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Good Trooper Gilda

by Mitch H

Chapter 16: Afternoon On The Firing Line

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"ARE YOU DWEEBS LOADED YET?" Gilda yelled at the top of her lungs.

"No, lance corporal! Gale's got some issue with this slug, we're going to have to shave it down."

"Put it aside," Gilda said in a milder tone, "and use another one. It's not lead we're short of!"

"Yes, lance corporal!" The two griffons pried the misshapen lump of lead out of the offending slug-thrower, and managed to get their next bullet into the barrel with only minimal hammering at it with the ram-rod. They had managed to break five ram-rods so far this morning, but since they had far more slug-throwers than powder and shot to put them to good use, it hadn't been a disaster up to now. The powder in that almost-jammed slugger was worth more to Gleaming Shield's test series than the slugger itself.

"Are we ready on the firing line now, you blue-daubed dweebs?" The griffons stood to the line drawn in the brown, stubby heather underpaw, their sluggers in their talons. They cried out in sequence, acknowledging their preparation. "LIEUTENANT MA'AM, WE'RE READY FOR TEST ROUND FIVE!"

"Ready!" came the reedy reply, distant across the clearing, emanating from a pile of sandbags in front of a wall of similar sandbags on the far side from the line of sluggers.

"PRIME!" The aiming point was a red stain on a sandbag in the wall behind and above the protective pile of sandbags under which her unicorn crouched. A mixed magenta-purple shield popped up over the pile of sandbags, turning the target-stain black as the shield obscured it.

"Take AIM!" The griffon rankers brought their slug-throwers to bear, and squinted down the steel tubes.

"FIRE!" The Territorials, unlike civilians, road agents, and thugs for hire, knew how to conduct volley fire, although the manual of arms was written for crossbow and longbow. Their fire was less the disjointed popping off that Gilda heard these days down in the city, but more a proper massed scream, like a metal plate being sheared sideways. It could have been better - the poor powder and the non-standardization of the sluggers meant that it wasn't really possible to fire in actual unison - but it was a respectable volley.

The clearing in the juniper grove filled once again with a cloud of grey-black smoke. Gilda was placed just far enough to the right of the firing line that her view of the shielded pile of sandbags wasn't initially obscured by the slugger-smoke, the shield glistening like oil in the grey afternoon light.

It stayed up! Only a little ripple, more like jellied ham repeatedly tapped by the edge of a spoon than the harbor with rocks thrown into it, or the ice-wall quivering of the original unicorn-magic shield-spell that had shattered so easily on the battlefield.

"Secure weapons! Moisten swabs! Fix swabs to ramrods! Clear barrels!" The books on artillery had been clear on this subject - the barrels had to be swabbed with dampened sponges after every round, or else they could foul and burst the gun, according to the old, deprecated muzzle-loading cannon manuals Gleaming Shield had gotten from the Royal Artillery.

They had to use the canonniers' manuals. There was no such thing as an Equestrian manual of arms for talon-held black powder weapons. They just weren't practical for pony hooves, not that anypony had shown interest in such advances in the past. As far as the pony military was concerned, ranged fire was for bowmares and unicorn magic, or bombardment by pegasi, or field artillery from the earth pony batteries.

"Oh, bugger!" came a cry out of the smoke over the firing line. Gilda could barely see all the way down the line. "Fire, lance corporal!"

"That's what the buckets are for, Gerald! Put it out before it spreads!" The heather was drier than Gustav's wit, and the primitive slug-throwers threw as many sparks as they did smoke and slugs. Their flint-and-steel triggering devices put sparks into the air as well as into the priming pans, and sprayed burning bits of black powder along with smoke and slugs down-range. Every other volley had sparked fires on the range. The heather under and in front of the firing line was now spotted with little charred spots, not that Gilda could see them at the moment.

"While Gerald and Gunter put out their fire, the rest of you break ranks and go collect the trenching shovels, my little dweebs and dweebettes! I don't know about you, but I'm getting tired of having these blasted weeds catch fire under my paws.

"Don't just stand there, hop to it!"

Gilda marched out onto the range, fairly confident that nogriff was about to pick up a slugger and fire another round while she was crossing their line. It was too damn much hassle to load the blasted things. In her opinion, crossbows were less of an annoyance. At least you couldn't set fire to your own cover with a crossbow.

She crossed around behind the sandbags, and found Gleaming Shield poking her horned head up over the sandbags, looking around to see where the slugs had ended up this time.

"Lieutenant ma'am, care to evaluate round five? It looked good from this side."

"Stress was about… the same, I think?" mused the lieutenant as she climbed over the top of her sandbag pit and started picking out the bits of hot lead smoking in the turf and from one sandbag that had been outside of the shield. "The elastic recoil definitely did the trick. Each slug isn't really all that energetic when you look at its force-profile. It's just - significant when you consider it in point vectors, that force in space. Spread the shock over a hoofs-length or three and it's nothing more than somepony jabbing with a spear. Or a bunch of someponies jabbing with spears. I think I can hold that continuously."

"Was the stress from the volley, or from just holding it? Won't be any use if the shooters don't put together a volley fire, and just keep plinking away at your shield."

"No, it's definitely the weight of the rounds impacting, not holding it by itself. That was true of my use in combat of the Mark I shield, but that spell was much less efficient, I think?"

"Maybe the next test should be timed fire? One second intervals?"

"Hey! I like that. Yes, we should do that. Wait, what are they doing out there?"

"Clearing the damn heather, I'm afraid we're going to get a backfire into the powder boxes if we don't clear the range better."

"Well, your judgment call. I'm going to go take a nap under the bushes. Wake me when you're ready."

"Yes, lieutenant ma'am."


The second round of timed fire was ongoing in the clearing out beyond the POW camps, when a herd of ponies in regimentals appeared trotting down the track from the main road. Gleaming Shield's liquid shield was holding steady now despite the steady bang! bang! bang! of the griffon rankers firing in sequence. Gilda didn't hear their hoofsteps for the clatter of the sluggerfire, and jerked in astonishment when a hoof tapped her on the flank right above her left rear pannier bags.

She tore her gaze away from her officer's multi-colored shield, to find said herd of officer-ponies and non-coms staring in consternation at the scene.

"HOLD LINE!" Gilda yelled, not taking her eyes from this new complication. The firing ceased, leaving the clearing suddenly, paradoxically silent.

"Can I help you gentle-ponies," Gilda asked, mildly.

"Oh, hey, girls!" came her officer's voice from behind the griffon, along with the clopping hoof-beats of a pony in a hurry. "Gilda, these are the ponies from the new Slug-thrower Study Group that was formed last week."

"Gonne Research Group," said the large purple pegasus in a captain's uniform.

"What the hay is a gonne, Big Bell?" asked a straw-colored earth pony wearing lieutenant tabs and a thoroughly non-regulation stetson hat. "Yew know everypony's callin' them sluggers on the streets. Just because yew found some silly name in those old Morari the Maneless journals…"

"They're clearly what she was writing about. It's proper Ponish it is, the way it ought to be! Gonnes!"

"Musketoons," said a pop-eyed earth pony with a slightly scorched mane wearing the hideous green and orange dyes of the Hayward Dragoons. "One of the designers in the labs has been experimenting with projectile-type weapons that fired incendiary grenades. Wanted to call them musketoons."

"Pfft, these only set things on fire by accident, Zippo. I still say it shoulda been Slugger Study Group," sniped the tall, scrawny unicorn lieutenant with… why did that pony have black grease painted under her eyes?

"ANYways," interrupted Gleaming Shield, "you guys should definitely check this out. I've got the anti-slugger shield working, I think! Gilda, how many rounds do we have left for a demonstration?"

"We're running short of powder. I'd guess less than forty rounds total. Maybe more if they start underloading the pieces."

"Well, we can't have that!" said Gleaming Shield, broadly, playing to the audience. "Doesn't make for a proper test if we lighten the pressure of the fire."

"We can't know how common powder is among the griffons we captured these weapons from. In field they might tend to underload their sluggers if they think they're short." Gilda knew when to play Discord’s advocate.

"There's no good reason you should be short of gonne-powder," said a blue unicorn with ensign tabs. "Twi- Gleaming Shield, why haven't you been around to talk to Lieutenant Lulamoon?"

"Who?" asked Gilda's lieutenant, whose eyes had narrowed a bit at being half-addressed by that forbidden name that Gilda herself wasn't allowed to use.

"Trixie Lulamoon! You remember her! She dropped out of the School in our second year, the one who was always playing with fire. She went into the Royal Artillery, she's here in Trottingham!"

"Hmfph. Maybe I have seen her somewhere. I doubt she'd be willing to help, you know we didn't get along. When I asked the Artillery, they said they didn't stock this primitive black powder mixture. Something about savages and filthy saltpetre concoctions…"

"Ha!" laughed the blue mare. "You know Trixie. She's more flexible than you'd think when it comes to stuff that goes boom. I'm sure she'll be able to help!"

"Perhaps. But… for now, we don't want to calibrate the shields to the wrong standard. Come on, girls, we're going to show you a volley, then a display of timed fire. Gilda! Set it up with the rankers, I'm going to show my colleagues the range!"

The lieutenant scurried off in what, for her, passed for a cheerful mood, chattering at the herd of young pony officers. It was the largest group of peers Gilda had ever seen Gleaming Shield among, these young officers she'd somehow summoned to their testing range out here in the scrubland. Gilda looked away from the herd, and discovered that the blue-furred unicorn had appeared in her blind spot, eyeing the bat-hen with a strange expression she couldn't quite parse.

"Oh, don't mind me, please, order your troops as you need. We're not used to griffon troops in the provincials, you know. Just ponies in our barracks. I suppose it's rather the same as commanding pegasi, if, you know, they trusted us with commanding pegasi."

"Pegasi aren't griffons, nor vice versa, ensign ma'am."

"Oh, call me Minuette. I'm really just in this uniform for the tour of duty. Not my life, you know? Every graduate gets a reserve commission these days, and I'm sparing the rest of my class by taking my tour now, so they all can get a leg up on life when they're young and busy. So here I am, serving in the Marezonian Provincial Regiment with the girls. Boy, we've really caught it with these dang gonnes, or sluggers, or whatever you want to call them! Us and the bloody Beefeaters, we're the ones who see the mess in the streets." She waved a hoof at one of the pony officers down-range with the others, a grim-looking unicorn wearing crimson Princess's Own Griffish Rangers regimentals.

"Primitive contraptions," Ensign Minuette continued to ramble, "but don't they make a mess! The regiments in garrison and back home don't seem to understand why they're important, but you get out there, and woo! Ponies down all over town!"

A talkative unicorn. Exactly what Gilda had always wanted in life. She turned away from the chattering unicorn ensign who showed no sign of shutting up, and rattled off a quick, brusque series of orders to the firing line, directing the volley fire and timed fire steps and preparations required.

The blue mare kept rattling on, ignoring Gilda's preparations.

"...not Gleaming Shield! Mare, she was such a phenom in school, you know? Burned like dragonfire. Nopony could understand why she went for something so low-status as the Griffish Territorials. Might as well have gone into sanitary engineering, you know?" The mare showed no indication she had any idea how insulting her comparison of command in the Griffish battalions with latrine digging might have been. Not that Gilda didn't sort of agree, but it was the principle of the matter.

"I was under the impression the lieutenant ma'am attended the Military Academy, miss." If the blue mare insisted on not claiming her rank, Gilda could accommodate. "The Academy does not hoof out 'reserve commissions', or so is my impression of matters. LIEUTENANT MA'AM, WE ARE READY WHEN YOU ARE!"

"Oh, she did, but I was a student at Gifted Unicorns, you know. We shared faculty, especially when it came to the high-thaumic stuff and the greater evocations and thaumaturgies. Gleaming Shield was always first in our shared classes. Nobody could out-work her when she was applying herself, not even the Princess's Own Student. Drove ol' Moondancer absolutely around the bend." The blasted blue mare had talked right over the lieutenant's reply to Gilda, but the stream of ponies rushing off of the range and back to a safe place behind the firing line gave the bat-hen a good idea what the substance had been.

"Miss, if you could stand back behind the firing line for safety's sake. LIEUTENANT MA'AM, ARE YOU READY?"

"Not yet! Give me a moment!"

"HOLD LINE!"

"I say they're too close to the targets," grumbled the pony in Rangers regimentals. "Most of our casualties have been from snipers operating at twice this distance."

"Balls to that!" said the big, beefy pegasus mare in Maretonian khaki. "When it gets bloody, it'll get damn close, it always does. Point-blank's when your shield's gotta hold, if you're gonna be doin' unicorn witchery!"

"Close is better than far," said a third officer, male, spectacled, shaggy, and horned, wearing some regimental uniform Gilda didn't recognize. His distinctive pale 'socks' stood out against his orange coat. "They're physical thrust mechanisms, chemically driven. They will lose energy with distance. Highest stress at point blank range."

"Ready when you are!" came floating over the range, the sheen of the liquid shield appearing over the sandbags.

"PRIME!" Gilda yelled at her griffons, aware of the crowd of ponies behind the firing line.

"This is exactly the sort of madcap magic Gleaming Shield was always getting up to, you know," said the blue mare, as downrange the many-colored shield dome glistened over the lieutenant's sandbag dugout. "But leave it to Twi- Gleaming Shield to figure out a way to protect against the snipers and the ambushers. Hey, there Braeburn! Whaddya think-"

"AIM!"

"What ah think is that the question is, will ponies who ain't magical prodigies be able to put that spell to use," Lieutenant Braeburn groused.

"FIRE!" The rippling crack of the sluggers going off in semi-unison drowned out the lieutenant's friend's witterings. But Gilda had to agree with the stallion. Just because Gleaming Shield could perfect a shield, didn't mean that others could use it.

Could they?

Author's Notes:

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

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Good Trooper Gilda

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