The surveillance enchantment hadn’t paid off as handsomely as they had hoped, at least, not yet. It turned out that crooked carriage repairponies did not, after all, plot villainously in earshot of the front gate of the warehouse they stored their stolen merchandise. Or, at least, they didn't do it consistently enough to immediately provide unambiguous, actionable intelligence.

Likewise, the captured Sergeant Longshanks was a wasting and limited asset, and Gleaming Shield had ordered him turned over to the Provost Marshal's ponies as soon as was practicable. They would not be hoofing him, alive or otherwise, over to Chop Shop and her villains for dissection or submersion in the nearest filthy cistern. He disappeared into the military police's dungeons, to be drained dry by actual interrogation specialists.

No, what actually provided Gilda, Gleaming Shield, and Corporal Gustav's strike-force with new and usable intelligence turned out to be Rarity's friends in the guild-halls, who were eager and willing to report criminal activity in their districts. The tip in question had been delivered by an enthusiastic informant-unionist, garnished by a great deal of fulmination on the subject of the disloyal and rebellious nature of this particular gang of road agents.

Said informant-unionist rode along as a guide for the lieutenant and her usual gang of well-armed Territorials hidden inside of their special ambush-carriage driving through the miserable slush of a Trottingham winter morning. Gilda and Gustav trailed behind with the bulk of their force as usual, slow-marching patrol-style through a snowy mix of sleet and rain. It wasn't quite cold enough for the snow and the sleet to stick, and the grey precipitation was subsiding when they heard it, that outburst of slugger fire that was the first clue that this latest raid had hit the jackpot.

And the jackpot was firing back.

The explosive rattle of multiple slug-throwers firing so closely together it almost qualified as 'volley fire' sent ice water into Gilda's veins to match the ice rimming the cobblestones underpaw. She and the rest of the reaction force broke from their careful walk, picking across the slick streets, into a half-flight gallop, rushing to catch up to their comrades under fire.

Grant and another ranker trampled the distracted, chilled hijacker lookouts, and Gilda, Corporal Gustav, and the others left them struggling in the slush as they darted through the drying air in a rush to get to their forward element before the bait-carriage was run over.

Or just shot to pieces. That was a lot of slugger fire.

When Gilda came into view of the ambush, a dozen feet above the slick cobblestones and moving at three times dry-weather ground-gallop speed, she could see the rapid flickering of a magenta dome ahead of her. Each time a lead slug struck the lieutenant's shield, it flared, flashed, and shattered like ice before refreezing as it fell.

It went through this terrifying freeze cycle two and a half times in the wingbeats it took for Gilda to cross that soggy, freezing ocean of air. She wanted desperately to look for that shieldwall to come back up one more time, but she was on the shooters, and the backs of their heads were more important…

She thought afterwards that a set of throwing knives and an air-lance couldn't have been nearly equal to something as newfangled and horribly long-ranged as a crowd of griffons firing state of the art slug-throwers, but the shooters had hyperfocused on the unicorn holding her shield-dome over the carriage, and weren't watching their rear, were putting ill-advised trust in their lookouts. They paid terribly for their misplaced trust.

Griffons went down left and right, sliding in the miserable slush, sluggers flying and blood splattering. A lot of griffons went down, but there were significantly more than a lot of griffons in that mob. If they had been trained, it might have been bad. If their powder was drier, it might have been a catastrophe. Gilda blessed the miserable weather, and almost prayed in thanksgiving when Corporal Gustav and the others flew to her support. The chilly, slushy chaos turned into a little less of a fair fight.

No soldier ever wants to fight a fair fight. Fair fights are for drunks, boxers, and civilians.

Sluggers proved to make for rather inferior clubs in close quarter fighting, and once there was more than just Gilda in the fight, things went quickly their way. But not before a lucky thug with a loaded slugger and dry powder put a round into Corporal Gustav's back.

Gilda lost her temper a bit after that. They didn't take many prisoners from that ambush, and those they did, would go straight into the surgical teams' appendages.

Those that survived the icy race-course ride back to the hospital.

It was a shame so many died, and that the rest weren't in condition to be interrogated immediately. They'd had a lot of slug-throwers. Somegriff probably knew where they got them.

If Gilda was lucky, it was one of the survivors under anesthesia, and in the careful paws of Dr. Bones. Or the Abyssinian the nurses called Trapper Tom. Or even that weirdo Hawk Eye.

Four winds help them all if it was the bird being operated on by Burn Salve.

Gleaming Shield wasn't actually in the queue for the surgeries. She had gotten through the ambush without any exterior wounds, just a grossly overstrained horn and a bit of intermittent unconsciousness. She'd kept all of her griffons intact, and unperforated - even the idiot unionist who'd led them into far more trouble than she'd prepared them for, or, to judge from her cursing and endless apologizing afterwards, expected herself.

Gilda had gotten her unicorn up the stairs to her garret in the attic, and left a ranker named Gil to keep an eye on the unconscious lieutenant. Gleaming Shield would be fine, she just needed to sleep off her magical overexertion. Or so a horned nurse had assured Gilda in the triage station.

Gleaming Shield would be fine. Unlike Gilda. The lieutenant was her responsibility, and she'd nearly been beaten flat by massed slugger fire. Corporal Gustav was her responsibility, and he'd gotten shot.

The corporal was always insistent that he was Gilda's superior, and not vice versa, but that wasn't how it felt when that slug had blown a hole in him right in front of her, and left far too much of his blood on the half-frozen cobblestones of Halfpenny Road. When she'd gotten them all back home, Gilda had made sure that Gustav was the first under Bones' knife. Everypony in the 93/1st insisted he was their best meatball surgeon, whatever Hawk Eye and her drinking buddy said.

She looked out the window at the house across the way that held Gump and his pony buddy in that second-floor improvised ward. They'd had no casualties before now, not even in the Crab Bucket, not in Gilda's time with the Fifth Griffish Territoral. Now they'd had two and a half, and all of them from her teams.

She burst through the front door of the building housing the surgical ward, and hurried down the street. Maybe Gene had something to report from Gleaming Shield's long-distance surveillance rig. Gilda kicked furiously through the puddles that had gathered between the cobblestones in Tinker's Alley. Somehow the sleet that had befouled Halfpenny Road had missed the 'hospital', where the city was a couple degrees warmer, and the weather had been simply miserable rather than outright filthy.

She paused as she passed the two muck-stained ambulances they'd hauled back from the site of the ambush. The profligate bastards had been using them as barricades, tipped on their sides and weighed down with barrels full of rocks. The Territorials had flipped them back on their wheels,and tossed the wounded and the sluggers into them and hauled them home through the puddles and the slush. The unionist was sitting on the back of one of them, looking half-frozen and woeful.

Gilda didn't have time for that griffon's miserable guilt, and stalked past her, ignoring her tears.

They hadn't even found the hijackers' lair. The Territorials were only able to take what was left abandoned and half-ruined on the field of battle. Sirocco only knew what they had squirreled away in some warehouse or factory-shop somewhere deeper in the ward!

Gilda looked up at the observation post on top of the rowhouse across the way. They needed somepony to give orders.

"Hey, Gerald!" she shouted up at the bundled-up griffon on the roof. "Where's Falcon?"

"Hain't seen 'im in days, lance corporal!" the old bird shouted down from his rooftop perch. "Maybe last Friday?"

"Days! Who's been overseeing you lot?"

"We oversee ourselves, we do, lance corporal! The corporals know what they's doing, they do."

"Then where's a corporal?"

"Why, 'ave you misplaced yours, lance corporal?"

"Don't make me come up there and wing-slap you, private!"

"Ha! You an' what army!"

Gilda leapt off the cold cobblestones, and got in the disrespectful bird's beak.

"Whoa! Was only funnin' lance corporal. W- w- izzat blood?"

"Yes. Yes it is. And I will see your weapon, now. Present arms for inspection, the lot of you!"

Gilda distracted herself from her anxiety with a display of authority.

Even if it was mostly imaginary. Nogriff claimed she didn't have the right. Especially after she loomed over them.

When had they all gotten so small?

Eventually Gilda found who was in charge of their griffonshit outfit. Corporal Gabrielle was astonished to be informed that with Gustav out of commission, she was senior noncom, and as there weren't any officers on the premises…

They found Captain Falcon passed-out drunk in a closet next to the Fens, to which a sleepy nurse - who had been getting some rest in that den of iniquity before her night shift - had guided them.

"How often has this been happening, do you know?" Gilda asked Corporal Gabrielle, who looked less surprised than resigned.

"About five minutes after 'e found out about the still they have over there in those officer quarters, Gilda." The corporal sighed. "'e's always like this around alcohol. It's my fault, we should have sent 'im with that load of prisoners instead of Gold Brick. 'e wouldn't have come back, either, but at least 'e might have been useful with the battalion. If I didn't know 'e had a wife and kits back home, I'd say let 'im drink himself to death."

"Bah. They all have wives and foals back home. Seems to be the default setting for ponies. I guess this makes it a griffon affair until my officer sleeps off her magic-burn."

"Is it bad?"

"Could be worse. She could be dead, or shot in the back, like Gustav."

"What in Tartarus were all three of you doing out there in this filth by your lonesome!" snapped the older hen.

"We weren't by our lonesome. But they believed in leading from the front, I guess."

"Damned fools. Where did they get such a damn foolish idea? Celestia preserve us from brave officers."

"You prefer the drunkards?"

"He ain't doin' any damage 'ere, is 'e?"

"Try saying that when the rebels come rolling over our posts because no officer's been keeping up standards."

"Feh! The officers wave their sticks an' their 'orns, we do the keeping up of standards."

"If you say so, Acting Sergeant."

"Oh, 'ades, no, don't you pull that on me!"

"Somebody got to take the minotaur by the horns until we have at least one conscious officer."

"Buggerit. Let me know when yours is foreconscious?"

"Meh, I had something I wanted to… yeah, no, you're right. Priorities."

Gilda went to look in on her battered officer. The rest could wait until there was an officer to blame for whatever went wrong next.

Of course that was when the turul princess flew down out of the sun in a mood. Gilda had almost gotten to the lieutenant's attic and was talking to Gil when that batpony pest Ping came scrabbling through the front door of their rowhouse.

"Griffon for you, lance corporal! Also, huge honkin' bird of prey, but the griffon's the one who's yelling for you!"

"Huge honking-" Gilda looked out the cheap clear-plastic screen that passed for windows here in the ghettos. It was a little blurry and rain-streaked, but that was obviously a dampened Lady George perched delicately on a rowhouse roof that maybe wasn't built to hold a couple tons of great bird. "Gah! Bob and Gertie!"

Gilda ran out into the street, and for the third time that day, threw herself skyward off of a cobblestone street surface. It was almost like she was a fully functioning griffon adult, she thought sardonically, shivering a bit.

"Hello, 'Bob'," Gilda said with a false cheerfulness which she hoped to elicit an equal exchange. "Hello, there, 'Gertie', have you been a good roc for the griffs back in barracks?"

"GILDA! I'm hungry, damnit! And cold! They won't let me go fishing in the harbor! I can't get any exercise anymore! And nogriff will tell me anything about the status of my investments and my goods. I'm becoming quite wroth with your Lieutenant Shield!"

"That's terrible, 'Bob'. Can you get 'Gertie' to go down into the street and perch down there? This house isn't built to hold her."

"Oh, fine, right, here." The big fussy bird jumped down into the street, the released rowhouse groaning a bit as it decompressed from the sudden removal of a great deal of weight. Lady George came to rest on the cobblestones below, right in the middle of a puddle, looked down in disgust, and then looked up like she'd remembered something.

"Oh, right, I brought something. There was a couple letters for your lieutenant. Also the rest of these griffons, here, but the important one's one top." The turul tipped a postal bag out of her crown, and flung it at Gilda. Where the hijackers with their slug-throwers hadn't come close to knocking her out of the sky, the turul accomplished with the weekly mail.

Gilda bounced off of the half-timbering of the rowhouse, and barely got her wings back under control before she splashed into the cobblestone-lined puddle below.

"Oh, oops, sorry. I keep forgetting you're not bigger than you look."

"No, that's fine. They make us tough in old Stoney." Gilda set down next to the mailbag on a dry patch of street, and looked into it.

Package of letters for her lieutenant, bunch of nonsense for the rankers. She snorted, and grabbed Gleaming Shield's bundle.

Gilda looked up at the post on the roof of Gleaming Shield's rowhouse, where three curious bundled-up Territorials were looking down at the free entertainment.

"Greyson, get down here and get this mail distributed. MAIL CALL!"

Gilda got up and went into their rowhouse. If Gleaming Shield couldn't be bothered to be conscious, her bat-hen could read her correspondence for her.

"Where is the lieutenant, anyways?" boomed Lady George outside in her 'Bob' voice as Gilda climbed the stairs. When she got to the attic, she stuck her beak out of the roof-hatch.

"Asleep, and overexerted, if you'd kindly be quiet, 'Bob'. Officers trying to sleep, here."

"Officer no longer sleeping," groaned Gleaming Shield from behind Gilda. Gilda looked over her shoulder at her lieutenant, who looked as hungover as Blue Falcon no doubt would be, if that souse ever would stop drinking. "Hello, Bob. How is Gertie today?"

Gilda closed her eyes, somehow sad and irate at the same time. "Lieutenant ma'am, you should check your left withers-pocket."

"What? Oh, fine," the lieutenant said, pushing aside her blankets and leaning out of her cot and groping for her jacket, hung over the chair beside the desk-crate. She pulled the note-paper they had written up together, a necessary reminder of Lady George's circumstances to the decidedly not regal unicorn, who was prone to forget the existence of the turul. This wasn't the first time the unicorn had forgotten her charge and her obligations to the great bird. That accursed crown… "Ah. I see. Yes, that makes much more sense. Sorry about that, 'Bob'. How have you been recently?"

"Fine, Lieutenant Shield. I brought a reminder for you," said Lady George from outside of the building, not even bothering with her 'Bob' voice anymore, simply shouting through the thin wall.

"Mail call, lieutenant ma'am," Gilda said helpfully, grateful to see the unicorn shaking off her horn-fatigue and mental fuzziness with her more usual alacrity. The bat-hen handed her officer the bundle of letters

Gleaming Shield dragged herself out of bed, and sat wearily at her desk-crate, looking through her letters, muttering to herself. "Hmm, hmm, a-ha!"

"And?" asked Gilda, impatiently. Lady George looked in the roof-hatch with one eye, as close as she could get to being in the attic.

"It never rains but it pours," sighed Gleaming Shield.

"In Trottingham, it never rains but it rains sleet," muttered Gilda under her breath.

"What was that?" the lieutenant said, turning around. "We've got company coming. Lots of it. Great time for visitors, don't you think? Just perfect. Gilda!"

"Yes, lieutenant ma'am?"

"We still have those slug-throwers in the armory?" The armory was a rack of spears and bladed weapons in the shack behind the shelter that 2nd Company's sole assistant armorer bunked down in, when he wasn't doing post duty as a ranker. The three sluggers lived in a crate under Armorer Gertrude's bunk. They barely had any of the black powder the sluggers used at all.

"Such as they are, lieutenant ma'am. Also, we collected a bit more than ten functional weapons from the field. Plus a lot of busted tools, and whatever powder and shot the old birds were able to strip off of the dead. Maybe more in the effects of the prisoners and wounded."

"Collect everything we have that can shoot, and everything we can shoot with. We have VIPs coming, and I'll be damned if I won't have a way to protect them against what happened today."

"Yes, lieutenant ma'am."

Author's Notes:

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