Blackacre

by Princess Woona

Unannounced

30 June, Y.C. 970
Ponyville

“Surprise?” demanded the tan pony, slamming a hoof on the desk. “You thought that dropping in on me would be a nice surprise?”

“That’s not what I said,” said the light blue pony. “I said there were things we needed to talk about in person, that it would be nice to see you, and that I was sorry it had to be a surprise.”

“Of course you said that,” said Margaret, crossing her forelegs and sitting back in the chair. “You’re good at telling people what they heard.”

“I —” started Aspia, but broke off, unwilling to drag the conversation any further down.

“I’m here,” she said instead, with a slight air of concession. “And we need to talk.”

“About what?” said Margaret with a bitter laugh. “What could you possibly want from me? A status report? Special dispensation for something?”

She shook her head, cutting in with a wag of a hoof before the older pony had a chance to respond. “No, you’re not here for that. Status reports go through the Home Office; I would know. You would know. They’ve got everything you want; no need to come out here.

“And special dispensation?” She laughed hoarsely. “For what? Ponyville isn’t much of a town any more; anything worthwhile was requisitioned by the Army,” she said, disdain seeping though. “Try the generals. They can get you what you want.”

“How about advice?”

Margaret blinked.

“Excuse me?”

“Advice,” repeated Aspia, taking a step forward. “You’ve always had a mind for numbers, for working with ponies, for looking at things in a slightly different way. What if I just want —”

“Oh, I see,” said Margaret, her expression cold. “You want to use me. Fine. Talk.”

Aspia pursed her lips for a moment, keeping herself from taking the bait.

“The situation —”

“Oh,” shot Margaret mockingly, “wait. I forgot. You probably need to get me clearance for this, don’t you.”

She paused.

“I’ve secured special temporary dispensation as an internal consultant.”

“Ooh, big words,” she said, waving her hooves around. “Cut through it. Get to the point.”

“That —”

“You know what the point is?” she pushed on. “You’re here, I don’t know how, but you’re here, and you suddenly want my help. You think that there’s something, anything, something I can bring to the table to help you do whatever it is you want to do.”

“That’s —”

“Isn’t that right?”

Aspia was silent for a few seconds longer than was comfortable.

“Are you done?”

“Are you?” countered Margaret pettily.

“I want your help because I need your help,” said Aspia. “Because I have a problem, and I think you can do something nopony else at home can. I think you can solve it.”

“I think you can shove it.”

“Maggie!”

“Mommy!” she shot back in an acidic tone. “You really have no idea, do you.”

“I can’t read your mind,” she said testily. “Clearly there’s —”

“Doesn’t even look like you can read,” she snorted. “Have you looked at a paper lately? Seen a photograph? Hell, talked with any of the pegasi outside?”

Aspia said nothing.

“I came down here to see what was really going on. In Blackacre everypony’s fine with being a symbol of something or other, but here? For three months I’ve been here, on the front lines, watching ponies get chewed up and spat back out, what’s left of them, and I can see full well why they don’t give a damn.” She snorted again, her voice growing louder. “And then a week ago you launched your little crusade, get every pony on Equestria working on making your little bombs!”

“I didn’t —”

“And then two days ago you actually deployed them, actually used the damned things, and now Blackacre is a cratered hellhole!” she shouted, voice at a fever pitch. “And it’s still burning! I don’t know how, all the trees are gone, it’s just rock and ash, but somehow it’s still burning! It’s so bright that I can read! In my bedroom! At night!”

“That’s not,” started Aspia, but she might as well have been talking to a tornado; Margaret was standing now, hooves firmly planted on the desk, heaving breaths in her rage.

“Sit down,” commanded Aspia, “and listen.”

Much to her surprise — she didn’t.

“No!” roared Margaret. “No! For once in your life, mother, you listen to me! You scorched the earth and everypony on it, and now you have the gall to come here and talk to me about it?”

She shook her head and lowered her voice in a remarkable show of self-control. “Get out of my office.”

A moment’s silence.

“Are you quite done?”

“Get out.”

“No,” she said flatly. “Now you listen to me.”

Margaret said nothing. A good enough sign, at least for now. Aspia took another step towards the desk.

“The entire purpose of the Secrepony of Defense is to plan for the worst,” she said quietly. “That’s what I do; that’s what my staff does. We think up hopeless situations, dead-end maneuvers: we don’t just plan for the worst-case scenarios; we think up new ones every day.

“It’s exactly like playing devils’ advocate,” she continued in a matter-of-fact tone. “We spend our time thinking up new and interesting ways that other ponies might try and kill us. And then we try to figure out how to stop them.”

“Which includes killing them first.”

“If necessary,” she conceded with a shrug. “Does any of us actually want to enact any of our plans? No! Of course not! Nopony in their right mind wants to do the things we plan. But if somepony out there seriously wants to hurt us, then we have an obligation to do everything in our power to both plan those scenarios and counter them.”

Aspia was silent for a moment. At least Margaret respected that.

“They’re called worst-case scenarios for a reason,” she said sadly. “And we’re not the ones who make them happen.”

“No,” said Margaret, “you’re not.”

Though the words sounded an awful lot like a concession, her expression was anything but.

“You are the ones who drew them up.”

Aspia couldn’t quite place the look on her daughter’s face, but it did not bode well.

“Which means that you picked the weapons. You went through the stockpiles, calculated production, figured out logistics. You assigned quotas, determined who would meet them, and deployed the finished product.

“You figured out what wings would go where, and even though I don’t think you wrote up any duty assignments I’m betting Pommel’s working off your notes.” Her mouth was harder now. “Ten thousand pegasi were exactly where they are because of you, because you knew it, expected it, planned it.

“And what’s the point?” she asked, waving a hoof in a sharp motion. “Because I’m willing to bet you know that to. Why? Because you wanted it to happen. You ran the damage estimates. Land, trees, property, casualties. You planned it all out, planned it exactly. Plus or minus a few hundred ponies, of course.” She snorted. “But what does that matter when you’re talking about razing an entire region, and everypony and everything in it, to the ground?”

“Maggie,” cut in Aspia, “that is the very definition of a worst-case —”

“I know what it is,” she snapped, not even commenting on the name. “Which means you have no excuse.”

“Excuse for what?” she wanted to ask, but didn’t have a chance to get the first word out.

“You knew exactly what would happen!” shouted Margaret. “You planned the damned thing! You sat down in front of Princess Celestia, handed her a stack of papers and said here! Look! If you want to kill them all, this is how you do it.”

Aspia’s expression hardened. It had been a stack of folders, the very last of which had been red, sealed with black wax. But explaining that it was one of a choice of options didn’t seem like a series of words that the pony in front of her would listen to.

“You sat down in front of the Princess,” her daughter accused her, “and said that, based on the situation, you recommended burning Blackacre to the ground. You recommended that,” she said, stabbing a hoof towards the window, where even now smoke was rising in the distance. “You recommended killing them all.”

“I did no such thing,” she snapped.

“Like hell you didn’t,” shot back her daughter. “Your whole job is writing up worst-case scenarios, remember?”

“We just write them.”

“Oh, you just write them,” she mocked. “And when you’re writing them you never take into account reality, right?”

She frowned.

“No, you don’t,” answered Margaret. “You look at how many troops there are, right? And where they are. And how much of this raw material you have, and that raw material. You look at logistics, weather patterns, medical supplies, experience. You look at every single aspect of what the situation is like right now, on the ground, when you’re making your plans.”

Aspia said nothing. That was right, of course, but she couldn’t say anything without egging her on.

“And the reason you look at it all?” Margaret laughed. “Because you know, every step of the way, that if you need to enact that plan, if you need to actually do it, you need to be able to do it.

“Because,” she repeated, voice hard, “because you always know that it’s a possibility. Not a ‘choice,’ not an ‘option,’ not a ‘potential,’ but a fact. Because there’s a very real chance that somepony might actually decide to use that plan. Might actually do it.”

“Yes,” said Aspia, trying to maintain her calm. “But we don’t decide —”

“Oh, you don’t?” sniped Margaret. “You have no input into the decision-making process at all. You just present the options and say nothing. You just wait until someone else makes the decision for you, is that it?

“You’re an adviser.” She smiled. “You have as much input into the process as anypony else. Hell, probably more, because you actually were there thinking the plans up. You do the analysis; that’s what you’re there for. If the Princess had the time to do it all herself, why would you even be there?”

“We don’t decide. That’s for her to do.”

“Sure it is,” she said soothingly. “You provided the options. You saw the casualty reports — you wrote them — and you still made the call that, at the end of the day, if you needed to do it, it was worth doing. The only way she could make that decision is if you had already decided it could be worth doing. If it could be justified.

“Tell me this,” she said, clenching a hoof. “If you had said it wasn’t worth it, that there were some things that could never be justified, some lines that just couldn’t be crossed — would she still have done it? If you had said no, would she still have said yes?”

Silence.

Margaret chopped a hoof down, her voice hard. “You made that decision. You made the plan, saw exactly what would happen, and you made that decision, just as if you had signed it yourself.”

For a long time, neither of them said anything.

“Get out of my office,” repeated Margaret. “And get out of my life. I’m not going back to Canterlot, and I damned well don’t want to be associated with you.”

“Maggie —”

“They haven’t figured it out yet,” she said offhoofedly. “But they will. And when they find out that you were the pony responsible for so much senseless death, they’ll spit at the name McNamare.”

Aspia again said nothing. She had no doubt that the threat of being cut off from her daughter wasn’t going to last; foals always said such things but never meant them. But to be this incensed… was there something they knew closer to the front line that never made it into the reports? Or….

“…know who I am here,” Margaret was saying. “Not even the guards outside. I’ve been here more than three months, and nopony knows. I came down here to see how ponies thought differently, and it turns out they’re right. Which is good, because I plan on staying here.”

She paused meaningfully. “I would go to my father, but I wouldn’t know where to start looking for him.”

“Maggie!” said Aspia, caught off guard and entirely unwilling to drag a whole other emotional bundle into what was already a tense situation.

“Don’t call me that!” she snapped.

“Maggie McNamare, you will listen —”

“I will not!” thundered the tan pony. “That’s not my name, not anymore. I’m a mayor, not a… McNamare,” she added, spitting the name.

“What?”

“I’m changing my name,” she said with an air of derision. “To the only thing you and my father had in common, besides me.”

“Margaret —”

“— Mare,” she finished in a harsh tone. “Because that’s the second-best thing I can do to get you and everything you did out of my life right now.”

A moment of stunned silence.

“The first thing is where you get out of my office.”

“Margaret,” said Aspia gently, with the tone one might adopt in talking with somepony in a looney bin, “Margaret, what are —”

“Get out of my office,” she repeated. “Or I will have you removed.”

“I am your mother.”

“And I don’t want to be your daughter. Get out.”

She stared at her for a moment. Margaret wasted little time.

“Guards!” she bellowed.

It took about twenty seconds of tense silence, but they showed up, clearly not expecting to have been summoned to this sort of meeting.

“Remove the Secrepony from my office,” she said icily, Margaret’s stare never leaving Aspia’s unforgiving eyes.

The guards exchanged looks.

“Remove her,” she repeated.

The elder of the two guards stepped forward, but hesitated to actually touch the light blue pony. She wasn’t technically in the military chain of command, but it didn’t take much common sense to realize that maybe the Secrepony of Defense might have more pull than, say, a baker.

A few more tense seconds —

“All right,” said McNamare, holding her daughter’s — the mayor’s — gaze. “I’ll go quietly.”

She turned and, without a word, started towards the door. The guards fell in behind her, relieved to not have to place hooves on somepony who, if not officially, could likely end their careers with the stroke of a pen.

For a long time after her — the Secrepony left the room, Margaret stared off at the door.

She hadn’t even looked back.

Shaking her head, she turned back to the desk. The war crimes outside weren’t her business. She had completed the writeup, but hadn’t finished sourcing it all yet; Jackie was trying to wring a last few names out of the pegasi. She didn’t know what she would do with Jackie and her knowledge of the local bureaucracy; even in disguise she could pull information that nopony else would even know to look for.

And the sources were key. The Herald wouldn’t even take a look at a submission like this without solid sourcing; even if she showed her work, it was still a fifty-fifty shot as to whether they would run it. The Times would run it if need be, but she would rather have it go out on the biggest name in news; she would rather offer the Herald right of first refusal.

This would run. And when it did, Canterlot’s propaganda would dry up like so much fog for the burning smoke it was.

Equestria had to know.

Comments

[The Orange Nebula]

That's just wrong. No story with this much effort and time spent into it deserves the treatment this one is getting. I plan on reading this :)