, and check my pistol. Two bullets left in the mag, so I toss it and swap a new one in. Gun in hand, I walk into the next room.

I see a lot of stuff the split second I open the door.

I see a chilled storage area with shelves full of fresh tomatoes, mozzarella balls, bags of spinach, and every other fresh ingredient I could imagine.

I see ten armed humans and they’re not dressed in government uniforms, and they’re not dressed in that bright red P.E.R. stuff either. It’s beige and black and it’s got stuff like “Death to Equestria,” “Vengeance!” and “Human Liberation Front,” scrawled all over it. The H.L.F.

I see that they’re all facing the door at the other end of the room to me, guns cocked and loaded, and that they’re a split second away from breaching the door.  Four men stack up by the doorway, and a fifth has a grenade in his hand, pin-out.

“Hey, you’re the other other assholes!” I say.

The man on the door slips and falls as he opens it, and the grenadier drops his grenade.

I dive sideways behind a box of endives as fire from two directions tears the room apart, the defenders in the next room cutting down the H.L.F. fighters as the H.L.F. are split between continuing their breach, killing me, and figuring out which way is up. The grenade dude steps to punt his dropped live grenade in my direction, so I pull the Sick Sour and shoot him right in the crotch. He slips and falls on his own grenade and I take cover. The blast deafens me and sends a foot flying into the wall behind me. I pop out from behind the shelves and pop two more H.L.F. fighters a few times each while they reel from the blast, and then run and tackle the last remaining hijacker from behind as he tries to run through the doorway into the next room. We dive into a kitchen together, his neck pushing up at a weird angle as he slams face-first into a steel workstation.

“Commander, that was a pony!” I hear one of the fighters in the kitchen yell, wrongly. I’m 100% griffon, except for the cyborg bits.

“Anything on this plane that ain’t human gets a bullet,” replies another.

Alright, have it your way, dumbass.

I slip between the workstations. A H.L.F. hijacker turns into my little alley, his rifle just low enough for him to look around and held close enough to his chest that the barrel doesn’t stick out and give his position away. Good training. I shoot three times before I click dry, one smashing into his rifle and wrecking it, the other two soaked up by his body armor. He grunts in pain, grabs a cleaver from the hanging hooks and runs at me. I grab a sharpening steel from under a workstation, ducking low to avoid the other two goons trying to line their shots up, and slip forward with a boost from my wings. The steel cracks against his wrist hard enough to shatter it. His arm flops against his side and yet he doesn’t drop the cleaver.

He goes for his sidearm as I go for a pot of boiling pasta. I’m faster, and dump it directly on his head before he pulls the trigger. He doesn’t like that very much.

A bullet slams into my metal arm, sending a really freaking painful buzz down my entire skeleton. I tumble to the floor and kick open the door of a reach-in chiller, rolling behind so that half a dozen bullets ricochet off the metal instead of hitting me in the face. I grab a glass bowl of hollandaise from the reach-in and throw it in the face of the shooter as he tries to reloads. Out of the corner of my eye I see the third hijacker about to vault the worktops, pistol in hand, so I grab a cup of flour from a flour draw and toss it his way. The white dust passes over the countertop and goes *whoof* over the gas stovetop, and I hear a yelp of pain as I reload the Sick Sour. In the reflection of a hanging pan, I see Eggs Benedict trying to clear broken glass and creamy sauce from his face, so I lean out and put a round through his face, and then several more rounds through Spaghetti-O as he flails around with his sidearm.

I peeked up to look for the putz with the singed eyebrows and ducked another hail of shots. When  the shooting stops and becomes a torrent of fumbling and swearing, I jump over the counters, flap my wings, and dropkick him. He stays standing but drops his rifle magazine before he can switch it in. Before he can pull a second magazine, I grab his wrist in my robo-claw, yank him to the side, and press his hand down onto the flat-top grill until it sizzles. As he screams about his dumb burned hand I headbutt him, and strip his sidearm and rifle from him.

“You’re my hostage now, Crispy,” I shout, levelling my pistol at his head and spinning him around. “Move!”

“You can’t take me hostage,” he protests, “I’m a hijacker!”

“Shut up!” I say, pistol-whipping him, “I’ll take any and all of you freaky monkeys hostage, and you’ll like it!”

“You moron, everyone on this plane wants me dead!”

“That makes two of us,” I say, pushing him forward.

I try to think of the layout of the SkyLab as I peek over my hostage’s shoulder. There’s one long corridor running through most of the bottom level. Holding cells are at the opposite end to the kitchens. I just need to make it through here.

I push the hostage forward into the hallway and walk into nineteen varieties of fuck. The entire corridor is a massacre with at least three different factions stabbing, smashing, and shooting each other, everyone pouring out of the different rooms along the hall to fight and kill. There’s a giant hole in the middle of the corridor, leading downwards into empty sky. I feel way too many sets of eyes on me.

“You’re on your own, dipshit,” I say to my hostage as I dive into the room directly across the hall from the kitchen, leaving him to get riddled.

I roll to my paws in a recreation room, alone. There’s a billiards table, several arcade machines, and a mini-golf game. I shut the door behind me, take cover behind the table, and dig out my map of the SkyLab. There’s only a handful of cabins between this room and the holding cells, and if I can get into the next room along, there’s a whole section of subceiling I should be able to crawl through relatively unshot. I take one of the golf putters and give the wall a thwap. Reinforced. Damn. Can’t get through without breaching charges.

I take a step backwards from the wall, a split-second before a unicorn buzzed to the balls on dark magic smashes through the walls, sending me crest-over-tail into the billiards table. Dust tickles the back of my throat, and I look up in time to see the unicorn sublimate the antimagic reaction team operator she had held in her magic, as two more operators rush in with charged batons to wail on her. Stumbling to a crouch, I take aim at them, and then realise that not one of them has even noticed me.

“Y’know what, I’m just gonna sneak through,” I mutter, bracing against the putter as I push myself up.

Just as I get to the new hole through the wall, some dick lobs a grenade through. With a grumble, I swing the putter, send the grenade sailing back into the next room, and take cover. There’s a lot of boom and a bit of viscera. I strut into the next room and look at the devastation.

“Birdie!”

The three goons in the rec room are still scrapping, so I stay low and out of view. Thirteen rounds left in the pistol. I see a claw-held grapnel launcher under one of the bodies, so I grab it, but the rest of the equipment in the room is pretty... messy from the blast. Above my head, more than a few ceiling tiles are blasted out. I hop up into the ceiling space and start to crawl.

These two cabins are the longest crawl of my life, because some cheerful lil’ kidders keep shooting stray fucking rounds up through the ceiling, and the only protection I’ve got is nylon webbing and a half-inch of fur. I want to put a few shots back through the holes, but I decide against it. Bullets go both ways.

I hate ceiling space already. I’m coughing up dust, I’m trying to dodge bullets by wiggling, and oh boy, this ain’t the quick jaunt that the SkyLab schematics made it look like. I’ve got inches to move on either side, there’s pillars and cables and crap everywhere and some big metal canisters that will probably explode if something hits them, and if I put a claw wrong I’m gonna fall through into a melee of heavily-armed battle monkeys. I’m tired. I’m hungry. I’ve had too many amphetamines, too many poorly-healed knife wounds, and my missing arm itches like crazy.

For some reason though, this doesn’t bother me like it should. Normally when I get real fed up, I can’t take it any more and I punch someone and storm off. But damn it, this time is different. A week ago my life was going right for once. The scone trade was better than ever, I was finally getting paid for my awesome stunts, I was drinking buddies with Rainbow Dash again, and heck, even Griffonstone was looking like less of a slum. And if I give up now, I’m never getting any of that back.

I want it back. I want my best friend, I want my scone cart and my giant cast-iron pan full of gravy, I want a cold beer and one of those curly sausages with a mountain of fried onions on top, I want to fake-kick some overpaid tool from Foalwood in the face and get paid money for it, I want to see Equestria again, shit, right now I’d settle for seeing the real Ponyville again and I want it all right now.

Nothing is going to stop me. I’m going to find Trixie, rescue Discord, and then track down the interdimensional ingrown hair that’s holding this fake-universe together and punt that fucker right into a wood chipper.

Four yards away from the end of the last cabin, something ricochets up into the ceiling and hits me. I squawk in pain and desperately crawl forward, until I end up over a wall partition, hidden between a thick enough wall of wiring that I don’t have to worry about a second shot. There’s no blood, just a throbbing ache in my hip. The bullet hit me in the holster and jammed straight into the Sick Sour. An inch either way and I’d be a goner. If I don’t get another gun, I’m a goner either way.

Over the other side of the wall partition is a T-shaped mini-foyer at the end of the long hallway, and at the right side there’s a door forward into the holding cells. Discord should be inside, and if I’m lucky so should Trixie. The only things in sight are a pair of cowering human air-plane waiters, hidden behind a big plantpot. Thank Zephyrous, I won’t even have to glare at—

Both of the humans, the tom and the molly, take out machine pistols as they peer over their makeshift cover.

...Is anyone on this freaking plane not armed?

Before I can move a flashbang goes off. From my little peephole in the ceiling, it’s barely enough to make me blink. Can’t say the same for the two plane waiters. Three P.E.R. fighters turn the corner, and the unicorn of the trio disarms the stunned waiters with telekinesis as the other two wrestle their captives to the ground. The human fighters search the prisoners while the unicorn mare disassembles and destroys the captured weapons. One of the humans gives a thumbs-up, the mare gives a nod, and both of the captors draw knives.

I fall through the ceiling. Not because I’m trying to save anybody, but because I’m too heavy. I land on the mare hard enough to wind her, and snap her neck before she does anything funny with her magic. The humans forget their prisoners and come at me with knives. I punch the closest one so hard in the kneecap that I feel the bones shatter under my metal fist. His leg gives out underneath him, and he breaks his fall face-first on the ceramic plantpot. 

The second one is quick and stabs me under the ribcage before I know what’s happening. It doesn’t work out so good for him. I’ve got heavy, coarse fur over thick, loose skin, and he’s got a belt knife. The first stab barely nicks me. I peck him in the face before he can stab a second time, rip his toy knife out of his hand, and slam it into his left temple.

Both plane waiters stare at me, horrified. They leave me kinda at a loss for words.

“...You’re not with them?” asks the molly.

“No. Uh, no,” I reply, “I’m with you guys. I’m part of a security task force, Operation Liquid Solid... Snake.”

I see the tom looking at my webbing, misappropriated and modified for me by Trixie. “Are you Delta Force?”

“Gamma Force, we’re better, and also secret,” I say. “Listen, it is absolutely imperative to my mission that I get through this door right here. Can you open it for me?”

The molly nods, and swipes the lock with her keycard. It flashes from red to green. Then, the other end of the foyer explodes, and a wardrobe-sized hole opens up in the wall of the plane. Air screams all around us, the force shields flickering and failing. Both of the waiters cling on to the cubby holes and shelves.

“Do you know where the parachutes are kept?” I shout.

The tom pulls up his shirt, revealing a sleek beige plastic fitting underneath. His dark fingers point at it. “They’re built in under our uniform, standard issue! You know that,” he shouts back.

“You’re not Delta Force!” The molly points at me, accusing.

The plane banks to the side and I kick them both through the hole. “Good luck!” I yell after them, as the plane rights and the force shield flickers back into existence. Knife-in-claw, I ease the door to the holding cells open.

It’s another, smaller hallway, with a blank wall ten yards ahead. As the door shuts behind me, the noise and carnage from the rest of the plane falls silent. Each of the four cells has a thick door with a tiny viewing bullshit, none of that ‘thin metal bars’ crap you see in comics. The doors ain’t locked either.

I open the first one and figure out pretty quick that Discord was here. I don’t think that the weird bunch of unrelated, disjointed restraints and hi-tech antimagic stuff welded into the tiny cell would be designed for anything else. There’s still his smell here, but crap, with all the blood and gunsmoke on this plane, maybe everywhere else onboard smells like him too. Only thing missing is the big guy himself.

The next cell is worse. Three prisoners, one a pony, in orange jumpsuits. Blindfolded, cuffed, executed. A bullet hole between the eyes of all three. Fresh blood. They didn’t want this hijacking to turn into a rescue operation.

I really hope Trixie ain’t in here.

Two more cells. One on the left with the door ajar, and scraping noises coming from inside. Four more bodies, but only one of them is a prisoner. He’s a human, with some real quirky mechanical modifications dangling from where his hands should be, scratching on the floor. There’s a big hole in his chest. He still looks better off than the three dead guards in the room. I guess they skipped a step when they searched this guy.

I open the last cell.

“Gilda! Get this damn dirty ape off of me!”

Trixie and a very alive guard are on the floor, with Trixie clinging on to the human like a spiteful knapsack. There’s some kind of plastic gadget covering her horn, and she’s doing her best to stop the human from grabbing his pistol. I stop him by stabbing him in the neck.

I pull Trixie to her hooves. “Good to see you.”

“Very. One moment,” she says, and pulls the dead guard’s baton from his belt. She holds it between her teeth, struts out of the cell, and smashes an electrical panel outside of her door.

“Thank Celestia,” she says, pulling off the weird horncap and sighing with joy, “that wretched inhibitor was driving Trixie to utter distraction.”

“What happened?” I ask.

“That moronic demiurge blew my cover is what happened,” she huffs, tearing off her orange jumpsuit with telekinesis, “the humans have him doped up to the gills. Not one of them saw through my disguise until Discord blurted out that I was here to rescue him.”

“That’s our boy, all right. C’mon, there’s guns and shit in the next cell.”

Trixie gingerly steps over the pooled blood from the eviscerated cleanup squad. “Ah. I had wondered why my jailor ran into my cell in a panic. He made a poor choice.” She looks at me, sharply. “Speaking of which, why are you here? I’m far from ungrateful for my rescue, but I believe we were all going to meet at the Aleph.”

“I got reeled in,” I say, picking up a pistol. It’s bigger than the Sick Sour, drab grey metal, with a black plinky-plink damping tube at the shooty end. “You know where Discord is?”

“He’s upstairs, in the laboratory,” she replies, racking a shotgun and pulling a string of breaching charges off one of the dead operative’s webbing. “Excuse me,” she says, and then teleports.

To somewhere.

Damn it, Trixie.

I sigh, and pick up some spare magazines for my new pistol, slotting them into my webbing. These ones are single stack, with seven short, fat bullets apiece. Only two rounds left in the gun, so I swap it out, leaving me with a full clip and two spares. Could do worse, I guess. The plane shakes as I pull out the schematics and check where I am. There’s an elevator around the corner, which will be a kill zone. The only set of stairs in the entire plane is back the way I came, across the hall from the kitchens.

Damn it, Trixie.

As soon as I start thinking up a plan, a patch of ceiling collapses to the floor about two wingspans away. I cough up dust and hear a voice calling.

“Gilda? I’m up here. Find a rope and I will haul you upwards.”

I fly up through the hole. Trixie gives me a sheepish look. “Ah, your wings. Excellent.”

We’re in a cabin, smaller than the cells downstairs but better furnished. There’s a bunkbed, a wardrobe, a bedside table, a cramped desk, a portable cinema projector called a ‘teevee’ mounted on the wall, and a big hole on the floor.

“So, how do we get to the lab from here?”

“The elevator is only a dozen paces from this room, but the entire shaft is on fire and some miscreant appears to have poured a crate of live grenades into it,” says Trixie.

“Huh. I wondered what that popping sound was.”

“As neither you nor I are fireproof, sadly, we are forced to take the alternative route. From here, we must pass through the cafeteria to the briefing room, then through the administrative center, into the bar and stairwell, up into the executive suite, and then into the la—”

“Wait, stop, why all that? Why not just go ‘blink-blink-boom,’ teleport into the lab and knock a hole for me to climb up?”

She shoots me a sour look. “Because, between the shielding technology, the speed of the plane, and the frankly insane quantity of chaos magic that Discord is shedding, any teleport attempt into the lab would end with a mass chromatograph lodged inside my nasal cavity. As loathe as I am to admit it, we are taking the stairs.”

“Right. Do you know what we’re up against on the rest of this floor?”

She shrugs. “I do not. Trixie can only imagine it will be similar to whatever you faced on the floor below.”

“Hoelun save us...” I mutter.

“I can, however, see what awaits us outside this very room,” says Trixie, turning on the spot and lighting up her horn. A cone of webbed light spreads across the walls of the cabin, turning the beige metal walls almost see-through, like frosted glass. A dozen other similar cabins line the short hallway, with us at the back and the door to the restaurant at the front. Two four-man room clearing teams in government uniform are pouring into the furthest cabins.

“That better be a one-way spell, Trix,” I say.

She huffs and rolls her eyes.

I arm my grapple-launcher, chamber a round in the muffled pistol, and flick the safety off. Trixie slings her shotgun over her neck and withers, ready to aim and fire. “Soon as they commit to the next breach, you hit the ones in the hallway with a flash spell and I’ll shoot them and dive across the hallway into the next room. When the survivors regroup and try to take me down, teleport into one of the rooms they’ve already cleared and get them from behind with the shotgun. Cool?”

“As ice.”

I double check my ammo, and when I’m about to ask her to do likewise, I see her gun doesn’t have a magazine. “You’ve got more than one shot in that thing, right?

“Yes, there’s a tube along the bottom.”

“How do you know how many shots you’ve got left?”

Her horn lights up again, and a miniature version of her scanning spell turns the barrel see-through, showing seven massive buckshot rounds in the tube. 

“Clever.”

Her light swings back up to the wall. Both teams are about to breach. We nod to each other, and I put my claw on the door handle. Trixie’s face scrunches, and I hear the bang from the hallway as a fat vein of magic turns into pure light and sound.

I breach. Four in the hallway, blinded, my first two shots stable, three limbs on the ground, one aiming, one headshot, one more headshot, three shots to the chest real quick as I start to move—

The walls explode.

—quick grab saves me from falling into empty sky as three cabins are ripped apart by an autocannon round, whole sections of the outer walls ripped out into the air, most of the government soldiers falling straight out of the plane. More humans appear, bright P.E.R. red uniforms, rappelling down from the side of the plane, armed and ready. The one government soldier ready with his rifle gets torn apart by automatic fire.

Trixie hangs by a limb at the bottom of the gaping hole in the plane, disrupted mid-teleport. In less than a second, the rappellers will notice her.

“Well, shit.”

I spread my wings and dive for her, unholstering my grapple launcher and guessing. I fire the moment I wrap my arm around Trixie and the line shoots out back into the cabins, swinging us back up in an arc. The rope swings into the thighs of the last remaining government soldier, knocking him off into the sky, just as he shoots a rappeller in the head, and with a boost from my wings we tangle the ropes of two more P.E.R. soldiers, knocking them off balance, and then slam straight into a third, backing him up into a wall. I wing-up and kick him in the throat for good measure.

The two tangled rappellers take aim at us before I can bring my pistol to bear. Trixie’s horn lights up, her shotgun lights up, and the ropes holding them suspended snap neatly. We scramble into the one remaining cabin and shut the door behind us.

“We gotta get Discord outta here,” I say, reloading and pacing the cabin. It looks a lot like the last cabin we were in, except there’s no hole to the level below and there’s half a soldier on the floor. “I don’t know much about airy-planes, but I don’t think they fly too good if morons keep blowing holes in them.”

“They’re hijackers, I doubt very much that they’ll knock us out of the sky before they get what they want off this plane,” says Trixie, brushing rubble off her coat.

“There’s two teams of hijackers, and I don’t think they planned on running into each other.”

She frowns. “Hm. That’s not reassuring.” Her horn casts a web of light over the wall to the restaurant. It’s a big room, the size of all the cabins put together, with two dozen round tables, a juice bar and dumbwaiter at one side, and a bunch of vending machines on the other. In the middle there’s a kind of divider, a free-standing wall covered in cloth, twelve feet long, one foot wide, five feet tall, with a bunch of plants and stuff sprouting out of the top.

There’s also about thirty government troops in there, dug in and loaded for dragon. They’ve turned tables and office furniture into makeshift barricades, they’ve got belt-fed machineguns mounted on tripods, and they all seem pretty... twitchy.

“That’s not reassuring either,” she says. “I have six shots left. How are your supplies?”

“Two clips plus four bullets,” I say, swapping out the half-empty magazine for a new one. “No pistol ammo on this dude,” I add, kicking the torso on the floor. “It must’ve gone with his legs. He’s got a grenade on him, though.” I pick it up and toss it from claw to claw.

Trixie turns around, thinking hard, with her spell still revealing Fort Foodhall behind her. “Hm. I have a devious plan. If I teleport the grenade behind the barricades to the left backward corner of the room, and cast an illusion on the rightward wall, we could lead them to turn their fire on each other...”

“Uh, Trix,” I say, as I see two foal-sized grapnels slam through the left and right walls in the restaurant, “I don’t think we’re gonna need any of that.”

Something heavy and the size of an elevator box slams into the right side of the plane, hard enough to leave an impression on the wall, and a force shield crackles to life in front of it. A split second afterwards, the exact same thing happens to the left side of the plane. A pipe smashes out of each box into the restaurant and a dozen flashing distractor bombs light up the air, sending the government troops diving for cover.

With a red hiss, the walls covering the breaching boxes sear off and clatter to the floor as a dozen fighters storm out of each one. The humans from the left box are all in red. The humans from the right box aren’t.

“I’m pretty sure none of those dudes are friends,” I say, as Trixie tackles me to the ground.

Every gun goes off at once. Bullets whiz through tables, dividers, juice boxes, and humans. More fighters keep pouring out of the boxes now bolted onto each side of the plane. The rounds from the bigger guns, the light machine guns and battle rifles, come straight through the walls into the cabins. In a few seconds we won’t even need to breach the next room, they’ll have cut a hole in for us.

I lie flat and hold the pistol to my chest, huddling in at the bottom of the bed next to the wall. “You got a plan, Trixie?” I hiss.

“A brilliant plan. We wait here on the floor until they’ve killed each other, and then we stroll straight through. What do you think?”

“I think that’s the best plan I’ve ever heard. You’re a natural at this!”

Before she can reply, a government soldier smashes through the wall into our cabin, propelled by a P.E.R. fighter with rocket boosters on her body armor. The soldier either has a broken spine, or is a very flexible narcoleptic. The P.E.R. fighter makes that mystery totally moot by twisting her opponent’s head around 270 degrees. When she turns around to return to the carnage, she sees us.

My pistol goes *chut* really loud and shoots her in the face before she can raise her eyebrows.

“Okay,” I whisper to Trixie, “probably nobody heard that, if you cast a smoke illusion we can still hide—”

The floor shakes as a zombot spire rams through the base of the plane, pushing a thick grey spike up into the restaurant like a giant beehive made of sins. Zombots crawl out through plastic orifices in the spire, almost pushing out like a living liquid, thirty griffon-sized attack drones oozing out into the room before anybody can even draw a bead on them. 

Twisted freaks made from metal, magic, and mismatched meat, looking like a necromancer had crammed a butcher’s counter and a hardware store into a washing machine and animated whatever pit-forsaken thing had crawled out. There’s too many limbs or not enough limbs, stingers that look like aerials, joints that don’t move like any joint should, armed with claws and magelights, avunculators and accurized nadelgewehrs, and they’re strong and they’re fast and they can see through fucking walls!

The soldiers are still fighting each other, not the zombots. They won’t have a chance to learn from their mistakes.

Trixie grabs me. “We can’t stay and fight! We need to stick to cover and push through to the next room!” she hisses, and then casts a spell on us. We blur like a faded movie reel. Harder for anything not a zombot to aim at, with a little bit of space manipulation. Glancing shots will miss us, and aimed shots might just glance us, if we’re lucky. It won’t last long.

We vault the bed into the restaurant. It’s a charnel house. The humans outnumbered the zombots three-to-one a few seconds ago, and now half the humans are dead. The ones that didn’t shoot each other have been shredded by nadelgewehr fire, crushed into a bloody pulp or rent apart by claws and metal whips. The unluckiest have been stunned by avunculators, just waiting for the mech-eggs to burrow into their spines while the fighters devour their brains. 

I skid behind a crate of fresh oranges just in time for the humans to turn against the zombots, not that it does them much good. You might kill a zombot with a good burst of full-auto rifle fire to the chest, but it’ll eat your whole head before it goes down.

A zombot with two legs and four arms grabs me by the webbing. No use punching it in the face, they’ve got separate brain-things in all their limbs. I shoot it through the kneecap with the pistol, and as it collapses I use its downward force to rip its fingers clear of my webbing. It hisses and tries to raise its other wrist-mounted nadelgewehr, but I don’t give it the chance. I vault straight over it, cram my grenade in its too-wide mouth, and yank the pin. My robotic hand seizes the back of his neck, and I launch him into the thickest melee of zombots I can see.

Boom.

The cover I dive for ain’t thick enough. I feel a fiery prickle as tiny shards of heated rubble lodge in my coat, and a nasty-big lump of metal shears through the upturned table an inch away from my eye. Trixie phases into existence next to me, and turns our cover see-through. Five zombots left, nine humans—wait, make that six humans, between us and the door at the end of the room.

We run for it. Trixie blows a hole in a zombot that might have once looked like a pegasus and when it reaches out to lash out I put two bullets in its head and drop-kick it, I throw a half-exploded fruit plate into the sensor globe of another zombot, follow up by stabbing my knife into a nice fleshy-looking part and tearing it out, punching it aside just in time for Trixie to smash the butt of her shotgun into its nerve center. One drops both halves of the human it was holding to run for me, flings an electro-whip from its torso that lashes into my leg and turns everything screamingly blindingly white and only stops when Trixie blasts a pineapple-sized hole in its hip and it falls backward, writhing. I empty my clip at a zombot who looked like it was charging up a nasty antimagic blast for Trixie, and it flails around trying to stop its own magic from eating it.

The hipless zombot on the floor grabs for me mid-reload with its three working limbs, dragging me to the ground. I drop my pistol and we grapple and roll, slamming into the breakfast bar. It tries to open its maw to suck my brains, so I backhand it with my metal fist. The zombot keeps moving, but gives me enough space to roll over on top of it and grab a boiling pot of coffee from the bar. It makes a noise like a drowning fax machine when I smash the full pot on its head, but it doesn’t give up, still grabbing and jabbing. I slam its head into the bar, and a metal tray falls off. 

A blue glow lifts the tray and jams it edge-first into the zombot’s mouth. Trixie screams at me over shotgun fire, “Wings, Gilda!””

I grab the tray in both claws, flare my wings, and kick off the rocket boosters, slamming forward hard enough to give a lesser griffon a concussion. The tray shears through the zombot’s jaw, lopping off the top of his head like a soft-boiled egg.

I stumble to my paws, grab my pistol and reload, just in time to kick a zombot into the firing zone of the last few humans. The door is yards away. I feel the antimagic zombot lunge for me before it happens, my knife already set to tear through the soft tendons supporting its rending claws. I drag its crippled arm to the side, slam my knife into the back of its head so hard that the hilt dents its skull, and rip the knife downwards through its spine until it sticks. The blade snaps as I try to pull it free. Cheap crap.

The smoke starts to clear. All the zombots are dead. Trixie’s shotgun is bent in half, and her blurring charm has worn off. Seven rounds left in my pistol, no spare magazines.

Across the room are three surviving humans. The government trooper pulls the P.E.R. fighter to her feet, and the H.L.F. hijacker just looks dazed. A moment later they notice me and Trixie. They don’t aim their weapons, but they don’t lower them either. I’d say the mood of the day was ‘wary’.

I cough, and holster my pistol. “I don’t know about you guys,” I say, “but I think today is a real good day to make some new friends.”

The humans nod, slowly. They wait, and then lower their weapons and begin to tend to each other’s wounds. “What were those things?” one asks.

“They are zombots,” says Trixie, “interdimensionary necromantic constructs that feed on the denizens of weakened universes and draw power from the weakening of dimensional boundaries.”

“We’re a special team sent through time and space to stop them before they eat reality itself,” I add.

“Wait, so you guys are like Kyle Reese from The Terminator?” asks the trooper, muffled by his combat mask. “That’s sweet!”

“I don’t know who that is or what that is, but yeah, probably,” I say. “Listen, as soon as these fuckers show up once, they show up everywhere until we can find and blow up whatever it is that’s drawing them to this world. The third member of our team is being held in the lab upstairs. We need him to save everyone. Can you help us?” I ask.

The trooper stands up straight. “I can’t get you to the lab myself, ma’am, but there’s someone in the next room who can”

The zombot spire splits, and the last zombot appears.

I’m already diving for cover. Trixie flashes into better cover. The humans are too late.

Most zombots are the size of a griffon. This one is as big as a manticore and twice as mean. It looked like a sculptor didn’t know if she wanted to make a centaur or a centipede and tried to split the difference.

Six limbs flash out, unholy grain scythes, and vivisect both of the hijackers. The trooper has enough time to unload half the rounds in his combat shotgun, but doesn’t know where to aim on the big ones. The zombot’s mouth opens, half the size of its body, and consumes him whole.

Before it even starts chewing it grabs a vending machine in its technacles and flings it against Trixie’s cover with a nasty crunch. I draw and open fire with my last magazine, going for the joints, the thaum wells, and the fleshy bits. It’s on me before I get three rounds off, and squishes the silencer with a claw.

I know what it wants as soon as it pins me down. It wants my brain, not as mushed-up food or a collection of repair-neurons, but whole and unharmed and plucked from my head, ready to turn into a whole new line of me, trapped inside millions of fighter drones, each one screaming for a release from its torment.

Feelers flow out from under its chin to measure my skull. In my panic I grab a bundle in my mech-claw and rip them clear. The zombot wheezes, seizes my metal arm, and drags me over the rubble-strewn floor until I’m backed up against the breakfast bar. It takes my metal claw and smashes it into the counter. I can still feel it, but it’s trapped inside. I keep struggling, blind panic, checking my empty holsters as the brain-sucker extends from its forehead, closer, close enough to touch—

I don’t hear the shot that blows its head off. I hear the next five, though. 

The giant zombot creaks, splutters, and falls to the side, its limbs and weapons dissolving as the punctured thaum wells destabilize its body. I stay still, pushed up against a half-destroyed breakfast bar, exhausted in my pile of rubble.

“Hoo-eee,” comes a human voice. “This is one of those old Big Frame Revolvers, isn’t it? Sam, get Magnum Research on the line as soon as we land, I want one of these babies in every room of the White House, and a spare in the Oval Office.” She’s got a funny voice. The words are casual, but the accent is kinda prissy. Like a drunk librarian.

“President Warren, the rescue craft will be ready in seconds. We need to leave,” comes another voice.

I look up, bleary eyed, and see my saviour. Human woman, average height, thin build. Old. She’s got wire-frame glasses, and a short, sensible crest. Looks and sounds like a librarian, except she’s got a real expensive-looking suit and she’s carrying a revolver the size of a small shotgun. I can’t tell if she’s seen me or not. She looks over her shoulder. “Right, right. Is there room on the rescue craft for this big bastard I just shot? I want to mount it in the Entrance Hall and tell all of Teddy Roosevelt’s descendants that I beat his record. And please, it’s Liz.”

“Ma’am, the craft is standing-room only, the SkyLab could fall apart at any moment—”

“Damn, that’s a shame—wait!” The woman sees me and rushes over. Before I can get a word out she checks me for injuries, gently lifts me to my paws, and throws an arm over my withers. There’s a gaggle of suited staffers facing us, looking half-exasperated and half pants-shittingly terrified. By their side, there’s a pair of armed males who aren’t in uniform but are definitely soldiers”

“Look what we have here,” says... the human president? “A genuine Equestrian ally who took up arms to help defend humanity against alien invaders, rescued in the nick of time by White House staff! Sam, this is a golden photo opportunity, take some pictures. Get the boys from Delta here too.”

A grey-crested staffer sighs and takes out a small black camera as the two civvy-wearing soldiers crowd around us.

“Make sure our guns are all in frame,” says the president, dangling her giant revolver in front of her.

“Ma’am, for the record I think this will clash with your strong stance on gun control—”

“I have an exceptionally strong stance on gun control, Sam,” she snorts. “I should control all of the guns. Speaking of which, where’s your gun, lass?” She’s looking at me.

“Uh,” I say. “Oh. The zombot smashed it up.” I point to the crushed pistol on the floor in the midst of the blood and carnage.

“She needs a gun. Someone give her a gun. Daniels, have you got a spare gun?”

The soldier next to me nods, lowers his rifle, reaches into his baseball jacket and pulls out a gun too big to be a pistol and too small to be a carbine, with a big curvy magazine. He passes it to me. “MP7, forward grip and adjustable stock, forty-round magazine. The selector switch is set to ‘safe.’ While you are in the presence of Madam President it will stay that way,” he hisses.

The president chuckles, and adjusts her wire-frame glasses. “Pay him no mind, he’s pining for his drill sergeant days,” she says, nudging me. “What’s your name, kid?”

“Gilda. Gilda Redbeak.”

“Pleased to meet you, Gilda, I’m Elizabeth Warren. I’m the boss of the USA, you might have heard of us. Smile for the camera!” The camera flashes several times, and she leans in uncomfortably close and whispers, “now, do you mind telling me what you’re doing armed to the teeth on my God-damned plane?”

I swallow. “I’m working with a trickster god and an itinerant illusionist to fix a hole in the universe before interdimensional predators devour all the living inhabitants and reality collapses in on itself.”

“That sounds important.”

“Yeah,” I nod, “that’s what I said when I found out.”

“Well, Gilda,” says President Warren, standing up and stretching, “there’s a spare space on the rescue craft. Come with us, and if your story checks out, we’ll give you all the support we can provide.”

“I’d like to, but uh, my friend is kinda trapped in the lab upstairs and he’s the only one who knows where the hole is.”

“Hm. Truth be told, I’ve got about thirty seconds until my staffers carry me bodily out into the rescue helijet, so I can’t exactly give you a guided tour.” She reaches into an inside pocket and pulls out a key fob, passing it to me. “This will get you through the doors, though. Good luck, Gilda.”

Her staffers and soldiers begin to lead her away. I follow a few steps and see into the next room, one of the emergency doors had been torn off, and an attached tube led to the rescue craft. A dozen humans in rumpled suits hustle into it.

“Let’s go, everybody,” says the President, “we can still make dinner in Brussels!”

“Ma’am, we need to head to the nearest secured control room.”

“Sam, I’ve had six terms as US President. I’m a hundred-and-six years old. I’ve taken on Wall Street, China, an army of evil ponies, hell, I’ve even sat through Joe Biden’s sex tapes, and I’ll be damned to the depths of Ted Cruz’s fetid nostrils if I let some ratfink space cyborg get in the way of dinner with the Belgian PM and Bernie Sander’s Disembodied AI. I want to touch down at Zaventem before I finish these briefings. Oh, and Gilda?”

I look over at her. “Hey?”

She cranes her neck out and looks sheepish. “I, uh, left my cigar clipper in the lab. Get it back to the White House and I’ll give you a medal.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

“Godspeed.” She snaps off a salute, and then she is gone. The rescue craft detaches with a crunch, leaving a thin sheet of metal where the emergency exit had been.

I wander back into the ruined, bloody restaurant in a daze. What was I even doing again?

“Gilda...”

I spin 180° and look down. Trixie looks up at me. She’s stuck underneath a crumpled table, a crate of squished pecan plaits, two-and-a-half dead humans, and a vending machine. Only her head is poking out of the bottom of the pile.

“Uh... You okay, Trix?” I ask. She doesn’t respond and just stares at me. “Did you see that shit that just went down? That thing nearly eats my brains, and then the king of all humans just shoots it. I mean, what’s that about?”

She blinks, slowly, and tilts her head to call me forward. “Gilda...”

“Yeah?”

“Gilda... I know we’ve had... a long, and taxing day...”

I laugh ruefully. “You’re telling me.”

“But... Gilda, please...”

I lean in closer. “Yeah? What is it?”

“...when—if—you can find the time...”

We’re almost face-to-face. “Uh-huh?”

“...I’d rather not spend the rest of this flight...”

“Yeah?”

“Trapped,” she snarls, “under a FUCKING SOUP DISPENSER!”

I jump back up. “Ah, right. Sorry Trix.”

Between my wing power, my robot arm and my shredded abs, it doesn’t take long to shift the vending machine. As soon as the weight lifts, Trixie wriggles into a better position, and starts casting again. Rubble, gore, and pastry goes flying everywhere as she unburies herself.

She picks up one of the human’s automatic rifles and tests the weight. There’s a second barrel slung under the shooty bit, but instead of being wide enough to fit a peanut in, it’s wide enough for a crabapple. She then picks up a bandolier stuffed with insanely oversized rounds, bullet-nosed, almost as big as a can of soda. Her eyes light up.

“Oh. I’ve heard of these things,” she murmurs, blowing a strand of her mane off her bloodstained forehead. With a *click* the underbarrel pushes forward. She slides one of the mega-bullets into the back of the barrel, and clicks it shut again.

“Is that thing even safe?” I ask, hefting up and slinging a machinegun with a giant belt of ammo strapped to the side. Trixie’s cackling softly, and grabbing stray clips for the rifle bit. “Right, dumb question,” I mutter.

I grab a new pistol, a new knife, a machete-looking thing, and a third knife because there’s gold engraving on the hilt and it looks cool. Trixie grabs a whole bunch of different hand grenades and a machine pistol, just for funsies.

“Where to now, then?” she asks, arming her rifle.

I point to the briefing-room door. “That way.”

The plane shakes like a plane shouldn’t as we head into the next room, a tiny theater thing with rows of seats facing a podium and stage up front. Papers scattered everywhere, ash and smoke floating through the air, half the seats torn up and turned into makeshift barricades. The humans in this room must have been crammed like sardines.

Trixie shines her horn on the curtain behind the stage, showing a computer desk, a dressing table, and a door to the next room. She tries the same trick on the door and wall when we pass the curtain, but the wall is too thick and the room is too smoky. Cursing, I grab the door-handle and prepare to breach, but she prods me with telekinesis. I glance her way, and see her staring at the computer screen.

“Discord showed me a trick,” she mutters, shaping her magic. “There are tiny cameras all over this aeroplane. If any of them are connected to this machine, this spell will bully it into revealing what they see...”

“That’s how these things work? I figured they were shiny typewriters or something.”

“I’m not entirely clear on the concept myself, but the spell appeared to have its desired effect last time—Ah ha!” She rears up on her hind legs with glee as the screen shows the next room. It’s a small office, eight desks, loads of computers, half-cubicles... and three dozen cheap chairs scattered everywhere. Humans ain’t big on standing, I guess?

“Looks clear,” I say. 

“Wait.”

“Trixie, I’m no rocket wizard but I know that if you poke enough holes in a flying thing, it stops flying.”

She prods a button on the keyboard and the screen changes, it’s the same room but tinted green. “Low-light conditions.” She prods again, and the room is blues and greys, with dark black patches by the air vents. “Thermal output.” Prods again, stark greys for the room and blinding whites for the cables, screens, and computers. “Electro-magnetic emissions.” She hoists her rifle and joins me at the door. “Humans have strange methods of concealment. I had to check that the room was empty.”

I open the door and step through, keeping my machinegun level. “Yeah, it’d be a hay of a thing to walk into an ambush after that last fight...”

Trixie shuts the door behind her, and every one of the cheap chairs morphs into a changeling, horns glowing, wings buzzing, teeth bared.

“Ah,” says Trixie, clenching her teeth. “Magical concealment.”

One of the changelings is... they ain’t bigger than the others so much, but built. Thinner shell and thicker muscles, smaller wings and glowier magic, chompier teeth and extra-bitey neck tendons. They got four changelings in front of them, ready to take a bullet, and they’re glaring at me.

“It Will Not Meddle In Our Affairs,” the crunchy one growls, “That Is Not Its Role, Foolish Ones.”

“You talk funny,” I say, keeping my gun level. 

“It Will Leave Us To Take The Ever-Shifting God From His Prison, And It Will Be Allowed To Leave. It Will Not Interfere.”

Trixie cleared her throat and stepped forward. “Changeling! Queen Chrysalis herself has condoned our mission, and Discord is under her protection. Your mere presence here is direct disobedience!”

The changeling roars in anger. “It Barks The Name Of A False Queen And Expects Us To Lie Down! Chrysalis Wallows In Sloth And Contentment, She Feeds Her Sickle When There Is Harvest For A Scythe. The Power Over Chaos Itself Is Within Our Grasp!”

“You dorks wanna control Discord?” I laugh, “I don’t think Discord knows how to control Discord.”

Trixie’s eyes dart from side to side as the changelings crawl around to take up the best positions. “If you make the tiniest mistake, your ‘False Queen’ will find out. She does not seem the type to take betrayal lightly.”

“Enough! It Will Give Us The Key To The Ever-Shifting God’s Prison, Or It Will Be Destroyed!”

“Fuck off, grasshopper,” I say, and squeeze the trigger.

Heavy bullets spew from the machinegun, the recoil so hard I have to yank down to stop it climbing into the ceiling. It cuts two changelings in half, punching them back as the bullets drive into their carapace and turning them inside-out as they rip through the other side.

A dozen changeling magebolts slam into me and turn every thought to pain and every nerve to fire, the force lifting me off my paws and pushing me against the wall. The changelings are quick and well-trained, no denying it. They charge the moment the bolts hit me, teeth bared and horns thrumming, and that kinda follow up takes a whole lot of drilling, mud, and shouting to learn. Thing is, as much as the magebolts hurt, they make every single muscle in your body tense up. Your beak clamps shut, your biceps flex, and your wings hug your back.

Your claws also clench shut. In my case, around a trigger.

I see Trixie out the corner of my tear-filled eye, whipping up a cloud of distorted, oily fog and deflecting bolts with her own magic. She fades into the fog and half a second later, her rifle fires out from eight different places.

My webbing pours antidote into my bloodstream. The pain fades, my muscles relax, and I aim at the crunchy critter leading them just in time for a changeling to fall on me. I throw my body weight into him and guard my neck, driving him hard enough into a desk to break it, but he’s not going for that. He bites the ammo belt leading into my gun. A dozen rounds smear him across the carpet, and my gun clicks dry.

Changelings hit me. I don’t know how many. Enough sweep my hindlegs out from under me, grab each of my limbs, pin me to the floor, and churn enough magebolts into my chest to make the antidote useless. Enough that all I can see is a light-blotting ball of black carapaces. The magebolts lay into me until I’m foaming at the beak, helpless as a cub. I feel one behind me prying my head back, and see one with their jaw wide and set to tear my throat out.

My cyborg arm shoots out, on its own mind, and grabs the offending changeling’s tongue. Changeling magebolts work great on muscle and nerves, but it looks like they’re wimpy against robot bits. I feel the prickle of my injector mod again, setting my veins on fire as pain and adrenaline mix with morphine and Hoelun-knows-what. I’d sit bolt upright if there weren’t two-hundred kilos of changeling pinning me down.

The arm decides to help with that. It yanks the changeling’s tongue so hard that the whole ‘ling follows and slams into one of its buddies, knocking it off, and then into a second one, and ripping its tongue out—taking a good chunk of jaw and neck with it—as it tries to bash the third. None of the changelings are too happy about that turn of events and they try to swarm forward and fill the gaps, but they’ve given me too much space.

I unsheathe the machete and decapitate a changeling in one stroke. In a panic, another one grabs at my machete arm, tries to clamp its whole body down over my arm, and gets close enough for me to dig my beak into the back of its neck. The changeling cries out and tries to back away, leaving a leg undefended, which I promptly lop off, pick up, and smash into the face of another changeling.

With the changelings off my torso, I see one in front of me charging up a really big magebolt, and I’m starting to see wanton magebolts as an unpleasant aspect of modern life. I resolve the issue by hacking into his skull with the machete. The spell fizzles but my blade sticks, and a hard yank just drags the whole dead changeling closer to me. I do the painful-but-pragmatic thing, letting go of the handle, drawing my pistol, and blowing out the guts of the three changelings dumb enough to keep swarming me.

As soon as I stand I get the leverage I need to yank my machete free, just in time to see a changeling with bloated green glands fermenting up a real nasty loogie to spray all over me. I throw the machete and it sinks deep enough in his chest to knock him backwards. Thin green liquid bursts out of all his swollen glands, hissing and steaming at it hits his carapace, dissolving him into a puddle of dark goo as I slide into cover behind a mess of broken desks and broken changelings.

Three other changelings had similar plans, swelling themselves up with caustic bile, and spewing it into Trixie’s fog alongside a barrage of magebolts. Before I even get a chance to think “shit, is Trixie dead?” the mare herself blinks into the middle of the changeling crowd, tosses a few blinking beeping things into the air, and blinks away again. I’ve learned to dive for cover when I see stuff like that happen.

The boom eviscerates just about every changeling in the room, and does a number on my eardrums too. Goop and shell fragments drip down on me from the ceiling. One of my ears is ringing, one of my nostrils is pouring blood, and one of the changelings is still scrapping. I peek up over the cover and draw a bead on them. It’s the crunchy one, spitting sticky green webbing everywhere, gunking up Trixie’s rifle, throwing glittery counterspells in the air, and putting Trixie on the defensive by throwing sharp spines from bumps in their legs. I fire off a few shots, but they’re fast enough to dodge and weave from two different shooters.

“Gilda, catch!”

Trixie’s machine pistol phases into my mechanical hand, and I squeeze off a spray of lead with it as my own pistol runs dry. Only a pair of shots even touch the changeling, glancing off the slopes of their shell, but it winds them enough for Trixie to counter their counterspell and crash them face-first through a computer screen a yard from me. I holster my empty pistol, aim the automatic, and dive to the floor as a spray of spines from the changeling’s flailing limbs nearly turns me into a pincushion. 

The changeling yanks their head free and shakes off broken glass, when they should have been checking if I was about to jam a knife through their ankle, which I was. The blade crunches through a softer part of his hind leg and into something wooden on the other side. Hopefully it’s harder to dodge bullets when you’re pinned to a desk like a pair of butterfly wings.

That’s when the fucker kicks me in the beak.

I reel and curse and see Trixie finally levelling her now-goop-free rifle at them. I don’t see the changeling setting off an unstable force spell, but I sure freakin’ feel it when it slams me, them, and Trixie all into opposite corners of the briefing room. The moment me and Trixie get up, we fire a dozen rounds at him, but they all plink off some kind of barrier.

“They’ve cast a variant of Clover’s Resilient Cuboid,” comes Trixie’s voice, muffled through my ringing ears.

“What?”

“Our spells and weapons won’t hurt them, but they are unable to hurt us!”

The changeling cackles. “I Do Not Need To Hurt It. We Can Overcome It.”

I look around at the carnage as I reload my pistol and re-arm my dropped machinegun. “Who’s ‘We,’ pal? We just turned your whole platoon into smoothies.”

The changeling looks real cocky for someone that just had a knife lodged through their leg. “We Are Not Bound By Such Constraints Of This False Path That Lesser Things Are. You Have No Idea Of Our True Power!”

Me and Trixie step over the carnage and walk towards them. “Well that’s real nice buddy, having all that true power and shit, but since you’ve decided to stick yourself in that dorky space rhombus, we’re just gonna walk on past and leave you to choke on a—”

The door blows open at the end of the room and a dozen changelings spring out like a screwed-up cuckoo clock, and these look beefier and better-seasoned than the last mob. I look over my shoulder. Twelve more changelings behind us.

Trixie’s horn flares, and I feel the creepy tingle of defense magic on my fur. “We made short work of your last wave of changelings. You’ll fare no better the second time.”

“It Will Hurt Itself In Its Confusion.”

In a dull shimmer the changelings behind the boss—and probably the ones behind us too—all morph and shift. Half of them look like Trixie and the other half look like me, right down to the robot arm and bloodstains.

I grab Trixie around the withers. “I think it’s time for us to go.”

She raises her rifle and aims above the doppelganger gang in front of us. “Warning shot!”

She pulls the trigger on the other barrel. The ceiling explodes. The changelings don’t fare much better.

“Little high...” she mutters, coughing dust. I see the impostors behind us, mid-pounce. I hold on tight to Trixie’s back and spread my wings as they dogpile us.

My wing-boosters turn on full-blast. We rocket forwards. Literally.

The whole room is motion blur, insides shuddering, Trixie screeching in rage and panic. Dozen changelings clinging to our legs seem to stretch out from the motion. Magic shielding sends concussive echoes through my skeleton as we batter through doors, walls, and desks.

We land in a three-way gunfight. Crash, I guess. Out the corner of my eye I see H.L.F., P.E.R., and government goons all shooting each other. Dumb monkeys.

We broke our fall on a P.E.R. machinegunner inside a circular bar. Left a hole in the bar, and a hole in the gunner. Changelings still alive, still grabbing us, still trying to kill and/or eat us. Strong grip. Too many to take out one-on-one. I push Trixie away, change angle, and wing-boost directly upwards.

The force of the slam makes me see black, but the changelings on top of me fare worse as they hit the ceiling. Their grip breaks long enough for me to spread my wings and let out a short burst of superheated air. It sets on fire the ones that it doesn’t cut in half.

An ethereal cord glows around my wrist and yanks me down. I hit the floor right next to Trixie.

“More behind us!” she hisses.

Rolling onto my back, I see a crowd of our doppelgangers swarming into the melee, heading straight for us. I grab the machinegun from our human crash-mat and let loose. First wave goes down. Second wave use the first wave as shields. Tougher. Ones from before got taken apart by a stray hit. These ones keep truckin’ after two direct hits. 

Chitin-whips fly out of the false Trixies and wrap around my hind legs. Before the pain hits me, I grab the living cords with my robot arm and yank them, dragging a pair of not-Trixie’s directly into our entrance hole through the circular bar, stuffing it shut. I put several rounds into their faces before the machine gun clicks dry.

Trixie levitates half-a-dozen assorted grenades as changelings swarm over the bar top. “Cover your ears,” she says.

I do just that. The grenades teleport out of sight. The pins hang in the air for a moment, then fall. I cover my face.

The explosion buries us in dead changelings. Better than live ones, but more gooey. 

We push and crawl our way out from the bodies. The blast might have messed up the changelings, but the humans are still going strong. I pop my head up just as some asshole in P.E.R. fatigues finishes reloading. I watch him draw a bead on me before I could touch my pistol, let alone aim it. The rifle yanks out of his hands in a blue glow, twirling in the air as its sling wraps around his neck. It jumps up and kills him with a neat snap.

Thanks, Trixie.

I pull myself out of the corpses and return the favor as a H.L.F. loon dives for Trixie with a big fuck-off knife. His wrist crunches in my robot fist, and instead of crying like a normal bird, he screams and reaches for his sidearm with his not-crunched arm. I grab the scruff of his neck, fly to the side of the cabin, and ram his head through a cracked porthole. He quits struggling when I nab his sidearm and shoot him four times in the back.

I turn to see Trixie enchanting the shattered glasses and bottles around the bar to act like gnats. The humans don’t aim so good with clouds of sharp glass flying at their face. All sides take cover behind turned tables and torn leather couches. The smart ones are already pulling their combat visors down.

I shoot some half-blind government soldier in the back, drag his body down, and use him as cover. Trixie scuttles next to me. She’s still got her cool rifle that shoots the mega-bullets. Lying low on the ground, she reloads the under-barrel.

“Can we—”

The boom cuts me off. Sends us both sliding across the floor. Whole plane sways to-and-fro. From outside. Leather couch hits us and pins us against the far wall. My face presses against the glass of a porthole.

I can see several things. First, two of the engines on this side are on fire, and another has been obliterated. Second, one of those AC-130 gunships has a hole where the cockpit should be, and it’s falling out of the sky. Third, that giant grappling cord between that plane and this plane is about to loop around us.

The plane tilts again, and I see more stuff. Make that all three AC-130s are about to loop around us.

I hear more popping but this time it’s just Trixie shooting, pouring bullets into the room behind us as more doppelgangers prepare their assault. She fires the mega-bullet gun and paints the hallway with changeling.

I grab her and start moving forward, from cover to cover, firing my stolen sidearm at the few inexplicably-alive humans still in the bar. At the far end of the room is the door to the cockpit, P.E.R. hijackers blind-firing from cover. Between us and them is the stairwell. Government troops firing and dropping grenades from the deck above, fanatic H.L.F. fighters in heavy armor swarming from below.

The whole plane jerks. Trixie steps over a body, and glides right over it. She sprays off another burst of rifle fire, and the recoil pushes her a yard back.

“A-are we getting lighter?” she asks.

She tugs the magic cord on her fetlock connecting us, and I’m pulled through the air like a griffon-shaped cub’s balloon. I scramble to drag the both of us behind an overturned table. The table starts to float.

So does everything else.

Everything lifts off the floor. Brass casings, torn couches, discarded magazines, dead bodies, live bodies, globs of blood floating along in the air, broken glass, shot glasses, spilled vodka, everything not nailed down comes up. The gunfire stops as fighters float out from cover with no way to turn or aim in the air. Antigravity rules.

“Gilda, what the heck is happening?” screams Trixie.

“We’re in freefall!”

“I DON’T LIKE IT!”

“Don’t worry, it never lasts long,” I mutter, wrapping my claw around the ethereal rope until I see it turn solid blue.

“That better not be gallows humor, Gilda Red—gyaah!” 

She cuts off mid-sentence as I spread my wings, pull her close, and fly in towards the stairwell. I have an easier time of it than you’d think, since I can fly and none of the humans know how to fight in freefall. I take pot shots at two H.L.F. idiots who try to brace against a wall to aim at me, and just yank the gun out the hand of a third one who got too close. Another human just lets go of his gun and puts his hands out when I look at him. Smart.

A panicky-looking idiot shoots their automatic rifle without bracing themselves. The recoil spins her in the air like a very serious Catherine wheel. I don’t even bother, but Trixie uses her telekinesis to push the spinning shooter safely out of our way. She stops me with a block of magic as we reach the edge of the stairwell.

“Safety first,” she says, teleporting a stun grenade. 

I hear the bang and continue upwards, taking Trixie with me, and swatting a mess of debris and broken glass out of the air in front of me. Four soldiers at the top of the stairwell, anchored in place with cords. Very clever. If the stunner hadn’t blinded them, they’d have shredded us. As Trixie disarms them with magic, the one human smart enough to hide behind his friends aims a gun at her. I punch him in the dick and steal his gun.

“There’s the door!”

The door to the science lab is big, shiny, and buzzing with force fields. I flap up to it and touch it with the key fob. It opens up to a small airlock, grey steel and dull fluorescent lights. As I pull Trixie inside, the door shuts behind us.

The noise of gunfire and combat stops dead. Lights go out. Total silence.

“Decontamination.” A disembodied voice speaks as the lights go red, and a medicine-smelling mist sprays out from vents in the floor.

The other door opens, out into the science lab. Absolute bedlam. Computers, test tubes, machines I can’t even name all hanging in the cramped, sterile space. One side of the lab is taken up by a rocket-car looking thing. In the middle of the lab, in a thick green tube on a raised dais, I see Discord. He’s been shrunk to the size of a chicken, and he’s sleeping in green goo. In front of his tube, next to a control panel, there’s a human in a white coat.

“Stop right there,” he says, the mustache on his lip shaking in anger. “If I press this button here, it will annihilate the anomaly you call Discord! You cannot release him. You have no idea of the sheer destructive potential he represents—”

I cut him off by shooting him in the head.

“That was quick,” says Trixie.

“Sorry, I hate monologues.” I fly over to the dais, past bunsen burners and glass mason jars, and press the ‘Release’ button instead. The fluid drains out through white tubes, leaving him curled up on the bottom, and then the glass shield retracts. He flops out onto the floor.

“Slorbuzzy,” he mutters, and starts to snore. I pick up the ferret-sized god and pass him to Trixie.

Trixie jabs a hoof into my side. “Gilda, exactly how long does freefall last?”

“Ten.”

“Minutes?”

I shake my head. “Nine. Eight—”

“NOT THE TIME, GILDA!” she screams. “How are we supposed to get out?”

“Shit, I dunno. Figured Discord would sort us out.”

Trixie slaps him with magic. He snorts, but doesn’t wake up. “That isn’t going to work!”

“We could take the submarine.”

I squawk in shock and point my gun at the human. So does Trixie. The human grins, sheepishly.

“Oh. Sorry,” she says. Her black beret floats off her head. “I’m not armed? But I think we’ll all fit in the submarine, though?”

I don’t lower my pistol. “How the hot fudge will a submarine help when we’re falling out of the sky?”

She shrugs. “Well, there’s a parachute on it.”

Trixie sighs. “I can’t be bothered to argue. It’s fine. Let’s all get in the submarine.”

I holster my gun and drag Trixie over to the rocket-car-but-actually-a-submarine-thing, and the four of us crawl in through a hatch. Well, the human crawls, I flap, Trixie gets dragged, and Discord is luggage. It’s cramped inside, and when the hatch shuts, there’s just a dull yellow light above our heads. Everyone straps into the bracing belts on the side, except the human, who hooks herself up to a control panel near the nose end.

“There’s a porthole on the ceiling, if you want to let some air in,” says the human.

“Are you serious?”

She giggles. “No, it’s a submarine, innit? Navy humour. Sorry. Anyways, this model here is a bit more high-tech than that, it is...”

A button taps and the submarine walls turn transparent. The lab appears around us, still a mess. Another button taps.

Lots of G-force!

We’re falling into the sky, rocket-boosters pushing us away from the SkyLab. Everything is blue and white and blindingly bright. The ocean below is big, and bigger every moment, until the chute opens. The force makes me see black, and when the stars clear out, we’re drifting down slowly. Trixie looks a little queasy. I know how she feels.

In the distance, I see the SkyLab explode.

Seconds later, there’s another, milder jolt as we sink into the ocean. The see-through sides of the submarine fade to black, and a long strip of blue light comes on. I sigh, and wipe away a trickle of blood running down my face.

“Okay, okay,” I say, looking at the human, “who exactly are you?”

“Lieutenant Doris Prosser, Royal Navy,” she says, not looking up from her control panel. Something about her voice grates on me. It sounds both like it’s dumber than it is, and also that it’s exactly as dumb as it sounds. “I’m from Worcester.”

“Wustah?” says Trixie. “Where’s Wustah?”

“It’s near Birmingham. In the Midlands.”

Discord coughs. “Correct me if I’m wrong,” he says hoarsely, “but weren’t the humans on that plane all from the other place?”

“Oh, now you decide to wake up!” hisses Trixie.

“Do you mean London? I don’t think I met any Londoners on board. I’m not very good with faces, though. Sorry.”

“No, no,” says Discord, “the other country. With the eagles, and the hot dogs.”

“Ohhh,” says Doris, dragging out the sound for too long. “Americans.”

Discord snaps his claws. “That’s the ticket.”

“Well, it was their plane, yes, but um, this submarine is part of His Majesty’s Navy. S’one of our prototypes. We needed American labs to test it, but um, there has to be a British commissioned officer with it at all times.” She pauses, annoyingly. “Um. That’s me. I shouldn’t be doing this, to be honest. I’m not actually authorized to even touch it.”

“Why didn’t you abandon the plane with the other humans?” asks Trixie. “My name is Trixie, by the way. Trixie Lulamoon. A pleasure.”

“Oh! Well, nice to meet you, Miss Trixie,” says Doris. We’re deep in the water now. My inner ears pop as the pressure shifts. “I guess I probably should have, you know, but I thought we might land safely after all the hijackers got shot, innit? After I saw stuff floating and all, I thought that might not be as much of a good plan as I’d thought, though. I decided it would be a better, uh, course of action to jettison the submarine instead of potentially leaving it unattended in international waters, surrounded by several known enemies of His Majesty’s Government, more than one radical political paramilitary, and a bunch of those Doctor-Who-looking things.”

“The what now?”

“She means the zombots,” says Discord.

“I see,” says Trixie. “If you’re so dedicated to protecting this machine, why did you let us on board?”

“Well. Um. To be totally honest, I thought you’d shoot me if I didn’t.”

“I hear that,” I say, “I hate getting shot.”

“Also,” she turns to peer back at us through the corner of her eye, “I didn’t catch all of what Professor Hogben was saying before you shot him, but as far as I could tell, he thought it would be a bad idea to let the ratty fellow over there fall into the wrong hands, and on account of the fact that I’m not the wrong hands, I decided to take him into my custody. Do you know him?”

“They work for me,” drawls Discord. His eyes are closed, and he’s shaking the tension out of his legs and shoulders.

“Oh.” Doris glances between me and Trixie. “How is it?”

“Pay’s awful and I need a vacation,” says Trixie.

“Yeah, and the work feels more like babysitting than anything else.” I glare at Discord. His eyes are still closed. “Speaking of, how the hell did these monkeys get the jump on you?”

“They didn’t.”

“What?” I snap. “You fucking... you let? Yourself? Get captured?”

He harrumphs. “That wasn’t wholly my intention. When I left the library in Hong Kong, I went into an opium den and got good and strung out of my mind. Some time later I offered to perform feats of chaos magic in return for more opium. One merry fellow asked me to transform myself down to a twentieth of my size and weight, and render myself entirely insensate for the next twelve hours. He seemed on the level.”

Trixie’s teeth grind together. “Why did you perform magic in front of the monkeys?”

Doris fiddles with the submarine controls. “Why were you in Hong Kong?”

My fist clenches. “Why did you get high on opium.”

Discord opens his eyes, and looks at me like I’m simple. “Because,” he says, “I was in an opium den.”

“So freaking what?””

He giggles. “When in Roam...”

This is going to be a long freaking week.