Chapter 19: Virtue's Downfall (Part 2)
“The last team’s just checked in. Our amigos are out of the city, free of pursuit, and adjusting their course south to move to Buckley. Archer’s already gone ahead to warn Mother Shimmer of the new threat.”
“Get back on the horn with the other teams and get me casualty reports. We may’ve caught the Talons by surprise, but they still put up more than a solid fight…”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Through the dimmed but steady mechanical roar that filled our new sanctuary, I could hear Ricochet and Amber Dawn as they conversed at the driver’s seat of Buckley’s tank. With Blake and I now secure inside Lily’s belly, Amber had been working with Ricochet to monitor the rest of the task force that had accompanied them on the mission to rescue me, receiving frequent reports as the rest of Buckley’s company pulled out of the city. With us, the other members of the tank crew were staying vigilant at their assigned stations. Only a white-coated, purple-maned unicorn mare – Neera – formerly assigned as one of the gun loaders of Lily’s crew, was away from her post, her horn alight as she carefully maneuvered a pair of tweezers into the wound in my flank to extract the bullet within. “I’m afraid you’re going to be moving around with a busted rib until we get you to Doc Preston.” she explained, eyes narrowing with focus as she worked. “Thankfully neither of the bullets you took out there were hollow point rounds, otherwise that would’ve turned into a pretty big problem. Still, I’m going to advise that you not move around too much once I’m done. Best not bother that rib if you don’t have to.”
In the time between my rescue and the present, Neera had done a quick inspection of both the wounds I had sustained, determining that she could indeed remove the bullets and dress the injuries. Still, despite being told to lay on my side on the steel floor, I was only paying her half a mind as she patched me up… less even. Because huddled up in the back of the tank with me, gathered together outside the engine compartment hatch, were all the faces that I had yearned to see during every second under Talon captivity. They were all alive and intact, and out of them, only Gunny and Ivy had sustained wounds. Gunny had taken a round to the right shoulder and another to the upper left leg, and Ivy had taken a single hit to her left side, thankfully not damaging anything vital. Neera had already patched them both up from the supplies in Lily’s medical stash, but now each of them was looking back at me with their own degree of anxiety, giving me their undivided focus at my request that they listen to me and the ominous news I had to give to them.
“What’s going on, Nova? What threat is he talking about?” Ivy ventured first, sitting up straight on her haunches at her place by Gunny’s right side. “You look nervous… Nova?”
“I am nervous… I’m terrified…” I replied lowly, wincing and barely choking back a pained grunt as Neera maneuvered the tweezers in my flank wound.
“What happened in there, Nova?” Gunny asked, his tone darkened with protective concern. “What did they do to you?”
They made me open an Old World military bunker… the Guardian Project.
They made me give them a cruise missile platform that they’re going to turn against the southeast… and all of its settlements…
They made me… betray… everypony I know and love…
“They didn’t do anything to me, Gunny… but they found something when I was imprisoned there.” I explained after a sigh, looking to the floor. “They found an Old World facility, a military site buried when the bombs fell all those years ago, one that remained operational to this day… And they found a weapon system inside, one that was used during the war to intercept and destroy balefire missiles and other zebra megaspells… They’re cruise missiles, and… and the Talons are repurposing their defensive functions to make them into offensive weapons that they can launch anywhere… at any time…”
As I’d expected, everypony gave me only their silence, their shocked silence… and stared. Even Blake, laying just out of wing’s reach from me, was looking to me with eyes that showed me that even he was understanding just what kind of a danger the Talons were posing to us now… and more important, to Hopeville.
Everypony realized it together.
“Cruise missiles…” Shore whispered, bowing his head. Beside him, Ivy raised a hoof over her muzzle, eyes wide, and Raemor too looked away with a soft sigh, pursing his lips.
“Your joking… you’ve got to be joking, right?”
But to Gunny’s statement, laced with hope, I slowly shook my head, apologizing a thousand-fold with the sympathetic look I gave him; even him, with all his toughness and courage, was shrinking under the threat. “The Talon General that was stationed in that base told me everything, confident that I wouldn’t escape to warn anypony else.” I answered. “His soldiers worked in that facility all last night after its capture. He’ll launch those missiles today… With everything he talked about, I… I just know he will…”
“But how did he find something like that?” Shore asked, looking back up from the floor. “Surely an installation of such importance during the war would have been heavily fortified with defenses and countermeasures to protect it from invasion.”
Again, I shook my head. “He’d been planning the capture of those bunkers for months, and he knew about the installation for an even longer time. He studied the schematics, found all the weaknesses… acquired all the keys he needed to crack it open…”
Including me…
“That’s the last team…” My ears perked as Ricochet’s voice entered through the break in our own conversation. “That puts us at thirty-one losses total, Amber…”
And that’s when I froze up…
Together my friends looked to the driver seat, a place where I dared only to make a sideways glance to. Amber Dawn was hunched over by Ricochet’s right side, unresponsive to the tank operator’s report. And the other Buckley ponies that I could see from the corner of my eye – I could see them all as they became lost in the number that they’d been given, each of them slumping just slightly… but enough. It was yet another testament to the unity of Buckley’s ponies… but the way that Neera froze in her operation on my wounds… that made the final blow against me, my heart breaking in two at the collective reactions of the tank crew. Sympathy, sorrow… blame – they all rose from nothingness as a single unit, only to come out and say with a voice of fiery severity just what it was that those thirty-one ponies had died for… those thirty-one ponies who belonged to families, had lifelong friends, who likely knew me only as the outsider who stepped before Buckley’s eyes and changed the views of its residents, inspired them to take a daring move that diverted from a legacy of isolationism.
And now they were gone… just like that. Thirty-one souls – the price for my freedom and the freedom of my little brother.
“Look, we have to do something.”
Breaking the silence in but a whisper, cautious and respectful to the mourning tank crew, Gunny looked between me and the others, drawing my eyes back to his worried face. “What?” I asked, swallowing in an effort to clear up the roughness in my voice.
“We have to do something about those missiles.” Gunny reiterated, tapping a hoof against the floor. “We’ve got to get back home and warn Captain Saber. We’ve got to prepare for what’s next best we can.”
But I found myself shaking my head at him. “Gunny, I already told you… the Talons are going to launch those missiles today. We’d never make it home to warn them in time.”
“But with Hopeville being so small, then surely they wouldn’t make it a priority target, right?” he argued. “They might wait… or they might not even attack it at all.”
“You know, that is a possibility.” Shore agreed. “With the Talons so busy with Challenger, they might not use their missiles against the smaller settlements.”
“I hope you’re right… I really hope you’re right.” I replied to them, with no small lack of confidence in their theory. “But my point still stands, and that point is that we need to help a group that we can help to repel a Talon assault, not go to a group far away only to get to them when it’s too late…”
But at the revelation of my true feelings on the matter, Gunny’s eyes partly widened; even Shore seemed a little surprised. “What… you mean you’re not even going to try?” Gunny asked, leaning forward with a puzzled stare. “You could make it back home in hours if you flew there now. You’d be there long before any of us would be.”
A bolt of pain abruptly stabbed into my flank, making me hiss just before I felt as something was pulled out from my wound, a metallic clinking then sounding at Neera’s successful extraction of the first bullet. Letting out a held in breath, I looked back down to the floor, saying, “It’s a two day journey to reach Hopeville on hoof, and even at my best flight speed I wouldn’t make it back home until the evening, maybe even later than that with this broken rib.”
“But it’s our home that’s at stake out there, Nova!” Gunny pressed, voice raised to press his argument. “It’s our job to make sure we do our part to keep Hopeville safe! You can’t tell me that you’re just going to lea-”
But I was stopping him right there. “Did you not just hear Ricochet?!” I interrupted, raising my own voice to a near yell to get his attention. “Thirty-one ponies died back there to make me a free mare again! And none of them hardly knew me as more than a wastelander who changed Buckley’s outlook on life. And yet, for whatever reason, they all were chosen for a mission to rescue me. Now they’ll never see their home again… all because of me…”
“Easy now, senorita.” Ricochet spoke up from his place at the driver seat; he was looking ahead… not at me… “They didn’t die because of you. You didn’t fire the shots that ended them.”
“I was captured by the enemy, and then they came to rescue me only to die in the effort. That makes me the one to blame just as much as pulling the trigger would.” I countered, quickly adding to my companions, “And before any of you try, I’m not going to fight you on this. I know that we should put our home first. That was the attitude we left One Eighty-one with. But after what Buckley just sacrificed for me, I owe it to these ponies to help them fight back against whatever the Talons might throw at them. My capture cost them thirty-one lives, and I’m going to do whatever I can to help them through all this.” I looked among each of my friends individually. “I don’t expect any of you to share the same sentiments. In fact, I’m glad that you’re wanting to get back home quick as you can… and really, I think you should go. I think all of you should go. But I’m going back to Buckley, and if the Talons attack and launch some of those missiles at the base, then I’m going to aid in its defense.”
“Well, what if they don’t?” Ivy asked. “What if those missiles they supposedly have are going to be sent off somewhere else or something?”
“Then I’ll see you all back in Hopeville tomorrow.” I answered her simply.
“… If you won’t go, then somepony else has to.” Gunny replied after an uncomfortable pause, looking away for his eyes to fall upon the circular flight of metal stairs leading to the open exit hatch at the top of Lily’s main cannon. “Even though you’d get there the quickest, I’ll run over there instead and tell Saber everything I’ve heard from you. And hopefully after that, we’ll still have time to figure out how we’re going to defend ourselves from this weapon.”
“Hold on, Gunny.” Reaching a hoof out to block his path to the exit, Shore leaned forward to look him in the eyes. “If Nova is this persistent about going to Buckley’s aid, then she will need good fighters by her side if the Talons launch an attack on the scale that she’s saying they will. I could go back. That way you can stay and help her.”
Turning, Gunny pointed a hoof to the black earth pony. “No. You’re coming with me.” he declared firmly. “I’m going to need a wingpony in case I come across anything on the way home. You remember what we ran into on the way to Buckley. Squads from both the Talons and the Black Blood are appearing more frequently in the region, which means Challenger’s soldiers are occupied elsewhere. It’s becoming a lot more dangerous to travel out there.”
“The point, Gunny, is that at least one of us should stay with Nova and help her.” Raemor suddenly voiced, likewise leaning forward to look him in the eye. “And remember – we were the ones who asked it of Buckley to help us track Nova down. Putting it in Nova’s perspective, we do owe them the help for her rescue and safe return to us.” At his sagely input, I looked to the old unicorn to meet his eyes, giving him only a thin smile despite the appreciation I held for his words.
As for Gunny, he looked a little on the surprised side, as if he had forgotten that what Raemor had reminded him of was indeed the truth. But that surprise turned into resignation as he bowed his head and sighed. “Yeah…” he muttered back. “Yeah, we did…”
“If I might have a word on this…” To my right emerged Amber Dawn, maneuvering past Lily’s starboard gunner and stepping up beside me where I lay.
“Don’t tell me to leave.” I warned lowly. “Buckley has been good to me and my friends… now more than ever. I’m not going while the Talons are making their big move.”
“I’m not going to tell you to leave. In fact, I’m rather touched that you care so much… but I’m going to suggest that you go anyway.” Amber responded. “If the Talons are planning something, then I promise we’ll be ready. You’ve seen us, Nova. You know what we’re capable of, what we have protecting us. And I know you remember being told that we had beat the Talons back once before, ten years ago when they first arrived in the region. We can win again just like we did before, and if every settlement out there is in danger of these cruise missiles, then you should warn your ponies too, and others if you can.”
But at that I shook my head again. “I know Buckley is strong. I know you’ve got powerful tech and skilled fighters, I get that. But like I already said, Hopeville is a day’s flight away from here, more with a broken rib that would force me to stop and catch my breath several times… and I’m scared, Amber… I’m scared that I’ll get there only to find that I was too late to do anything at all… and I can’t take that. I want to go where I know that I can help.”
Amber was silent at that, her mouth opening only to close again as she fought to carry on in her own argument. But after a long pause, with only Lily’s engine breaking what would’ve been another spell of uncomfortable silence, she looked away with a short sigh and gave a single nod. “If that’s what you really want… well… I definitely know some ponies back on base are going to want to know that you’re okay.”
“Pegasus…” From the exit hatch a muffled female voice called, drawing my eyes up to see a steel pony head peering inside, its black visor facing me. “If you really want to go back to where these ponies are going… then if you wish, I could fly to this Hopeville in your place and warn the town myself.”
“… What?” I found myself flinching back in surprise from the sudden and unexpected proposal from my power-armored guardian, who had stuck around to ride atop the tank the whole way after leaving the Talon base. But despite my shock, a much-needed dose of relief quickly replaced it to course through me like a healing potion. “You’d… you’d really do that?” I asked, glancing back to my friends to see their own reactions; both Gunny and Shore were wearing the same surprised face that I was.
“Yes, I would.” came the mare’s answer as she gave a single nod. “I may not have seen what you’ve seen, but a threat like the one you describe can’t just be brushed aside.”
“But you hardly know me… or any of us…” I argued, wincing as another painful jolt rippled in my side; Neera was getting to work on the wound in my side.
But at my case, the mare only shook her head, discarding it immediately. “Like I said before in that base, I came to help another pegasus.” she said. “All I’ll need from you is directions.”
“I guess that settles it then.” Gunny spoke up, uplifted as he rose up to all fours. “I’ll show her the way back to Hopeville… and seeing as how she’ll make it there far faster than Shore and I would, we can stay with Nova along with the rest of us, and Saber will still have a shot at getting a warning.” Turning, he gave me a stern look as he raised a hoof to point at me. “But just so we’re clear, Nova – we make this visit quick, no more than a couple hours. And after we’re done, then we get ourselves home. Got it?”
A plan of action was finally coming together… one that I was more than happy to accept. “Yes.” I replied with a nod, cracking just the faintest of smiles at my friend’s change of heart. “Thank you, Gunny.”
He didn’t smile back.
“So all of you are going to come back to Buckley?” Amber asked, following Gunny as he made his way to the stairs. “Even the little one, there?”
Blake…
My baby brother, already listening intently to each of us, jolted to alertness at Dawn’s question, and immediately he sprung for me, coming to a stop by my head and hugging me around my neck in a quick and startling move. “I’m not leaving my big sister again!” he declared hotly, putting on a bold glare as he pulled me in to a protective embrace. “Not after we got taken from home! I’m staying!”
“Blake. I don’t think you should come with us.” Gunny spoke up, softer to try and calm the sudden defensiveness in the colt’s tone. “You should go with that pegasus up there, climb up onto her back and stay airborne where it’s at least a little safer until you get back to Hopeville.”
But Blake shook his head with vigor; he wasn’t having any of it. “No! No, no, no! I’m not leaving my big sister! I don’t want to be taken from her again! Not again! Not again!!”
“Blake, hush…” I reached out to him as his words became more frantic… more frightened… and I pulled him in close, hugging him tight against me and running a hoof through his mane as his breath quickened. “Hush…” I encouraged, wincing as a whimper escape my little brother’s mouth in reply.
“Not again…” he repeated weakly, his words choked as he struggled to keep himself composed. “Not… not again…”
“Nova…”
Gunny, and the others as well, were all looking to me, looking to where Blake buried his head into my neck to keep me from being taken away again. “I’ll keep him close.” I assured. “And if something does happen, I’ll make sure he stays out of harm’s way.”
Thankfully, the big unicorn didn’t press, standing down with a single nod and instead trotting to the stairs to head up to the exit hatch. “So… I guess that means we’re all going then?” Ivy spoke up in question, timid as she watched Blake.
“Yeah.” I answered the gray mare, looking to her as Gunny disappeared through the hatch to join our companion outside. “We’re all going.”
“Then make sure each of you has your weapons and gear ready to go.” Amber warned, returning to the front of the crew compartment. “We’ve got an extra battle saddle that we can spare for you, Nova. It’s got two semi-automatics on it, precision seven six two millimeter battle rifles.”
“When I get done with this rib and bandage her, then I’ll help her get into that saddle.” Neera piped up to the commander. “I’ll need to modify it with some padding so that the wound won’t bother her too much in flight. Doc Preston’s going to be the only one who can fix this properly.”
“That’s fine.” Amber replied with a toss of her mane. “But since she’s coming with us, I don’t want her coming in weaponless. We don’t know what we’re going to find when we get back to Buckley…” Then, she looked back to me… eyes showing the anxiety that her face was hiding. “But just in case you are right, Nova, I’m going to order all our teams to be combat-ready and to assume that they’ll be entering another battlefield.”
I gave her a slow nod, flinching at another jab of pain in my side. “That’s a good idea.”
“I just hope to the Goddesses that you’re wrong.” Turning away, Amber stepped up by Ricochet, following the driver’s eyes out through the viewing port to trace the route back to Buckley. “I really hope you’re wrong…”
“Believe me, Amber…” I responded, equally low as I looked down to Blake, meeting him eye to eye and running my hoof through his mane again. “So do I…”
*** *** ***
“Buckley ATC, this is Amber Dawn aboard Lily, come in…”
Though Amber Dawn spoke right into the radio by the driver’s seat, I could barely hear her voice over the resonant thunder of Lily’s engine. Ricochet was pushing the tank to its top speed, and had been doing so for what must’ve been almost two hours by now. The grinding treads sounded clearly through the open hatch atop the main cannon, and even the engine compartment, designed to lessen the noise of the engine, couldn’t keep us from having to speak up when we talked.
Now, with my bloodied muzzle cleaned and the back half of my torso completely mummified with bandages, I was up and preparing with everypony else aboard Lily. With Neera’s help, I was rigged out with a completely new battle saddle that had been stored away in an emergency weapons locker in the back right corner of the crew compartment. Comprised of the promised twin seven six two millimeter rifles, with plentiful ammo for each stored away in a pair of accompanying auto loaders, the rig as a whole felt a little more on the heavier side, or at least more so than my own saddle. This wasn’t helped by the bulkier protective padding that had been added to the saddle’s two torso straps by Neera, her failsafe to prevent my bandaged and still broken rib from worsening further during flight; the heavier weight of my new rig along with the lack of body armor created an imbalance that made me privately miss my old but familiar gear, which was, according to Raemor, waiting for me back at Buckley in Mother Shimmer’s silo.
“Are you sure we’re close enough, Ricochet?”
“I’m positive, ma’am. We should definitely be in signal range of the control tower by now.” Ricochet answered the commander. “I followed our original tracks back, and I recognize the terrain.”
“We’re not seeing or hearing anything up here, sergeant.” From above, the guardsmare with us, Brooke, poked her head in through the hatch. “There’s no smoke, no lights, no gunfire. Buckley looks quiet.”
“Keep trying, Amber.” Gunny encouraged, already trotting towards the stairs and ascending them to the hatch to take a look outside for himself. “They’ve got to be there.”
“Buckley ATC, this is Master Sergeant Amber Dawn aboard Lily.” Dawn called into the communicator mic once again, speaking slower and with more volume. “Buckley ATC, come in. I need a situation report…”
But again, nothing came through the radio to respond, leaving the tank crew in tense silence as each looked towards the radio, anticipating an answer… any answer. “I don’t get it…” Ivy chimed in, leaning in next to me as she set her dark green SMG at her front hooves. “Why aren’t they picking up if nothing’s going on outside? If it’s quiet, then they must be okay.”
“I don’t know.” I replied to her, reaching a hoof up to situate the firing bit of my new saddle. “I don’t get it either.”
“Do you think they got hit with that new Talon weapon you told us about, Nova?” Amber called from the front, looking over her shoulder to me. “You said they’ve got a weapon that knocks out all electrical and magic-based systems, right?”
But I shook my head at her. “No. The weapon creates a disk of light that stays in the air for a few minutes. We’d see it if they’d actually used the thing.”
With a sigh, Amber turned away and back to the radio, leaning in to the mic to speak once more. “Buckley ATC, this is Master Sergeant Amber Dawn! Does anypony read us out there?”
“Sergeant!”
A response!
“Sergeant, this is ATC, Private Irons.” came the voice of a stallion. “Damn good to hear your voice again, ma’am.”
The buck on the other end of the com link, Irons, sounded tired, out-of-breath, and everypony on the tank crew picked up on it as they stared to Amber from their stations. “What took you so long to respond, Private?” Dawn questioned. “What’s the situation?”
“Commander Tracer was giving out new orders, ma’am.” Irons replied. “The tower just spotted possible enemy movement out to the east, but the terrain’s too hilly over there, so Archer’s heading out to take a closer look. He came back a while ago, told us what you ran into out there and told us about what Nova discovered. Mother Shimmer and Tracer are already organizing the guard, and the base is on high alert.”
“What about the defenses?”
“The anti-air battery’s hot, and all howitzer crews are repositioning their guns as we speak, ma’am.” the stallion explained between breaths. “Still, I’m sure everypony’s going to feel a whole lot better when you bring Lily back.”
“We’re no more than five minutes out now. We’re coming in from the north and we already have a visual on the base. If hostiles are coming, we’ll get there before they do.” Dawn assured him, leaning up closer to the mic as she quickly added, “But now that I’ve got you on the horn, listen up. On the way back, Nova informed us of something else the Talons have, some sort of new weapon they didn’t pack ten years ago.”
“Another weapon? You’ve got to be kidding…”
“No, I’m not. It’s something the Talons call an M.I.C.. It’s an area-effect weapon that knocks out electric and magic-powered systems for a time.” Amber explained. “When Nova saw this weapon in action, the Talons used it to infiltrate an Old World military bunker that was equipped with a big enough automated turret grid to hold back an entire company of ponies. When they used it, the weapon fried the whole grid long enough for a team to infiltrate the facility and shut down the defenses from the inside. Nova didn’t get time to tell Archer during the escape, so I need you to tell Mother Shimmer, Tracer, and Tech Sergeant Lela about this and try and see if they can come up with any way at all to counter that new weapon.”
“As if cruise missiles weren’t bad enough…” Irons huffed.
“The Legion’s definitely been busy since the last time they showed up.” Amber agreed, leaning back from the mic. “But we still need to be ready just like last time. Get moving, Irons. Tell the others what to look out for and make sure to spread the word. There’s a chance that all this could just blow right over us, but I’m not going to risk Buckley’s safety on hopeful thinking.”
“I hear you there, ma’am.” the stallion wholeheartedly agreed. “I’ll let the others know you’re almost back, and we’ll have the gate open for you when you arrive.”
“Thank you.”
With that, Amber stepped away from the radio, coming around to show us all a much-relieved smile. “Looks like we made it in time, everypony.” she announced to the crew, each of them beginning to relax. “We’ll be back home shortly. When we arrive, each of you is to stay at your post, and Lily will remain online and battle ready. Once through the gate, you’ll be on patrol around the base through the rest of the day to help the artillery spotters identify anything hostile trying to breach the fences. We’re not going to relax until we’re sure the Talons won’t try and come after us again.”
“Amber, this is Tracer calling from ATC. Can you hear me?”
Another voice came over the radio, a familiar masculine tone that belonged to Buckley’s second-in-command, a voice that snappily drew Dawn’s attention. The amber mare hastily spun back around and returned to the radio, quickly calling back, “Tracer, I hear you. Are things okay over there?”
“Things are a little hectic right now, but we’re fine.” the commander answered. “What about you and the task force? Did everypony make it out of Marefax?”
“No… not all of us.” Amber responded after a short pause; I looked away from her. “Thirty-one were killed before we got out.”
A sigh came through the other end of the com link. “I guess Archer was just waiting to tell me when I didn’t have so much to organize here.” Tracer lowly remarked. “Alright. Private Irons said you’re less than five minutes out. Is that right?”
“Yes, we’re almost back. And the rest of the task force should be returning within the next couple hours. Our retreat wasn’t as organized as I would’ve liked.”
“That’s fine. I’ll see you in a little-”
KZZZZZZT!!
Together, both Amber and Ricochet jerked away from the radio, the rest of the tank crew snapping startled eyes to the front as the radio exploded with loud grating static. And simultaneously, from up above, I saw at the upper edge of my vision a swelling light outside the open hatch, reaching a peak level of intensity in a mere second before settling into a lingering bright white.
“Tracer?? Tracer come in!”
My ears pinned back against my head as I shot up to all four hooves, my eyes locked to the hatch just as Brooke poked her head in. “Sergeant! An explosive just went off over Buckley airspace!”
“Tracer?! Tracer?!” With a growl, Amber leaned in by Ricochet to look out the front viewing hole. “I lost him! Ricochet, get us there now!”
“I’ve already got her at max speed!” the yellow earth pony responded, hooking his forelegs tightly around his twin driving control sticks. “We’ll be there shortly!”
“Nova, Shore, get up here!” From beyond the hatch, Gunny urgently shouted for us, and at his word, Shore was the first to run for the exit stairs, already racing up to the hatch as Ivy followed close behind.
“Nova, what’s going on??” Blake piped up behind me, catching my leg as I trotted by.
But there was no time for explanation. “You stay put, Blake! Stay right there!” I ordered, sidestepping him and moving to the stairs, pausing only long enough to catch a glimpse of my brother’s anxious eyes as I looked to Raemor. “Raemor, would you take care of Blake for me?”
Thankfully, despite the suddenness of my request, the old unicorn waved a hoof to urge me ahead. “Of course, Nova. Go.”
“But Nova, I-”
“STAY THERE, BLAKE!!” Tearing myself away, forcing down the twinge of guilt brought by my sharply raised voice, I scrambled up the stairs and through the exit to emerge into the open air. A strong breeze immediately flowed through my mane at the speed of Lily’s passage, her treads grinding and creaking and her engine growling as I pulled myself back outside. But it was right when I got all four hooves back onto flat steel that my ears perked at a new sound, an ominous and frighteningly familiar noise that brought my eyes to the light that had swelled to life. Buckley Air Force Base – its structures were nearly pitch black under the literal screen of sparkling white light that now hovered over the base. And from within its perimeter came the wailing cry of an air raid siren, its echo washing over us as I came to a stop by Gunny and Shore. “Buckley’s about to get hit…” Gunny spoke up, raising a foreleg to point off to our left.
But I had already seen what he had just now recognized. Just outside the M.I.C. blast, rising up over a shallow hill to the east of the base, was a whole mess of black blobs against the cloudy sky that numbered over a dozen strong. And each of them was moving together, shifting and making room for one another to form up in a staggered line. “Those are vertibucks…” Even from here I could distinguish the twin rotary engines of the Talons’ aerial vehicles, see the wings that attached them to the bodies of their aircrafts, see the whirling propellers.
The Talons were preparing an all-out assault…
“Mother Celestia… we need to get Lily in there now!”
Looking over my shoulder, one of the two guard bucks standing at the rear of the tank turned for the hatch and approached, the second continuing to stare out with wide eyes. “Yeah, and screw going through the gate!” he replied. “We just need to plow through the fence!”
“No!” I came about to face them both, startling them to a halt. “No, those vertibucks are staying outside that light screen for a reason. They won’t function if they go into that light, and Lily’s going to shut down too if she goes in there. Amber has to wait until that light screen goes away before she can bring the tank back to Buckley.”
“We don’t have time to wait!” Brooke argued, stepping up between her companions. “What if there’s a ground force coming in, too? We need to be there!”
“Didn’t you hear Nova?” Gunny demanded, coming up by my right side. “That thing they’ve got takes out all automated systems, electrical and magical! If you go into Buckley, then this tank’s going to be vulnerable!”
“But you could still attack from long range.” Shore suddenly offered, Ivy trotting over to join us. “If there’s any place where you might be able to dig in and possibly hide, you could surprise those vertibucks while they wait. It would be tricky, but until that light goes away, you won’t be able to do much more than that if you engage now.”
“Yeah… yeah, that’s better than just waiting. And I’m sure Cobalt could pull it off…” Brooke replied, looking nervously between her holstered revolver and Buckley; only the raid siren continued to wail from within. “Okay, we’ll tell the Sergeant. But what about all of you?”
“Lily might need the infantry support if any of those vertibucks divert from their formation and come after us.” one of the stallions chimed in, trotting back to the hatch and stepping inside. “We’ve got a pair of anti-air launchers stowed away in the port locker down there that we can use.”
“Maybe we should stay here, then?” Ivy asked.
“Yeah. We can stay put and come in on Lily once it’s safe, keep the tank covered while we wait.” Gunny said, moving for the hatch.
“You stay. I’m going to fly ahead to Buckley and help there.” I declared in reply, snapping out my wings and giving them a quick test flap. “I want to see what’s going on.”
“Are you sure about that?” Gunny asked, stopped midstride as I looked over my shoulder to him. “You’d be safer out here, and you’d have more cover with the rest of us watching your back.”
“I know. But I’ll be more helpful over there.” I argued. “They’ll need everypony they can get, and they’ll need them now.”
But my unicorn friend pursed his lips, swallowing back what was undoubtedly a quickly-formed counter to persuade me otherwise. Instead, he replied with a throaty sigh, shaking his head as he planted his forehooves on the main gun. “Fine… but you better damn well make sure you watch yourself out there until we meet up with you again.” At his words, I found myself fighting the urge to shrink at the glare he gave me, one that he held steadfastly through a short moment of silence to let his words sink in. But as quick as it had come, it softened away when he more somberly added, “We don’t need to lose both you and Grace… I know Shore couldn’t handle that… and I don’t think I’d be able to either.”
For just a split moment my breath caught itself in my throat, forcing me to swallow as the two of us stared. It was a harsh reminder of what we were all putting at the back of our minds right now, despite how much we didn’t want to do so… despite how much we just wanted to sit down and mourn together. But with a single sad nod, I gave Gunny my promise to do as he wished… fuel for a determined fire coming to life in me.
“I’d suggest you go to one of the two surface access points between the runways, those two little buildings on the median. You’ll probably find Commander Tracer directing the effort to get all non-combatants into the maintenance tunnels.” Brooke called up from my other side. “That air raid siren is the order for all the civilians to get underground.”
Giving her a quick nod, I faced front and crouched, preparing to spring. “That’s exactly who I need to find.”
“Alright. Then we’ll see you over there, Nova. Good luck.”
And that was my cue.
Backing up a step for a running start, I threw myself forward and leapt off the side of Lily, pumping my wings with steady strokes to pull myself aloft. Quickly achieving a steady pace despite the throbbing ache of my rib, I leveled myself out low over the surface and hooked right to face the Buckley, that familiar tunnel vision setting in as my eyes landed on the base. The whole place was a mirror version of the National Guard Bunkers, glowing like its own miniature sun from the sheet of light hovering above; the M.I.C. charge itself looked to have detonated over the center of the base. As I ate up the remaining distance between me and Buckley, I could see that the base’s sheer size had prevented it from being fully covered by the screen, with the northwest and southwest corners illuminated only dimly. But from within the base suddenly erupted a tremendous blast, a concussive thunderclap followed in short succession by a second, third, fourth, and after a short pause, even a fifth. And from within the light I caught a glimpse of lingering smoke trails from a volley of heavy rounds, coming from behind Buckley’s three great hangars.
With Buckley firing the first shots, I pulled up upon spotting the fences of the base’s northwest corner, climbing to the rooftop level of the hangars as I entered the base’s airspace. From here I immediately found three of the giant turrets that made up Buckley’s anti-air battery. And like the National Guard Bunkers, all three of them were spitting up sheets of sparks from their pedestals, their automated components locked up by the Talons’ spell. And beyond them, coming into perfect view as I winged over the rooftop of the leftmost hangar, was the bases twin runways, with a whole mass of ponies running frantically to and fro about them. What once was just a flat plot of land was now being turned into its own massive staging area. All along the east airstrip, a massive firing line bristling with gun barrels was being set up through the use of steel barricades and sandbag walls. Fifty and thirty caliber HMGs, grenade machineguns, and even tripod-mounted miniguns made up an array of over two dozen fortified heavy weapon nests, each of which in turn was guarded by its own squad of infantry that was setting up their own barricades for cover. Just behind them, occupying a stretch of the dirt median between the two runways, was a company of over a hundred soldiers that were scattering to their assigned positions. And mixed within the second line was two of the base’s Old World military transport wagons, situated parallel to the runways and dug in tight within a wall of their own sandbags. And behind them, making the third and final line, was eight of Buckley’s mighty howitzers spaced at wide intervals along the whole length of the west runway; three were still being locked down by their crews, the others undergoing hasty reloading.
At the heart of the frantic activity were the two squat square buildings nestled between the runways, one just outside the base’s center, and the second at its north end. A thick and congested crowd had formed outside each structure, and from the two residential sectors on the base’s east side came even more ponies, galloping out from their homes to where additional soldiers were herding those who couldn’t fight to the base’s underground access points. Even as I angled in for the building at the base’s center, the balefire missile silo access, I could see that things were moving rather smoothly, with the crowd already shrinking down as noncombatants filed inside in a tight yet organized pack. And as I came around, slowing myself in the air to circle back to my target structure, I could see five guards stationed to either side of the entrance, formed up side by side along the front wall as each shouted their encouragement for the evacuees to hightail it to their underground shelter; and among them, standing apart from his subordinates while still aiding the evacuation, was the familiar pale red earth pony that was Buckley’s second-in-command.
Thump…
But just as I found Commander Tracer within the mob, a soft thump of deep sound rippled its way through the frenzy below, with a flash of light like slow lightning further brightening the light screen above.
Thump…
A second light pulse followed right after it, drawing me to a hover as I scanned the east horizon for the source.
Thump…
But when a third flash came next, I understood only then that the light was coming not from the ground… but from above. My blood went cold, my ears pinning back flat against my head as realization hit me like a bullet. When I dared to crane my head back to look, I could just make out through the light screen, which was already beginning to dim, a wide circular patch of pure blue in place of the natural cloud cover, the very sky split apart by a trio of bright rippling shockwaves as three blazing white fireballs plummeted down toward Buckley like meteors…
The missiles…
The thunder of the three Guardian missiles’ thruster engines begun to swell as they screamed towards their targets, and with a cry I flew back the way I’d come to get clear. But I had only just righted myself in the air when my whole world seemed to explode around me, engulfing me in a deafening and merciless roar. The very air convulsed from the tremendous blast, the successive shockwave from the missile’s impact smashing into me to throw me violently from the air as a second explosion meshed with the first. I could only feel myself screaming as I tumbled head over tail, a wave of heat from the first detonation splashing over me as I flailed for any kind of purchase, desperately fighting to keep my wings open to catch the air again. But the wind only buffeted my wings as I tumbled, a third explosion coming to life, and I couldn’t get myself realigned before my efforts ground to a halt all at once. I slammed back-first onto a concrete surface, my injured rib sending a blast of crushing agony through my whole body as I bounced from the impact, skipping against the same surface once more before I went tumbling down in yet another fall. Sight then returned to me from the initial shock, only long enough for me to see the dirt before I struck the ground a final time, landing square on my stomach.
Finally the spinning came to a stop, the only silver lining as I lay in the dirt. Immediately I broke out in a coughing fit, which served only to further torment my broken rib as I pulled my right foreleg back to plant a hoof on the ground. My coughs came as ragged thuds of sound to my ringing ears, accompanied by a chain of five sharp claps, another volley from Buckley’s howitzers that combined with the continuing rise and fall of the raid siren. Pulling back my other front leg back to get another hoof under me, I forced myself up off the dirt, finally orienting myself enough to look around. To my left, Buckley’s northern residential sector had taken a direct hit, and the impact had obliterated well over half of the shacks, tents, and old barracks buildings that had made the homes of many of Buckley’s civilians. The subsequent shockwave had leveled even more of them beyond the impact point, and now, only a great gaping crater remained in their place, over which hung an ominous pillar of rolling black smoke. Just outside the wreckage, civilians were running for their lives, their panicked screaming reaching me even through the shellshock that suppressed my hearing. Past Buckley’s front firing line and amidst the panicked crowd, most of which was running for the underground access point to the north, I counted up four pairs of soldiers as they dragged injured civilians behind cover, a dozen more leaping from their posts to go to the aid of others. Among the first to be dragged back was an unconscious older unicorn stallion, half of his left foreleg completely severed from the rest of him. Another was a heavily burned earth pony stallion, likewise unmoving. And another victim still was a screaming young mare, her torso ripped open at the center from the blast, the wide gash gushing blood as she thrashed in the hold of the soldiers bringing her back to safety.
I didn’t dare to think how many bodies were beyond the east runway.
Breathing heavily, each breath stabbing mercilessly at my broken rib as I got myself to all fours, I looked ahead to find myself facing the silo entrance building, having bounced off its rooftop to crash land just behind it. Above its ceiling was the top of a second pillar of thick smoke, ominously close to me as it towered high above the surface; the second missile looked to have impacted the runway median close by. And looking to my right, I found the third smoke pillar a short distance away billowing up to the left of the ATC tower’s top level, the only part of it visible over the roof; a building had been destroyed, evident by the stone and metal chunks that had been flung skyward, now coming back down.
But just as I got myself to a steady stand, I immediately felt a foreleg as it draped itself over my back. With a sharp tug I was pulled stumbling back away from the building, spinning around to find the wide eyes of an armored mare, an orange earth pony with a short red mane. “Nova, are you okay?!”
The shellshock from the missile was only slowly clearing out from my senses, but still I could hear the question from the mare I recognized as Kenzie, one of the wagon gunners from the Marefax expedition. “Kenzie…” Coughing again to try and clear my throat, I kept close to the earth pony as she led me parallel to the west runway, the two of us passing by one of the howitzers as its crew reloaded the massive cannon. “Kenzie, I’ve got to find… I’ve got to find Tracer!”
Amidst a fresh wave of painful coughing, I managed to spit out an answer explaining myself to her. But as I staggered my way along, leaning up against the mare for support, she promptly shook her head. “Tracer’s getting the rest of the civilians underground!” she replied, looking ahead. “You’re not going to get to him in this panic!”
Indeed, the screams of Buckley’s non-combatants that had yet to be evacuated from the surface was a reminder of that truth. And looking back over my shoulder as I moved, I saw that the once organized evacuation of a once compliant crowd into the silo access had disintegrated into utter chaos. Many of the ponies remaining in the mob were now shoving their way up to safety, clogging the entrance and hindering their progress all the more; the missiles had completely shattered any hope of a calm and quick evacuation, instilling only a deep and crippling fear of the next impending strike.
With a final rough nudge of encouragement, Kenzie guided me through the final stretch to her destination, and as I looked to the front again, I found that she had led me behind one of the two stationary cargo carriers in Buckley’s second firing line, likely her own place of deployment; close by was a quartet of unicorn guards, all four working to finish stacking up the final sandbags of the improvised barrier. “Kenzie!” As we came to a stop, the orange mare trotted back around in front of me. “If I can’t get to Tracer, then maybe you could tell me what’s going on, and then tell me where I might be needed!”
But once more she shook her head, raising a hoof to point to my chest. “I’m not sure if you’re in any condition to be doing much, especially after that fall!” she retorted, her voice becoming a little less distorted for me to pick up on the concerned note in her tone. “I saw you go down, and you’re damn lucky! But whatever injury you bandaged up there is starting to bleed again!”
“I’ll be fine!” I shouted back, forcing myself to stand normally despite the protests of my rib; the fall had definitely set back Neera’s treatment… and considerably, too. “Just tell me what’s happening!”
Both of us jerked as the howitzers let off another volley, this time all eight guns firing one after the next in rapid succession. “This lightshow the Talons put on jammed all our coms!” Kenzie explained, leaning in close. “Archer’s flying back and forth to report enemy movements to us until we can use our radios again! Last time he checked in, the enemy was mobilizing a whole infantry battalion of at least six hundred to the east! They’re supported by twenty vertibucks, a dozen griffins, and ten armored wagons! The howitzers are putting fire on them while they mobilize, but I think-”
Thump…
Oh Goddesses…
Thump…
“MISSILES!!”
“INCOMING!! INCOMING!!”
Together Kenzie and I scrambled for cover, throwing ourselves against the wagon as the same horrifying thunder grew into a deafening scream. And again, no resistance met the incoming missiles. One after the next they struck, one on the other side of the wagon and the second behind me and to the south. Despite my ringing ears, buzzing louder from the fresh detonations, I immediately spun back around and stepped from the wagon to look for the impacts. One had hit at the end of the west runway, and my ears pinned back at the sight of a howitzer barrel jutting up from the missile’s blast crater, shrouded in smoke. And to my left, I found that the second missile had been even more devastating, having made a direct hit on Buckley’s spark generator building neighboring the church; the building was almost entirely flattened, only the north wall standing amidst the raining debris.
“We’ve got to do something about those missiles!!” Whirling back around, I found Kenzie as she and the four guards with us got back up to their hooves. “Kenzie, when are those turrets coming back online?! They should be recovering from the interference!” Looking up, I could see that the M.I.C. screen had dissolved away to a thinner veil now, giving us all a full view of the blue sky that had come from where the missiles had parted the clouds. “This screen’s weakened, so those turrets should be reactivating any moment now!”
“I don’t know when they’ll be back up!” Kenzie shouted back from her place by the wagon. “Lela’s probably got to restart the whole damn system or something!”
“It looks like that missile didn’t punch through to the underground level of the generator building!” One of the unicorns called, likewise scoping out the damage. “We should just be glad the generators didn’t get hit!”
“HEY!!”
Suddenly, a voice called from above us, the stallion taking up the call again as he approached us quickly from the north. Archer was winging in toward us, slowing in the air to draw himself to a hover over the wagon; though he appeared unscathed, the steel blue stallion was breathing heavily. “Archer! Are you okay?!”
“Kenzie, get ready!” he spoke instead, dodging me to look to the orange mare. “The Talons are moving their whole battalion in all at once, and their vertibucks are forming up behind them! Once this screen’s gone, we’ll be engaging enemy vehicles!”
“Roger that!”
Right away Kenzie made her way to the support steps on the wagon’s front left corner, climbing up to the grenade machinegun mounted up top. “Nova!” Now Archer was facing me as he hovered. “If you can fly, then I need your help!”
I gave him a nod, snapping my wings out wide. “I’m fine, Archer! What do you need me to do?!”
“I’ve got to warn our guards that the Talons are coming in!” he explained. “I need you to get to a couple of the howitzer teams and tell them to redirect their fire from five hundred meters to two hundred! That’ll keep them on target so they can land more shells on the enemy before they arrive! Once you get two or three of them to adjust, the other teams should see it and follow their lead!”
“Got it!”
“And when you’re done with that, get up to the sniper nest at the top of the ATC tower!” he quickly added, already flying past. “I want you sniping, and our snipers up there have an extra rifle that you can use!”
And with that he was already speeding away towards the far end of the runway. As sudden as the orders were, I was brought back to focus now that I had an order to follow, and with a grunt I jumped skyward and pumped my wings to catch the air. But as I got off the ground, I already found a guard flagging me down, waving for me to catch my attention. He was part of the nearest howitzer team, two of his five crew mates using their combined telekinesis to lift one of the heavy shells from its place in a barricaded pile of ammo and float it over to their gun’s open receiver.
“Outsider! Over here!” came the unicorn’s call as I made my way over. “Did Archer tell you what’s going on?!”
“He told me that the Talons are moving their force in to engage!” I answered, coming to a hover in front of him. “You need to adjust your fire from five hundred meters to two hundred so that you can stay on target! I’ve got to tell the other teams to do the same!”
“Shit… alright, you’ve got it! I’ll tell the others here! You get moving!”
Banking right I lined myself up with the runway and poured on the speed, as much as my damaged rib would allow. The howitzer that was the farthest down the line was positioned in front of the northernmost hangar, a residential hangar if I remembered right. This crew of four unicorns and two earth ponies had already loaded their gun fresh, and one of them was already at the firing lever. “HEY! WAIT UP! HEY!” Thankfully, the crew one and all heard me out over the raid siren as I drew up to their position. “The Talons are almost here! Archer spotted them closing in on the base, so he needs you to adjust your fire from five hundred meters to two hundred to keep putting shells on them while they’re still on the move!”
“Understood! We’ll adjust!”
And that was all I paid mind to before I spun in the air and moved on to the next team, retracing my flight path to catch the other guns I had passed by. But the next team, stationed just past the first perpendicular lane connecting the runways, was already locked and loaded, its crew in position to fire. With a jarring clap, the howitzer barrel recoiled sharply as it slung the round into the air; farther down the runway, at the opposite end, two more guns followed suit.
As I angled in for the gun crew, one of the loaders paused as she caught me in her peripheral sight. “Hey, we saw you go down! Are you okay, outsider?!”
“I’m fine!” I assured quickly, snapping a hoof up to point eastward. “Listen! Archer spotted the Talons moving their force in! They’re coming and they’re bringing in everything they’ve got, so he needs all the howitzer teams to adjust their fire from five hundred meters to two hundred!” The unicorn mare, eyes briefly going wide, gave me a quick wave in reply as one of her crew mates joined her, to whom she promptly relayed my instructions.
And with that I was off again for the fourth team. However, I found that this team, as well as the three others farther down, were beginning to alter the angle of their guns, just as Archer had said. The howitzer barrels were beginning to lower as they were adjusted, dropping down until they were positioned at only a slight incline from the ground to mimic the position of those whose crews I’d already warned. Now the field was changing as I made my way down the runway and towards the ATC tower. Thankfully, the area was cleared of a majority of the non-combatants, with only a couple guard squads helping the remaining injured reach the safety of the underground. The howitzers had reached a unified angle once again, and already two more fired their next shots with the new corrections complete. And with them, the front line was coming together as the infantry finished up their last minute checkups on the fortifications that now thickly dotted the terrain.
Thump…
Thump…
Two pulses of light augmented the dying M.I.C. screen, and with a gasp I snapped my eyes back up to the sky as I ground to a stop. Two more Guardian missiles were on their way, engines blazing white as the warheads plummeted down. But suddenly, from the southeast corner, a piercing buzz of gunfire erupted over the base, and before I could look, one of the two missiles detonated in the air, a ring of fire rippling out as the second missile blazed by. And only a second later, a smaller rocket raced in from the south on an intercept course for the second missile, smashing straight into it and likewise detonating the second missile. The missile exploded right over the church, the resulting fireball bathing it in red-orange light as its windows shattered from the explosive force. But though the anti-air turret on the church continued to spark, still unable to recuperate from the interference, I saw from my place the turret atop the concert hall, the great weapon pointed to the airspace above the church with its heavy multi-barreled chain gun spinning.
It was no longer suppressed by the M.I.C.!
With that spark of assurance I pushed myself forward and double-timed it toward the ATC tower. As I rose, lining up to the sniper nest, two more howitzers sounded off together, two more trails of smoke materializing as their shells streaked low over Buckley and out to the east. And as I followed their path, I could see for the first time the Talons on the march. The Legion had assembled what looked like a small invading army to attack Buckley, with whole blocks of black-armored infantry, easily with a hundred soldiers each, stretching across the full length of Buckley’s eastern perimeter. At the very front of their battalion, true to Archer’s intel, ten bulky armored wagons, looking to be larger all around than Buckley’s, were rolling up as a line and already nearly upon the fence. And above them, the Talons’ air force of twenty vertibucks remained waiting for the last light of the near fully dissolved M.I.C. charge to fade. Behind them, I could spot the fresh craters from the howitzer shells; a good number of them looked to have found their marks, judging by the unmoving black spots I could see against the otherwise brown earth.
But from the front of the force suddenly emerged multiple bright flashes, and I could see with a start a whole volley of missiles just before they struck the fence, all ten punching wide holes into the barrier. And right after, the air over the Talon force flashed like a strobe light as their vertibucks opened fire all together. By the dozens, rockets streaked out from the aerial vehicles’ stub wings, combining into a terrible barrage that rained down on Buckley’s troops like so many spears. I screamed as the base was strafed from east to west, the unguided rockets cruelly carpet-bombing a great swath of the runways, some reaching even farther back and blasting holes in the hangars behind me, and others still falling short of the firing lines to chip away at the residential sectors.
As fast as it had come, the devastating volley was over. But the Talons’ sudden display of their own startling brute force had thrown most of Buckley’s defenders into total disarray. Over a third of the entire base was now pockmarked with small smoldering blast craters, and the casualties from the surprise barrage… I could see scattered wreckage where multiple machinegun nests had once been set up, and even from my place in the air, I could see unmoving bodies amidst the scrambling guardsponies.
Thump…
No… no, not again!
Thump…
As the guards miraculously unharmed by the rocket barrage scrambled to get into whatever cover they could find, the familiar pulses of light flashed over the base, another two Guardian missiles coming in fast. But once more, a violent continuous buzz of gunfire made its angry reply, the concert hall turret responding to the threat. And yet neither of the missiles detonated from the attack, and with alarm I saw that the now functional turret was engaging a pair of vertibucks that had broken off from their formation to enter the weapon’s sensor range.
They were distracting the turret from the incoming missiles!
But with a shocked jolt, I snapped my gaze left as a second turret erupted with a thunderous voice. The AA turret on the nearby munitions hangar had recovered enough from the Talons’ spell to operate once more, and having snapped up in its housing to point skyward, the heavy chain gun was burning hot orange as it roared. But at that, I forced myself to turn away, despite how much I wanted to see for myself if the revived turret hit its targets. As I threw myself back into flight, climbing up the final stretch toward the sniper nest, I heard as one missile detonated above the base, close by but still a fair distance above. But at the same time, the second missile had exploded… only at ground level. It had made impact farther behind me, but even then I could still feel the shockwave of air from the powerful warhead.
Undoubtedly modified, just like Vance had promised…
“Damn it, how many more are they going to send?!” That was the question I asked myself as I drew up to the glassless windows of the ATC’s sniper nest, my teeth clamped together behind closed lips as I growled at my own silent words; now I had a real urge to kill… to see blood behind a rifle scope.
Inside the sniper den were two stallions, one ash-colored earth pony and one medium-green unicorn each by the two open eastern windows as they reloaded their rifles, mounted atop the window ledges with their own bipods and modified with suppressors. The tower itself had been cleared of everything that was non-essential, with only the old bolted-down terminals and monitoring stations remaining in their original places; the far wall was occupied by a quartet of large duffle bags, extra ammo and equipment spilled out from their open mouths.
“Nova!! Get in there and get ready!!” From behind me, I recognized Archer’s voice as he shouted my way, and looking over my shoulder, I found him racing in from the runways. “We’re going to be in the thick of it in a matter of seconds now!!” Facing front as he flew by, I followed him in the rest of the way, the two of us slowing to a hover by the open windows. “You’re rifle is in here!” he added, giving a sharp flap of his wings to zip right through one of the windows. “Come on, let’s get you geared up!”
Already, the sharp cracks of long rifles combining with sustained bursts of machinegun fire alerted me to the first skirmishes on the ground, and copying Archer’s move, I hastily threw myself through the open window to come to a landing inside the tower. “Am I sticking with you?” I asked, tucking my wings against my sides as he trotted over to the far end of the chamber.
“Coms are still down. Until they’re back up and Mother Shimmer and Tracer can speak to everypony again, I’m one of the base’s acting commanders, just like Ricochet, Bolt, and a couple others.” he explained, looking back to me. “Since we can’t attack from the air with so many vertibucks out there, I want you with me so your sharper eyes can be behind a rifle scope. And aside from that, you need to be somewhere that isn’t as physically taxing. That broken rib of yours is going to slow you down in a dogfight, so that’s the last thing I want you doing.”
As if on cue, my rib provoked me to wince at the realization that Archer had discovered my injury. But I said nothing as he about-faced, reaching to bite down on the stock of a rifle suspended over an open duffle bag on its assembled bipod. And lifting it up quickly, he turned about and came back to lay it at my hooves. “This isn’t like your three-o-eight. It fires assault rifle cartridges, five fifty-six, but it’ll still put a hole in a pony’s skull at half a mile.” Though it definitely wasn’t like Blue Fire’s Torch, the new rifle looked potent enough. Black and gray, it loosely resembled a markspony carbine, but was a little bigger all around, with a greater clip size, a larger scope, and even its own suppressor. “And take this, too.” When I found the pegasus again, he was already bringing something from the duffle bag over to me – an ammo sash with a half dozen pockets, each holding a full magazine for my new weapon. And stepping close, he craned his head forward over my shoulder and slung the sash over my neck. “There. Now get back outside and set up on the roof of this building.” he ordered. “I’ll be right behind you, now go.”
There was no time left to ask questions. Wordless, I scooped up the rifle with a foreleg and held it tight against my chest before leaping back out through the open window and into the air. By now, the light screen was only a ghost of its former self. And down below, the Talons had taken that as their cue to engage. The skirmishing had rapidly turned into the full-scale battle that we’d been waiting for, as the first platoons of Talon soldiers had entered the base, already fully occupying the residential sectors to use the sprawl of houses as a staging area. Just behind them, I could see their armored wagons through the smoke, already having passed through the breaches in the fence; the rest of the enemy force that I could see looked to be moving at the wagons’ speed, coming in at a cautious but calculated pace.
Arcing right to follow the curve of the ATC tower, I angled in for the open rooftop and landed smoothly by its lip. Carefully I set the rifle down, measuring a hoof between its bipod and the roof’s edge, and coming around, I lowered myself gingerly onto my belly, slow to avoid distressing my rib any further. Though it still didn’t pass up the opportunity to remind me of its broken state, giving me an extra kick of pain for good measure, I forced myself into a proper prone position and pulled my rifle back against my shoulder before clamping onto the firing bit and sighting down the scope.
Through thin black crosshairs I finally got a detailed look at the battlefield. The battle had started in full now, spreading out from the residential sectors as the Talons begun to dig in. The enemy front had been set up past the residences, with several squads already setting up their familiar deployable barricades and just as many enemy troops putting fire downrange. The vertibucks’ rockets had distracted Buckley’s guards long enough for the Talons to execute the first offensive maneuver, and already I could see several of Buckley’s ponies just as they were gunned down, taken by surprise before they could get to cover. To the right of the epicenter, I found one of the Talons’ wagons as it made its way towards the front. Now I could see that, instead of being pulled like Buckley’s, this wagon was being pushed, a team of five hooked up to a heavy steel bar while additional troops kept them covered, others still using the wagon itself as protection from hostile fire; the wagon looked wholly unarmed, only a bulky steel box moving on shielded wheels… but I knew better.
And it would be my first target.
At this angle, I got a bead on the team pushing the wagon as well as their infantry escort, providing dozens of easy targets. Guiding the scope down and to the left, I brought the crosshairs onto the front of the moving group, finding a unicorn stallion holding down the trigger on a light machinegun. Chomping down on the firing bit, a single suppressed round fired, smashing into the guard’s armored shoulder. The hit staggered him, the shock of the impact getting him to drop his weapon as he stumbled. With only a slight adjustment I brought the crosshairs onto a new target, another Talon unicorn with an assault rifle floating at his side as he reloaded. I didn’t give him the chance to finish, and with a single shot, I sent him to the ground as I put a round through his unarmored neck.
To my left, I picked up the sound of hooves as they landed roughly on the stone beside me. A quick glance revealed Archer, landing with his .50 caliber Longbow, likewise suppressed and situated on its bipod, and a small saddlebag with ammo in tow. “I’m starting to pick up faint chatter on the radio!” he called, laying down flat and situating himself by my side. “It’s not back to normal, but it should get there in a couple more minutes at the most! When Tracer or Shimmer calls in, they’ll give us fresh orders of engagement!”
“Are they both down there?!” I asked, bringing my eye back up to my scope and taking aim again.
“They’re probably back in one of the hangars!” came his answer. “For now just soften up the enemy where they’re hitting our ponies the hardest! We need to keep them from gaining too much ground while we form up a counterattack!”
Already I found a third target, an earth-pony mare with a combo saddle consisting of an assault rifle and shotgun. With a short ‘paff’ of sound, my third shot dropped the mare where she stood with a clean headshot. But now, after three consecutive hits coupled with the casualties from the retaliatory fire of Buckley’s swiftly regrouping defenses, the other soldiers nearby were getting smart, and though still keeping up with the wagon, they begun to spread themselves out, many moving to the deployable barriers that had been going up at the front, while others fell back to take cover by the wagon itself. Still, not all of them were protected from the angle of fire my position gave to me, and there were still plenty of targets to choose from.
But before I could get my crosshairs centered over a fourth target, my scope was blocked up as a wall of fire and dust exploded into view, a sharp blast that had followed a long burst of fire from one of Buckley’s anti-air turrets. I flinched away from the scope, spotting the wreck of one of the Talons’ vertibucks as it tumbled once over the dirt, crumpling in on itself before coming to a halt just outside the east runway. But above it, traveling in low through the air, four more took its place in a loose V formation to support their allies on the ground, with five others moving in farther down the runway to approach the northern hangar. And sure enough, looking the other way, I found that five additional aircraft were coming in towards us and spreading out to occupy the Talons’ left flank, with three more angling in towards the church at the base’s far corner. Right away the familiar report of Buckley’s AA gun atop the munitions hangar, along with the turret guarding the concert hall, were met by the vertibucks’ own miniguns. Spotting the former, I saw the lead aerial quartet taking evasive action as the gun locked on, slinging a torrent of lead at one only to snappily rotate on its platform to target another, one of its rockets racing out from its pod with a resounding hiss. At the same time, one of the vertibucks from the farthest wing detonated in a seemingly spontaneous explosion. The other four sharply dipped away to either direction of the flaming wreck that was all that remained, executing evasive action as each spit out what looked to be a dozen small fireballs from their bellies. And at the same time, two rockets suddenly raced into view and struck the lazily floating flares one after the next, barely missing what had to be their target aircraft; between the rocket trails, I could just barely see the thin white line left behind from the flight of the high-velocity shell that had brought the formation’s lead vertibuck down, both the hovering stripe and the twin smoke trails from the rockets coming from behind the hangars.
“Nova! Eyes to your right!” Reaching me just before another thundering volley from the seven remaining howitzers, Archer’s call brought me back to return my eye to my rifle scope. And as I swiveled my rifle over, he added, “We’ve got some soldiers trying to establish cover on our flank, by the crater!”
Just past the southernmost crater, where one of Buckley’s howitzers had been destroyed, a small group of enemy infantry was making a break for the west runway. The defense was thinner here, with perhaps only twenty or so allied guards close by, the Guardian missile having left a wide open area for the Talons to utilize. And though allied reinforcements had been pouring out of the hangars, they wouldn’t arrive here for a good few minutes yet. Bringing my crosshairs down on the moving team, I counted their number to fifteen, with additional squads moving more slowly farther behind them. A suppressed round from Archer’s fifty cal brought down one of them as I selected my own target at the center of the team and took a shot, clipping the right hind leg of an earth pony stallion carrying a folded up tripod on his back – a component of an unassembled HMG. Immediately after, an escort unicorn with a single assault rifle floating by her came into my line of fire from her place at the rear. And before she could pass by, I fired again, the round striking her armor’s flank plate and making her stagger in her gallop to tumble to the ground.
From the bottom of my scope came muzzle flashes, and the bold Talon team was forced to halt as they were spotted. Two of them, both unicorns, slammed down the deployable shields they were carrying, wrapping them up in telekinesis to unfold the plates into two wide plate barriers for the rest of them to take cover behind. With Archer taking another shot, knocking out an assault rifle that another unicorn was blind-firing over the barrier, I turned my scope back up and to the left, finding additional contacts that were making their way over to back up their advance team. Here I found another of the Talons’ heavy wagons, this one making the southern tip of the enemy’s line or armor. Like the others, it was under heavy escort, with a line of infantry putting fire downrange in front of it to protect it from heavy weapons. I aligned my scope with that front line, finding a unicorn mare just as she reloaded her ten millimeter SMG. With one shot, she staggered from the impact of the round against her armor’s chest plate. And with one more, I caught her at the top of the head as she tried to get herself back up.
A third round from Archer’s rifle dropped an earth pony close to my latest kill with a chest wound, the heavier round punching through his thick armoring. With the body count stacking up, the boldness of the advance team faltered as they likewise came to a stop, four of them hastily unhooking their deployable cover to set up some protection. One was a white unicorn mare, her face written with nervous tension as she struggled to get her barrier off the clamps holding it to her back. And before she could get it free, I took a shot, dropping her with a headshot for both her and her barrier to fall unmoving to the dirt. The other three barricades were already set up when I situated my scope on a new target, sparks flying from the black steel as Buckley’s guards below us kept the Talons pinned. Still, the enemy soldiers managed to keep up their own fire, popping in and out of cover to take a potshot at the first guard they spotted. I leveled out at the top of the lead barricade just as an earth pony stallion with a mouth-held SMG ducked back into cover. And just a second later, he reemerged to fire again, and I shot. The round sparked off the barrier right under him, startling him back into cover just as a neighboring earth pony buck popped up to level out his markspony carbine. I snapped my scope over just as he fired two quick shots, and like before, my shot clipped the barrier just off to his left. But a second later, and his head snapped back as a spray of crimson shot out behind him, Archer scoring a headshot on him.
As I kept my scope leveled at the barrier, the Talon’s wagon emerged into the top of my crosshairs, drawing my eye to it. With Buckley keeping the escort at bay, the fire picking up as a small batch of much-needed reinforcements came in to assist them, I adjusted my scope to level out by the wagon. It was on approach to the front line and on course to pass by its leading guards. And grimly, I suspected that the others were too. The pulling team was still in view from my position, driving the heavy wagon forward, and I brought my crosshairs over a stallion hooked to the right side of the vehicle’s boom. Quick and clean, I dropped the slow-moving earth pony, and noticed quickly how the wagon abruptly slowed. And as the dead pony slumped in his harness, an escort galloping by beside him flipped over himself as Archer brought him down, the fifty caliber round severing the unfortunate Talons’ lower left foreleg.
BOOM!
From ahead and just above, a distinguishable explosive pop sounded over the constant roar of the base’s active AA guns, and was followed by a violent metal rattle. And just as I looked up from my scope, a foreleg hooked around my throat and pulled me back. “Back up, back up!!” Archer pulled me up to my hooves as he shouted his warning, the surprise action making me drop my rifle as I was tugged away. But just a split moment later, and I gasped as I saw why. The wing of vertibucks closest to us was scattering as a barrage of fire chased them from the roof of the building neighboring us – Club Eternity. The turret there had come back online to engage them, and it had strafed one of them before it could evade. The hit aircraft was spinning out of control, its port engine ablaze, and it was barreling straight for our position! Archer and I turned to flee from the falling vehicle, the two of us stopping only when the very stone under our hooves shook as the vertibuck smashed into the building. Wheeling around, I saw that it had just missed the lip of the roof. But the screeching metal and crumbling stone told me that the vehicle was carving down along the wall, finally coming to a jarring halt on the surface with one final crunch.
“The turrets are coming back online! But we’re not out of this yet! We need to help them keep the pressure off our guys down there!” Over the roar of the Club Eternity turret, Archer shouted his order as he galloped by me to make his way back to his rifle. Indeed the four vertibucks that remained close by us were fully engaged with the revived turret that had downed their formation leader, a wild and lethal aerial dance as they turned, banked, and weaved to avoid the turret’s twenty-five millimeter storm of lead. Even together, the four of them could hardly get a shot on the heavy gun as it snapped from target to target, and the short bursts of minigun fire that they did manage to fire off only seemed to agitate the formidable weapon. And with a quick glance as I galloped back to my post, I found a similar scene at the concert hall, munitions hangar, and the church all together, each of the guns keeping the majority the enemy aerial force occupied; the formation of four by the hangars now only numbered three, with the fourth having disappeared outside the base.
Rejoining my rifle again as Archer reloaded the Longbow, I fell back onto my belly and hurried to get my rifle back into place, the weapon having been jarred from its place by the crashed vertibuck now smoldering below us. Now, joining the vertibucks as they tried to get the upper hoof on Buckley’s anti-air defenses, I could see the reported dozen griffins as they dispersed among the battlefield, all of them going for the infantry line which was already looking to have been pushed back to the runway median. Bringing my rifle back to its proper place against my shoulder, I turned away from the raging conflict to focus back onto my sector. The wagon was the first thing to come back into my crosshairs. In the time it took us to get back to our posts, the dead member of the pushing team had been removed from the harness and replaced by another to keep the vehicle moving at a solid pace. But now, it was just passing the front line of enemy infantry, which had nearly doubled in size.
With the wagon taking the lead of the enemy advance, and with it remaining under heavy guard, I had a feeling that the otherwise unarmed transport had another purpose. And with that in mind, I picked up right where I left off. Bringing my scope up and easing the crosshairs into position, I found the team pushing the wagon just as they begun to alter their course, hooking it right to face the Buckley line head-on. Before they all disappeared behind the wagon from their change of direction, I got one shot on the earth pony at the back of the team, and just before the wagon concealed them, I saw him crumple to the ground as his right hind leg gave out, my round punching through his armor there.
Beside me, Archer’s rifle sounded off once more as I swung my scope back to the escorts. The enemy line had indeed grown significantly, but through my scope I could see that our allies on the ground were beginning to change up their tactics. In that moment I caught sight of the howitzer crew that was just off to our left, the second to last in the artillery line. But instead of just its own crew, over a dozen unicorns had stacked up behind the great cannon, and each of them was using their own telekinesis. Fourteen horns glowed brightly as the entire gun was wrapped up in a literal rainbow of light. Bullets sparked wildly off the gun’s built-in blast shield, the Talons catching on to what they were up to, but the pack of Buckley unicorns had already lifted the gun off the two steel bars that kept it firmly on the ground. Now it only sat on its wheels, the barrel coming down to ground level as it was guided to its target, and with a clap the gun roared. With the gun no longer on its supports, the firing of the shell caused the howitzer to snap back, alarmingly bouncing on its tires and nearly bowling over its crew before falling back onto its supports. The gun hadn’t been designed to be used like that, but to my surprise, the improvised plan had worked. Looking back through my scope, I found that the Talons’ wagon had fallen over onto its right side, now laying useless just outside the crater where the howitzer shell had impacted the ground.
With the shell having gone off so close, over half of the Talon position had become disoriented, enough for us to make a full counter attack. And the bullets flew, Buckley’s guards cutting down several enemies who had been jolted out from their cover before they could retreat back to safety. One after the next, the other six howitzers fired off another thundering volley as I brought my scope down onto a new target. The unicorn stallion in my sights had likewise been thrown from his cover, and was now making a brave effort of keeping the trigger down on his assault rifle, still shooting despite being under heavy fire. Two shots, one to the chest and the second to the head, put an end to him before I sighted in for his neighbor, an earth pony mare who had already been wounded from the close proximity of the howitzer round; one more pull of the firing bit, and I tacked on another kill to my count.
Thump…
I paused at the resonant boom that just barely reached me through the battlefield, my ears twitching back as a familiar pit opened up in my gut.
Thump…
More Guardian missiles were coming!!
Thump…
Looking skyward, I shouted the warning to Archer, and where the blue of the open sky had almost been completely resealed, the thick clouds were parted once again as three more of Guardian’s missiles careened down towards the base one after the next. They arced in from above the clouds to the east and hooked down towards the base’s north side. And as I watched, the lead warhead detonated in the air as one of the hangar turrets locked on and fired. The remaining two slashed through the wreckage and remained on course as the turret’s chaingun continued to buzz. The second was clipped just a second later, one of the turret’s rockets intercepting it to knock it out of the sky. But the third missile blazed right through it, and the turret couldn’t adjust itself in time to keep up. The missile smashed right through the ceiling of the residential hangar, and after a split second pause, the whole building detonated in a cataclysmic fireball. The ceiling went up first, the force of the blast tearing through it like paper before a wall of fire erupted from the open hangar doors. Then the whole building, walls and all, came tumbling down with a terrible screeching of metal, its frame groaning as the old structure gave out; its AA turret was the last thing to disappear into the fireball left behind by the missile’s impact.
And just like that, one of Buckley’s three great hangars had been utterly destroyed, leaving only a flaming wreck in its place.
But even then the battle continued to rage, even with the new devastation that decorated the field as a black and orange pillar of smoke, and the sounding of sharp repeating cracks of gunfire drew my eyes from the terrible sight and back to the frontline. From my elevated position I could see that, like Buckley’s ponies, the Talons had altered their own tactics. The wagons had executed a new step in the enemy battle plan, and while the howitzer teams had managed to take out a second wagon, the eight remaining transports had now come to a stop together. And now, the front panel of each one had opened, unlatching from the rest of the vehicle from the top and slamming to the ground to create a ramp. And from each ramp, a twenty millimeter flak gun had rolled out onto the field, each of the signature mobile guns protected by a heavy machinegun turret that had emerged on the rear half of the wagons. The turrets coupled with the flaks to create another deadly hail of lead that sent Buckley’s ponies scrambling behind cover; some of the guards were too late to do so, the flak fire catching them just a second too soon…
Now the Talons were on the offensive again, their troops heartened by the eight flak guns that now took the lead of their advance, and glaring hatefully to the battlefield, I brought my eye back up against my scope. But just as I took aim farther to the south, intent on targeting the closest flak gun, a hoof shoved against my uninjured side just before Archer’s voice called, “Nova, we need to move! We’ve been spotted by griffins!”
His warning carried a desperate tone, a sentiment that I quickly shared as I forced myself up to all fours and backed away from my rifle. Snapping my eyes skyward, it only took me two seconds to find the hostiles that Archer had identified. Directly ahead, coming in fast from slightly higher up in the air, were three griffins winging straight towards us in a tight V formation. And even from my place on the roof, I could see a recognizable face that was leading the strike wing to us, a griffin male fully armored and armed to the teeth. And at the sight of him, tunnel vision came back for yet another visit, stopping by to give a fine hello to the fiery hatred that had been forced to simmer within me since the last time he and I had met. And the urge to flee that I had just started to feel at Archer’s warning was immediately squashed down as I let my wings come open. “Are we engaging them, Archer?”
Standing close beside me, I heard the pegasus stallions’ saddle rifles as they clicked together, locked and ready to fire. “I don’t think we have a choice, Nova.” came his low reply. “They’re coming for us.”
That was the only answer I needed… and it was the only one that I would’ve accepted.
Because Blackhawk had come to this fight, and he was coming to face me once again. Only now, I was armed and able to properly fight back, and as I rose into the air with Archer to meet the enemy’s challenge, I had the distinct feeling that I was just as eager to square off as Blackhawk himself was.
The both of us wanted the blood of the other. The both of us wanted vengeance… but only one of us would get it.
*** *** ***
“You’re loaded! Let ‘em have it!”
With a piercing screech, another rocket roared out into the air from the anti-air launcher held in my telekinesis, arcing upward and adjusting course for the vertibuck that had forced Lily to stop while keeping us pinned behind her. I only caught a glimpse of the projectile as it locked onto its target before I scrambled back to safety with both Brooke and Shore, the aircraft’s minigun buzzing to life once again to tear up the dirt right in front of our noses. A second later, and the minigun went silent as the sizzling pops of the vertibuck’s flares replaced it, marking another successful evasion. But just as it did so, the second launcher fired off behind me, and just as the vehicle righted itself from its maneuver, the second rocket streaked up to strike the wing holding the starboard engine to the fuselage; the engine completely severed from the rest of the craft, and the imbalance sent both parts plummeting to the ground.
Finally, after six rockets, we had an open lane to move again, and Amber was already taking advantage of that opening from her place at Lily’s command seat. Rippling back to its full volume, the tank’s massive engine revved up just before her treads screeched, and with a lurch, the steel beast was on the move again. Together, Shore, Ivy, and I followed, joining back up with Brooke and the two stallions that made up the rest of our makeshift squad. Now, with the light screen gone at last, we were finally heading into the fight… and with Buckley burning before us, I knew that their tank was needed now more than ever.
“Hey! Listen up outsiders!” From her place by my left side, Brooke shouted to get our attention as we upped our pace to a trot, adjusting as Lily picked up speed. “As soon as Lily busts down the gate, Ricochet’s going to be throwing her right into the thick of it, and we’re going to be following her in!”
“Coms came back online just a little bit ago, and Tracer’s reported that the Talons pushed us off the east runway and past the median!” one of the stallions, a tan earth pony with an orange mane, spoke up. “They apparently came in with around six to seven hundred, and though they’ve taken some losses already, they’re still gaining ground, and they’re gaining it quickly!”
“So we need to keep them from going too far!” Brooke replied, looking me in the eye as she added, “When we get in there, we’re going to keep as much fire off Lily as possible while she takes out the stuff that the infantry can’t! We’ll make sure to get others to help us out along the way, but if you find anti-armor or heavy weapons in the Talon line, take them out quick as you can!”
“What about those other vertibucks?!” I asked, pulling the launcher closer to us. “They’ll come after us once we get in there!”
“The turrets are keeping them dancing, for now!” she answered. “Just keep your eyes open!”
“I’ll take the launcher, outsider! You help make sure Lily stays safe from ground threats, and we’ll keep the sky secured!”
The light green unicorn stallion that made our sixth squad mate, who had been running back and forth between myself and the tan earth pony while driving back the vertibuck, pulled the anti-air weapon from me with a nod before trotting back to his companion to reload it. And with the order given, I turned my attention to my own weapons, unhooking the All-Equestrian from its place on my back and bringing it forward.
“We’re almost to the fence now! Get ready down there!”
From up top, taking his position by the mounted fifty caliber machinegun, the gunner unicorn shouted down his warning to us as we fell into a gallop to match Lily’s pace. And one final time, I checked over my LMG – safety off, round in the chamber. I was on my second to last clip, with the current clip at least half emptied. The rescue mission at the Talons’ prison had forced me to burn through a good chunk of my ammo, including all of my buckshot shells and all but six of my revolver rounds. This time, I knew that I needed to be more conservative with my shooting, and I knew that Ivy and Shore would both be doing the same.
“You two ready over there?!”
Looking to my right, I looked upon where Ivy and Shore were keeping close. Shore carried a focused look on his face as he passed me only a single nod. But Ivy herself looked more than a little shook up as she kept her twelve-point-seven millimeter SMG hovering close to her chest. “As ready as I can be… considering I’ve never been in a battle like this!” came her answer, glancing to me as she spoke.
I faced front as I brought the All-Equestrian close to me. “Just move where we move and keep close! We’ll have your back in there!”
“Here we go!!”
The time for talk had passed.
At Brooke’s call, I found in the corner of my eye Buckley’s west perimeter fence as it stretched away to the south. We were coming right in for the northwest corner of the base, lined right up with the leveled hangar that had just taken a direct hit from one of the Talons’ cruise missiles. And then came a violent rattle of metal as the fence in front of us buckled and caved inward, Lily driving right into the barrier and passing over it with effortless ease. Not slowing even in the slightest, the tank rolled right over the now flattened fence, and one after the next, the six of us galloped right over top it, finally crossing into Buckley itself.
We immediately came under fire, multiple rounds bouncing off Lily’s hull as she drove forward. Then the ground pulsed under hoof as the tank’s main gun responded with a violent clap, the mounted minigun and fifty caliber firing together right after. With no target in sight yet, we kept right up behind the tank to keep out of the way of the fire the vehicle was drawing. Up above, the engines of a vertibuck swelled to life as one of the aerial vessels passed over us, flying low in the air and moving full speed as the AA turret on the center hangar swept across the sky with its chaingun; three vertibucks were occupied with the turret and its partner gun on the other remaining hangar.
From the front, a thick curtain of dirt exploded skyward to come back down and shower Lily just before a violent cloud of sparks erupted from the right side of the tank’s main gun, a rocket unable to punch through the armor only to bounce uselessly off the plating. Then the main cannon fired again, with the two machineguns picking back up as the secondary cannon on the right side fired a shell. “We’re almost past the hangar now!” Brooke adjusted herself to come back around to my left side from her place behind me. “When we pass it, we join up with the infantry and we traverse the line to follow Lily as she makes her way through! Amber wants to carve a path right between the runways!”
“Got it!”
At my confirmation, she repeated her instructions to her two companions, both of them prepping their assault rifles for the gallop we’d have to make from cover to cover. “I can see one of the howitzer teams, Gunny!” Shore shouted. “There’s plenty of cover where the infantry set up in front of it!”
Taking a peek out towards the approaching warzone, I spotted the crew just as they fired off their gun once again. With it only standing on its two wheels the cannon lurched violently back, the kickback nearly causing the gun to bulldoze its crew of a dozen unicorns. With the large team thus occupied, there were over three dozen guards scattered between five different barricades that were putting up steady fire to keep the enemy’s attention off the gun, all of who had set themselves in front of the howitzer to establish a protective wall. And upon relaying this to Brooke, she gave us her approval at making that our first destination.
Now we were at the opposite end of the burning hangar, having moved in closer to where the wall had once stood. The flaming wreckage bathed us in heat as we galloped past, emerging out into open terrain before Brooke shouted the order to run. With Shore and Ivy moving in front of me, I booked it across the dirt and onto the wide lane connecting the burning hangar to the runway. The lane was spaced with wounded guards and those that were trying to heal them under fire, many of the disabled ponies having been severely burned or maimed; there were over fifty wounded out here alone, with even more farther out… I didn’t want to think of how many might’ve been in that hangar when it went up in flames.
Flecks of dirt pelting my face brought my focus back to the fight, a grenade having detonated just to the left of the howitzer as we drew near. To our left came another report from Lily’s main gun, followed close behind by the smaller starboard gun. The tank was rolling onward at full speed, and up ahead, the Talon infantry that had dug in at the front of the occupied east runway was beginning to fall back. At the same time, a new group was coming forward to take their place, this squad of seven carrying with them two missile launchers with a twenty millimeter rolling into position behind them. As we galloped by the howitzer on our final approach to our position, the flak gun opened up, its heavy rounds kicking up a blast of sparks after every hit. And with it another missile raced out from the Talons’ place behind their barrier, this one detonating against the tank’s frontal armor. But Lily pushed right through the smoke as her main gun came around to target the new threat, the minigun raging and driving the new squad back into cover; the fifty caliber was now silent, the gunner buck forced to hide inside the tank from the fire the vehicle was drawing.
Ahead, Shore and Ivy skidded to a halt and ducked down behind the closest sandbag wall, and I followed their move just as the barrier was peppered with assault rifle fire. Brooke and the others crouched in with us as the three guards already here made room. “Lily’s in position! Time to go to work, outsiders!”
The clap of the main cannon sounded once again at her command, and with that I swung the All-Equestrian up onto the sandbags and rose up to take aim for the flak gun. The gun crew and their support had nearly taken the brunt of the tank’s shot, the round falling just short only to blanket them with dirt and dust as they struggled back up from their daze. With that opening I lit up the flak gun as its crew tried to return to their places, sparks flying. I clipped one of the unicorns on the team before the rest threw themselves back to the ground, and Ivy and Shore hit the escorts together, Ivy with her SMG and Shore with his sidearm. A second later, and the flak gun went up in smoke, a shell from Lily’s secondary cannon flattening it with a direct hit.
With a mechanical shriek, the tank begun to move, crossing into the unoccupied median and adjusting to a northward course to put itself right between the two fronts; already, the frontal armor of the vehicle was shimmering a dim pink, just like before at the Talon headquarters. Swiveling the All-Equestrian right, I brought the iron sights upon the closest group. But before I could fire again, I caught sight of the larger muzzle flash of a heavy machinegun, and I ducked back down just after its first shot struck the sandbags just below me. “The machinegun on that wagon’s been strafing us from here all the way to the second howitzer!” From Shore’s right, a Buckley unicorn guard called over the noise as he slammed a fresh magazine into his automatic rifle. “All our reinforcements from the hangars are out on the field, but the wagons are keeping us from getting anywhere!”
“We’re fucking stuck is what we are!”
“Let Lily handle the wagons!” Brooke responded from her place beside me, ignoring the remark from another stallion farther down the sandbag wall. “Just keep putting rounds on the infantry! Blind fire if you have to!”
“We need to head farther down the line!” Lifting the All-Equestrian up over the barrier, I kept myself low as I fired two short bursts, then pulling it back down as I looked to Ivy and Shore. “I want to find out where Nova’s gone to!”
“I think I already see her! Up there!” My eyes snapped over to meet Ivy’s before she pointed with her SMG to the sky. And there I could see what she had found – there was a dogfight up there, five combatants diving and arcing as they battled for aerial dominance in the base’s southern sector; and two of them were pegasus ponies.
I glared at the sight; Nova was already wounded… she wouldn’t last forever up there no matter how determined she was. “We need to get to her!”
BOOM!
From behind us and to the right, the continual buzz from the closest anti-air gun that had been accompanying us went silent, a drastic change in the sound of the fighting that everypony caught. And just when I looked, I found a smoldering hunk of iron as it fell down the front face of the center hangar, the mangled remains of a chaingun barrel. “Sweet Luna they got another turret!” Two vertibucks were still engaged with the turret atop the neighboring hangar. But now it was the only turret left in this corner… and the third vertibuck…
“INCOMING!!”
And before I could react, minigun fire showered the space just behind us, and I heard bullets bouncing off metal as the howitzer team was pounded in a strafing pass by the third vertibuck, the craft having circled back to come to a hover behind us. The unicorns on the howitzer team dropped like flies, only two having sprang away fast enough to avoid painting the concrete crimson. But just as the twin miniguns adjusted to sweep across the ground towards our cover, carving up the pavement along the way, one of our squad mates got an opening to launch another anti-air rocket. The vertibuck’s miniguns went quiet as the aircraft dipped to the right to evade, dropping yet another batch of flares to lure the missile under its belly where it detonated harmlessly. But then, another rocket raced in from the remaining hangar turret, forcing the vertibuck to break off of its pursuit of us as it fell back into the last turret’s field of fire.
But the damage was already done, and ten of the twelve members of the gun team were motionless on the ground as red seeped out around each of them. “You two, gather weapons and ammo and follow us!” Brooke was the first to break from the trance of the sudden loss, and another blast from Lily’s main gun drew us all back together to continue on. Picking two carbines from the mess of spare weapons, the two remaining howitzer unicorns, both stallions, joined up with us as Brooke took the lead, peeking out from the edge of our barrier. The machinegun from the wagon had gone silent, and after a quick look, I found that the wagon itself had been torn wide open, a gaping hole now in place of what was once one of the armored sides. With this small but vital space of the median now cleared up as Lily moved onward, the remaining infantry squads here begun to move forward at the order of their leading officers, keeping their interval tight as they trotted out onto the median; rifle fire met them, but they were fast to retaliate against the Talons, taking out multiple consecutive contacts as they struggled to reestablish themselves after Lily’s passing.
“They’re falling back! Keep your heads down and stay right on me! Let’s move!”
Galloping out into the open, Brooke led us farther down the runway, keeping us well behind the barriers that made Buckley’s forward positions. Like the Talon line, Buckley’s guards had crowded up behind the sandbag and plate walls, taking turns at firing quick shots to try and soften up the enemy’s positions, prying for weaknesses. And looking along the line as I ran, I saw that this was the case along the full length of the runway; there were hundreds out here, hundreds on both sides!
A moment later and we were coming up to the next howitzer team, their gun snapping back as it let loose another shell. Looking out to the east, I followed the shell up to where it impacted, obliterating a group of Talon soldiers and blowing three others off their hooves and into the air. While we had heard organized volleys coming from the artillery before we had arrived, the howitzers were now firing at their own pace, at the will of their crews. Past the billowing dust cloud, I could see where the rest of the Talons’ vertibucks were engaging the two turrets occupying the base’s eastern corners. There were three remaining airborne, with two smoke trails showing where two more had been brought down by the potent turret grid. From the quartet of vertibucks to the south, one of them had broken away to fly back and reinforce its wingmates behind the enemy line; the vertibuck threat was starting to thin out, slowly but surely.
But as Brooke got us to our next position, our team finding cover to hunker down behind, I found that we were coming up onto a new problem. Just beyond this point was a gap in the defenses, with the building wedged in the median serving as an improvised wall all on its own. But past that was the center of Buckley’s line, which was the sector that was under the heaviest attack as four vertibucks backed by a wing of griffins continued to lay down suppressing fire. As such, a good chunk of the defense was pinned down tight, and it was here that the Talon soldiers were getting bold by moving into the median itself, strengthened by the combined support of the vertibucks and the twenty millimeters that focused their efforts on the center. It was this observation that an earth pony mare relayed to Brooke as we settled down. “We’ve got to hold that stretch of the runway long enough for Lily to break through!” Brooke responded to the nervous guardsmare. “If the Talons knock out the center, they’ll cut our line right in half! We can’t afford to get separated like that!”
Together, Lily’s main gun and portside gun fired, marking our cue to pick a target and engage. Together, Shore and Ivy and I rose out to scan over the field to the north. The enemy infantry presence was thicker here, even more so the farther down I looked, and already we were coming up on another one of the Talons’ armor positions, both a wagon and flak gun keeping close together from their places in the median. Out of the closest targets that were just past the building, I brought my crosshairs onto a Talon unicorn with a long-barreled rifle in his telekinesis. But before I could fire both he and his neighbors retreated behind their plate barrier as a machinegun burst sparked violently off the steel; thankfully, our new position was reinforced with heavy weapons of our own, including one of Buckley’s military wagons with a mounted fifty caliber MG, that were doing their part in keeping the Talons occupied.
With a precious couple of seconds to aim, I found a new target as he brought his assault rifle to bear, and yanking the trigger down I strafed his cover back and forth, felling both him and one other buck before I finally emptied my clip. I ducked back down as return fire peppered our own cover, removing the large empty box clip and securing it back onto my armor in exchange for my last one. “I can’t hit anything with this SMG!” In front of me, Ivy hastily lowered herself to a crouch, facing me as she floated the weapon in question back to its place on her leather armor. “It kicks too much!”
“Your lever-action would give you greater precision when shooting, especially at this distance! Use that!” Both of her weapons had been supplied to her in Hopeville before we had left, and with the SMG being a 12.7mm model, the rifle was the weapon that balanced Ivy’s arsenal with her current skill around firearms. With a nod, she floated the thirty-thirty lever-action by her left side. “Are you okay?!” she called. “You’re not hit right?”
“I’m fine! Just make sure you keep your head in the game!” I responded, fitting the last box clip into the All-Equestrian and loading a round into the chamber. “I want to keep us moving towards Nova so we can help her! She’s vulnerable with that broken rib!”
“Right!”
Giving me a nod, Ivy and I rose back up together and took aim. Together we found a fireteam keeping their focus on a position farther down our line. A shot from Ivy’s rifle sent one of them falling back to cover with a shoulder hit before I opened up, strafing the position and sending the rest back into hiding, giving some breathing room to their former targets. Across my vision, shot after shot raced from Shore’s energy pistol to where he aimed for the flak gun crew. With additional rounds striking the frontal plating of the gun, the crew was wheeling the weapon about, bringing the long barrel over to point just to our left. The weapon opened up with its sharp repeating cracks of fire, tearing clean through an already weakened barrier and forcing a squad to displace. As I put fire down on the twenty millimeter, I heard the familiar screech of the anti-air launcher to my left, the rocket racing right over my head and up to one of the vertibucks at the center; from the corner of my eye I saw the light from the flares that the vehicle deployed.
At the front, Lily put two more cannon rounds onto the enemy as the tank cleaved its way through their ranks. With the flak crew momentarily stalled, I swiveled my LMG around to the left to put the tank in my sight. Lily was now crossing over the lane connecting the two runways together, and picking up speed, she was drawing up parallel to us as she approached the nearby building. With a shriek of the treads, the tank turned left in its place to circle around the east side of the structure, adjusting once again and heading straight to disappear behind it. I felt a tap on my neck before Brooke galloped behind us with the others of our team. Passing the gesture along, I pulled away from cover and kept low as I followed after them, Ivy and Shore both doing the same and falling in behind me. With Lily now moving out of our line of sight, Brooke was keeping her eyes toward the median to match the vehicle’s pace as it lumbered along
“UP HIGH! LOOK OUT!”
The cry was carried from up ahead to swiftly ripple its way back to us, and having stuck close to the forward barricades, our squad came to a halt together to hit the ground. And just as I leapt into cover, I could hear as the propellers of another vertibuck grew into the dominant sound over the battle, coming in low and fast from the left. Then, at the top of my vision, I saw a quick series of consecutive pulses of light that flashed in time with the whining hiss of the unguided rockets I had seen before. They were fired off in rapid sequence, over a dozen impacting just to our left, and from within the roar of the barrage I heard the screeching of metal as it was blasted open. The steady grinding of Lily’s treads went silent, as did the engine, as not one but two vertibucks shot by overhead and arced away behind the enemy front. And when I looked back to ground level, rising up over cover, I found Lily where the great tank was now still on the ground where she had just passed the building. The main gun had been blasted apart by the vertibucks’ surprise attack, leaving a smoldering and mangled wreck of twisted steel in its place with both the attached minigun and fifty caliber now completely destroyed. And with that, smoke was rising from the engine block at the rear.
But the significant damage was the last place my thoughts went to as I stared wide-eyed at the wreck of the main gun.
“Oh Goddesses, Blake’s still in there!!”
Ivy spoke with horror the very same thought that plowed right into me. But from the southeast came the sharp cracks of the nearby twenty millimeter, and with a start I threw myself back to the ground just as the top of the sandbag wall exploded from the impact of the gun’s heavy rounds, everypony nearby ducking down with us as the mobile gun targeted our position. Return fire popped up immediately, guards farther down our line gaining a break from the fighting to put rounds on the gun crew. Just in front of us, as the flak gun’s fire strafed down the line and away from us, Brooke poked her head up over cover again to get a look at the enemy, only for her eyes to go wide with shock.
“What’s going on?!” I called, tucking the All-Equestrian in close and preparing to move out of cover again.
“The enemy’s making a run for Lily!” she cried, winning the startled attention of the closest guards. “She too damaged to move, and they’re going to try and take her! We need to get in there now!”
Without even waiting for a response, Brooke sprang right over the sandbags and out into the open, ignoring the stray fire that struck our damaged cover. But one after the next, both her team and four additional guards hopped over the wall, with those father down the line turning their focus to providing cover fire for their advance. With a grunt I sprang over the barricade, following Brooke’s lead and landing onto the dirt of the runway median. Just as I set hoof on the ground, two shots plunged into the dirt right in front of my hooves as a third drove right into my chest plate, the armor absorbing the round as a nearby unicorn guard buck was gunned down. With Shore and Ivy joining me, the latter taking a quick shot with her rifle, I recovered from the hard impact of the bullet before lunging ahead to follow after Brooke and her team. Up ahead, a group of Talons had been advancing towards where Lily lay immobile and were now the closest enemy presence to the vehicle. Three of them lay dead already as the squads from both sides laid down fire on one another, and with no cover, two more allied guards fell along with two more Talons. Quickly settling into a gallop, I snapped my LMG up and swung the barrel to the right to put my own fire down on the enemy. What progress they had made was halted as I held the trigger down, the black-armored soldiers scattering back for their line as Shore and Ivy added to the defense.
Looking forward, I found Brooke already positioned against the tank’s right side with her remaining squad mates, her revolver held tight in her jaws. A second later and the three of us stacked up with her, just in time to meet three hostiles as they darted in for a quick look at our position. Brooke and the two unicorn bucks from our original team put down fire on them, one shot catching one of the three in the left foreleg before they could fall back again. Return fire smashed into Lily’s crippled front armor, and I jerked back as Brooke’s head snapped violently to the right, crimson spattering the ground before she crumpled to the dirt with a hole in the side of her skull. Swearing, one of the two unicorns behind her took her place and kept out of the line of fire, swinging his assault rifle around to fire blind.
From behind me came a sudden frightened scream, Ivy’s voice carrying it. I spun about, finding her just as she was bowled down to the ground, a Talon earth pony having come up from behind to knock her down. Shore responded first, a shot from his energy pistol hitting the stallion square in the neck. But just as the enemy stallion begun to glow ruby red, the shot dissolving him into ashes, another earth pony and a unicorn followed in, the former with a ten millimeter SMG held in his jaws as the unicorn brought a pump-action shotgun around to bear. Before the shotgun buck could get a target I lunged for him, swinging the All-Equestrian and knocking the weapon away just before it roared, the shell firing into the air. But then, the telekinesis surrounding the shotgun dropped altogether, and before I could recover the unicorn charged me. He hit me head first, his horn driving painfully into my armor and forcing me back two steps. I instantly let my LMG fall away to center my focus, and rearing back I slammed my forehooves into his shoulders, halting his momentum as he copied my move. For a moment we were locked together, both of us shoving and twisting to try and throw the other off balance. But then, the glaring soldier’s horn came alight once again, and I felt his strength slacken as he focused his telekinesis. I didn’t give him a chance to show what he was picking up, as with a hard shove I finally got him to yield, and the unicorn tripped over himself for me to slam him up against the side of the tank. The telekinesis spell died away from the jarring impact, and with the unicorn dazed, I pulled up my right hoof and brought it down on the top of his muzzle. Then I shoved again, throwing him to the side and onto his back. Once more his horn came to life as he tried to recover, just in time with my own as I reached back for my sidearm. But just as I pulled it from its place and snapped it forward, the unicorn having done the same with the nine millimeter he carried, his head jerked back as a shot from above pierced through the noise of the fighting. To my left, the third pony who had flanked us had been taken care of, having been knocked out by fire from the front line. And from that front, additional support had joined us, over a dozen more guards having formed around Lily to see to the vehicle’s rescue, digging in both in front of and behind me.
“Gunny!” Looking up, I found three ponies already on top of Lily, each laying low behind the main gun that was now glowing a bright, brilliant pink, the plating beginning to smooth out from the vehicle’s regeneration spell. And looking over the tread and down to me was Raemor, his .45 pistol hovering close. “Another vertibuck’s trying to make a pass at us again! We need to get Blake out of this fight and into a shelter!”
He was pointing a hoof to the south, towards the heaviest of the fighting. A quick glance revealed one vertibuck that had deviated from the center, where two of the aerial vehicles continued to suppress the infantry there. Just a short ways father back was the fourth vehicle of the center formation, having been shot down during the latest skirmish. And behind us, the last hangar turret continued to keep the three vertibucks of the northern wing at bay. “Is the hatch open?!” Trotting along the side, recovering the All-Equestrian and securing it back into its place on my armor, I approached the still smoking engine block and sprang up to catch the ledge with my forelegs, quickly pulling myself up and aboard; like the main gun, wispy tendrils of pink energy swirled around the armored engine block.
“I barely squeezed through, but Blake will fit!” the old unicorn answered me, holstering his sidearm and turning around as I approached.
From the ground came another rocket from one of our anti-air launchers, sounding off in time with a pair of echoing howitzer shots, to catch the vertibuck in time to force it off its attack vector. Looking ahead as I came up to the gun, I immediately noted a shift in Buckley’s defense. Though keeping to the sandbags on the west runway, a whole platoon had come from the center to reinforce our own position, coming in to help secure Lily, and their combined fire had silenced the closest twenty millimeter, the flak gun having taken a direct rocket hit. But the enemy was just as persistent in their drive to overtake Buckley’s battlefield advantage, and the Talons had established a new defensible point not even twenty yards away from us to the southeast. And between their new firing line and the soldiers that were still coming around to approach Lily from behind, our position was in just as much danger as before.
A bullet punched off the main gun just to my left, jolting me down onto my belly and forcing me to crawl the rest of the way over to Raemor. The right side of the regenerating cannon was the only available cover aboard the tank, and even then, enemy fire was still close; the Talons were definitely gunning for us. “Is Blake alright?!”
“He’s not injured! He’s only shaken up from the attack!” Raemor replied, nodding for the gun to get the colt out.
Together we looked over cover and down the misshapen hatch. A thin black haze had completely filled the crew compartment, and inside I could hear the voices of the crew as they frantically worked to get Lily back online. “Ricochet, how are we looking?!” the voice of Amber called from within.
“Nothing’s responding!” came the accented reply of the tank’s driver. “The regeneration spell hasn’t fully repaired the engine yet!”
“Keep trying!” Amber ordered. “Cobalt! Put that fire out!”
“Blake!” Calling into the hatch, I saw as a unicorn made her way to the stairwell to find me a second later, her horn alight to combine with the pink glow of the tank’s regeneration spell. “Hey! Where’s Blake?!”
“Right here!” Looking frantically to her right, Neera briefly moved out of view. But before I could pick up anything else, the metal in front of us sparked up once again, a line of assault rifle rounds peppering our cover to force the both of us back from the hatch.
“On your left!!”
“Don’t let them up here!!”
At the rear of the tank spoke frantic voices as three Buckley unicorn stallions joined us up top. Together they approached the left edge of the tank, using the inactive tread for balance as they fired straight down to the ground along Lily’s left side; it didn’t take much to realize that the Talons were trying to stack up right against the tank. “Gunny!” Once more, Raemor called out, giving me a shove to get my attention. “I’ll get Blake! Help them keep the enemy from boarding while we get him out of there!”
Without reply, I reached out for my riot shotgun, bringing it forward as I shifted on my belly. I kept low and approached the edge of the main gun, tucking the weapon close as I crawled along. Of the three friendlies that had come aboard, one had already been killed, and the other two threw themselves onto their stomachs, backing away from the edge. “Five along the left side, holding their ground! They’re heavily guarded!”
“Not for long!” As I crawled towards the two bucks, the second threw aside his rifle to pull a whole belt of grenades from his armor. Six metal apples were attached, four frags and two of them with red stripes around their centers – two incendiaries. “Fire in the hole!” And with a grunt his horn flashed to rip the pins out of all six of them before the floating belt was launched, flipping over and over through the air to disappear behind the tank. I froze, dropping my shotgun to fling my forelegs over my head, until a second later when the six grenades went off together. The explosion ripped into my ears, setting them ringing as dirt peppered my back. Looking back up, I saw both the unicorns bringing their rifles around as they begun to move back towards the ledge. But just as I did the same, sparks erupted just to my right and traveled along Lily’s back, and one after the next, both of the stallions went down as red spattered the metal beneath them.
I recovered from the shock just in time to see a griffin as he shot past, flying low and arcing away to the right to get out of harm’s way at his successful pass. But my eyes swiftly darted to the rear of the tank, where I caught sight of new contacts that sprung up from below. Two black-armored earth ponies pulled themselves aboard, each with SMGs clamped in their jaws. Just as they spotted me I swung my shotgun forward, and one trigger pull later, the stallion on the left lost half his skull to topple overboard and back to the ground. In that time, the second had gotten the time to take aim with his SMG, and four ten millimeter rounds punched into my armor’s chest plate before I could fire again. The slug caught him in the shoulder, not enough to get through his armoring, but enough for him to stagger back and present another shot; one more slug sent his brains out over the dirt.
Right away, despite how I was virtually surrounded by the fighting to secure Lily, three more hostile contacts came into my field of fire, climbing up the side of the tank to my right together. But before I could get my sights lined up on the closest enemy, a single shot ripped through the constant noise, firing in unison with the blast of agony that tore into my right side. I was sent staggering to the left from the rifle round that had torn right through my armor, and crying out I lost my balance, falling on my left side from the force of the hit. The shock put me in the dark, a single moment of blindness from the wicked burn of the armor-piercing round, and through the fog came the report of an automatic weapon, a second shot from the rifle that had knocked me down mixing with both it and rapid fire from two different pistols. At that I went scrambling for my shotgun, prying my eyes back open and searching left and right. The weapon had fallen right by me, my telekinesis having dropped it close, and with a flash of light my horn reignited, red light wrapping around the shotgun to yank it back by me. But as I did, I found that all three boarders had been repelled, the tank now cleared just before hooves stepped into my field of view. “Gunny!”
“Ivy! I’m hit!”
The bullets continued to fly, whizzing by overhead to scare the steel-gray unicorn down into a low crouch beside me as she floated her lever-action over. “Oh no! Are you alright?! Can you move?!”
“I can move! We need to get Blake!” My side erupted with fresh burning as I forced my hooves under me, drawing a pained pant from me. “We need to get Blake and go!”
“Over there!”
One after the next came four hollow thumps, reports from a grenade launcher, and I snapped my eyes over to the tank’s main gun. The pink glow swirling around the metal was fading, the main cannon and both the minigun and fifty cal looking to be almost fully reformed. Atop it, Raemor fired off two more grenades, ducking back down as rifle rounds sparked harshly against his cover in retaliation. But by his hooves, hunkered down low and huddled up against the side of the cannon, was Blake, shaking but otherwise unharmed.
Raemor had gotten him out!
“Come on, Gunny! Get up!” Giving me a shove under my gut, Ivy helped me up to a stand, the both of us stumbling our way over to cover with the others. Behind us came fresh gunfire, coming from up top with us. Ivy spun back around at the volley of automatic fire as I stumbled ahead, a single shot from her rifle mixing with the great noise. After another three steps I came back around, seeing where two more Buckley guards had boarded. One unicorn guard wielding an assault rifle was immediately shot, two rounds punching through his chest plate to knock him back off the tank. The second turned his light machinegun to the opposite side, opening up against four more Talon boarders, felling the one farthest down the hull immediately. I took aim to the closest, firing one slug that drilled into his torso, sending him wounded over the side. But the enemy behind him was charging towards us, with his companion doing the same as two more Talons climbed aboard behind them. I just intercepted the first charger as he brandished a wide machete in his telekinesis, and one slug drilled into his chest. I fired again before he had a chance to recover, Ivy doing the same with her rifle for the both of us to drop the Talon unicorn together.
But from the right came a sudden cry, a battle cry that was carried on the voice of yet another boarder. And before I could even turn to see him, a Talon stallion galloped past right in front of me to swing his own machete for Ivy. But she had seen him just in time to hastily back-step from the downward swipe of the bladed weapon, which instead sliced against the steel floor with a resounding metal screech. I got a window of attack from his move, lunging forward and swinging my riot shotgun like a club to clock the bold stallion on the left side of the head. He staggered away, tripping over himself and nearly collapsing from the hit as his machete clattered to the floor. Behind him, the tank had become the sight of a wild and chaotic brawl, three Buckley guards squaring off against four Talon soldiers, all up close and personal. But as I leveled my shotgun to take out Ivy’s attacker, who was ripping his nine millimeter pistol from its holster to fight back, the very floor beneath my hooves shifted as Lily abruptly lurched. And from behind me came the labored mechanical whirring of gears.
The main gun was moving!
As the turret begun to rotate, the tank’s engine rumbled to life once again, a deep and nearly vengeful sound. Together both me and Ivy’s attacker recovered from the sudden disruption, and together the two of us lunged for each other. The unicorn had both his machete and his sidearm out in the open as we locked ourselves together in a grapple, and the former came down first, swinging to strike for my left shoulder. I snapped my shotgun over to block the attack, the blade slicing off the back of the weapon and floating off to the side from the force of the hit. Before I could draw the shotgun back, a sharp sting swelled against my opposite shoulder at the report of a nine millimeter round. But then came another crack of a rifle, and the unicorn stumbled to my right as a round drilled into the armor protecting his right side. I pounced on the opening Ivy had created, swinging my shotgun back to connect with the Talon’s jaw, sending him a few steps back as I used the swing’s momentum to level the shotgun and take aim; the last slug in the drum painted the silver steel red.
Just as I watched the unicorn go down, his weapons clattering to the floor, my wounded side exploded with red-hot agony as I was suddenly bowled off my hooves. One moment I felt a surface beneath me, and the next, I was falling through open air to come down hard on dry earth. As soon as I hit, I felt a weight come crashing down on me, the body of my attacker landing full on mine before toppling over me. But through the pain I forced myself back to focus, finding a second unicorn stallion as he fought to get himself steadily back on his own hooves. With a grunt I zeroed in on my revolver, my horn lighting back up to yank it from its holster and thrust it forward. I fired one shot as the gun came into the corner of my vision, the round almost grazing the smaller stallion’s neck only to bounce off Lily’s side with a heavy metal clang. Before I could get another shot, the opposing pony swung his hoof and caught the revolver where it floated to knock it free of my telekinetic hold, and with a second quick swing, his hoof smacked across my jaw in a solid hit. But through his hit I moved to counter, and planting my hind hooves against his chest I kicked out and bucked him back before he could score another, sending him stumbling all the way and against Lily’s hull. With him momentarily out of the way I rolled myself back onto my hooves, stamping down the burn in my side to spin around. But just as I tried reaching for my bowie knife, the enemy lunged again. He rammed me head-on, driving me back three steps before I threw my weight forward to meet his push. We came to a standstill, the smaller stallion growling as he tried to get me back on the ground. But with a heavy swing, I rammed my hoof into his side, the hit alone knocking him off balance and sending him down.
But as he fell, I felt a sudden sharp pull against my side. And before I could react, I was tugged into the same fall by the unicorns’ weight, unable to catch myself before I lost my balance and was yanked down with him. I landed atop the stallion before my momentum carried me over him, and I came to land on my back. In the corner of my vision the stallion moved again, the quicker of us to get himself back onto his hooves as my wounded side kept me grounded. Instead I took the movement as the initiative to go for my knife, and with a flash of light, Honor slid free of its sheath with a brisk hiss. As it floated into the air before me, I pointed the blade tip for my target and launched it, sending it to my right to intercept the stallion before he could make another move. But as it sliced through the air toward him, his own horn came to life for the knife to grind to a halt just shy of stabbing him in the shoulder. I immediately felt as his telekinesis combated my own, the knife beginning to rotate in the air, turning away from the Talon unicorn and coming slowly to point for me.
The stallion’s telekinesis was strong, to the point where the knife begun to move closer to me despite my own struggle to best his magic. It came forward another few inches before our struggle came to a second standstill, and it was then that I rolled, cancelling my telekinesis altogether. I heard as the knife stabbed into the dirt just behind my back as I got my hooves back under me. When I came around to face him, his horn was still glowing as he retrieved the knife from its place, pulling it up close to him and leveling it out in the air as he crouched. Then he rushed me, catching me before I could reach for the All-Equestrian, and I was forced to jerk back as he slashed for me. I reared all the way back onto my hind hooves, seeing Honor’s blade as it crossed right in front of my face. I fell back to all fours, following the knife as the Talon reversed its course, sending it right back for me. But I couldn’t back away fast enough from his second attack, and I felt the tip of the knife against the right side of my neck, cutting upward and leaving a thin and shallow gash that bled instantly. Then he swung a third time, adjusting the blade to point down before he stabbed. Instead of trying to evade it, I reached for the knife once more as it came down to try and take it back, and with a flash of my horn, Honor ground to a halt once again. I had caught it just in time, wincing back at the sight of the knife tip that was no more than a couple inches away from my right eye as red and green magic fought for control.
BLAM!
A single shot echoed out to reach my ears over the continuing battle, and all at once I had full control of Honor again, the opposing green magic vaporizing instantly. That’s when I heard the stallion go down, his body toppling to the dirt with a light thud. And when I saw him, I spotted the headshot that had taken him down, one clean hit to the top right side of the skull just behind the ear. It had come from an elevated position… from Lily. But when I looked, searching for Raemor, or Ivy, or even Shore…
I found only Blake… staring at me… wide-eyed and trembling behind the iron sights of the nine millimeter pistol clenched in his jaws.
That was all I saw of him before both Raemor and Ivy skidded to a halt at either side of him, together shocking him into dropping the weapon at his hooves. Wordless, Raemor’s horn flared to life to lift the colt bodily off the tank before both he and Ivy jumped off the side, the former carrying Blake close behind him through the air. And just as they landed, Lily jerked as her main gun roared out her words of vengeance, the tremendous clap of sound putting a painful grating ring through my ears as the very ground pulsed underhoof. I called out to the others, hearing my voice as a dull, suppressed version of its former self even as the earth pulsed again, the lighter cannon on the tank’s left side firing right after.
“Gunny, take him!” Though his voice came dimly to me, I saw Raemor as he approached with Ivy and Blake, sidestepping towards me as he faced the south to keep watch on the nearby fighting. “Get yourself and Blake underground!”
Again he called, looking between me and the direction of the Talon frontline. And though I wanted to protest the old unicorn’s order, I galloped to close the rest of the distance between us, scooping up my knife and revolver on the way before Raemor lowered Blake back onto his hooves. As soon as the colt touched down, he stumbled to the side, nearly collapsing as he looked in a panic from left and right for any danger; though I didn’t study the battlefield, the lack of fire being thrown in our direction told me that Buckley’s forces had won us a break, even if just a brief one. “Blake!” Quickly I came beside him, whirling back around to put myself between him and the enemy. “Follow me, Blake! I need to get you inside!”
Looking down to him, I found to my dismay that he had paid me little to no mind. His fear was gluing him to inaction, something that was easy to spot even amidst the fight. With no time to waste I focused on the colt and wrapped him up in telekinesis, and with a little effort I got him off the ground to float low in the air beside me, eliciting a startled yelp from him as I pulled him over. Then I was booking it to the nearby entrance of the building that had been just behind us. As soon as I settled into as fast a gallop that I could, the familiar rippling roar of Lily’s engine rose to life with a hateful tone, and the grinding of her treads picked up right after. Buckley’s tank was finally moving again, and though I didn’t turn to see, I knew the infantry was holding their own out on the field.
A quick moment later and I was at the door, setting Blake back onto the ground as I put myself against the wall beside the door. The entrance was closed, and testing the handle with my telekinesis showed that the door was locked up tight. With a growl I thumped my hoof against the heavy metal. “Hey! Hey! I’ve got a civilian out here, open this damn door!” With the ring in my ears fading, I listened in for any signs of response, restating my call to try and get the attention of anypony that might’ve been guarding the entryway.
“Gunny, why isn’t the door open?!”
“Stay behind me, Blake!” At the colt’s frightened question, I turned to him and ushered him along to stand by the door before I spun around to face the battlefield. Now, I beheld a vastly different battle than the one I had seen before boarding Lily to fetch Blake. What had once been two distinguishable lines, one Buckley’s and one the Talons’, had disintegrated in several sectors to nothing more than a chaotic brawl. While the battle had continued around me, the strength of each side had changed. Both had taken new losses, plenty of new losses, and the bodies were piling up. On the Buckley line, a third howitzer had gone down, now reduced to a smoking shell of its former self at the center of the line. It had been the focus of a heavy attack, judging by the number of dead and wounded that were surrounding the disabled artillery piece; but apart from that, even worse, I couldn’t look to a single spot of friendly territory without finding a fallen guard.
But despite the losses, the Talon force had paid an equally heavy toll, more so even. In the time I had been occupied on Lily, the enemy’s vertibucks had lost their hold in the air, with three of them having been shot down in the north and center sectors alone. The anti-air grid, what was left of it, had held its own against them, and while all their griffins had remained airborne, the enemy air force had been reduced to just under half its former strength, with a fourth vertibuck having been clipped at the opposite end of the base. And on the ground, the Talons had and still were being pounded by a whole array of heavy weaponry that Buckley’s guards had come to assemble at the center. Concentrating their firepower for a massive counterattack, Buckley’s line had compressed to perhaps two-thirds of its former size to focus its strength, all the remaining force converging on the center and pushing in closer to Lily to help the heavy tank in her charge. And with the Talons more scattered than before with the loss of additional flak guns and heavy wagons, at least three of each, their fortified positions were becoming more vulnerable targets. They were beginning to pull back, with the center of the Talons’ battered line already falling back off the east runway entirely.
We were gaining the upper hoof.
My ears perked at the sound of a heavy click behind me, and looking back over my shoulder, I found the door as it swung open. A pale blue unicorn mare with a silvery mane met me, an assault rifle floating close by, and right away she backed from the entrance to make room for Blake. “Get in here!”
I didn’t wait for a second invite, turning to Blake and forcing him through the door before I followed him in. Together the two of us stumbled into what had once been a lobby, which had now been converted into its own little kill-zone. Three entrances led to different rooms, two directly ahead, and the third leading to a tunnel stretching down and under the surface. Each of them was fully blocked by sandbags, and each was guarded with two heavy machineguns, one thirty and fifty caliber each. “You two are damn lucky, I hope you know that!” said the mare who had led us in.
But before she could continue, “Lieutenant! The Commander just got back on the horn!” From the underground tunnel entrance, one of the unicorn stallions behind the heavy weapon emplacements called to grab the blue mare’s attention. “He says the Talons are bugging out! They’re retreating from Buckley!”
“Is he serious?” the lieutenant asked, taken by surprise at her subordinate’s claim.
“Lily’s back online, and they’ve lost a big chunk of their vehicle support.” the buck answered, his voice laced with hopeful energy. “They must be falling back to keep their losses down or something.”
“D-does that mean we’re safe, Gunny?”
As the guards’ continued their talk, I felt Blake’s hoof as he jabbed at my left foreleg. Looking down to him, I found the young pony with wide eyes and pinned back ears, his hooves barely keeping him upright as he shook with fright; he was scared far beyond what he deserved. “We’ll be safe now, Blake.” I assured, stepping back to fully face him. “You just stay here with me and this’ll be over with soon.”
“I want Nova…” he responded, his whole body sagging with fatigue. “We need to find her… We need to find her, Gunny.”
“She’ll be alright, Blake. I promise she’ll be fine.” But my words were falling on inattentive ears, Blake only looking back to the open entrance as if expecting Nova to come galloping through the door right then and there. I was quick to step in close to him, just in case he tried heading back outside on his own. But looking with him through the open entrance, my ears quickly picked up how the battle was moving, the rifle and machinegun fire still strong, but definitely diminishing as Buckley’s guards pursued the retreating Talons. From the sound of things outside our new shelter, they had already gone past the east runway and were now bringing the fight into the base’s east perimeter. “This thing’s almost over, Blake.” I quickly added, looking back to the colt to watch for his next move. “Nova’s going to come back soon. But right now, you need to wait here where it’s safe. Do you understand?”
“But what if she’s hurt??” came his immediate argument, carried on terrified words. “What if she needs help?? We need to find her!”
He was becoming restless, and already he was beginning to slowly make his way for the door as he spoke. But I moved in to hook a foreleg across his chest, halting him just as he begun to pick up his pace to leave. “No, Blake!” The colt immediately put up a struggle, planting his hooves on my obstructing foreleg with a grunt to try and shove it aside. “You can’t go out there, Blake! You came out of there unscathed, and I won’t give you another chance to get yourself shot!”
“But Nova-”
“I’ll go out there and bring her back to you!” I interrupted quickly, this time, thankfully, silencing both his words and his struggle to push me away. “I’ll find her, but you have to promise me that you’ll stay here until it’s safe to come back out. Alright?”
Finally, he looked me in the eye again, measuring up my offer. And after a pause, “You promise you’ll find her? You promise?”
“I promise.” I answered, giving him a single pat on the shoulder before nudging him back towards the barricades. “Now stay with these ponies until it’s safe to come outside. I’ll be back s…” But as Blake stepped back, looking between me and the entrance to show his lingering hesitation, I spotted something on Blake’s coat… something that broke the consistent light gray color and stood out to draw my attention – on his right flank was a sliver of blue against the gray, a sliver that grew… and took on a distinguished shape… one that I immediately recognized. “Blake… your flank…”
A moment of confusion, and then the colt turned, craning his head around to see what I was seeing.
And even he froze as he beheld the mark that had formed upon him…
*** *** ***
Pain…
It was… everywhere… everywhere at once…
By claw and bullet, my blood was painting my body with thick spots, jagged stripes, and messy splatters of crimson. But still, with struggling wings I remained in the sky high over Buckley, my eyes locked to the east where the twelve Talon griffins of the invasion force were settling into a loose V formation to quit the field. And among them, I knew that Blackhawk was the one that was rallying the griffin wing together to get them safely out of the base. He was in the middle of their formation, the very center of his subordinates that were the members of the Talons’ 63rd Strikers… I had been watching him, following him ever since he left me bloodied and maimed at his back. He was already past Buckley’s east fence now, having flown far enough away to be just a winged dot against the cloudy sky.
I could only just barely see him through the tears that had risen to life in my eyes, the tears that heavily blurring my vision.
I had been following his every move ever since he had turned tail and fled to oblige the Talons’ order to retreat. And the farther away he flew, the greater my urge was to give chase, to catch up and end him. And yet it was the very tears I cried that stayed my hatred, kept me locked in a hover above the place that I wept for. Only a week ago, I had seen Buckley as a monument of a settlement, a true testament to the will of ponykind to not just survive, but to build and thrive even with the safety and serenity of the Old World having long since vanished. It was an equal match to Challenger in every way, and together, they showed me that building a life on the surface was not only possible, but was also a way to revitalize ourselves and to restore what we once had in Stable 181, to carry that peace, that unity, that strength out onto the surface. Buckley showed me that what we had thought we had lost back in 181 was actually not lost at all. But now, that inspirational symbol was burning before my very eyes… thrown into chaos in the wake of the short but deadly battle.
The sight of Buckley, of the smoke and the flames… of the bodies… I couldn’t stop the sobs that came from the horrible scene. Because below me… below me was a post-battle combat zone that had been branded into the earth, a great gaping scar brought by a piece of the Old World, one that was made to protect ponies, no less, that fell into the hooves of a terrible New World enemy… an enemy that I had been forced to help. It was this knowing that put a familiar dreadful pit into me… only deeper and darker and more painful that it had ever been before in my time on the surface. And it was this knowing, and this outcome, that broke me apart… tore me open and left me dead inside. And now, with the adrenaline of mine and Blackhawk’s dogfight fading… all I did was sob.
I wept because it was all my fault. The destruction I now beheld… it was something that I had burned into the earth. It was all… my… fault…
And yet, the burning base was not the only thing I cried for. No. Mixed with all the sadness, the anger, the regret that tormented me, was a fear that greedily cut into me when I was already down and bleeding out. It was a fear that hadn’t come from my second aerial duel with Blackhawk, or even from worry about how my friends and my baby brother had fared on the surface. It swirled in my mind from only once source – from Blackhawk himself. It had been his voice, the words he called to me, the promises he swore to uphold through the battle that had raged below us like the Armageddon’s fires. Whatever it was that had changed in the Talons’ mission just before my escape from Stable 184, whatever it was that they had wanted to keep me imprisoned for, it had made Blackhawk swear more than just vengeance for the loss of his wife at Plainwell. He had sworn instead that he would take me back into custody, back to General Vance and back to enslavement, even if it wasn’t here and now. And he swore to do so because of Guardian, because of the possibility that there were other systems like Guardian out there, other tools that the Talons could find because of me which should’ve otherwise remained buried and out of sight and mind.
He said that my role in aiding the Talon Legion was not yet over…
He said that there was power in me… in both me and my cutie mark. And he said it was power that he wanted… power that he needed… that the Talons needed…
And I was too terrified to even try and think of what he meant by that.
“Nova! Nova, listen to me, damn it!” A shock rippled through my left shoulder as a hoof jabbed me there, the light but sudden jolt of pain coming from the wound throwing me back into the real world. Right away I came to find the familiar face of Archer, the pegasus stallion having managed much better than me in our aerial battle with Blackhawk and his two Strikers. It was the first time I had gotten close to him since we had left the ATC’s rooftop to engage Blackhawk. And this time, he was glaring at me, giving me the impression that he had been trying to yank me from my darker thoughts for more than just a couple seconds. But with that, I could see a great deal of worry, taking physical form as he said, “Nova, Lily’s back online and she’s chasing the Talons out! The battle’s over, so you need to land and get medical help, now!”
With his voice bringing me to my senses, I was reminded harshly of just how much pain my body was going through. In our duel, Blackhawk had resorted to non-lethal attacks, aiming to weaken me enough to drag me away when I became too injured to fight back. As such, he had shown a side of him I hadn’t seen the first time we had faced off back above Hopeville, a shocking aerial proficiency that I had not nearly been able to rival. His claws, sharp as knives and able to cut through flesh like it was wet paper, had scored multiple hits on me. Despite what I felt had been my best flying, I couldn’t keep up with both him and the two Striker griffins that had made up his team. And the two of them, even while simultaneously dodging Archer’s attacks and keeping him occupied in the sky, had harried me with gunfire so that Blackhawk could move in for a quick slash at me when my attention wasn’t on him. He had gotten me three times, once vertically across my right side, once at a diagonal along my left which had gone from the middle of my belly all the way up to my shoulder, and once across my back, the trio of gashes stretching from the middle of my back to the base of my neck… which was the deepest and most agonizing of them. And to top it all off, apart from my broken rib, Blackhawk had even gotten a hit in with his revolver, the large pistol round practically overkill as it crippled my right front leg where it had struck just below the shoulder. And like before, Blackhawk had gotten away virtually unscathed, his armor once again protecting him from the hits that I did manage to get on him; even the battle rifles I had been given hadn’t been enough to penetrate his rig.
But still, despite his effort to take me back into custody, I had held on. Despite his great effort… he didn’t get me…
He didn’t get me…
Once again, Archer reached out to gently nudge me with a hoof, doing so on the neck so as to avoid a sensitive spot and provoke another painful jolt. This time he didn’t speak, only hovering in close to me and waiting as I tried to pull myself together. But try as I might, I couldn’t get a single word to come out. Instead, my effort to speak only yielded another painful sob, my whole body hitching as two more tears trailed down my cheeks. That was when Archer took the matter into his own hooves, gliding ahead to hover farther to the left and below me. “Let’s go, Nova. You can’t be up here flying anymore.” he called. “We need to get you on solid ground and get you some help. I’ll stay close by to help you land if you need it. Come on.”
I was in absolutely no mood… or even physical shape, for that matter, to be arguing with anypony. Though sluggishly, my body begun to move as I complied with his order. And without any form of reply, I tilted myself in the air and lined myself up with Archer to follow him in as he begun to descend toward Buckley’s west runway. We settled smoothly into our course, the both of us falling into a slow and easy glide down. As we got going, Archer slowed himself in the air to draw up close, eventually falling in right beside me. Though I didn’t look, I could feel his watchful and concerned eyes on me as I focused on finding a place to land. Down below, the east runway that had served as the fallback point for when Buckley had been temporarily driven back by the Talon advance was now mostly clear of personnel. With Buckley’s forces in pursuit of the retreating enemy, all that remained there was a scattered collection of guards that were tending to the wounded… searching over the bodies to designate the living from the dead. And with them, Buckley’s five remaining artillery crews were holding their positions by their guns, though they were no longer firing. But as I drew lower and lower over the surface, I spotted a thicker concentration of activity coming from the munitions hangar. With the Talons clear of the base all the way to its east perimeter, the doors to the armory were slowing sliding opening, and a group of ponies that had been hiding within were coming out and moving along the hangar driveway; a number of guards close by were congregating to them.
With a painful flap of my wings I angled in toward the munitions hangar, Archer staying right next to me as he easily copied my move. “See that group there? I think that’s where Mother Shimmer should be.” Archer stated. “They had set up in one of the hangars, though I never had the time to find out which one… At least it wasn’t residential…”
With a somber sigh, I agreed with that sentiment.
On final approach to the hangar, I begun to distinguish some of the ponies within the slowly growing group. Indeed, some of Buckley’s leadership was mixed within, as the first pony I saw was none other than Commander Tracer. Three different ponies galloped in from different directions of the runway median to meet him as he trotted outside with two others, likely other ponies of a higher rank. Four others were already gathered close by, forming up by the commander to begin to guide him down the runway. As I begun to slow to adjust myself for a landing, I followed their path and traced it ahead, looking farther south as they moved. And there, past two more ponies moving on the pavement, I found a second larger group of at least ten, all gathered together in a tight cluster.
And through the lingering blur in my vision I saw, to my surprise, three Buckley unicorns telekinetically dragging two Talons across the ground and toward that second group.
Slowly I came to a stop, hovering in low over the ground before I begun to descend. With my full weight pulling on my wings, my movements were unstable as I tried to even out my wing beats and lower myself down slowly. Archer came around to hover right in front of me, moving in close and reaching out to set his forelegs against my lower chest. “I’ve got you, Nova. Go ahead and land.”
Wordless I followed his instructions. With the ground just inches below now, I flapped my aching wings one last time before planting myself on the ground. I landed roughly on my hind hooves first, feeling as Archer kept the rest of me up long enough to halt my momentum. And then he lowered me the rest of the way down on his own, letting my front hooves onto the stone. As quick as it touched, I pulled my front right hoof off the ground to keep my weight off it, unable to keep off a sharp hiss as my gunshot wound exploded at the touch. “Come on, Nova.” Archer landed right after me, touching down just to my right as he looked over me with a worried grimace. “Let’s get you to a medic.”
But behind him, I found a familiar face just as he called my name, not so much a call as it was a shocked question. Archer saw where my eyes had focused to as I took a single rough step to the left, to walk around the pegasus, before he turned and followed my line of sight. Together we saw Gunny, frozen when we found him, but then trotting towards us with his eyes widened with shock, locked on me and all my wounds. The sight of him, despite the fact that he was mostly unharmed, barring a single gunshot wound on his right side and a shallow but bleeding gash along the right side of his neck, brought a fresh set of tears that promptly slid down my cheeks. And limping forward, bypassing Archer, I hitched with a heavy sob as I moved quick as I could, to close the distance between us myself.
It was Gunny that reached me first, galloping the rest of the way to me to swiftly wrap me up in a hug. And at being held by my dear friend, I let myself fall apart, letting more tears come freely out which quickly begun to soak into Gunny’s armor. Right away, there were things that I wanted to tell him, now that we were reunited after the battle. I wanted to tell him the things that he should know… about what… and who… had been the cause of this terrible moment; he needed to know. But once more he beat me to it, and despite my weeping, I heard his voice as he promptly asked, “Who did this to you?” And after a short pause, “Did you find Blackhawk up there? Was he…” I gritted my teeth, shutting my eyes even tighter as I returned to my fight to stomp down my crying. And after a short bout of struggle, I managed to nod where my head lay against his armored chest. I heard Gunny sigh as he rested his head over my neck, my silent confirmation clearly not what he was hoping to get; I winced at the disheartened pitch in his voice. “I’m sorry, Nova.” he said. “I should’ve been there to help you like I said… close by to back you up.” He held me just a little tighter, careful in the application of his strength around my wounded body. “I could’ve done… something…”
But to that, I managed to shake my head, moving enough to get his attention. And after one final sob, I choked out a response. “No… he… he didn’t get me, Gunny.” Blackhawk didn’t get me. He got Gracie… he got our friend… but not me… “He didn’t get me…” With a grunt, I leaned back and away from my friend, the unicorn similarly letting me out of his hold as he took a step back. And as I came to look him in the eye, one question came to the forefront of my thoughts as I swallowed down another sob that wanted to come. “Blake…” I choked out, the word forcing me to clear my throat. “Gunny, wh… where is he?”
“He’s safe.” he replied, instant and sure. “He was in the tank when the battle was on, and we got him out and to a shelter just before the Talons retreated.” As he explained, he looked back over his left shoulder, towards the squat building sitting in the median. “He’s back in…”
But as soon as he looked back, he fell silent. And I saw, at the same time, the reason why. Wherever Blake had been, he had left to come outside, and had followed Gunny in order to find me. My baby brother was staring wide-eyed at the bloody sight that I amounted to, only to come running as soon as we locked eyes. A moment later and he threw himself against me, and painful as it was, I didn’t even flinch as I pulled him in and held him tight with my injured leg. “Oh, Blake! Thank Celestia you’re alright…” I muttered, instantly bombarding his forehead with grateful kisses as he clung to me. “Goddesses, I was so worried…”
Through my words, I heard Blake as he too begun to sob, and I felt as what had been light shaking turned into far rougher hitches. It was a quick and surprising change, to the point where I leaned back to try and look him in the eye again. Eventually I had to force him to look up, taking my leg off his back to reach under his jaw and lift his head up. Tears met me as he reluctantly looked at me, and I narrowed my eyes in puzzlement as he continued to remain silent. “Blake… Blake, what’s wrong?”
“I…” My little brother swallowed as I nervously stared, waiting. “I… I-I sh… s-shot somepony…” He looked away again, closing his eyes as he swallowed back another sob. At his revelation, I slowly lowered my foreleg away from his chin to reach back over and pull him against me again, only staring ahead as I let his words sink in. “I killed… I killed a pony…”
“It was a solider.” Speaking lowly, Gunny walked into my peripheral vision, looking out towards the east as the gunfire continued to lessen and lessen. “He tackled me off the tank when it had been disabled… when we were getting Blake out of there. He managed to get my knife from me, and we fought for it with our horns. When we came to a standstill trying to take the knife, that’s when Blake put him down. I thought it was Ivy or Raemor… but Blake was the one that saved my hide there… And he…”
“And he what?” I slowly asked, running my hoof through Blake’s mane to try and comfort him, a sad little whimper escaping him.
“Nova… he’s got his cutie mark.”
My eyes popped round, my hoof stopping in my little brother’s mane mid-stroke, and I felt as Blake nodded against my chest, confirming Gunny’s words for me. For a long moment I was still, unable to respond, only turning to my unicorn friend where he looked between me and my brother with sympathetic eyes. He came to stare back at me, another pause lingering before he eventually gave me a nod of his own, further proving his story for himself; it was the last signal I needed to fully, truly believe his words. “Let me see, Blake.” At his gesture, I recovered enough from the shocking news to release my brother again. Together the two of us took a single step back, putting just enough distance between us to look into each other’s eyes. “Let me see it…” I gently repeated, watching as Blake craned his head around to look back to his new cutie mark once more for himself. Then, facing front, he slowly turned in place to present a clear view of his left flank to me.
And sure enough… there it was…
A mark of deep blue was etched onto him now, sitting proud and new against his light gray coat. But looking the mark up and down, following its shape, my sense of curiosity morphed into one of rapidly rising shock. Because while blue was the color, the mark’s shape took on that of a flame, a fireball that could be seen as floating in the air, still and calm yet resonating with strength, with gentle tongues of blue-white fire licking out from the top as it burned.
Blake’s cutie mark was a blue flame…
Like my blue flame…
Like our father’s…
It was the exact same thing…
“Nova!”
The only thing that could’ve pulled me from the shocking sight did so – Shore’s voice calling with immediate fright. He came from the right, his galloping hooves coming in clearly over the near non-existent gunfire, and I turned to find the black stallion just before he skidded to a halt in front of me. This time, I beat my friend to the embrace I knew was coming, and I reached out my wounded foreleg to him, whereupon he fell right into the best hold I could give him. Unlike Gunny, Shore said no immediate words, and his silence provoked new tears to fall, two more trailing down my cheeks. But this time I forced myself back to focus before I could fall into a second bout of weeping, leaning back to look over Shore’s Stable 181 security armor; thankfully, I couldn’t see any blood. “Are you okay, Shore?” I managed to ask, swallowing as I fought for my composure.
“I’m alright, I’m alright.” came his easy response. “But Nova, your wounds are… your wounds are ugly. You need to get help…”
“Hey! Over here!”
From the right, Gunny called loud and clear out towards the east as Shore and I let each other go. And though I didn’t look, I heard as yet another familiar voice answered him. “Gunny! Is everypony okay?!”
“Nova’s hurt!” Gunny answered Ivy, additional hoof steps coming within my hearing range as she approached. “And I’ve just got the one hit! Are you two good?”
“We’re not hurt. We both made it.” Then came Raemor’s words, both he and Ivy halting their trot to a walk as they joined us. “And I’m glad to see that the rest of us did as well.”
But then, just as I begun to finally turn to look over the rest of my companions for myself…
“Nova!”
One more voice… one more call. Tracer. I knew his voice too, and I heard it from behind me as it reached me with an urgent tone. I turned as fast as my crippled leg would allow, coming around to see the dark red, green-maned earth pony as he came to a halt a few yards away, two Buckley guards flanking him as he looked my way. “Commander… is something wrong?” I asked, wincing as both my leg and my back gave me an extra kick of pain.
“Come with me, Nova.” came his brisk reply. “Can you move?”
“Are you serious?” Right away, Gunny came to stand by me, stopping by my left as Blake leaned up against my right hind leg. “She needs a medic, and she needs one now!”
But alarmingly, Tracer paid Gunny’s concern no heed, instead trotting the rest of the way to us and stopping right in front of me. “Nova, come with me.” he said, his lower tone accompanying a slowly forming glare… one that made me lean back in worry. “We captured two Talon soldiers back there. And one of them identified you by name.”
My breath caught in my throat… and my dead silence was copied by everypony around me.
Tracer’s suspicion had been immediately apparent in his voice… and I felt a cold fear coming to life in me.
The commander about-faced, his two guards copying him before they made their way back down the runway. As soon as they moved a few paces down I could see where the larger congregation of ponies had formed. The same group just past the munitions hangar had grown to well over twice its size, with two dozen Buckley guards having formed a congested ring around what had to have been Tracer’s aforementioned prisoners. “Nova?”
Gunny was the first to break the spell of silence that had come crashing down on us from Tracer’s revelation. His one word question was… uncertain. He was unsure what to think… what to do. And so was I. Only minutes ago I had wanted to tell Gunny what had really happened during my imprisonment. The sight of the destruction that had been carved into Buckley had stabbed me so deeply… and telling the truth would be the only way to rip that knife back out so that I could heal… maybe. And yet now, with what Tracer had said… I was glued to where I was, frozen with fear… fear of telling that truth that I had wanted to speak before. Because surely, if what Tracer had said was true… then one or both of the captured Talons had surely seen me back at the National Guard Bunkers. Or at the very least, they had been told of my role in unlocking the Guardian Project.
They definitely knew of me… they had to…
And I needed to see…
“Nova?”
Again Gunny asked for me, this time leaning forward and bowing his head to try and look me in the eyes. And I met his stare, albeit with uncertainty, as I replied, “Help me over there… I need to see those prisoners…”
“But Nova…” Stepping past him on the left was Ivy, looking equally worried as she too looked me eye-to-eye. But I shook my head to her before looking forward, only restating to her my wish to see the captured enemy soldiers.
And thankfully, despite the uncomfortable silence from Shore and Raemor… and my baby brother… nopony else fought me on it. Gunny only crossed in front of me before stepping up by my right side, whereupon I took the presented opportunity to lean against him for support. And together we begun to make our way over to where Tracer was already waiting for us, looking back to us over his shoulder as we took our first steps. Despite the commander’s presence, hardly any of the guards in the group of over two dozen were paying him any attention. While they were largely silent, their focus was placed solely in the center of the ring, where I could hear grunts and the sounds of punches being thrown.
“You’re lying!” From within the ring came the first voice, loud and angry. And again, another punch was thrown. “I know you’re fucking lying, scumbag! Now tell the truth so I can ease your passing!”
“MAKE ROOM! MOVE!”
Tracer’s voice cut into the crowd with ease, halting them all where they stood. And all at once, over a dozen pairs of eyes swung back to look upon me as we approached. I nearly froze again at the sudden attention, a mix of angry and worried stares meeting me as the Buckley earth ponies and unicorns begun to step aside to make way for me. As soon as the ring parted at its center, I saw the black armor of a Talon uniform. As I limped closer, the armor shifted slowly where it lay on the pavement, a pony rolling onto his left side. And when Gunny and I drew up to the ring with the others, I saw the armor’s owner. A Talon earth pony buck lay panting on his side, fighting to regain his breath as he wiped a foreleg over the dark orange fur of his muzzle; blood streaked across the armor along his leg, painting a dark glistening trail along the black plating. And just behind the earth pony was a unicorn, another stallion who had likewise been sent to the ground. He was on his belly and facing away from me, his ash-colored mane disheveled, and his body likewise heaving as he sought to get his breath back; a Buckley unicorn stallion was within the ring, just a couple paces back from the gray-maned enemy with a combat knife hovering menacingly beside him. Together Gunny and I came to a halt, stopping just inside the ring of guards. The orange earth pony immediately looked to me, his eyes slightly widening at my presence as he beheld the mare who had, not long ago, been on his side. And at the silence that took over the entirety of the group, the second stallion slowly shifted, likewise turning to look upon me. Unlike his companion, the unicorn remained as composed as being beaten could allow as he looked upon me… but I did not.
The unicorn was light-brown in color, and after a quick glance over his armored form, I recognized the stocky build that matched the familiar mane and coat colors.
Sergeant Trigger… from the Guardian expedition…
“This one identified you by name, outsider.” From just to the left of where Trigger lay, the unicorn with the knife pointed the weapon’s tip to the captive sergeant. “I asked him how the Talons had gotten their hooves on those missiles they used, and he spoke up about you right away. He said that you were… he said that you were the reason that they had gotten those missiles.”
“But that’s not right!” came a mare’s voice from amongst the crowd. “That can’t be right!”
“It is right.” Trigger spoke up, not even breaking our eye contact. “I’ve told you the truth about those missiles, two times now. She was the one to get them for us, whether she or any of you like it or not.” There was a dreadful silence among us all, one in which I begun to go numb at his words. And yet, in the quiet, Trigger’s tired face gradually formed up in a tiny smile as he looked me over. “So… I guess you outmaneuvered Blackhawk yet again.” he observed, now speaking to me directly. “You got away… barely though.” I heard him… but I didn’t speak. I only listened to him… it was all I could do. “It’s a funny thing really, what a lust for revenge will do to someone.” Letting out a single cough, clearing his throat, he added, “Revenge makes you stronger for leaving you with only one objective, and no regrets or hesitation to go with it. And yet it makes you weaker… blind sometimes, maybe… especially when all you can think of is the ones you’ve lost and the one you want to kill for it, the one who’s responsible for it…”
“Hey!” Just behind me came Commander Tracer’s booming voice again, blocking off the rest of Trigger’s thoughts and forcing him into silence. “Tell us how!” Tracer ordered him. “You say Nova gave you those missiles, but I don’t believe you. Tell us how…”
With a defeated huff, Trigger finally looked away from me to find Tracer within the group. “Why ask me?” he replied, then nodding over to me. “Nova can tell you anything you want to know just as well as I can… After all, she was there…”
Even without looking, I felt as the eyes of every nearby pony fell upon me… and I knew that every single one of them noticed me as I begun to shake. My breathing quickened to accompany the trembling in my limbs, and my head bowed down from a terrible weight that hung itself over me. And try as I might, the tears from before that I had just recently managed to stave away begun to reform, my eyes watering up before I let them close. Through all of this, nopony spoke, friend or otherwise, and yet the tension steadily swelled, coming to a boil that made me all the more hesitant to speak. But… now, there really was no way to hide from the truth. Now… now I had to speak.
“Nova… what is he talking about?”
Archer…
The pegasus stallion had likewise entered the ring, pushing through the crowd to stop over to my left. Anxious disbelief was written on his face like a book. Oh no, he didn’t take Trigger’s words as truth, and I knew exactly what is was that he wanted to hear. He wanted to hear that I played no part in the Talons’ acquisition of the most powerful Old World weapon buried in the southeast. He wanted to hear of my innocence so as to be able to place me on the same side of the spectrum of good and evil that he himself was on. He wanted to hear that I was good, the same mare that I was when we had first met… when I had first come to Buckley and inspired them…
He didn’t want to hear that I played the biggest part in giving Buckley the destruction that scarred it now. And I knew that behind me, all of my friends were looking to me with the same face, with the desire to hear the same things that Archer wanted to hear. But seeing the stallion flier’s face, the worry in his eyes… I couldn’t stand it anymore…
“I’m so sorry, Archer… I’m so, so sorry…”
It was the last thing I said to myself… before I spoke the truth…
“When the Talons captured me… they brought me to their base in Marefax and held me there for three days.” I explained, clearing my throat of the roughness that had formed during the pregnant pause. “On the third day, I woke up from the tranquilizer that they’d used on me, only to find that they’d captured my brother too. They… they strapped him with explosives… threatened to kill him. They used him as a leash to tie me to their Major General’s hoof so that they could use me how they wanted.” I dared to look up, to look upon the faces of the guards whose full attention I now had; shocked attention met me in well over half of them… some were already beginning to glare… the quickest to put the pieces together. “And so they took me out to the far northeast corner of the region.” I continued. “There was a facility out there, Old World military, known in the old days as the Southeast National Guard Bunkers. The Talons had their sights set on it for a long time, long enough for rebels from their own homeland to take shelter inside.” After a breath, “And in that facility… there was a door that they couldn’t open… the only one that they needed to open. They brought me there to open that door for them…” As I spoke, the task itself becoming more and more difficult as I went on, I found myself turning to where Gunny remained by my right side; his wide eyes… Goddesses… his eyes… “It had been closed for a long time, probably even before the world ended. And it was locked by some sort of advanced technology… something that they called a biometric scanner. It was a lock that was designed to only release in the presence of a pegasus pony, and no others.” I let my shoulders rise in a weak shrug. “Turns out that they were hunting for pegasi in this region once they found out that they were the key to opening that one door. According to the General, there had only been four pegasus ponies spotted in the region… They just… they just found me first…”
“And behind that door were those missiles…” Tracer, from his place behind me, spoke with a tone that showed his understanding, his realization of the very truth I feared to speak; his voice was low with that recognition.
“The missiles made up one of the Old World’s several military projects, this one called Guardian.” I replied. “It was a defensive system designed and built by pegasus ponies to combat megaspells – both balefire missiles and actual launched spells. When I got that door open… the Talons repurposed them to give them the offensive capabilities that you saw today-”
BLAM! BLAM!
With a gasp, I jumped in place at the two shocking reports of a rifle, its short distance from me putting a thin ringing in my ears as I looked back to the left. There, close by where he stood a step away from Archer, a Buckley unicorn stallion glared down the sights of a precision carbine, on the other side of which lay Trigger and his companion, both bleeding out onto the concrete from the holes that had been put through their skulls. And suddenly, the same stallion swung his eyes to me, glaring hateful fire that froze me in place. “So you’re telling us that you went into that facility and opened up the door to give these fuckers those missiles yourself?! You’re saying that you helped them get those missiles so they could bomb us, hell, bomb the whole Goddess-damned region?! Do you have any idea what this attack has just cost us??!”
“I didn’t open that door on my own free will!” Despite the stallion’s display of rage, I matched his volume with mine… only in desperation… “They put an explosive collar on my brother, and they were going to murder him like an animal if I didn’t do what they wanted! Opening that door was the only way I was going to be able to save him!”
“SO YOU FUCKING SACRIFICED LUNA KNOWS HOW MANY LIVES ALL FOR YOUR LITTLE BROTHER?!!” Another stallion, the unicorn with the blade from before, immediately backed up his comrade, his own voice even more frightening and angry than the former.
“THEY GAVE ME NO CHOICE!!” I screamed to him, yet another pair of tears beginning to slide down my cheeks as I whipped my head around to face him. “If my brother hadn’t been at risk I would’ve never helped them!! You need to believe me when I say that!!”
“LOOK AROUND YOU!! LOOK AT HOW MANY BODIES ARE ON THIS RUNWAY!! WE’VE LOST FUCKING DOZENS, MAYBE HUNDREDS!!” the second unicorn roared.
“Buckley is burning, outsider!!” Before I could try and respond, a mare from the ring stepped in; I found her on the opposite side. “Look at what those missiles did to us!! Look at what you did to us!!”
“Do you think I wanted this?!” I demanded hotly, locking eyes with the mare where she stood glaring, teeth bared in seething anger. “The Talons made me go into those bunkers! They made me kill ponies who opposed their government, including a mother who I killed right in front of her child!! THEY… MADE… ME!!” I was screaming just the same as the others now… my voice cracked with the intensity, and my shaking threatened to bring me to the ground. “Do you really think I would’ve chosen to do any of this willingly, even after everything my friends and I did for Buckley?!”
“You’re an outsider!” the same mare shot back, stamping a hoof down. “I wouldn’t put anything past you!”
“I can’t believe what I’m hearing from you, outsider!” A second mare, three ponies away from the first, was looking to me not with anger… but with a pained expression; it was the face of a pony who now knew that she had misplaced her trust. “You sided with the most dangerous monstrosity that the southeast’s ever seen, and you aided them in the deaths of Goddesses know how many! How can you live with that?!”
“I have to live with it!” I said, my voice hitching as a sob broke through my sentence. “Don’t you understand?! I have to live with the fact that I killed innocents in the National Guard Bunkers! I have to live with the fact that I betrayed everypony I’ve ever cared about to help the Talons in their damned mission! And I have to live with the blood of dozens on my hooves, maybe even hundreds if they use the other missiles elsewhere!”
“Not for long you don’t!!”
What??!
One of the unicorn stallions from before had shouted those words, drawing a gasp from me at the very sudden and ominous turn from a screaming match that was already becoming too unbearable. But that was all I was able to do before something slammed down on my back, and slammed down hard. Both the wound on my back and my broken rib exploded with agony, the force of the hit like a bullet all on its own, and I screamed as the impact sent me easily to the ground. I hit the pavement belly first, my jaw striking the concrete after and knocking me into a daze. A whole mess of shouting voices quickly swelled to life, with hardly a single distinguishable word between them. But among the closest to me, I heard Blake cry in shock at the sudden attack I’d just taken.
But then came the cocking of weapons. One at first… then another… and another… one after the next ponies were arming their weapons…
“DROP YOUR RIFLE! DROP IT, FUCKER!”
The readying of rifles had quenched every voice almost simultaneously. But Gunny was quick to break the silence with his sharp order. His voice drew my eyes back up, and looking over my right shoulder, I found the brick-red unicorn with his horn flaring bright. The All-Equestrian hovered horizontally above me, and I followed the direction of the LMG’s barrel to find the unicorn with the carbine rifle as Gunny’s target. “Back off!” the Buckley unicorn snapped back, his own weapon floating just shy of pointing right at me. “I’m taking this traitor out, and then I’m going to kill each and every one of you outsiders that tries to protect her! I knew all along that we couldn’t trust you-”
But Gunny only pressed on, fearless and without hesitation, stepping forward to stand protectively over me. “You drop that rifle, or I’ll drop you right where you stand!” he warned, crouching threateningly. “I dare you to make a move!”
But while Gunny was more than ready to kill the guard, and the unicorn’s rifle was not yet aligned with a target, there was over a dozen other weapons that were all leveled for Gunny, almost all the other guards within the circle more than ready to act at my friend’s first move. With Gunny, I could see Shore where he stood just behind him. He was facing the opposite direction, his laser pistol held firmly in his jaws as he faced down the guards on our right, most of which had likewise brought their weapons to bear. And looking to the left again, I found another pony blocking my view where he stood right in front of me – Blake, facing away from me as he stared with fright at the unicorn who sought to be my executioner; with my view blocked by both Gunny and my brother, I couldn’t find Raemor or Ivy.
“Get the hell out of the way, outsider!”
“You’d better drop it!”
“Last chance, outsider!!”
“I will fucking end you!!”
“FUCK YOU!!”
And with a flash of light, the carbine unicorn brought his rifle to bear, the barrel coming up to point for me and Blake together.
BOOM!
One shot, a single clap of thunder whose echo silenced everypony… everypony and everything in our chaotic circle. I jumped at the shot, my eyes snapping shut in fear for the worst… and yet nothing came… no pain… no screaming… no gunfire that followed after. I had expected a battle to come to life, one that would’ve inevitably cost Gunny his very life. Yet for a moment, the only noise was that of the burning hangar nearby, the crackling of the fires that licked away at the rubble. But then came the sound of hooves against the stone, all at once as the right side of the ring begun to move. And when I looked, I saw as the guards there parted away to form a wide lane of travel, a path through which a single unaccompanied pony walked.
Mother Shimmer…
Moving slowly, her nearly glowing green eyes settled on me as soon as she could see me past her youngers. In the ghoul’s mouth was a pistol, a much larger model that sported an equally larger caliber bullet, which was made of shimmering blue metal… a beautiful weapon. A few more steps in and Shimmer came to a smooth stop, turning and bowing her head to where her weapon holster was secured around her left front leg. And with one easy motion, she holstered her personal sidearm before looking back to me where I lay; thankfully, Shimmer herself looked unharmed... or as unharmed as her decayed body could appear.
At least I had that on my side…
“Enough.” she said, her raspy voice surprisingly… calm. “Enough of this, my children.”
As if it were a command, the guards surrounding us one and all begun to lower their weapons, all of them besides the carbine unicorn, who only stared back at his leader with disbelief. “Mother Shimmer, this outsider betrayed us!” he argued, his former anger suddenly reduced to a more desperate version of its former self. “We can’t let this go! We have to make her pay for this!”
“I said, enough, child.” Shimmer replied after a short huff, patient as she swung her eyes to the stallion. “There has been too much bloodshed today already. I want no more.”
“You can’t say that this traitor doesn’t-”
The carbine stallion persisted… or tried to. But in a shocking change of composure, Shimmer’s calm eyes instantly warped into a fiery glare, and the lazy green haze that had been floating around her body abruptly pulsed in a startling display as she yelled, “I SAID NO MORE!”
That put the stallion into silence… now only leaving me as I looked to Buckley’s leader… waiting for her to speak to me…
“Commander Tracer.” she began, letting out a disheartened sigh as she looked past me; I followed her gaze only to find Gunny, the All-Equestrian now lowered away. “Gather everypony here and get them to aid the wounded. Doctor Preston lost his clinic in the residential hangar, but he’s setting up a station in the church to try and tend to some of those who have been wounded with what supplies he has left.”
“Yes… of course.”
“And make sure that everypony is assigned a task.” she added, the crowd already beginning to thin. “There’ll be much to do.”
“Yes, mother.” Tracer replied.
“And as for you…” I flinched back, hearing her first before I looked; now her eyes were on us with a purpose. “Each of you will gather yourselves up and proceed to my silo. The doors are open, and there’s a medical box inside with some potions and bandages. Tend to your own wounds as best you can while we work up here. Tonight I’ll have a nurse tend to you properly. Go to my room now, and do not come out. I’ll speak to each of you together when I am able.”
The earth pony ghoul immediately turned away, stopping to scan along the guards as they begun to disperse, Tracer and the other superior officers calling out their orders to move. And frozen in place, I only watched where Buckley’s leader looked to, following her gaze along the base’s west side… passing the pile of rubble that was all that remained of the base’s repair shop. Then she turned to the left, to where the guards that had chased the Talons out of the base were now coming back… to the remains of the northern housing sector.
The leader… taking in her losses…
The sight of her, so calm as she looked out over her home and the post-battle carnage that blanketed it… for some reason, it was a sight that gave me the greatest sting of guilt out of all the others… I was looking at Buckley’s founding mare, who had built the base up from a ruin in the wasteland to its proud self… who was now just… just stuck… taking the measure of everything she had lost in the Talons’ quick and savage attack. And as Gunny followed Mother Shimmer’s order for me, leaning down to gently nudge my side and persuade me to move, I let myself fall into tears once more as Shimmer moved on to tend to her people.
And this time, those tears fell without any obstacle whatsoever to bar them… as the full and merciless weight of what I had done came crashing down on me.
Footnote: 50% to level up
Bonus Perk: The Fire We Share – He’s got his cutie mark! Through the fires of battle, the bond between you and your brother has become even stronger. Each of your tag skills are now permanently raised by +5.
Stats
Page generated in 0.036 seconds
Total duration
1,011 users online
1,649,839 hits today, 2,561,572 yesterday
FIMFiction
My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic Fanfiction
Designed and coded by knighty & Xaquseg - © 2011-2024
Follow & Support Us
Support us
SubStar
Chat!
Discord
Follow us
Twitter
MLP: Friendship is Magic® - © 2024 Hasbro Inc.®
Fimfiction is in no way affiliated with or endorsed by Hasbro Inc.®
Nova, please... don't let this stop you.
You've been through worse. You might not see us readers, but we're with you.
Buckley ain't gonna like you for a while, but they'll get over it when Shimmer talks to them. Or at least, after she talks to you.
4927151 Indeed a hard road is ahead for Nova. There is much that has happened, much that the Talons put her through at Guardian and elsewhere. We shall see what awaits her.
Holy hell this thing is getting all sorts of messed up
I love it
5000703 I'm glad you do.
Hopefully this will continue to be the case with future chapters.
Also featured on falloutequestria.wikia.com.
5202853 Well how about that?
Thank you for telling me. I would've never known otherwise.