In the Company of Night

by Mitch H

The Consequences Of Poking The Bear, or, The Bear-Trap

SBMS013

I could hear the Lieutenant cussing across the square as we landed. I jumped from our chariot and ran for the centre of the Company clustering in the early morning light. They were in a fairly tight grouping on the east side of an empty market square, and I found my patients easily enough, still packed into the chariot frames we had loaded them into. I waved my orderlies forward as I looked over the three of them. The one I expected to live was stable; Updraft and the other had passed on at some point during the retreat. I now understood the Lieutenant's loss of composure. She and Updraft were old cronies, they had been recruited together during the long Eastmaark contract, on the world before Openwater Bay and Crossroads. Updraft had never gotten further in the Company than corporal, but she and the Lieutenant had continued their friendship despite the differences brought by the Lieutenant's drive and ambition. And I had just killed that friend. I was in the soup but good.

I looked up as I directed my surviving patient indoors inside the neighboring tavern on the square, eyeing the gathering clouds blowing in from the west. Red sky at morning, sailors take warning… The Lieutenant stomped past my place in the market square like a bombardment walking its fire towards a doomed fortress. The rushing clouds brought a cold wind under their skirts, and I was chilled as I watched her consult with the surviving non-coms in front of the charioteers.

"If that damn…" she paused, gathering her dignity, and started again. "Tell him he's the liaison to the locals, and to see if he can keep them from getting over-run by the rebel counterstroke. We have business in Rennet, and someone has to hold the locals' hooves on this," she said to the sergeants, and turned away to the chariots, leading a contingent of the strike force still on the ground to the vehicles, and waved them forward. Long Haul packed the Lieutenant and the remainder of the assault force on the chariots, and the weary charioteers hauled them off without any further instruction. She had not actually said anything directly *to* me, and I was left exchanging uneasy glances with Chestnut Shell, the ranking non-com among the remaining brethren.

"So, " I said to Chestnut Shell, who was not in my line of command, or vice versa, "The Lieutenant seems to have left me in charge, for what that's worth."

He nodded without any sign of regret, and hoofed in the direction of an approaching officer who was neither the enemy nor part of the Company. Ah, leadership, and the residue of command.

"Greetings, your eminence, and good morning to you. Do you think the harvest will begin today, or is it to be rain and hail?" I essayed to the lieutenant, small ell, who marched up to us like she had never left the parade-ground even to piss, not since she had been pinned by her betters on escape from whatever equivalent institution passed for an officers' academy in these benighted parts.

"Ah, just a moment, please, I have forgotten something necessary which cannot wait on pleasantries." I turned to Chestnut Shell, waved in the direction of the distant smoking customs post up the road, and issued quick whispered orders to secure the edge of town around the road, find out what local defenses were in place, and if they were in as poor a shape as I suspected, put the brethren in a scratch ambush posture just inside the town where we could dismantle any reaction force or vanguard.

"My pardon, we may have issued accidental invitations to guests whose imminent arrival might cause our conversation to be disrupted if I had not ordered proper preparations. Sawbones, at your service, physician and Annalist of the Black Company, in the recent service of the Bride of Tambelon," I wittered in affected aristocratic tones at the fuming lieutenant, whom I was desperately hoping was actually an officer in the imperial army, or at least a vassal of someone answering to someone that answered to the Bride. I knew less about the province we had inadvertently invaded than I ought to have, since we were operating in neighboring Rennet.

"Who? What's a Black Company?" She eyed my bloodied cloak, and the mares-head badge of the Company that pinned it closed.

"Mercenaries, private military contractors, a Company in the grand old manner. One of your empress's legates hired us from off-world to help your superiors deal with certain problematic traitorous risings while your military dealt with larger concerns. Specifically, we're doing something about the fact that your neighbors in Rennet aren't answering the Bride's mail, and are taxing the traffic on the Bride's Roads." I was keeping one ear pointed in the direction of the ponies I had dispatched to the edge of town, hoping to not hear any sort of commotion, but expecting it nonetheless.

"Yes," she said with some irony, her own ears flattening in the first break from military decorum I had seen from her yet, "I am aware of the local outbreak of the White Rose in Rennet. We had the remnants of the first army sent to suppress the rebellion come streaming through here last spring. Well, the donkey and earth pony remnants, I'm told the caribou regiments mutinied en masse. A large force, your Company? We've been mostly observing the roads leading out of Rennet, trying to avoid provoking the White Rose, we can't possibly handle them if they decide to raid us again."

"Well, we've gone and poked the bear for you, so you'd best be prepared anyways. Speaking of preparations, what do you have on hand to handle, say, a company of caribou dragoons with their blood up? Possibly reinforced, possibly an entire battalion. Not exactly sure how big the reaction force tasked to this road's excise barricade might be, our scouts probably have numbers, but they left with my superior officer without briefing me. An unfortunate oversight, but there we are," I ended, lamely. The Lieutenant really ought to have made better arrangements…

"Reaction force? Provocation? What have you done?" She leaped forward, and grabbed me by my cloak, pulling me in close to give me a close view of the second lieutenant I'd seen today lose their shit.

"Me, personally, nothing. The vexellation I was supporting, on the other hand, descended last night on the fortified customs post on your road just to the north-west of here, and destroyed both it and the reinforced company defending it. They might be upset about the rune-caster we had to kill in the course of that assertion of the Bride's sole traffic-taxation authority in this imperium. The force at the barricade should have been a total loss, but there were signs that their supports had been warned and were moving to contact when we evacuated the battle-space. Clouds of dust, signs of ponies on the march or possibly the gallop, you know, the whole drill. My people are preparing a reception if the reaction force develops into a probe into this province. What's the name of this town, by the way? And while you're at it, you could introduce yourself. I can't keep thinking of you as Lieutenant Hey You."

"Corporal!" she yelled at an earth-pony non-com standing at ease by the tavern door nearby. "Call out the guard! All shifts, rally them to this square! Then send a runner to alert the militia captain!"

"And you – you've brought destruction to my doorstep! It won't matter what name this town has if the caribou *burn it to the ground*! They destroyed a hamlet a half-klick to the southeast earlier this summer for an offense much less serious than destroying one of their excise posts!" She almost started hyperventilating in a panic as her subordinate galloped off to collect her troops, such as they might be. And I still didn't have a name for my local officer or her allegedly-doomed town.

"Hey You! Numbers! Names! What do I have to work with? Focus on now, and worry about later when there is a later. Start with your troops. How many trained? You mentioned militia? Are *you* militia, or are you regular? This'guard', are they regulars?"

I did my best to get her on task, and continued the rapid-fire interrogation, wishing for a moment for the Crow and my medicated bottle of doped whiskey. But I couldn't work with a lieutenant stoned out of her mind, any more than I could with a panicky one. But walking her through these questions awakened her dormant training, got her on task, and between the two of us, we worked out what resources we had, and how to slot them into what defenses they had on hand. She led her guard to the edge of town. They were a sort of glorified militia, younglings recruited into "active duty" and maintaining the facilities for the general militia in the town – Pythia's Fell, btw, finally a name! – when that organization was called to arms. Most of the general militia was out of our means for contact, and it might take a week to call up the local regiment from their civilian business in the hamlets and farms surrounding the Fell.

What we had to work with was the hoof-full of Company sections the Lieutenant had left in my care, and a roughly equal set of town guards in sketchy barding and cheap spears. Looking them over, I knew what I was looking at – bait! I posted them inside the town, in plain sight from the road as it entered Pythia's Fell, but well away from the edge of town, leaving a number of tactically effective alleyways for our shadows to lurk. If the enemy approached, they'd set eyes on those shaky recruits, and charge like a band of nomadic savages. I hoped. The sections of Company veterans – and by this point, even the scattering of new donkey brethren were veteran by the standards of the locals – were concealed around the expected axis of enemy advance in those useful alleyways, out of sight.

I went through the brethren, looking for any other force-multiplier we could use to shock the enemy, get them to panic and flee if we could. We were light on magical power, even the subtle sort of glamour that might have a psychological effect, the sort of thing that Otonashi specialized in. My eyes fell on the mark of one of the unicorn bowmares, named… Zero Phase? It half-peeked out from under her barding, but I seemed to remember it was something illusion-based. Not strong enough for her to be called to the warlocks' section, but something.
I pulled aside Zero Phase, and tried to work up something that might bite in the full light of day. Or, I thought, looking up at the lowering clouds heavy with portent, half-light. We had an idea, and were working on it when I saw the reaction of the ponies in the local guard to something out of sight down the road from us. The enemy was approaching.

Zero Phase started her casting, weaving a shell of darkness around my cloaked self, playing to my dark coloration and exotic looks. I picked up my lance, and eyed the ponies on either side in their proper barding, and my own breast unprotected by anything other than my Company badge and my own hide, and gestured to my left at Zero Phase, demonstrating how I wanted the illusion off-centre, so that anything flung at our creation did *not* fly true and straight right through my ribcage. And maybe a pony's-height taller than the top of my hood? Get them to waste their projectiles on empty air, and not fired into the mass of our brethren, that was the idea.

The enemy was much more cautious than I had hoped, advancing at a slow walk towards the anxious locals' spear-line. Several platoons at least of well-armed and barded caribou entered the kill-zone, and slowly marched on my bait, until they stopped and formed in the roadbed, a disciplined pike-hedgehog which grew as further platoons marched up to the forming phalanx. It was bowel-loosening even to my veteran eyes, and I wasn't standing in front of that bristling hedge of pikes-heads waiting to be mown down like the ripe corn awaiting the scythe-blade.

Perfect, their formation would be entirely flanked by our ambush. They outnumbered us heavily, but we had their rear, and they had been foolish enough to form a phalanx in the tight quarters of a town. They were fucked, they just didn't know it yet. A caribou officer in the rear of the formation barked a series of brief commands, ordering the pike-push, which was our cue. I waved Zero Phase's apparition's arm far above my head, giving my own and only command.

And then we fucked them.

Nothing is more terrifying to a trained force of ponies in a tight formation like a pike phalanx than to be unexpectedly and suddenly flanked. The pikes make the formation deadly and unstoppable from the front of the formation, unless you have some sort of magical powerhouse or a hell of a lot of high explosives. It'll tear right through shield walls, spear lines, some light fortifications like barricades, and most shield choruses. But the interlocking files of pike which make the formation resilient and provide the mass which produces such great momentum, means that it has a long turning radius, and in fact, has to turn in a single body. It is as if the ponies of the phalanx become an eight-hundred-legged monster which couldn't simply double back on itself; a stiff-limbed and awkward great beast with an exposed flank.

An exposed flank which we rogered but good. We didn't have the ponies to generate much of an arrowstorm, but what we could get in the air, every dart found its target, and the lancers and swordsponies charged into the mostly unprotected rear of the enemy, only the officer with his halberd turning to meet the unexpected charge. He went down with a ruined face as Chestnut Shell broke a lance off in him, and the caribou rear disintegrated in a spray of blood and viscera. The confusion spread through their formation like a wave of dismay and chaos, and I loomed up over the chaos like a dark cresting wave of shadow. Zero Phase's creation wasn't really a masterwork, in fact it was falling apart even as I directed it over the slaughter, but even the failure was unsettling, and I like to think it played its part in turning surprise into panic, and panic into utter rout.

The roar of battle was being drowned out by terrified screaming, and the roadway was a tumult of wide-eyed terror between the few brethren of the Company intent on our bloody business, and the ponies of the local guard, who were cautiously pushing forward against the confused front of the collapsing phalanx. They were right to be cautious, as the majority of the caribou were still locked into their forward files, and could do serious damage to the spearponies in their front if the rebel were feeling bold and fearless. With their fellows being dismembered behind them, and some dark magic shadow cutting off the light over their exposed heads, they were most certainly no longer in a bold and fearless mindset, but if they had been given targets right under their muzzles, something to strike out at, they might have been dangerous in their distress.

It was at this point that the lieutenant of the guard proved that her head was of more utility than simply keeping her helm from chafing her crest, and started yelling terms of quarter, promising prisoners protection from "the demon and her spawn". She had a set of lungs on her, and the offers pierced the battle-chaos like an aria drifting over a mightily laboring tartarus-orchestra in full swing. The pike-caribou of the fore, who might have simply overrun her thin line and broken out of the trap by powering through it - fearful of whatever hellish miasma floated overhead, and encouraged by my brethren's contrapuntal, theatrical howls and moans, playing up the lieutenant's theme from across the battle - began dropping their pikestaffs on the roadway.

A surrender once started is difficult to stop even with intact command structure, and we had cut down their officers and sergeants in the rear of their files in the first charge. Likewise, it is difficult to stop a slaughter once you've committed to it, but our own small numbers meant that we had mostly blown our wind by the time the lieutenant called the surrender, and couldn't have butchered the surrendering enemy even if we wanted to. Which, I have to be honest, some of our brethren definitely would have done, if we had the numbers and the wind for it.
And if we were on our own, without allies, we might have done it anyways once we'd gotten our second winds. The Company didn't have the facilities, the numbers, or the time to deal with prisoners of war in any number, and we weren't taking them at that stage of the campaign. But the locals were in their element, had the facilities, had the mind-set to think of taking prisoners, and somewhere to put them where they wouldn't simply carve their way back out again once the captives regained their nerve. Even if those captives were the remnants of a battalion, less the detached company destroyed at the customs post the night before, and the casualties laying all over the roadbed just inside Pythia's Fell. Our trap had succeeded beyond anything we had any right to expect.

The civilian population, which had stayed indoors that bloody morning, came out as the battle ended, and aided their guard in rounding up their prisoners as the storm broke overhead. I and my brethren retired to the edge of town, and kept an eye on the road back into Rennet as waves of cold rain washed across the countryside and into the town's gutters and eaves. The gutters ran red with caribou blood, but few of our number were even slightly wounded in the fight. It was one of the most one-sided affairs I had ever participated in, and for once my services were not needed. Well, Hyssop had gotten stuck in with the rest of them, and had popped her stitches, which gave me something to do with my time. I sat in the tavern later, cleaning the newly-opened head-wound and re-stitching her, and keeping an eye on the burned jenny, whose Company-name was Free Hilt. It looked increasingly like she'd survive her burns, and I was basking in the dual pride of professional success and unexpected military prowess.

That was where the oracle found me and proceeded to pull the heavens down around my ears.

Author's Note:

Hoosh. This one didn't want to see the world, I had to re-work it three times before it was anything. Oh, well, at least I have something like a plot stirring in the depths. Everything up to this point has been prelude, whatever my protagonist thinks of matters. No matter how educated and curious he is, he really doesn't know much of the worlds around him.

Comments

[Arkonfleight]

And then we fucked them.

Ah, the enlisted.
I love this so far. Ponies and horrible pragmatic muck go together like dark chocolate and capsaicin.