SBMS009
The first engagement of the campaign came on a sunny early fall afternoon eight days after the Company broke camp. The flying column had made excellent time, and outran all news of its passage. The Captain went into laager beside the Bride’s Road just outside of the reach of the Rebel’s forward patrols, as the Lieutenant was airlifted to the forward base to take control of operations inside Rennet Province; I and the witches-coven rode Air Pony on the return leg.
I looked over the supplies, wagons and ambulance-corps I had left behind during my sojourn playing Tartarus-bartender. While the rest of the column took a much-needed half-day’s rest on the provincial borders, I made sure the oxen were prepared and everypony were in good condition from the long march.
That brief rest left the ground cohorts relatively rested and sharp; they re-dressed ranks and advanced in proper array, leaving those of us in the support column and rear guard behind as they stormed down the main road into enemy territory with a flourish. I’m told the excise officers and their small complement of soldiers – a corporal’s guard completely unprepared for what thundered down the macadam towards their paltry barricades – stared stupidly at the on-rushing cavalcade, and didn’t even notice the detachment of pegasi and griffins who took their position from behind, trampling the lot without mercy.
After a few moments of organized chaos as the main force charged ahead, the carters’ corps and support ponies started moving the wagons down the road into the province. The vehicles were much lighter without an entire shifts worth of slumbering ponies draped over every flat surface, but we were also just ourselves, without our seconded and detailed brethren-soldiers lending their muscle to keeping the rattle moving down the queen’s highway. Two warlock-mares, Otonashi and the Crow, accompanied us as we rolled westward through the fighting. We reached the scattered barricade, the barriers ripped away from the roadway, blood and bodies strewn across the verge underneath the sudden mounds of rubbish which had been a set of gates, fencework, and a short tower now leaning cock-eyed away from the roadbed in the lengthening shadows beneath a glorious sunset.
The total surprise had been such that not even one got away to warn the pair of regiments bivouacked a quick canter down the Road from the barricades, outside the first major market town inside Rennet. Some thought was given to providing our own warning of the breach of the border, as our plans had been made in the expectation we would have to ambush the reaction force, but more flexible minds overruled this attempt to get clever, and instead, the pegasi led the full strength of the ground cohorts around and up to the rear of the furthest of the enemy’s two regimental compounds, which they knew would not be prepared for a sudden assault.
The Company’s ground-ponies attacked the walls from in front of the last glare of the setting sun, rolling right over the posted guard and their neglected walls with as much ease as the aerials had taken the barricade. Earth ponies charged and bucked the walls en masse, bringing down an entire section as sweetly as a lesser force might have taken down a post-fence, and the donkeys and zebra raced to spit the few rebels in sight.
The unicorns passed through those ponies as they took down the wall and its few defenders, and rushed through the compound, isolating the various buildings, the barracks from the mess-halls from the officers’ quarters. As it was dinner time, the regiment’s caribou were mostly crowded together in the mess hall, and a scratch unicorn chorus’s communal shield sealed the front entrance to that building, with another detachment swinging around the rear of the building to cut down anypony who figured out that their own buildings had more than one egress, and to watch for attempts to cut an escape hatch through the building walls. A detachment of griffin pyro specialists were sent for, as the enemy mass was contained unarmed but for trencher-knives within their own mess hall. Sections of unicorn swordsmares and archers skirmished with those rebel soldiers and officers who hadn’t been eating or on guard, until every eye in the compound focused on the sudden pyrotechnic burst on the mess hall’s peaked ridge, the flames flowing like liquid downslope along the tiled roof and bright into the gutters and eaves in the gathering gloom.
This panicked the caribou outside of the trap, and half of them ran for the second regiment, while the surviving officers tried to rally the remainder in a sally to break the Company’s hold on their trapped compatriots’ only means of escape. By this point the rest of the Company had joined the unicorns within the compound itself, and a tidal wave of donkeys, zebra, and earth ponies swept away the brief counterattack, trampling the dry packed dirt of the parade ground into bloody mud.
We heard the commotion in the distance as we approached the town and its beleaguered garrison along the Bride’s Road. The witch-mares completed their preparations, and Otonashi sent out her discord’s-shadows into the town, chasing away curious eyes, terrorizing the civilians into barring their doors and windows against the onrushing Night. At the same time, the Crow lit up a simple Nothing-Important-Here amplified by blooded-crystal charms and fetishes mounted on most of the vehicles of the column. It couldn’t have been all that powerful, as the Crow wasn’t exactly a powerhouse of puissance, but it was sufficient to distract any already-distracted observers, and we rolled in obscurity through the outer borough of that town shivering behind their shutters, towards the screaming and fires and sounds of clashing weapons.
The retreating remnants of the shattered rebel regiment fell back on the confused elements of their sister regiment now cautiously and timidly filing out of their own compound in the near distance. The aerial detachments formed up over the Company with pyrotechnic devices hung below their wings, ready to divebomb the reinforcements when the second regiment’s milling soldiers and officers managed to dress formations and counterattack.
The wall breached by the Company’s attack wasn’t facing the expected direction of the counterattack, being opposite of the second regiment’s compound, and this meant that the Company could turn the rebels’ own fortifications, however feeble and unworthy of the name, against them. In the darkness of onrushing night, the second regiment never quite got up the sack to charge the walls by torch-light and the glare from the burning mess-hall, and the glowing green cats-eyes lurking on every fire-step along the walls awaiting their charge most likely did nothing to fire their ardour.
We rolled past this Mexicolt standoff along the Road outside the town proper, passing not four hundred yards from the front gates of the second regiment’s compound, vulnerable and only lightly protected, although the pegasi and griffin circled overhead, ready to pounce on any move by the enemy to turn and stop the vulnerable and irreplaceable vehicles of the Company. We passed in silence, protected from detection by the Crow’s cantrips and the enemy’s fixation on the massively effective diversion provided by their brother-regiment’s rank and file roasting in a great blaze and the beasts out of Tartarus that had replaced those howling dead on their own walls in the darkness.
As the rest of the column continued into western darkness, I hooked my medical-supplies wagon to the rear of another not-quite-encumbered-enough carter who gave me the silent stink-eye, and led my oxen and the ambulances around the rear of the shattered regiment’s former compound. We brought the ambulances up to the western ruins of the wall, and they unhitched their yokes, joining me as we went into the pyre-lit tartarus that the battle had made of the fortified camp. We retrieved our wounded, carried across broad ox shoulders to the waiting ambulances, and when those were found, recovered our few dead, and put them in the ambulances too. I stumbled in the half-lit darkness up to the Captain glaring over the eastern wall at the gormless enemy, panicking at the sudden flames from a passage of Tickle Me’s pegasi caracole, their wings thrumming overhead as their projectiles burst among the scattering caribou in the near distance. I informed him that we were away, our wounded and dead were following the supply train, and squatted to await his pleasure.
His glowing eyes, quite dragon-yellowish-green in the flickering night, looked over the dying flames of the mess-hall-massacre and the Company holding its positions along and behind the wall, and in flight overhead, and rumbled, "Well enough, good enough. Time to become a rumor."
We left while the getting was good. Shorthorn and the rest of the warlocks’ section weaved a grand glamour over the walls facing the milling rebels, leaving those spooky glowing eyes in place, glaring down on the unnerved enemy in the darkness, while the Company’s ponies themselves filed off the walls and joined the quiet withdrawal through the breaches in the western wall following the oxen and their equine loads in the ambulances.
A section or two of pegasi continued to swoop over the enemy, eliciting a scattering of arrows, sling stones and the occasional javelin, but the rebel were firing blind in the darkness, and only succeeded in scaring the occasional bat flying through the night-pegasi’s lazy circles. The caribou probably didn’t even notice when the last Company pony left the field, coasting conservatively off in the distance to help maintain a combat air patrol over the main force trotting off at the pace of an excited ox’s-run to join the supply column which continued its placid shadowed march into the distance, in the general direction of the awaiting forward base.
Died that evening, of wounds or instant trauma, were the following ponies:
The unicorn Dusk Flare, veteran, of a cut to the femoral artery incurred in the initial fighting to take the parade-grounds. He bled out standing on the wall with his fellows, unaware that he bore a mortal wound.
The donkey recruit Morning Glory, of multiple poisoned darts to the head and shoulders, taken while sweeping the rebel guard from the flanking walls.
The donkey recruit Inland Runner, of a forelimb detached by a mighty blow by an oversized caribou in the fighting of the initial counterattack, who was probably an enemy regimental commander, who did not survive the encounter with Runner’s file-mates.
The donkey recruit Middle Donkey, of a crushing blow to the head, I was not able to get any description of how she fell, nopony saw what happened. Sack merely found her senseless body by the main gate; she never recovered consciousness to tell her tale.