13 June, Y.C. 970
Canterburg Forest
Taking command, the minotaur had said.
Vera had assumed, as was entirely reasonable to do at the time, that that meant she would be taking command of their platoon, the group that had trained together for months now. It made sense; during training exercises, they had rotated platoon command through the squad leaders, and she had consistently been the best. They were used to working with her, she already had a lineup of reliable ponies, and she generally knew what she was doing.
Taking command of a group of two hundred and fifty ponies, on the other hoof, was a different beast entirely. Not just because she hadn’t been expecting it — she hadn’t — but the other five platoons that had completed boot at the same time were… different. They had worked together, on occasion, and often had worked against each other in competition, but a grand unified command like this… well, none of them had expected it.
As the major who ran Foal Mountain had explained to her, early in the morning, there were supposed to be six all-recruit platoons under the control of a single veteran captain, who would take them over. The captain was there mainly to foalsit them; the route they needed to take was quite straightforward, and it was about as safe as it got.
Unfortunately, that captain was… indisposed. She had never gotten a full story on that, and certainly didn’t expect to anytime soon, but it certainly sounded as if he had simply never arrived at the camp due to a delay of some sort. As a result, the major had put her in charge.
Not that she wasn’t grateful for the command opportunity. This was the sort of thing that shot ponies up in the ranking. Graduation from boot, and a brevet straight to captain? That had to be some sort of record. All she needed to do was walk them two days’ march, deliver the troops, and live up to the reputation thrust upon her.
She cracked a smile. Not, all in all, the worst possible thing.
Much less cheery than her career opportunities, though, was this damned weather. By the time they had actually stepped off yesterday morning, it was pushing on four hundred, with banks of low rolling fog to meet them as they descended into the valley.
They had reached the river by noon, though judging by the lingering haze it was hard to judge the time with anything other than a pocketwatch. They had marched to the river once or twice before, during training, and it was supposed to be a five hour trip; at eight hours or so they were taking it slow.
She was fine with that, though; they had two whole days to make the trip, and they were traveling slow for good reason. Aside from their combat gear — medium duty body armor, standard issue spear and knife set, personal weapon of choice if desired, and a small flask of high-energy hay slurry — each carried a supply pack. Some ponies had shovels and engineering equipment, some had tents, a few had big bundles of normal rations. They were self-contained at the unit level, and between the two hundred and fifty of them, were fully equipped as an expeditionary unit for non-specialized medium-term combat and support operations.
All of which was a bit overkill for a two-day hike, of course. Their preparations weren’t for the transfer, though, but rather for their arrival at camp. None of them knew what to expect once they actually got to their deployment, though they all expected it would involve combat operations within Blackacre itself.
None of them were looking forward to that.
Vera tried to keep their minds off of it, but it wasn’t working out so well. Problem with a march like this was it didn’t involve much thinking. Sure, the terrain was hardscrabble at points — calling the route through the forest a road was generous — but after a while you just went on automatic, freeing up your mind to think of other things.
All except the outriders, of course. She glanced out to the sides of the winding column of ponies, into the mist that had followed them down the mountain, across the river, and into the forest, where faint lights danced around them: outrider ponies, feeling their way over the land, searching for ambushes or traps.
Not that they would find any. Canterburg Forest, as might be expected, hugged the base of the Canterlot mountains; there wasn’t much beyond scrub brush between it and the decidedly wilder Blackacre forest to the south. The land wasn’t fertile, wasn’t rich in minerals; more importantly, it lay within the shadow of Canterlot itself. This was about as safe as rural Equestria got.
Still, it was comforting to know that the outriders were there, screening the forest in front of them. The main column was spread out, staggered pretty much according to personal preference. On an unpaved path like this, there was no sense in trying to keep a formation; they would have to break ranks every three steps to hop over a small gully or hop on a log. Besides, loose ranks were happy ranks.
Not that morale was a problem for a two-day hike. It was almost pleasant.
“Ho! Vera!” came a familiar voice behind her.
“Gawker,” she said with a welcome smile. “What’s the news from up front?”
“More of the same,” he said, trotting up beside her. “Path dips down a bit for a few hundred feet. There’s a little stream at the bottom.”
“Fordable?” she asked, hesitant. The big river at the bottom of Foal Mountain had a bridge, but some of the larger streams since then had required a bit of legwork to figure out where two hundred and fifty ponies could cross safely.
“Oh, sure,” he said with a shrug. “Hop over it. I’m thinking fresh water, though.”
“Right,” she nodded. It had been two hours since their last rest. No one was complaining, but they were welcome pauses, even if only for a few minutes. It slowed them down a bit, but they were getting close to Saddle Lake anyway. Only a few more hours now. “How far ahead?”
“Twenty minutes or so. That’s what they’re telling me.”
“Twenty minutes for you, or for us?” she asked, raising an eyebrow.
Gawker laughed, but there was something else to it.
“You tired?” she asked. The outriders wore light armor but not much else. They traveled the same route, but did it the hard way, off the path and ahead of the column; scouts couldn’t exactly carry a full travel pack.
“A — bit,” he said with a quick nod. “Going to be happy when this is all over, though.”
“Over,” she echoed. “When we get there, that’s when it starts.”
“That… is true,” he said with another nod. “It’ll all change, that’s for sure.”
“Absolutely.”
They walked on a few moments in silence.
“I should get back out there,” he said with a vague wave in front of them. “See if there are any other streams.”
“Sure,” she said, dismissing him with a wave. He dove ahead, picking up speed; in a few seconds he had rounded a curve and was out of sight.
That was a bit odd of him. Usually he stuck around for a few minutes after reporting, if only to talk. It got mighty quiet out there in the middle of the forest.
Certainly this haze didn’t help. It was late in the afternoon, but again that was a determination better made by a timepiece than by looking to the sun. At least they could see the sun, though; a faint disc of white through the trees, it wasn’t much, but at least they could see it. From what she remembered of Blackacre, the trees tended to grow quite a bit taller there.
Rounding a turn and continuing in the general direction of the rest of the column, Vera let herself go on automatic. Setting aside the fact that they were literally soldiers marching off to war, it was actually quite pleasant here.
There was a faint earthy smell to the air, and save for the jangle of harnesses on the column of ponies it was silent in the forest. The haze did a number on absorbing sound, but the ground did its part. Here the soil was slightly moist; it must have rained recently. Between the mist, the damp earth, and the trees, sound didn’t project far at all; it was muffled, as if the ground itself was taking a day off.
Above them, the mist filtered the light fairly well; it was diffuse, bathing everything in a faint greyish glow as twilight approached. It hadn’t been a pretty day in the normal sense of the term, but it was a quintessential rainy day in a forest, and that could be a pleasant thing indeed. A damp spring day, a day without a care in the world, the kind of day she could walk through for hours without realizing it, tuning out everything else and reveling in the essence of it. The hushed quiet, the slight touch of moisture in the air, the stillness of the forest around them —
Vera snapped back to the here and now, almost stumbling over a rock with the shock of seeing the forest around them entirely still, quiet, and devoid of any sort of light.
Where were her outriders?
“Dumn,” she called out. Ahead of her, at the next bend in the road, one of the platoon leader ponies stopped and turned, a quizzical expression on his face.
“What’s up?” he said, starting towards her at a light trot.
“Dumnorix,” she said, very slowly and evenly, as if to not startle the forest, “where are my outriders?”
“I —” he started, but stopped short.
“Form up!” he bellowed, but before the ponies around them could so much as grab their weapons a shriek of pure terror pierced the quiet of the forest.
Vera and Dumnorix glanced at each other and, as of one mind, immediately took off at a full gallop, a dozen ponies thundering at their heels. They tore down the path, taking logs and gullies at leaps and bounds, shedding packs and supplies and anything that wasn’t a weapon or armor.
Ahead they could see the path dip down into a turn; they rounded the corner and shot out into what looked very much like a clearing, with a little stream burbling to itself in front of them —
Along with perhaps two dozen bodies laid out on the earth in front of them.
Reflexively Vera gasped, recognizing the gear: these were Royal Army ponies. They… they were her ponies.
“What the hell happened here,” muttered Dumnorix.
Slowly they pushed forward, threading through the corpses that seemed to have fallen where they stood. Almost none of them had drawn their weapons, yet each was very much dead, surrounded by an expanding halo of reddish dirt.
As they moved closer, the brook got louder — until they realized that the burbling wasn’t a brook, but rather one of the bodies, its flank quivering ever so slightly with ragged breaths as blood pulsated on its neck.
Vera dashed forward, heedless of the fact that this was a textbook ambush if there ever was one, on a beeline for the one pony who was somehow still alive — but it was too late; the pony’s flanks shuddered once, then were silent.
Slowly she turned the pony’s neck in her hooves —
And nearly dropped it as she recognized the face.
“Gawker,” she whispered. “What… what did they do to you….”
“Wrong question,” said Dumnorix, coming up beside her with eyes wide. “What did he do to them.”
“The hell do you mean?” she demanded with a flare of anger.
“Look,” he said, running a hoof down Gawker’s neck. “Serrated cut.”
Her nostrils widened with revulsion from the freshly dead friend, but she knew he was right. She had seen those serrations before. They all had — that ragged pattern could only have been cut with a standard issue combat knife. They had all suffered a few of those by accident, when live-fire exercises got a little rough.
Except that this particular knife had torn through his jugular.
“There it is,” said Dumn, pushing Gawker’s head aside to reveal a glimmer of steel lying on the earth beneath, dyed a steaming crimson from tip to pommel.
“Why would one of our own attack our own outriders?” she wondered, musing with a part of her brain that perhaps this was what shock felt like. She was bending over the freshly slain corpse of the pony who had been one of her closest friends for the past four months. There should be an emotional reaction here, she knew, but for some reason she just couldn’t conjure one up.
Behind them, the thundering of hooves as a dozen ponies burst into the clearing, each one in full armor and clutching a weapon as if their life depended on it. Which, in all fairness, it probably did.
“What…?”
Slowly, Vera stood, her hooves dripping slightly on the earth beneath.
“What do we do?”
Slower still came the realization that their outriders were dead, their main column was utterly undefended and spread out over the better part of a mile, and they had no idea what was happening.
“Orders?”
On all sides, the forest was silent, its fog absorbing everything, even the metallic smell rising from the bodies in the clearing.
Above them, the sun had faded into a dull grey, somehow managing to cast shifting shadows through the haze.
And behind them, the muffled sound of a scream from the column.
And another.
And another.