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Chapter 4

“None of this makes any sense,” I said. Major Hiller, of the Canadian Armed Forces, Joint Task Force 2, seemed to agree. His group and mine had both arrived at the radar station at the same time, on unclear orders of two different authorities.

Still, all of us were anticipating something to happen here, so we decided to wait. The Canadians had brought basic survival equipment, but Shep and Jeff took our helo back to Traveler, returning with hot food and a couple of decks of cards. Since we had lots of friends with guns now, I told the fliers to take it easy and spend the night aboard the ship.

A couple of hours passed. We’d all moved inside the abandoned building, and it had begun to warm up from the body heat of the soldiers, Nika, and I. A couple of troops had been left outside to stand watch.

There wasn’t much conversation. They were unwilling to talk about their secrets, and we felt the same way. Good thing we had poker. The plastic chips even made it so we didn’t need compatible money.

We were in the middle of a hand when the door was wrenched open. One of the soldiers on duty came in. “A doorway just opened.”

I was the first one out of the building. Sure enough, there was a portal standing there without a frame. That meant it was being powered from the other side. As I walked over to it, Apple Bloom, Scootaloo, and Sweetie Belle came through. All three were injured in some way.

“What happened?” I asked.

Instead of answering my question, Sweetie Belle said, “This is a portable doorway. It’s got about twenty seconds left before the generator self-destructs. You need to get those saddlebags.”

I followed her pointing hoof towards a pair of crumpled green bags lying a few dozen yards past the open doorway. There were a lot of questions I wanted to ask. How had they been hurt? Was whatever caused their injuries waiting for me on the other side? Where was the doorway connecting to? However, her warning about the time left got me to move without even a snide comment.

I put my head through the doorway and glanced around. There was a grassy plain with mountains in the distance. I heard the sound of jet engines and glanced up. There were a pair of Su-27 Flanker fighter jets orbiting the area. They were distinctive and easy to recognize because of a protruding bit of fuselage between the engines.

I remembered that it was unique feature to the Flanker jet because of a little mnemonic phrase I had memorized: “Flanker has a wanker.” Nika’s version of it in Russian was not as dirty, but less funny.

Speaking of her, I felt a gentle touch on my withers that let me know she was there. I heard the sling swivels rattle as she pulled her AK-47 off her shoulder. She dropped the bolt and chambered a round. Clack.

There were now perhaps fifteen seconds left. I dashed through the portal and made for the saddlebags. There was a staccato hammering sound behind me and Nika shouted in surprise.

I whirled around, seeing dust hanging in the air as one of the jets roared low overhead, nearly blowing my ears out. The pilot had shot at us! I stared up at the plane, seeing roundels on the wings from…the Griffon Kingdom? It took me a moment to remember that the Russians had sold them some jets.

Nika was on the ground beside the doorway. A small metal box with fancy electronics attached to it was powering the portal. The device had clearly been designed for one-time use only, as a built in digital counter was ticking numbers off. 10…9…

I grabbed Nika out of the grass and hauled her back through the doorway. She was covered with kicked-up dirt, but unharmed. Maybe I’d overreacted, but when a fighter jet armed with a thirty millimeter cannon fires in your general direction, you don’t hang around.

I looked back. I hadn’t grabbed the saddlebags the first time, but I thought I was quick enough to make one more trip. As I went back through the doorway, the second jet came around and fired a burst into the ground in front of me. I pulled up short and nearly fell, almost replicating Nika’s reaction.

I hesitated, looking at my objective, but I was out of time. I turned and headed for the doorway as fast as I could fly. Over my shoulder, I heard a bang as the generator blew up. The portal slammed shut, whacking off the last few inches of my tail.

I skidded to a halt, my heart beating like crazy. Nika was safe, and the three mares from Equestria weren’t in terrible condition. Could have been worse.

“You didn’t get it!” shouted Apple Bloom, who was bleeding from the head.

“Well excuse me for putting my girlfriend over your interests,” I said.

“You have no idea how important that was!” growled Scootaloo, who had half the feathers on one wing singed off.

“It wasn’t my job,” I pointed out. “Until you three showed up, I didn’t even know what I was doing here.”

Sweetie Belle glared at me, ignoring the numerous small cuts on her body. Her horn began to glow menacingly.

Nika put the barrel of her rifle against the back of the unicorn’s head. “Be careful.”

The white mare dropped her magic. I had no idea what she was planning to do with it, but was thankful to have someone on my side. The Canadians had merely been standing by and observing quietly.

Apple Bloom turned, noticing them for the first time. “Who are they?”

“I could ask you the same question,” said Major Hiller.

“Classified information,” Scootaloo said.

Hiller’s expression didn’t change. “Same.”

“Well,” I said, “Unless you’ve got another portable portal, I guess you three will be needing a ride. Too bad I’m not going to give you one.”

“What do you mean?” demanded Apple Bloom.

“Princess Celestia told me to come here. She didn’t say anything about meeting up with you, or participating in whatever you were doing.”

“Your contract said that you agreed to take orders from Princess Celestia, or anypony with authorization,” said Sweetie Belle. “We’re ordering you to take us to the nearest doorway entry point back to Equestria. I would say it’s the least you could do after failing to carry out the order to retrieve those saddlebags.”

I chuckled a little. Granted, I had no idea what was in those bags, or how important it might be, but I was being given orders by a white unicorn with a pink and purple mane. Even if you’re a pony yourself, living on Earth your whole life alters your sense of humor.

“You know, our nice Canadian friends could probably get you back to civilization quicker,” I pointed out.

“I’m not getting involved with any of this business,” said Hiller. He turned and boarded the helicopter with all his men. After a few minutes to spin up the blades, they departed.

Meanwhile, Nika and I had called for our own helo and waited in hostile silence with the three Equestrians. Shep and Jeff picked up the five of us. The trio of mares perked up as we approached the ship. Fillies love ships. Actually, they were probably trying to spot hidden equipment. Considering what they knew about my previous boat—which was too much—that was to be expected. The old boat may have been gone, but I still regretted letting them wander around so freely.

Back aboard, I went to the CIC. Opening the door, I said, “Get me Canterlot.”

Andy blinked. “Um, okay.”

And about ten minutes later, he made it happen. It’s not easy to just cold-call royalty of a country in a different dimension, but Andy was a pro.

“Mr. Canvas, how are things?”

“Not so bad. Your three secret agents might disagree.”

“Are they all right?” Her voice was calm, but carried so much no time for jokes undertone that I nearly snapped to attention like a soldier.

“No serious injuries,” I reported. “They told me to get a pair of saddlebags from the other side of the doorway they arrived through, but I was attacked by Griffon fighter jets and didn’t manage to get the bags before the timer on the generator ran out.”

I hoped my explanation didn’t confuse her. I had no idea what Celestia might already know about the mission of the three mares. It seemed hard to believe that she could run a country and yet be intimately involved with special operations, but there was a lot that I found hard to believe about Celestia.

There was a moment of silence. Celestia said, “When you get to a doorway, I’d like you to come have a meeting with me face to face.”

“This is a secure line,” I said.

“That isn’t the point.”

I figured that once you get a few years on you, you get set in old-fashioned ways. If the stories were true, Celestia had a lot of years. I replied, “All right. I’ll come to Equestria.”

Andy had picked up most of the conversation. After I put the receiver down, I told him what I knew. Apple Bloom, Scootaloo, and Sweetie Belle were trying to bring something out of the other dimension. Was it equipment? Documents? Whatever it was, it fit in a pair of saddlebags.

I finished my monologue with more speculation. “The Su-27 is an air superiority fighter. The only reason I can think of that they were trying to attack us on the ground—and with guns—is because nothing else was available at the time.”

“So would you say those mares were in Griffon territory?” asked Andy.

“Well, that would make sense. I mean, it’s possible that they could have flown to somewhere else, but that seems less likely.”

“Maybe that’s why they didn’t have ground-attack planes,” observed Andy. “They were reacting quickly to intruders and that was all that could respond in time.”

I nodded. “Makes sense. It still doesn’t explain why the Canadians showed up. I know that intelligence was sent to them by the United States, but I thought we were all allies with Equestria. Why didn’t Celestia tell anyone beforehand?”

“And why did we have to come all the way up here,” added Andy. “Dimensional doorways can appear anywhere they’re built to go.”

While I wasn’t in the portal business, I knew that the way they were made dictated where they would open to, and it wasn’t easy or cheap to change that. Maybe the one-time portable doorway was used for emergency escape, if things were so bad that anywhere was preferable to where you were.

At any rate, we weren’t going to be getting answers out of our guests. They asked for a secure video conference with Celestia, and we gave it to them. A couple hours later, they came out of the room and went back to not answering our questions.

We cruised down the Canadian coast until reaching Halifax, where there was a doorway facility. It didn’t have direct access to Canterlot, but I was fine with that. I hadn’t been to Equestria very often, and Celestia hadn’t said exactly when she wanted to meet with me. Nika and I went through the doorway and left the rest of the crew to sail back to Norfolk.

It was late in Ponyville when we came out of the doorway building. I had heard them sometimes called Doorports, but that reminded me too much of an airport. Still, since long distance travel had been primarily taken over by doorways, I guess we needed to –port something.

With all the tourists, Ponyville had grown a lot in just a couple of decades. Nika and I booked a hotel room and decided to see what could be found for dinner. I didn’t eat hay and other Equestrian food very often, mainly due to lack of availability on Earth. I didn’t have problems getting the roughage my gut needed, but if I was really going heavy on the human food I could just take some fiber pills or something.

Nika had dressed for the occasion. She wasn’t such a pirate that she couldn’t clean up very nicely once in a while. She wore a grey dress that was cut to make even the drab color look interesting. One of my pale green feathers was braided into her hair for color.

I knew how people reacted to our relationship, but it might be interesting to see the pony view on it. The feather was a bit much, but it’s not like I had a hand for her to hold to make it really obvious.

Pony restaurants were generally human-compatible as long as said person was willing to eat just a salad. As we were being seated, a server went by carrying something that appeared to be sautéed alfalfa with a side of daisies. It smelled good. All the food reminded me that I hadn’t had animal crackers in days, however.

Our waitress came over. My order of sweet iced tea seemed to confuse her a little. Ponies, like the British, typically took their tea hot, but the mare said she would see what could be done. She hung around for a bit. “I haven’t seen either of you around before. I take it you’re just visiting?”

“That’s correct,” acknowledged Nika.

“Do you mind if I ask where you’re from?” said the waitress. “I’m taking linguist classes at the university, but I’m not good with human accents.”

“Russia.”

The mare turned to me. “And what about you? Somewhere over towards Trottingham, maybe?”

“No, I have a human accent, too. I’m from Virginia.”

The sweet tea was nothing compared to how much that confused her.

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