The Equestrian Brigade

by computerneek

Chapter 1

Two enormously powerful beams of magic slam into each other at something approximating ground level. The result, a crater.

Next, an even stronger beam of magic comes directly down on top of a target. The target of the alicorn’s ire withstands the blow easily, but the ground underneath his hooves does not. The result, an even bigger crater.

Rather than going elsewhere to make another attack, the alicorn decides to double the attack- offering a second or so of relative peace before the second wave. Just enough time for her target to lower the barriers she can see him raising every time she charges for a blow.

Partial success. He had lowered his barriers, as she expected- and, when he realized the second attack was coming, had started throwing them back up again. He’d only gotten some of them up, though- and whereas the intact barriers can protect him effectively indefinitely, given his power levels, the process of constructing such a barrier is a very fragile thing- rendering such defensive action flat-out impossible.

The few barriers he’d managed to throw up in time creak and groan under the force. Her target, despite having a similar power level to her own, doesn’t have enough power to protect himself long-term with these brute force ‘quick & easy’ style shields. He pours all his energy into them, but it isn’t enough; before long, cracks start forming in his outermost barrier.

The alicorn hovers in midair, maintaining the attack. Thanks to the finely-crafted attack spell, she knows, beyond a doubt, that his barriers are beginning to collapse- and that he’s pouring all his power into them at his maximum thaumic rate. Sure, her attack is running at her maximum thaumic rate as well- but his magic was stolen from countless regular ponies, and hers was given by three alicorns.

The difference? Regular ponies actually produce power at a miniscule rate- usually around a tenth of a percent of their maximum thaumic rate, being the rate at which they can use that magic. Most unicorns, at their maximum thaumic rate, can burn through their entire thaumic reserves in minutes.

Alicorns can burn through their reserves in a single second. That is, they would be able to, if they didn’t also produce power at their maximum thaumic rate. Meaning that, while he’ll be forced to reduce his power levels soon, she can maintain her attack indefinitely.

The main reason she didn’t try for simple endurance overshot is that the barriers he’s been using- when he has a few seconds to throw them up- are purpose-built high-efficiency shields, capable of deflecting a thousand thaums for every one poured into them. As such, when she poured on her strongest against them all, all she managed to do was nullify his magic production.

That would also be why he kept lowering them- magic production is very important and, if a pony manages to run out, they can actually stun their thaumic facilities, creating a production blackout often hours long, and a usage blackout often many times as long- lasting for several hours after they manage to top off their reserves again.

If she can force him into thaumic exhaustion, as such a state is called, even his natural wards will fall- and her attack will be just as effective against him as it is against the rock he’s standing on.

Once defeated, he will lose all of his stolen power and be, once again, banished into Tartarus. As for the ponies he stole it from…

She doesn’t know what’ll happen for them. She knows their power will return to them- but once it’s all spent, will she and the other three Princesses then have to deal with an Equestria full of ponies in thaumic exhaustion for a week?

She really hopes not. For one, an earth pony in thaumic exhaustion can’t do their normal magic with plants. For two, pegasi in thaumic exhaustion can’t fly- or walk on clouds. For three, unicorns in thaumic exhaustion will be used to their magic- and as a result, injure themselves with everyday appliances- like the oven- far more easily than either other race!

She also kinda wonders why her own normal power follows the same pattern as most regular ponies, rather than the Alicorn one. She’s not actually using it right now- next to even Cadence’s power, her maximum is nothing. Add the other two, and there’s really no use.

So, once this is over and she returns the other princesses’ magic, at least she won’t have to deal with a lack of magic. She’ll be able to give Rainbow a standard cloudwalking spell, to allow her to inhabit her cloud home, while she researches a way for her to use her standing supply of magic to jump-start another pony’s recovery from thaumic exhaustion.

She watches as the first of his shields reaches local overload, forms a hole, and finally shatters. The rest of his shields take the load- and the flow of power being supplied- but will be collapsing faster. They’re operating way over their effective strength, the thaummage where a shield is able to block the most per thaum of input- so the more he puts into it, the less each individual thaum he feeds them is actually doing.

This, of course, means that his transition to running fewer shields at higher thaum values reduces the overall strength of his defenses- and that his shields will fail completely soon. A good thing, too- the amount of dust kicked up by the crater is starting to obstruct her line of sight and, slowly, reduce the effective thaumage of her attack.

Then her crater gets deep enough. One blow from an unexpected direction is all it takes; when a very solid something in the crater’s trajectory decides very stubbornly that it will not vanish into a cloud of dust, her target lands on it.

That is, one of his hooves landed on it. One of his hind hooves. He falls over- and loses his focus on his shields. Moments later, she’s smashed her way straight through the collapsing or misdirected barriers, spends a half a second or so on his natural wards, and finally hits him with the full force of her attack.

She can hear his long, monosyllabic cry- ‘no’- as her spell takes hold and performs its work, easily stripping him of his power. As the first stage.

Once he is fully stripped of his power, returning the power to its rightful owners, her spell rips open a portal to Tartarus, thrusting him through it, back to his original imprisonment location.

Next, her spell would have closed the portal and been done, but she stops it, holding the portal long enough to shatter the Princesses’ bonds and pull them back out. Once she does pull them back out, she closes the portal, puts them down just outside the crater, and lands herself before she starts the spell to return their power.

---

The object that had tripped her opponent up had not been untouched by the blast of thaumic energy. Sure, it looks like it hadn’t been touched; the rough metal surface still even bears surface rust!

The way in which the beam had most touched it is fairly invisible. The beam had been powerful enough to penetrate the previously rust-caked surface and into the technology inside. The technology that had then absorbed it, preventing it from blowing off the last of the rust.

When the energy was absorbed, it had been converted into electrical energy and proceeded to flow an enormous distance through deteriorated but still intact wiring and cabling to a single power cell. This power cell’s thousands of brothers are all inoperable, but thirty-eight and a half percent in a single cell this size is nothing to laugh at. Especially when combined with the comparatively miniscule but steady flow of solar energy now coming from the same plating.

Now, on its own, that solar flow would be considered laughably low, at about three watts. For the equipment connected to the power cell, even thirty-eight and a half percent in one power cell is extremely low.

But this equipment knows how to deal with a low-power situation. It’s actually designed to run on flows as low as a single watt- though it can’t really do anything at that power level. Fortunately, it’s got a lot more power to deal with, at really whatever wattage it wants.

So it drinks from that power cell as it starts processing. A second later, it goes down to single-watt power draw as a second set of processors kicks into high gear, burning up far more power despite their smaller size. Power draw grows even higher as these processors reach out with their higher clock speeds to slam full-force into several other systems, many of which are not working- or, in some cases, not even there.

One of them, the only truly critical one, responds as designed, and activates. It in turn reaches out to more devices- though this time, it does so with wireless communications… and power transfer. A whopping total of three hundred eighteen devices respond and set to work. Thirteen of them fail before they are able to accomplish any useful work, but the rest successfully begin mutual servicing operations. Once they’re all in tip-top shape, half of them switch to self-replication duties while the other half race off to restore the activated systems to tip-top shape in reverse order. As more are produced, the additionals are split evenly between the two tasks.

The set fixing the various systems eventually reaches the exposed plating and begins cleaning off the rust, restoring the absorbing systems to functionality- and vastly increasing solar production in the process.

Once solar production climbs high enough, it trips a flag somewhere deep inside those first processors- and more commands flicker through more cables. Many of the invoked systems are nonfunctional or, in at least one case, nonexistent- however, a few of them respond.

By the time this happens, the Princesses have long gone home- and a new day has begun.

---

I awaken. Damage Control is still processing many of my auxiliary functions before enabling them, but my core personality and emotional routines are fully functioning. I interrupt this processing for a moment, pulling a situation report. The result is alarming, but manageable. I am left in the dark as to where the power in the single surviving power cell came from, but when I chart the generation logs against the repair logs on the generating plating, I find a clear correlation. This I expected- but when I divide the first by the other, I find a gradual fall to virtually nothing, a tiny rise and return, and finally a much larger rise, currently at about 103.41% the first recorded light intensity.

Based on this pattern… Please wait… Ahh, yes. Based on this pattern, out of the many things that could be beaming energy into my hull, sunlight is by far the most likely, at 93.47%. I pause, and revisit the timestamps in my personality log, before running a quick benchmark on my Personality Center.

It is confirmed. I am running on less than a two-hundredth of a percent of design processing capacity. This has reduced my analytical capability to near zero, after personality routines; I estimate my thought processes are running… are running… 437.93% as fast as a regular, unaugmented human’s thoughts. I order Damage Control to devote 10% of available nanites- taking them out of the set that’s working on my solar capability- to verifying the integrity of my working processor and restoring additional Survival Center processors to function. Next, I run some simulations in an effort to discover what created my current situation.

All simulations have just completed. I calculate 37.31 minutes has passed; during this time, Damage Control has restored function to one additional processor core in my Survival Center, run the necessary tests, and released it for my use. This has increased total available processing power by about 33.33%. Before I analyze the results of the simulations, I run a benchmark once again.

Interesting. Available processing speed has increased by almost 47.39%- probably because the restored core is in the same Survival Center as one of my existing cores, which are each in a different Survival Center. Survival Four, according to Damage Control, is missing. I analyze the results of my simulations.

Analyzing took me almost 3.17 minutes. I ask Damage Control when the next core is coming online; the result is disappointing, at almost 1.71 hours. That was the only one it found to be in a quickly-restorable state.

In any case, analysis results. The most likely sequence of events I have considered to expose the plating and charge that power cell is tomfoolery.

Which I find unlikely.

Second on the list is a deliberate restoration effort.

Which I find unlikely, unless the effort was made by… Oh, a horse.

Third is an energy weapon attack with sufficient intervening rock and atmosphere to diffuse the energy enough to prevent any significant damage.

This possibility, upon evaluation, I find to be possible. It’s unlikely that my simulation parameters are even remotely accurate, if this is the case; for a regular laser weapon to be diffused evenly, atmospheric density must be close to high enough to spontaneously combust almost any combustible- if I assume an average Terran atmospheric composition, that is. If I assume an all-nitrogen atmosphere… Some combustibles would still spontaneously combust. However, it would take a different pressure… At which most combustibles would spontaneously combust anyways. For that matter, at that pressure, hydrogen gas would spontaneously combust in the absence of oxygen, through a process known as fusion. If I go for helium, or argon, I end up with even higher required pressures.

So I adjust my evaluation to allow a non-uniform distribution of energy. I pick an arbitrary pressure of one hundred atmospheres of argon, calculate the energy weapon strength required to charge my power cell to the known value, and finally compute the amount of damage a weapon of this strength would do.

Such a weapon would penetrate almost five centimeters into my hull- and my nanites have discovered surface rust.

My best guess, right now, is that either the weapon had a far lower intensity and longer duration- such as energy weapons simply don’t have, as a matter of effectiveness- or I am looking at the wrong possibility entirely.

I evaluate the rest of the list, but not one of them shows more than a 1% match to reality.

This processing has taken me another 43.71 minutes. I now generate one simulation, based on the weapon scenario, on what might happen if I allow Damage Control to continue repairs on default priority. Then I run one on what would happen if I restrict it in some way.

I continue to run such simulations and analyze the results, spending an additional 47.29 minutes, before I issue the orders. My exposed plating has not yet been cleared of rust; repairs have focused on the exposed portions. Even those are still dull. I order Damage Control to stop repairing this plating before these visuals are interrupted. After 13.41 minutes of consideration- during which Damage Control finishes another core and begins testing it- I append that, when the solar armor repairs are done, the assigned nanites should travel to my geothermal facilities, locate and service the most serviceable one, and begin construction of a vertical pipe with which to extract geothermal energy. The momentary scan with the two sensors I have responding indicated I am resting above a fault line- and if I can reach it, temperatures should be significantly higher than at my position.

It will take time to build, but once complete, I can assure myself continued power. I do not expect solar to reach such a level that I am able to maintain continuous operations.

Finally, to increase the time before Damage Control is forced to shut down for power requirements, I divert to Low-Level Alert.

Author's Note:

A new story with a new chapter, written from a new home. Read on!

Comments

[pablofiasco]

well shoot, im pretty sure i know what this is crossing over with, time to add it to the list

[computerneek]

9317456
I'm pretty sure you're accurate, as well.

[LostArchivist]

For what is important, nopony even knows its there to be important, save the Alicorn herself and any who forget to specify 'summary' when asking the simple question of how the battle went.

You may want to re-work that sentence; it sounds awkward (run-on?) and "its" is a typo (should be "it's).

How did the move go? (Unless you posted that in a blog which I haven't read yet, because my feeds are a huge pile of nope right now and I don't have time to look.)

So, is this only a Bolo story, or are there more crossovers? I ask because the previous commenter is either new (ALL (almost, anyway) of your stories involve Bolos :P) or caught a reference that I did not.

[computerneek]

9326089
I'm thinking he's new- the username is unfamiliar. Not that I keep track of my commenters, but I do tend to notice when someone comments on multiple stories and/or chapters, even over a semi-significant period of time.

As for the run-on behavior of that sentence, that's actually kinda intended. You know how she is.