The Siege Of Canterlot

"General! Ma'am!"

"I know, I know..." Hawkeye muttered brusquely, walking purposefully down the corridor to her office and the balcony that looked out over the city. She, like everypony else in the city, had heard the explosion, and immediately knew it spelled trouble, whatever the source of it. Her aide, who had called out to her, followed her, trying to keep up as she hurried into her office and looked out from the balcony.

A plume of smoke and dust towered above the city walls, hanging in the air even a minute or more after the blast. Whatever it was, it had been damned powerful, that much was immediately clear. The dust cloud lay in the vicinity of the Unicorn Gate, but out beyond the wall, right among the outer defences. That was where the enemy had been concentrating most of their attacks over the past two weeks, and it seemed they wished to continue that trend. Hawkeye turned to her aide.

"Muster the reserves," she ordered. "We may have a hole to plug."

The mine had taken the best part of a week to prepare. Changeling engineers, experts at digging fast and accurately underground to create their hive cities, had been called into action to dig a tunnel that would run beneath the Equestrian lines. Though the plateau was thick, solid schist, the top hundred feet or so was made up of soil and softer limestone, through which the Changelings could tunnel with ease, using a combination of hand tools and magic. This, they had done with some expediency, and filled the resulting chamber beneath the line with powder drums. A long fuse had then been set and lit, and the explosives detonated to coincide with the changing of the watch. The Changelings had done their job well; the explosion was directly beneath the palisade and the earthen embankment, as expected, and a hole some one hundred feet long had been blown in the defensive line. Fifty ponies were dead, and several score more wounded, but most importantly, the defenders were in disarray. Their vision was obscured, their order of battle broken, their cover smashed, their comrades dead or dying. A large and inviting gap had been opened, and the enemy were heading directly for it.

"To arms, to arms!" somepony shouted. "Stand to! For Celestia's sake, stand to! They're coming!"

Snapshot regained his senses, dragging his attention away from the towering cloud of dust that still loomed over him. He still had his musket; or at least, somepony's musket was lying right beside him. Maybe it wasn't his after all, but no matter. It would do for now. He picked it up, feeling a stinging pain in his side and looking down. Clearly he was badly bruised, if nothing else, but there was no time to seek medical aid, nor even to feel fear.

"Still alive, lad?" Billhook's familiar voice came from behind him, and the irrepressible Sergeant clapped a mighty hand on his shoulder. "Got your wits back yet? You're going to need them."

"I'm alright, Sergeant," Snapshot replied, gripping the musket and making sure it was loaded.

"Good lad. Stand up and fight!" Billhook bellowed. "Form a line! You there, all of you, get over there and reinforce that fucking hole!" he ordered, gesturing to a group of shellshocked ponies who jolted into action upon getting an order, heading for the long gap in the palisade line which was now visible as the smoke and dust cleared. "With me, lad," Billhook added to Snapshot. "Let's see if we can't find the Captain. There's a big fucking hole in our line and we need to get moving, or else we're going to be knee-deep in shit."

Right, Sergeant..." Snapshot moved with Billhook. Small groups of ponies, survivors from closer to the blast, were organising their own resistance, forming firing lines, but there was no level ground upon which to stand. Instead there was a huge crater, deep enough for four or five ponies to stand upon each other's shoulders. The earthen embankment had ceased to exist for a good eighty feet, as had the palisade fence, with just a few stakes, snapped like twigs, to be seen scattered about. Some of the defenders had ceased to exist entirely, atomised by the huge explosion and cast to the winds. Others lay dead, twisted and broken bodies dotted here and there. With the roar of the enemy closing in, one thing was clear. A resistance had to be organised, and fast.

Snapshot followed the Sergeant. They were not assigned to the section of the line which had been destroyed, but it was adjacent to their sector, and they had to cover it, for most of the soldiers who were meant to be holding that area had gone to meet their Princess in the next life. Billhook hastily rounded up as many survivors as he could and pushed them into a firing line. Only then did they find Captain Oats, who had been blown half out of her uniform, her tunic ripped and torn, exposing her breasts, her chest and face blemished by half a dozen bloody cuts. But she still had her sword, she still had her pistol, and she still had her wits and her new-found commanding presence, discovered since the attack on Trottingham, which seemed to truly have transformed her from a drunkard who was half-insensate most evenings into a proper, upright, dignified officer of the crown. "Good to see you in one piece, boys," she greeted them, her tricorn hat still somehow planted firmly upon her head, despite the damage to the rest of her clothing. "Sergeant, don't let anything through that gap."

"Yes ma'am!" Billhook replied with a firm nod.

"I've already summoned the sector reserves, but..." Her words were drowned out as the batteries on the Phoenix Bastion opened fire behind them, hurling their cannonballs out over their heads toward the enemy. The guns of the Timberwolf bastion followed moments later, then the guns upon the wall, and suddenly everything was a cacophony, as it was every morning. But this was no mere bombardment like it had been the day before or the day before that. This was an attack, a full scale assault.

Snapshot took his place in the makeshift firing line that Billhook was forming on the inner lip of the crater. Beyond the wall they could see the enemy.

"Here they come, I see them!" someone cried.

"Hold fast, lads and lasses!" Billhook ordered. "Now listen to me and listen close." He waited for a lull in the outgoing bombardment as the batteries reloaded so his words could be heard clearly. "When the enemy come, I'm going to give the command to fire twice. When I give it for the first time, you do NOT fire. Understood?"

"Yes Sergeant!" came a chorus of replies.

"When I give it for the second time, you let those fucking bastards have it. Got it?"

"Yes Sergeant!"

Oats circled around the edge of the crater to try and find the commander of the next section of the line and coordinate their defence, leaving Billhook in charge for the moment. He had assembled about sixty ponies in two ranks of thirty, all with muskets and all ready for a fight. Doing so concentrated their firepower but thinned the ranks of those who were left to defend the rest of their assigned section. It was necessary, however, for without doing so there would be nothing to stop the enemy simply pouring through the gap. They drew closer as musket fire began to crackle from the walltop behind them. That meant they were in range of small arms, which meant they were almost upon the defenders at the breach.

"Make ready!" Billhook roared.

The thunder of charging feet could be heard, along with the war cries of the Shadow Army. Black-clad figures appeared in the breach.

"Hold...hold...fire!" Billhook bellowed. The line of enemy soldiers threw up defensive shields, their front rank composed almost entirely of unicorns for just such a purpose. Nothing happened. They kept advancing and dropped the shields after a couple of seconds, as their instinct, training and experience told them was the right thing to do. Hold the count, one, two, three, drop shields. They did so.

"Fire!"

Billhook's repeated command brought the expected results. Both ranks of musketeers opened fire as one, sixty guns blazing in unison. hearing the Sergeant's deliberately loud first shout had made the Shadow Army's unicorns raise their shields in expectation of the volley which didn't come when they had imagined it would. Their shields had dropped once more as he shouted again, and the musket balls struck home with deadly effect, tearing through the enemy. Two dozen ponies dropped dead, another twenty falling wounded. The usual tactic of ignoring the volley fire against the Shadow Army in favour of individual aimed fire had been dropped just briefly, and it had achieved good results. The fact that there was a large crater that the enemy would have to cross to reach the Equestrian infantry favoured the defenders, as it meant the attackers could not simply charge rapidly and close the gap before another volley could be prepared.

Nevertheless, as the second and third ranks of Shadow soldiers, shorn of much of their potential magic protection, began to descend the sloping wall of the crater, while others started to move out around the perimeter. More fire came at them from the flanking positions as Equestrian soldiers tried to fight them off while simultaneously attempting to prevent more enemies from pushing through the intact sections of the wall. They kept pouring through the gap in the palisade, into the breach, though they were met with increasingly heavy fire, especially as Captain Oats returned with a company from the adjacent sector, opening up on the enemy from the flank and catching them as they tried descending the crater to get across it. Bodies began to pile up at the bottom of the crater as dead and wounded ponies slid and tumbled down the loose earthen flanks of the still-steaming hole.

Snapshot loaded another musket ball into his weapon and took aim. His heart was pounding once more, for this was another struggle for life. The enemy were coming in large numbers, seeing an opportunity. Their mine had done its work and there was a breach in the defences. If they could push enough troops through the gap then they could take the palisade and force the Equestrians back from their first line. That was their plan, but blowing a hole in the palisade was not the only part of that plan.

In two locations some several hundred yards away from the breach, the ground again began to shake. Equestrian soldiers feared another mine exploding beneath them, but there were no explosives involved this time. Instead, cracks and gaps began to appear in the soil as sinkholes opened up. Ponies scrambled away, some pulled to safety by their colleagues in the defensive line. From the holes in the ground came not fire and blast, but Changelings, clambering from the newly formed exits of their invasion tunnels, which had again been dug with great precision, bringing them up a couple of dozen feet to the rear of the palisade fence. The assault force was laden down with multiple pistols each and a short, curved sword, while some carried sacks of grenades and lit fusees, moved rapidly up the tunnel from the rear so as not to asphyxiate the waiting Changelings by using up all the air, with which to ignite the bombs before tossing each one to a waiting compatriot, allowing for a rapid volley of grenades to be unleashed. They launched their assault in just such a way, with explosions peppering the rear ranks of the Equestrian lines and tearing through the militia reserves who were stationed behind the front to relay ammunition and loaded weapons. These militiaponies now found themselves in the midst of a brutal fight they were not prepared for. The two tunnels came up to the surface on the flanks of the breach in the palisade, one to the west and one to the east, precisely because the Equestrians had acted in the exact way that the Changelings had expected; by pulling forces from those flanking sectors to reinforce the gaping hole in their line caused by the mine's detonation. It was the logical play, and the only one they could have made in the circumstances, but it left them vulnerable to the sudden appearance of enemy infiltrators behind their own line.

"Changelings, Sergeant! Thousands of 'em!" somepony cried out, alerting Billhook to the new threat. Drones and workers were charging from the nearest tunnel, not far from where Snapshot had been resting mere minutes earlier while eating his porridge. The enemy spilling out were moving both toward the breach to link up with their pony allies, and also away from it to try and turn the flank of the rest of the defensive line and catch them unawares, hoping to roll up the entire line in one fell swop and take the palisade.

"Shit! By Celestia's cunt, those Changelings are slippery bastards!" Billhook blasphemed. Taking the name of the Princess in vain was frowned upon but usually overlooked by the priesthood, but profaning in quite such vulgar terms, something that for the most part seemed to be the preserve of sailors and soldiers, was taking things to a different level. BIllhook, had a priest overheard him, would have found himself technically in line for two dozen lashes for his colourful language. "Stand fast!" Billhook cried. "Don't let them through. Hold those traitors off, buy the top brass time to bring up the reserves!"

Captain Oats, with her newly acquired company in tow, charged forward to meet up with Billhook and the rest of her actual unit, which she had temporarily left behind to fetch reinforcements. There were now about two hundred ponies protecting the breach, through which hundreds of Shadow soldiers were pouring. The militia who should have been moving to back them up and protect any gap in the line were now heavily engaged with the Changelings who continued to sprout like weeds behind them, clambering from the tunnel with pistols firing and grenades exploding, separating the two lines of Equestrians The regulars and the militia were split, and the flanks were also being cut off from those troops around the breach, which had also been carefully located by Changeling surveyors and engineers to be right in front of the Phoenix Bastion, at a point where an absolute minimum of its guns could be brought to bear upon the attackers as they were actually fighting for control of the opening. The Timberwolf Bastion was still able to provide supporting fire, but only at risk of hitting their own soldiers in the process, while all but the smaller cannons of the Phoenix Bastion could not be depressed far enough to fire down at the breach.

Snapshot, his musket reloaded, stood firm with the others as they broke from a solid wall of ponies into a skirmish line, free to fire at will. Musket fire crackled above them as soldiers on the wall to the rear backed them up, but the shooting from the flanks was mostly the guns of the enemy. They were being rapidly hemmed in. However many of the enemy they killed- and there were bodies strewn across the crater and the breach- more seemed to arrive, to say nothing of the Changelings in the rear.

"Corporal!" Oats called, hurrying up to Snapshot and Billhook, her uniform still tattered and torn but her sword now well-blooded. "Take your section and these grenades." Another pony moved to hand him a canvas sack of bombs. "There's a Changeling tunnel over there." She pointed to where Snapshot had been resting earlier. "Go and blow the hell out of it. Block the exit. bring it down on their heads."

"Yes, ma'am!" Snapshot replied. His section- the ponies under his direct command- were a rag-tag bunch. His true section comrades were mostly dead, either in Trottingham or, in Ramble's case, here in Canterlot. When Oats's survivors had been amalgamated into the defence force, he had found a half dozen strangers, plus Ramble, left in his care. Truth be told he had barely learned their names in the two weeks of the siege, but they were decent enough soldiers, though a little green, having served in the city garrison and nowhere else of note. "Let's go, fillies and gentlecolts," he ordered, taking the bag of grenades and slinging them over his shoulder.

His section followed him, out of the maelstrom of the breach and back toward the Changeling tunnel. They could see, through the powder-smoke of battle, that a contingent of militia were fighting valiantly against the horde of drones. Many of the militia were complete novices to actual combat, raw recruits signed up in a time of desperation to bolster the ranks of the city's defenders. Others were ex-soldiery themselves, of more advanced years but battle hardened and with skills they had never forgotten how to put to use. Though they fought with valour and courage, they could not fight with the ferocity of the Changelings, who used a lethal combination of magic, blade and ball, fighting with swords and pistols, grenades hurled left and right, lunging and leaping with the use of their wings. They were everywhere.

"Alright, stick together, heads down!" Snapshot ordered. Three mares and three stallions followed him into the fray, clutching their muskets, bayonets ready. He could not yet see the hole they had bored in the ground, presumably with their magic to make the final breach to the surface, but he could certainly hear the Changelings hissing and shooting. All they had to do to seal the tunnel was punch through the enemy, ignite the fuses of the grenades, toss the sack into the hole, and run.

Snapshot led the charge with a dry mouth and a pounding heart. The Changelings, most of them at least, were preoccupied with the militia, but at least some of them were already facing his way, engaging a thin line of regular Equestrian infantry who had been manning the palisade fence but now found themselves in danger of encirclement. They were from Oats's unit, fellow survivors from Trottingham, and Snapshot rallied them. Every extra bayonet was one more nail in the tunnel's coffin, at least in theory. Together they pressed on, firing their muskets, then closing rapidly to go in with the bayonet and sword, stabbing their way through the enemy. Changelings came at them, firing pistols and swinging axes. Snapshot ducked one clumsy swing and impaled the worker-Changeling with his bayonet, ripping its throat out. His section fought beside him, battering their way through with support from the others. The militia kept the bulk of the Changelings busy, forming a natural focus for any new arrivals coming out of the tunnel. Their battle plan relied on surprise and speed, and on keeping the Equestrians divided, but the defenders were reacting quickly to the multiple threats, facing them all as best they could with their limited numbers. Buying time for reinforcements to arrive from the city was most important now.

Snapshot and his unit inched closer to the tunnel, but resistance became fiercer as they did so. Several of the other ponies who had joined him went down, shot or run through by Changeling blades. The defensive line was constructed to make it as difficult as possible for an attacker to make easy progress. There was little open ground, but instead plentiful wooden spikes, placed seemingly at random, small ditches with no evident purpose, mounds of earth for defenders to hide behind and fire from, barrels and sandbags and overturned wagons, makeshift emplacements and blockhouses built from logs. That made it difficult to obtain a visual reference as to exactly where the tunnel entrance was, but the mere fact that the number of enemies was increasing indicated to Snapshot that they were going the right way.

Rounding a pair of wagons roped together to form a firing point, over which were draped the bodies of two Equestrian soldiers, he finally laid eyes on the tunnel. A sinkhole in the earth some ten or twelve feet in diameter, it paled in comparison with the crater from the explosion of the mine, but still allowed three Changelings to emerge abreast and join the fight. Snapshot ordered his ponies to take up firing positions around the two carts. The two dead soldiers were unceremoniously dragged out of the way, and accurate musket fire began to clear a path toward the tunnel. On its far side, the militia were still fighting hand to hand, sustaining heavy losses against the crack Changeling assault teams, but inadvertently doing their job of drawing just enough attention away from Snapshot and his section. Though the Changelings, through their Hive Mind, could share intelligence and alert each other that more Equestrians were moving up, they did not know their intended purpose. Snapshot decided it was time to make that abundantly clear.

With his section providing covering fire, he produced a piece of flint from his tunic and opened the bag of grenades. Striking the flint against the longest fuse he could find, he ignited one of the grenades, and leaped from cover. Musket balls whipped past his head, going in both directions, as his comrades tried their best to protect him, and the enemy, now suddenly alert to his intentions, tried to kill him. Snapshot could not fly; his wing was injured from the blast of the mine. Even if he could have done, it would have just made him that much more of a target. But he didn't have to run the whole way. Instead he hefted the sack with an almighty shove and a grunt of exertion, tossing it as hard as he could into the opening before turning and scrambling back to cover behind the wagons.

He made it back, and the bag of grenades made it into the hole. Within a few scant seconds, a fountain of dirt erupted from the tunnel entrance, shaking the ground once more as all of the grenades detonated. In the tunnel, panic ensued, briefly, among the Changelings who were about to emerge above ground, as the tunnel ceiling began to collapse upon their heads. Half a dozen were killed outright in the blast, and a score or more were crushed and suffocated beneath tons of dirt. One tunnel, at least, was sealed. But there was another, and the breach in the line wasn't getting any smaller. The city was still in danger.