FFMS047
I don't like this, fumed an instance of the Filly in the gruff tones of the Company's one-eyed physician and Annalist. First law of tactics, never pick a fight when you don't know the numbers and the dispositions of the enemy. You don't have nearly enough information for this to be a good idea, the zebra continued in a direct princess-radio connection as we waited at the docks for the boat service to bring over another tranche of former-Company ponies.
It was the dead of night, and only a hoof-full of MPs and we, their faithful 'thralls', were there to observe the heavy skiffs as they laboured through the icy, treacherous waters. We'd already brought over two companies under the cover of darkness and our MP protectors. White Rose ghoul-handling tactics were themselves rather blasé about the well-being of their thralls, and the combat necromancers would expect us to go plunging in with great violence and little care for self-preservation.
Our handlers would be carrying plenty of thralling needles for capture of fresh undead in the battle, after all.
And so, we were stocking up on additional combat multipliers. I could easily handle an invisibility cantrip over a full battalion, so that was what we were planning to go in with. Sawbones was trying to talk me into keeping the boat service running all night long, and to bring in one, or even two more battalions from the south shore to some hidden position where they could deploy as reserves if the situation turned sour or went unexpectedly pear-shaped.
"Sir, if we keep the boaters running that long, they're going to be falling asleep at the sweeps when it comes time for us to be shipped across the shore ourselves. There's only so much my glamours can cover, and the oarponies sleeping on their benches is going to cause somepony to take an unhealthy interest in our operations."
Bah. You're all being too inflexible. All your ponies are oarponies by now, just have the troops sit their own sweeps, let the boaters get their blasted beauty sleep.
Huh. That was actually something we should have thought of. I passed along a suggestion to the head of the boating service, who sneered at me and told me to teach my granmere to suck eggs. I shared this observation with Sawbones, and stuck my tongue out at the Filly who was relaying my communications.
She returned my comical grimace and added a raspberry on top of it.
As the boatloads of new ponies poured over the docks, many of them recoiled in horror at what was waiting for them, even though they should have been briefed about the ghoul-glamours. I should have been flattered by the reaction – been happy that my magic was powerful enough to fool even ponies who were expecting the spectacle. But somehow, perversely, I felt rejected.
They were hidden beneath their own ghouling glamours soon enough, and then, over that, I layered the semi-invisibility cantrip. We marched them through the logistics base to the now-somewhat-crowded ghoul-pens. I exchanged words with the squad of Sawbones-trained medics who had been sent over by their respective battalions. They had had limited practice during the river-campaign at their new duties, but this deployment would be a real baptism of fire. The situation inside the fallen quarantine boxes were fuzzily understood at best, and one of our primary tasks was to retrieve any surviving White Rose medics and recruit them, at lance's-point, if necessary.
With ghoul-flu in the greater encampments, we had too much need of Spirit-possessed, trained physicians to be all that fastidious when it came to the volunteerism rule. The ones who were too salty about being dragooned into the cult could be shuffled out again later, after the crisis was over.
Somehow. We'll figure out something. Assuming that it was a crisis. Sawbones certainly thought it was when we told him about it, apparently the loyalist-side of the epidemic was a real horrorshow, almost as bad as Pepin had been. But he might have been anticipating and over-stating. You may have noticed, but he has a tendency to be overly dramatic and more than a bit doomful, that grim, striped worrywart.
I got some sleep in spurts and pauses during that night, waiting by the docks while boatful after boatful of Order ponies slipped across the docks, and were secreted away in commandeered warehouses, where they slept under the oversight of a few MPs and their squads of Order 'ghouls'. I didn't immediately activate the cantrips on these further companies of ponies, but I still had to anchor my preparations on them. When it came time for them to ship over, I wouldn't be able to be everywhere at once.
Painstaking preparation makes for smooth and swift battles, wrote the Annalist Esteem. It was amazing how much of the old Annals Sawbones had stored in his long-term memory, accessible via a sort of dreamworld library he had erected in his dream-palace. I hadn't been able to read the actual physical copies, but in his meticulous memories, I was able to spend endless hours of virtual study.
Morning came far too swiftly, and by then, we had two battalions and a company hidden at the MPs' thrall pens and the commandeered warehouses. We only had room for one of the battalions on the boats which would be transshipping us from the logistics bases to the north shore; the boats were planning to load up the rest of the troops while we were deploying with the necromancer corps, in the hope that nopony would be paying attention to the boaters while there was the prospect of action against the quarantine pens.
They'd stand offshore with the reserves in case things went really pearshaped. By the time we were beating north to the infected shore, Sawbones' pessimism had infected me in turn, and I was almost dancing on my hooves, imagining nine kinds of catastrophe, and wishing we hadn't returned the rest of the warlock coven to the Company the week before.
But we were committed, and here came the shore. The MP handlers 'directed' our disguised troops off the overburdened boats, everypony stepping carefully to not jostle each other or the hidden squads of invisibility-cantripped troopers. We were considerably more than double what our MP companies' had on their rolls, thus the double-deception.
We disembarked into a bitter flurry blowing over the campgrounds, a mess composed half of snow, half sleet. I could hear a summary of the chatter over the princess-radio as the hidden battalion scrambled in our wake. Nopony had taken into account that whatever was left of command and control on the northern shore would have decided to use the boats to evacuate another battalion of combat troops across the river. We weren't the only ones who had noticed that those boats could take considerably more than a battalion in a trip – if you were desperate and didn't care about overloading or drawing the attention of the curious and censorious.
I'm not sure if these ponies are quite ready for this, muttered Sawbones via the Filly.
"You trained the medics yourself, Sir. Don't you have confidence in your training?"
In the first place, no, not really. In the second place, it's as much about supplies as anything else, and you're critically short of that, too. But I was talking about the line troops. You don't have nearly enough Company veterans in the mix.
"I think we've got almost all of the Company veterans with the Order – those that aren't battalion commanders or higher. We can't get many more on this sort of notice, Sir."
Still not enough. Ghoul-fighting is too hypothetical for too many of your Order ponies.
"We had them dream-training with the vets for an entire sleep-cycle. Well, most of them. And they're pairing up with a couple sections of your best up there in Braystown. Push come to shove some of them can pull your remote-control possession gag."
We don't know if that will work for the typical ranker or corporal. Do we? Has someone been experimenting without briefing me?
"Uh, I don't know. Maybe you ought to go ask somepony who might know?"
Bah.
Thank you, dear Filly, for bothering to transmit that one.
We got off the banks of the Housa without more than a few accidental collisions between evacuating line troops and our invisible reserve force. I think they just wrote it off as the confusion of the embarkation, and I didn't see or hear any commotion that would suggest that someone was raising the alarm.
Too late to worry about it, at any rate. On the plus side, the early-morning storm blew over, leaving us chilled but slowly warming in the thin winter sunlight.
Once the battalion evacuated onto the boats and cast off, the north shore was suddenly empty, ghostly, abandoned. The battalion camps were individually fortified along the shore, inland a hundred yards in most cases. It was almost as if somepony had anticipated a quarantine necessity. Most militaries encamp their troops in division-sized castra, but the White Rose had chosen these tiny little enclosures, probably doubling if not tripling the materials necessary to set up and maintain them. Each camp had a guarded gate, and a well-fortified wall and ditch. They were generally close enough to each other than each camp's outer ramparts could be swept by the bolt-throwers mounted at the corners of each camp.
Notably, they also had a second ditch inside the wall, which was easily reversed to make each fortification a prison if the necessity arrived.
Which it had.
Many of the camps were now abandoned, empty, their battalions evacuated southwards. The others were tightly locked down, both the active quarantine camps and the allegedly healthy mini-castrum. Our MPs looked around in vain for the necromancers who were supposed to meet our force upon landing.
Nothing.
We directed the glamoured reserve battalion into a position just off the main lines of advance where they weren't likely to be overrun by any reaction force tearing flank across the emptied parade-grounds and common areas. The sound of violence and chaos wafted upon the distant air, but I couldn't make out exactly where it was coming from, not with these foreshortened earth pony ears I was wearing.
Finally, our MP handlers began 'moving to contact', which is soldier-speak for cautiously ambling forward with arms in hoof.
We'd been told that there were problems with the #15, #16, and #21 camps, with over a half-dozen others under quarantine but still under control. Sadly, nopony had done anything as useful as post helpful camp placards, so our MPs were reduced to shouting queries at the gate-guards of each camp-gate as we moved forward along the shore.
We eventually found a fraction of the necromancer corps at the #21 camp, where the gate-guards were guarding from outside of the gate, and the wall-guards had reversed the barricade. Their shouts over the gate brought forth a pair of battered-looking ponies streaked in gore and ichor in equal measure. The blood and the disgusting gunk which ghouls produce in lieu of living blood were the only measure you could use to judge these ponies by their profession, for neither of them had a single fetish emplanted upon their shoulders.
Looking closer, I could see the bloodstains where those devices had been roughly ripped out, leaving weeping sores. These necromancers had been very, very busy.
"Oh, by the Rose, you've shown up just in time, where's your Captain, your Major? We need your reserve needles, we're totally bingo here!"
I tuned out the necromancers' attempt to shake down our MPs for their equipment, and took a closer look to the 'wall-guards' and the 'gate-guards'. They were all undead. The only living ponies visible at this camp were the two necromancers, one of which was clearly asleep on her hooves. And the other one looked like the only thing keeping him from drifting off was the argument he was losing with our MP captain.
The general drift of the conversation was that there really was nothing left living inside fortified camp #21, and that somepony needed to get down to #15 and #16 soonest, if there was any hope for there still to be anypony still alive in those quarantines. A quick prompt across the princess-radio caused our MP captain to jolt, surprised, as an aspect of the Spirit appeared in her view. I thought to myself that we probably should have trained the MPs on the princess-radio a little more thoroughly, but no time for all that now.
And no, there weren't any surviving medicos inside the blasted waste-lot which was fortified camp #21. Total loss, including two doctors and a half-dozen assistants. Blast.
We got the MPs to move us onward, the reserve battalion silently slipping along the emptied shoreline to our left. It was a good mile down the shore before we came to camp #16, and #15 beyond it. The gates and the barricades had been likewise reversed, but the guards were still living here. The necromancers had concentrated on the worst of the quarantine failures, and clearly it had been more than they could handle.
I wasn't sure why these White Rose necromancers were so bumbling, a full corps hadn't been able to handle what the late Major Gorefyre and her rag-tag band of rear-support villains had been able to enthrall and control a group of ghouls larger than the number of shamblers a single battalion quarantine should have contained, assuming a 100% loss rate.
I mentioned my concerns to Sawbones.
Yes, I see what you mean. The Filly frowned with one eye closed, mimicking the zebra's body language. Hard to say without being inside of their organization. Did you see the others? I think we decided that the White Rose necromantic combat corps had to be a multi-company large-complement sort of affair?
"Just the two, but I got the impression they had a squad inside the walls, still working over what's left of #21."
You don't think the necromancers are vulnerable to the new plague? the Spirit asked for Sawbones.
"Oh, tartarus, I hope not. Do we need to worry about our MPs?"
Worry about your rankers first, jenny. Being Company doesn't give you immunity to catching the flu!
"How are you keeping this mess under control on your side of the fence?"
To a certan extent, we aren't. It's ugly out here. To the extent we've got it locked down, we've opened the cult doors wide open, everypony we see with symptoms is getting offered the blade, and we're being pretty aggressive with everypony else in the general vicinity of the sickhouses. I'd guess 'the Company' has doubled in the last two weeks, although the majority of them aren't exactly armsponies, if you know what I mean.
"I'm surprised the Nightmare hasn't been bragging up a storm about it, Sir," I mused as the MPs directed our 'ghouls' to take over the gates and the barricade posts.
She's not been involved, Luna's taken it over as her own personal project. She's our least alarming face as far as the civilians are concerned, anyways.
"So long as she doesn't talk to the nice ponies as if they're ancient Equestrian courtiers, I suppose."
The Filly sniggered, and somehow, I knew that it was her, and not Sawbones, laughing at this jab at her other self.
We took a company's worth of our 'ghoul' troopers just to post the walls of the two quarantine camps. We would have been badly overstretched if we'd tried to clear one of the camps like this. All credit to our officers' planning skills, that we were not obliged to do something so daft.
The reserve battalion advanced to join us before the gates of #16. We formed with the visible 'ghouls' company in the fore, and the three hidden companies drawn up in a deep column behind the van. As the troops were settling into formation, the Filly interrupted my concentration again.
Feufollet, open me up a shadow-gate. I need to make a grand appearance. The Filly didn't sound like Sawbones on that one. In fact, it sounded like…
I formed an illusory disc of darkness in the centre of the morning sky above our column, just before the order to advance was given.
The shadow-stuff burst apart like a midair explosion, smoke-like shredded tendrils trailing as a grey-winged figure rocketed overhead. The relieved White Rose guards, who had been eyeing our 'ghouls' skeptically, scattered in surprise, wide-eyed and panicked. Not the best reception I've ever seen Cherie get from our audiences. But then, nopony had prepared them for the display. Sloppy work, I was rather irate with Cherie for calling an audible at the very last moment like that. Very disappointing.
The sudden appearance of our thestral banner-filly preempted the order for the advance, and the troops began the charge. The thundering hooves of over four hundred ponies rolled over the encampment like the sound of an onrushing stormfront. The MPs had to gallop to keep up with the sudden advance of their supposed 'thralls'. I followed in the rear of the formation, and pulled the illusions which had hidden the troops' lances and barding. I needed my magical juice for other priorities now that the troops were engaged.
The initial rush swept the small marshalling yard inside the cramped quarters of the battalion camp. It had never been intended for so many ponies to remain inside these quarters for any length of time, it was a sanctuary, a place to sleep and eat, and a place to quarantine in case of extremity. Which this had become.
There were over a hundred ghouls just lying around in mounds inside the marshalling yard, and in the doorways of various smashed-in barracks and the dining hall. They came to alert as we suddenly breached their sanctum. And it had indeed become theirs – if there were any living ponies left inside camp #16, they were forted up in some smaller corner of the space, because the common areas had been abandoned to the dead.
The ponies of the Order, still wearing their ghoul-semblances, crashed into the disordered clots of true ghouls like a trip-hammer landing on a random pile of coals. The ghouls scattered everywhere, driven apart and away by the physical impetus of the collision. Our troopers re-dressed their lances as they regained their balance, and made a second, more controlled push, and the ghouls that stood in the way went down like wheat before the newfangled reaper-machines. The slaughter went very quickly from my view-point at the rear of the formation. One minute, the marshalling yard was full of the undead, and in the next, it was crowded with hundreds of my ponies, their barding and lanceheads splattered with ichor and filth.
A half-dozen Order ponies were injured in the crush – mostly from them trampling and goring each other in the crush. The little training they'd done ahead of time hadn't quite gotten them past point where they were almost as much of a danger to each other as the enemy. The medicos fought to get to our injured as the platoon-leaders struggled to get their ponies under control. Finally, the wounded were cleared to the rear, and the rest began a push into the secondary areas of the camp – the compromised barracks, the dining hall, the medical quarters, the supply-sheds.
The battle quickly scattered out of my view as platoons disappeared into the various structures, and I could only track the fighting by the battle-cries and the sound of weapons clashing. That distinctive sound was the easiest way to spot where our ponies were fighting, and succeeding, because the ghouls they were slaughtering were not cognizant enough to operate tools. Fresh ghouls are dumber than pigshit, and without their invulnerability and aura of terror, they weren't a threat to a prepared force. Well, so long as that force was inspired by the Spirit. Without the protection of the Spirit against the ghoul-bite, without the power of the Nightmare within our blades and our lanceheads?
Well, that would have been a much different battle.
Cherie continued to circle overhead, screaming some sort of battle-cry in that high, wavering screech of hers which penetrated deeply, bypassing one's ears to resonate somewhere inside, in the guts, in the throat, in the gizzard. I recognized what she was yarbling about, but I doubt any of those Equuish-speaking Westerners would know what the tartarus Brûlez chaque fleur devant nous! meant. I'd have to talk to her once this was all over about her using Prench to play up her 'legend'. It wasn't helping, I thought. It was more important that the audience knew what she was on about, than they were impressed with her august presence.
The troops began dragging living ponies out of their hiding-places here and there. A couple of supply sheds; two barracks; the battalion-major's quarters all yielded a crop of living, if rather sickly ponies.
As the rest of the companies continued the extermination process in the other areas of fortified camp #16, the medicos and about a company's worth of troopers dragged the survivors out of the front gates of the camp to an open space quickly designated for triage. Most of the victims were both very sick, and terrified by their 'rescue'. We hadn't removed the troops' ghoul-semblances, and as far as the remnants of that battalion were concerned, they were being hauled off by dubiously controlled undead.
The medics were overstretched in the crush, and ran about like maniacs trying to properly triage almost a hundred patients. Thankfully I hadn't put the medics under a glamour, so from the outside, it just looked like a bunch of physicians working among thralls. The triage wasn't without fatalities, sadly. Five of the victims didn't survive the stress of being rescued, and had to be put down by their rescuers. Afterwards, we discovered a living White Rose physician and two of her assistants among the survivors, but in the chaos of the rescue and the battle they were far too incoherent to be identified as more than just another pair of victims from the ranks.
A rather chastened-looking Cherie finally came down from her showy circuit overhead, and helped with the treatment of the victims. I moved along the rows, whispering to them nonsense designed to explain what was happening to them, while quickly blading them into the cult. Cherie saw what I was doing, and followed in my train, explaining to my victims what I had just done to them. Since she did so in the centre of a chorus of saintly Fillies, humming some sort of White Rose hymn, I guess it worked better than what I had been sort-of-planning to do once I'd gotten through the survivors.
By the time we were done, the five were dead, but the rest were – well, they were sick as dogs, and feeble, and I hadn't helped matters by compromising their hides with my shallow ritual-cuts. The medics gave me the stink-eye once I was done, but I wasn't having any of that.
They'd have to have done it themselves, and frankly Sawbones had neglected this aspect of their new roles, although he had told me how he was making it a part of the new training regimen out there in the plaguelands.
By the afternoon, camp #16 had been cleared, and we started moving the triage patients back inside the protection of the walls. The combat elements moved over to camp #15, and prepared to repeat the whole process again. So far we hadn't needed the emergency reserve still waiting in the warehouses over on the midstream islands. The boating service ponies were ready at the docks to move the emergency reserve as soon as we gave the yell.
The rest of the cowed ponies of the northern shore hid behind their ramparts, their guards staring in our direction, those that were in eyeshot. We were hardly behaving like they expected MPs and their thralls to operate in a quarantine suppression operation. Honestly, I wasn't sure exactly what they expected, but I was pretty sure what we were doing wasn't what they had – well, not wanted to see, but expected to see.
I think they had expected an ugly, out of control mess. The necromancers had lost control of the north shore, that was clear. A few showed up as the pseudo-ghoul troops swept into #15, and Cherie flew air support for the advance. The necromancer-officers walked tentatively up to my lieutenant, the hapless Salted Soil, who wasn't even pretending to lead her thralls in the advance anymore.
"So, uh, who's controlling those assets? I've never seen thralls operated so… enthusiastically. Or vocally. How are you getting those battlecries out of them?"
Salted Soil looked up at the thestral flitting about in plain sight overhead, screeching her silly Prench battle-cry. The necromancers were deliberately ignoring her. Trying to pretend she wasn't there, I think.
"They're on autopilot. We've come up with a new programme, one that runs on personality imprints. Experimental, very hush-hush. We were planning on demonstrating it to the college when we got suddenly called up."
The rather tired and sickly-looking necromancer nodded owlishly, as if this bit of arrant nonsense made perfect sense.
"Experimental personality imprints, of course, of course. Which is why they sound like ponies?" There was a distant screech as somepony got trampled or lanced, and I winced in sympathy. "And react sympathetically, it looks like. Very impressive! I need to hear how these new techniques are accomplished! Carry on, lieutenant! Very impressive work. Hurk."
And that was when that desperately sick necromancer vomited blood all over Salted Soil's hooves, and the extent of the problem in the necromancer corps made itself painfully obvious.