Preparations
An actinic glare abruptly flooded the expansive library from a flat upright ellipse, which then rippled and ejected first a small avalanche of packs and straps, then three flailing bodies, one after another, to bounce and slide across the polished-stone floor. With an oddly truncated whoosh the harsh light winked out, leaving the echoing room dim and quiet. For a long moment the only sounds were strained breathing and muffled grunts.
A pair of softer glows sputtered to life. “Sunset? Captain Brass?” Cook’s slightly breathless voice called out.
“Yeah,” Sunset called back. “It’s . . . darker in here than I expected.”
Rose’s contribution was a vigorous and inventive string of curses. “You didn’t tell me I’d need motocross armor for that little trip.”
“You’re not hurt, are you?” The will-o’-wisp around Sunset’s alicorn expanded and brightened, resolving a trio of equine silhouettes. The sturdy young unicorn mare herself wore nothing—unlike either of the other two.
Cook had become a unicorn stallion not much larger than she. His clothing was reduced to a dickie-like garment with cargo pockets on the chest, snug buttoned brushguards around forearms and cannons, and hiking boots on all four hooves. His glacier glasses, unchanged other than to accommodate his transformed cranium, hovered in the off-white grip of his levitation, revealing disconcertingly pale eyes. Sunset’s anxious glance flicked past him, seeking the third member of their little party.
Rose was . . . a pegasus mare. A big one. The khaki campaign coverall she wore lacked hoof gloves and splint reinforcing, though grommets and pads for the latter remained. Nailed to her hooves were steel shoes clad with vulcanized rubber. Not surprisingly for a newcomer through the portal, she was turning her head this way and that in self-examination. Her eyepatch, like Cook’s glasses, looked little different; her scars showed bare and pink, lacking any hair. Her mane retained a buzz cut, but her tail was longer.
“I’m fine, I think,” replied the normally self-assured ex-captain in a subdued voice. “But—” Two sound and brawny arms stamped, one after the other. Then she turned, and Sunset caught her breath.
“It’s . . . your wing, Rose,” she explained in a hushed voice. “Your right wing.”
The scarred head whipped around. With an effort Rose spread her wings for the first time, hesitantly, awkwardly, feeling her way into her body’s changes. The left wing was everything it should be, half-pony-length primaries to shame an eagle, secondaries and coverts and auxiliaries, immaculate and gleaming.
The right wing gleamed as well, silver to her body’s brass. After a fashion it was at least as impressive as its mate, for every visible bit of it was metal, as finely worked as a grandfather clock. “What—?”
“I’m convinced the portal has a mind of its own,” Cook commented in the same dry tone with which he’d greeted Sunset. “It seems to decide how to . . . translate anything traveling through it. Apparently it decided your prosthetic should be an artificial wing.”
Both wings flexed experimentally. “But how does it work?” Bemusement and wonder lurked under the shock in her tones.
“It has to be magical,” Sunset offered uncertainly. “I’m not sure what else it could be.”
“Right now enchanted clockworks are the only way Equestria can produce prosthetics as good as we’re used to back home—but the process is even more difficult and expensive, so they’re pretty rare,” Cook amplified. “This world’s still in the throes of the Industrial Revolution; go back a hundred and thirty or a hundred and forty years and you’d be in the right ball park.”
“Yes, I remember,” Rose noted in an absent tone. “I got a briefing packet when I was assigned to the sirens.”
“Oh!” Sunset straightened. “How are they doing, by the way?”
The smile that lit the equine face was as luminous as it would be on the human face. “Their therapy with Doc W is going slowly, but they’re making progress. Since they aren’t minors any more, they should have been transferred to the young-adult division, but nobody there has a security clearance. Besides, they asked to stay on my client roster instead.”
“Time,” Cook put in diffidently.
Rose’s whole face shifted; suddenly a military officer looked out of the single good eye. “Right. First order of business: we need a look at Canterlot.”
“Uh—this way.” Sunset raised an arm in a sweeping gesture toward one of the library’s green-glazed doors.
Rose stared into the eyepiece of the telescope still pointing across the fertile green valley toward the axe-cleft pass that cradled Canterlot. The other two stood silently behind her on the high balcony of Princess Twilight’s strange residence; neither was in the mood for small talk after their own peeks through the brass tube’s lenses.
“Mister Cook.” The command voice was crisp and firm. “Take notes.” One of her ears flicked back, imprinted reflexes taking care of what her conscious mind was too preoccupied to interfere with. The faint chimes of spellcasting rang as Cook obediently levitated a clipboard and fountain pen liberated from the study downstairs; sheets of stiff watermarked paper fluttered in the slight breeze before his glow smoothed them down again.
Drawing on her training and experience, Rose outlined in short declarative sentences what she could see and interpret of the fighting—and fires—raging among the streets and buildings of the embattled city. “The Guard’s getting hammered,” she concluded. “My guess is they were in barracks and totally surprised when this went down. Looks like squads or individual guns—artillery, that is—got into action here and there, but without support, they aren’t lasting very long. Those airships are nailing any tube and crew that gets off a shot. I don’t see any gasbag wreckage, and with all that smoke it’s hard to tell how many the enemy brought to the party. I’d say the city has another hour or so before someone there surrenders.”
Sunset hiccuped on a sob. Cook let out a breath, then asked quietly, “Anything identifiable, Captain?”
“I’m not sure,” Rose replied. “I can see some sort of roundel on the airship envelopes—a pair of light-blue lightning bolts. The left one is down and slightly left, then horizontally right, then straight down; the right one is a mirror-image. Either of you recognize that?” Sunset and Cook both denied any knowledge of the odd insigne.
“Okay. I don’t think we can get anything more at this point.” Rose turned away from the telescope to face the unicorns. “Second order of business: we need to get that information back through the portal. Mister Cook, can anyone else make heads or tails of those notes?”
“They’re in shorthand, so it might take a bit of time to find someone who can read them, but I did my best to make them neat and tidy.” Cook’s tone was precise and unwontedly sober.
“Good.” Rose started back for the stairs at a brisk walk. “Sunset, will Principal Celestia still be on campus?”
“I think so.” Sunset’s voice was thick.
“Let’s hope so. We’ll wrap the sheets around something, tie up the whole packet with parcel twine, and throw it back through.”
A sizable rock, stealthily levitated through a back window from the grounds outside, was rinsed off and dried hastily in the kitchen. Sunset wrapped the papers and twine around it, pausing occasionally to sniffle and wipe her eyes. Cook took over levitating the package as they made their way back to the library.
“Do we just throw it?” Rose asked dubiously as she looked over the mirror and associated contraptions.
“It’s . . . kind of like a computer in sleep mode,” Sunset replied. “I think that might work, but touching the mirror first always seems like a better idea.”
Cook did just that, stepping up the mirror’s dais and extending an arm to press his booted hoof against its surface. A magenta swirl of light faded in, displacing their reflections. He stepped back again and, with a toss of his head, flung his burden at the portal, letting his levitation lapse at the last moment. The paper-wrapped stone vanished and the mirror once more reverted to a disarming quiescence.
He turned back and stepped down. “All we can do is hope. Or pray, if you do that.”
Rose drew in a breath. “Third order of business: now that we’ve sent back all the intelligence we can, we have to put the portal out of commission.”
“What?” Sunset shrieked. Cook winced but held his peace.
“Sunset.” Rose’s tone was patient. “Think. The enemy is about to take the capital. Their next step is to secure and consolidate. How long will it be before troops are here in Ponyville? How long will it take them to sack this place? Once they have, how long will it take them to figure out the portal? They probably couldn’t mount any kind of serious operations through it, but do you want to see Canterlot High become a literal battleground? What if they realize they could send agents provocateur through it instead?”
“We can—we can hold Twilight’s castle.” Desperation was clear in Sunset’s voice and stance.
“It’s not a castle.” Rose’s manner was unyielding. “It has no curtain walls, no enceinte, no baileys, not even a motte or a palisade. At most it’s a tower house, and not a well-fortified one. How long do you think a high-school graduate, a diplomat, and a half-crippled army captain could defend it against infantry battalions, airships, and high-velocity cannon, let alone magic? We don’t have the authority to commandeer a Guard detachment, assuming there’s any around here, and we don’t have the moral right to talk any townsfolk into reinforcing us with a few muskets and shotguns.”
“We don’t need to destroy the mirror,” Cook’s calm voice broke in. Both the mares looked over at him; he in turn was examining the mechanisms half-surrounding the tall glass and dais.
“Explain,” Rose ordered in a flat tone.
“What makes the mirror interesting to a potential investigator are all the gizmos and doohickeys attached to it.” He waved an arm at the arcane addenda. “Clear those away and move the mirror somewhere innocuous, and it’s part of the scenery.” His eyes narrowed. “Without them the mirror won’t work as a portal for another . . . six months or so, if I remember correctly. With luck, nobody would notice anything unusual for the three days the portal would be open. Then it would close for another twenty-nine months.”
“And what about those gizmos and doohickeys?” Rose was frankly doubtful.
“We . . . we put them in Twilight’s study.” Sunset still sounded unsteady, but she frowned in concentration. “She’s already got a bunch of junk in there.”
“Okay, that might work,” Rose allowed, having seen that disaster area for herself. “But I’d want some insurance.”
“We pull the spark plugs and take them with us,” Cook said with a shrug of the withers.
“The journal,” said Sunset. “That and, uh, Twilight’s notes on the portal. Without those, they can’t put it back together, and even if they do, they can’t make it work.”
“Then we refugee out,” Cook added. “We sure can’t stay here, and once we disable the portal, we can’t go back home through it.”
“Mister Cook—” Rose paused and sighed. “No, you’re right. Both of you. Let’s set it up.”
They worked as quickly as they could. The oncoming evening darkness forced them to light a few gas lamps in the library, but otherwise they relied on as little illumination as possible. As far as anypony outside knew, the extruded crystalline tower was deserted, all its inhabitants having decamped to Canterlot for the aborted Friendship Festival. None of the trio wanted lit-up windows to betray any hint otherwise and thereby attract undesired attention, either from the growing panic in the neighboring town or from the enemy airships beginning to peel off from their orbits over the vanquished city.
Sunset dismantled Twilight’s ingenious jury-rigs, sorting the parts on the floor around the mirror’s base. Cook made round trips to the study and back, placing those parts on, in, under, or around, as seemed appropriate. When he discovered a bin, drawer, or cabinet of similar parts, he took the opportunity to emulate the purloined letter. Rose made a swift tour of the whole structure, securing every exterior door and window she was able to find. In the process she discovered she could fly, if clumsily, though how much was beginner’s fumbling and how much was impairment from her physical damage wasn’t clear even to her.
Eventually they were ready for the final step. “All right, where do we put it?” Rose asked as they stood and gazed up at the now unsuspicious-looking mirror.
“The map room,” Sunset finally said.
Cook cocked his head. “It’s too grand for any of the private spaces except possibly Twilight’s suite, and I don’t think we have the time and energy to haul it up there. It would be out of place in any of the working areas like the kitchen. I concur.”
Rose nodded. “How do we do this, then?”
In the end, Rose pushed the unwieldy furnishing along, forehooves on the first step of the dais and wings extended for balance. The unicorns levitated the peculiar rollers used as part of the modifications, placing them in front of the mirror and taking them up as it moved past. Maneuvering the whole cavalcade down the corridor, across the vast chamber with its thrones and gigantic round table, and to the destination at right angles to the main door, took as long as stripping off Twilight’s alterations.
Afterward they stood catching their breath. Sunset stared at the table, mesmerized by the ghostly map projected on it, active and in its own inscrutable way agitated. Canterlot lay dark and foreboding. The symbol Rose had seen on the airships rotated around its vertical axis above the blighted spot. Murky tendrils already were visible, reaching out along the roads, railroad tracks, and even as the crow—or airship—flew. One was creeping toward Ponyville, the nearest settlement of any real size. “Cook? Rose? I . . . don’t think we have a lot of time.”
Rose took one look and swore briefly. “Grab your bags, both of you.”
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Tower house, eh? Gonna have to remember that for my stuff.
9118468
Some I’d known; some I had to research. Military history is a hobby of mine, but Rose has studied it professionally, particularly fortifications through the ages, and still reads a lot about it.
Wikipedia, of course, has articles on tower houses and all the castle-related terms Rose mentions—hence the in-line hyperlinks.
Oh, but this is a fun little behind-enemy-lines setup you've created here.
I look forward to seeing what adventures this little band of
brothersfriends is going to get up to while Twilight et al. are off having their movie.9118977
I hope I will deliver to everyone’s satisfaction!
The mental image of rubber-soled, nail-on horseshoes amuses me, and I don't know why.
In any case, I hadn't even considered the necessity of dismantling the portal. Still, very glad that they didn't go with Rose's scorched hyperspace approach. That wouldn't have ended well be any stretch of the imagination.
In any case, the Map is providing some very helpful strategic information, but it's not like the trio can do much with it. And the Palace-Tree is just that, a tree. It's no more designed to withstand a siege than its parent. (Arguably less so unless its awareness has access to defenses we've never seen.) Looking forward to seeing what our heroes have planned.
9121698
I’ve seen them in photos and at least once in connection with touristy horse-drawn carriages. I imagine nail-on shoes might be more common among military and other outdoor-oriented ponies. Going shoeless or wearing non-permanent shoes or boots probably is more popular in Equestria than it was in the real world up until the nineteenth century. I gather modern shoeing has developed into an amazing variety of styles and materials—but a lot of them wouldn’t be available with late-nineteenth-century technology.