Blackacre

by Princess Woona

Entrenchment

30 December, Y.C. 969
Blackacre

“Wait for it….”

A beam of light shot by overhead, singeing a layer of branches. Not that there were too many left at this point; it was mostly just trunks and stouter limbs. A shower of dislodged twigs fell into the trench, their ends steaming slightly.

“Wait for it….”

Off in the distance, more artillery. They weren’t hitting this section hard, at least not now. Blackacre held the high ground, so Canterlot would be fighting uphill. To make things worse, they held the line at roughly where the forest transitioned to grassland: in order to get artillery close enough to shell the lines, it would be dangerously exposed. That didn’t stop them from trying, lobbing shells on low parabolic arcs deep into the forest, but that was strategic, as opposed to tactical, shelling. Meant to take out rear positions in the forest, disrupt their lines.

“Go!”

Three brown-cloaked figures scrambled over a trench into another farther down, running down the breastworks to the next bunker fifty feet down the front. Another few beams flashed past, but the shots were coincidence, not aimed; they were about five hundred feet from the foremost of the Blackacre trenches.

The fact that they were misses didn’t make them any less deadly.

The figures slammed into the open door to the bunker, resting for a few moments against one of the internal walls. The last of the three huffed mightily, wiping a bit of sweat off his orange coat before it could freeze.

“Is it always like this out here?” asked Igneous Rock.

“You don’t know the half of it,” said the first pony of the three, rolling his eyes. He picked a clump of dirt out of his mane, smoothing his horn. “They’re just takin’ potshots now. When the first wave hit?” He shuddered a bit. “You popped your head up to take a look-see, it popped off.”

“How are the supply lines holding?” asked Cloudy Quartz from between them, wiping a splash of mud off her greyish coat. “What do you need up here?”

“We’ve got supplies for a while,” said the first pony, poking around the smallish interior of the bunker to make sure all was where it should be. “And we can move what we need in during the night.” He paused. “Scratch that. Could use more naphtha.”

“It’s not meant for cooking,” said Quartz, rolling her eyes slightly and scratching a note onto a piece of paper.

“Oh, we’re not using it for cooking,” he said with a devious little grin. “At night, they’re rangefinding based on where their horns hit and where our fires are. So we put them a hundred, two hundred feet back…”

“…and they miss their shots,” finished Rock with an approving nod.

“That’s a happy side effect,” he shrugged. “Two night ago we finally got them to charge during the night.” He laughed, a short barking sound. “They thought our trenches were empty. They thought wrong.”

“They won’t make that mistake again.”

“Can’t make a mistake if you’re dead,” countered the guide. “Anyway, they still haven’t recovered their strength. Reinforcements are slow in coming in.”

“That’s because they’re going to other places down the line,” said Rock, moving to change the subject. “How are you holding? In general.”

“Pretty good, for now,” he shrugged. He gestured at a local map on one side of the little bunker space; blue and green lines were drawn all over it, but none of them had been erased yet. “We’re supposed to hold, so we’re holding. That little charge of theirs didn’t work out too well, so I guarantee you they’re not keen on trying again.

“All that goes down the tubes the moment they decide to throw their back into it.” The unicorn swept a hoof over the charts on the wall. “We’re fighting tooth and claw to hold the line, and they aren’t really committing to it. The moment they decide to push… well, we can do our best, but there’s five of ‘em to one of us. High ground’s good, but not that good.”

“What about pegasi?” asked Quartz. “Bombardment risk.”

“Negligible, at least from them,” he said, shaking his head. “Between the trees and our party cannon, they can’t do much. It’s a forest, and unless they get under the tree tops, they’re not doing much.”

“Good. How about the trenches?” Rock unrolled a chart from his saddlebag, the images on it diagramming out a half-dozen different ways to dig a trench. To the untrained eye, they were variations on a hole, but to him they were night and day. Which was to be expected from the engineer responsible for designing most of the fortifications.

“This and this work fine,” said the frontline pony, pointing at two different variants. “The half-height stuff, forget it. Most important part of the trench here is they don’t know where you are. Only way the half-height holes are any good is if you crawl.”

“They’re a lot easier to build,” said Rock. “No cross-bracing, just a few sandbags. Throw ‘em up in half, a third of the time.”

“No dice,” said the pony firmly. “Gimme half the length of full trench to that mess any day. No questions asked. It’s not that the half-height stuff isn’t as good; it’s that it’s plain bad. Doesn’t make any sense.”

“All right,” said Rock, making a few notes of his own on the designs. That would require a not insubstantial reworking of their construction plans, but… well, if they were going to trench over the entire Blackacre Forest, it was going to be as a contingency plan anyway. Hopefully, the front lines would hold enough to complete the full works.

“Well, that takes care of that,” said Quartz. “You asked for me, though. What is it?”

“How many gardeners do we have?”

She blinked at him.

The bunker’s thin slit windows flashed as a lance of light passed uncomfortably close to them; a half-second later a muffled scream filtered in. That beam might have missed its mark on the lines, but it hit somepony.

“Gardeners.”

“Yeah,” he said with the crack of a smile. “C’mere. I’ve got something to show you.”

They obliged; he rapped a few times on the wall, fiddled around with a section, gave it a pull — and, to their surprise, it heaved outwards, revealing a trap door.

“What’ve you been doing to my bunkers?” demanded Rock, though his voice was more curious than anything else.

“You’ll have to crawl, but it’s good enough to fit,” he said by way of response, entering the cramped tunnel. After a few seconds, his horn glowed, illuminating the space. The earth was well and thoroughly frozen, but it still had a musty smell, somehow almost damp.

After perhaps a minute of crawling through the mud, Rock cleared his throat loudly. “Where, exactly are we going?” he asked, voice muffled by the dirt all around him.

“Almost here,” came their guide’s voice, filtering back.

True to his word, after another few seconds the glow at the front expanded a bit; they pushed forward and realized the tunnel expanded into a large chamber. Well, not large, relative to anything normal. The three of them could fit in it while standing up, though, and that was large enough compared to the tunnel.

“Look at this,” said the unicorn, drawing their attention to a ladder at one side of the room. They looked at it, following the rungs up the side of the chamber. Come to think of it, it wasn’t so much a small chamber as almost a conical room; the top tapered up, up… and was that a speck of light at the top?

“Where are we?” asked Quartz.

“Inside a tree,” said the unicorn proudly. “About thirty feet from the bunker. That ladder goes up to maybe forty or fifty feet above ground level. Gives you a fantastic view of pretty much everything, including down into their lines.”

“Tree?” demanded Rock. “You’re exposed! Totally —”

“Nope,” he said with a grin. “It took us three or four different tries, but we managed to enchant the tree. It wasn’t dead, but obviously we had to hollow it out. Still, we can keep it alive for a few months. Which is where your gardeners come in.”

“Gardeners…” echoed Quartz.

“Important part is the magic, though. It’s live, but that doesn’t do much by itself. We worked out a series of protections through the bark. Anything hits it, it grounds down through the roots. And even then it’s mostly glancing hits, because who aims for the trees?”

“You,” started Quartz, “you what.”

“You can’t do that,” said Rock, blinking in utter confusion.

“Why not? We’ve had it like this for days now, and it just keeps going. Enchantment resets itself each time it’s hit, so we don’t need to worry about recharging it. Set it up that way myself.”

“Uncontrolled enchantments?” spat Quartz. “Wild magic? That’s —”

“That’s a problem for Canterlot,” said the unicorn sharply. “And right now they’re trying to kill me, so I don’t exactly have a problem with breaking their rules.”

The two visitors were silent for a moment. Then, in a perfect moment of simultaneous comprehension, something went click. Immediately they each started muttering to themselves, working out the implications.

“Rampant… could work. Need to train out patrols. Basic herbological….”

“…replication; yes, yes; maybe a Von Neumare process…”

“…redirect the basic charge…”

“…basic network of tree caches; wouldn’t take much to enchant them….”

The unicorn let them stew for a few moments before clearing his throat gently.

“Anything strong enough to take out the tree also takes out the network connection,” he said. “It’s a perfect self-contained unit.”

“It is,” agreed Rock. “We’ll have to work out the details, but….” He smiled. “I think we can work with this.”

“I know we can,” said Quartz, eagerly. “Can… can I take a look?”

“Go for it,” said the unicorn, gesturing at the ladder. “Keep low, though.”

“Right,” she said, springing at the rungs. They creaked slightly but carried her up nevertheless. In a few moments she was in the trunk; a few more and she was peering out a knot towards the Canterlot lines. She could see into their first three trenches, see the artillery emplacements just over a frozen knoll, see the command tents off in the distance near Appleloosa.

“This is incredible.”

“It is, isn’t it?” offered the unicorn. “They’ve got to send up pegasi to get intel. We just have to use the trees.”

Rock shook his head, marveling that this frontline unicorn had managed to do something they couldn’t: figure out a way to tip the scales in their favor. Numerically they were outnumbered three to one; he was no tactician but that much was obvious. Breaking the rules, though, was a different thing entirely. Well, it seemed obvious now, but the rules seemed so sensible. Runaway enchantments were a unicorn’s worst nightmare, sometimes all too literally. If it was either that or death, though….

He smiled.

“This changes everything.”