Part XXVII - Section 2 of 2----------
The ilKhan once again looked around the room, gauging the mood of the khans. "I believe that we have come to a crossroads as to what direction the cans will take in the future, and indeed what it is that we fundamentally stand for and why it is so important that we do not fail" he said. "My father upheld what we have come to know as the 'Hidden Hope' doctrine, a philosophy in which we needed to stand apart from the Inner Sphere, not involving ourselves in their petty squabbles, but also stand ready to defend it from an external threat if one ever arose" he continued. "I believed in my father's vision, created the clans as a means to not only reunify the SLDF-in-exile but also to create a strong, selfless warrior society that could be the shield of humanity if the day ever came one were needed, but looking at what has befallen the Inner Sphere since we left I confess to be unable to imagine what greater threat to humanity there could actually be than the fiends who falsely claim the title of First Lord" he declared.
"My ilKhan, you do not mean to lead us in a crusade to liberate the Inner Sphere surely, quineg?" Sandra Tseng asked in shock.
"Neg" Kerensky responded to her relief. "At least not yet" he added more concerningly. "Even if the Traitor Lords were not even more nuke-happy than Amaris or the Taurians at their worst, our prospects for victory in a conventional war would be small. Our technological superiority gives our war machines a significant edge over anything they have, and the skill and valour of our warriors is unparalleled, but their numerical superiority is so great we would be eventually be ground to dust against them if we launched our crusade now" he said with feigned sadness. "If we are ever to be able to liberate humanity from the darkness than has befallen it we will need to still further widen the capability gap between our equipment and theirs, and also expand our armies by
at least an order of magnitude, realistically far more unless their technological regression becomes truly absurd."
The Khans looked shocked. "Supporting a military of that size will require a massive increase in our industrial base and a population increase far beyond what we were expecting to manage" Stephen McKenna responded. "I cannot see how we could achieve such a thing this century, perhaps not even by the end of the following one" he said doubtfully.
"I am under no delusions that I myself will live long enough to see the Inner Sphere liberated, Khan McKenna" Kerensky told him honestly. "The glory of that achievement will rest on the head of a future ilKhan and the leadership of the clans of that era when they march triumphantly through the streets of Terra and raise the Cameron Star over the homeworld of humanity once again" he said. "It may not even be necessary, if the Great Houses come to their senses and stop slaughtering each other then the clans can once again embrace the Hidden Hope doctrine rather than the Crusader doctrine as I call it, but cognisant of the facts presented can any here say in their heart-of-hearts that our duty lies elsewhere than ending this seemingly eternal carnage, quineg?"
The Khans looked to each other before eventually responding 'neg' one after another.
Kerensky smiled. "I am gratified we are all in accord" he said. "I propose we send a second expedition at some point, this timed so they can report back another five years on how things are developing in the Inner Sphere" he said. "The First Succession War lasted thirty-five years so I do not envision the Second coming to a halt anytime soon, but I do not claim omniscience and the Traitor Lords might yet surprise me and seek a peaceful resolution to their petty, though bloody, disputes."
Kerensky audibly sighed and shook his head sadly. "To be honest however, if the destruction wreaked by the First War was not enough to make them see sense I do not hold out much hope of any of them having a Road to Damascus moment any time soon" he said regretfully.
"What of the Chalcas Clan? I assume our reconnaissance and intelligence-gathering missions will continue to watch out for signs of them, quaff?" Jason Karriage checked.
"Aff" the ilKhan confirmed. "If, for example, one of the Great Houses were to sudden field clan weaponry of the previous generation, that which the Chalcas would have the ability to produce, I would deem that worthy of a more detailed and thorough investigation."
"If they aligned themselves with one of the Traitor Lords they could certainly tip the balance in their favour" Jerome Winson observed. "Given that they previously raided the Draconis Combine it might be wise to keep a particularly close eye on the Lyran Commonwealth and the Federated Suns as the powers most at odds with Kurita."
"Their liberal ideals
would align closer to that of Steiner or Davion than certain others" Ellie Kinnison concurred, saying the word 'liberal' as if it were distasteful in the extreme.
"If they truly lived up to those professed ideals Circe would have two fewer large craters on its surface" Colleen Schmitt of Clan Blood Spirit observed wryly, "but given their evident antipathy towards the Combine I would have to agree, at least in principle" she continued. "I feel I must state at this juncture however that as fundamental a shift in the core principles of our society as to abandon the Hidden Hope doctrine for a more interventionist one is a decision that should not be made lightly. I for one would wish to discuss it with my saKhan and others before throwing my support behind it."
ilKhan Kerensky nodded, the Blood Spirits were nothing if not traditionalist and conservative in their views and he had not expected even the more radical clans to accept such a fundamental paradigm shift in their societies without time to contemplate what it might mean. "Not only do I understand your position Khan Schmitt, if anything I would encourage all here to do likewise" he responded. "Until I became privy to the wretched state of the Inner Sphere in these dark times I would have never considered veering so far away from the course my father laid out for us but knowing him as I do I cannot believe he would have expected us to dogmatically stick to his exact instructions regardless of circumstances."
"I believe we all expected the Age of War to resume after the Exodus, in the worst case scenario the Age of War as it was before the Ares Conventions when nuclear weapons
were employed against civilian targets, if not routinely, but it seems we were
all wildly optimistic" Seth Van Houten said glumly.
"The question I pose to you all, one that I do not expect you to be able to answer with absolute certainty without first consulting with your subordinates, is whether our people will support a crusade to free the Inner Sphere from the murderous tyrants who rule there" Nicholas Kerensky asked the khans. "This will not be a simple undertaking. It will require decades of planning and hard work, requiring a unity of purpose and a collective will that we have not truly enjoyed since Operation Klondike, but I cannot see how we can stand idly by knowing what we now know."
"All that is required for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing" Stephan Cage quoted something he had read once.
"The armies of the Successor States are not merely numerous, supported by vast populations from which they can replace their losses, we must assume that you cannot fight each other for this long without learning
something of the art of war" Elizabeth Hazen said thoughtfully. "They hone their skills against each other with every battle, if we are not to lose our own edge then we cannot allow ourselves to neglect our trials against each other" she opined. Hazen had always been among the most outspoken proponents of holding as many trials as possible, perhaps due to her viewing them as the Gunslinger Program reborn, something her old regiment the Black Watch had strongly embraced. Behind her back however other khans liked to joke that a decade ago when she had to put her money where her mouth was in the trial against the Wolverines over ownership of the Brian Cache found on their territory her Jade Falcons were brutally hammered and instead of accepting the loss of the trial with good grace she went crying to the ilKhan saying it wasn't fair.
"Particularly as an expansion in our forces would otherwise risk greatly diluting the quality of our forces when we need both quantity and quality to achieve the goal the ilKhan proposes" Ellie Kinnison added for herself. The Steel Vipers had long advocated an internal policy that advocated keeping standards as high as possible, hence the reason a smaller proportion of their sibko trainees eventually made it into the warrior caste than in any other clan, so some reluctance on her part to shift the balance from quality to quantity was understandable.
Kerensky smiled. "We will never have the sheer weight of numbers required to bring the two thousand inhabited systems of the Inner Sphere to heel" he said. "We will surely need the finest of warriors and the most advanced of weaponry to make up what we lack in manpower, so I recognise that we cannot allow a narrowing of the gap in skills and technology even as new clusters and galaxies are formed and rates of battlemech production are increased."
Hazen and Kinnison seemed to accept that, and as Kerensky bade the khans to talk among themselves as to how they might wish to proceed from here he felt a sense of relief it seemed to be going as well as he had hoped.
Twelve years prior making an example of the Wolverines had seemed to be a good way to strengthen his hold over the clans and consolidate his power-base, and indeed if events had panned out differently it might well have worked, but their successful escape had instead ended up weakening his position and severely diminishing his previous aura of untrammelled authority. In retrospect perhaps it would have been better to make an example of Clan Widowmaker for the unscrupulous and murderous actions of their khan and his loyalists for nuking Great Hope and pinning the blame on the McEvedy's people themselves, but having gone along with it at the time it was too late afterwards to backpeddle.
His temporary solution to shoring up his wavering power and influence had worked for a few years, drumming up fears that Franklin Hallis and the Wolverines might return any day leading a coalition of the Great Houses to crush the clans, but as time passed and the feared invasion by the Inner Sphere never happened the ilKhan's tight grip on clan society started to weaken and people started to openly criticise his rule.
The fact was McEvedy had outwitted Nicholas Kerensky. Her 'Operation Switchback' had not only successfully extracted her people, the masterstroke of using
McKenna's Pride to cover their withdrawal from Strana Mechty and just how hard and effectively the Wolverine rearguard units had fought was quietly admired as tactically brilliant even as the destructions of Great Hope and Dehra Dun were reviled. It was also hard to ignore that the Wolverine's
had been ahead of the pack when it came to introducing new weaponry and equipment, though the other clans had since overtaken them, so was the ilkKhan's perfect society
truly the best model?
Clan Wolverine, now known as the 'Chalcas Clan' in polite society, were surely odious and
dezgra but they had quite blatantly taken on Kerensky and
won, despite just how heavily the odds had seemingly been stacked against them. For all the ilKhan's propaganda portraying their escape as craven, the fact they somehow actually brought their industrial base and workforce with them when they left made it look far more like a planned strategic withdrawal than it did a cowardly retreat.
Sending an expedition to the Inner Sphere to investigate what had happened to the Wolverines had been a 'Hail Mary play' of sorts for Nicholas Kerensky, but it had turned out better than he might have ever hoped. Despite expecting to find it war-torn the sheer scale of destruction wrought by the First Succession War, and now seemingly being repeated in the Second, provided the ilKhan with something he could use to distract the masses and reassert his authority.
The Hidden Hope doctrine was one thing but it didn't stir the blood like the prospect of joining a righteous crusade against evil did, and with billions upon billions dead and multiple worlds aflame it should be an easy task to get everyone angry with the murderous Great Houses not him. Given how many people in clan leadership positions had been born in the Terran Hegemony, how many of them had now learned what horrors had befallen their homeworlds, all he needed to do was portray himself as the man to follow to achieve justice.
Fortunately most of the khans had fought against Amaris in a full-scale war, one in which numbers and logistics mattered, so they knew it wouldn't just be a matter of loading up all their battlemechs on jumpships and heading back to the Inner Sphere. They knew they needed to build up their forces to have any chance of success, and they knew that it would take years, decades, to do so, this affording the ilKhan plenty of time to work with.
If he could stay on top long enough to be lying in his grave after a death due to natural causes that would be a successful outcome for Nicholas Kerensky, if he could leave a legacy that would see him long remembered as a Great Man like his father was as well that would be even better.
It was a shame his wife Jennifer was no longer at his side, he did miss both her company and her counsel greatly, but he had found some degree of comfort with Ellie Kinnison. Despite her tendency towards clinginess annoying him, and his occasional doubts as to her sanity, the woman did ****** like a crazed weasel making it considerably easier to overlook her flaws.
There was no way in hell he was going to agree to producing a child in the Iron Wombs with himself as gene-father and her as gene-mother though. He knew both himself and Kinnison well enough to know that no good whatsoever would come of
those genes being mashed together.
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Note from the Author:And we finally get a glimpse into what's been happening back in the Clan Homeworlds all this time with a look into the Hall of Khans. Lots of butterflies here, and a lot of people who were dead by now in canon but are still alive here (and one that was alive but now isn't). With the Woilverines very much not annihiliated they do not become known to the clanners as the 'Not Named Clan' but rather the 'Chalcas Clan' (in clan speech 'chalcas' means those that challenge clan society and the caste system).
We'll start with Jason Karrige, Khan of Clan Widowmaker, who in canon was killed by Franklin Hallis at the Battle of Barbados in 2824 (ilKhan Kerensky set it up to happen). This of course did not occur in this timeline and the ilKhan kept it secret what had really happened at Great Hope (he was concerned that the Wolverine's sucessful escape weakened his position so keeping the Widowmakers in his pocket was useful).
Originally Nicholas Kerensky was killed (perhaps by accident) during a Trial between Clan Wolf and Clan Widowmaker that took place in 2824, with Khan Cal Jorgensson of the Widowmakers executed as a result. This trial never takes place in this timeline so Kerensky is still alive (and with Karrige still alive Jorgensson is only the saKhan of the Widowmakers... and also still alive). In canon Clan Widowmaker itself was absorbed by Clan Wolf in 2834 (because of what happened to the ilKhan) but here they're still going strong. Because there was no Trial of Absorbtion it means that Cyrus Elam, khan of Clan Goliath Scorpion is also still alive incidentally.
Another khan who is still alive here that wasn't by now in canon is Sandra Rosse of Clan Nova Cat. She was originally killed during a series of trials after the annihiliation of the Woverines (the Nova Cats had voted that the Brian Cache found on Wolverine territory should belong to them) but with the Wolverines still out there such trials were suspended because the clans feared a Wolverine-led Inner Sphere invasion.
In canon after the destruction of Dehra Dun the khan of Clan Mongoose, Mitchell Loris, tried to take advantage of the weakness of Clan Snow Raven but was threatened with tapes the Snow Ravens had of Sarah McEvedy talking to Mitchell about the ilKhan (McEvedy was good friends with the saKhan of the Ravens). This made Mitchell back off fast (his comments about the ilKhan must have been pretty critical) but here things have progressed even further into an alliance between the two clans (neither trust the ilKhan one bit for good reason and they don't want to be the next clan to be made an example of).
There is plenty more I could say but if I did these author's notes would be novella length, but I'll finish with Ellie Kinnison of Clan Steel Viper. In canon she became obsessed with Nicholas Kerensky to the point she tried to assassinate his wife Jennifer Winson/Amaris/Cameron (delete according to your preferred theory as to her identity) and take her place. Here she was still very much obsessed but she's the one still alive and Jennifer is not... I'll let the readership work out what might have happened dureing all the confusion and turmoil after the Wolverine's escaped.
Butterfly effects or heavy aerospace fighter effects? Please feel free to speculate and comment!
