• Published 8th Oct 2018
  • 7,906 Views, 1,005 Comments

Good Trooper Gilda - Mitch H



Gilda just wanted to find herself. Instead, she found herself a soldier's life.

  • ...
10
 1,005
 7,906

A Scrimmage In A Back Alley

Gilda sat beside Gwaine on the buckboard, rolling slightly as she read the weekly papers and he drove their covered heavy cart down the Boulevard of the Corvids. A block and a half ahead of them, the cobblestones rang with the hoofsteps of hundreds of steel-shod ponies marching in formation, part of a pony regiment moving stiffly through that bitter winter air, in the general direction of Fort Gharne.

Two of Gilda's rankers were in the traces pulling the cart; three more heavy carts followed behind, all bumping over the chilly cobblestones. It wasn't snowing, but it was still damnably cold, and the packed snow got stuck between the paving stones, lurking to heave the occasional stone up out of the street and rattle an unwary's rider's beak.

Gilda had her wings half-extended, in a mostly futile attempt to keep her balance in her seat while she read her papers. There weren't really dailies published anymore in the Griffish Isles due to shortages and distribution issues, and there was only two weeklies that published outside of Trottingham, neither of them in the rebel sympathizing districts of the main island. The closest thing to a rebel sheet was a four-pager called the Beak and Bone, and it wasn't so much a disloyal paper as one that was unpredictable and caustic. Gilda had heard that they'd been raided numerous times, but had heard little about the printer herself.

The papers were full of the doings of the princess, all the Trottingham ones, at least. The news didn't seem to have reached the Blue Skye or the Dark Roost Beacon as of the last printings. If this was a secret visit, Gilda couldn't imagine what a well-publicized one might look like.

Three of the papers were basically pony society journals, and unless you cared to know which impoverished peer or peer's daughter was chasing which factory-owner's heiress, you weren't likely to get much of interest out of reading those, but occasionally they had obituaries of notables. Or so Gilda had been told, she never was able to pick the notables out of the usual array of decrepit widows and ancient, irrelevant relics. She just didn't know Trottingham well enough to tell who was a mover and a shaker, and who was just shaking in a corner, waiting for the killing to end.

The two griffish weeklies were more interesting, and of those, the Beak and Bone was the most interesting. The griffon who wrote it - and it almost certainly was just one hen, or else they'd managed to get every single contributor to write in the same eccentric style - was no fan of the princesses, but in previous numbers they'd shown a level of hatred for the rebels that put cats' proverbial hatred for water into the shade. Perhaps it was just that one of the princesses was in town and available for abuse, so the sins of the insurrection were left for later, so that the Beak could feast upon this week's lunch special. An opportunity target, of sorts. But whoever they were, they were surprisingly well-informed about Mi Dolente Cadenza's deportment and couture. Were they a griffon in one of the battalions?

Oh, this was interesting. Where had Gilda heard this particular turn of phrase, 'pink watering-can'? The prince-major. It couldn't be… could it?

Gwaine turned their cart off of the main drag, and into one of the neighborhood access roads, leaving the distant companies of ponies to continue their shivering march towards the city wall and the fortifications around the harbor. Gilda loudly commented on each road they turned onto, each time they made a turn, and Gwaine rolled his eyes at each announcement. No one else said anything, and the heavy canvas covering the cargo bed didn't ripple in reply, either.

There was a mixed group of ponies and griffons waiting for them in a courtyard off of an alley running parallel to Threepenny Road. This was boss country, and the guild militias didn't have any griffons patrolling these alleys and streets. Gilda vaguely recognized the greasy-maned unicorn as the one from Chop Shop's garage. No sign of Chop Shop herself.

"This 'ere the merchandise?" asked the unicorn stallion.

"Damn, colt, I don't know, maybe. We were taking these down to Tinker's Alley to pre-position for the evacuation of the doctors and nurses. I guess they won't be getting their carts, if your boys are gonna 'hijack' 'em. Where's Chop Shop?" Gilda said.

"Oi don't see your officer, either, 'en," the criminal pony replied.

"Ma'am was busy, sent me to make the exchange."

"So I 'ears, so I 'ears - alla the Territorials is supposed to be outside ov the walls to prance for the princess. Why're you birds 'ere with yer carts, if you're supposed to be out wif the rest of the Terries?"

"Well, you know they can spare somegriff like me and my boys. They prefer to not know what we're up to on the best of days, let alone a bastard cold day like today. At least this here coach-bench ain't as cold as freezing my feathers off out there in the open, with the damned Boreal blowing on 'em all. Where's Chop Shop?"

"So it turns out, the mum, she was busy too. Everypony's busy today, cept you and me. Busy days, ain't it? Even if it is cold as a 'og's 'ind tit."

"We're all busy. I got shit to do myself, can we make this happen before my own hind tits freeze?"

"Agreement was for carts an' the 'ead of Longshanks."

"What are you, stupid? I wasn't going to be carrying a horse head through the streets. There are patrols out here! We were driving right down the middle of the Corvids!"

"That's the thing, me 'en. You've been johnny out of sight for 'ow long now? We thought Longshanks maybe did for you and your fancy 'orse. Then we didn't 'ear from Longshanks either, and we didn't know what ta think."

Ponies and griffons with gonnes emerged from the shadows all around the griffons in their cart-traces and on their buckboards. Enough to make one hell of an ambush.

"And then? One of our ponies wif' the provosts, she sees Longshanks bein' hauled t' an iterrygations room in the guts of Gharne. We sees that, and we figgers you weren't serious about your business proposal. Till we got yer message. Chop Shop don't appreciate bein' taken for a ride." The unicorn stallion took out Gilda's signed note, throwing it in the alleyway mud underhoof.

"So g'bye, Corporal Gilda ov Griffonstone. We don't fancy yer type here. Light her oop, boys!"

Gilda kicked the buckboard twice.

Two things happened in rapid succession at this point. The distinctive oil-slick waver of the anti-gonne spell turned the world to rainbowed underwater shimmer, followed quickly by a series of sharp cracks as the armed gangsters did their best to shoot down Gilda and her rankers.

Lieutenant Slapshot's shield held, wobbling in that distinctive way that an anti-gonne shield under fire did as each bit of high-velocity lead was slowed and stopped mid-air. Gilda started breathing again, and she reached forward to pull the rip-cord releasing her rankers from their encumbering traces. Everygriff grabbed their ready-weapons, which for the two just set free of their traces were hidden under the cart's haul-pole, their bundles dropped loose by the same ripcord that had freed the griffons from of their harnesses.

Gilda and Gwaine grabbed their own gonnes out from under the buckboard. The Marezonian ponies in the cargo hold threw off their canvas covers, and rolled over the sides of the cart, waving their own pointy bits in every direction as they got their orientation in the sudden brightness of the sheltered space under the unicorn's magical dome. The other carts had all sprouted their own little magic domes, and the Territorials operating them were likewise shaking loose their restraints and retrieving their projectile weapons as their pony cargos dismounted under cover.

Gilda barked in outrage as the swifter-witted villains dropped their gonnes and scattered.

"ONE ROUND RAPID!" Gilda screamed, bringing her own gonne to bear on one of the dumbasses staring stupidly at the griffons who had failed to be properly shot down.

Her weapon misfired.

She looked down at her piece as the other griffons' gonnes barked and smoked at the would-be ambushers. Her gonne's priming pan had lost its black powder charge. Gilda cursed and scrabbled to re-fill her pan, and then snapped back to the scene, which was now in natural light as the Marezonian officers had let their shields drop so that the griffons could fire.

There was one horned pony still in view, running towards the passageway into Threepenny.

Gilda fired, and this time the gonne bucked in her talons. The pony went down with a red spray.

"GIDDY UP!" screamed Captain Big Bell, and that pegasus led the charge. A thunder of hooves heralded the armed stampede as the Marezonians gave chase.

In a matter of seconds, only the griffons were left with the abandoned carts, the clouds of gonne-smoke, and the bodies.

"OK," yelled Gilda. "Hens and toms, time to police the scene! Find the wounded! Gather the gonnes! Gwaine, Grant, reload and stand guard, I don't want any surprises!"

She walked over to the other side of the barricade, grabbing a polearm from one of the rankers looking stupidly at a dead pony lying in a heap in the muddy slush. She looked around the edge, ready for a stay-behind to try to take her head off.

Oh, look, another cart. Her lucky day.


"One round rapid?" Big Bell asked with a broad grin on her face. "Last time I heard, those gonnes only got one round in 'em without steppin' and fetchin' and playin' with rammy-rods and powder-horns."

Gilda looked up at the huge pegasus as she touched down in the alleyway. Captain Bell had been the first to return. There weren't many pegasi with the Marezonians, and the big pegasus's wings, however stubby and silly-looking, gave her a degree of mobility the earth ponies and unicorns that made up the bulk of that regiment couldn't match.

"We're using the manual of arms for bowponies. Longbowponies. Supposedly, they can get up to a dozen rounds off per minute. Same with unicorns and their horn-blasts. Doctrine calls for 'five rounds rapid', and as soon as I can get a gonne that can fire five rounds in a minute, you can be damn sure I'll be calling for that."

Gilda was standing over the pony she'd shot down, overseeing Gerrald as he cleaned the hideous wound on her victim's head. He'd never hold another gonne in his horn-magic again, poor bastard, but maybe he'd live out the day.

"And what kind of battle-cry is 'Giddy up', anyways?" Gilda said. Then she added, reluctantly, "Captain ma'am?"

"Aw, roadapples, seemed like the thing to say at the time. What shoulda I cried, 'Celestia Wills It'? 'Fer Harmony An' Equestria'?" The pegasus shrugged her wings, smiling amiably.

"'Charge' probably would have sufficed, captain ma'am," Gilda suggested. The Marezonians were not the most disciplined bunch Gilda had seen in her relatively short career in the military, but they didn't seem to get embarrassed about it.

"Anyhoo, we lassoed at least five runners," Captain Bell said. "The rest have either gone to ground, or maybe got picked up by the main body. We'll see what they come back with in about twenty minutes, they were still scrambling when I left."

"Any griffons, captain ma'am?" Gilda asked.

"Just the two I saw. It's the blue zone, the ponies that went to ground can't hide too long, can they?" Technically Big Bell should have been in charge of this part of the operation, but the big captain didn't know the ground or the situation, so everypony was deferring to the Territorial corporal. It made Gilda a little uneasy.

"Depends on how many bits they've been sloshing around in this neighborhood. They had to have made themselves pretty popular with the local beefers if Boss Gantry was willing to let them pull this horseshit on his turf."

"Is that what these griffons are, local troops of the neighborhood boss?"

"Well, it's nothing that organized, I think. I'm as much of an outsider to these alleys as you ponies are. We've got two wounded griffons in the carts already. Neither is Gantry. Let's see your captives."

When the Marezonian detail with the first batch of prisoners arrived, neither of the griffon runners were Gantry, either. Gilda didn't know the boss, but Gwaine was a local, and said he knew ol' Gantry from his civilian days.

"You see him before the ambush went shooty?" Gilda asked him.

"I dunno, Corporal. There was a griffon about the right age at the back besides the barricade, 'ad a 'at over ‘is eyes. Coulda been 'im, coulda been any ov a 'alf-dozen other codgers from the Threepenny."

"Well, nuts. That's a disappointment."

The road outside the alley entrance filled up with more and more ponies as the two companies that had proceeded Gilda's detachment returned with their own captures. They'd turned around at the sound of the gunfire, as arranged beforehand. The runners had run smack into a nice little screening force who had been told what to expect. The gangsters had been roped, tied, and hauled back to the ambush-site, trussed up like Boreas Day turkeys. After exchanging a few appreciative, admiring words with the Marezonian's heavily-made-up earth pony colonel Gilda turned to one of the trussed-up ponies sitting in the churned mud of the alley behind Threepenny Road.

"Well, no sign of Boss Gantry, and we know we weren't going to get Chop Shop herself. I guess we'll have to satisfy ourselves with you, Greasy. What's your name, anyways?" Gilda knew Sneaker's name, but the basis for future interrogation was to get the grif- the pony into the habit of answering his captors' questions.

"Ain't 'Greasy.'"

"Well, Greasy certainly suits you. Or maybe Muddy Arse. What do you think, Colonel Jubilee? Dungflank maybe?"

"Shucks, I think I'm not the pony to help ya with questionin' ponies, corporal! Y'all have fun, I gotta get my colts back in stable afore they freeze their ballsacks off. See ya, let us know next time you need beaters for another hunt, honey, my colts’ll bring you some quick hooves and strong backs to snap them coneys right up."

The bound unicorn and Gilda watched the red-maned officer sashay off with her ponies in tow, and Gilda wondered how a mare wearing that much armor could look so… well. She looked at the very much not sexy Captain Big Bell, and raised an enquiring eyebrow.

"What? Everypony loves the colonel. They say she might be the next governor."

"I didn't say anything, captain ma'am. Thank you all for your help and consideration."

"Ain't nothing. We're just tourists round these parts, getting Princess Celestia's grand tour of the east. War's how harmony teaches ponies geography, don'cha know?" The big captain looked down at their prisoner.

"Waddya gonna do with the greaseball, Corporal?" asked the pegasus.

"Turn him over to the MPs along with the rest. Let their prison hospital deal with the wounded, let their docs sew 'em up."

"This town shows a certain lack of deputies. Where's the law? The manuals say we're supposed to hand criminals over to the local authorities."

Gilda and Captain Bell turned to look at Gwaine.

"Boss Gantry is the local authorities, captain ma'am," said Gwaine, looking anxious to be talking to a pony who wasn't in Territorial colors.

"What! Whaddya mean he's the authorities?" the big beefy mare demanded.

"'E was Constable Gantry back when they was still constables. Neighborhoods where as the JPs survived, they's the bosses. Where th' rebels got 'em, the constables generally took over, those the rebels didn't knife, that is."

"Sound just like home," Gilda snarked. "Except nogriff claiming they were chosen by the Four Winds for the job on account of a great-great grandhen that sat on a golden shitter."

Big Bell laughed, and then shivered in the cold wind blowing through the alleyway.

"I don't know about you-all, but my feathers are turnin' blue. OK, colts, git up and go! Let's go find the barracks before the hinges freeze shut!"

The armored ponies passed out of the alley into the street outside, where they could form a column and move out. A bit of yelling and whooping, and then the Marezonian captain and her ponies were gone, too, and it was just Gilda and her griffons. And their prisoners.

"'Ow'd you know?"

Gilda looked down at the shivering unicorn tied up at her paws.

"How'd I know what?" Gilda asked. "That you were going to fuck us? You're criminals, of course you were going to fuck us. I just wish we'd gotten your griffon co-conspirator, that's all. He's already tied up, boys. But tie a bow on him for the MPs. He knows an awful lot about the contents of their prison in Gharne. Maybe he'll see his filly there. That'd be nice, wouldn't it, Sneaker?"

Gilda kicked the gangster, and nodded for Grant to drag him off to one of the guarded carts. She wondered if she'd see Boss Gantry at Lieutenant Colonel Pie's griffish city council. He seemed to have the instincts for politics. Never there when the gonnes started barking.

Author's Note:

Thanks for editing and pre-reading help to Shrink Laureate, Oliver, and the general Company.