----- 11 Days Later -----
Date: November 5, 2823
Location: SLS Michigan – Deep Periphery (Charlie 425 A)
Title: Betrayal of Ideals – Asunder
Author: Blaine Lee Pardoe
Type: Serialized Novel (BattleCorps)
Synopsis: Khan Franklin Hallis reviews the Wolverine situation as he shepherds a small fleet of ships through an unoccupied system. He split the evacuation fleet in the hopes of allowing more to escape – having each sub-fleet proceed separately and then rendezvousing at key systems to recalculate routes, switch up the mix of ships, and proceed along separate routes to the next rendezvous. He knows that the ilKhan’s charges were baseless, but also knows that neither Nicholas nor the other Clans will listen to his protestations of innocence – especially since one of the last JumpShips to join the convoy brought a copy of the ilKhan’s declaration of a Trial of Annihilation.
Khan McEvedy remains missing and presumed dead in the aftermath of Great Hope’s destruction, but Franklin is committed to carrying out her Switchback plan – waiting until the Nicholas’ pursuit force races ahead, then following behind them unnoticed. Hallis is fairly confident that his anti-Watch efforts have ensured operational security.
The Wolverine Exodus includes 75% of the Warrior Caste and 66% of the lower castes. Even with the cached ships, there wasn’t room to transport everyone that wanted to go. Supply-wise, the ships have food and water, but not enough to get back to the Inner Sphere. Rationing has been imposed, but the fleet will need to resupply en-route.
Notes: Two million people died in the Pentagon Civil War, leaving roughly four million at the end of KLONDIKE. Based on Nicholas’ obsession with equality among the Clans, I think we can assume that each Clan, therefore, has about 200,000 members at this point. With the warrior caste numbers being so small as to constitute a rounding error, the 2/3 figure suggests that Hallis managed to cram an astounding 130,000+ people onto his ships. Based on the Strategic Operations rules, to get to the halfway mark (Bristol), the fleet needs to allot 55 tons of supplies and living space per person. That works out to 7,150,000 tons of supplies (just food, water and air – they mention that they took industrial gear and weapons as well).
This is possible, to be sure. One Potemkin carrying 25 fully laden Mammoths would give you 1.3 million tons, so you just need 6 of those. However, it’s guaranteed that the Switchback fleet isn’t using such an optimal mix of transportation – Mules and Overlords are mentioned by name in earlier sections. I estimate that the Wolverines would need a whopping 867 Mules to carry 130,000 people and enough supplies to get to Bristol (though that number would be cut down substantially by taking the WarShips’ vast cargo holds into account). Assuming that the fleet contains a mix of DropShip classes, the range for DropShip numbers is from 150 (if all Mammoths) to 867 (if all Mules). If we put it somewhere in the middle, let’s call the Wolverine evacuation fleet 500 DropShips strong. They probably would have prioritized getting the bigger JumpShips (Star Lords and Monoliths, rather than Scouts and Merchants), from the naval caches, so an average of 5 docking collars per JumpShip gives a guesstimate of 100 JumpShips, or thereabouts.
My back-of-the-envelope guess is that roughly 1,000 ships remained in active service of the nearly 1,400 that went on the Exodus, with the rest having been destroyed, cached, or disappeared into the Dark Caste (H:OK notes that the independent spacers who successfully fled when the Clans arrived formed the basis of the Dark Caste in the Kerensky Cluster). Given Nicholas’ obsession with equality at the outset, that would give each of the Clans 50 ships (both WarShips and JumpShips) to work with – implying that the Wolverines may have at least doubled the size of their fleet when they raided the caches.
