Purse Strings looked across the harbor from the battlements of Fort Gharne. Archaic turrets and parapets all along the walls were crowded with equinity. The cool morning air was heating swiftly under the hot June sun, and the burbling chatter of a thousand ponies floated upwards, and out over the still waters of the harbor.
A stillness disturbed, cut here and there by the wakes of numerous boats under way. Skiffs, boats, and ferries were all in motion, skittering hither and thon across the increasingly crowded, enclosed waters of the harbor. More and more of them were moving out through the passages into the open waters, between and beyond the batteries, past the the wound-away coils of the great booms that the batteries stood as protectors, great booms that in times of danger were drawn across their respective channels to keep out the enemy. Channels through which the boats darted into the waters beyond the harbor, like schools of fish returning to their mother-sea.
The last few freighters and cargo ships were inside the harbor herself, making their approaches to the piers in the busy docks, or passing into the main roads beyond the harbor-channels, moving into the open waters.
Everypony, everygriff knew. Something was happening this morning.
The news had spread through the city and the working Trottish world. All the city bustled in the moments before the demonstration, the exercise - the assault. Paradoxically, working Trottingham was turning itself inside out, trying to get a morning's work done in a few scant hours.
Purse Strings heard things. And he felt the eyes of dozens upon him and his signal-station ponies.
How had he heard things? Contacts. Partners. Fellow conspirators. For instance, some few of those boats down in the harbor and the outer roads were licensed by Purse and his partners in crime. Oh, the rest of the harborfolk had quickly figured out that there was no way for the consortium to keep them from running passengers and lookie-loos without paying for the privilege, but they'd still made a bit of coin before the rest of them got wise to their lack of leverage. The ponies and griffons responsible for the wooden bleachers erected along the northwest side of the port on the other hoof, had establishments which tied them down in one place, and exposed them to Purse's partners' - let's not call it extortion, but rather, extremely aggressive licensing invoicing.
Also, that particular group was planning on putting the stands to future use that had nothing at all to do with a transient, if eminently exploitable military exercise. The loose talk of a revived Trottish cloudball league was, indirectly, helping finance Purse Strings' various schemes for today.
However difficult said loose talk made hiring or recruiting proper pegasi personnel. Purse had heard enough of that particular woe from the sergeants and the officers. Frankly, he thought that any pony so trivially-minded as to prefer pushing puffs of skystuff over soldiering for the Princess, were hardly the sorts to be useful in the military. Let the flitterers flit about, he'd prefer some ponies with thunderforged steel in their spines, standing between him and the trouble they were likely to find out east.
Purse looked around himself at the clots of ponies lounging about the battlements around him and his signal crew. Access to the walls and walkways of the fort and her harem of batteries was another thing he had no leverage over, and after the trouble with that bat-pony, it hadn't been politic to even try. So, the EUP had, on its own, decided to get in on the fun, and had opened up the fortifications to ‘reliable' subjects of the ducal coronet.
Which meant ponies. Lots and lots of ponies. Including a surprisingly large number of foals. A schoolhouse's worth of said foals were milling atop the turret next to where Purse's signalling station squatted on the adjoining wall parapet. They'd considered placing the bulky equipment on the higher turret, but it turned out that the angles favored this stretch of wall better than the slightly taller platform above. More paradoxically visible.
"Mif Octavia, is the tenty cale monster going to be back today?" a high piping voice drifted down over the edge of the platform.
"Young Master Pip, I have told you before, there is no such thing as tentacle monsters, and you would do best to not rile up the other students with such bosh."
"Yeah, and me mum said the same thing, but I don't know what else to call somefing what ‘as long fiddly streamers an' clear long tenty cales a danglin' about!"
"This is what comes of not attending your lessons, Master Pip, and if I'd known you were looking out the window instead of attending, you would not be attending this outing. Now do be quiet, I feel a headache coming on."
"Aw…"
Magus Heartstring's dubious projection had been from all accounts a highly effective training aid. Most folk who had seen it, had added that the projection was also very creepy and weird, and the unexplained appearance of an enormous translucent pony brain and spinal column had caused alarm and hilarity throughout the city every time it had made an appearance. The bossfolk had chosen to not explain anything, mostly on the basis of ‘we're too damn busy to deal with this shit'. All the press had been told was that it was an illusion, and part of the new regiment's training regime.
Purse ended up explaining a lot to his partners and the randomly curious. It had helped sell the whole endeavour. He had polished his delivery, repetition after repetition, until after a while he'd started to feel more like a carnival barker than a purser.
But in exchange, he heard things. Like that rumor of at least one new cult forming around the ‘signs and portents'. More than a few ponies and griffons he'd talked to had insisted that the official story was painfully obvious bollocks. And their speculations were sometimes more entertaining than his own patter.
He'd been informed that the smart money was on the testing of a secret weapon that the Equestrians were deploying in Trottish airspace as a sort of oblique threat against the Princess's neighbors. Purse had tried to explain that it was just the peculiar exhibitionism of ponydom's most egotistically weird magician, but that just made people laugh at him.
Purse sighed, and picked up his tin binoculars. He stared at the far distant clouds, still side-lit by the early morning sun. They were slowly moving into place. No flags, yet.
In the end, the real money maker for this had turned out to be rental binoculars. The long week of training had brought out the early viewers en masse, but there had been a near-riot about how hard it was to see the training soldiers darting about in the high distance. Luckily, Purse had heard about it, and had the solution close to hoof.
He'd found a supplier for cheap optics a good month ago, but the factory in question had refused to deal in the small lots that the squadron and the ship had required. The next best option was ten times the cost, and would have taken months of painstaking craftsmareship to create the necessary equipment, probably delivering in August or September.
So, Purse had found himself with over three thousand units' worth of rickety tin folding binoculars, with even more cheap glass lenses. They were barely worth using in a military setting, but were almost perfect as toys for rich ponies' foals.
Or, it had occurred to Purse, rented out to tourists and onlookers at an event.
And, strangely enough, sales to factory owner-operators, shop stewards, and so forth.
They weren't quite cheap enough to just sell and forget for most griffons and ponies, though, and it had been bore upon Purse's attention that perhaps they were just militarily effective enough that the higher-ups would prefer that he not inadvertently supply any surviving rebels or enemies of the state said ‘foal's toys', so the rentees were required to supply a deposit, and the ponies and griffons given the rental franchise had been strictly instructed to keep their goods in line of sight at all times.
Purse still didn't expect to get more than half of them back. Most of which would go to the toy-sellers on consignment, and the rest into squadron storage.
Nopony cared about the ones he'd outright sold to the factory ponies, and guildgriffs. And right now, he could see the glint of glasses trained on him and his signal-station from all over the garment district, and some of the factories beyond the Blue Line. Purse suspected that most of the sold binoculars deeper in the Pennies, deeper in the griffish ghettos, were trained on a certain set of airdocks on Tenpenny Street.
He swung his own pair of binoculars from the slowly advancing cloud-posts, to bear on those very airdocks. The Daddy Longlegs and her crew were almost finished preparing for liftoff. The decks were swarming with ratings, riggers, troopers, and artillery-ponies. The alien steel tubing, struts and supports had strangely distorted the squat airship lines of the refitted Daddy, making her look more like the spindly spider-ish insect she'd been named for in the first place. Instead of an aerial mattock-head, or a wedge waiting for a sledge, dangling from her enormous, glittering envelope.
It's some sort of irony that the old girl finally looks like a daddy longlegs only on the cusp of having a new name forced on her.
The ready flag rose over the rear of the ship, one of the ratings hauling the green flag up a sheet to join the other signal-flags twitching listlessly in the near-calm weather.
"Mr. Grog, we have ready from the ship. Please relay at once," Purse rapped out in a voice sadly lacking in authority, a fact he had long since come to terms with, no matter how much he struggled otherwise.
The signal-pony raised their own green flag on the left hoof side, leaving just the red flag dangling on the right hoof side.
Purse returned to his evaluation of the distant cloud-platforms, eyeing their signal-post. Purse's own signal-station was under observation by the Territorial battalions playing air-cop for the exercise, and the first green flag was the signal that sparked small gangs of griffish Territorials to start harrying wayward civilians out of the air over the harbor, and in a corridor between the harbor and the airdocks in the northern Pennies.
When Purse took his eyes away from his glasses, he could see the bustle dying down in the docks in the distance. He glanced around, and saw the change in the city everywhere he could see. The glinting of glasses trained on his position had gone away, from every other shop door, from those places his observers had lurked. Instead, ponies and griffons were trickling out of every door, joining together in streams headed for the bleachers and stands.
In the distance, steam whistles screamed their shift-change song. Purse suspected that the factories in the Pennies and elsewhere were disgorging their workers on early lunches or breaks. And indeed, when he looked, he could see flecks of blue on the roof-tops broadening into patchy carpets of distant griffonhood.
More closely, Purse could hear around him the tenor of the crowd's burbling shift, as they noticed the overhead crab-backs flittering about overhead, pushing out the toms and hens who had taken to the sky, thinking to fly along with the last flight of the Daddy Longlegs. The Territorials also had been watching for green flags.
All of Trottingham's libels and more respectable publications had been given fair notice of the event ahead of time, and more than a few had joined in the hoopla, whooping up a fair amount of excitement. It was the sniggering of the Beak and Bone, and the cheerleading of the Duchess's Post, more than simple word of beak or the training exercises which had brought all those bosses to buy Purse's binoculars, brought all these working people out into the sun, to crowd together on rough pinewood bleachers & slick fortification stonework, or even on their own factory roofs.
And there went the second flag, over a cloudbank northeast of the main harbor channel.
Purse gestured to Lime Grog, his head signals rating, and the ratings raised their right-hoof flag. Purse turned his cheap binoculars towards the airdocks, and saw them register the go-ahead.
The Daddy Longlegs began to slowly rise out of her slip, and Purse tapped Lime Grog's partner on the withers. The middle green flag was raised.
And their job was done.
The great long airship got underway with a belch of black and white smoke from the triple stacks at the Daddy's aft.
"What is that?" "It's so ugly!" "It's so slow!" "Waaa!"
"Children! Settle down. That is the new ship they have been working on over in the shipworks on Tenpenny. The proud product of patriotic Trottingham! Look at it soar!"
"Like a big ol' garbage bird, you mean!"
"Jam Sandwich! You be respectful! That fine piece of Trottish engineering is the pride of the city! No matter what it looks like! And sit down. Hay Rick, let Willow Bark have her turn with the binoculars."
"But Missus Octavia, there's only now anyfing worth lookin' at!"
"Still, it is her turn. And there will be plenty of time. They should take a good ten minut- oh, my."
The airship's engines kicked in just then, and it took off with a sudden start. Apparently the civilians didn't know to expect that sort of acceleration from anything as big and heavy-looking as the Daddy Longlegs.
Grov promised a lot of extra performance out of that envelope treatment, and he hadn't been talking up his sleeve.
The airship moved swiftly, impressively, crossing the Blue Line as Purse focussed his binoculars on her decks. The riggers came pouring down out of the rigging from the envelope above, and Purse watched them swarm down across the decks and through the open hatches. Meanwhile, ponies in glittering guard regalia bustled about, hauling shining brass tubes here and there, slamming them into sockets all around the edges of the decks.
Purse had just picked out the blue-furred artillery lieutenant on the rapidly approaching deck, gesturing in agitation here and there as her minions mounted the mare's falconets in the places they'd decided upon, when he heard a yell from one of his signal-ponies.
He looked away from his binoculars, to see Lime Grog gesturing into the distance. Hundreds of dots had detached themselves from the cloudbanks to the northeast, and were forming themselves as they fell out of the sky, joined by larger dots that would be the various air-carriages and gun-teams.
Cheers began to rise up from the crowded battlements, as the audience spotted the distant fliers, the second half of the day's entertainment joining the spectacle.
Looking back to the ship, Purse Strings almost missed it, as in the seconds he had been distracted, the Daddy Longlegs had doubled her speed once again, and the ship was passing directly over the squat turrets of the fortress.
The wind of her passage nearly knocked Lime Grog off of his perch on the signal station, and Purse could hear tiny screams from the unseen foals in the turret overhead as they were buffeted by that wind.
Purse cringed, his mind's-eye full of tumbling little bodies falling off the high tower onto the pavement far below, but apparently the unseen schoolteacher had corralled her charges well enough that she didn't lose any of them to the down-gusts as the Daddy Longlegs rushed towards her fate beyond the harbor's fortifications-line.
The gyring eddies subsided, and as the various ponies blown about the battlements reassembled themselves into an audience from their somewhat wind-blown and scattered disarray, Purse looked out to sea, to catch the soaring great ship spreading her cruising wings beneath the weak late-morning breezes. The sunlight shone savagely in Purse's eyes, lighting up the rocket-racks that the half-mad artillerymare had strewn across the sides of the refitted ship.
Beyond the racing airship, Purse could see distant sails dotting the sea out to the horizon. Had the fishing fleets come close enough to catch the show?
More immediately, the aerial troops of the squadron were now visible beyond the glittering envelope of their target, little black and blue and grey motes moving in carefully precise courses, converging on the Daddy Longlegs.
Purse had barely gotten his binoculars focused at the new range, when a series of flashes blinded him. He dropped his glasses and blinked furiously, trying to see what had happened.
A second later, the tearing sound of Lieutenant Lulamoon's rockets lighting off reached the ponies watching atop Fort Gharne, to match the blooms of black and grey smoke that had erupted out of the rocket-launching mortars.
Then, a silent series of explosions, in red, green and blue, and the on-rushing ponies and griffons of the Guard disappeared from view, hidden by the colored clouds of smoke.
Another second, and then Purse felt the detonations in his chest, almost in tandem with the sound of the great thumps. The falconets had rippled off a series of shots almost perfectly, if accidentally, timed with the arrival of the sound of the rockets' bursts. It was as if the little brass firearms had produced those great thumping booms. Cause and effect had been deranged by the distance, the decoupling of sound and sight.
Gasps of thrilled horror spread through the ponies in the audience, with some wails of confused terror from the unseen foals in the turret above. Even Purse, who knew exactly what he'd just seen, because he'd been in the planning for every bit of it, found himself unsettled and hollow-chested, a visceral trill of alarm running down his spine at the apparent slaughter of the bossfolks' troopers.
Then the little black and blue and grey dots tore through the colored clouds of gunsmoke, their headlong flight bringing them again, intact and alive, into the view of those watching. The troopers charged the great airship in perfect rank and order, their spearheads now visible and glittering, and the sharper-eyed would then begin to spot the even tinier dots pacing them as they flew. They've launched their projectiles.
Suddenly, the bigger dots became bigger still, as the troopers flared their wings and rose suddenly, catching the air in their straining pinions, flung up by magic and momentum to swoop over the top of the onrushing airship, and the tinier dots - the projectiles - continued in their ballistic courses.
Purse got his binoculars focused on the envelope of the racing ship, but the impact sites of the projectiles were on the opposite side of the ship from where he was sitting with the audience of Gharne. Only the slightest tinges of red and orange on the sides of the envelope showed where the dye-balloons must have struck.
The troopers swooped and swerved in the back-wash of the Daddy Longlegs's passage, and the falconets on the decks below fired again, soundlessly. More little explosions produced more tiny little detonations, and small colored clouds expanded with the delayed sounds of the fire of the falconets which had produced the clouds, confusing the senses once again as to what effect was evoking what sounds, the distance and the clamour making a perfect aural chaos of the event.
Then both the guncarriages of the attacking battery posted in the cloudy distance, and the ship's own carronades, fired almost simultaneously, adding yet more clouds of colored smoke and fire to the spectacle, and the sounds arrived in a perfect confusion of thunder absolutely divorced from the swirling spectacle.
So many charges expended… do there have to be so many? Every one, so many pounds of gun cotton, so many ounces of this precious substance or that, to color the explosion, make the great booming sound, produce this colored smoke or that. Lieutenant Lulamoon was a very expensive indulgence for a very young regiment.
Every bit Purse Strings and his partners had squeezed out of the presentation of this display, the rentals, the extractions from the tour boats, the bleacher rentiers - every bit of it was going to the very, very expensive Lieutenant Lulamoon and her appetite for explosives.
Purse had totally lost track of where the troopers were in all the welter of smoke and fire and noise, and if he, who had in his saddlebags the script to this staged battle, was confused, how better could the clueless ponies all around him follow?
The Daddy Longlegs took a sudden right turn, leaning on her side, and a sudden cross-breeze revealed the embattled deck of the ship to the wondering eyes of the ponies, those with, and without the cheap tin binoculars.
Struggling figures dotted the planking barely visible between the swaying envelope above, and the main body of the gondola below. Brass glints and figures in crystalline fabric swung here, rushed there, and every now and again, some maniac was still firing off rockets from the long, spindly mortar-guide tubes.
Finally, some sort of odd struggle on the poop deck was resolved, and the whole ship shuddered as new hooves on the ship's wheel changed her course, once again. New carriages approached the half-captured airship, and little figures leaped from the back of the chariots onto the tumbled decks, covered in struggling griffons, ponies, and assorted other people of various tribes.
That is a bit more than what was planned. Some of the ratings and riggers decided to make a fight for it?
Purse squinted his eyes through the crummy optics of his cut-rate glasses, and looked for the tell-tale sign of real blood, real damage. The ship was too wreathed with smoke and mess for Purse to be certain.
Then, the large flag of the Equestrian merchant-marine flapping from the rear of the great ship twitched, jerked, and then suddenly was struck.
The audience roared with realization, as the torn-down colors were quickly replaced by a new, unfamiliar flag, a sunburst in magenta and lavender. The voices of ponies and griffons, from rooftop, from battlement and bleacher, from factory-roofs and shop-doors and the streets and the boats and the docks in and around the harbor - it was as if all of Trottingham had spoken the same ineffable word, deranged by distance and place and time until one's ears were hopelessly dazzled by the sheer confusion
The Daddy Longlegs was captured, taken in prize. The crystal privateers had overcome their foe, and the ship was theirs!
And as the clocks struck noon, the Trottish crowds screamed in approbation, ponies from the battlements, and the griffons from the bleacher stands along the port and the harbor-side, to see one band of Equestrians conquer another in the neutral skies of Trottingham.
Purse Strings sat back, satisfied.
I guess everypony really does love a good show.