----- One Year Later -----
Date: February 6, 3005
Location: Poulsbo
Title: Vanish
Author: Michael A. Stackpole
Type: Short Story (A Time of War – Limited Edition)
Synopsis: Eighteen-year-old Morgan Kell, freshly graduated from the Nagelring, arrives on Poulsbo with his cousin, Duke Arthur Luvon of Donegal, as part of a post-graduation Grand Tour of the Lyran Commonwealth. (The prodigal Kell entered the Nagelring at 15 and graduated in three years.) As they exit the terminal, the pair are greeted by a stunningly attractive blonde, who passionately embraces Arthur, much to Morgan’s embarrassment. Morgan recognizes her as Leutenant-General (and designated heir to her uncle, Archon Alessandro Steiner) Katrina Steiner, the guest speaker at his Nagelring graduation eight months previously. It turns out that the true purpose of the trip to Poulsbo was to surreptitiously allow Arthur and Katrina some time together, while appearing to be just one more stop on the Grand Tour.
The two had been corresponding for years, and realized their true feelings when Arthur’s JumpShip blew a coolant seal and couldn’t make it to Tharkad for Morgan’s commencement. They exchanged pledges of love via ComStar couriers and set up the Grand Tour hoping to meet on the sly.
As they proceed to The King House hotel, Morgan notes that Poulsbo looks about a century out of step with the Lyran core, both in terms of style and level of technology, which degraded noticeably during the Succession Wars. Wanting to give the lovebirds some time alone, he sets off to explore the city of Bangor Heights. Morgan notes the city’s low-rise urban sprawl and the use of non-standard time units, due to the local rotational periods, and gets a local pocket watch to keep on schedule.
Morgan stops for dinner at a bar (“The Lost Locust”) where the locals peg him for an outsider and won’t give him the time of day. He notices a dartboard with Alessandro Steiner’s silhouette on it – a tribute to the carnage engendered by the Archon’s “Concentrated Weakness” strategy. He notices a rainbow-themed mobile hanging over the dartboards, and makes a special drink order (“bifrost yellow”) at the bar – actually a recognition code for the local Heimdall cell. Shortly, he’s approached by a man calling himself “Grison,” while Morgan introduces himself as “Hound.”
Grison asks Morgan why he’s on-world, worrying that it might be connected to a recent upswing in Loki activity. He says he’s heard that Loki is worried about a potential attack on a high profile governmental official connected to the dedication of a memorial to the Stealths’ defense of the world in 2812. The two suspect that Katrina Steiner is the target, since Poulsbo’s remoteness would allow Alessandro Steiner to control the flow of information onto and off-world. Heimdall believes that an Archon who is willing to leave key systems defenseless would be more than capable of marginalizing and assassinating any potential threat to his power base.
Morgan wants to alert his friends, but Grison warns him off, fearing that if Katrina ever learned that Morgan was Heimdall-affiliated, she could use that knowledge as Archon to unravel the entire Heimdall network. Grison tells Morgan to meet him at another bar, the Lone Pine, if he needs to.
Morgan returns to The King House and briefs Arthur, who acts as though he expected something like this. He notes that Loki hasn’t bugged his rooms yet (according to his surveillance-detecting chronometer), but expects that they soon will. He isn’t specifically worried about Alessandro, but his position as Duke of Donegal has made him a lot of enemies across the spectrum. He pulls two needler pistols out of a hidden compartment and gives one to Morgan.
Notes: This was included as a special premium story in a limited “collector’s edition” release of the first printing of the A Time of War rulebook. Stackpole has commented that he really wanted to tell the story of Katrina Steiner as the Red Corsair in a novel, but FASA/ROC insisted his novels be set in the 3050s to carry the ongoing story forward, so his pitch for Katrina’s “Red Corsair” adventure had to be reworked as the Clan/Kell Hound novel Natural Selection, explaining the Jade Falcon commander’s use of the “Red Corsair” identity. When AToW came out, he got the chance to tell at least the prologue to Katrina’s big Periphery romp.
Granted, Poulsbo is about as far out from the Lyran core as you can get before you’re either in the Free Worlds League (Cerillos is just across the border) or the Circinus Federation (also just a few light years away). However, rather than being ignored by Tharkad, one would think that it would be a major military staging point. Writeups on the world show that it was indeed used for such a purpose during the Age of War, but that the LCAF closed the base in 2632, during the Good Years and Tharkad pretty much let Poulsbo go its own way, despite the severe hit to the local economy. The base was reopened in the early 2800s, so they’ve been “back on the grid” for nearly two centuries by this point.
So, ComStar, at least, already knew that Arthur and Katrina were an item. This was still the “age of innocence” regarding ComStar’s reputation. Everyone trusted them as neutral servants of the whole Inner Sphere, never suspecting that ComStar was reading everyone’s mail, or that the First Circuit’s manipulations played a major role in the decline of technology and the continuance of unending warfare. (Check that – they certainly did suspect that ComStar was reading everyone’s mail and leaking it selectively, but after the battering the Free Worlds League took during the Interdiction of 2837-2838, nobody felt like calling them on it again.)
I’m not clear exactly on how Poulsbo’s remoteness would allow the Lyran Archon to control the flow of information onto and off-world. Doesn’t ComStar have an HPG station there? Wouldn’t ComStar’s INN and/or other media outlets be able to pretty much immediately file stories about the death of an Archon-designate?
Morgan modifies the recognition code to “yellow” due to it being Thursday. That would imply that Tuesday = Red; Wednesday = Orange; Thursday = Yellow; Friday = Green; Satuday = Blue; Sunday = Indigo; and Monday = Violet, if they’re going by the rainbow spectrum charts, which conveniently synch up with the days of the week (not counting ultraviolet and infrared). Bifrost, is, of course the rainbow bridge of Norse mythology which is guarded by the god Heimdall. Sort of an obvious recognition code, but no one ever accused the Lyrans of being subtle...