The Fifth was packed and ready to return to the barracks when the explosions began to ring out across the city. They had spent the week in Battery Giuseppe on the pony side of the harbor, just across a minor channel separating the chained casemates and bastions sitting on a trio of natural seamounts. It was, if anything, the least vital portion of the seaward defenses of the city, which is why they were able to abandon the post to the pony artillerists who permanently staffed the battery, and fly to the sound of the guns.

Or the bombs, as it proved to be.

The crab-back marches had turned tense and confrontational as fall had faded into winter. The successful raiding and neighborhood-clearing campaigns of the summer and early fall had been utterly undone by the wave of new migrants that had followed the fall harvests into the city from the countryside, and a whole new cadre of rebels pugnaciously filled the griffon side of the city with new anger and new ambition to drive out the pony oppressor.

In retrospect It had only been a matter of time before the rebels attacked the marches, instead of simply hiding in place and duking it out with the strike forces that always swept in when their covering crowds emptied out of the ghettos the rebels infested.

Gilda was just glad it hadn’t been the Fifth that had caught a beakful from the rebels.

The Fifth was in its full finery when the moment came, not quite in march array, but awaiting their turn as their replacements had danced and strutted their way through the city. Rarity’s genius had birthed the new uniforms in all of their beauty, and the Territorial battalion looked like a dawning sunrise, blue fading to yellow, with red grace-notes provided by the individual vanities of the troopers who insisted on lacquering their wing-blades and upper armor plating with streaks of crimson and burgundy. Rarity had objected to the practice, until Gleaming Shield had noted the potential image, and then the fashionista had leaned into the idea, sourcing better lacquers and directing the artwork of the troopers appropriately.

Gilda thought they looked more like the proper and traditional celestial blue crab, the old and ancient ones sometimes taken from the shallows west of Sandstone, with their blue shells tinted with a sort of dawn rainbow of reds and oranges and yellows. She herself picked a more orangeish sort of ochre for her lacquer.

All of that proud delight in their new fuss and feathers fell by the wayside when the twittering and laughter of the griffons milling about the marshalling-yard were shocked into silence by that chain of detonations that rolled across the harbor like the drum-heavy overture of a horrible, grim opera. One of the nasty griffish traditional ones, full of betrayal, sibling slaughter and nobility in all its glory.

Gilda was looking at Gleaming Shield when the bombs went off. She’d never seen the purple unicorn look so pale, or once the twinge had passed, so emptily furious. The lieutenant’s voice was first to break the shocked silence with the necessary orders.

The troopers gathered around the full supply carriages as a set of scouts leapt into the air to race westwards, and gather information. Cockade after fine-feathered cockade was flung into the open tops of the carriages, revealing the iron-pot helmets they’d provided aesthetic cover and protection from the brain-cooking sun.

By the time the initial scouts returned with a word-picture of the unfolding disaster, the battalion was in battle-array. Gilda untied the golden cloth-frames which had hidden the armor and utilitarian frames of the spare colonel’s gig which she and Gleaming Shield had been scheduled to operate in the now-canceled crab-back march. Gleaming Shield sat in the colonel’s saddle, her satchel behind her in the boot. The lieutenant’s own armor had been modified in Rarity’s finest aesthetic, and Gilda’s had been stripped down for carriage-hauling, but still flamboyant and flashy, all yellows and blue grace-notes, the former tailored specifically to Gilda’s sad lack of azure plumage. They both looked oddly decapitated without the signature cockades.

The battalion rose into the air over Battery Guiseppe in a unison as well-tuned and well-formed as if they were flying for the crowds and the joy of the parade. But they were armed and armored for something worse than a simple bit of feather-flashing and leg-stretching joy she’d been anticipating.

They reached their apex over the center of the harbor, with the pillars of black smoke and fire visible ahead on the griffish shore, inland from the docks and much of the neighborhoods. The distant sound of fighting was interrupted by the orders of the sergeant-major and the corporals, a very specific order that the unicorn officers never would have issued, that was no part of pony military culture. Throughout the ranks in flight, the rear ties of the troopers’ drawers were untied and yanked open.

As the ranks ahead of them in the flight began shitting in unison, Gilda was thankful they’d been able to talk Rarity into adding those emergency evacuation flaps on the back end of the drawers for their fancy uniforms. Elsewise the traditional pre-battle defecations would have meant that their finery would have been a great deal more yellow and brown than Rarity’s designs had made allowances for.

“Oh, for the love of harmony, Gilda, do you have to?”

“For the love of the harmony of my uniform, yes, lieutenant ma’am, I do. Unless you want me shitting myself when the bolts and bullets start flying.”

“Oh, god, it stinks!”

“Better up here before we come into contact, it’ll dissipate,” said Corporal Gustav from the file maintaining formation just to the right of Gilda and Gleaming Shield’s gig.

The shadow of Lady George flying just above Gleaming Shield’s gig interrupted the afternoon sun in a brief eclipse, and the lieutenant looked up, reminded that the turul existed.

“Gilda, get us up by the roc! There, good. Hey! ‘Bob’! We don’t need ‘Gertie’ for this, and she’ll just create panic. Well, more panic than there already is. Can you just… go to cruising altitude?”

“Can do, lieutenant ma’am!” said ‘Bob’ in ironic imitation of Gilda’s usual tones. Lady George spread her wings and rose on the thermals rising from the fires ahead of them, quickly shrinking with distance as the battalion fell and she soared high into the brilliant blue of the autumn sky.

The Fifth parted with its royal mascot, and flew into the war.

They made a combat stoop on the north side of the chaos in Gilbert Square, two blocks away from the smoke and the screaming and the yelling. The rippling roar of the light cannon had ceased, and now there was only the sound of screaming and the clash of arms for those not deafened by the preceding barrage.

As they descended, an orange pegasus in some unfamiliar coat-tight blue uniform intercepted them.

“Good, you’re in the exact right place!” the pegasus yelled. “Take up blocking positions along July Street, the word is they’re breaking, they may be breaking this way!”

“Major-?” asked Gleaming Shield, looking askance at this random officer giving her griffons orders.

“Spitfire! Wonderbolts, on detached service! We knew they’d come out into the open like this, it’s an opportunity! A bloody, wonderful opportunity!” The pegasus mare wasn’t Trottish, and she wasn’t cursing. She was just giddy at the prospect of slaughter.

Gilda sometimes wondered what exactly had happened to the peace-loving ponies Grampa Gruff used to wax nostalgic about. Or were they always this bad, and hadn’t thought to vent it on griffons before this?

Ponies on the ground guided the Fifth into their blocking positions along the side-street which crossed the Boulevard of the Corbids, which had been the marching-route of the other Territorial battalions when they’d been ambushed. A third of the griffons of the Fifth, along with their unicorn officers, took up formation on the ground, and another third landed on the squat apartment buildings that lined July Street.

The last third circled in the air over their fellows, ready to intercept any fliers as they fled from the confusion two blocks south on the smoke-choked thoroughfare. This was more chaotic than it sounds, because civilians were still straggling away from the bloodshed, the more curious and bloodthirsty remnants of the crowd which had been scattered by the bombings. These enraged towngriffs had apparently taken up any weapon or weapon-like implement that came to talon, and more than a few had been captured along with the rebels they’d been harrying as those griffons tried to retreat through the Fifth’s lines.

Gilda kept Gleaming Shield aloft to provide officer cover for the swirling mess which their aerial deployment immediately disintegrated into, pairs of griffon troopers grabbing bloodied and wild-eyed griffons in disheveled civilian attire, and pulling them down to the rooftops to process and sort out the angry victims from the escaping rebels.

The aerial third of the Fifth quickly found themselves on the rooftops, their talons full of their captures and incidental civilians, and the third which had been at that level, rose to replace their fellows. Gilda and Gleaming Shield stayed aloft, maintaining control over the gyre of Territorials rising empty-taloned, and falling with their temporary captives. The other officers processed their catches, having climbed up to the rooftops to maintain order.

It seemed like forever, but it was barely three in the afternoon when the heavy skirmish lines from the ambushed brigade of Territorials met the Fifth’s griffons along their positions on July Street. Only a talons-full of rebels fled ahead of the enraged griffons who had chased them from the fighting in Gilbert Square. When they came up against the griffons of the Fifth, every single one threw down their weapons and surrendered. They survived the rout, unlike many of their fellows.

The griffons of the Ninth and Third had not been amused. They were out for blood.

The Fifth just put their final captures into the improvised pen they’d built out of a half-smashed chicken coop on the roof of one of the apartment buildings on the south side of August Street, and laughed off the demands of the pissed-off troopers from Gilbert Square. These rebels were the Fifth’s, and that was that.

The book-keeping and arguing over prisoners went on long into what little there was of afternoons in the last days of fall.

Gilda took a moment to shake out her overstrained wings, unhooked from her gig. It was heavier than it looked, weighted down with armor plating along and under the colonel’s saddle, a little bucket or tub designed to protect the rider from the projectile fire of any prospective opponent. Nobody really cared about the griffon that had to drag all that weight unprotected at the end of the yoke. No extra armor for Gilda

Some loudmouth in the prisoner’s pen was raving at his guards and his shame-faced fellows. Not all the fight had been beaten out of the rebels, it seemed.

“Ah, proud is it, you damn scuttlers across shallow seas? You may have penned me up here with these cowards like a pullet in among the broilers, but the rebellion still lives! It would thrive, if we weren’t all here in this bucket with you damn crabs! You’re the reason the ponies don’t even bother locking their doors! To keep a crab captive, just put her in a bucket with other crabs, and they’ll all keep each other in their place! They can count on you to pull us back down into the pot with the rest of you! Damn you, damn you all!”

The guards weren’t in a laughing mood, and the mouthy griffon might have caught more than just a couple spear-butts in his face, but a trio of heavily-armored earth ponies and a unicorn officer arrived just in time to haul him alive out of the Fifth’s prisoners’ pen. The mouthy griffon must have been somegriff important.

Gilda went back to watching her lieutenant work, and resting her wings.

It was nearly dark when Gleaming Shield finished her part in the resolution of the situation along July Street, and coaxed her bat-hen back into the traces of their appropriated colonel’s gig. The lieutenant got them back up into the air, and directed Gilda southwards into what had been the center of the fighting earlier in the day. They barely got going before she told Gilda to land in the Square, so that she could look over the battlefield before they lost the last light.

Gilda thought wryly that the lieutenant must have been restraining herself mightily from taking similar tours of the strike-force raids. Those had come like clockwork, every week, almost on a bloody, smoky schedule. This was the first time the unicorn had indulged herself in a bit of massacre tourism.

Perhaps it was the bombs, perhaps it had been that being an actual part of a battle had loosened Gleaming Shield’s iron self-discipline enough to play military tourist, but here they were.

And Gilda had to admit she was curious, too.

The square looked like the jetty-side batters after they’d butchered one of Lady George’s catches. Gilda had not expected there to be this much blood. It stank even worse than it looked, like a crowd had sacked a butcher shop and shat and pissed on every counter, in every corner.

Further south was the blackened rubble and the smoke, here it was all bodies and blood. The two of them had landed in a part of the square where the fighting had been talon to talon, spear to shield, wing and paw, beak and tooth. There were windrows of dead griffons laying in clumps where they had fallen, dressed in the rough woolens common among the rural poor and some of the worst griffish ghettos. Gilda’s beak stung from the horrible bouquet of copper and ammonia and feces.

And just the faintest whiff of sweet acetone and sulfur.

Details from the other Territorial battalions were policing the battlefield, removing their own dead and collecting discarded weapons. There were less of the former than Gilda had feared, and more of the latter than she’d thought possible.

It occurred to her that they hadn’t taken nearly enough prisoners earlier in the day to account for all of these blades and clubs and - were those slug-throwers? The rebels had been heavily armed.

As Gleaming Shield was examining the shattered barrel of some device in her magical field-grip, Gilda heard someone behind them chirp in a weirdly cheerful feminine voice.

A voice that made the lieutenant freeze in wide-eyed horror.

“Didn’t I tell you that we were due for one hum-dinger of a shindig, General Sir? I can’t believe how many party favors they left us!”

“Major Pie, we lost a lot of birds today,” rumbled something like a gravel-pit given voice. “Perhaps you should show some restraint, given the dead all around us?”

“Gee, General Krupke, this is my mourning grimace! I can’t help if it looks exactly like my ‘I told you this was going to happen if you kept letting the Territorials show off’ face!”

“Pie, you told me to double down on the crab-back marches!”

“Because I was pretty sure it would be worth the price. And I don’t know yet if that’s true. But I have hopes, because look at all these party-poopers, our crabbies pinched them but good. Oh, hey, Twilight, long time no see!”

Gilda watched as Gleaming Shield wiped that look of horror off her face and composed herself. She followed the lieutenant’s gaze as they both turned around to face the voices.

It was the commanding general of the garrison, a heavy-set older stallion named… Gilda forgot his name. Something to do with forges or anvils. She was pretty sure it wasn’t anything so unpony as ‘Krupke’.

Beside him was an earth pony so shockingly pink that Gilda thought at first that she’d been bathing in viscera. Her mane was long, lank, and equally pink, but there was a crazed look in her eyes, an enthusiasm that sent a shiver down the hen’s back that had nothing to do with the autumnal chill in the evening air. The pink mare was wearing a staff officer’s uniform, and major’s tabs.

Beside them both was that damn dark-coated earth pony Gilda kept seeing around the city. The one that had been with that bureaucrat that had objected to their falconry a month or so back. The one that kept showing up in weird places where ponies shouldn’t be. Like guild halls deep in the griffish quarter.

“Hey!” yelped the pink mare. “Hey! Twilight Sparkle! Over here! Howaryadoing? I haven’t seen you since the Academy! Isn’t all this keen? We really walloped ‘em good here, didn’t we? Hey, come on, Twilight, say something!”

Author's Notes:

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