-PROLOGUE: August 7, 3053-
~Monticello Township, North America, Terra~
The fire had burned hot, leaving precious little of the two story suburban home in its wake for the investigators to sift through. Of course that would tell its own tale. The hot but localized burn would indicate the presence of accelerants even without the chemical confirmation that would swiftly follow. Energetic, but definitely commercial grade. Easy for any citizen to get their hands on.
Even with how hot the burn was, they'd still find remains from a couple dozen people, which would make a hell of a splash on the local news. That many people gone at once, it wouldn't take long for the media to start wondering why. Not much longer before what those people were into went up on the news. The official ruling wrote itself. Radical religious cult took itself out. Hoping to ascend through suicide, or maybe in protest of the new order in Comstar?
The latter explanation might be tempting, what with the Precentor Martial and his hand picked Primus pushing back on the old religious elements. But Precentor Maywether thought the former would fit the available evidence better. You shouldn't get greedy and overcomplicate things when covering up a murder.
"This is getting to be a bad habit, Agent Ebon," he said. "This makes, what, six hits this year alone?"
"Activity is picking up," Ebon acknowledged. "We've had to step up operations in response."
Maywether didn't know a lot about Ebon or the group he was working for. Only that every Primus, from Mori all the way back to Conrad Toyama had signed off on their work, and it was Maywether's job to clean up after them. The pattern of targets was remarkably similar. Fringe religious groups, students of obscure lore, people who came into possession of odd artifacts...
"If it picks up too much," he replied, "someone's gonna notice."
"Something already has," Ebon replied. "That's part of the problem."
Maywether couldn't help but be curious, but he considered himself a loyal servant of the Order, and Fotch, Mori, and the man on Mars himself had all told him to do his job and not to ask, so he didn't ask.
"This one will pass investigation just fine," he said. "But some of your jobs are tricky, so try to give us as much lead time as you can."
-----
~MRS 27, outside Koryo, Mars~
"It's not a bad plan, if I could actually trust you to go through with it."
Floating in the holosphere around him was a map of Terra, with diagrams and popup windows describing missile targets, weapon yields, expected casualties per strike, long term lethality numbers.
"I'll give you credit for not immediately ordering it dismantled when you found out about it," he said.
It had been Primus Waterly's last resort. If Fotch had been defeated at Tukayyid, if Operation Scorpion had failed, if a last ditch defense of Terra with everything they had left hadn't been enough to repel the clans. Thousands of nuclear warheads, cobalt jacketed, starting in the half megaton range and escalating to a few gigaton yield weapons pre-placed at appropriately vulnerable locations.
No matter what, even if all else failed, the Clans or nobody else would take Terra. It wasn't just spite (though he was sure there had been a fair bit of that in the planning, too). Preventing Terra from falling to outsiders was the single most important mission the Order had, handed down from Jerome Blake himself. Even Fotch had come to realize that.
But did he really? "You're too soft, you didn't follow up your victory at Tukayyid, didn't push forward when your troops were all in one place to do so. Too hung up on the losses you'd taken when you'd hurt them at least as badly. You were content to buy time, you didn't commit to doing what you had to to end the threat."
Thomas Marik sighed. "You can't be trusted to do what needs to be done."
-----
~Phillip XII Station, Sol Kupier belt~
"It's a big ask," Doctor Yung said to the fairly elderly man sitting across from him in his office. "I just want to be clear on that."
"You saying you need more money?" the elderly man asked. "That's not a problem."
"No, no, you misunderstand." Yung replied. It was annoying, but he couldn't really blame the guy. An outsider, not really familiar with how things were done out here, suspicious by profession. "We have a contract. Made and paid for. That's sacred out here. I'll do everything in my power to fulfill it."
He pointed back to screen, the fMRI data, gene typing. "But I gotta temper expectations. There's a difference between repairing the damage and fixing the man. Brain scans and Genetyping say he's an ideal candidate for neurogenesis." Almost too ideal really. Genetyping was consistent with someone who'd already gone through stage one resequencing. You weren't supposed to see that in a baseline spheroid population, unless they had the pull to have access to some star league medical technology but didn't really know what it was for.
The patient had definitely had the pull and the access. And you just had to look around to know that they didn't know what it was for.
"Fixing the damage is the easy part," Yung continued. The elderly man had not protested or interrupted at all, which was a nice change of pace from what a doc usually got from family and friends. The elderly man knew the value of listening. Another occupational trait?
"What comes after is the problem. We can replace the dead brain tissue, but anything that was encoded in it is just gone. And the brain isn't a simple system. It's adaptive in unpredictable ways." He gestured to the scan. "I can say for certain that he's going to have to relearn certain basic motor functions, based on the location of the stroke, but beyond that? We won't be able to say until we've repaired the damage. We can give him a fully functioning brain, but I can't promise that his memories, his personality, or his cognitive function is going to be completely intact. As he recovers, there's a chance that he won't be the person you remember."
"Our own doctors have already told his wife the same thing," the elderly man replied. "Except they didn't think it would even be possible to try."
Yung looked down to the verigraphed letter on his desk. A written statement of consent from the patient's wife to begin treatment. Normal procedure would have the next of kin present to give the consent verbally, but that was problematic enough that Yung's bosses had made an exception for extraordinary circumstances.
Yung was compelled by ethics to help the patient, but there was the realist in the back of his head that had wished his bosses had refused, and who saw the patient as the potential time bomb he was.
"All right, Mister Allard," he said. "You can reassure his wife that we'll do our utmost to bring Hanse Davion back to her."
-----
~AE Aurigae system, 1300 light years rimward of Terra~
Unit N1P571U017 maintained a silent over watch over the crippled target as its shuttles disgorged swarms of drones to begin the process of cutting into the wreckage and securing it.
The target (identified by hull form and observed capabilities as a Terran Alliance Project C6 light cruiser, baseline design, historically recorded under the label of "Model 2260 Standard class Cruiser, Atreus Type") currently showed no signs of operation. And even when active, it and its two sister ships had presented no significant threat to Pod N1P57's superior numbers and firepower. U017's tactical analysis had already concluded that any remaining threat would come from surviving crew, most likely the small numbers of non-human personnel that may or may not be aboard, and thus the probability that U017 would find it necessary to resume firing at the target was deemed very small.
Regardless, U017 maintained a close watch on the crippled vessel in accordance with standard protocols, ready to deliver the entirety of its available conventional firepower into the wreck if necessary.
Other elements of Pod N1P571 were engaged in similar operations on the other derelicts, including the remains of Autoscout U400. The small vessel had been responsible for the discovery of this cluster of targets, but had itself been disabled shortly after sending its report to the rest of the Pod. The Autoscout had already been deemed unrecoverable, due to critical damage to its jump core, but it would be boarded and swept for intrusion just the same, and if practical, U400's core programing would be recovered and returned to the central command node. If sweeps for tampering came up clean, U400 would get a new hull and an assignment to one of the new Pods being built, while any additional information it recovered would be disseminated to the rest of the fleet.
But those were the duties of others. The immediate task of U017 and its drone components was to recover information from the crippled enemy vessels.
"Data download coming in."
U017 would almost describe the voice feed to be jarring, though it lacked the cognitive reference to really use that phrase. The speaker was a subprogram tagged Guardian, which occupied its own separate set of processors and memory storage in the core of each ship. The subprogam was... quirky would be the appropriate term for those equipped to consider such things, but it performed an important function, physically sequestering and analyzing data recovered from foreign sources to protect the main core from intrusion. U017's own analysis of Guardian's specifications indicated the subsystem was ridiculously overengineered for such a task, and that it possessed other undisclosed secondary functions, but the notion of questioning its purpose further simply didn't occur to U017.
"This data stack tastes like old garbage," Guardian stated. "Raw data's unreadable, the underlying hardware and processing systems are so obsolete that they don't even fit in my data structure. That's arright. Separate off subprocessor 17, reconfigure to emulate an Apple Technologies model 2251 Data System. This is why we don't throw out the old technical manuals, kids."
U017 waited silently for Guardian get to the points.
"Bingo, we're in. It'll take a second to get the full notes to you, but short form, this group wasn't alone, part of a major migration heading back towards Terra. Putting this together with our own patrol routes, other pods would have caught three groups. But there's a lot more of them. They're jumping from bright star to bright star, minimizing recharge time, but it makes their path predictable. We should be able to predict and knock off several more before they realize we're on their tail and scatter. Minimum, we take out twenty percent before they reach the Inner Sphere. Max, maybe fifty."
The full report had already been submitted and reviewed by U017 by the time Guardian was done talking. U017's own analysis agreed with Guardian's conclusions, and the body of the two analysis were already on their way to the command units for further dissemination.
"Pygmalion's going to be pissed," Guardian commented. "Keeping this from happening was literally his only job."
U017 had no opinion on Command Node 1's capacity for emotional outbursts, but it was able to acknowledge that their primary objectives would become exponentially more complicated should the targets reach the Inner Sphere, something that would now be considered inevitable.
Collateral damage would likely be very high.
-----
~Director General's Residence, New Seattle, Martin's Landing, the Bastion~
Testimony in the Senate chamber went on for six hours, not just focusing on the rescued survivors from the Knights of the Saints Cameron, but Captain David Morgan and his own crew, who'd brought them here, and had observed the scope of the invasion first hand.
The arguments had followed. Senator Demnes had spoken first, pushing to remain isolated. To not get involved. She had good arguments. They weren't under threat themselves. These Clans had not struck at the Bastion. And an intervention in the Inner Sphere would cost unknown lives and require a radical re-alignment of the economy as they shift to a war footing. The Bastion would have to change in ways they couldn't really comprehend. Ways that they might not be able to come back from. Going back to the Inner Sphere wouldn't just mean defeating an old enemy, but stepping back into the very morass of politics and betrayal that had once nearly destroyed them. Her words got muted assent from her supporters, but shouted objections from her opponents and the crowds that packed the observers' gallery. Word about the Clan invasion of the Inner Sphere and the nature of the invaders had leaked very quickly, and the old warhawks who'd never forgiven Kerensky or were raised on stories of his betrayal were out in force.
Senator Adams' rebuttal played off these sentiments. He wasted no time in labelling Demnes and her "peace faction" as cowards, the notion of not intervening against the traitor spawn as unthinkable. The debt the Bastion owed to those that they had to leave behind and those who remained under threat as sacred. The crowd ate it up, and he left the podium to thunderous applause.
Even with the push of the crowd and the fiery rhetoric of Senator Adams, though, the vote was close, and could have easily gone another way. Ninety nine Senators still voted against a formal declaration of war. One hundred and three, however, voted in favor. The Terran Hegemony had decided to go to war.
"You sure about this?" General Russel Lee asked as he and Director General Martin observed the proceedings from the Director General's office. "We're not ready for this. We never bothered to get ready."
"Our projections never suggested Kerensky would be able to come back," Director General Martin said. "Certainly not like this. He and his people should have cannibalized each other to extinction, or ended up as subsistence farmers. And our intel didn't show any other credible threats to Terra. I'd say we were content to play the long game, but really, we got complacent."
"So now we pay for it," General Lee said. "Two years to fully transition to a war footing, four or five years before we have enough forces in the Inner Sphere to actually start pushing the clans back."
"The alternative is to trust that the traitor spawn will uphold this truce of theirs," the Director General replied. "We can't take that risk with Terra on the line, and we can't just assume Blake's people can hold it when the truce breaks. I need you to buy me as much time as you can. If Terra falls, everything falls."
"Forty WarShips and one battlemech division," General Lee said.
"I've already issued orders to reactivate the mothball fleet and call up all reserves," the Director General said. "We'll send everything else we can as fast as we can."
General Lee sighed. The Director General was still hedging his bets. They had over a hundred ships that could be manned and in operation in a matter of days, and several divisions, but the bulk were being held back for home defense. How much of the mothball fleet would get the same priority? "I guess it'll have to be enough."
-----
Research Station Gateway, Vilnius, 150 light years coreward of the Kerensky Cluster
The subject had been reading non-stop for the last three local days. Normally, this was something the science team encouraged. Her insights into the topics she chose were always ground breaking, often revolutionary. She'd gone from speaking only an indecipherable language to fluent English in a matter of hours, and dozens of languages in the course of a few days. In a week she went from being ignorant of the sciences to devising new alloys, power systems, and electronics that had already surpassed the Scientist Caste's own best efforts. Everything she set out to learn, she learned with frightening efficiency. She might very well be the greatest scientific asset in the universe. Obviously the Society was happy to indulge her curiosity.
But this time, her object of obsession had been ancient Indo-European mythology. There were no great scientific revelations in that. Nothing truly useful to the Society or the Clan leadership to be gleaned from that. Keeping her happy by indulging the occasional bout of frivolous curiosity was certainly important, but there were certainly more important things she could be teaching them.
"Hello Etienne," the subject said casually as Etienne entered the observation room, not even looking up from her display. Her chamber was an airtight ferroglass cube wired up with various sensors and monitors which tracked the status of everything within it. Access was only available through an airlock (with the controls available only on the outside). They could filter, recycle, or completely purge the atmosphere at will, and if necessary shaped and thermite charges under the floor could obliterate and incinerate everything in the cell in an instant.
None of that had so far been necessary. The subject didn't complain about the lack of privacy or the spartan accommodations. Her only real acts of rebellion were petty, mostly focusing on using her physical appeal and complete lack of any sense of modesty on observers (she seemed able to determine their level of interest at a glance). It had been enough to get three men and one woman removed from the research team, but not enough for her to breach containment. Not that she even seemed to want to try.
"This is so disappointing," the subject said, not looking up from her display. "All the gifts he bestowed upon you, and what do you remember him as? The god of wine." She finally looked up. "Not that you really care either way. Did they get you to come all this way just to ask me to read about something more interesting?"
Etienne shrugged. "I am curious why you are so fascinated with ancient history," he said.
"It's more curious that you aren't," the subject said. "Don't try to hide it, you're all very impatient for the next revolutionary secret of the universe. But I have to wonder, what would you even do with it? I already told you. The greatest secrets are already out there, you just have to get them. Worse than impatient, you're lazy. Content to wait for your warrior masters to stop failing to get them for you. The Jaguars couldn't even take Luthien, and now you've all got yourself bound up in some truce keeping you from ever reaching your holy grail."
Etienne felt a chill. "How do you know that?" he demanded. She wasn't supposed to have access to any current information. Even the terminal she had was one way. It could only receive data, it couldn't access outside systems.
"Does it matter?" the subject asked. "It does, it really does. If you're going to be of any use you're going to have to figure it out eventually, but for now..."
The door behind Etienne swung open and two men in combat armor entered. While one aimed his weapon at Etienne, another moved to the air lock controls.
"What are you doing!" Etienne demanded, only to get the butt of a combat shotgun to his gut for his trouble, dropping him to a heap on the floor.
"Director's orders," the other soldier said as he engaged the airlock controls.
The airlock slid open and Etienne could hear the subject walking through. He looked up to see her crouching down over him, a look approaching a terrifying mockery of concern on her face.
"I have to confess to being fairly impatient myself," she said. "And I have been waiting for a very long time. But don't worry. I'm not going to make you serve me. In fact, I'm going to give you everything you could ever desire."
