The Blueblood Papers: Royal Blood

by Raleigh


Chapter 14

Getting shot in the flank bought me a few more days of medical leave on a comfortable military hospital bed with friendly nurses, both of which I had become rather intimately familiar with over the course of my career. It was a shame I only got to receive such hospitality after suffering pain and injury of a sufficiently debilitating degree. As Doctor Surgical Steel said when he had to examine my backside for the second time that month, it was only a ‘flesh wound’, as if there were other kinds of wounds out there that are inflicted without harming one’s flesh.

“A few inches to the right and it would have perforated your colon,” he said as he stitched up the hole in my left buttock after he extracted the musket ball with what looked like tweezers, dropping it in a metal tin held by the nurse next to him. “Then tha’d be crapping in a bag, which puts a bit of a downer on thee gallivanting around with fairer sex, so I’ve heard. I’m sure t’ mares of Canterlot would be grateful for t’ break. Now quit tha whining and hold still.”

The wound itself had become a literal pain in the flank. Until it healed, which would be a few more days even with the restorative effects of earth pony alchemy speeding up the natural healing process, I would continue to have trouble sitting or lying in any position that wasn’t curled up on my right side. I tried not to think about how much like fabric skin is as the good doctor closed up the wound, though the image of Rarity stitching up my hide like some sort of barbaric Griffon’s leather coat refused to leave my mind any time soon.

As for Maud Pie, she was fine after her ordeal. It would be a while, however, until she could walk on all-fours again, but by the end of it all her foreleg would be as good as new. The story that had spread around the camp was how I had single-hoofedly carried her back across no mare’s land under enemy fire and after having been shot myself. Never mind that it was Cannon Fodder who had done much of the heavy lifting, but neither he nor Maud herself had seen fit to correct what other ponies were saying. For this I received another two shiny commendations to pin to my chest in the form of the Flash Magnus Star and the Amethyst Heart. A reward for getting wounded seemed a little counterproductive to me, but by my count I should have received a few of them by now, so it was a long time coming.

[The Flash Magnus Star, named for the Pillar of Equestria Flash Magnus, is a military decoration awarded to commissioned officers for exemplary bravery in the face of the enemy. The Amethyst Heart was a relatively new decoration introduced by Princess Cadance, and is awarded to soldiers of all ranks who have been wounded in combat. Blueblood makes no mention of this, but on his recommendation Maud Pie received the Rockhoof Star, the civilian equivalent of the Magnus Star, for that same action.]

Nevertheless, after getting patched up and pumped full of painkillers, Maud was ready to present her findings to General Market Garden. Surgical Steel had told her to avoid work until her hoof had fully healed, but as she was one of that very lucky minority of ponies for whom their work was also their hobby, she carried on regardless, much to the good doctor’s irritation. At any rate, this all meant yet another strategy conference, and my newfound intimate knowledge of the Changelings’ defensive works was apparently considered important enough to demand my presence there.

It was early evening, and I was limping along to Market Garden’s command marquee when I bumped into Second Fiddle; if I didn’t know any better I’d have said he was lying in wait for me, waiting to pounce while I was in a bit of a rush. He darted out suddenly from behind a tent belonging to some other officer whose name I never bothered to remember, and trotted on towards me. A newspaper was tucked under his armpit and he had a very stern expression on his face, the sort that looked as though he had been practicing in front of a mirror before venturing out. His peaked cap was pulled lower over his eyes than usual in a manner he probably thought looked more serious, compared to the more rakish angle I preferred to wear mine. He was going to tell me off for something, getting shot or endangering the life of a civilian, most likely.

“Good evening!” I said, tipping my cap; he might have been something of an ass lately, but that didn’t excuse poor manners on my part, so long as it continued to rankle him.

Indeed, it seemed to have caught him off-guard, as he stopped, blinked a little in confusion, and then slowly remembered what it was that he wanted to harangue me about. “Uh, yes,” he said. “Look, Blueblood, I don’t like finding out what ponies under my command have done in newspapers unless they’ve died gloriously in battle.”

Those words probably sounded better in his head, I imagined. He held up the newspaper folded to a page about a third of the way through, where it showed a photograph of my flank with the rather prominent bandage over it. The headline of the article declared in bold letters ‘Prince shot in bum’, illustrating that illustrious organ of the press’ exemplary journalistic integrity. I could only assume the editorial team had given up on employing real writers and started hiring directly from middle schools. Quite how they got that photo I can’t say, as I don’t recall seeing journalists in the camp, but their kind are as bad as the Changelings are for getting into areas they aren’t welcome in.

[The Changeling War marked the first limited use of war correspondents, being the first major war to take place after the advent of print journalism, as journalists and photographers were dispatched to the frontlines to report on the ongoing conflict. These were, however, subjected to wartime censorship under the DOE Act. Photographs of Prince Blueblood’s flanks were apparently considered to be safe for publishing.]

“It was only a brief excursion,” I said, affecting a casual shrug as though getting shot at was something I had somehow gotten used to as a war hero. “When an opportunity presents itself sometimes one just has to take it. If Maud Pie figures out how to break down that damned wall then we might have won this war right there and then.”

Second Fiddle glared at me, the whites of his eyes stark slits against his charcoal grey coat. “I already warned you about going above my head. You just couldn’t resist another chance to show me up.”

“Oh for heaven’s sake,” I snapped, glancing around to make sure nopony was eavesdropping. Either the soldiers milling around nearby were too busy chatting, playing cards, or catching up on sleep to pay attention to our little tête-à-tête or the Equestrian Army had started recruiting from the Royal Actors Guild. “Will you get that silly notion out of your head? I merely did my duty and nothing more, and you’ll do yours too, I’m sure.”

I could tell he was trying desperately to think of some sort of witty response to that, but snappy badinage was never his strong point, so he merely settled for doing his very best impression of Princess Luna after she had accidentally eaten a lemon but didn’t want to admit it. Ponies who think that the world owes them something because they think they’ve had a hard life, as though the universe operates on some sort of cosmic balance system, tend to react poorly when the inconsistencies and flaws in their solipsist view of the world are pointed out. It was then that it occurred to me that since I had been shot in the backside he hadn’t seen me or inquired about my health at all, and I, being the snide cad that I am, could not resist twisting the knife just a little more.

“I’m fine, by the way,” I said. “Thank you for asking. It still stings, but the doctor says I’ll be as right as rain in a few days as long as I keep drinking those revolting potions. I don’t see why earth pony alchemists can’t make potions taste of anything but lukewarm vinegary Germane wine.”

“Oh.” He scratched at the ground with his hoof and his ears flattened against his head, which dropped slightly like that of an admonished puppy. “I’m sorry. I’ve been all out of sorts lately. There’s just so much work to do; Market Garden loves to plan absolutely everything to the tiniest detail and it’s a struggle to keep up sometimes, and I barely have any free time left to do anything else. We spent three hours last night talking about the rate of ammunition expenditure versus supply and the potential impact on our supply lines if we doubled the number of cannons. Do you know how many barrels of gunpowder is needed to keep a cannon firing each day and how many can fit on a single supply wagon? I do now!

There it was, I could still play him like, well, a fiddle, I suppose, though had I known where this would lead later I might have been a little nicer to him. Nevertheless, now that we had cleared the air a little, as clear as it could possibly be out here with the unique aroma of thousands of ponies living in close proximity to one another, the two of us made our way to Market Garden’s meeting. An attempt at small talk by Yours Truly, commenting on the continuing hot and muggy weather and Countess Coloratura’s recently-expressed desire to perform for the troops (one occasionally listens to popular music, as, despite the expectation of my regal status, classical is rather dreary), was met with responses of one word or fewer and I soon gave up. It was all business with him, and considering that business was war I was even less enthused.

We filed into the marquee and took our places by the table. The usual hellos and welcomes were over and done with quite rapidly, Market Garden being the sort to want to get to what she considered to be the more interesting parts, directing the battle as she saw it, as quickly as possible. If it meant that this meeting could be over quicker without the pleasantries then I was fully on board, despite the mounting dread gnawing away at the pit of my stomach that such talk always inspires.

Maud Pie was there. Her injured foreleg was in a sling, so she hobbled awkwardly on three legs to the table, holding her notes in her mouth. Despite being drugged up on painkillers, she seemed no less subdued than usual. She placed the parchment on the table before her, sat on her haunches, and arranged them neatly with her one good hoof. As she did this, the other ponies gathered for the meeting, being generals of corps, division, and brigade, staff officers, the odd commissar, Second Fiddle, and me, leaned expectantly over the cluttered map table. In the dying light of the day and the bleak glow cast by the candles all around the marquee the sight had put me in mind of witches and warlocks gathered around a profaned altar for a Nightmare mass.

“It’s as I hypothesised,” said Maud Pie, “the walls are treated with a substance that makes them stronger. Bare limestone would have crumbled by now, but this Changeling resin has coated and permeated the porous rock, allowing it to absorb the kinetic force of a cannonball’s impact. It seems to be organic, and reacts to damage to the wall like a body reacting to a wound. Where your cannons have struck the wall it moves to reinforce that damage like a scab.”

“So, what is it, exactly?” asked Major-General Garnet.

“I don’t know. I’ve never seen anything like this before. My best guess is that it’s magical. I’m sorry, this is beyond my area of expertise, which is rocks. Just rocks.”

“I don’t particularly care what this, ah, ‘Changeling-stuff’ is,” snapped Market Garden, just as Garnet opened his mouth to ask another question. “What I want to know is can we overcome it and how long will it take given the current rate and intensity of our artillery’s firepower?”

[Blueblood’s testimony here appears to corroborate General Market Garden’s later assertion that it was she who had first coined the famous slang term ‘Changeling-stuff’ (usually abbreviated to C-stuff by soldiers, who may have invented this term independently) for chrysalite, a kind of magically-enhanced resin that the Changelings used as a building material (and not to be confused with the more infamous chrysaline, which is a different substance). Much of it was found reinforcing the buildings in Changeling-occupied settlements across the Badlands, including Virion Hive, making the walls much more resilient until the development of more powerful artillery and explosive shells nullified its defensive properties. As the war ended before the planned siege of Chrysalis’ hive could take place and the secrets of its manufacture are now lost, how a structure of pure chrysalite would withstand bombardment is pure conjecture.]

“It makes the rock tougher, but it doesn’t make it invulnerable. My best guess would be about three more weeks, maybe more, using what you currently have, until the wall’s structural integrity is weakened to the point where this substance can no longer hold it together.”

Market Garden pulled a face and chewed on her lower lip, Garnet muttered something under his breath to one of his aides that sounded bitter, while Second Fiddle merely snorted and stamped a hoof in irritation. This was supposed to have been a quick siege; knock a hole in the wall, send enough soldiers in to overwhelm the defenders, declare victory and start thinking about the next one, then repeat until the Changelings give up. That was the overall plan as far as I could make out from what little I remembered of those meetings, at least.

“We don’t have three weeks, we barely have two,” said Market Garden, dragging a sheet of parchment filled with scribbled numbers, sums, statistics, and other arcane things that made sense only to her and nopony else. “What if we had more cannons?”

“That would speed up the process,” said Maud. “It’s tough, but it’s not invulnerable.”

“Then we shall have every cannon available brought to bear on that blasted wall,” said Market Garden. “And when I say ‘every cannon’, I damn well mean every cannon! I’ll have the Ministry of War raid museums for antiques if they have to; I want that bloody wall smashed to pieces before the enemy can reinforce.”

“I’ll make sure we get enough,” said Second Fiddle, seemingly out of a need to be seen to be contributing to the discussion and therefore justifying his presence here. “Virion Hive will fall!”

Garnet, however, remained the depressing voice of reason. “If we assault a breach it’ll be a massacre,” he said, shaking his head. “Prince Blueblood’s report changes everything; the Changelings have muskets now, so who knows what else they have. We can assume that they have cannon too, and I promise you by the time we muster for an attack they will have sighted every inch of land and air between our line and the breach with infantry and artillery. We will take sustained casualties crossing the open land and sky, and once our colts hit the ditch the enemy will pour unrelenting fire there - muskets, grenades, lead shot, mortar rounds, shrapnel, and canister shot. Magic too, even. There’ll be no escape down there. Pegasi will have to contend with airborne shrapnel, too. Anypony who makes it to the breach will have to fight hoof-to-hoof with an entire war swarm. Ma’am, if my division takes that fortress by storming a breach it will no longer be fit to carry on further offensive action.”

“How could you possibly know that?” Second Fiddle blurted out before anypony else had the chance to say anything more sensible. “The Equestrian soldier is worth ten of their drones. By Celestia we will prevail.”

“Because I read books, sir, not propaganda,” said Garnet, shrugging and making no attempt to hide his irritation at that stupid question. “The gap between the artillery creating a practicable breach and a division mounting an assault will allow the enemy time to prepare. I suggest, ma’am, that if this army is to be fit for carrying on this fight that we bypass Virion Hive, leave a token garrison, and meet the relief column head on. All I ask is we think twice before hurling thousands of ponies to their deaths.”

“Canterlot expects results, Major-General.” Second Fiddle scoffed, shaking his head. “We’re fighting a war, and a war we’ve got to win. Casualties are inevitable in war, did your books tell you that?”

“Sir, there are casualties and there are casualties,” quipped Garnet. “The former is acceptable and the latter is not. Generals, good ones, are the ones that avoid casualties.”

Under normal circumstances I might have interjected, if only to put an end to this absurd conversation so we could move on to the next agenda item and I could be in bed sooner. Second Fiddle, however, had warned me to stop undermining him, but it became increasingly clear that he was perfectly capable of doing that by himself. I hadn’t said a word and he had already made himself a bigger fool than I ever possibly could, and that included when we were in school together and I had convinced him to jump out of a second storey window into a stagnant pond full of irate swans to impress some fillies. My old school chum seemed to have a knack for riling up the hackles of otherwise perfectly sensible ponies (inasmuch as anypony who willingly joined the military and stuck around long enough to rise to the general staff could be considered sensible), and it was going to get him into a lot of trouble one day.

Good, I thought as I watched the two argue over- well, nothing much in particular; Second Fiddle seemed to be more upset at the perceived challenge to his authority than what Garnet actually said. It would be about time, really, that somepony else other than me tried to make him realise that there was more to this war than his ego. That was what this was all about; like all of the ambitious officers I have had the misfortune to meet over the years, he had gambled the career he had built on a single, risky campaign, and here was a more experienced veteran telling him not only that it would not work out the way he planned and there would be little in the way of glory for him, but of the mortal consequences that even the slim chance of success would bring. An officer often has one of two reactions to being told of such consequences: either a stoic acceptance of the grim reality that his actions will bring accompanied by a token show of sympathy, or a steadfast refusal of the facts and a readiness to blame others. Second Fiddle was falling into the latter category.

It was Market Garden who put an end to this. She slammed her hoof on the table, making the scattered pencils, compasses, and a few of the closer staff officers jump.

“That’s enough,” she said. “If we could have one meeting without a petty argument then we would have won the war by now.”

“I apologise, ma’am,” said Garnet, bowing his head slightly in contrition. Second Fiddle, meanwhile, turned to me and mumbled something about how the general had started it, apparently expecting sympathy on my part. He would find none from me, as I sat there and pretended not to hear him.

“Your objection is noted, Garnet,” continued Market Garden. “But our orders are clear. Canterlot demands that we take Virion Hive now, not in a few months’ time, but now. We’ve been at war for two years and barely have anything to show for it. Our options are limited; you know that I would never consider a direct frontal assault on a fortified position unless there was no other option, but time is against us here.” She grabbed a large map and dragged it over, knocking over a few pots of pencils and quills and scattering a few other papers in the process. “Now, come on, how do we go about doing this the correct and proper way? I want ideas.”

The meeting descended into something of a free-for-all, as staff officers, generals, aides, commissars, and even the servants pitched in with ideas of varying suitability. One naive optimist, surprisingly the commissar attached to the 12th Division, suggested that, in accordance with the ancient laws of war, once a practicable breach had been made in the walls the enemy would then surrender to avoid a needless bloodbath. I had to admire such wishful thinking, as were I not so much the realist I might have fallen into such false hope myself.

[This was indeed the case in the ancient wars of unification and the wars with the Griffons. Once the walls of a fortification had been breached it was customary for the garrison to surrender now that their position had been rendered almost impossible to defend. Refusal to do so typically resulted in the attacking force granting no quarter to the defenders.]

Another officer pointed out that the artillery was currently hammering away at three points of the fortifications, and as long as the relief column hadn’t arrived to reinforce the defenders they may be unable to properly defend all three breaches if assaulted simultaneously. It certainly sounded plausible, at least to my uneducated ears, but Market Garden pointed out the impracticality of making three practicable breaches at the same time. Still, it was the most useful suggestion that had been made thus far. From there, the other suggestions were less helpful; a plan to send in pegasi and Griffons to seize the wall was dismissed on the account it would leave them isolated and trapped until the earth ponies and unicorns could get there in time. Weaponisation of the weather sounded appealing, zapping the breaches with lightning storms to keep the bugs from reinforcing, but the representative from the MWC warned that such things were difficult to control, particularly if his weather specialists were being shot at, and that friendly casualties as a result were almost inevitable. Lightning was more likely to strike Equestrian metal armour than Changeling chitin.

They carried on; one officer suggested dragging Princess Twilight Sparkle along, since she was apparently the most powerful user of magic who ever walked the face of Equus (which I couldn’t possibly comment upon, but her prowess in the bedroom, however, I could certainly testify to), point her at the walls, and simply make the whole lot disappear. I highly doubted that such a tremendous feat of magic would be within the power of even Twilight herself to accomplish. Besides, I remembered the last time an alicorn princess involved herself in the business of war and it ended poorly for all involved.

I watched all of this with my usual sense of detachment; the whole scene felt peculiarly abstracted, as though I was watching a troupe of very poor actors putting on a badly-written play in the most run-down theatre imaginable. Numbers and statistics, each representing the life of a pony were bandied about without a care, and it all felt so distant from the horrifying consequences. Perhaps this abstraction was the only way the ponies gathered around this map table, or safe in their offices and meeting rooms in Canterlot, could even begin to think about directing this war, for to acknowledge the reality that every decision taken must involve some measure of loss and grief, no matter how small, could only lead to a deadly paralysis of thought. All one could do, provided one was the sensible sort of officer who knew that this level of abstraction could only go so far, was to trick oneself into believing that this was all somehow worth it in the end if we won and to do one’s best to make that particular number on which all generals are judged as small as possible.

Nevertheless, my mind wasn’t completely distracted from the job at hoof. The ponies here had focused on ideas of going through the wall or over it or some combination of both, indeed those seemed to be the proposals most grounded in reality. Where the officers bickered and argued, however, and where their discussion was at least somewhat productive, was in the finer details of such a plan, which still boiled down to throwing ponies at the Changelings’ walls until either the enemy was overwhelmed or everypony was dead, whichever came first. However, as I looked over at the various maps and diagrams of Virion Hive on the table, the low, squat, blocky houses and rather primitive structures reminded me of what I had seen of the Rat Pony Tribe’s underground city and the extensive tunnel system in and around it. Maud Pie had said that the earth here was not good for building or digging, but clearly the natives here had found a way to make it work. Perhaps...

“Why don’t we go under the wall?” I blurted out. The conversation stopped abruptly; it was the first thing I had said for that entire meeting, other than ‘hello’, and now everypony stared at me. I’m not one to feel particularly self-conscious, as being raised to take on the role of a prince had instilled a sense of confidence that only a belief in divine right can provide, but I did wonder if I had just made myself look like an idiot.

“Blueblood,” said Second Fiddle, hissing at me, “that’s utterly stu-”

“Brilliant!” exclaimed Market Garden. “You're a genius, Blueblood, a military genius!”

Second Fiddle’s mouth drew into a thin, flat line across the lower half of his face, and his eyes narrowed into slits. “Yes,” he said. “A genius, of course. Just one slight issue; how are we supposed to go under the wall?”

“Oh,” I said, affecting an air of casualness that was sure to annoy him. “I know a pony.”

***

I have to admit that I was not at all certain that Earthshaker, chief of the Rat Pony Tribe and the cuckolded blackguard who flogged me, would even consider my proposal for more than a second. After all, he had no love for Equestria and especially Yours Truly, but I was pleasantly surprised and immensely relieved when he and about two dozen of his tribe marched into the camp, about six hours after Market Garden dispatched a messenger to their city with her proposal. It would have been rather embarrassing for me otherwise, after being declared a military genius by a pony whose immense ego was matched in size only by her distinct lack of manners only for this plan to have fallen through at the very first hurdle.

I say ‘her proposal’ as Market Garden promptly took all the credit for it and continued to do so for the rest of her life after the war. It was a running theme for her, and though I try my best to keep out of such debates, I am at least aware that McBridle insisted that Operation Buttercup was at least in part plagiarised from notes that he and his staff had left behind after he retired. Unfortunately, those seeking more definitive illumination from me on that subject will have to be disappointed yet again; though I counted McBridle as something of a friend, or at least approaching one, I was but a regimental commissar at the time and kept out of the loop, as it were, on the actual planning of the war unless it was of direct concern to me or the regiment. I suppose that he had a personal prohibition against talking shop when socialising, in the same traditions of the old gentlecolts’ clubs of Canterlot, was what made us friends in the first place, as opposed to the likes of Market Garden, for whom work consumed the totality of her existence.

It was mid-afternoon, just shy of tea time, when Earthshaker and his ponies turned up. They emerged from the desert, approaching in a small, tightly huddled mass with their chieftain leading the way. With their sand-coloured coats and dusty robes they looked as though they had emerged from the earth itself, and given their natural skill at tunnelling that would not have been an entirely unreasonable assumption. They were mostly earth ponies, with the odd pegasus and unicorn, and each carried spears tipped with the formerly-standard issue Royal Guard steel spearheads that I had attempted to offer them during that previous unpleasantness. I faintly wondered if they would try and swap them for muskets. Earthshaker himself, in what I took to be a bid to try and impress us, wore a battered iron breastplate over his robes. Metal was a rarity out here and the skill to forge it more so, therefore something like that must have been a status symbol for their sort. He must have felt like a right fool when he saw the rear picquets of our camp dressed from head-to-hoof in mass-produced mithril armour.

They were greeted by a welcome committee consisting of Yours Truly, Commissar-General Second Fiddle, and an honour guard made up of whichever Solar Guard soldiers and officers I could round up at short notice. I thought it best, however, if the Royal Standard would remain safely ensconced with the colour guard this time for reasons that should be very readily apparent to avid readers of this dross. While a few ponies were concerned about my previous history with Earthshaker potentially souring relations before they could even get started on this little favour for us, I was rather more worried about Second Fiddle putting his hoof in it and upsetting the fragile accord between our two nations that Princess Celestia and her intrepid team of negotiators had worked so hard to achieve. [Credit where it is due, I merely offered guidance and support to both Equestrian diplomats and tribal representatives, who did most of the difficult work of negotiating a deal acceptable to all sides.]

Second Fiddle might have been a dab hoof at the art of buttering up his betters for personal gain, as I myself have fallen victim to in the past, but his interpersonal skills otherwise required a bit of work. Something had put him in a sulky mood that day, and he spent the entirety of this little welcoming ceremony pouting and ignoring Earthshaker, which, upon reflection, was the very best outcome I could have hoped for, really.

“We will not do this for you,” said Earthshaker when I greeted him and his ponies. “We do this for our tribe, for our kin still enslaved by the enemy, and for revenge. The one who took Dalia from me is in that city, and I want both.”

Fine, thought I, whatever his motivation, nopony cared so long as it got the results we needed. “Be that as it may,” I said, “we are united against a common enemy. I invite you to share our water.”

Earthshaker was never one for conversation, and even without the language barrier and our mutual inexperience with each other’s native tongues I doubted he would have stuck around for more small talk. He merely nodded curtly and raised his hoof, then bumped it against mine when I reciprocated that gesture. I hadn’t forgotten the torture he had inflicted on me, and the scars that now criss-crossed my back would ensure that I never would. Likewise, he would never forget that I had rutted his wife, and although said spouse had been replaced by a Changeling, if she existed at all, his particular sense of stubbornness would not allow him to let go of a grudge once it had become firmly embedded in his mind.

When he turned his back and trotted on over to his gaggle of ponies I scraped that hoof on the dusty ground to wipe away the taint. It was difficult to suppress my feelings of disgust and hate, but a princeling learns from a young age to conceal his emotions, lest his father strike him with a cane for daring to express anything but a resolute acceptance of the situation at hoof. Yet needs must, and the true architect of our collective misery was cowering behind the safety of those walls; we would work together towards this end, yes, but I was not about to afford this belligerent little unicorn, who thinks just because he rules over a mob of backwards, slave-owning, and sullen heathens that he can throw his weight around, any more of my hospitality than what was necessary to expedite the end of this current unpleasantness. So I left him to it, resolving to keep myself as far from those proceedings as possible and trust that his thirst for revenge was stronger than his instinct to sabotage the workings of the ‘slaves of the tyrants of the sun and moon’, as he was so fond of putting it.

“So we really don’t have any engineers who can do this for us?” said Second Fiddle, once Earthshaker was reasonably out of earshot. “We have to rely on these… these heretics?”

“They’re not heretics, they’re heathens,” I said. “There’s a key difference, heretics are-”

“It doesn’t matter what the difference is,” he snapped. “They’ve all turned their back on Celestia.”

“I’m sure she doesn’t mind.” In fact, I was certain of it; Auntie ‘Tia was a damned sight more tolerant than those ponies who claimed to hold her in the highest devotion.

“I still can’t believe our own ponies can’t do this.”

“We have engineers, yes, but they’re all working on the trenches and blockhouses. None of them can do geomancy, not like the chief over there.” I pointed over to said pony, who was having something explained to him by Pencil Pusher - probably the location of where he and his ponies could pitch their tents or some tedious bureaucratic detail that the ponies who have been living in holes in the ground could never hope to understand. Southern Cross happened to see me looking over, pulled a face, and jabbed his head in the annoying bureaucrat’s direction, to which I responded with a wink.

Second Fiddle leaned in closer, and I could smell his sweat mixed with an overabundance of cheap eau de cologne and a breath mint. I almost gagged at it; at least Cannon Fodder understood the concept of personal space. “I just don’t trust them,” he said sotto voce.

“Well, neither do I,” I said. He looked a little relieved at that, as anypony who tries to conceal a spore of prejudice within them feels when another admits to those same feelings. And in my defence, at least I had a valid reason for mine. “That’s the fellow who flogged me, so you watch him like a hawk, you hear?”

That smoothed a few things over for the time being at least; Earthshaker could go about his business and Second Fiddle could indulge in his paranoid fantasies, and the only issues I would have to deal with is the latter occasionally mistaking some custom peculiar to the former’s tribe, such as stopping a few times a day to beg forgiveness from the spirits of the earth for this violation of its ‘flesh’, as being suspicious. They were easily brushed off and my old chum got to pretend he was doing something productive for a change. As for the actual business of digging the mine, however, I paid very little attention to that business, now that I had passed responsibility for supervising that onto Second Fiddle.

[Commissar-General Second Fiddle’s reaction to the native ponies of the Badlands is of particular interest in exploring the complexities of the thorny issues of culture, especially if we contrast this prejudice with his congenial attitude towards the Griffons. While he appears to have overcome the anti-Griffon sentiment commonplace among Equestrian officers at the time, it is surprising that he could not afford the same tolerance for individuals of his own species. Blueblood makes no mention of this, but as it has been my aim to create a kinder and more caring world since I was forced to banish my sister, the irrationality of prejudice presents an interesting philosophical conundrum.]

Market Garden’s final plan is known by every single schoolfoal in Equestria, but for those ponies reading who perhaps didn’t go to to school or whose education was free I shall do my best to summarise what was a rather more complex battle plan than anything Crimson Arrow or McBridle could ever have come up with. Essentially, she had decided to go with as many of the more sensible suggestions, including mine, as she could manage. Whatever deficiencies she had in terms of personality and likeability, she made up for in her capacity to scrounge up materiel, and quickly too. On the very same day Earthshaker had turned up more cannons started arriving from all areas of Equestria, likely denuding a few of the artillery batteries kept in reserve of their guns, and joined in the bombardment. The day after that even more came, and the entire stretch of the ridge immediately facing Virion Hive was lined with an unbroken line of cannons that fired all day.

In what was up to that point the largest bombardment in history the artillery would smash a series of holes in the fortification wall, but only two would be directly assaulted. While that was going on, Earthshaker’s tribe would dig a mine directly under the wall of the castle itself and our engineers would pack it full of dynamite, which was to be detonated just as the first assaults on the breaches were made. Assuming that the resulting hole in the castle keep was large enough it would then be stormed by the Guards Division and the whole thing hopefully captured. In theory, General Odonata would not be expecting a direct assault on the keep itself and certainly not by undermining, again, making the assumption that this could be kept a secret, and with the multitude of breaches and no indication of which would be attacked, she would be forced to spread her forces thinly across the entire length of the wall. If we were really lucky, we could even capture her with her socks down in the castle.

Three of the divisions of I Corps would launch a separate assault each, with the fourth held in reserve to exploit a successful attack should one present itself. Only one of these three assaults had to be successful, for as Major-General Garnet had pointed out while off on yet another installment of his award-winning lecture series on boring things nopony cares about, once a breach had been won and the reserves were sent in it spelt certain defeat for the defenders. Market Garden would pour troops into a held breach and, like a dam battered in a storm, the defenders would surely collapse against the ensuing onslaught.

A rush of excitement flooded through the camp, such that I hadn’t seen since the very start of the war. The troops were flushed with the success of the Battle of the Heights, which showed that we could defeat the enemy decisively in open battle, and despite everypony knowing that an attack, even with all of the advantages granted by whatever trickery our generals could summon, would be immensely costly, they were, on the whole, thoroughly looking forward to it. Market Garden’s belief in her ability to command bordered on the delusional, but her absurd over-confidence was reflected with the common soldiery; with all of the doom and gloom we had gone through with the dour General McBridle and the suicidally incompetent Crimson Arrow, a general with initiative and who at least appeared to know what she was doing had given them some sliver of hope that we could win this blasted war. I, of course, remained sceptical.

I appreciate that this talk about troop movements is all very complicated and not particularly interesting, unless one is that kind of pony who tends not to be invited to parties often, but for the rest of us more normal and well-balanced individuals I have taken the liberty of drawing a map illustrating the key points of this plan. There are more accurate military maps out there, I’m sure, but if you want to find one you’ll just have to go to a library yourself; I can’t do everything for you. Besides, it was all going to go to Tartarus in a hoofbasket very shortly.

[The map sketched by Prince Blueblood on the back of a set of instructions for flat pack crystal furniture lacks much of the finer detail of military maps and is out of scale, too. Virion Hive is much larger in reality, being a city of approximately two thousand ponies plus the Changeling occupation forces. The castle is smaller compared to the city as a whole, and the distance between the fortress and the Equestrian front line is much wider in real life. More accurate maps are available elsewhere, but this will suffice for providing us with a basic understanding of the plan. Upon seeing Blueblood’s horn-writing here I trust readers will develop a greater appreciation for the hard work that goes into editing his memoirs.]