BattleTech - The Board Game of Armored Combat
BattleTech Player Boards => Fan Fiction => Topic started by: Hotpoint on 04 January 2023, 13:05:51
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SPECIAL NOTE FOR BATTLETECH FORUM MEMBERS:
This story is also being posted elsewhere, which is why the Author's Notes are written in the way they are (for the benefit of those less familiar with the setting). This is a reboot of my story "Revenge of the Nerds" and will borrow from the earlier version occasionally.
The fates of both the 295th and 331st Divisions (which were coincidently both part of the 11th Army of the SLDF) were dictated by jumpdrives going wrong at an inopportune time. Having their fates altered by one of those jumpdrives going wrong at a different time seemed poetical.
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(https://imagizer.imageshack.com/v2/800x600q90/924/VHkE1L.jpg)
GUIDED BY THE LIGHT OF A (RED) CAMERON STAR - A BATTLETECH ALTERNATE UNIVERSE
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Part I
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"To hell with it. We'll make our own Star League with Blackjacks and Hussars"
Major-General Jenna Romanov - 2830 CE
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Militia Headquarters (Niops VII) - Niops Association – 2827
In most inhabited systems being assigned to keep a remote watch over the zenith and nadir points of the star, monitoring for the distinctive electromagnetic signature of an emergence-wave heralding a jumpship about to arrive, was an important and valued task.
Of course, in those systems jumpship arrivals were a considerably more frequent occurrence than they were for Niops, which had twice gone more than a decade without so much as a single visitor.
It might have been an urban legend but there was supposedly one poor son-of-a-bitch that had spent nearly his entire thirty-year career in the Niops Association Militia (NAM) manning the monitoring station who had never once detected an inbound jumpship signature. By sheer bad luck he hadn't ever been on duty when the sensors registered one but had stubbornly refused a transfer from the posting until he did.
That was not a retired military man whose stories were worth listening to in a bar.
If it wasn't for the fact that a uninvited vessel could be carrying a dropship or two full of pirate raiders the job wouldn't even exist, but because it was a dangerous galaxy and it could be pirates there was always some poor unfortunate non-com sat behind a screen on Niops VII bored out of their mind and praying for a transfer to a better assignment.
On that particular afternoon the poor schmuck watching the screen wasn't one of the usual non-coms who sat in the chair, but a junior officer instead. A sergeant had gone off sick and because Second-Lieutenant Jason Carmichael had done something to get on someone's shit-list, he wasn't entirely sure what, he was temporarily re-assigned to what was likely the most tedious job for at least thirty light-years in any direction.
It wasn't like there was much excitement to be had in any job in the NAM. You could count the number of attempted attacks on the system since the colony was founded on one hand, and none of those had managed to get anywhere close to making landfall. What Niops lacked in numbers of infantry, tanks or battlemechs for the ground-forces it more than made up for in squadrons of old, but still serviceable, aerospace fighters.
Carmichael had known full well that in signing up to become a mechwarrior he would likely never actually get to see combat in his machine, but at least it was a job that would pay the bills. More to the point he just didn't have the grades to land a gig in the science bureau where the big bucks were to be made and the rock-star astrophysicists had to beat the girls off with a stick.
Leaning back in his chair Carmichael took a long swig from a can of carbonated lemonade. It was a little too sweet for his tastes, and the chemist that developed the synthetic lemon flavour had apparently never tasted an actual lemon, but it was the best thing you could get from the vending machine out in the hall.
Barely more than a desk and three large computer display screens, positioned in a room not much larger than a supply closet, the Monitoring Station didn't even have a door because the Major in the office down the hall knew that if it did the man or woman sat at the screens would be inclined to use their time more productively and take a nap.
"Maybe if I pray really hard someone in the Free Worlds League will stumble across an old map of the Star League that has us on it and they'll invade?" Carmichael muttered to himself drily, putting down his can of soda. That possibility had certainly been a real concern when the news (much delayed) had arrived in Niops that the so-called 'Succession War' which had started in 2787, not after the Star League fell, had finally petered out in 2821. If the armies of House Marik weren't tied down fighting the Lyrans and Capellans on their borders they might look out towards the rim again instead, and it wasn't like the NAM could take on the military of a Great Power.
So far, no Free Worlds League though, fortunately for the people of the Niops Association. It could have been even worse than the Mariks of course, having them as your big neighbour was better than enjoying the dubious pleasure of the Draconis Combine or the Capellan Confederation breathing down your neck. The latter state even practised what was effectively a mild form of slavery, only a proportion of their population being granted citizenship and everyone else being placed into the 'Servitor Class' stuck doing all the crappy and dangerous jobs.
The Drac's under House Kurita didn't have servitors, but their numerous camps full of dissenting political prisoners were certainly demonstrative of a society that you wouldn't want to live in if you were used to a free press and liked to speak your mind.
Carmichael looked around the room, noting the insignias of both the Star League and the Terran Hegemony still emblazoned on everything, instead of the flag of the Niops Association itself. It was likely the Star League Defence Force that had installed all this equipment when the colony was founded over a century before in 2700 and nobody was going to bother replacing any of it it until it completely wore out.
When you got right down to it, in all likelihood Niops was effectively all that was left of the Terran Hegemony after the five big Successor States had divided it up amongst themselves. After all the destruction wreaked upon the Hegemony by the Amaris Coup, and then the fourteen-year-long campaign by the SLDF to take Terra and the other occupied worlds back from the bastard, it had been in no fit state to fight off the new set of invaders, though a few worlds had supposedly tried anyway and paid the price in nuclear fire.
Maybe if most of what was left of the Star League military hadn't opted to follow Kerensky out into the Deep Periphery the Hegemony might have survived, but by that point the SLDF wasn't in a position to take on everybody at once with some vaguely realistic chance of pulling off a win. They still had generally better equipment, that was how the Hegemony had brought everyone to heel in the first place establishing the Star League, but the other major interstellar powers had weight of numbers and each one a fierce desire to reign supreme in the Inner Sphere.
That fierce desire had resulted in them bludgeoning themselves for over thirty years with little to show for it. Well, little to show other than billions of deaths and the ownership of a few more planets, often highly irradiated by this point, that used to fly the Hegemony flag but now bent the knee to some foreign Lord sat on a throne in New Avalon, Luthien, Capella, Atreus or Tharkad.
Say what you like about the High Associator of Niops, effectively the Head of State of what had become a de facto independent nation now that the Hegemony was gone, he might have a really crummy title but at least he was born on Niops and was chosen by the local populace.
Carmichael yawned and stretched. This job would suit his brother down to the ground, he decided, plenty of time to sketch out that stupid novel he was always talking about writing. The alternate history one where Kerensky is killed in the fighting on Terra just after he took down Amaris, General DeChavilier takes over command of the SLDF and digs in to defend the Hegemony against all comers.
"I should have remembered to bring my noteputer, tried to get a new high-score in Reunification Wars III, or at least been able to check my messages" Carmichael said to himself regretfully before he picked up his soda again, downed what was left of the contents in a couple of gulps and lobbed the empty container into the trashcan. "With an aim like that I'm wasted sitting anywhere but the cockpit of a Highlander."
"You'll be lucky if they let you command a Burke, Lieutenant" a voice from behind interrupted his thoughts. "Remain seated, that's exactly where your ass is supposed to be located" it continued when Carmichael started to rise.
"Major Heath" Carmichael greeted the woman that was his temporary CO while on this, hopefully also temporary, assignment. She had an office down the corridor and spent most of her time reviewing paperwork which likely explained why she often looked on the verge of emptying her service-pistol into the next person that failed to return a request for leave in triplicate. She now stood in the doorway to the Monitoring Station with a soda of her own in her hand, also the lemonade because it really was the best thing in the vending machine.
"Having fun Lieutenant?" Heath asked wryly.
"Yes Ma'am" Carmichael replied.
"Strange, it doesn't mention a masochistic streak on your psyche profile" Heath responded. "I've spent a good few hours in the chair myself, makes you totally reassess your definition of what it is to be bored out of your skull."
"Far be it from me to disagree with a superior officer Ma'am" Carmichael replied flatly. "I've got to ask, why not just get a damn computer to do this job instead?"
"One was supposed to be delivered from Tau Ceti just before the New Vandenberg Uprising began back in '65 and because of that it never got here" Heath explained.
"Then why not just make our own?" Carmichael asked reasonably. Despite being way out in the Periphery, beyond the accepted boundary of the Inner Sphere, Niops wasn't a primitive, barely developed low-tech backwater. They could still make things that were increasingly considered lostech elsewhere, thanks to all the fighting and economic disruption.
Heath shrugged. "Always something higher priority for the Project Workshops and there's always an extra body available to put in the chair in the meantime" she told him. "If nothing important goes wrong and needs replacement parts from the Workshops for a couple of years I guess they'll make us one, but don't get your hopes up."
"If I'm still here in a couple of weeks I'll be considering resigning my commission" Carmichael told her, not entirely in jest. "Why don't they just rotate this duty?"
"Because there's also usually a few people that are either no use for anything else or have done something deserving of punishment" Heath replied. "Assuming you're one of the latter group I also assume you won't do whatever it was again."
"I don't know what I did" Carmichael replied honestly.
"Then it's likely that after you've eventually escaped this tedium that I'll be seeing you again" Heath told him, the seldom-seen smile that had now appeared on her face demonstrating that his personal purgatory had brightened up her whole day. "See you in an hour to make sure you haven't fallen asleep or put your gun in your mouth" she told him. "Have fun Lieutenant" she added with a chuckle as she walked off.
"I await your next visit with joyful expectation Major" Carmichael replied sardonically.
"That sarcasm might be the reason you're in the chair Lieutenant" Heath called back.
Carmichael blinked. Crap, she might be right, he thought to himself, assembling a mental list of higher ranked officers he might have sassed recently.
Before he could think of a third name for the list the central computer screen lit up followed by the other two as numbers and text started to scroll upwards. "Oh shit!" Carmichael quietly swore as the sensors reported an emergence wave at the Zenith point. "MAJOR WE HAVE AN INBOUND JUMPSHIP" he called out as he began to run through the checklist of what to do.
"This had better not be you yanking my chain Lieutenant" Heath replied tersely, shortly before she stuck her head back around the empty doorway. "Guess not" she continued in surprise as she saw what was on the screens and stepped inside to stand over him. "Bring an optical telescope to bear" she ordered. "The star-gazers won't like us re-directing one of their precious orbitals but it's not like the stars won't be there to look at tomorrow."
"Already on it Ma'am" Carmichael replied, taking remote control of not only one of the dropship-sized telescopes orbiting Niops VII but also sending an alert to all NAM installations of the inbound ship. At least the fighter-jocks would have some fun, getting ready to make an interception if necessary.
One of the inexplicably weird things about the Kearny-Fuchida jumpdrive was that it was demonstrably provable that the emergence wave of a jump actually started to form at the destination before the incoming vessel made the jump. This meant that in one sense Carmichael knew about the jumpship having made a successful jump before it's crew even did.
It was often said that if you kept too strong a mental grip on the basic principle of causality then the K-F equations were going to be beyond you because effect demonstrably preceded cause.
Somewhat less weird was that the power of the detectible emergence wave correlated to the mass of the inbound jumpship, and how far it had jumped. This gave you the opportunity to guess what might be on the way before it appeared. Based on the readings Carmichael was looking at it could be a massive Monolith transport jumping ten light years, but it would be far more likely to be a smaller Invader jumping the safe maximum of thirty.
Thanks to the distances concerned what they were looking at had actually happened minutes earlier, the standard jump-points being located hundreds of millions or even billions of kilometres from the star because jumping in anywhere close to a gravity well was dangerous to the point of being suicidal. When you're dealing with literally astronomical distances light moved inconveniently slow and you spent a lot of time looking into the past even relatively locally.
"It's an Invader class" Carmichael noted, hardly a surprise because nearly half of all jumpships in the Inner Sphere were Invaders. Despite the menacing name they were actually just civilian transports, although that didn't mean the three dropships she was carrying weren't full of people with guns and hostile intent.
The image of the Invader appeared on one of the screens and most planetary defence forces would kill for a telescope with a resolution which could make a ship that far away look so sharp and clear. One benefit of being a colony originally built for astronomers and astrophysicists was that sensors designed for scientific research worked pretty well in a military application too.
"Incoming tight-beam radio transmission from our guest. Looks like Niops Recognition Codes" Carmichael reported. "Really, really old ones. Also we're receiving a follow-up hail from a Captain Simon Mitchell… isn't that the retired SLDF Navy guy that showed up last year to see if anyone had nuked us yet?"
Heath laughed. "Yeah, that's him" she confirmed. "I was on duty when he jumped in broadcasting codes we hadn't used since before Amaris" she recalled. "I mean they weren't valid but it made us curious enough to ask how the hell he had them."
"Turned out he used to deliver cargo to Niops before the war right?" Carmichael remembered seeing that on the holovision news. That sort of thing was a big story in a system like Niops where, unlike most of the Inner Sphere, the newscasters weren't reporting how many towns and cities were blasted to rubble that day.
"Yep, basically said it was nice to see we were still here and then asked if Niops was open to accepting refugees from the Terran Hegemony if he could find any" Heath recalled. "The High Associator eventually sent a reply saying we had already taken in more refugees than we could easily handle, but if they were from the former Hegemony worlds we could take a few, as long as they had at least one person with useful technical or scientific skills per family anyway."
Carmichael nodded. "Already got all those Capellans that turned up before I was born to handle the unskilled labour I guess" he observed. It was the arrival of those refugees fleeing the Succession War, bearing personal accounts of the immense scale of the destruction being wrought, that had convinced Niops to remain isolationist and firmly off the grid. Weirdly enough the Capellans were only too enthused to being taken in, despite not being accorded full citizenship rights by the Hegemony descended majority population who were suspicious of outsiders. It turned out they were just happy to get any rights at all, because for most of them that in itself was a big step-up compared to back home.
"We're receiving a follow-up communication from the jumpship, still text only" Carmichael announced. "Message reads: 'Hope the invite still stands, sorry about interpreting it a little broadly but it's easier to ask for forgiveness than permission. Also, we've been looking and we can't find anywhere else to go'."
"What the hell do you think he means by that?"
"Your guess is as good as mine Ma'am, probably better, you know the guy and I don't" Carmichael replied with a shrug. "Wait a second, I'm detecting additional emergence waves appearing at the Zenith and Nadir points" he stated, managing to keep his tone level and professional. "We have a large number of inbound jumpships and if they're all arriving from the same system he did then some of them are very, very large."
"Define large"
"Like that ****** Black Lion Class battlecruiser that just jumped in… and a Texas Class Battleship…and now a freaking McKenna!" Carmichael exclaimed. "Detection System is also showing multiple transport jumpships now appearing, plus additional warship contacts including at least one more cruiser and several destroyers" he reported then frowned. "This isn't some training simulation you organised to rag on the new guy is it Ma'am?" thinking he should ask just to be sure.
"No" Heath replied flatly. "No, it is not."
"Now picking up IFF transponders, all vessels showing as belonging to the SLDF Eleventh Army" Carmichael told her, taking the Major at her word. "Do you think Kerensky's people have finally come back?" he asked, it had been over forty years since they vanished but much of the Inner Sphere had been expecting them to return ever since, likely in a bad mood when they saw what had happened to the Terran Hegemony in their absence.
"Who else could it be?" Major Heath replied reasonably, it wasn't like any of the Successor States could have fielded hardware like that even before they lost most of their fleets fighting each other. "I hope you're still keeping all other NAM installations sites appraised" she checked.
"Feeding them everything I have. Aerospace Fighter Command must be crapping themselves" Carmichael reasoned, imagining some poor fighter-jockey being told he might be scrambled to take on a fleet of warships and their own complements of aerospace fighters.
"I'll get on the horn personally to Brigadier Nellis from my office, if the ghost of First Lord Richard Cameron jumps in riding a magic unicorn yell out" Heath told him wryly, shaking her head in disbelief as to what was happening.
"Wait, we're receiving a communication from the battlecruiser. Vessel is claiming to be the SLS Michigan, message reads as coming from a Major-General Jenna Romanov of the 295th Battlemech Division and counter-signed by an Acting Major-General Franklin Hallis of the 331st. They're requesting permission to come down in a dropship to meet the High Associator and the ranking officer of the Niops Association Militia."
"Now I really need to talk to Nellis" Heath responded with a grimace before running out the door.
"I'll keep an eye out for the Spectral First Lord on the Unicorn, Ma'am" Carmichael called after her, grinning as he realised that he was going to have the best story to tell of anyone that had ever sat in this damn chair.
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Note from the Author:
This a a reboot of a story I had running over on Battletech Forums and which I realised was wasting its premise and the setting, this version should be inordinately better.
If the Battletech Universe (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BattleTech) is unfamiliar to you then to give you an idea it has been described as 'Game of Thrones with Big Stompy Robots'. After the fall of what was a powerful central government, one led by the Lord of a Great House, the other Great Houses fight over the scraps via any means at their disposal (armies, wealth, spies treachery). Pirates and Mercenaries are a common feature of this setting, the mass slaughter of civilians is common and there are even dragons (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Branth) you can ride (well on one world there are).
Battletech is not however 'Game of Thrones with Big Stompy Robots'. Battletech predates the first book of A Song of Ice and Fire (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Song_of_Ice_and_Fire) being published by over a decade, so therefore in fact Game of Thrones is Battletech without Big Stompy Robots (and Tywin Lannister only wishes he was Hanse Davion of the Federated Suns).
That being established the year is now 2827. The Star League (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Star_League) fell just over forty years ago, the Terran Hegemony (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Terran_Hegemony) was mostly destroyed by the Successor States (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Successor_States) fighting over who got to take the biggest chunk of it during the (First) Succession War (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/First_Succession_War) that raged from 2786 to 2821, after General Aleksandr Kerensky (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Aleksandr_Kerensky) led most of what was left of the Star League Defense Force (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Star_League_Defense_Force) off to places unknown after winning the Amaris Civil War (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Amaris_Civil_War), and out in the periphery near the edge of the Free Worlds League (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Free_Worlds_League) a tiny single-system polity called the Niops Association (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Niops_Association) tries to ignore the rest of the Inner Sphere (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Inner_Sphere) as it studies astronomy and astrophysics.
Founded by the Terran Hegemony under the auspices of the Star League as a self-sufficient and oversized scientific research project, one intended for a multi-generational study of stellar evolution, Niops survived the Amaris Civil War and the Succession War by making sure not to get noticed in all the commotion. This worked so well that they ended up practically all what was left of the Star League (and the Terran Hegemony) and didn't suffer the catastrophic fall in their tech-base that most everyone else did (it helped that they had a weirdly disproportionate number of very smart people to start with).
In canon the Association continued on like this right through the Second (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Second_Succession_War) and Third (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Third_Succession_War) Succession Wars as well, but in canon a ships jumpdrive (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Kearny-Fuchida_Drive) failed later than it does here in this AU (all will be explained later, it makes sense, honest). As a result of this mechanical fault a certain group has to take a detour which ultimately results in them running into another group... and well the 295th Battlemech Division (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/295th_BattleMech_Division) under Major-General Jenna Romanov (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Jenna_Romanov) and the 331st Royal Battlemech Division (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/331st_Royal_BattleMech_Division) under Acting Major-General Franklin Hallis (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Franklin_Hallis) turn up at Niops looking for a new home, and with a few ideas and plans about the future.
Screw the Roman cosplayers of the Marian Hegemony (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Marian_Hegemony), all those worlds are rightful Niops Association Hegemony clay!
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ahem,
EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEHHHHHHHhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
[insert expression of enthusiastic joy at a new Hotpoint story!!!]
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I give you the Niops planetary system, which I shamelessly borrowed much of from the real-life TRAPPIST-1 star system. TRAPPIST is also a Red Dwarf star with three worlds in the Goldilocks Zone (not too hot and not too cold) but because it's a M8V Class Star (instead of a somewhat larger, and warmer M5V like Niops) the Goldilocks Zone there is the 4th, 5th and 6th planets rather than the 5th, 6th and 7th for our own subject.
I've reordered a few of the planets in their orbits to better suit Niops as well, and tweaked some things on occasion, but it works pretty well I'd say.
(https://imagizer.imageshack.com/v2/800x600q90/922/JrbcW2.jpg)
All the planets are tidally locked to the star except for Niops VII because it's the furthest out. This helps explain why the majority of the population of the Niops Association live on the coldest of the three inhabitable worlds in their system (tidally locked worlds with oceans and an atmosphere enjoy extreme weather as a result).
Niops I, II & III are hot as hell (Niops is only a Red Dwarf but they orbit really close to it). Niops IV is similar to Venus (thick, toxic atmosphere), V, VI & VII are inhabitable but only VII is really hospitable (it's cold but it doesn't have rainfall in some places that resembles a waterfall more than it does a storm).
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1 ping only
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More please
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Great start, looking forward to this. :beer:
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GREAT TO SEE YOU BACK!!
"Battletech is not however 'Game of Thrones with Big Stompy Robots'. Battletech predates the first book of A Song of Ice and Fire being published by over a decade, so therefore in fact Game of Thrones is Battletech without Big Stompy Robots (and Tywin Lannister only wishes he was Hanse Davion of the Federated Suns)."
i flew my soda all over the table. that is soooo perfect.
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Cool! Cannonshop's enthusiasm alone is enough for me to follow this further, though I'll say I'd have watched it without a post aside from that... :thumbsup:
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Wolverines and a second group that otherwise would have died out and at Niops hopefully in time to balance out their xenophobic isolationist scientist ways. Yeah this could get interesting very fast.
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Definitely enjoying this so far. Should be fun to see how the two cultures end up meshing.
Wolverines and a second group that otherwise would have died out and at Niops hopefully in time to balance out their xenophobic isolationist scientist ways. Yeah this could get interesting very fast.
Niops isn't exactly xenophobic at this point in history. Isolationist, sure, but that's not surprising for a tiny high-tech enclave in the midst of the First and Second Succession Wars.
Where Niops become xenophobic is after the Jihad, where mercenaries they hired worked with one of the locals to try to overthrow the government, where the Marian Hegemony harmed their industrial infrastructure, and where the Word of Blake then went nuke-happy on them, resulting in Niops basically resembling the Fallout series for a good 60-80 years, during which the Free Worlds League and Republic of the Sphere both did their best to exploit them in the name of "stablizing" them, which, as we note, they didn't really succeed at.
Even then, though, what's Niops mainly up to these days? Mining germanium and splitting profits with Interstellar Expeditions. That's not exactly xenophobic.
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Tag
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Taking another route to RotN? Now with Wolverines + 1?
Target locked.
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Nice premise and a strong start! Thanks for sharing.
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Part II
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"Buffalo Meadows orbited a red dwarf as well, so settling down on Niops VII felt almost like coming home. Better food here though, and a lot more kids running around."
Commodore Sarah Mbeki - 2830 CE
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Robert H Goddard Spaceport (Niops VII) - Niops Association – 2827
Standing beside the small vertical-takeoff-and-landing aircraft that had delivered him to the edge of the massive landing pad, the Goddard spaceport having been constructed decades before from a mix of reinforced concrete, fused black stone and some skilled civil-engineering, High Associator Giles Olson squeezed his eyes shut and steadied his breathing. He had always known this day would come, though he expected it would be the military of the Free Worlds League that he or his successors would be facing when it did, but that certainly didn't make it any easier.
Once belonging to the militia, the Vector VTOL which had picked him up from his home in the capital and then flew him the fifteen kilometres out to the port had been nicknamed 'Bureaucrat One' many years before and the moniker stuck. Painted blue and bearing the crest of the office of the High Associator, the VTOL's nickname was itself a reminder of how a position that was once just that of the director of a long-term research project had only become that of a Head-of-State due to external factors beyond their control.
This sort of thing was really beyond the pay-grade of a radio-astronomer who had only really turned to politics because his wife pushed him into it, Olson thought to himself glumly.
Another VTOL, also a Vector but this one still painted in its original NAM colours rested beside 'Bureaucrat One', having arrived slightly earlier bringing Brigadier-General Nellis, the ranking officer of the militia, with it. The other Vector was also armed, unlike Olson's own, though what little firepower it boasted was utterly dwarfed by what was heading their way.
"It's a Lee Class military dropship, pretty much state-of-the-art just before Amaris sent the Star League spinning straight to hell" Brigadier-General Nellis observed professionally as the massive craft they were there to greet began its final descent high overhead. "Seventeen thousand tons, armed to the teeth and it could be carrying a full battalion of mechs plus a squadron of aerospace fighters aboard" he told Olson sounding almost blasé about it all. "Much bigger than anything we've got, armed or not."
Because of the ongoing need to transfer goods and people around the system the Niops Association had maintained a small number of dropships of varying types themselves over the years, a couple of which could be seen resting on the pad nearby. With the notable exception of a single old Confederate the militia used to shuffle war-machines between Niops V, VI and VII, none were of a military nature however and that one exception was pretty small, massing less than two-thousand tons.
"I'm more concerned about that warship that escorted it here from the jump-point, the one that's in geosynchronous orbit above us" Olson replied, opening his eyes again and pointing to the sky.
Nellis chuckled mirthlessly. "It's only a corvette, if they were really trying to scare the crap out of us it would be a battleship aiming Heavy Naval PPC's down at the capital, Sir" he said fatalistically. "As per your orders I made sure to have every bird we have either in orbit or ready to scramble, carrying all the heavy ordinance we could hang off them, just to make sure our guests know they can't foist just any terms they want on us" he informed the High Associator.
"I assume you also re-deployed our ground forces away from civilian areas as instructed?" Olson checked. "I'm hoping these people aren't savages like the Mariks were at New Dallas, but in case they are I don't want nuclear bombs dropping on our towns because there's a few soldiers there too."
"Yes Sir, all our battlemechs, tanks and infantry are now dug-in at least fifteen kilometers from what few urban centres we have." Nellis confirmed. Even in a system like Niops, where the standard stellar jump-points were only a couple of days journey by dropship to the inhabited planets, that still gave the defender plenty of time to prepare. Of course, hostile forces often preferred jumping in to so-called 'Pirate Jump Points' for that exact reason since arriving at a lagrange point much closer to your objective did made for a somewhat riskier jump, but also an easier fight planetside since the defenders had considerably less time to prepare a warm welcome.
"Not that we could defend the towns anyway, given how few battlemechs and tanks we actually have" Olson remarked sadly.
"Urban warfare favours the defending side, but you're still correct in this instance, Sir" Nellis concurred. "On a more positive note we've also rigged the Project Workshops on all three worlds with explosives, so you can threaten to blow them up if you need to play hard-ball in negotiations" he added.
The High Associator nodded. The Project Workshops, bespoke manufacturing facilities that could reproduce near any piece of machinery or circuitry, were in some ways the technological crown jewels of the Niops Association. They had made it possible to maintain the system's high tech-base and standard of living despite being cut-off from any possible resupply of equipment. They had even produced the majority of the handful of Highlander and Black Knight battlemechs which represented the main striking power of the NAM's ground forces.
Mass production was not something a Project Workshop were optimised for, however. In that role they were far inferior to even the assembly lines of the Successor States, let alone the slick automated robot factories of the former Terran Hegemony. That being said however, while they couldn't make anything in quantity quick or efficiently they could however make you most anything, just as long as they had the schematics for it, or an example to reverse-engineer.
If you wanted a gauss rifle for a Highlander, a new fusion engine for a cargo dropship, a replacement radio-telescope or a complex part for a Hyperpulse Generator then a Project Workship could make it for you. If however you needed a hundred of any of them you'd better be prepared to wait a good long while because it was, in effect, extremely high-tech artisanal production that was partially hand-built.
High Associator Olson suddenly laughed causing Brigadier Nellis to regard him quizzically. "Something strike you as funny, Sir?" Nellis asked wondering what that could possibly be under the circumstances.
"It just occurred to me that I should have listened to that maniac that wanted to build a few nuclear devices to crack asteroids for mining" Olson explained his laughter. "They would have come in handy right now to improve our negotiating position."
"Or just the knowledge they existed could have gotten us glassed from orbit unless we had scores of them plus effective delivery systems" Nellis suggested just before the deafening sound generated by the fusion engines of the dropship coming into land made continuing the conversation impossible for now.
Olson and Nellis covered their ears with their hands as the landing gear of the massive spheroid spacecraft deployed and with engines being smoothly throttled back, so as not to completely scorch the surface of the landing pad, the Lee class dropship set down as gently as seventeen thousand tons worth of metal, plastic, glass and ceramics actually could.
"Think I should wave a white flag?" Olson asked, both of them uncovering their ears as the engines shut down completely. "I've got a handkerchief in my pocket."
"I doubt they think we're coming here expecting them to surrender so it's rather a moot point Sir" Nellis replied wryly as one of the battlemech-sized hatches on the dropship began to open and an unloading ramp started to slide down.
"I should have stayed in radio-astronomy" Olson muttered to himself, setting off towards the ramp with Nellis beside him.
"If it makes you feel better, if they decide to vaporise us on a whim with one of those big Particle Projector Cannon mounts I've got a battery of artillery set up and ranged in that will unload a whole heap of shells on them in response" Nellis told him.
"I'm sure the expanding cloud of hot gas that was once me will be very pleased about that" High Associator Olson replied sardonically.
"My cloud will be" Brigadier Nellis responded rather more brightly, sounding sincere enough about it that Olson seriously doubted the man's sanity.
By the time they reached the dropship four figures, three male one female, had already descended the ramp, all wearing SLDF uniforms, two of them in army fatigues and the other two in the jumpsuits favoured by the navy.
"I feel overdressed" Nellis quipped since he himself was wearing his dress uniform, although it was at least the same colour as their army fatigues, the standard olive drab of the Star League military which looked even more dull than normal given how bright, or rather dim, the local star was.
If a young child on Niops was told by their parents not to look directly at the sun a reply of 'Why not' was not an unreasonable response. It was some of the fluorescent fittings inside that could hurt your eyes, particularly in brightly lit laboratories, workshops and efficient hydroponic farms.
One of the two men wearing white navy jumpsuits stepped ahead of the others. "High Associator Olson?" he queried.
"I am" Olson confirmed.
"Nice to finally meet you in the flesh, we've only conversed via radio before, and then with a delay" the man told him, smiling. "I'm Captain Simon Mitchell, not quite as retired from the Star League Navy as I made out to be when I jumped into Niops last year."
"Apparently not" Olson replied drily.
"Apologies for the minor deceit there but I'm sure you can see why it was necessary now" Mitchell continued unabashed. "It's even colder here than I remembered it being, of course I'm a few years older now so that could be the problem" he admitted. "Town's grown a lot too, got a good look dropping in from orbit."
"You can ramble later, just get on with it please Captain" the only woman in the group spoke up impatiently.
"Damn kids have no respect these days either" Mitchell complained, grinning.
"I'm eighty-nine" the woman retorted.
"And I'm a hundred and seven so the point stands Ma'am" Mitchell replied, smirking
"Mitchell" the other man wearing a naval jumpship chided with a distinct edge to his tone.
Mitchell straightened up. "Sorry Admiral" he responded, abashed. "Ahem" he cleared his throat. "High Associator Olson may I present our ranking commanding officer, Major-General Jenna Romanov" he formally introduced the woman who now stepped forward herself.
"I apologise for Captain Michell's irreverence, I'm afraid he's long past the point in his career that he takes protocol seriously and long past the age where threatening him with a firing squad isn't an exercise in futility" Romanov said with a resigned sigh. "May I present my senior staff, Acting Major-General Franklin Hallis and Admiral Zoltán Bremman."
Olson acknowledged them with a nod to each. "My military advisor and head of the Niops Association Militia, Brigadier-General Craig Nellis" Olson introduced his own companion in turn.
"Major-General" Nellis recognised Romanov's rank with a salute that she returned.
"Nice to see you're still wearing SLDF colours here Brigadier-General Nellis" Romanov observed. "Sorry I don't still have my own dress-uniform but it got recycled years ago" she said. "We should get onto business I suppose" she continued, looking back to Olson.
"I confess I'm dying to ask what brought you here, where you've been all this time and why you're back now, but that can all wait for the moment, Major-General Romanov" Olson addressed her, cutting to the chase. "What terms are you offering?" he asked flatly. "Please bear in mind that Niops is not undefended and we all fully prepared to destroy our own most valuable facilities to prevent them falling into hostile hands intact."
"Terms?" Romanov queried.
"The terms you wish to dictate for our surrender" Olson explained, wondering why he had to.
Romanov suddenly burst out laughing causing Bremman and Mitchell to do so as well, for his part Hallis just smiled.
"Something strike you as funny?" Olson wanted to know, realising he was now in the position Nellis had been not so long ago in not getting what seemed to be a private joke.
"Yes, I'm afraid you've really gotten the wrong end of the stick here, High Associator" Romanov told him once she managed to stop laughing. "We've been poking around the Inner Sphere for nearly two years looking for what's left of the Star League, or rather the Terran Hegemony, and you appear to be the only part left that isn't near-utterly destroyed or else under foreign occupation" she told him. "You've also continued to govern yourselves as a civilian administration within the bounds of the Hegemony legal system, making you de-facto, and arguably de-jure, the Terran-Hegemony-in-Exile, whether or not you've ever really thought of yourselves that way."
Olson looked confused by the way this seemed to be going. "What are you saying exactly?"
"That we've concluded that, by default, the Government of the Niops Association is effectively the Government of the Terran Hegemony and therefore the High Associator, that being you in this instance, is also the Director-General."
"I'm sorry?" Olson replied, nonplussed.
"Perhaps this will clear things up" Romanov replied, giving Mitchell a nod.
"Atten-hut" Mitchell said loudly, himself and the others snapping to attention. "Present arms" he continued, all four of the SLDF officers then saluting.
Saluting Olson.
"Eleventh Army, Star League Defence Force reporting for duty, Director-General" Romanov addressed Olson formally. "With your permission we will start deploying aerospace and naval forces to help defend the system immediately, and in conjunction with Brigadier-General Nellis begin making plans to integrate our ground forces with those of the Niops Association Militia."
Olson stared at her for an extended period of time as his mind caught up. "Shouldn't you be trying to track down someone named Cameron?" he asked plaintively, taking them at their word for now.
"Amaris was a little too thorough unfortunately, the only ones left are very distant cousins" Romanov replied sadly. "The closest might be the Windsor-Camerons on Terra, but we suspect they'll be under the thrall of the damn phone company by now" she said. "A figurehead to rally around would be great, but not if they think the sun shines out of Jerome Blake's ass."
"This isn't some ploy or trick is it, get us to lower our guard then stomp us?" Olson asked, pretty reasonably he thought.
"No Sir" Romanov replied, shaking her head. "We'd like to stay, establish a new home here, but if you order us to leave and never come back we'll do so" she told him honestly. "I mean we could invade and take over but that would make us the kind of people we just don't want to be."
"Some of us have a recent history having to deal with a tyrannical ****** that thinks might makes right and he's not someone we care to emulate" Acting Major-General Franklin Hallis spoke up for the first time. "We do have some ideas for the future though Sir" he continued to Olson. "It would be a real shame to let all this starlift capacity and firepower go to waste, but that'll be your call."
"At least a half-dozen unclaimed systems with habitable planets within easy reach of here to antispinward" Admiral Bremman chipped in. "Only small existing populations for the most part, if any people at all, who could be swayed to accept protectorate status by the promise of jobs, protection from pirates and a generally higher standard of living."
"It's Free Real Estate" Hallis agreed, nodding enthusiastically. "We strongly advise it would be best to plant a flag there before the damn Mariks do, get a foothold we can develop into something with a big future and prevent Niops being surrounded by the Free Worlds League as well."
Now utterly dumbfounded Olson looked from one of them to the other trying to determine if this was all some bizarre dream, or else the most monumental practical joke played on anyone in the history of the Inner Sphere.
"Oh, there's one more thing I'd better mention as a matter of some priority" Hallis continued. "Captain Mitchell told us that when he was here originally, transporting cargo to and from Niops for the SLDF, back at the dawn of time when battlemechs ran on clockwork, you had something called a 'Project Workshop' that he got a tour of because there wasn't much else to do."
"Yes. Yes we do" Olson responded guardedly.
"And that it could make just about anything?" Romanov checked for herself.
Olson nodded. "Within certain limitations but broadly yes" he confirmed.
"Great because it would make it much easier if we could borrow it to make the replacement parts we need to fix our Potemkin Class and then use it to bring the rest of my division and its gear here" Romanov told him. "The alternative would be having to send all our available jumpships back to the Draconian Drift in order to collect them, instead of just one carrying spare-parts and a bunch of engineers and technicians to help speed up repairs."
Hallis nodded. "Even after getting their other ships running again after forty years, the ones which did have functioning jumpdrives I mean, we didn't have enough starlift between us to give all of the 295th a ride" he explained, "much less haul away all those battlemechs gathering dust out there" he continued sadly. "We can really use them too, hence wanting to go back quickly."
"How many battlemechs are we talking about?" Nellis queried, intrigued. He doubted it would be anything close to a full division's worth, not after the losses taken by the SLDF fighting against Amaris, but even a couple of battalions would represent a lot of striking power these days.
"Six regiments worth" Romanov told him. "Near pristine condition, completely wasted on some rock orbiting a red-dwarf in the periphery" she opined. "I mean a different rock, orbiting a different red dwarf in the periphery" she corrected herself for clarity.
Nellis raised his eyebrows. "You have six regiments worth of battlemechs?" he asked in shock.
"No, the 295th has six regiments, which is admittedly more than twice what my 331st can boast, but then again we do have better machines."
"Well yes, obviously. The 331st was a Royal Division" Nellis replied having made sure to brush up on them before the meeting. The 'Royal' commands of the SLDF were given upgraded equipment than regular line formations like the 295th.
"No, I mean well yes we do have a fair number of SLDF Royals as well, but I was referring to the new stuff, the gear that was developed after we followed Kerensky Senior off on his Exodus" Hallis told him. "Major-General Romanov's people missed out on all that."
"From what you've told us that seems like a blessing" Romanov interjected.
"I doubt you'd have gotten along well with Nicky K so yes" Hallis confirmed with considerable understatement.
Olson looked from one to the other. "Wait. Didn't you both come from the same place?" he queried, confused as ever.
"No, his people went with Kerensky when he left the Inner Sphere, my people tried to, but we were delayed in joining them before they set out" she explained. "We followed later, hoping to catch up" she continued. "Then one of our damn jumpships broke down only a few jumps out into the periphery and, because it was the Potemkin I mentioned before, and was carrying about two-thirds of our dropships, we had a choice of either settling down out in the wilderness or ferrying everyone back to the Inner Sphere a few at a time with what working ships we still had. Long story short, we settled down and played farmer for forty years until Hallis and his people ran into us while they were running away from Kerensky Junior."
"I'd prefer to call it a secession, or at least a tactical withdrawal, Ma'am" Hallis responded defensively.
"So would I in your shoes, but that doesn't mean I'd be right" Romanov told him, making Hallis wonder if she had always been cranky and mean-spirited sometimes or if that streak in her character had developed with age.
"Ironically the reason we ended up running into them was because one of our jumpships broke down heading in the opposite direction back to the Inner Sphere decades later" Admiral Bremman remarked. "It necessitated a major detour in our planned route that happened to put them in our path."
"Love the symmetry, but not necessarily the maintenance crews" Captain Mitchell joked before taking notice of the increasingly confused and clueless expression on the High Associator's face. The man was clearly trying to understand what they were all talking about without the benefit of decades of backstory to fill in the gaps. "It's all a long, convoluted tale of woe Sir, and if you're interested in hearing it all then you might want to start by inviting us to stay in your lovely star system" he told him, the old man putting on the most persuasive and winning smile he could, being very glad he still had all his teeth.
These being the teeth Mitchell was also lying through about the system being lovely. Beyond the cold, and despite how large the sun appeared in the sky above you, the eternally drab colour it painted everything was hardly conducive to lifting your spirits.
High Associator Olson once more squeezed his eyes shut and took a deep breath to steady himself. "What the hell" he said eventually. "Welcome to Niops where the sky is always red, the medical care hasn't yet degenerated to the level of boring holes in your head to let out the demons when you've got a headache, and the Chinese food is surprisingly good" he said. "I also recommend the sport-fishing in the ocean but try sunning yourself on the beach and you'll get frostbite not a tan" he warned as a sprinkling of snow started to fall from the sky.
"Eh, you should see some of the weather on Strana Mechty" Hallis replied with a shrug.
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Note from the Author:
The Niops Association only controls one system, but has people living on three different planets there. As such it must be able to move people, goods and machinery between them (including the battlemechs and aerospace fighters of the NAM) hence having spaceports and a few dropships for transport. The NAM has a Confederate (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Confederate) of its very own but can borrow one of the civilian Mule (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Mule) dropships if necessary. The Mule is pretty big, over 11,000 tons, but that's still quite a bit smaller than an SLDF Lee (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Lee_(DropShip_class)).
The VTOL aircraft 'Bureaucrat One' is a Vector (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Vector) which the Star League produced in very large numbers (over ten thousand built so the NAM getting hold of a handful isn't implausible). It's armed and can carry an infantry platoon (or a politician).
The 331st Royal Battlemech Division (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/331st_Royal_BattleMech_Division) of the SLDF under Major-General James McEvedy (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/James_McEvedy) (father of Sarah McEvedy (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Sarah_McEvedy) we will hear a lot more of later) followed Aleksandr Kerensky (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Aleksandr_Kerensky) on his Exodus (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Operation_EXODUS)back in 2784. The 295th Battlemech Division (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/295th_BattleMech_Division) under Major-General Jenna Romanov (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Jenna_Romanov) wanted to leave with Kerensky too but were delayed and arrived at the rendezvous point after the Exodus fleet had already left. The 295th set out in pursuit, hoping to catch up, but their Potemkin Class (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Potemkin) Transport Cruiser broke down in the Draconian Drift (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Draconian_Drift) only a short way into the journey. This was a very big problem because it was carrying some twenty-five dropships worth of personnel and equipment (the majority of the division).
The 295th ended up settling on Buffalo Meadows (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Buffalo_Meadows), an inhabitable planet itself orbiting a Red Dwarf. In canon they ended up dying out there because they weren't having enough children to sustain the colony in the long term (because the 295th recruited mainly from the Terran Hegemony, Romanov was trying to get the division back the 'Royal' status it used to have once again, most of them had lost their families in the Amaris Civil War).
The 331st, by way of morphing into Clan Wolverine (again we will hear a lot ore about that later), pulled a reverse Exodus in 2823 during which one of their jumpships broke down. In cannon this happened a little later than it does in this AU and resulted in most of them getting killed. Here, because it occurred a little earlier, it resulted in them having to take a detour that eventually saw them running across Buffalo Meadows (to the great surprise of all concerned).
Two divisions of what had been the 11th Army (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/11th_Army_(Star_League)) of the SLDF (the 331st was part of V Corps, the 295th in XLIX Corps) tripping over each other in the middle of nowhere because they both suffered jumpdrive failures (albeit forty years apart) is so improbable, yet so poetical, I just had to run with it.
Directly antispinward of Niops ('west' on a map of the Inner Sphere) can be found several habitable worlds that in original canon would eventually form the Marian Hegemony (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Marian_Hegemony) (founded in 2920 by a man that perhaps liked movies about Gladiators a little too much). We're currently a century before then so those worlds are still up for grabs... and well worth taking control of incidentally).
I'll leave you with an image of what the sky looks like on Niops VII (the image is actually an artists rendering of what the sky might look like on the exoplanet Kepler-1649c (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kepler-1649c) but since the star Kepler-1649 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kepler-1649) is an M5V Red Dwarf like Niops, and 1649c orbits about the same distance out from it as Niops VII does its own star, it should be a good representation).
(https://imagizer.imageshack.com/v2/800x600q90/924/lQxKyL.jpg)
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Fingers crossed they don't stomp the Lothians... 8)
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I find it hilarious that the high associator is made no less uncomfortable by the SLDF coming to swear fealty to him as he was the idea of surrendering to them. Maybe it was just switching gears too soon.
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The universe definitely moved faster than he was prepared for... ^-^
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But hey, the man reacted with a certain amount of aplomb here. 8)
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He certainly did! I hope he continues to hold it together... :)
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I foresee many changes in the near to mid-future, certainly as it relates to the Cappellan refugees. Specifically, that as Niops is basically the last remnant of the Hegemony, and they are, technically, also the last remnant of the Star League, that the Cappellans should be accorded full rights according to the rules of the Star League.
There's going to be a period of transition, as Niops expands, just to be able to house and feed all the new arrivals. And with the Succession Wars continuing, they'll have less to worry about outsiders finding out about them.
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But hey, the man reacted with a certain amount of aplomb here. 8)
I admit the closing line was rather nice. Especially the remark about frostbite from sunbathing.
Let's hope he keeps that poise when it comes time to explain how far off any reservation Kerensky junior went. (Although to be fair the situation they were in was so nuts as to make him appear less crazy relative to the circumstances)
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"It's Free Real Estate"
(https://media.makeameme.org/created/i-see-what-5b65cb.jpg)
I'll leave you with an image of what the sky looks like on Niops VII (the image is actually an artists rendering of what the sky might look like on the exoplanet Kepler-1649c but since the star Kepler-1649 is an M5V Red Dwarf like Niops, and 1649c orbits about the same distance out from it as Niops VII does its own star, it should be a good representation).
One of the things I did in my early Niops stories, which I should probably do again once i can get the cobwebs off my writing, is have Niopians wearing sunglasses any time they were outside during daytime on planets around G-type stars.
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The hard part will be integrating all these people and cultures together but if they can they have a very strong foundation. Quietly absorb the closest systems and build up Niop fast. Shipyards, factories, everything. Uses outer colonies for resources and future growth. Dont let anyone know they exist until they are in a position to actually defend themselves from incessant raids or invasions.
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So, question, WHY don't the Niopians use the Project Workshops for building some of those Star League auto-factories? Or even some lower tech factories for, I dunno, computers, or anything else?
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Well for a start they are backed up making all the other things they need right now or in the near future. Something discussed in chapter One as to why someone had to sit at the tedious watch station instead of relying on a computer run automated system.
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So, question, WHY don't the Niopians use the Project Workshops for building some of those Star League auto-factories? Or even some lower tech factories for, I dunno, computers, or anything else?
Because those factories are gigantic. As noted in the first chapter:
If you wanted a gauss rifle for a Highlander, a new fusion engine for a cargo dropship, a replacement radio-telescope or a complex part for a Hyperpulse Generator then a Project Workship could make it for you. If however you needed a hundred of any of them you'd better be prepared to wait a good long while because it was, in effect, extremely high-tech artisanal production that was partially hand-built.
Now, imagine trying to build a Star League tech automated factory that takes raw ingredients in and spits out a finalized product, like a BattleMech. That's going to be a massive series of facilities, having to make the various alloys that go into the armor layers, the components and alloys for the fusion reactor, the myriad of electronics components, computers, myomers, weapons and their components, etc.
To do that, the Project Workshop would have to first make the tools to make the machines to make the components and the tools to assemble the machines that assemble the components and the tools to make the machines that maintain the components of the factory, etc. That's a massive undertaking, and it's no surprise that, in canon, the Niops Association was in no position to be able to do that.
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Because those factories are gigantic. As noted in the first chapter:
Now, imagine trying to build a Star League tech automated factory that takes raw ingredients in and spits out a finalized product, like a BattleMech. That's going to be a massive series of facilities, having to make the various alloys that go into the armor layers, the components and alloys for the fusion reactor, the myriad of electronics components, computers, myomers, weapons and their components, etc.
To do that, the Project Workshop would have to first make the tools to make the machines to make the components and the tools to assemble the machines that assemble the components and the tools to make the machines that maintain the components of the factory, etc. That's a massive undertaking, and it's no surprise that, in canon, the Niops Association was in no position to be able to do that.
Yep. Niops was intended to be self-sufficient, not an industrial powerhouse with plenty of spare production capacity. It's also likely the arrival of the Capellan refugees fleeing the First Succession War at the end of the 28th Century put a serious strain on the economy, and having to provide infrastructure for them delayed an awful lot of stuff on the backlog for the Project Workshops.
Once they were established the additional workforce would have been a boon, but in the short-to-medium term a lot of things that ideally needed replacing before they broke down weren't (until they broke down completely, and had to be replaced).
It'll happen again with the SLDF turning up, although the 331st/295th have plenty of experience with starting new colonies completely from scratch so that helps a lot.
It's also worth keeping in mind this snippet from Betrayal of Ideals regarding the Wolverine's Switchback fleet:
"The Wolverines had been building new Models of Battlemechs and per Khan McEvedy's orders, Franklin had made sure that the design specifications and the tools used to make the new weapons and 'Mechs were already tucked aboard one of the warships. For the clans that tried to scour the factory floors, they would find nothing but smoking ruins. Frankin was hoping that some of the weapon systems could be built aboard ship, allowing some refitting of the 'Mechs that had made their escape."
They actually brought their factories and production-lines with them!
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And I am guessing in this iteration Nicholas could not catch up so they have their full fleet... Guess McEvedy died in the nuke attack instead being captured? Yeah that will be a huge help once they get those factories and workers settled somewhere and start producing spare parts and more mobile factories and industrial satellites to act as seed facilities.
Though dos bring up potential butterflies. Nicky torturing McEvedy for info was what let him catch up but it was also what let him figure out the Widomakers khan was playing him like a fiddle. So got to wonder how that plays out because between that and the Wolverine apparently making a clean break away Nicky was probably left in a very precarious situation.
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Excellent start! Looking forward to reading more.
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Part III
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"Proper planning prevents piss-poor performance."
Sarah McEvedy, Khan of Clan Wolverine - 2823
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(FLASHBACK) SLS Michigan – Star System Gamma 12901 (On the Exodus Road) – 2824
Trish Ebon was still trying to get over the shock of being appointed saKhan and promoted to Star Colonel by Franklin Hallis, the man himself only having recently become Khan of the Wolverines with the death of Sarah McEvedy, and now she found herself having to disappoint him already. It was less than an hour since she had departed the Khan's flagship to join her new command, ferried over by a small shuttle-craft. "My apologies Khan Hallis" she began awkwardly, her image projected as a hologram from the bridge of her own ship, the SLS Bismark, onto the bridge of the Michigan. "I must report I am unable to perform the task you set for me at this time."
Hallis raised his eyebrows. "You don't feel you are qualified, query affirmative?" he asked, she had certainly seemed taken aback by the promotion.
"Negative" Trish responded, her holographic image shaking its head. "By which I mean I do believe I am qualified, it's just that your orders, taking my squadron of warships ahead of the main fleet to act as a picket line, relies on my having a ship with a lithium-fusion battery with which we can report back to you if we encounter vessels of the Kerensky loyalists" she explained.
"Trish, I mean saKhan Ebon, you do have such a vessel" Hallis pointed out, looking suitably confused since he was the one that chose the vessels assigned to her command. If equipped with an L-F battery a jumpship could perform two jumps before needing to spend a week recharging from its solar-sail or fusion reactor. This gave it the ability to jump into a system and then jump straight back if it ran into trouble, something the majority of vessels could not do.
"I have the Saratoga… but I have been informed by her captain and chief engineer that her jump-drive is FUBAR" she reported. "It was always… flaky, and needed coaxing to work, but the series of jumps we've undertaken since we left Clan space have put too much strain on it for the jury-rigged repairs made to keep her running."
Hallis groaned. "This is what you get for pulling old ships out of mothballs that haven't spent time in a repair yard since before we left the Inner Sphere" he muttered to himself.
"Her drive isn't slagged, so we can fix it, but if we rush the repairs then Saratoga's next jump could be the last she ever makes" Trish's projection told him.
"How long for repairs that'll get us back to the Inner Sphere?" Hallis asked.
"Well over a month before Saratoga can jump I am told, including recharging the drive once repairs are completed" Trish replied apologetically.
Hallis frowned. "And that is not just her chief engineer exaggerating so he can look good getting her working in half that time, query negative?" he checked.
The new saKhan and freshly minted Star Colonel shook her head. "Negative. Her jump-drive is in dire condition, and if we need her to be able to perform a double-jump with her Lithium-Fusion Battery we certainly do not want to cut corners on the repairs."
"We don't have a month to spare Trish" Hallis told her seriously.
"I know, but if we leave her behind we have to leave the dropships and aerospace fighters she is carrying behind too" Trish pointed out. "Not to mention the seventy-thousand tons of supplies and equipment in her hold."
"We can transfer some of the contents in her hold to other ships, but you are right about her dropships, every other ship already has their docking collars fully occupied" Khan Hallis replied gloomily.
"There is one other option" Trish told him. "If we can borrow a couple of dozen of the best engineers and jump-drive technicians from the rest of the fleet, and can also obtain any spare parts we might need from other ships, we can get Saratoga running reliably in half the time, maybe even less" she told him. "
Khan Franklin Hallis pursed his lips, that sounded a more reasonable proposition but perhaps he could do better. "What if I sent you a hundred pairs of extra hands?" he suggested instead.
"They would just get in each other's way, it's the law of diminishing returns unfortunately" Trish replied. "If for some reason we find we do need more of the technician caste, I mean more engineers" she corrected her terminology as the caste system had been officially abolished, "we can ask for them at that point."
"I thought it was too much to hope for" Hallis replied sadly. "Well, I couldn't give you a month, but I can give you two weeks, and if we're going to stay here longer than expected we can perform some less vital but nonetheless worthwhile and overdue maintenance on the other ships as well" he reasoned, making his decision. "I know everyone is itchy to get off the ships and taste some fresh air and fresh food, but our layover at Barbados can wait a little longer."
"The Saratoga will be a very useful part of our Touman when we reach the Inner Sphere" Trish opined. "That's why we chose to bring her along in the first place. I'm glad we're going to keep her on that basis alone" she added. As a Riga II class carrier/destroyer the Saratoga was a generalist rather than a specialist warship, with less firepower than some other destroyer classes, but nevertheless more armour than most to keep her in the fight if she did ever have to join the line-of-battle. Her real offensive power came in the form of her internal fighter-bays, large enough to carry a full wing of aerospace fighters, along with a cargo-hold large enough to keep them supplied for an extended period.
That the Riga II was also fitted with a Lithium-Fusion Battery as built, giving her excellent strategic mobility, and, unlike most destroyers, could haul a couple of dropships along with her only added to her utility.
"Send out your requests for personnel, I'll make sure the entire fleet gives you their full cooperation, saKhan Ebon" Hallis instructed her. "I will also notify them that we are staying here a while. Keep me posted on how the repairs to Saratoga are going. Wolverine Actual out."
"Yes Sir. Bismark out."
"Well, we all thought it was going too well so far did we not, query affirmative?" Hallis asked the bridge crew who had been listening in, his question answered by a chorus of 'Affs' and 'Affirmatives' depending on which style the crewmen concerned favoured. Kerensky had been pushing his desired changes to the speech patterns of his clans for some years now, but it was still a process very much in transition. Many older people in particular could not readily re-learn how to speak naturally, avoiding the use of contractions except for certain ritual ones, and it often made for halting, less than fluid conversations. Franklin Hallis himself knew he slipped back and forth between saying 'don't' and the preferred 'do not' more than the younger generation raised on the Clan Homeworlds did, not that it likely mattered anymore anyway.
Hallis turned to the communications officer. "Notify every ship in the fleet of the situation, and that I want them to carry out an urgent inspection of their own jump-drives so we don't have to do this all over again another dozen jumps down the Exodus Road" he ordered.
Despite reinforcing their warship complement from the Norfolk and San Diego boneyards, the mothballed fleets that dated from the First Exodus under Kerensky's father, the large majority of the Wolverine vessels floating out there were civilian transports. Invader, Star Lord, and Monolith class jumpships carrying dropships full of civilians and supplies. The civilians had been cooped up a while now, spending most of their time floating in zero gee on the dropships because the grav-decks of the jumpships they were docked to could only handle so many people at once, making it necessary to take turns on them. They were getting cranky, losing muscle tone, and a diet bereft of fresh food was bad for morale even if they weren't starving. As such Hallis could only hope the news that they weren't going to make landfall on a habitable world with edible fruits and vegetables as soon as expected wasn't going to be received too badly.
As the new orders were transmitted out Hallis sighed with resignation. To be honest it really had been going very well despite a few cranky civilians, at least since the unexpected nuclear conflagration that had seen both the Wolverine capital city of Great Hope, and the Snow Raven capital of Dehra Dun, bathed in atomic fire. If he had to guess, Khan Hallis would have pinned the blame for the destruction of Great Hope on that conniving rodent Jason Karrige, Khan of the Widowmakers, but it might have been Kerensky himself. As for Dehra Dunn he knew full well what had happened there, an aerospace fighter carrying a nuclear strike package, one belonging to the Snow Ravens themselves, had been shot down over their own city when it was dispatched to strike a Wolverine target.
The Snow Ravens had thought the Wolverines had destroyed Great Hope, so as to prevent it falling into enemy hands, although if they had been aware Sarah McEvedy was still within the city limits at the time, helping to evacuate civilians to dropships waiting to ferry them to the Switchback fleet, they might have reached a different, and more accurate, conclusion. Sarah McEvedy was arguably obstinate and rebellious, but she wasn't insane or suicidal.
Hallis doubted that the other clans would be told what had actually occurred, even though if they gave it any thought whatsoever, they would realise that if the Wolverines had escalated to WMD they wouldn't have just used a couple of them, not given how outnumbered they were.
Not that Khan Sarah McEvedy had ever entertained the nuclear option anyway. Clan Wolverine just wanted to get away, doing something that would ensure they were hunted down until the end of time was self-evidently not in their best interests.
"We are going to start running out of fresh water at some point" Hallis noted, looking to his aide. "I know we were going to resupply at Bermuda, and we still will, but in case something like this happens again later we should go ahead with putting together that improvised J-U Water Purifier that was suggested to me. That way in future we can be less fussy about where we collect our water from in future, and maybe ramp up hydroponic production on the Invaders too so we don't get scurvy" he continued, not entirely seriously as the ration-packs they were living on were fortified with vitamins to prevent that sort of thing. "Can you look into that as a matter of priority."
"Yes, My Khan" the junior officer replied formally, bowing slightly.
Hallis had barely gotten used to being treated with a certain amount of deference as saKhan, second in the clan's social order, after the death in battle of the previous saKhan Dwight Robertson. With the subsequent death of Khan Sarah McEvedy now he was the one everyone looked to and all he could do was try and pretend he wasn't mostly just following the written instructions Sarah left him.
"Nothing wrong with scurvy, Khan Hallis." Captain Brentjes, commanding officer of the Michigan observed from his own command chair. "There is a fine, long naval tradition to feeling deathly ill and having your teeth fall out before you die painfully from a vitamin deficiency" he joked.
"Other naval traditions include keelhauling and lashing men with the cat o' nine tails and I'd soon as not bring them back either" Hallis replied. "Unless we somehow capture a few Widowmakers, or perhaps Old Nick himself" he added to some laughter from the bridge crew as he decided Sarah would have liked that line too. Referring to ilKhan Nicholas Kerensky as 'Old Nick', a once common epithet for the devil, was really starting to catch on in the fleet of late. That or calling him 'Nicky K' because he would absolute hate being referred to so informally.
It was such a shame Sarah hadn't made it off Circe so she could have seen her plans for Operation Switchback working as intended. Using Nicky K's ego against him she knew that as soon as the Wolverine fleet made good their escape from Clan space he would gather as many operational warships as he could, leaving barely enough to defend the Clan Homeworlds in case the Wolverines double-backed, and would go charging after them hell-for-leather.
Realising this Sarah had outwitted her opponent and as part of her plans had issued instructions for the Wolverines not to set out for the Inner Sphere right away, but instead to hide in an uncharted system a handful of jumps out from home and a couple of jumps off to the side of the Exodus Road. After giving the other clans a few weeks lead to get far ahead of them along the known and charted route back to the Inner Sphere, Nicholas surely intent on chasing down his quarry before it could reach safety, the Wolverine fleet simply started following on behind, generally feeling pretty pleased with themselves for bamboozling the schmuck.
Franklin Hallis knew it was working because as they followed on behind they kept finding the refuse Nicky's fleet had dumped as it went, still well ahead of the people they thought they were chasing. Hallis only wished he could be there to see Kerensky's expression when the clans eventually reached the edge of the Inner Sphere, only to find a distinct lack of Wolverines to murder and indeed no sign of them whatsoever.
Ideally by the time Old Nick realised what had happened the Wolverines would have veered way off the Exodus Road, now being close enough to the Inner Sphere to not need to stop for resupply again, and then the Wolverines would vanish off the face of the galaxy.
Until the time came to put things right at least.
"All ships except the transport Dobrev have confirmed receipt of the new orders Khan Hallis" the communications officer reported. "They may have a problem with their communications."
Hallis nodded. "If you do not get a reply from them soon tell the closest vessel to them to send over a shuttlecraft to investigate, that might be something else that needs fixing as a priority. Additionally, since we are going to be here a while, check with Buccaneer if there is anything they can do to increase production of replacement weaponry and spare parts" he ordered.
The Buccaneer, a Sovetskii Soyuz class Heavy Cruiser, could not only carry five dropships along with her she also had a cavernous internal cargo hold, one large enough to haul an additional two-hundred thousand tons of goods or equipment. For this reason she had been assigned the task of hauling what had been the tooling, plant and machinery of the clan's armaments factories so the Wolverines would not have to start again from scratch when they reached their final destination.
The first enemy clan to overrun the factory complex on Circe where the Wolverines had produced their war-machines was going to be very disappointed to find nothing but the burned-out shells of buildings, utterly bereft of anything useful. Franklin Hallis decided that Kerensky would probably have most of his spies shot for not only having failed to notice the Wolverines stealing multiple warships and jumpships out from under their nose, but for somehow even missing entire production lines being dissembled and carted off before hostilities began.
The vaunted 'Watch', Kerensky's newly-formed Intelligence Agency, clearly required laser-eye-surgery or corrective lenses because that went beyond sloppy to being an example of complete ineptitude.
Given the need to repair and refit 'mechs and aerospace fighters damaged during the clans fighting withdrawal the personnel aboard Buccaneer, which included most of the factory workers, had managed to cobble together a couple of basic production lines aboard her for producing various equipment. The production rate was slow, and the meagre raw materials at hand wouldn't last forever either, but at least they could get a few more machines ready for battle in case they were needed anytime soon.
The thing that really burned was that given a few more years to ramp up new battlemech production, and further modernise the older war machines they already had, the Wolverines would have been able to put up so much of a fight the other clans might not have even dared to cross them. On the other hand, that was likely one of the reasons Kerensky made his move when he did, Hallis realised.
In retrospect it was obvious that at some point the ilKhan was going to have to make an example of someone in order to keep a lid on dissent, and Clan Wolverine was the obvious choice. It wasn't just that we kept putting our heads above the parapet by playing fast and loose with Kerensky's rules, Hallis considered, it was the more egregious offence of outperforming the other clans by doing so.
When Nicholas Kerensky had led his disparate band of supporters on a Second Exodus from the war-torn Pentagon Worlds, those his father had settled as the Star-League-in-Exile, to the more distant colony of Strana Mechty, it was always with the intention to return, restore order and bring them back under control. Specifically, his own control and with a very particular definition of 'order'.
The formation of the Clans had essentially been a massive social engineering project intended to achieve that very goal. The competition fostered between the twenty clans aimed at a kind of guided Darwinian selection that would hone the skills of his warriors and spur the scientists, engineers and technicians to create ever-better weapons. The Clans never had the numbers to squander men or machines however, so the rules of the society put strict limits on just how many losses were deemed acceptable before one side or the other in a dispute was supposed to fold. That necessitated a return to the ancient notions of champions fighting to determine the outcome of a war, instead of whole armies being put to the sword.
Kerensky imagined Paris and Menelaus meeting in single combat to decide the outcome of the Trojan War. He probably should have paid more attention to the fact that Menelaus handily winning that fight did not result in the Trojans surrendering, it takes both sides playing by the same rules to make that sort of thing work consistently. Moreover, a dispassionate, more open-minded observer could well conclude that it was stupid to tie one hand behind your back in situations where you had a decisive edge in numbers or technology.
Nobody had ever accused Sarah McEvedy, daughter of Lieutenant-General Richard McEvedy of the 331st Royals and now Khan of Clan Wolverine, of being dogmatic or closed-minded. Politically naïve perhaps, and as regards diplomacy about as subtle as a brick to the back of the head, but she wasn't going to tie her own hands for the sake of social niceties.
Eschewing Kerensky's ideal of 'honourable', one-on-one pseudo-knightly combat for a pragmatic combined arms tactical doctrine, one based largely on the SLDF operational manuals for Regimental Combat Teams, the Wolverines under Sarah had overperformed during Operation Klondike compared with other clans. Then, after the Pentagon Worlds were secured as per Kerensky's vision, the clan had then begun winning a disproportionate number of Trials of Possession as the spoils of war were divided up, strengthening their Touman but unfortunately also raising the ire of their rivals.
It had been Khan McEvedy's solution to a temporary shortfall in food production however which had begun to bring the situation to a head. Nicholas Kerensky's laws were meant to make the caste system inviolable, the only movement possible meant to be downward, from the elite of the Warrior caste to the others. With the possibility of people going hungry McEvedy took a pragmatic approach and freed up the castes, transferring personnel around to help alleviate the problem.
The Wolverines didn't starve, moreover the majority of the population, most of whom had only been under clan rule since the culmination of Klondike in 2822, seemed more than enthusiastic about a relaxation in the caste system because it indicated that they might get more say in their own lives again.
McEvedy took stock of the situation, decided that doing what actually worked was more important than a rigid adherence to rules, some of which had been originally presented as merely temporary war-time expediencies to maintain order anyway, and ran with it.
Resource production increased with a freer, more dynamic economy, people were generally happier to have the yokes arounds their necks loosened, and the science and technician castes in particular flourished likely because they didn't have the boot of the warrior caste planted as firmly on their necks.
Already among the top tier of clans technologically Clan Wolverine started to pull ahead of the others, eventually demonstrating this change in the balance-of-power in a very noticeable way.
Despite having developed improved versions of several types of standard Star League weaponry, these improvements based largely on inheriting a lot of R&D work carried out by the Terran Hegemony on behalf of the SLDF, none of the clans had actually been developing and producing new models of battlemechs. Instead they had upgraded what machines they had inherited, while the limited number of new-builds were simply copies of SLDF equipment.
Then to great consternation in early 2823 the Wolverines unveiled the Stag, Mercury II and Pulverizer battlemechs, all brand new designs that they were already putting into mass production. They also demonstrated a new type of Extended-Range Particle Projector Cannon which was powerful enough to take off another battlemech's head at a range only a much larger and heavier gauss rifle could before.
Other clans were working behind the scenes on advances of their own, it was rumoured that Clan Coyote was ahead in Pulse Laser development for example, but while they were still at the prototype stage at best the Wolverines already had their own new toys in actual production. This also had several of the other clans deeply concerned about what McEvedy's people might themselves have at the prototype stage and whether they could catch up anytime soon.
One thing quickly led to another, a dispute over the ownership of a large cache of old SLDF supplies, which included a number of nuclear weapons, and which was found on territory now belonging to Clan Wolverine escalated. Already angry about the relaxation of the caste system by the Wolverines, and almost certainly concerned that they were demonstrating that things quite clearly worked better if you set aside some of his diktats, Nicholas publicly told Sarah to toe-the-line and hand the contents of the cache over or else, privately he was even more strident.
Sarah thought about it a long time, and when she had thought about it long enough she declared independence from the Clans.
Finding himself increasingly lost in his own thoughts Khan Franklin Hallis made a conscious effort to put aside the past for now and started to consider how else he might seek some benefit from the extended stay in the Gamma 12901 system that had been foisted upon him.
"Navigator. Find me a star system, off the Exodus Road, rimward and anti-spinward of here between twenty and twenty-five light years distant" he ordered. "It has to be a hot enough star that we can recharge our drives at the safe maximum rate, no damn red dwarfs" he continued. "When you find one plot a jump there and inform all other ships in the fleet to do likewise. If the clans appear on top of us all ships which can immediately make the jump to that system should do so on my order."
"Nice to see a ground-pounder savvy enough not to want a full thirty light-year jump to safety, far too predictable" Captain Brentjes observed. "It would however only be a stop-gap measure if we have to re-join the Exodus Road after a few evasive jumps, Khan Hallis" he warned.
"The plan Khan McEvedy formulated for Switchback included an alternate destination, if only as a temporary haven before continuing on to the Inner Sphere. If I am incapacitated for some reason I also provided saKhan Ebon with the name and location of the system concerned. I can only hope that it is as obscure as McEvedy believed it to be so Nicholas will not immediately guess our new heading. It is certainly not featured on the standard star-charts" he noted having checked to see if he could find the Columbus SLDF facility in the Epsilon Pegasus system listed anywhere. That hardly made it unique, for reasons of security, specifically to compartmentalise information, the SLDF had constructed a multitude of bases and supply dumps all over the place with only the personnel stationed there knowing where it was.
Rumour had it that during the Amaris War the 12th Fleet of the SLDF actually had a secret base somewhere inside the Rim Worlds Republic that the Rimjobs had no idea about. Warships staging out from there had made life hell for enemy supply lines.
"Colour me intrigued, Khan Hallis" Captain Brentjes responded, smart enough not to ask for any more details.
"What is life without a little mystery?" Hallis asked rhetorically. "If you need me I'll be in my cabin" he announced. "When I'm gone you might want to warn the fleet that if they waste the time we have here relaxing, instead of running battle-drills and fixing whatever they can then, then I might reconsider my policy on keelhauling. Which as you know is some serious shit in a spacecraft."
Captain Brentjes grinned. "Consider the word spread, Khan Hallis" he replied, clearly amused by the tongue-in-cheek threat.
The clans must have eventually figured out what the Wolverines were up to because two weeks later, just as Saratoga had finished charging her jumpdrive, a backtracking task force practically jumped in on top of them, presumably having previously checked the Barbados system for the Wolverines first because of its habitable world.
On the bridge of his flagship ilKhan Nicholas Kerensky could only begin to imagine why the entire Wolverine Fleet seemed to be patiently waiting for his arrival, Kearny-Fuchida drives charged and jumpsails packed away ready to go, as the whole lot of them promptly jumped out before he could issue orders to engage them.
They must be mocking me somehow, Kerensky decided, biting back his rage and outwardly seeming calm and collected as he ordered his fleet to unfurl their jumpsails and recharge their drives for the pursuit.
A week later Kerensky split his warships into four groups, each one capable of outgunning the Wolverine vessels and sent them off searching both rimwards and corewards along the Exodus Road, using his Lithium-Fusion Battery ships to scout ahead.
They found nothing so two weeks after that he widened the search pattern.
That was the problem with space, it was big and if the Wolverines had opted to try their luck away from the charted course of mapped systems along the Exodus Road then tripping over them again would require drastically more luck on the part of the clans.
With Kerensky's fleet so spread out and searching further afield they actually managed to miss the only Wolverine vessel that actually was still travelling down the Exodus Road.
The destroyer SLS Yukon had been left behind in the Clan Homeworlds, the last of the forces deployed to keep the clans busy while Operation Switchback was triggered. Gathering supplies, and rescuing a sibko of children, it had set off after the rest of the Wolverines months later.
None the wiser to what had occurred ahead of them the destroyer flew on alone all the way to the Inner Sphere where they found fleeting fame as the mysterious 'Canada Tribe' that caused the Draconis Combine much concern in 2825.
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NOTES FOR PART III (AS FOUND IN THE PREVIOUS POST)
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Note from the Author:
Then saKhan of the Wolverines Franklin Hallis (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Franklin_Hallis) found himself the new Khan with the (apparent) death of Khan Sarah McEvedy (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Sarah_McEvedy) during the nuclear destruction of Great Hope (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Great_Hope) in 2823. It was not something he was prepared for having only recently become saKhan after the death of Dwight Robertson (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Dwight_Robertson). Finding himself in need of a deputy of his own he appointed Trish Ebon (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Trish_Ebon) as the new saKhan (and promoted her to the rank of Star Colonel).
Operation Switchback (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Operation_SWITCHBACK), also known in Wolverine circles as the third exodus, was a detailed plan McEvedy devised and assigned Hallis to implement. Essentially a secession from the clans loyal to ilKhan (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/IlKhan_of_the_Clans) Nicholas Kerensky (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Nicholas_Kerensky), and then a migration from the Clan Homeworlds (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Clan_Homeworlds) back to the Inner Sphere along the Exodus Road (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Exodus_Road) it was going very well until the Kerany-Fuchida Jump-drive of the Saratoga (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Saratoga) failed at the worst possible moment.
In canon the Wolverines reached Barbados (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Gamma_1551_AW) and established a temporary settlement there to resupply (and give everyone some much-needed time on the ground). In order to make sure they wouldn't be surprised by the clan warships hunting them down Hallis sent three squadrons of vessels out to act as a picket line, positioned in systems between Barbados and where a backtracking clan fleet would be coming from. If they encountered enemy ships the picket squadrons, one under saKhan Ebon commanding it from the battleship Bismark (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Bismark), would send their ships equipped with a lithium-fusion battery (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Lithium-Fusion_Battery) back to Barbados to warn them. Although what class of warship Saratoga actually was isn't noted in the book Betrayal of Ideals (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Betrayal_of_Ideals) that tells the story of the Wolverines, I'm running with the notion she was a Riga II class destroyer/carrier because that class has an L-F Battery (most SLDF warships did not) and she has a name associated with real-life aircraft carriers (USS Saratoga CV3 and USS Saratoga CV60). The clans did refit almost all their warships with LF batteries but not until years later than this story is set. Incidentally Betrayal of Ideals is a good read (and gives us the best insight as to what a tyrannical jerk Nicholas Kerensky really was).
Unfortunately, when the squadron under saKhan Ebon did run into the clans they couldn't give that warning because Saratoga promptly broke down. This resulted in most of the Wolverine fleet being destroyed and the vast majority of them being killed.
For the want of a working K-F Drive a clan was lost.
However, if Saratoga had broken down before the jump to Bermuda everything would have played out very differently, it's therefore a nice PoD (Point of Departure) for an alternate timeline.
As regards the Wolverines leaving the Exodus Road to avoid being caught again there aren't many places to go in the Deep Periphery rimward of the Inner Sphere, at least until you reach the Clan Homeworlds.. That is except for Columbus Station that the SLDF constructed in the Epsilon Pegasus (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Epsilon_Pegasus) Star System (AKA the middle of nowhere) and was abandoned when the Star League fell.
In canon the remnants of the Wolverines reached the Inner Sphere and those survivors entered legend as the Minnesota Tribe (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Minnesota_Tribe) which raided worlds under the rule of the Draconis Combine for supplies. Well, there's no Minnesota Tribe in this timeline but the destroyer Yukon (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Yukon) which was following on behind the rest of the Wolverine Fleet (and did catch up with the Wolverine remnants after Barbados in canon but not here) still manages to make some waves of it's own.
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And thus the Wolverine survive intact. And Kerensky probably faced much disgrace. That should generate some huge changes for the clans. No kill of the wolverines means no terrifying the other clans into compliance. The widowmakers still have their crafty crazy khan. Ravens damn well know what happened and less reason to play along. A lot could happen there and it is all the more bitter because they get nothing from the scraps. The surviving wolverines who could not escape are still going to be killed or neutered and used as slave labor and be mostly useless to their new clans and the tech trove that helped fuel the golden century is gone to. Nicholas might well lose control of the clans and things fall back into civil war...
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But this story is about them successfully making it to Niops, so who cares what's happening to "Old Nick" (that's the best epithet I've heard for him) in the back of beyond. I'm in the for the IS-adjacent part of the story! 8)
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But this story is about them successfully making it to Niops, so who cares what's happening to "Old Nick" (that's the best epithet I've heard for him) in the back of beyond. I'm in the for the IS-adjacent part of the story! 8)
It does greatly effect things done the road if the clans survive or try to invade but that might beyond the scope of this. Right now they need to build up Niops and get established then decide how much they will interfere in the quagmire that is the is.
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"Old Nick" :thumbsup:
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a small nitpick/suggestion.
in the canon, only 6 rigas survived the pentagon wars, each of which are accounted for turning into york classes.
From Sarna about the Aegis "but a surprising number survived the fall of the Star League and departed the Inner Sphere during the Exodus. A number of these craft have been observed in Clan Toumans, the design highly favored by Clan Jade Falcon who use it to perform escort and transport duties"
It seems more likely the LF ship the wolverines had would be Aegis class which are much more numerous than the accounted for rigas as well as being old enough to be likely preferentially mothballed.
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a small nitpick/suggestion.
in the canon, only 6 rigas survived the pentagon wars, each of which are accounted for turning into york classes.
The thing is the "canon" numbers are the ones according to the records we know Nicky K had falsified... canonically. ;)
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Part IV
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"Contrary to what you may have heard, Trueborns, sorry I am supposed to say 'Ironborns', are not clones. The rumours about the genetic enhancements are true though, so if you call us clones, or freaks of science, we will hit you very, very hard. Sorry, I was also told by the Principal earlier that we are not allowed to hit you if you are mean to us because we are different. This is a stupid rule and if Wolverines always obeyed stupid rules we would still be living in the Clan Homeworlds, instead of my sibko and I being forcibly integrated into the Public School System against our wills."
Frederick Hallis of sibling company Gamma introduces himself to his new class at Joseph-Louis Lagrange Memorial High School - 2829
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Arecibo Plains – Niops Association (Niops VII) – 2828
Despite the planet being slightly larger in diameter than Terra, the vast oceans of Niops VII covered so much of worlds surface that overall the homeworld of humanity could still boast the most land area of the two.
Not that you could ever claim Niops VII was exactly overcrowded. It might only have roughly three-quarters the land to live upon, polar ice caps not really counting, but with a population still only in the low single-digit millions, compared to Terra's teeming billions, one thing Niops was not lacking in was room to accommodate population growth, expected or not.
Situated less than thirty kilometres from the capital the Arecibo Plains were entirely undeveloped, although they could at least boast an excellent supply of fresh, if somewhat frigid, water and the soil was at least fertile enough for the native grasses to prosper. The large river that ran down from the glaciers in the mountains and snaked across the plains divided them neatly in two, the river itself eventually reaching the capital on the coast and emptying into the ocean there.
High Associator Olson had essentially placed a map in front of Lieutenant-General Romanov and her staff, pointed at the Arecibo Plains, and said 'They're all yours' initiating what quickly became a near deluge of dropships falling from the sky as the SLDF remnants moved in.
Invited to come observe proceedings personally Brigadier-General Craig Nellis of the Niops Association Militia had eschewed using a VTOL to come take a look and had instead chosen to come tearing up the river in a Silverfin Class Coastal Cutter, effectively the flagship of the NAM's tiny 'wet' navy. Only massing forty tons, and with plenty of horsepower, the cutter could make seventy knots and when it wasn't rescuing fishing boats in trouble on the high seas it was usually tied up at dock with nothing to do anyway.
Standing up on the conning tower for a better view as the atypically very much inland Coastal Cutter reached the plains, Nellis couldn't help be impressed not only by the sheer number of hulking dropships to be seen but also how neatly they had been parked, forming long neat rows a few hundred meters apart. There also seemed to be a veritable hive of activity going on around them. A plethora of wheeled vehicles buzzing around as well as numerous battlemechs, those types equipped with hands helping unload dropships as well as assist with other tasks where a deftly-handled thirty or forty ton robot came in very handy.
Three days ago there had been nothing here, Nellis thought to himself in wonderment, now it was technically the third most populous settlement on the planet, with tens of thousands of people already on the ground and more on the way.
The team of workers that appeared to be digging a large number of latrines indicated to Nellis they knew what they were doing because they were placing them far downstream of where numerous tents surrounding some construction work was going on. The fact that not everyone had the good-sense to do that a thousand years after doctors figured out the cause of cholera and other waterborne diseases never failed to astonish him.
A Mule transport dropship had set-down right next to the river with large-diameter pipes running from her into the water and another set of other pipes running out from her to a frankly enormous Aqueduct liquid cargo carrier. It had been mentioned that the new arrivals had actually built a Jamerson-Ulikov Water Purifier in the oversized cargo hold of a dropship so they could land and re-fill their water-tanks from any source they encountered on the way, ocean worlds, comets, anything, but it was still darn impressive to see first-hand.
Everyone was moving with a purpose with a goal in mind. Organised and efficient. It was certainly a very different scene than the one he recalled witnessing as a younger man when the Capellans arrived in their rickety old Leviathan jumpship thirty years earlier. That particular cloud of bolts and spare parts flying in close formation had been shunted into high orbit around Niops IV years ago, just in case the Association ever needed a jumpship for some reason. Meanwhile most of the eight large modified cargo dropships it had carried were mothballed for requiring excessive refit and repair themselves.
Nellis remembered being amazed at just how many tired and hungry war-refugees had been crammed into each rickety dropship as they landed and disgorged their passengers. The whole scene was both chaotic and heart-breaking and it spoke volumes for just how bad things must be out in the wider galaxy.
As the navy cutter reached the spot where a large camp was starting to be built alongside the river it slowed and to Nellis's amusement a gaggle of children seemingly appeared from nowhere to watch the watercraft pull up close to the riverbank.
"Never seen a ship that floats on water instead of in freefall before?" Nellis called out to the kids after making his way down from the conning tower to disembark, the crew having lowered a gangplank for him.
"Not in real life" one of the older children called back, Nellis now taking note that almost all of them seemed to be wearing small versions of SLDF fatigues and winter jackets. The oldest among them might have been fourteen based on their heights but if they had spent an excessive quantity in freefall they could just be taller than normal. In time gravity would claw some of that excess height back if that was the case, but that was always more difficult to see happening in children than it was in adults because the former were getting taller naturally anyway.
"We'll have to see about taking you all out fishing sometime" Nellis suggested, his offer greeted by an apparently an enthusiastic response from his audience as he stepped ashore.
"Are we supposed to call you Admiral Nellis today then? Query affirmative?" a voice Nellis recognised as belonging to Lieutenant-General Hallis interjected, the man having appeared out of a large tent nearby.
"Only if I was wearing my other hat, Sir" Nellis joked in return, proffering Hallis a salute which he returned before they approached each other and shook hands "You've already made a great deal of progress getting yourselves settled her, anyone would think you'd done this before?" he observed, smiling.
"Once or twice" Hallis replied. "Or it could be the fourth, I'm starting to lose track to be honest" he said only partially in jest. "Taking a risk sailing that boat up the river weren't you?" he asked. "How did you know you had enough depth under the keel not to ground her?"
"Because, believe it or not, back when I was a lieutenant someone thought that using her to go water-skiing up the river as a publicity stunt would be good for recruitment" Nellis told him. "It wasn't of course, it just made the NAM look like a bunch of yahoos."
One of the children, a boy, approached them, seemingly prompted to do so by some of the others. "Can we go fishing, Khan Hallis?" he asked sheepishly.
Nellis looked from Hallis to the boy, the resemblance between them was uncanny. "Your son, Sir?" he asked, assuming it must be. Hallis had already explained the 'Khan' thing, along with a quick explanation of some of the odd forms of speech his people from the 331st seemed to use at random, but it did seem a little odd for the man's own child to address that way in a non-formal setting.
"Well yes, but actually no" Hallis replied, confusingly.
"More of his DNA than a son would have, less than an outright clone, Sir" the boy told Nellis. "I am a Trueborn" he explained, proudly.
"Trueborn?" Nellis queried. This was a new one on him, though at least it sounded like it derived from English as opposed to something like 'quiaff' or 'Isorla' which did, but you wouldn't know unless told.
"Clan breeding program, children without the sex, created in a lab and grown in an Iron Womb, that's like a very fancy incubator that can bring a child to term all the way from fertilisation" Hallis told him. "Some genetic engineering but not as much as was planned for later generations" he continued. "We're not going to use that name for them anymore though, are we Frederick" he chided the boy. "Trueborn is a Kerenskyite word that implies other people are lesser."
"I apologise, My Khan" the boy responded with a bow that was met with a frown, "I mean, Sir" he tried again, this time saluting. "Dad?" he suggested finally.
"Sir is fine" Hallis told the boy, they still needed to finalise how they were going to integrate the children from non-traditional reproductive methods into a more 'normal' model of society. "I'll talk to Brigadier-General Nellis about the fishing, now you and the rest of your sibko need to get back to studying."
"Thanks Pops" the boy replied cheekily before running back to the other children.
"If you think I'm above abjuring my own bloodname you are very much mistaken!" Hallis called after him before noticing the expression on the brigadier's face, part wary, part quizzical.
"Were you…" Nellis began to ask awkwardly.
"Made by a geek in a labcoat, poured into a glass jar and decanted nine months later?" Hallis finished for him, though not using the exact words Nellis might have. "No, I had parents and arrived in the galaxy the way most people do, out of my mother" he told him. "The Clan breeding program began in 2816, Frederick there is from the first-generation, not many of them. It didn't really start to ramp up in numbers until three years later which is why you'll find a disproportion number of children aged between five and nine running around once we're more established" he told him. "Old Nick saw the program as the quickest way to increase the population, that of the Warrior Caste in particular."
"To what purpose?"
"Pretty obvious I would think, to raise an army large enough to retrace his father's footsteps back to the Inner Sphere at some point, perhaps long after his own death, and remake the Star League, or at least his vision of the Star League which bears little relation to the reality" Hallis replied. "To be honest it all seemed laudable at first, noble even, but that was before it became all too apparent that he was one mech short of a full lance up here" he added, tapping the side of his head. "Two or three mechs short on a bad day."
"That's a more polite way of saying it than I heard from other people that returned with you" Nellis told him. "Particularly the ones that had family in Great Hope."
"Yes, well, we can't know for certain Nicky gave the order but he is sure-as-shit high up on the list of suspects" Hallis replied. "Sharp of you and the High Associator to talk to as many people that weren't from the warrior cast as possible to see if we were telling the truth, by the way. Even if all that extra radio traffic to the inbound ships drove our communications people nuts."
"All I can say is that if you aren't telling the truth then you've coached a hell of a lot of people better than I ever could because, apart from some minor details, the sort of things not everyone would know anyway, their versions of events corroborated yours" Nellis told him. "The funniest transcript that crossed my desk came from a psychiatrist within your group that diagnosed Nicholas Kerensky with, and this is the dumbed-down version, sociopathy, megalomania and deep-seated daddy issues."
Hallis thought about that a while. "I could have told you that and not charged by the hour" he concluded eventually.
"Before I forget to say it, I really can arrange fishing trips for your kids, but it had better be pretty soon because in a couple of months they won't want to look at another fish" Nellis advised. "It's not like we were expecting you and the only available food we have in surplus comes out of the ocean."
"So we were told by a government official" Hallis replied. "To be honest looking down at all the cultivated land I thought you must be running a massive food surplus but I hadn't considered crop yields per hectare being so much lower here that we're used to."
Nellis shrugged. "The Terran Hegemony might have developed grain crops that would grow in pretty much any soil but you can't genetically-engineer extra sunlight. Fewer photons means less photosynthesis and the cold climate doesn't help either" he noted. "We grow a lot of our fruits and vegetables indoors hydroponically under artificial light but when it comes to something like wheat it's easier just to sow more land" he explained. "Although that isn't without problems either, the soil isn't the best here so we have to harvest seaweed to improve it, enrich the soil and give the dirt something to hold it together" he said then grinned. "My father owned a farm, my older brother inherited it when he died, not that I minded, I wanted to drive a battlemech not an agromech."
"I didn't peg you as a farmboy" Hallis admitted.
"Not everyone here is an astrophysicist, although my mother was a gravitational-wave astronomer as it happens, I joined the army because it meant getting to sleep in most days until sunrise like I was some lazy aristocrat" Nellis joked. "The bitch of it is, my brother hired a bunch of Capellans to work on the farm, so now he lounges around like some Lyran noble with peasants to plough the fields and harvest the grain for him, so he gets up later than I do."
"I'm sixth generation military myself" Hallis told him. "My father commanded the 331st before Khan McEvedy's father did, I guess it was our turn again" he added with a smile. "One of the kids you saw earlier, Jennifer, was made from her DNA so if the cycle keeps turning maybe she'll take over from me."
"Are you still making more…" Nellis began then paused, "what do you call them if it's not 'Trueborns'?"
"Not completely decided yet, I like 'Ironborn' myself" Hallis replied. "As to whether we're making more, none since we left clan space and when we get the program running again it will likely be geared towards not letting the bloodlines of the 295th die out. Their birth-rate where they ended up was extremely low" he said. "Talking of the 295th, Lieutenant-General Romanov is still going to be stuck in a meeting for at least the next half-hour or so with Admiral Bremman so she asked me to show you around. Before I do, are there any other burning questions you have that I can help with?"
"We could start with you telling me what that mech over there being used as a forklift is" Nellis asked, pointing to the one he meant.
"That's a Mercury II, one of the new machines we developed just before we came to blows with the other clans" Hallis told him.
"Ah, looking again I'm seeing some similarities to the Mercury, although I've only ever seen one in recognition books. Far too modern for the SLDF to surplus off in our direction."
"The Mercury light was a step-forward in battlemech design, a bigger step than a lot of people might know, so when we wanted to develop a new medium we scaled her up from twenty to forty tons and made the necessary internal and external changes required to allow that" Hallis explained. "Our other new medium, the Stag, was partially based on the Vulcan, but you would never be able to tell just by looking at her" he noted. "The Stag only has one hand so they're still packed away, our Pulverizer assault has two so you might see one helping out, but we only have a small number of them in operation."
"I've seen plenty of old Wasps though. There must be a nest nearby" Nellis joked. That was hardly surprising, the twenty-ton design dated from all the way back to the 25th Century and had been produced in huge numbers by just about everybody. Even the SLDF, who could afford newer fancier lights like the Hussar, Panther, and the Mercury itself, still went to war with Amaris with hordes of Wasps in their inventories.
Hallis nodded. "We wanted our rear-guard formations to hold up the clans as long as possible, maximining the number of civilians we could escape with, so we upped their complements of bigger tougher machines and stuffed the less capable lights into dropships to take with us" he said. "If we were not looking forward to adding all those battlemechs from the 295th to the roster I might be pushing to get the Pulverizer, and maybe the Stag II, into production ASAP to give us more battlefield punch, but as it is upgrading Romanov's machines gives us a lot more bang for our buck, resource wise."
"One of my staff gave me a side-by-side comparison of standard model Highlanders and Black Knights in NAM service, compared to ones re-armed with your improved weapon systems. Just a few tons of weight saved, and a little extra internal volume available, makes all the difference when it comes to increased capability."
"A couple of tons of extra armour here, some additional heat-sinks there, and pretty soon you've got a noticeably meaner 'mech" Hallis agreed. "I'll send you the specs of our version of the Archer. Halving the weight of the LRM launchers, and adding the latest model Artemis IV FCS, let us put together something that would chew up and spit out the SLDF Royal it was based upon" Hallis told him. "If it wasn't for the fact we know the clans are feverously working on even better gear I would be a very happy man."
"And you know that for certain because…"
"Because up until Operation Klondike the clans pooled some R&D work and occasionally shared information" Hallis explained. "Scientists and engineers talk among themselves, at least they do if it won't get them shot, so we know that the Coyote's, for example, were leading in Pulse Laser technology and we even had access to some of their preliminary research in that direction. There's always a time-lag between a working prototype and a production model though, so we can't be sure when they will be fielding the next generation of equipment, only that it's on its way."
The sound of fusion engines high above attracted their attention and they both looked up. "That should be one of the cargo dropships we've got emptying the cargo bays on Thunderer and Rawhide" Hallis remarked. "Even with one of the dropships being a Mammoth it is going to take a while, there's well over a half-million tons of supplies and equipment to unload from the old girls."
Old was right, certainly about the battleship. The Monsoon Class like Thunderer were nearly five-hundred years old and the SLDF had retired them a century before the Amaris War. A more modern warship like a Texas or a McKenna would tear a Monsoon to shreds but the cathedral-sized cargo bay, and the ability to carry a half-dozen dropships with her, obviously had its attractions if you wanted to move a lot of stuff from star-system A to star-system B.
"I suppose they're carrying supplies you need right away?" Nellis surmised.
"No, mostly we used them to haul metal ingots, spare parts, industrial presses and a couple of production lines for fusion engines we probably won't need for years" Hallis told him. "Oh, and about two-hundred-thousand SLDF uniforms we found in a supply cache when we were poking around the Inner Sphere a year back, pretty much all sized extra-small or extra-large just like you would expect."
"Then why unload them before the other ships?" Nellis queried, reasonably.
Hallis frowned. "The High Associator didn't tell you?" he responded in surprise.
"Tell me what?" Nellis replied suspiciously.
"We're sending Thunderer and Rawhide straight back to where we've been holed up most of the last two years, that is why we couldn't send Rawhide to go collect the rest of the 295th and their battlemechs" Hallis explained. "Between them they can carry thirty-one dropships, plus what we can stuff back into the cargo holds we are emptying for the job."
"Weren't you basing yourself out of a hidden SLDF facility?" Nellis recalled.
"Yes, Camelot Command in what is now Lyran space but the area used to belong to the Rim Worlds Republic" Hallis replied. "We're going to take it apart and haul the whole damn thing back here if we can. A repair yard for warships, another for dropships, a factories for turning out replacement parts and sections of warship armour, not to mention a full wing of Voidseeker Drones and the base computer that controlled them."
"Voidseekers?!" Nellis gasped, that was a name he had thought belonged to the past.
"Enough for a budget SDS system to defend the Recharge Station we want to place at the Zenith Jump-Point eventually" Hallis told him. "Just the sort of thing that will scare the hell out of visitors without us having to wave a warship in front of them."
Nellis looked at him incredulously. "And the High Associator was alright with this?" he asked in amazement. Voidseekers and the older, less capable, Blackwasp drone fighters had devastated SLDF aerospace fight formations during the Amaris War. Programmed like the Caspar AI drone warships to follow the orders of the man or woman heading the Star League, their lack of intelligence, or perhaps free will, saw them loyally serving Stefan Amaris as well as they had any of House Cameron.
"Honestly, I think he loved the idea of a high-tech solution to keeping uninvited guests with hostile intentions away, especially one that wouldn't raise a red flag with the clans if they're still low-key scouting for us" Hallis replied. "We assumed he would have told you straight away" he added apologetically.
"He's probably running it through committee" Nellis muttered to himself, annoyed at being kept out of the loop on defence matters.
"There was one suggestion we could disguise the Protecteur as a Caspar, she's a Lola III destroyer like the hulls they were built upon, but that might be a waste of capability. She was assigned to the 295th so if we ever needed to project some serious naval power without running the risk of the clans thinking 'Wolverines' it's only her and Cape Bon that are available. Coincidentally it was the crew of the Protecteur that pointed us towards Camelot Command in the beginning. They also had the codes needed to stop the Voidseekers attacking us."
"You people have been putting a lot of thought into this haven't you Lieutenant-General?" Nellis asked rhetorically.
"We're fairly sure the other clans want to genocide us. It concentrates the mind" Hallis replied flatly. "For that matter the Free Worlds League is only a jump away and I suspect anyone still alive on New Dallas or Brownsville is not going to consider them friendly, peaceable neighbours."
Brigadier-General Nellis nodded. It was hearing the stories of Terran Hegemony worlds lucky enough to survive Amaris then getting nuked back to the stone age by squabbling Successor States which had seen Niops keeping its head down for decades. "You're not being paranoid if they really are out to get you" he quipped.
"Right" Hallis concurred. "At some point, if their technology base continued to slide and they weren't too busy fighting the Lyrans and the Capellans, you were definitely going to be on the menu for some Marek with ambition."
"You know that, and I know that, the problem was always convincing the civilian government of that so they would agree to increase my budget" Nellis replied. "Of course, having a big chunk of the SLDF turn up one day to build a ring of lamellor ferro-carbide around us wasn't really on my scope" he continued wryly. "You're seriously bringing a warship repair yard here?"
"Only a mid-sized one, Camelot wasn't built to take anything larger than a Black Lion, that is why we couldn't make spares for a Potemkin jump-drive in the repair workshops there. Nothing that size would fit in the pressurised dry-dock so some bureaucrat decided not to give the automated factory the designs for anything Camelot would never be working on anyway. We had the codes to get it all started up but there was no way to re-program the thing even if we had all the design-specs in the right format. Which we did not."
"I was wondering about that" Nellis admitted.
"I would wager my Pulverizer that there are factories in the Inner Sphere now, the ones built by the Terran Hegemony for other people, where none of the staff working there have any idea how to fix if it goes wrong" Hallis stated with conviction, "and that they cannot switch over to producing something else instead because how the machinery in the place actually operates is an utter mystery."
Nellis grinned. "No bet" he replied. "One of my friends said that in a hundred years the only people left in the Inner Sphere that knows how anything works will be us and the phone company. That was before the war ended though, they might recover if they're not slaughtering each other anymore."
"I can't see the peace lasting, too much bad blood and there's still just enough left of the Terran Hegemony to be worth fighting over" Hallis opined. "The fighting ended in '21 because all sides were exhausted, give them ten years to raise new units and replenish ammunition stocks and they'll be back at each other's throats."
"Some might call that cynical, not me you understand but some people" Nellis replied.
"Aleksandr Kerensky used to quote a Russian Proverb that said, 'Eternal peace lasts only until the next war' and history supports his position" Hallis replied. "In a thousand years the historians will say that the Golden Age under the Star League was just a two-century long armistice between Age of War I and Age of War II."
"Keeps people like us in gainful employment" Nellis noted brightly.
"Aff" Hallis agreed.
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NOTES FOR PART IV AS FOUND IN THE PREVIOUS POST
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Note from the Author:
Niops VII has a lot of ocean with a lot of both native and introduced fish species swimming around in it. As such I imagined the NAM would have a small 'wet' navy mainly geared around being able to rescue fishing trawlers in trouble, hence them having an old Silverfin (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Silverfin) coastal cutter in their inventory that doesn't get much action. Brigadier-General Nellis is using the visit up the river to the new SLDF settlement on the Arecibo Plains to take it out for a spin (the usually bored and inactive crew are likely happy too).
The Jamerson-Ulikov Water Purifier (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Jamerson-Ulikov_Water_Purifier) is a highly efficient device that is rapidly becoming lostech in the Inner Sphere. Stuffing one into the hold of a Mule (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Mule) that can then refill the water tanks of a massive Aqueduct (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Aqueduct) liquid cargo carrier seems a good way to replenish the fleets water supplies on a long journey. It also means the new settlement has a source of safe potable water from the start.
The first generation of 'Trueborn (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Trueborn)' clan warriors was birthed (decanted) from the Iron Wombs (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Iron_Womb) in 2816 (with the technology being improved several times until 2850, the Wolverines here have second-generation 2819 tech). The distinct phenotypes aren't a thing yet so the genetic modifcation of first/second gen Trueborns is limited. Young Frederick Hallis was made from the DNA of Franklin Hallis, integrating the Trueborns into normal society based on a family structure might be tricky (Sarah McEvedy gave everyone the right to use their own surnames again after the Secession, my view is that the Truborns would simply get the name of whoever donated the most DNA to thier genes).
The Mercury II (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Mercury_II) medium battlemech of Clan Wolverine manufacture was based upon the advanced SLDF Mercury (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Mercury_(BattleMech)) light 'mech. Some battlemechs like the Mercury II, or the ubiquitous Wasp (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Wasp) have two hands which makes them useful for something other than wreaking destruction, here they're helping with construction instead.
Military technology did not jump straight from SLDF issue to the greatly superior so-called ClanTech weapons. By the time of Operation Klondike (and Operation Switchback) new 'Improved' versions of SLDF gear was in production amongst the clans that was typically lighter and more compact than their predecessors. A lot of clan-tech was at the prototype stage when the Wolverines left but for the most part only the 'Improved' transition types were in production.
It says in Betrayal of Ideals (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Betrayal_of_Ideals) that Franklin Hallis took two of the larger battleships and three transport from the Norfolk Boneyard (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Norfolk_Boneyard) as part of the preparations for Switchback. We know that one of the battleships was the Texas (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Texas) Class Bismark (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Bismark) but we do not know what the other was (it wasn't the McKenna (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/McKenna_(WarShip_class)) Zughoffer Weir (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Blake%27s_Sword), that was already part of the Wolverine Touman). The Exodus fleet had at least one Monsoon (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Monsoon) class battleship with them, probably because it could haul so much along, and a reader suggested it to be the Thunderer (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Thunderer) (as a legendary ship of the SLDF they might not want to leave it behind but still mothballed it later because it was so old). One of the transports Hallis took from Norfolk was the Rawhide (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Rawhide_(Individual_spacecraft)), described in the text as a "massive jump transport" and given that the Wolverines wanted to save as many of their population, and haul off as much of their industry as they could a Potemkin (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Potemkin) seems a good choice (it's certainly massive).
The secret SLDF facility in what used to be Rim Worlds Republic (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Rim_Worlds_Republic) space (but is now in Lyran territory) Camelot Command (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Camelot_Command) was in a poor state when it was rediscovered in-canon in 3050. We're over two centuries earlier so all the equipment is in much better condition including the factories and repair facilities. The stations pressurised dry dock could hold an eight-hundred thousand ton mass, Black Lion (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Black_Lion) but a Potemkin is twice the length and nearly twice the mass of a Black Lion so it wouldn't fit.
Camelot Command was defended by 'dozens' of Voidseeker (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Voidseeker) Drones (I'm estimating a full wing of them). Given that the 295th and its warship escorts, the Protecteur (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Protecteur) and the Cape Bon (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Cape_Bon), operated out of that very region (their duty-station was in the Rim Worlds Republic) it seems more than plausible that they knew of Camelot Command and had the security codes.
If you've got a Monsoon and a Potemkin to haul it all away Camelot Command is basically, 'Hey, free shipyard!' (but they would have to build a new pressurised drydock at Niops even if they yoinked everything else required).
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"Would have" or just "have to" build a new shipyard? I'd think it's the latter if they ever want to fix that Potemkin... ???
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"Would have" or just "have to" build a new shipyard? I'd think it's the latter if they ever want to fix that Potemkin... ???
Shipyards...require industrial base. I'm guessing that the Wolverines are going to step-stage that so that they can fix yonder Potemkin with quality work, rather than rushing things so it fails somewhere inconvenient.
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I thought the industrial base was coming in from Camelot? Or at least some of it, while the Workshops build the rest? ???
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I thought the industrial base was coming in from Camelot? Or at least some of it, while the Workshops build the rest? ???
as the characters themselves pointed out, an industrial base is more than hardware, and having lots of hardware with only a few trained people isn't good for long term industrial survival. Likewise for the people to identify, locate, and retrieve raw materials (a milling machine without materials stock is a very noisy thing that makes nothing.)
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Good point! :thumbsup:
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Shipyards...require industrial base. I'm guessing that the Wolverines are going to step-stage that so that they can fix yonder Potemkin with quality work, rather than rushing things so it fails somewhere inconvenient.
The parts they're going to get out of the Project Workshops are basically those needed to get the 295th's Potemkin back to Niops (gingerly), then at some point they'll put her through a full service and refit, as it were.
In canon it took Wylie's Coyote's thirty years to fix their jumpship after a misjump to the Samoyedic Colonies for lack of a handy shipyard where they ended up. They did manage to get it running again without a shipyard (eventually), so it can be done, but it's certainly not easy.
Having a Project Workshop to make the necessary parts for a temporary repair speeds things up a lot though.
Hauling back as much of Camelot Command as they can just means they don't have to start completely from scratch as regards orbital infrastructure. Terran Hegemony manufacturing is basically 'raw-materials in, complex product out' but making something like that yourself is hard.
The Valkyrie factory on New Avalon can churn out battlemechs by the hundreds per year, but building another factory like that from scratch required an industrial base the Federated Suns simply didn't have.
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Loving the story so far. Given this is still early in the Clan era and a lot of SLDF gear is still around, I would love to see/help write up a few TROs on what Royal ASFs would look like once retrofitted with Clantech gear, provided that Hotpoint is okay/amenable to that notion down the road.
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Loving the story so far. Given this is still early in the Clan era and a lot of SLDF gear is still around, I would love to see/help write up a few TROs on what Royal ASFs would look like once retrofitted with Clantech gear, provided that Hotpoint is okay/amenable to that notion down the road.
Initially any upgrades really are going to be very basic because it gives the best bang for the buck and concentrated on the non-Royal equipment of the NAM and the 295th.
For example, take a Tomahawk THK-63, remove the two large lasers and single small laser and replaced them with two Improved Large Lasers, two Medium Lasers and an extra half-ton of ammo. That gives you a THK-63n.
Or how about an EGL-R6. Replace the three large lasers with Improved Large lasers and add a ton of armour and an extra two heatsinks to give you an EGL-63n.
In simple terms you're just replacing Star League era weaponry with its lighter and more compact 'Improved' version and making up the difference in mass/crits with more firepower, heatsinks or armour depending upon what the particular ASF (or mech) might need the most.
The slight Wolverine/Niops Twist to that general rule is that anything that was mounting an ERPPC now has an Enhanced ERPPC.
In the slightly longer term any single heatsinks on ASF's get replaced with Star League era DHS and a Star League XL engine will get put into production, specifically the 270XL (because they already have the tooling, it's used on the Stag) so you can replace the 270SFE on the Tomahawk, Ahab and Chippewa.
The next XL engine available after that will be the Star League 180XL (to replace the 150 SFE in Spads and the 180SFE in the Gotha). It's actually intended for the Niops version of the Blackjack 'mech too.
It'll be decades before they catch up with full Clantech, too many other spending requirements.
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The slight Wolverine/Niops Twist to that general rule is that anything that was mounting an ERPPC now has an Enhanced ERPPC.
... I now have evil visions about what that kind of refit would look like for the Royal Stuka.
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... I now have evil visions about what that kind of refit would look like for the Royal Stuka.
My notion of STU-5Kbn was four Enhanced ERPPC in the wings and either an Improved Gauss Rifle or an Improved AC/20 in the nose (depending on how close you're planning to get to the target).
Basically "I'm here to do horrible things to dropships and/or do horrible things to Assault Mechs in strafing runs." >:D
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180XL you say? ???
Think of the infantry man! That would make one SWEET Goblin... :D
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They should be able to upgrade their Sabres to SB-27b-EC models... :thumbsup: That would be a great little upgrade
and that engine could be used to improve Von Luckner Heavy Tanks or Quasit Security Mechs or Vindicator VND-1AA (to better armor so it not a failure) or Wyvern Mechs
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180XL you say? ???
Think of the infantry man! That would make one SWEET Goblin... :D
The 270XL also gives you the PHX-1b and PhX-1c Royal Phoenix Hawks, along with the new PPCs and, IIRC, ER lasers.
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They should be able to upgrade their Sabres to SB-27b-EC models... :thumbsup: That would be a great little upgrade
and that engine could be used to improve Von Luckner Heavy Tanks or Quasit Security Mechs or Vindicator VND-1AA (to better armor so it not a failure) or Wyvern Mechs
More likely just to stick the 225SFE from the Sabres into new-build Von Luckners and upgrade the weaponry to "Improved" standard.
They make Sabres in the Magistracy so there's a supply of the things readily available (not a bad choice for future Planetary Defence Forces in the Hegemony worlds).
The 270XL also gives you the PHX-1b and PhX-1c Royal Phoenix Hawks, along with the new PPCs and, IIRC, ER lasers.
The 270XL also gives you the Royal Hussar.
Incidentally, any 270SFE engines stripped out of existing machines for the XL upgrade find a home in new-build Highlanders. Meanwhile 150SFE engines from Spads go into new Burkes (using three Improved PPC's means you can add three tons of armour so it's much tougher).
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Incidentally, any 270SFE engines stripped out of existing machines for the XL upgrade find a home in new-build Highlanders. Meanwhile 150SFE engines from Spads go into new Burkes (using three Improved PPC's means you can add three tons of armour so it's much tougher).
Even better: the low weight of Clan LRM systems gives you even more armor.
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Even better: the low weight of Clan LRM systems gives you even more armor.
I was thinking in terms of swapping out the LRM10 for an Improved LRM20 (same mass and crits) but perhaps splitting the difference at an Improved LRM15 (and an extra 1.5 tons of armour) might be an idea.
Swapping out the original Burke armament for three Improved PPCs and an Improved LRM15 increases armour from 5.5 tons to 10.5 tons and gives a firepower increase (until the LRM's run out).
It's still slow as hell but they'll surely regret running across you. ;D
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I was thinking in terms of swapping out the LRM10 for an Improved LRM20 (same mass and crits) but perhaps splitting the difference at an Improved LRM15 (and an extra 1.5 tons of armour) might be an idea.
Swapping out the original Burke armament for three Improved PPCs and an Improved LRM15 increases armour from 5.5 tons to 10.5 tons and gives a firepower increase (until the LRM's run out).
I suggest using at least 1 of the freed up tons for additional LRM ammo. Larger launcher means you go through the ammo bins that much more quickly.
The next XL engine available after that will be the Star League 180XL (to replace the 150 SFE in Spads and the 180SFE in the Gotha). It's actually intended for the Niops version of the Blackjack 'mech too.
Also useful for Royal Wyverns. Or if they want lighter something in the 30 ton class. My recommendation is for a Falcon.
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So by this point in the AU, the Wolverines already have Clan LRMs and DHS? Or are they roughly still equivalent to SLDF Royal tech?
Clan-grade LRM racks might as well be cheat codes for missile mechs. Half the weight, all the performance. No other singular weapon system in Clantech outside of the ER Medium Laser holds such a drastic advantage in terms of sheer weight<>performance differential.
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enhanced lrms not quite clan tech but they should make those pretty fast if they try.
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So by this point in the AU, the Wolverines already have Clan LRMs and DHS? Or are they roughly still equivalent to SLDF Royal tech?
They have Early Clan "Improved LRM" launchers which aren't full ClanTech (they're half the weight but still have minimum range). The various Improved weapons are basically the intermediate stage between SLDF equipment and Golden Century gear.
They don't have Clan DHS, XL Engines, Endo-Steel, or armour yet (they were either only at prototype stage or not even that far along when the Wolverines left).
Generally "Improved" weaponry is lighter and more compact than SLDF gear with one little anomaly. The Improved SRM is actually the same weight and size as a standard SRM but longer ranged.
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Interesting. What's the difference between an Improved LRM rack vs a full Clantech one in terms of weight then?
I know that:
Clan LRM-20: 5 tons
IS LRM-20: 10 tons
So the Improved LRM-20 is somewhere in between? Or maybe it has all the weight savings already but hasn't solved the minimal range issue yet?
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Yes, I took what he said to mean the "Improved" LRM-20 would be five tons but still have a minimum range of six.
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Part V
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"Who are we if not our morals, principles and beliefs rendered corporeal by our own endeavours? We might live under the dim light of a Red Dwarf but we have it within ourselves to ensure our values will shine out from Niops like a Blue Hypergiant. A beacon to the galaxy, a shining city on a hill, the champion of liberty and scientific progress not oppression and ignorance. All we have to do is make a choice, are we content to hide ourselves away, cowering in fear while civilisation collapses elsewhere, or do we step up to the task and embrace a destiny that providence has enabled for us? I say let us be the best versions of ourselves and together we can turn the Niops Association into the best version of itself too, not merely a beacon showing the way forward but more than that, a hero among the Star-Nations!"
Re-election Campaign Speech by High Associator Giles Olson - 2830 CE
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(FLASHBACK) Columbus Base – Epsilon Pegasus System – 2825
'The Terran Hegemony planted a flag here nearly three hundred years ago and maintained a presence here until just after the Amaris Civil War, it's not exactly surprising they seeded the planet with an assortment of edible plants in the quarter-millennium the Cameron Star flew over the place now is it, Query Affirmative?" saKhan Trish Ebon asked sardonically after the chief scout reported they had discovered a number of orchards only a few kilometres from the old SLDF facility.
"Aff" the scout replied, feeling suitably silly for having expressed surprise at his discovery. "Native plants have overgrown what we think used to be grainfields, wheat and oats most likely given the climate, and it looks like the local fauna did a number on the root crops once the fences came down, but there are plenty of apples and pears, and a few cherry trees" he continued his report. "Blackberry bushes too, the thorns probably kept off the wildlife."
"That is good, we will organise some manpower to pick fruit, give everyone a chance to eat something other than ration packs" Trish responded, looking around. The scout had met her at the main entrance to the facility across from the dropship landing pad and from there you could see all the way to the still intact base perimeter fence, built stronger than those around the farms presumably, and to the trees beyond.
Columbus base had been built into a very large crater, something very large and heavy must have come crashing down a hundred thousand years prior to produce such a dent, and the crater walls visible in the distance made for an interesting view as well. The micro-climate within the crater made it more hospitable than it would have been otherwise, though warm it certainly was not.
"We also found a warehouse full of ration packs, saKhan Ebon" the scout told her, almost apologetically. "I suppose that's not surprising either, it's not like they're something they would have bothered to bring back with them to the Inner Sphere when the system was abandoned" he reasoned.
Trish nodded. "Did you find any munitions?"
"A few hundred tons worth, mostly small-arms, nothing compared to what you found at the shipyard up there" the scout replied, pointing up to where Amor, the planet's relatively tiny moon, could have been seen if it wasn't broad daylight. Roughly a century before the Star League fell the SLDF had constructed an orbital facility within the moon where jumpships could be serviced, presumably planning ahead for a new wave of colonial expansion corewards of the Inner Sphere. It had proven a treasure trove of spare parts and supplies, with Trish herself having taken charge of making an inventory of the orbital while others reconnoitred the surface.
Trish looked around, her own dropship had landed less than an hour ago, a day later than the scout party who had set down first to investigate the spaceport and its adjoined facility and it seemed that the scouts had carried out their mission quickly and efficiently.
Although much of the complex was underground, the landing pads for dropships and the runways for aerospace fighters were hardly difficult to spot from above.
"The dropship repair yard at the edge of the landing pad might need some coaxing to get it operational again, though most of the machinery seems intact" the scout informed her. "If nothing else it has a large storeroom full of spares, though quite a lot of them are for dropships we do not use any more, Dictators, Manatees and Black Eagles."
"When the rest of the dropships arrive, we'll prioritise what spares there are for the ships that need them most" Trish replied. "You signalled that the Base Computer down here is still functioning, query affirmative?"
"Aff. It has been very helpful with providing inventory lists and maps of the facility" the scout told her. "It also seems to hold some very detailed charts of all the stars within two or three jumps of Epsilon Pegasus, as well as the standard route used between here and the Terran Hegemony."
Trish laughed. "That being the one we definitely will not be using in case the clans figure out where we went" she replied.
"That was my thinking as well, saKhan" the scout agreed. "Much of the Draconis Drift between here and the Inner Sphere seems to be uncharted, although there are a number of habitable, or barely habitable worlds off the beaten track which were recorded as being suitable for colonisation that we could use as way-points."
"Barely habitable?" Trish queried.
"Red Dwarfs mostly" the scout explained.
"Urgh" Trish responded with a grimace, there was a reason why humanity had colonised G Type stars like Terra itself first while expanding out into the galaxy, even though K Type Red Dwarfs were far more common.
You only had to look around on Columbus to see why. Epsilon Pegasus was a G2V star, just like Sol in the Terran system, and thanks to billions of years of evolution under a yellow sun it just looked inexplicably right somehow.
Columbus was the fourth planet out from the star and cooler than Terra as a result, the base itself was situated on the equator or growing crops would not have been feasible even in the sheltered crater, but the gravity was only slightly less than Terra and after nearly a year stuck aboard ship it would likely seem like paradise for the people shortly to start landing in their droves.
In some ways the Epsilon Pegasus system mocked the notion of the 'Goldilocks Zone' in that although it had two life-bearing planets, Epsilon Pegasus III and IV, Columbus itself was just a bit too cold for comfort, even at the equator, whereas Kew, the third planet, was just a bit too hot. With an average surface temperature at the equator nearing 45 degrees Celsius Kew was a world where you could only comfortable live near the poles, and even there it was far from temperate.
The terraforming technology available to the Hegemony could have readily fixed both worlds of course, warming Mars and then making a hell-hole like Venus habitable taught them a lot. Massive amounts of carbon-dioxide dumped into the atmosphere to heat up Columbus, and aerosols in the upper atmosphere to cool Kew would have been easy enough projects to undertake, but the Star League Corps of Engineers had only been instructed to build military and research facilities, plus any required support infrastructure, not to prepare the system for mass colonisation so they hadn't.
Trish Ebon and a squadron of ships equipped with lithium-fusion batteries had been sent ahead of the bulk of the Wolverine fleet by Khan Hallis, not only to make sure the Epsilon Pegasus System was safe but to determine the state of the repair facilities there. She had very good news to report to him on that score as the jumpship yard in orbit was still operational, so vessels in dire need of a service could get a proper one, and the SLDF had also left behind a massive quantity of supplies.
To be honest in some ways it was probably a good thing that Columbus was a little cooler than humans generally preferred because it should help motivate everyone to pack up and leave again when the time came to do so. It could be a while before Nicky K caught up with them but it would be foolish to assume he would stop looking anytime soon.
"You mentioned the wildlife? Seen much of it?" Trish asked.
"Something that looked a lot like a bear tried to turn Corporal Jansen into lunch earlier" the scout replied, grinning. "Its teeth and claws weren't a match for his Mauser though, we are planning to carve a few steaks off of it and cook them for dinner tonight" he told her. "Base computer says the local mammalian life is safe for human consumption."
"What about native fruits and vegetables?" Trish asked.
"Some are pretty hazardous, most will just give you a severe stomach upset. Best stick to the imported species of plants" the scout advised. "There is one native fruit that is safe to eat, looks like a melon but tastes more like a peach apparently according to the computer records relating to indigenous life. We found some but I have not tried one yet."
"What did the garrison call it?" Trish asked out of interest.
The scout grinned. "Melonpeach" he replied.
"I do not know why I bothered to ask" Trish said, rolling her eyes. "I suppose it is too much to hope that the hydroponic farms underground are still running, query negative?" she asked. Certain crops that simply couldn't be grown outside in a climate this cold, but were welcome additions to the diet of the personnel assigned here nonetheless, would have been grown there. On the cooler worlds of the clans you could often find chilli peppers and the like being farmed the same way.
"Neg. They were shut down when the garrison left" the scout told her apologetically. "There are still stocks of seeds in cold storage, and fertilizer we can transport up to the Invaders to bolster their own stocks so it is not a total loss" he continued. "If we need any replacement water pumps we could strip those too."
"Make a detailed inventory for me, I will study it then give a copy to Khan Hallis when he arrives so he can determine what his salvage priorities are" Trish ordered.
"One more thing, we found a couple of transport VTOL's in a hanger that the Technician Caste can likely get running if we want to hunt the local herds of game animals and bring back the meat" the scout suggested. "They seem to be pretty numerous, there is one common species in particular that resembles a woolly rhino that supposedly makes for tasty burgers and a pretty good chilli."
Trish Ebon blinked. "I will advise the Khan to make that a priority" she replied, practically salivating at the thought. "We are the North American Division once again, after all" she joked.
"We will need cheese for the cheeseburgers but if you want someone to try milking a three-ton mammal with a metre-long horn at the front it will likely result in a Trial of Refusal from anyone given the job, saKhan Ebon" the scout replied, chuckling.
"I will just ask the marines if any of them want to volunteer" Trish suggested, tongue-in-cheek.
The scout considered her plan. "That could work" he agreed.
It had taken them well over a dozen jumps, near five-hundred light-years off their originally intended route, to get them from the Exodus Road to Epsilon Pegasus. Even on half-rations it had been touch-and-go if they were going to make it, and without the improvised J-U Water Purifier the former science and technician castes had rigged up in the hold of a Mule they certainly wouldn't have. That Mule, along with the Aqueduct liquid-cargo-carrier it had been topping up whenever they located a planet or moon with an ocean or a polar ice cap, would be among the first dropships to land once Hallis arrived with the rest of the fleet.
If Trish Ebon never had to eat a survival ration washed down with distilled water again it would be too soon. Frankly the thought of eating some of that native 'bear' later was making her salivate as she set the scout back to his task and headed into the facility to see for herself.
Franklin Hallis had worried at one point he might face a 'Prinz Eugen Mutiny' of his own as not only the civilians began to complain vociferously about being hungry and couped-up so long but even some of the warrior caste started to question the plan. The only saving grace to the Khan's benefit was it was hard to argue against the proposition that they had to keep going because if they turned back and the Clans caught them the ilKhan would have them all killed.
It wasn't so much that the Wolverines were well aware that it was not them who had triggered a nuclear device in Great Hope, under the circumstances even the conspiracy theorists found it hard to argue convincingly that McEvedy had nuked herself, it was the destruction of Dehra Dun which meant Kerensky had to kill them all.
Thanks to the Black Box recordings on Bismark, and other sensor logs in their position, the Wolverines could prove it was not their nuclear device which had incinerated much of the capital city of the Snow Ravens, destroying their priceless genetic repository into the bargain. As to whether any clan would be willing to hear the Wolverines out, or actually study the physical evidence, was uncertain of course but could the ilKhan really take such a risk?
Only the Snow Ravens knew for certain that the Wolverines were framed for Dehra Dun, and presumably putting two-and-two together had a reasonable assumption that they might have been framed for the destruction of Great Hope too. However, if it became more widely known that Nicholas had covered up the actual events, and pinned the blame on an innocent party, then surely other clans would be reasonably concerned that the next time he wanted to make an example of someone it could be them that got set up.
Khan McEvedy was not the only leader that had expressed extreme disquiet at some of the ilKhan's actions during the crushing of any dissent in the Pentagon Worlds after Klondike. She had even surreptitiously recorded a few conversations she had with the Khans of other Clans on the subject, recordings that Franklin Hallis had since listened to. The one she had with Khan Mitchell Loris of Clan Mongoose in particular could easily be interpreted as him strongly supporting her viewpoint as regards Nicholas Kerensky's moral character, not to mention his sanity. The ilKhan was not nearly as venerated as he might wish, and he was likely not stupid enough to think he was either, meaning he had to stop the truth being told.
The most effective means of ensuring that the facts never emerged was to destroy all the physical evidence, and any copies that might have made of that evidence, and ensure there were no eye-witnesses left either. In short, every warship and jumpship belonging to Clan Wolverine had to be destroyed and their passengers and crew with them.
If any of Franklin Hallis's people had thought Nicholas Kerensky incapable of such an action they had largely vanished amidst the mushroom clouds rising above Circe.
You might be hungry, feeling tetchy and claustrophobic trapped aboard a ship for an excessive period of time but you had to be alive to be hungry and tetchy and that was better than the alternative.
Still, it was a very, very good thing that Columbus Base and the orbital facility on the planet's moon were intact and well-stocked because if they hadn't been general opinion might have veered to going back and making a suicidal fight of it.
Khan Hallis was adamant that when they eventually did go back it wasn't going to be a suicide mission. It would be to put a righteous and well-deserved serious whupping on the bastards, rebuild Great Hope and and then raise the banner of Clan Wolverine over it again.
Survival was not enough in itself. People needed a reason to keep going and graphically imagined thoughts of wreaking bloody vengeance could be a great motivator.
As Trish Ebon wandered the corridors of the old SLDF base, occasionally poking her head through a door to see what was in there and frequently finding something worth salvaging, she became increasingly annoyed that they only had a fraction of the free cargo space needed to cart off all this valuable loot. The automated production plant for turning out replacement electronic components was itself a technological marvel, one likely necessitated because it was a long way back to Terra from here, over a thousand light-years in fact. If you needed some components to fix a navigation console, or even just a personal noteputer, the machine could churn out whatever you needed, but it was truly massive and probably weighed as much as a mid-sized dropship.
That was the problem with raw-materials-in, complicated-final-product-out, Terran Hegemony manufacturing. There were a lot of intermediate stages involved in the process, even if the technological wizardry in the sealed unit did all the actual work, so simple and easily portable it was not.
The base computer was as helpful as the scout had made it sound when Trish reached the Control Room. It was already printing off hundreds of maps for the convenience of the people it had been advised were on the way, and although not a true AI it had been programmed in such a way that it was difficult to tell.
Trish decided that it would be advisable not to run a Turing Test on the thing just in case they decided to slag it instead of just wiping its memories of Clan Wolverine interlopers. It would be harder to destroy it if it turned out the thing had developed sentience in the decades it had been stuck here alone with little to do but monitor other less advanced systems. It wasn't likely by any means, but the Star League had dabbled in copying human neural pathways to help develop smarter, more intuitive computers, so you couldn't entirely dismiss the possibility.
Those damn Caspar drones had definitely been more tactically astute than most people had expected them to be during the Amaris Civil War. They didn't just charge straight at the enemy, all guns blazing, they tried to outflank and outfox opponents, setting traps including feigned retreats designed to pull you into range of heavily-armed SDS Battlestations.
The M-3 drones built into modified Pentagon assault dropships weren't nearly as smart, and the Voidseeker and particularly the older Blackwasp drone fighters were dumb as rocks, but Trish recalled her father telling stories about how when you were facing swarms of the damn things they weren't nearly stupid enough for comfort.
Riffling through desk drawers for useful information yielded little of that, although she did find an unopened bottle of Scotch imported all the way from Terra, along with a couple of whisky glasses. Something to share with Franklin she decided, stuffing it into a faux-leather hold-all she found nearby along with some pens that might still work and pencils that definitely would, you always steal the office stationary as a point of principle.
Before too long the entire complex would be stuffed to the gills with people, either looking for useful materials or just there out of curiosity. There were tens of thousands of civilians and military personnel likely desperate to stretch their legs planet-side, and it was nice to have the place mostly to herself before it was inundated with sightseers and salvagers.
Hauling most of the machinery away wasn't an option, Trish knew, but taking the control circuitry for much of it might be possible, along with the users manuals and any diagrams and tech drawings. How the hell they would be able to replicate the big, heavy machinery to plug the circuits back into once they reached their final destination was going to be someone else's problem.
A thought occurred to Trish as she turned back towards the computer. You know it's not really that big, she realised, and can't weigh more than a couple of tons surely?
If the Columbus Base computer had been smarter it would have been somewhat disturbed by the avaricious expression on Trish Ebon's face, as seen via the security camera in the control room. Though not as much as it would have been a couple of weeks later when one of the crew of technicians sent to take it apart for transport asked it to sing 'Daisy Daisy' while they started pulling circuit boards.
By the time Clan Wolverine eventually left the Epsilon Pegasus system they had stripped Columbus Base and the Amor orbital dockyard above it of anything useful that was small enough to carry away with them.
Not knowing if the clans were hot on their heels, or perhaps lying in ambush on the edge of the Inner Sphere, Khan Hallis sent three squadrons of ships to scout the route on ahead through the Draconis Drift.
When the squadron led by the old battleship Thunderer jumped into the Buffalo Meadows system, half-way between Epsilon Pegasus and the periphery border of the Draconis Combine, they almost opened fire on the warships and jumpships they found at the Zenith Point there. Fortunately they realised before pushing any fire buttons that the ships were all powered-down and seemingly mothballed and had been for quite some time
When a lithium-fusion battery equipped ship from the Thunderer squadron reported back to Khan Hallis that they had tripped over the 295th Battlemech Division, and he should probably go introduce himself to a certain Lieutenant-General Jenna Romanov that very much wanted to meet him, Hallis remained unconvinced he was not the subject of a huge practical joke at his expense. This continued right up until he found himself shaking hands with the woman and even after that he kept waking up thinking he must have dreamt the whole thing.
Honestly it just seemed so implausible that he began to seriously question his agnosticism because someone, or something out there, appeared to either really love the Wolverines or really hated someone else he wanted them to deal with.
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Note from the Author:
In canon the Terran Hegemony/SLDF facilities in the Epsilon Pegasus (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Epsilon_Pegasus) System that were abandoned in the early 2880's were not rediscovered until 3023 by which time they were rather worn down by age and lack of maintenance (although the base computer still worked and there was still plenty of other valuable lostech to salvage). Since in this timeline it has only been forty years since Columbus Base was shut down, rather than two-hundred and forty, everything is in rather better condition.
Given that Epsilon Pegasus IV (the planet Columbus) was founded as a Deep Periphery base as early as 2549 I can only assume that the garrison and base personnel had established farms to provide fresh food over the centuries, although four decades without having been tended allowed the native plants to take over again. Some of the local fauna is mammalian and given the climate (it's pretty chilly even at the equator) I can only imagine there to be some very large and furry herbivores running around the place.
The jumpship repair yard built into Amor (the small moon of Columbus) is not likely to be built large enough to cope with massive warships because Columbus was built to facilitate exploration and it's situated in the back of beyond. Even an actual naval base near to potential threats like Camelot Command (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Camelot_Command) could only take ships up to the size of A Black Lion battlecruiser so I can't see the Amor yards being any larger than that.
Epsilon Pegasus having some automated factory facilities to produce replacement parts and circuitry seems logical given that Terra is a thousand light-years away (eight months by jumpship).
The Draconian Drift (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Draconian_Drift) where the 295th ended up lies between Epsilon Pegasus and the Inner Sphere. It does not seem to have been much travelled because nobody found Buffalo Meadows (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Buffalo_Meadows) until the Comstar Explorer Corps (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Explorer_Corps) did in 3021 (not long before they also found Epsilon Pegasus too they were clearly searching that part of the Deep Periphery).
As for the Thunderer running across Buffalo Meadows, well it's certainly fortuitous but I've often pondered the fact that one of the least realistic part of fiction is that it can strive to avoid weird and unlucky events a little too much. Fiction has to 'make sense' or you risk losing the reader's suspension of disbelief, but inexplicably unlikely crap happens all the time in real life and can drastically alter how events end up turning out. A minor example I've always liked is that if you had a gunfight in a supposedly serious western movie where the sheriff's bullet went down the barrel of the bad guys gun, stopping the other bullet coming out and blowing the gun out of his hand, it would be treated as a joke that nobody in the audience would take seriously... but that really happened once in reality!
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Excellent interlude! :thumbsup:
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sing 'Daisy Daisy'.... nice 2001 reference.
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So, just wondering- did they take the huge dropship ground-movers with them, or were they too big?
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Part VI
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"All I'm saying is we need to come up with a catchier name than 'Improved Enhanced Extended-Range Particle Projector Cannon' for the prototype when they get it to work. It's clunkier than a rusty agromech."
Colonel Trish Ebon - 2836 CE
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Municipal Planetarium – Niops Association (Niops VII) – 2828
You could find numerous cities across the breadth of colonised space that featured a large domed building in their city-center. On many of them it was a governmental structure, a parliament or senate house, others meanwhile had theatres, opera houses or sports stadiums depending upon their cultural leanings.
Niops VII had a planetarium with seating for upwards of ten thousand people.
When Lieutenant-General Romanov had asked if there was a venue available for a presentation by herself and Franklin Hallis, one that had capacity for perhaps a few hundred attendees and most importantly a holo-projector, she had expected to be offered a meeting chamber in a government facility, or perhaps just a school hall. The location that was arranged for her instead was rather more epic in scale that she had ever envisioned, although she had to admit being able to project multiple holograms of battlemechs at 1:1 scale added a certain grandeur to proceedings.
As to whether having a piece of classical music playing incessantly in the background, this being 'Mars the Bringer of War' from Holst's Planet Suite, would add more gravitas was a matter for debate. The retired astronomer who ran the place as director of the planetarium certainly thought so, his side of the argument being strengthened by both stubbornness and him being the only person present that knew how to work the projector, so after Brigadier-General Nellis told Romanov that the Niops Association Militia used it as their unofficial anthem anyway she eventually conceded with a reluctant 'I'll allow it', a glare at the director and an audible growl.
It was things like that which resulted in people saying she was getting crotchety in old age, which annoyed her greatly. Not only had she always been crotchety she wasn't even in her nineties yet, let alone ****** 'old'. It might be best to try and get a couple of children from an Iron Womb soon though, she admitted to herself, chasing around after young kids after turning a hundred would doubtless be a pain-in-the-ass. Fortunately if they proved too much to cope with she could always foist them on the Wolverine's 'Sibling Company' system, part-creche, part kindergarten, part cadet school, that seemed to work well enough.
Even at her age barring an accident or enemy action she could readily expect to live long enough to see them grow up and perhaps have kids of their own. It was a oddity of fate that despite being decades older than most of the 331st she herself and a lot of her own people would still likely outlive a fair percentage of them, thanks simply to the youngsters not having received the anti-agathics people born in the Terran Hegemony had been given in their youth. Franklin Hallis himself had received them, being fortunate enough to having been born on Terra in the years between the liberation and Kerensky's Exodus, but most of his people were mayflies that might not even reach what was considered middle-age back in the Hegemony as-was.
Re-developing those gene-therapy treatments for use on Niops, in particular aiming to ensure that expensive military assets like genetically-engineered Ironborn mechwarriors lived long enough to warrant what was spent on them, was high on the list of priorities. Naturally the treatments would eventually be offered to everyone, it would certainly help the demographics, but Romanov suspected the criteria for which civilian children got them first was going to be IQ in a society structured like this one. In other places it might have been how much money your parents had, or if you were the cousin of some duke, but the Niops Association purported that it was a pure meritocracy based on intellect not nepotism.
If they were really as meritocratic as they liked to think they were you would see a lot more people of Capellan descent among the higher echelons of society however, Romanov considered. The distinct lack of second-generation immigrants amongst the politicians, civil-servants, scientists and engineers attending that day was noticeable, and not for the first time she heard Franklin Hallis quietly grumbling to himself about restrictive caste systems and the ****** who upheld them.
Romanov had little doubt that if the civilian government ever moved to formally stratify their society by law then Hallis and his Wolverines would military-coup the shit out of them and impose an egalitarian liberal constitution with universal suffrage and a bill-of-rights at gunpoint. Throughout history such coups typically came from the politically far-right, or occasionally far left, so having one sprung by the far-centre instead for a change would at least be novel, she thought with amusement. Romanov recalled reading something more than half a century ago in which the political philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau suggested that some people might to be forced to be free if necessary, and readily imagined Hallis subscribing to that notion.
As the last of the invited guests finally arrived, civilians were not the most punctual of people, Jenna Romanov considered that in some ways 'forced to be free' as a philosophy overlapped the unofficial policy of the SLDF towards the star nations of the Inner Sphere and Periphery during much of the Golden Age, 'Play nice, or else!'.
After a brief introduction presented by Nellis as the ranking NAM officer, Romanov and Hallis began by telling the audience abridged histories of their own respective peoples to set the scene. Since the tale of what had befallen Franklin Hallis's people since the fall of the Star League was rather more eventful than that of her own he went first, with the complicated story of the Star-League-in-Exile, the Clans, Operation Klondike and the Wolverine Secession taking a while to tell. When he eventually finished Romanov told an almost comedically abridged story about her own 295th Division which basically went like 'Got left behind by Kerensky Senior because we were running late, tried to catch up, starship broke down, decided to take up farming and raising kids, bad at both, ran into these sorry bastards from the 331st, eventually wound up here'.
Asking for questions at this juncture proved a mistake, Romanov had hoped that raising the spectre of the clans as another mortal threat to Niops, the locals were already wary of the Successor States, would make the audience think in terms of defence matters but it seemed to have lacked the desired impact. Most of the questions were directed at Hallis, querying the stellar classifications and planetary orbits of the various colonised systems of the Kerensky Cluster and Pentagon Worlds, whereas Romanov was asked by a xenobiologist about the native plants of Buffalo Meadows and how they compared with those of Niops VII, both being planets orbiting Red Dwarf stars.
"We had more trees and longer grass" Romanov flatly responded to the question before pointedly changing the subject to military matters. "Can I get a Flashman projected please, it should be on the data-cube I gave you" she requested of the Planetarium's Director who had plugged the thing into his own console.
After a few seconds the holographic image of the battlemech appeared floating in space in the centre of the planetarium. "For those that don't know, which I assume is most of you, this is an FLS-8K Flashman, a seventy-five ton machine that happens to be the most common heavy battlemech we have in service, or at least it will be once the rest of the 295th arrive with our equipment" Romanov told the audience. "It's a highly effective weapon-of-war, and fortunately for the SLDF the planet it was made on, Wasat, was one of the first Hegemony worlds to be liberated from Amaris, giving the SLDF a chance to help replace battlefield losses previously sustained in the Rim Worlds Republic" she continued. "Thanks to over a decade of round-the-clock production by the time the Star League dissolved there were some divisions with several battalion's worth of the things, including my own 295th. I know it's not the most menacing looking machine" she admitted, "Honestly it looks like a potato with arms and legs, but it's pretty fast for its weight class, well armoured, reasonably well-armed and most importantly in the current circumstances easily upgraded" she said, looking to Franklin Hallis to continue.
"For the record I don't think the Flashman looks like a potato with arms and legs, to me it has always put me in mind of an Urbie that has been pumping iron, hitting the gym really hard, but mileage will vary" Hallis began to some laughter from the SLDF and NAM personal present that knew what a Urbanmech looked like. "On a more serious note, it is the primary armament of the FLS-8K which works out so well for us here. She carries three Selitex Radonic Large Lasers that we can easily strip out and replace with our Improved Large Laser design, each of which is both more compact and a full ton lighter than the original" he said. "With the weight savings gained we add an extra ton of armour to the 'mech and two additional double-heatsinks, making what was already a good, if often underrated, machine even better."
"And it's something we can do quickly and cheaply because, do not be under any illusions the fact is we are facing a clear-and-present threat," Romanov added for herself. "Even if the other clans weren't hunting for the Wolverines, which they will be, remember that the Mariks are only one jump away which is why we're already setting up a production line for the Improved Large Laser even before we have other military industries established. We don't know how much time we have until someone unpleasant comes calling. It's really a matter of getting the best bang for our buck in the short term" she said. "For the resource cost of one brand-new Pulverizer assault battlement we can turn out enough Improved Large Lasers to re-equip nearly a battalion's worth of the Flashman, which is why the plant and tooling for 'mech production is still packed away while that for weapon production is not" she explained. "As a bonus, when the Successor States go back to war with each other, which they will, we can sell off our older surplus weaponry to the highest bidder, helping to recoup some of our investment into upgrades. And we will fleece the bastards on principle, count on it" she announced to some laughter.
"We'll finish talking about the Flashman with a sad story" Romanov told the audience. "Despite surviving Amaris, and helping us win the war, the factory on Wasat where they were made was destroyed in 2796 because once the Terran Hegemony fell the Free Worlds League and the Capellan Confederation started fighting over it" she said. "The side which was losing the fight on Wasat that year raised the factory to the ground because they're like vicious, petty-minded children and if they can't have the shiny toy then nobody can" she continued. "Worth thinking about if you're living on another world with plenty of shiny toys worth fighting over don't you think?" she asked rhetorically.
Hallis nodded sagely. "Of course, nobody in the Inner Sphere was talking about what was happening on Wasat that year because at the same time the Draconis Combine was massacring millions of civilians with ****** swords on Kentares" he reminded everyone. "Those petty-minded children can be really, really vicious and if you think being unarmed means they'll spare you think again" he advised. "The only thing they respect is military strength. The Age of War is back, ladies and gentlemen, don't fool yourself thinking otherwise."
"And once again remember that the Marik's are only one jump away and also remember what they did to the millions of people living on New Dallas and Brownsville, maybe not with swords but dead is still ****** dead" Romanov stated coldly.
Judging by the expressions on the people in the audience that argument had cut through, Romanov thought to herself with satisfaction. If the population of the Niops Association accepted that the Ivory Towers of Academia were a lot safer if they were behind strong walls then they weren't going to object to the changes in society that required.
"Moving on. Logistical considerations require a paring down of the battlemechs we are going to keep in service" Romanov told the now subdued audience. "To be specific, instead of trying to operate and maintain the multitude of different models we currently have, some in only single-digit quantity, in the interim we're going to only keep four types of each weight class" she announced. "Starting with the heavies, because we already have the Flashman up there and it was the first chosen to be spared mothballing, the other three heavies in service will be the Marauder, the Crusader and finally the Black Knight, which I'm sure will please the NAM pilots already well familiar with them. If you could project the other three 'mechs I named too please" she requested, images of the named trio of war machines soon appearing beside the FLS-8K.
"Apart from the Flashman these machines are actually a mix of those used by SLDF Regulars and the upgraded models assigned to Royal formations like the 331st, for instance. Fortunately the standards and the royals still share enough commonality of design to allow for long, cost-effective, runs of spares and replacement parts" Hallis noted. "For the record even the Royals will greatly benefit from refits with our various types of improved weaponry as our own planned series of upgrades progresses. For example, a MAD-2R Royal Marauder with its Star League ERPPC's swapped out for our own Enhanced ERPPC brings serious extra hurt to a long-range engagement. The resultant twenty-percent increase in firepower makes the difference between badly mauling the cockpit of an enemy battlemech and blowing its head off completely. Ask Colonel Callahan over there, he did it to an Orion belonging to the Snow Ravens."
"Son-of-a-bitch was just unlucky my Wolverine II needed fixing after another skirmish the day before, so I took out a Stag II that morning instead" the officer concerned spoke up from where he was sat. "He had thirty tons on me and was having fun peppering me with LRM's, all of which meant precisely squat when my first PPC bolt caught him square in the face and ended the fight before he got the chance to close to autocannon range."
"It's precisely that ability which makes us so glad that one of the Light 'mechs we have in quantity is the Talon TLN-5W, itself mounting an ERPPC we can easily swap out for our punchier version" Hallis observed, after acknowledging Callahan's unplanned, though welcome interjection with a nod of approval. "A few dozen of those little bastards running around at nearly a hundred-and-thirty kph, plinking away with a weapon that makes them a mortal threat to machines two or three times their mass, is going to play merry hell with enemy formations trying to follow a battleplan" he suggested. You might choose to ignore a Locust, or a Wasp or whatever if you're stomping around in an Atlas, following orders to take an important objective ASAP, but a Talon mounting an eERPPC could actually kill you if you didn't take it seriously, which was distracting to say the very least.
Since the TLN-5W had already been cited Romanov moved onto the subject of the light battlemechs they were going to keep in service for now, the images of the heavies being replaced by those of the Talon itself but also the Night Hawk, Hussar and finally the Mongoose. Mention of the latter being good-naturedly booed by a few of Hallis's people given it was a totem machine of Clan Mongoose. Fortunately that clan wasn't thought of particularly badly by the Wolverines compared with most, they wouldn't object too greatly to being assigned one, and there actually rumours that the Mongoose Khan, Mitchell Loris, had privately agreed with Sarah McEvedy regarding Nicholas Kerensky becoming increasing tyrannical, and decreasingly stable over the years, earning his clan a few 'well they're clearly not complete ******' points.
Not wishing to bore the civilian audience to tears talking extensively about war-toys they quickly moved onto medium battlemechs, with those being the Griffin, Phoenix Hawk, Dervish and Wolverine, the latter's mention being greeted by cheers. Hallis did spend a couple of minutes explaining how the new Improved Long Range Missile (iLRM) launchers would make the Dervish, sometimes derided as merely the poor-man's Archer, a much nastier customer.
After a waylay into materials science prompted by questions of how exactly the clans had halved the weight of LRM launchers while also making them more compact, several engineers requesting a chance to look into the new hyper-alloys and super-ceramics required to actually achieve something like that, Romanov finished the list of battlemechs that would avoid mothballing for now with the Assault Class. These were to be the Stalker, Thug, Pillager and Highlander, all of which would be greatly enhanced by the new weaponry available, though it would be quite a while before enough of that was produced to finish the upgrade program.
It might take well over a decade before they could re-fit all the aerospace fighters too, by which time even better weaponry, those only currently existing in prototype form, should hopefully be ready for production thus starting a second, perhaps even more extensive round of upgrades.
Gauging a feel for the audience when the prototypes were mentioned, Romanov surmised that they might not be all that interested in military hardware as such, but talk of hefty grants for Research and Development into fields with military applications set hearts a flutter. If there was one thing Niops enjoyed in abundance was people with degrees in physics and the other hard sciences, and while studying the stars might be their first love if you dangled a paycheque in front of them you could surely find plenty of people who were frankly overqualified in high-energy physics that would work on lasers for you instead.
Best to try to avoid forays into developing expensive and impractical wunderwaffe though, Romanov considered, thinking of the Wolverine's own egregious example of such that had recently been brought down by dropship from the Dobrev. That vessel being a carrack class transport jumpship which had been hauling the thing around in a crate ever since they left Circe behind.
Apparently Sarah McEvedy had the notion that they should create a battlemech specifically for the purposes of fighting in trials. As such it would not need to be economical to mass-produce, just mean as all hell, constructed out of bleeding-edge technologies and with a set of 'impossible' design criteria accompanied by a blank cheque.
The scientist and technician castes looked at the design specifications for quite some time until eventually one of them said 'Oh come on. This is bullshit!' which led to the entire enterprise being referred to as 'Project Bullshit'. This name stuck right up until they somehow managed to actually pull it off, renaming it Bull Shark before presenting it to Khan McEvedy just a few days too late to matter because by then they weren't fighting a Trial of Possession, or a Trial of Refusal, it was a Trial of Annihilation.
For a start, in order to fit in all the weaponry required, and within the necessary weight constraints, the Bull Shark BSK-MAZ needed a endoskeleton which was less bulky than anything the Star League ever managed, but no heavier. After realising that they didn't actually have to worry about completely bankrupting the clan by making more than one or two of the machines they chose to give up on titanium and switch to a superior beryllium alloy instead. Problem solved.
Beryllium being about seventy times as expensive as titanium, the stuff was effectively a precious-metal that cost half again as much per kilo as freaking silver, this solution did not in any way come cheap given you needed nearly two tons of it for the BSK-MAZ. That was even before you factored in you that you also needed to alloy it with a not inconsequential quantity of even pricier rhenium (and a little iridium which itself cost more than gold).
Growing all the finicky boron-arsenide crystals needed to create a new double-heat-sink which was only two-thirds the size was even more expensive, mostly because of the R&D costs involved rather than raw materials in this case. Given another decade of incremental improvements and enhanced manufacturing techniques the engineers said they might even be able to make them cheaply enough to be turned out in quantity but warned not to count on it.
By comparison miniaturizing a Thumper artillery piece to hang off the Bull Shark was cheap… by comparison.
So, taken all together Clan Wolverine owned the most advanced and deadly battlemech in the known galaxy, but for the same price you could buy a whole bunch of ordinary 'mechs that would quite easily kick the ever-loving shit out of the Bull Shark if they just ganged up on it.
It would have been hell to face in single combat or a two-on-two Trial of Refusal though.
"Primarily it's a question of logistics and resources" Romanov explained to the audience after fielding a few more questions, this time largely more relevant to the subject. "We already have a lot of the tooling and equipment we need, entire production lines ready to go in some cases, but until we can up primary resource-extraction we're going to be facing a bottleneck of supply" she explained. "On the plus side this has got to be one of the most carefully surveyed solar systems outside the core worlds of the Terran Hegemony. You seem to have mapped the orbits of every floating rock out there larger than a basketball but it'll take a few years to get asteroid mining operations up and running to the necessary capacity. Can I get a projection of the Niops System?" she requested. "I assume you have one?" she joked.
The holographic image which replaced the last set of battlemechs filled most of the planetarium, not only showing the star and planets but also the larger asteroids and their own orbits. Two of them, named Elizabeth and Helena after the daughters of First Lord Simon Cameron, resembled Ceres in the Sol System in that they were massive enough for their gravities to have formed them into spheres rather than irregular shapes. Woe betide you here if you called them Niops VIII and IX however, they were only 'Dwarf Planets' according to the official criteria for such things which apparently meant no Roman Numerals for them!
As he looked up at the projection Hallis mentally re-scaled everything. He was used to 'normal' solar systems where everything was a lot less compact. You could fit every planetary orbit here, and most of the asteroid belt, inside the orbit of Mercury which put everything mere hours away, not days or weeks. Hell, you could hop from Niops VII to Niops VI in an aerospace fighter if you felt like it, they had the thrust and carried enough fuel to make it a viable trip.
"Building up that kind of infrastructure is not something we haven't done before, and we didn't have access to Project Workshops then, so we know we can do it we just need the full cooperation of the people here today to get it done ASAP" Franklin Hallis spoke up again after bringing his thoughts back to the subject at hand. "We don't know how much time we have before the Sword of Damocles falls and the skies are full of clanners, or Marik's, or some other uninvited ****** with bad intentions" he warned.
"I can speed things up considerably on that front if you'll permit me to make a proposal on that score Mr. Hallis" a man towards the back loudly interjected. "With a small investment of capital, and by handing over a few items you already have in your gift to readily supply, I can obtain enough raw materials to meet your needs for centuries to come in record time" he boasted.
"It's Lieutenant-General Hallis not 'Mister' Hallis if you don't mind, and who are you exactly may I ask?"
"Professor Ogbert Farnstrom. I lecture in High Energy Physics at the university and also have a personal interest in meteoritics" the man introduced himself.
"Weather forecasting?" Hallis responded, confused.
"That's meteorology, meteoritics is the study of meteors" the scientist, Farnstrom, responded, visibly rolling his eyes at the military officer's ignorance. "As you already seem to know the asteroid belt beyond the orbit of Niops VII is ripe for full-scale exploitation, I have personally compiled a list of suitable Type-M metallic asteroids of considerable mass and stupendous worth that would only need cracking open to provide easy access to a cornucopia of raw materials" he said confidently. "Given the extensive spacelift capacity already at your disposal all I need to move ahead with the project immediately is a supply of thermonuclear devices, merely a couple at first for a proof-of-concept trial."
"Thermonuclear devices?" Hallis repeated slowly, raising his eyebrows.
"That small-minded luddite we elected High Associator turned me down point-blank when I approached him regarding the idea before" Farnstrom complained bitterly. "Some of his advisors even had the temerity to refer to me as the university's 'Resident Mad Scientist' for even proposing it" he continued bitterly. "I AM NOT MAD!" he suddenly and loudly exclaimed, jumping to his feet and shaking his fist at the sky, or rather the ceiling of the planetarium. "Sometimes a little angry" he admitted, "BUT NEVER MAD!" he declared unconvincingly as people nearby started edging away from him.
Hallis and Romanov looked at each other. "Um… right" Hallis eventually responded awkwardly, wondering if he might need to have the man restrained for his own good and that of others. "Our intent is to start a little more smaller-scale than that" he told the man. "Scooping up whatever rocks we find small enough to fit through dropship airlocks" he explained. Part of the asteroid belt was so close you could send out a Mule dropship to collect a few rocks and have them back to you ready to feed into an orbiting electric blast furnace within hours.
"That sounds like half measures to me" Farnstrom responded dismissively. "Timidly sweeping up a few pebbles, the mere leftover detritus of space, when you could harvest great mountains of metal shows a lack of ambition, nay a lack of vision!" he vociferously maintained. "I have personally run the numbers, checked and double-checked the results" he claimed. "Have your own scientists study my detailed proposals and I'm certain they'll agree with my calculations" he added confidently.
"We'll take it under advisement, Professor" Romanov told him carefully.
"Please do" Farnstrom replied happily, pleased that they seemed to be hearing him out at least. "While I have your attention, it would be extremely helpful in my own studies if I could borrow a Naval Laser from one of your warships, and a fusion reactor sufficient to power it of course" he now requested hopefully. "Pure science I'm afraid, no real military or other practical applications, but I could use it to prove a pet theory of mine that's been keeping me up at night for a few years."
"That's a definite no" Romanov told him flatly.
Farnstrom sighed. "I thought as much, too much to hope for but I had to give it a shot. I suppose I'll just have to get back to building my own" he said sadly, instantly setting himself up for an imminent visit by the legal authorities.
"Anybody else with any radical suggestions?" Romanov asked bemusedly.
"Stephanie Jeffs, Associate Professor of Geology" a woman introduced herself. "You might want to think about setting up mines on Niops III, the dark side facing away from the star is cool enough to make it viable, it's mineral rich with plenty of Rare Earth metals and the gravity well to haul them off isn't as steep as on Niops V where most of our existing mines are located."
"You're sure about the mineral deposits?" Romanov checked.
"I've landed enough probes and rovers there to be sure" the scientist confirmed.
"Don't listen to the rock people, geology is barely a real science" came a heckle followed by laughter from all sides.
"How would you like a geo-pick shoved up your ass sideways Hartman?" Jeffs growled, clearly recognising the heckler. "That goes for the rest of you laboratory-bound dweebs" she added, glaring in all directions.
"Fifty bucks on the geologist" Hallis whispered to Romanov.
"No bet."
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Note from the Author:
Although the Wolverines left before the so-called 'Golden Century' of Clan technological progress they would have still had access not only to prototype versions of quite a few later weapons, but also all the 'Early Clan' Improved versions of Star League gear (the Improved Large Laser, Improved LRM, Improved SRM, Improved Autocannons etc. etc. These are typically more compact and a ton or two lighter than what the SLDF had and depending on the mech concerned offer a big step-up in capability. Upgrading existing gear with 'Improved' weapons is far more cost effective than turning out brand new Pulverizers, Mercury II's or Stags.
Spending scarce resources keeping a plethora of different battlemechs in service is also a bad idea. Only keeping common (but effective) mechs like the Flashman (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Flashman), Stalker, Talon etc in service makes more sense (they don't have enough of any type to simplify things any further logistically if they want to be able to field more than one brigade). If they ever need the other machines they can still pull them from mothballs readily enough.
The anti-agathic treatments of the Terran Hegemony (my assumption being that it was gene-therapy because you didn't need to keep taking them) pushed lifespans out to a hundred and fifty (the sourcebook Touring the Stars: Granada (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Touring_the_Stars:_Granada) mentions a 97 year old mechwarrior that was still perfectly fit for combat because he had received the treatments on Terra as a kid). The Clans did not use them because of their culture of youth and wanting a quick turnover of generations (life expectancy for clanner warriors was particularly awful) but a combination of the treatments and Iron Womb technology will have an interesting effect on the demographics of the Niops Association. For one thing 'long-term multi-generational planning' means really long term when you might live for a century-and-a-half.
The Bullshit Bull Shark (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Bull_Shark) requires tech to work (like clan endo-steel) that the Wolverines just should not have had. Hope people like my justification for how they managed it (it's not clan-tech, it's blank-cheque-tech). Think of it as akin to how the Successor States were able to copy Clan-Tech after the invasion but just couldn't do it in a cost-effective manner until decades later.
Farnstrom is, in fact, quite mad (and also angry sometimes).
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Hilarious on all counts! :D :thumbsup:
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I wanna know Farnsworth's plan for that naval laser.
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Heh... clearly, he wants to render asteroids faster than anyone else! :D
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Knowing the Farnsworths(especially the 'mad' scientist types) it will no doubt be 'Good News!' before sending the logistics crew into a nearly suicidal delivery (of Nukes?) >:D
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxoNhqmEsnY
Lots of 'Good News!"
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Good news, everyone! ;)
I've started a thread over on Fan Designs for battlemechs featured in this story, starting with the Flashman FLS-8Kn.
https://bg.battletech.com/forums/index.php?topic=81930.0 (https://bg.battletech.com/forums/index.php?topic=81930.0)
I'll do the Dervish DV-6Mn next.
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I wanna know Farnsworth's plan for that naval laser.
would you believe a Long Range Laser Comm system? 8)
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LOL! No... ;D
And I have to say, I hate the emoji change...
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I wanna know Farnsworth's plan for that naval laser.
Optical Levitation experiment. He wants to build the galaxies most powerful ever set of Optical Tweezers so he can make big (well relatively big) things float.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_tweezers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_tweezers)
(it's not quite as crazy as it sounds).
;)
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Indeed! He may be working on the mythical "tractor" beam... 8)
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I suppose lots of things are at least translucent once you throw enough power at the problem.
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And my other option was he wanted to build a Laser Powered Rocket Ship
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_propulsion (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_propulsion)
and I agree with you
And I have to say, I hate the emoji change...
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Optical Levitation experiment. He wants to build the galaxies most powerful ever set of Optical Tweezers so he can make big (well relatively big) things float.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_tweezers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_tweezers)
(it's not quite as crazy as it sounds).
;)
So not any of the other options?
I can see him having a list he wants to get going, potentially on how well they may work together, if done just right.
Why go for just one, when you can do a set of paralel research?
Using the same system to detect the thing your floating..., lets you aim better, keeping it centered.
Or is that on his to do list, to keep that research team going, after they cracked it?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laser_articles
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_cooling
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_laser_sintering
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FILAT
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/4Pi_microscope
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lidar_traffic_enforcement#Detectors_and_jammers
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_power_transfer
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_propulsion
Mmm, what is he planning to do, with those tweezers?
Allowing a Behemoth to land on a planet?
Or trying to figure out how to create Endo-steel, on a planet?
There are several ways he could go, there, including making hostile artillery shells, miss their target, by making them float along, for a bit.
Heh, can it cancel their momentum?
I will see what you are planning there, when you post it, Hotpoint.
But I do think that guy will try again, even if he has to construct a new one, from scrap.
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Part VII
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"Star's End shipyard. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. I mean except for Ingvolstand, and Lackhove, and Oberon, and Butte Hold and... hell, let's face it that entire region of space is just pirate scum from one end to the other. Except for Von Strang's World of course, they're Amaris-Loyalists who named their planet after a ****** war criminal."
Captain Simon Mitchell - 2830 CE
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(FLASHBACK) Vicinity of Star's End Shipyards – Star's End System – 2825
If the yard had ever been equipped with a holographic comms system it certainly wasn't working anymore, so after spending an hour putting together his most piratical looking outfit Captain Simon Mitchell found he didn't need it yet when contacting the orbital facility yonder from the bridge of his jumpship. At least it helped him get into character when he hailed the local authorities over the radio, these being the people working for the self-styled 'Pirate King of Star's End' whose palace was to be found down on Novo Cressidas, the only habitable planet in the system.
It was pretty unusual for any but the most highly populated and advanced systems in the Inner sphere to possess such a shipyard, let alone one like Star's End out in the periphery. This was a holdover from the days it had been a major mining colony of the Rim Worlds Republic, not to mention once hosting a fleet base and supply depot for the Star League Navy.
What was left of the old naval facilities had not survived the Amaris War when the RWR military and SLDF were at each other's throats, but the civilian shipyard itself remained intact and operational, which was useful for anyone stuck way out here that needed repairs. It had a bay large enough for most any civilian jumpship as well as smaller ones for dropship maintenance along with a manufacturing plant sufficient to keep them all supplied.
When the Rim Worlds Republic ceased to exist as a polity, a combination of a vengeful SLDF, followed up by an invasion by the Lyran Commonwealth had made damn sure of that, Novo Cressidas, had become the de-facto capital of an independent system. One that prospered thanks to its mineral wealth and the fact they were perfectly happy to fix the jumpships and dropships of anyone willing to pay.
The Lyrans had annexed around a hundred worlds of the Rim Worlds Republic between 2773 and 2775, taking advantage of Kerensky having already broken their military. Officially it was in support of the SLDF's campaign to take back the Hegemony, but in reality it was a shameless land grab. If not for the Succession War breaking out in 2786 the Commonwealth would have probably gobbled up the rest of the former RWR eventually, including Star's End, but the worlds of the Terran Hegemony were seen as the far greater prize.
With the Rim Worlds Republic gone, and the SLDF off their backs, Star's End effectively became a pirate hub. A place where buccaneers and the more intrepid of periphery traders went to get repairs. It was great for the local economy, not so much for the worlds the pirates lived off like parasites.
Admiral Bremman had assigned Mitchell to this resupply mission, giving him temporary command of the carrack class Dobrev, because of all the officers to choose from he had the most experience at dealing with such pirates, albeit decades ago from his pre-Exodus Star League Navy service. Naturally Mitchell made a joke about his being so old he vaguely recalled being a midshipman on the sailing ship that caught Blackbeard, to which Bremman responded that explained why the first few pages of his personnel file were written on parchment in what looked like ink from a quill pen. Not wishing to be outdone Mitchell then countered that it must be a copy because originally it was cuneiform on a clay tablet.
Since he became a centenarian if anyone ever asked Mitchell if he still remembered his SLDF service number he would invariably reply, 'Sure I do, it's zero-zero-zero-zero-zero-zero-two. Shandra Noruff-Cameron got in there just ahead of me'.
Although not actually the oldest person in the fleet the youth culture of the clans, and Nicholas Kerensky's desire to get rid of those with deeply entrenched and old-fashioned SLDF sensibilities, had resulted in Mitchell being the oldest Wolverine still in uniform. If he hadn't been the captain of the Badger, an aging Vincent Class Corvette, he would have been retired long ago, but the Badger was a relic that had somehow avoided any major refits or being upgraded to the latest model at least three times. It was therefore a decidedly non-standard and quirky vessel that didn't even mount the same main armament as other Vincents, carrying Light Naval PPC's instead of Naval Autocannon. Most relevantly, many of the systems including the navigation computer pre-dated the Reunification War of the 2500's. Mitchell was the only person that could reliably re-boot it when it went haywire, or honestly even understand how the thing even worked to begin with, having been originally trained as a navigator himself under an aging instructor who insisted on her students learning about the systems used when she was a cadet.
Every time someone suggested handing a younger man or woman command of the Badger Admiral Bremman sighed and told them it was just easier to keep Mitchell than it was to replace the electronics with ones that didn't pre-date the Golden Age of the Star league.
It was however mere common sense, rather than his many decades of experience, that ensured Mitchell wasn't stupid enough to jump the carrack class Dobrev to Star's End under its real name. For the duration of this mission she was the Whydah Gally, a pirate ship that operated out in the Deep Periphery and was only visiting Star's End for supplies. By periphery standards Star's End saw an awful lot of traffic and monitored the jump-points carefully so they noticed the 'Whydah Gally' jumping in immediately, relaxing when they were told the armed jumpship didn't belong to some navy or another it was just another corsair.
This was just one of those rare systems where self-professed pirates jumping in did not result in mass panic from the local population but rather a friendly hail and an invitation to visit the local bars and brothels.
"Not seen a carrack for a few years" the manager of the jumpyard signalled after contact was established. "Should still remember how to service one though if you want to book some time in the yard" he continued. "We've already got a Merchant class in the dock, and a couple of Intruders queued up already, so it'll be at least few weeks before we can slot you in sorry" he apologised. "Of course, if you're willing to pay triple the fee I can always get you preferential treatment and see you sooner."
"Not here to use the yard" Mitchell radioed back from the bridge of his temporary command. "Only looking to stock up on basic supplies and see what spare parts for jumpships and dropships you might have for sale. They're difficult to come by out where we usually work."
"We've got plenty of spares, keep a big mixed reserve because we never know what'll turn up looking to get fixed" the manager of the shipyard replied. "Won't even overcharge ya, it's bad for repeat business and I'm not looking to make you consider a Naval Laser discount anyway" he joked. "As long as you're smart enough to steer clear of Paran you must swan about in the boonies like you're in a ****** McKenna or something carrying those guns" he suggested. That was actually the main reason Bremman had chosen the Dobrev for this job. Most transport jumpships were either entirely unarmed or carried merely enough light weaponry to make only the least intrepid of pirates steer clear. A carrack however boasted batteries of Naval Lasers and Autocannon, albeit ones falling on the lower-end of the firepower spectrum by warship standards, and was unlikely to be messed with. Mitchell did wonder about the mention of Paran though, what was special about that system, he wondered, making a mental note to low-key investigate.
Mitchell laughed. "There's a reason I don't usually visit civilisation, I'm the lord of all creation out there. I don't want to run into a real warship again. Must have been fifteen, maybe twenty years back, out in Drac territory, I ran into a Narukami class destroyer and barely escaped with my ass unviolated."
"If you think Star's End is civilisation then you're from even further out than I thought man" the shipyard manager responded, laughing himself. "As for running into a warship in the Combine or the Commonwealth I wouldn't worry about it. From what I hear they're having trouble keeping the ones running that survived the war and most didn't."
"So the war really is over now? Last time I poked my nose into the Inner Sphere the Steiners and Marik's were still kicking the shit out of each other and so were the Kuritans and the Davions. Who won in the end?" Mitchell asked, playing along with his cover story.
"Shit. You're really out of the loop aren't ya?" the shipyard manager asked rhetorically. "Nobody won, but the Hegemony worlds sure as shit lost the most" he said. "Guess you were from there originally, judging from your accent?"
"New Dallas" Michell lied, not exactly the biggest one he told that day.
"No shit? Sorry man" came the response, it even sounded genuine. "Where did you find that boat you're on anyway? Just curious."
"I didn't find it. They gave it to me, I just decided to keep it" Mitchell told him.
"SLDF deserter huh?" that would hardly be a unique case of that happening.
"I didn't desert the SLDF, the SLDF deserted me when Kerensky ****** off with most of the rest of the fleet" Michell replied, making himself sound bitter about it all.
"Let it go man. I used to be in the Rim Worlds Republic Navy myself, it's all in the past now" the shipyard manager advised, Mitchell actually starting to like the man. "If you want to come over in a dropship I'll have one of my boys direct you to a free docking port and meet you there. You can talk to him about what supplies you need and arrange payment."
"You take gold and silver I guess?" Mitchell checked.
"That's fine, prefer germanium of course. Or slaves, got any slaves? Brothel down on Novo Cressidas is always looking for a pretty girl or a young boy."
Mitchell didn't like the man much anymore. "Just the gold and silver" he replied, trying not to sound angry.
"Ah well, had to ask. Anyhow, might see you in the bar later. Shipyard out"
"Whyda Gally, out" Mitchell replied, ending transmission. "Anyone that's not sure he can resist blowing the nearest pirate's head off if he sees slaves over there had best sit this one out" he told the bridge crew. "And if I hear so much as a single 'quiaff' or 'query negative' or whatever then the man or woman responsible gets to clean the head with their tongue."
"Aff" the communications officer couldn't resist responding, trying to maintain a straight face.
"You're a pirate. Act like it" Mitchell told him sternly. "It's 'Arr' and don't you damn well forget it."
With the rest of the fleet, including Mitchell's usual command, waiting in an uninhabited system one jump to spinwards of Star's End, the Dobrev, having first been disguised with a new paintjob and fake IFF transponder code, had been dispatched to see what it could lay its hands on in terms of supplies. Several of the fleet's jumpships sorely needed replacement parts and every pirate's favourite shipyard was the only game in town way out here.
Later as he prepared to board one of the two Mule cargo dropships the Dobrev was hauling with her before heading over to the yard Mitchell idly considered that if his people hadn't run into the 295th he would not even be here right now. It had been an implausibly unlikely encounter several months prior, one only made possible because of the Wolverine diversion away from the Exodus Road to Columbus base. This detour had placed the largely unexplored, and virtually unpopulated, periphery region known as Draconian Drift between them and the Inner Sphere when the fleet resumed its journey home. The computer database the Wolverines found at Columbus had listed Buffalo Meadows within the Drift as habitable, with fresh water and edible native plants, hence the Wolverine's stopover there intending to resupply. Finding it actually inhabited, and by another SLDF remnant, understandably came as a bit of a shock to all concerned.
To her credit Jenna Romanov herself had taken it all in her stride, in fact the reaction of practically all of the 295th when the situation was explained to them by the newly-reconstituted 331st was basically 'If it's alright by you we'll tag along then'. Mitchell suspected this was as much due to not having enjoyed being farmers and labourers in a colony in a state of gradual decline facing eventual demographic collapse, as it was to patriotically signing up to be the SLDF reborn.
They had immediately faced a transport capacity problem though. The jumpdrive of Romanov's Potemkin, the Ulithi, would require a naval shipyard to fix properly. Even manufacturing parts for a kludge that might have enabled it to limp back to the Inner Sphere was far beyond what they could manage to produce under the circumstances so they were going to have to leave a couple of thousand volunteers behind, along with almost all of their war materiel.
Fortunately, unlike the Ulithi the rest of the jumpships and the two other warships belonging to the 295th still worked well enough. Getting them out of mothballs and running again went quickly, and eventually the now expanded Switchback Fleet once again set sail for the Inner Sphere, albeit now under the overall command of newcomer Jenna Romanov. She, of course, was an actual Major-General in the SLDF, not merely an acting one like Franklin Hallis, and had him beat on seniority anyway, by a long way. She did at least formally promote him to the rank of Brigadier-General (and acting Major-General of brevet rank), telling him that both his father Frederick Hallis, and the man's successor to command of the 331st James McEvedy, had been there in the room when General Mohammed Nagenda, overall commander of the 11th Army which had included both divisions, pinned on her first star.
Resupplied, reinforced and underway again a few more jumps brought them close to the borders of Draconis Combine territory. Clandestine scouting missions being dispatched into the Inner Sphere to gather intelligence and determine the lay of the land.
Running into some pirates operating out of Santander, a periphery system located just coreward of the Draconis Combine, had been fortuitous, the pirates providing much useful information given the right motivation. After an extremely one-sided fight of comically short duration, during which the pirates received an almighty shellacking, the survivors were captured and interrogated. According to what they had to say, after Kerensky's Exodus the Successor States had gone all 'Age of War Two, Thermonuclear Boogaloo', beating each other senseless for thirty-five years squabbling over who got to take over the former worlds of the Terran Hegemony.
Literally billions were dead thanks to widespread deployment of every kind of WMD, much of the Inner Sphere's industrial base and interstellar trade was a fading memory, somehow the freaking phone company now controlled Terra and the Combine had apparently decided that butchering millions of innocent civilians with swords was a perfectly reasonable response to one of their nobles being assassinated.
Presented with the dilemma 'So what the ****** do we do now?' a few of Romanov's people suggested somewhere they might be able to hole up for now while they made the final decision on that. For a while during the Amaris War they had been based at a top-secret Star League Naval Base hidden in the Dark Nebula in what used to be Rim Worlds Republic territory, but was now inside the borders of the Lyran Commonwealth. If it remained undiscovered the installation known as 'Camelot Command' would make for an ideal base of operations.
Barring any better suggestions the fleet set sail, heading anti-clockwise around the outskirts of the Inner Sphere, heading for the Dark Nebula and sticking to periphery space as long as possible to avoid 'Successor State' entanglements. A pair of ships equipped with lithium-fusion batteries that could manage more than one jump per week were sent on ahead to make sure the base was still there and intact while the rest plodded on.
The pirates from Santander had known all about Star's End, it just happened to be on the way, and it did have a shipyard, so it seemed like a decent place to stock up on supplies and collect a little more intel. The pirates being exhausted of useful HUMINT were executed by being put unceremoniously out the airlock. Traditionally pirates were hung of course, but it being surprisingly tricky to hang someone on a jumpship, even one equipped with a gravity deck (it's a centrifugal force issue), consigning them to the vacuum of space without a helmet was the generally accepted alternative.
Speaking of Human Intelligence, Mitchell was pulled from musings by his 'wife' swiping at him with a noteputer. "Terra to Captain Lomas" she said, using his cover name. "Come in Captain Lomas."
"What is it Gloria?" Mitchell replied, as she lowered the datapad.
"Just making sure you hadn't had a stroke, you were really zoned out there" she told him. "I've briefed everyone that's coming over with us again just to make sure they know how to behave and what to listen out for" she told him. "And try and call me 'Honey' or something would you" she requested.
"Gloria even if we were married I wouldn't call you 'Honey', it's cloying" Mitchell opined. "I'm not a good enough actor to be that out of character."
"So I guess 'snookums' is out of the question too then?" Gloria replied, grinning.
Mitchell shook his head, smiling gently. "I'm still going to go with 'Woman', as-in 'Make me a sandwich Woman' or 'Don't make me tell you twice, Woman'."
"Good thing we're not really married then because I'd make myself a widow twice over by the end of the week" Gloria told him, all too convincingly.
If Mitchell hadn't known that earlier in her life, decades ago, she had been in Star League Intelligence, with a résumé that included what she called 'wet work' as well as other spooky spy shit, he would have found that a lot funnier and a lot less disturbing.
Gloria was a few years younger than him and had run a diner with her husband in Great Hope as part of Clan Wolverine's Labourer Caste. Her husband had been killed when the city was nuked, though fortunately she, her daughter and grandchildren had been far enough away from the blast zone to survive.
Acting Major-General Franklin Hallis was smart enough to learn from his own mistakes and those of others. Back in Clan Space before the Secession the Wolverine's had not dealt with the spying upon them by the Widowmakers very well at first because, frankly, 'spooky spy shit' was just not their forte. He had therefore asked around the fleet if there happened to be anyone on any of the ships with actual experience in that area, this being how he learned why a doting grandmother named Gloria was so good with knives. It wasn't because she worked as a cook in case you hadn't guessed.
It had been Gloria that made the pirates from Santander talk, her methods of quickly breaking them and ensuring full cooperation being why Mitchell was not alone in being absolutely terrified of her.
She did make a damn good burger though, he had to admit. Her own cover story was that she was the captain's wife and ship's cook for the Whydah Gally and would be purchasing fresh food over there as well as surreptitiously gathering intel.
"When we get over there ask around and see if you can find out what's notable about Paran" Mitchell told the retired, or rather unretired intelligence operative.
"Never heard of it" Gloria replied.
"I had to look it up on the charts myself. It's seven jumps to corewards and anti-spinwards of here. Used to be a big food producer for the RWR. Not much if any industry, but that might have all changed in the half century or so it's been since the records were updated" Mitchell told her.
Gloria looked at him quizzically. "So why are you curious about that place in particular."
Mitchell shrugged. "Jumpyard manager made an off-handed comment about the place. Piqued my curiosity" he explained. "Seven jumps is far enough away that it's not really that local to here, and he thought we were based even further out in the periphery than that, but he said it like he expected me to know what he was talking about."
"Meaning it's something interesting enough for word to spread pretty far" Gloria surmised.
"That was my thinking on the matter" Mitchell confirmed.
"Well, if they used to export food, or maybe still do, that gives me a reason to bring the place up in conversation when I'm talking to the merchants over there" Gloria replied, thinking ahead.
"Fruits and fish, they exported fruits and fish. It was mentioned in the notes for the place in the star charts" Mitchell told her. "If you find out anything particularly interesting that can't wait until we're back aboard you'll find me in the bar over there after I've negotiated for spares."
Gloria nodded. "Always a good place to pick up random pieces of information and overhear interesting conversations" she concurred with his thinking on the matter.
"Sure, I might find some time to do that between drinks" Mitchell replied. "Hey, I'm supposed to be in-character as a pirate captain" he defended his intentions when the woman glared at him, probably thinking something about him being unprofessional and a rank amateur at this business.
"Alright but if you look like you're getting drunk and might blurt out something we don't want them to know then I'll drag you out of there in-character as the wife of a pirate captain and I won't be too gentle about it" Gloria vowed.
"I want a divorce" Mitchell joked.
"Pirates don't have divorce. One of them is either sold into slavery or gets thrown out the airlock" Gloria told him. "And I don't think anyone would buy you."
Mitchell was about to ask why she thought he would be the one getting sold, or flushed into the vacuum of space, but quickly thought better of it. Like himself she was armed, being so constantly was very much a part of pirate culture, and unless you were carrying something excessively powerful that represented a serious threat to the integrity of the hull of a ship or space station nobody would kick up a fuss.
Once they got over there to the station, yardship traffic control directing their Mule to the assigned port, Mitchell was initially surprised at how clean it looked inside, expecting a pirate shipyard to look as dirty and unkempt as much of the clientele. The metal bulkheads, corridors and doors however were polished to a gleam, the signs were freshly painted and the posters advertising the goods and services available on the station professionally made.
Then Mitchell realised that was because they had slaves doing all the work when he saw a broken man wearing a tattered jumpsuit and with an uncomfortable looking collar around his neck carrying a mop.
Piracy had existed even during the Star League era of course, along with slavery. It was just far less prevalent at a time where, if a pirate band or kingdom gained too much notoriety, a SLDF Task Force would turn up intending to send a message by stomping the crap out of them.
Not every intended stomping was successful of course. Not long after he graduated Annapolis in the mid 2740's a great source of mirth was provided gratis to the Star League Navy by the utter failure of the 44th Mechanised Infantry Division of the SLDF Army to deal with the pirates basing themselves out of Cerignola, a planet in the outskirts of the Free Worlds League. Thanks to the myriad caves and tunnels which made that world a veritable warren the pirates continually evaded capture, humiliating the 44th so such a degree that they eventually gave up and left after collapsing every cave entrance they could find with explosives.
Almost as soon as the dropships carrying the 44th left Cerignola, their commander claiming triumph, the pirates reemerged and went back about their business. Needless to say navy personnel like Mitchell found it a whole lot funnier than the army did.
After haggling down the price of a fair few pieces of equipment that the fleet would benefit from, including much-needed replacement seals for the helium tanks on an old Tramp class jumpship that had belonged to the 295th, Mitchell settled the transaction with a hefty bag of gold coins stamped with the heads of a few long-dead Steiner Archons. The coins were actually forgeries made by a machine-shop on Zughoffer Weir, but they were made from real gold so it was unlikely anyone would look too carefully at the quality of the stampings. That would not have been true of forged paper currency of course, and pirates weren't big fans of electronic transfers, hence the coins.
While waiting for the rest of his people to finish up their business, one of them was buying up all the old newspapers and magazines he could find, Mitchell found a spot at the bar, being grateful the shipyard had a gravdeck because he hated drinking booze from plastic squeezy bottles.
A lot of the chit-chat in the bar was about the Combine recruiting criminals from its prisons, including captured pirates, into so-called 'Chain-Gang Regiments' and sending them off to attack the Lyrans and Fed Suns by dribs and drabs in crappy mechs. The fact the war had supposedly ended back in 2821 did not seem to enter into the thinking of Jinjiro Kurita, which indicated to Simon Mitchell that a second full-scale succession war breaking out could only be a matter of time.
Of greater interest, and also concerning the Draconis Combine, was a story very recently arrived from there of a rogue warship of unknown origin appearing in their territory and extorting supplies from merchant jumpships and small settlements. That definitely required further investigation, Mitchell decided, wondering if it was a part of the clan fleet searching for them which had become separated from the main force and which had run out of supplies, being forced into banditry as a result. For that matter they might have even taken the opportunity to desert, given they were a long way from Strana Mechty and it wasn't just the Wolverines who weren't entirely happy with the way things were going in Nicky K's supposed utopian society.
It would be pretty funny if it was another bunch of Green Turkeys kicking up a fuss, Mitchell considered, grinning to himself as he ordered another drink. In order to demonstrate her unquestioning loyalty to Old Nick their Khan had resorted to mass executions of many of her own people because, after Klondike, the staunchest of Jade Falcon supremacists were so aggrieved by Kerensky choosing to join Clan Wolf instead they were publicly questioning his judgement.
While Mitchell drank at the bar, ending up having a conversation with a couple of pirate captains that asked if he would be interested in adding the firepower of his ship to a raid they planned into Lyran space, Gloria learned that the reason why the pirates operating in this region were so leery of Paran was that a few years earlier an honest-to-god Avatar Class Heavy Cruiser with Star League markings had jumped into the system there and never left.
Since nothing short of a battlecruiser, or ideally a battleship, could take on an Avatar just the damn thing being there kept most pirates well clear, even if nobody was sure if the weapons on the damn thing still worked.
It was certainly a story worth investigating once they were established at Camelot Command, and a mission organised to do so, although not with one of the faster lithium-fusion ships which would have shaved quite a lot of time off the journey to Paran. This was because they also learned not long afterwards that the rogue warship strutting around the Draconis Combine wasn't a Jade Falcon deserter, or from any of the other Kerensky-loyalist clans, it seemed to be the freaking Yukon somehow, and they needed to make contact before anyone else caught up to them.
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Note from the Author:
Star's End (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Star%27s_End) in the former Rim Worlds Republic (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Rim_Worlds_Republic) (part of which ended up conquered by the Lyran Commonwealth during the Republic-Commonwealth War (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Republic-Commonwealth_War) of 2773-2775) enjoyed a fairly unique position of being an indepedent system possessing a shipyard which could service and repair jumpships and dropships. It became a repair hub for pirates operating in that region of the periphery with its asteroid mining operations another valuable source of income. With much of the former RWW being made up of Bandit Kingdoms (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Bandit_Kingdom) Star's End does pretty well for itself.
If you're heading from the vicinity of Santander (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Santander) (another pirate hangout just corewards of the Draconis Combine) to Camelot Command (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Camelot_Command) in the Dark Nebula (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Dark_Nebula) then Star's End is very much en-route and one of the few places you can pick up spare parts for spaceships while staying in the Periphery,
The Dobrev (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Dobrev) is a carrack (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Carrack) class vessel, arguably a warship but in reality a heavily armed transport jumpship that happens to carry enough naval weaponry to keep your average pirate very polite. Pirates tend to employ unarmed or lightly-armed jumpships like the Merchant (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Merchant) or Invader (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Invader) class, relying on their aerospace fighter complements to provide firepower in the arena of space when needed. As such the Avatar (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Avatar_(WarShip_class)) class Heavy Cruiser Pioneer (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Pioneer) that ended up in the Paran (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Paran) system in 2819 is something that no pirate in his right mind would risk messing with and word of it would spread fast (particularly to a place like Star's End that sees a lot of pirate traffic).
Running behind the rest of the Switchback Fleet (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Operation_SWITCHBACK), trying and failing to catch up with the rest of them on the Exodus Road (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Exodus_Road) because of their diversion to Epsilon Pegasus (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Epsilon_Pegasus) (Columbus Base) , thanks to its lithium-fusion battery the Yukon (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Yukon) actually arrived in the Draconis Combine than the Minnesota Tribe (http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Minnesota_Tribe) would have in canon (word of this mysterious vessel spreading as far as Star's End by the end of 2825).
Incidentally, with a few drinks in him Mitchell would probably make a pass at Gloria if she wasn't still mourning her husband (and didn't frighten him so much).
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Interesting, and well done overall! :)
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Just a quick FYI your links, you need to loose the ' https//www.sarna.net/wiki/Minnesota_Tribe ' on your links so they work.
and until I looked it up I thought the story about the Avatar class Heavy Cruiser Pioneer that ended up in the Paran system, was going to be just spacer rumor.
Also glad to see they reformed Intelligence Service from the former retired professionals
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Just a quick FYI your links, you need to loose the ' https//www.sarna.net/wiki/Minnesota_Tribe ' on your links so they work.
Thanks, fixed now. Just copy/pasted it in from elsewhere where the formatting is different.
and until I looked it up I thought the story about the Avatar class Heavy Cruiser Pioneer that ended up in the Paran system, was going to be just spacer rumor.
It's a little surprising that Comstar didn't descend on them like a ton of bricks!
Also glad to see they reformed Intelligence Service from the former retired professionals
After their experiences with the proto-Watch I couldn't imagine the Wolverines not looking into that.
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and until I looked it up I thought the story about the Avatar class Heavy Cruiser Pioneer that ended up in the Paran system, was going to be just spacer rumor.
It's a little surprising that Comstar didn't descend on them like a ton of bricks!
Makes me wonder if they didn't think it was just a spacers rumor until it was too late, or could be why it can't be found now.
Also glad to see they reformed Intelligence Service from the former retired professionals
After their experiences with the proto-Watch I couldn't imagine the Wolverines not looking into that.
Make sense to me, and where to find them. cool
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Nice! Thanks for sharing this!
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Part VIII (a)
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"Niops VII is too damn cold for comfort, Alphard is too damn hot. I've heard that Stafford has a nice temperate climate, let's annex that system quickly while the Marik's are still distracted."
Colonel Roger Callhan - 2833CE
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Association Council Building – Niops Association (Niops VII) – 2828
Trish Ebon grimaced as a particularly sharp gust of icy wind that came barrelling down the street caught her. 'How long do we have to wait out here?" she asked. "It's getting dark, by which I mean darker" she added. It never really got bright here, at least not by the standards of worlds in most inhabited systems.
It didn't help that the street lighting was expressly designed to avoid light pollution which the locals regarded about as negatively as other places thought about radioactive nuclear waste. On the plus side you could pretty clearly see the stars at night, even in town. That gave you something to look at when you lay on your back gazing up at them after being run over by a ground car, crossing the street at night wearing dark clothes being pretty hazardous here.
"Told you we should have worn the cloaks Trish" Franklin Hallis replied, his sense of vindication off-set by his failure to press the issue.
"Maybe if it was a fancy-dress party and we were going as Comstar" Trish replied dismissively. She had never liked the hooded cloaks that Khan McEvedy had adopted as clan formal wear.
"They're warm" Hallis pointed out.
"They're ridiculous" Trish opined as they continued to wait outside the seat of government for the Niops Association, a building that resembled a drab office block more than it did a grand senate house or potentate's palace.
It would be bad form to go in before Lieutenant-General Romanov arrived but she had gotten herself caught up with something urgent she couldn't delegate and was running late.
Trish sighed. "There had better be food served at this shindig" she said, "and a free bar" she added.
"It's a formal affair, so it's a 'soirée' not a 'shindig' Trish" Hallis told her.
"You know you can tell your father was a general, you were just born to be an officer and a gentleman weren't you?" she asked rhetorically. "You're just so sophisticated" Trish continued, grinning. "Or does that come with being Khan?"
Hallis smirked. "Sure as hell doesn't come with being saKhan apparently" he replied, checking his watch. The only reason Trish even got an invite was actually her semi-official title of saKhan, and a degree of confusion among the local elites as to what Clan leadership positions actually meant in terms of their status in high society. In the end someone decided that you could equate a Khan to a Count of the Terran Hegemony in terms of power and authority, which made a saKhan equivalent to a Baron (or Baroness in her case). "We're missing the chance for a glass of champagne and caviar on melba toast while the High Associator schmoozes the guests" Hallis complained.
"Yeah" Trish responded laughing for a moment before stopping when she saw his expression. "Wait. Are you being serious about the caviar?"
"Sure. They introduced a genetically modified sturgeon here years ago, you can find them in a lot of the river estuaries in the warmer parts of the planet" Hallis told her.
"How do you know that?"
"I went out on a boat fishing with Frederick and his sibling company, there was a guide who was telling the kits about the fish here, native and introduced" Hallis explained. "I nearly caught an Ironfin Tuna."
"Nearly?"
"Damn thing broke the heavy-duty line" Hallis explained. "Did you know they grow up to half-a-ton in weight?" he asked rhetorically. "I should have rustled up some ****** depth-charges" he muttered to himself. "The Ironfin look a little different than the ones imported from Brownsville supposedly, nowhere near as much in the way of heavy metals in the seas here."
Trish sighed and shook her head sadly. "I read a report on the state of the Hegemony Worlds saying that the nuclear winter there should finish soon, if it hasn't already. Still not somewhere I'd want to go for the sport fishing."
"It's doing better than Lone Star" Hallis replied gloomily, having read the same report. "Romanov is here" he suddenly announced, pointing down the road to where an old J. Edgar ground-effect vehicle came just come into sight, the reconnaissance hovercraft kicking up dust but making sure to remain under the town's speed limit. Most of the way from the Arecibo Plains Romanov likely had the driver going flat-out, but tearing through the capital at over hundred-and-eighty would result in a speeding fine that no quantity of stars on your collar could get you out of.
The J. Edgar came to a stop and Lieutenant-General Romanov got out, returning salutes from both Hallis and Ebon before telling the driver she would radio him when she needed collecting. As it drove off again she appraised the two officers from the 331st.
"What kind of dress uniform is that?" Romanov wanted to know. Whatever it was they had on it certainly wasn't proper SLDF issue even if it was, at least, regulation olive drab in colour.
"These are the only dress uniforms we have Ma'am" Hallis explained, apologetically.
"You look like you're cosplaying as cadets from a Lyran Military Academy" Romanov opined. Certainly the style and cut of their uniforms had the air of Steiner about it, the Prussian Collar in particular, although the Sam Browne belt worn over their jackets was more of a periphery militia thing.
Trish Ebon thought the yellow-tan leather gloves and knee-length boots that accompanied Romanov's own SLDF Dress Greens looked even more ridiculous and incongruous than a Clan Wolverine cloak did, but was smart enough not to say it.
"I think all the other guests have already arrived and gone in Ma'am" Hallis told Romanov. "Couple of hundred of them all-told."
"I'll expect we'll overhear a few snide remarks about military punctuality, but some things are higher priority than a social event" Romanov replied. "One of our jumpships scouting to anti-spinward ran into some pirates. They had them outgunned so as per standing orders they engaged. After losing a few aerospace fighters the rest of the pirates jumped out. Admiral Bremman wants to deploy an L-F Tramp with a Titan to Alphard to secure our grain supply."
"Sensible" Hallis concurred with the admiral's thinking. Finding out that there was a reasonably sizeable farming community on Alphard only two jumps away, one that was willing to trade for their food surplus after a good harvest that year, had been a blessing. After a few months of fish most every day, and edible seaweed every other day, even the fonio they grew on Alphard, the arid conditions making it a more suitable crop than the rice, wheat or maize common on most worlds, had been gratefully received by the civilian population. Bread and porridge made from fonio wasn't great, but it wasn't terrible either, and you could always turn it into a perfectly good beer.
The Alphard Trading Corporation (ATC) had settled the planet not long prior to the Periphery Uprising of 2765, wanting a local workforce for a planned expansion in their nascent mining operations there. The ATC had named the world in honour of the other planet Alphard, the one in the Free Worlds League where the corporation was founded, but any plans they might have had for further development were stymied by the entire Inner Sphere having gone to hell shortly thereafter. The Periphery Rising was immediately followed by the Amaris War which was itself soon followed by the fall of the Star League and then the Succession War, resulting in the new colony being abandoned and left to its own devices for decades, while the corporation itself went bankrupt and largely folded.
On the plus side, the isolated and forgotten settlers stranded there managed to get through the whole terrible age without getting blasted by orbital bombardment, so compared to many other places they didn't do too badly out of an otherwise unfortunate set of circumstances. They did have to suffer the very occasional visit by pirate raiders, something that led to them having treated the first visitors from these 'Niops Association' folks warily, but if you turned up seeking trade not making threats, and you brought news from the rest of the galaxy, they soon warmed up to you.
Alphard would never be a bread-basket of a world. It was so hot and dry that only a small proportion of the land was ever going to be arable without a number of truly epic irrigation projects, but you didn't need billions of acres under the plough to support a population that was barely into the double-digit millions by the late 2820's. They had a lot more people living there than Niops could boast, but the Inner Sphere was littered with cities that had more people living there than the combined populations of Niops V, VI and VII.
"I've told Bremman to be ready to go as soon as I get approval from the High Associator" Romanov told them. "Good thing he's right in there and hopefully in a pliable mood after a few drinks. Let's get going shall we?" she asked rhetorically, heading off towards the entrance.
If this had been an event held in much of the Inner Sphere, where the nobility reigned supreme, and for some reason the rules of etiquette were based on those of 18th Century Europe, they might have expected to be loudly and formally introduced to the other guests on arrival by a servant with excellent diction, but, as it was they practically managed to sneak in unnoticed.
Officially the 'High Associators Annual Ball' the guest list in previous years had been invariably made up of politicians, senior academics and a smattering of NAM officers, all either born within the Terran Hegemony or whose parents or grandparents had been. It seemed however that High Associator Olson had taken to heart a few pointed remarks from certain people of a Wolverine persuasion regarding caste systems and there were a few more token representatives from the Capellan immigrant community than usual. Respectable small or medium business owners for the most part, although there were a few 'community leaders' who had been pushing for more integration and, of course, Guan Yuanchun, the richest man in Niops.
The richest man in Niops being the son of a Capellan immigrant might have seemed a little odd if you didn't know the story, it had certainly surprised the SLDF people when they found out. His father had been the ship's captain and owner of the Chǎngníng, the Leviathan class jumpship that had carried eight overcrowded dropships full of refugees into the system decades before. The government of the Niops Association allowed them to stay but they didn't want the Chǎngníng leaving so it could remind outsiders the place existed.
After some negotiations the government nationalised the jumpship, agreeing to pay the owner the market value for the vessel. The problem was, even an obsolescent four-hundred-year-old jumpship, of a class that hadn't been manufactured since the Reunification War, was worth an absolute fortune, and they didn't have the sum required to hand. Fortunately Guan Yuanchun's father was open to being paid in instalments of roughly two-and-a-half million dollars a year… for the next century, thus setting up his young son and future descendants quite nicely.
The Guan family had learned that while you couldn't buy your way into the ruling class here, you could make campaign contributions to their election campaigns, which meant they certainly wouldn't ignore you for fear of you giving money to their rivals.
On most any other planet the richest family would have held even more sway, but in the Niops Association, where the money had portraits of famous scientists on it not long-dead members of the nobility, it wasn't 'All about the Newtons' despite what the rappers said. It was all about standing on the shoulders of giants.
Rapping being a big cultural thing on Niops was something else the SLDF people had found weird. The first time Trish Ebon went into a bar and found the entertainment for the evening was two nerds rhyming to each other in a lyrical battle about whether Gottfried Leibniz or Isaac Newton was the 'King of Calculus' left her nonplussed. It was also the first time she heard the phrase 'It's all about the Newtons', when the advocate for the man himself waved a handful of the hundred-dollar bills that bore his likeness in front of his rival.
It had been stacks of 'Newtons' given out as loans from the Guan family which had enabled other immigrants to set up businesses, including the popular Cantonese restaurants and take-out places dotted around town. As such it was unsurprising to see a number of the guests from that community buzzing around Guan Yuanchun, while in-turn the man in question chatted with the High Associator and other important politicians.
To some among the original population, albeit a small minority to be fair, Guan Yuanchun was considered 'uppity'. Given that he had four children already, and another on the way, all that money was eventually going to be divided up amongst an awful lot of grandchildren and great-grandchildren so in the longer term the proper order of things should be restored, they reasoned.
There had always been Capellans other than the Guans at these sorts of events of course, it just made a change that the majority of them were there as guests, they weren't just serving canapés or tending bar.
It was a small incremental change perhaps, but Franklin Hallis felt pretty sure that Sarah would have approved as he sought out a drink.
Although billed as a 'Ball' there seemed to be very little actual dancing going on, with only a handful of couples to be seen on the dance floor, going through the motions as a waltz played from loudspeakers. Less than half the female guests were clad in actual ballgowns, the majority in more conventional dresses of varying quality, though none being actually cheap or informal. Most people were simply milling about having conversations, generally with a glass in their hands. The 'Ball Room' for the evening was itself really just a large chamber usually used for charity events, townhall meetings and the like, with other smaller rooms that opened onto it used for spillover, a couple with tables and chairs and one hosting the bar.
Not being exactly familiar with champagne Trish and Hallis asked Romanov if the stuff being served was good quality, her reply that it was the best champagne she had tasted in over fifty years failing to clarify things much. She did warn them from experience that it had a higher alcohol content than they might think it had, being very easy to drink, and that it was also a very, very bad idea to get drunk on the stuff because it was hellish coming back up, refusing to elucidate further on how exactly she knew that.
Hallis quickly determined a method for telling who the Capellans among the guests were, they were the ones that addressed his commanding officer as 'General Romanova' instead of Romanov like everyone else, and they invariably asked if she was related to the Tsars. Despite the stereotype the Capellan Confederation wasn't just 'China in Space', it was partially 'Russia in Space' too, thanks to the mix of worlds that comprised the youngest of the Inner Sphere's Great Powers.
She was in fact related to the Tsar's. At least according to her grandfather who had told her as a little girl that they were descended from the fourth son of the third son of Tsar Nicholas I. That didn't put them very high up in the line of succession at the time, but it had meant they had to flee Russia in 1917 before the Bolsheviks had them shot.
Despite her lineage she herself spoke barely a word of Russian while many of the Capellan community on Niops could. That was something you had to keep in mind about them, their English wasn't necessarily always necessarily the best, but that was because most of them spoke something else at home. In many cases English was actually their third or even fourth language, after Mandarin, Cantonese and Russian, and they actually thought it was pretty funny to have their accents or fluency in English criticised by the terminally monolingual.
Franklin Hallis had intended to prop up the bar, this being situated in a side-room off the main meeting hall of the building where the Ball was taking place, but Romanov ordered him to mingle like Trish was doing so he sought out Brigadier-General Nellis of the NAM who was discussing fleet deployments with some academics interested in stellar mapping.
"I don't think most people truly grasp the distances involved, at least not judging by how many seem to expect the ships to be back any day now" Nellis opined to the group. "Thunderer and Rawhide might have set off months ago but Camelot Command is thirty jumps from here, just the round trip there and back would take more than a year, and that's not taking into account how long it will take them to strip the place of everything useful and pack it up for transport back here" he noted. "We're talking hundreds of thousands of tonnes of equipment just to fill the dropships they're hauling with them, let alone the cargo bays of the ships themselves."
"Nearly three-hundred thousand tons of cargo space aboard Thunderer, closer to four-hundred thousand for Rawhide" Hallis interjected. "We borrowed the largest available ships we could from the Clan boneyards for Switchback."
"Interesting use of the word 'borrowed' there, Franklin" Nellis responded, amused by the phrasing.
Hallis laughed. "Rumours that I told the crew that boarded Thunderer to 'drive it like you stole it' are entirely unfounded' he joked, the academics laughing along with him.
"In some ways the ships assigned to salvage Camelot Command have it easy though" Nellis suggested. "The roundtrip to Buffalo Meadows is over eighty jumps for Buccaneer and Maverick, and that's taking the short route practically straight across the middle of the Inner Sphere."
"They don't even get to visit anywhere interesting on the way. Only systems that were never colonised, had mining outposts or hosted SLDF facilities because we can't risk them running into anyone" Hallis noted. "It's a good thing we got used to long boring journeys."
"You're not worried about mechanical breakdowns? I know that jumpships prefer to travel between inhabited systems because of that concern" one of the academics queried.
"They're both in good condition that's why they were assigned the mission. Buccaneer is actually the youngest warship in the fleet with the fewest miles on her" Hallis replied. "She was only completed a year before the Periphery Uprising and was still in her shake-down cruise when fighting broke out" he continued. "The Monolith Class jumpships like Maverick weren't even put into production until the tail end of the Amaris War so she's even newer."
"The Buccaneer is a Sovetskii Soyuz class Heavy Cruiser right?" one of the academics asked. "My son makes plastic models of warships and talks about them a lot. I blame myself for buying him a copy of Janes Fighting Ships instead of a telescope when he was younger."
"He must have been thrilled when the real thing jumped into the system" Hallis surmised.
The academic nodded. "Yes. Now he wants to join the navy when he's older" he replied. "I suppose you approve?"
"Of joining the Navy? Never, my family are Army going back forever. I had an ancestor in the British Army who rode a tank during the NATO intervention into Second Soviet Civil War" Hallis told them.
Nellis smiled. "I think I had an ancestor who flew fighters for the United States Air Force in that one" he recalled. "Or it might have been in the war against the Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, I'm not sure" he said. The two early 21st Century conflicts were often bound up together in people's minds as the origin of what eventually became the Terran Alliance.
"The Airforce? Didn't he want to join the military instead?" Hallis couldn't resist the old joke, Nellis laughing along although he doubted the aerospace fighter jocks of the NAM would find it quite so funny. "If anyone wants to lay a bet on it we're running a book on who gets back first, Buccaneer or Thunderer" he announced. "The ships heading to Buffalo Meadows have a lot further to go, and they left well after the ones going to Camelot because we had to manufacture the replacement jumpdrive parts for Ulithi first, but compared to taking apart a whole starbase fixing a ship, even something the size of a Potemkin, is a quick job as long as you have the parts."
As to whether they could get the jumpdrive on Ulithi working again with a jury-rigged repair that was by no means certain, although the parts the Project Workshops produced for the task met the required standards, at least theoretically. In the worst case scenario the fourteen dropships the Buccaneer and Maverick could haul between them could bring back all the rest of the 295th personnel wise, plus a lot of their equipment. The remainder of their gear would likely have to wait there in mothballs.
It was difficult to make up for the carrying capacity of a Potemkin. Between its cavernous cargo hold, and the twenty-five dropships it could carry, the thing was in a league of its own. In reality it was as much a prize as the six regiments of battlemechs also waiting to be collected at Buffalo Meadows were, if not more so. Even if they got a shipyard up and running in record time, the economy of the Niops Association simply wouldn't stretch to building something remotely as costly in money and resources as a Potemkin for decades, perhaps not this century.
As the night wore on, and more alcohol was consumed, people started to loosen up a little. Hallis was taken a little aback by a woman asking him if it was true the Clans practiced jus primae noctis, which he of course truthfully denied but wondered how the hell that rumour got started.
The other medieval thing, trial by combat? Oh, yeah that was true, we did that, he confirmed before being persuaded to tell a few war stories.
After pestering the man for a while Romanov received permission from the High Associator to deploy a ship to interdict any pirates heading to Alphard, contacting Admiral Bremman by radio straight away to tell him the mission was a go. They didn't need to send an actual warship, a Tramp class transport carrying a Titan carrier dropship was more than a match for most any pirate force. The Tramp itself carried a few relatively light guns, the Titan more than a few, but it was really the three squadrons of aerospace fighters the latter carried that would inspire the belief that discretion was the better part of valour and send the miscreants running. That was a lot of fast-moving, hard-hitting firepower by periphery standards.
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Part VIII (b)
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Later, after making the mistake of revealing she had taken lessons in ballroom dancing while a cadet, this being very much the thing to do back then apparently, Jenna Romanov found herself unwillingly on the dance floor. First performing a Minuet with an elderly nuclear chemist who was surprisingly light on his feet, happily not making a complete idiot of herself though wishing her dress uniform boots were more suitable for such things, she then found herself stuck there for a Viennese Waltz as well.
"The last time I did that it was with the youngest son of the Duke of Caph at a Ball on Zollikofen, I remember finding out years later than Amaris had him killed along with most of the rest of his family" Romanov told Trish after she eventually managed a tactical withdrawal from the dancefloor. "Felt a little bad for having slapped him so hard when he got drunk and tried to grab my ass later that evening" she recalled, frowning.
Trish laughed. "Talking of asses, Franklin has been checking out the one on that girl over there in the slinky dress for most of the last ten minutes" she said. Pointing over to where her commanding officer stood nursing a drink and an expression of uncertainty what to do.
"If there's one thing I can't stand for in the men and women under my command it's indecisiveness" Romanov declared. "Go kick him or something."
"Yes Ma'am, right away Ma'am" Trish responded gleefully, heading off in his direction.
Franklin Hallis sipped on his latest glass of champagne wishing it was a good scotch, or a passable vodka, or a strong hooch that was light enough on the methanol that it wouldn't make you go blind as he tried to look interested in a conversation about the mass of stars and how brown dwarfs were also-rans in the sport of stellar evolution. The young woman over there watching the dancing was pretty though and he racked his brain on how he could strike up a conversation without sounding like an under-educated cretin.
"Can I have a request a private word with you Sir" Trish Ebon broke his train of thought.
"Affirmative" Hallis replied, following her off to one side, the music being loud enough that they wouldn't be overheard. "What is it Trish?" he asked.
"Her Imperial Majesty, the Tsarina of All the Russias, says if you don't go talk to the girl instead of continuing with the creepy staring she'll have you shot, or sent to Siberia or something" Trish told him, embellishing her instructions a little.
Hallis blinked. "I don't know what you're talking about" he lied unconvincingly.
"Franklin, if you think I'm above going over to her and saying 'My friend over there really thinks you're pretty and stuff and wants to ask you out' then you are very, very mistaken about just how much fun that would be for me" Trish threatened. "You're a grown man not a teenager for the love of Cameron. I've literally seen you looking less nervous leading soldiers into battles that were likely to get you killed" she said. "For that matter I have seen you leave a bar at the end of the night with a chick from the Steel Vipers who had literally threatened to knife you in the back earlier that evening."
"That turned out to be a big mistake, she was completely insane" Hallis replied, grimacing at the memory.
"All Steel Viper girls are insane, they take after their Khan, you can practically smell the crazy on that bitch but that's beside the point" Trish replied. "Stop checking out the girl and go talk to her. Romanov's orders."
Hallis groaned and set off towards the girl. "Jax Benedict would not have treated me like this if I'd made him saKhan instead" he muttered to himself regretfully.
The girl must have noticed him approaching because she turned towards him as he arrived. She had been sitting with an older man earlier, not her partner judging by their interactions, more likely her father Hallis decided. The man was off having a conversation with a few other guests on the other side of the room and had been for a while now. "Hi" Hallis greeted her. "This is the first one of these I've been to, how long do they go on for?" he asked, thinking that might be a decent way to strike up a conversation. "I need to be up early for an inspection."
The girl shrugged. "First one of these for me too" she replied in a thick Capellan accent which surprised him a little as her dress looked bespoke and really expensive. Her ethnicity was obviously East Asian but it wasn't like the people from the Terran Hegemony who settled here first were some kind of Caucasian monoculture. Given her age she must be a second-generation immigrant but the Terran accent typical of Niops had passed her by completely somehow. "What you being inspected for?" she asked, revealing her English was a little halting too.
"I'm the one supposed to be doing the inspecting" Hallis told her.
"Make sense, you must be an officer to get invited here. Not Militia, wrong uniform. SLDF soldier?" she reasoned.
"Yes" Hallis confirmed. "Mechwarrior with the 331st Division" he added proudly.
"Wolverine person then, not real SLDF like General Romanova" the girl replied airily. "I meet Wolverine people before. They don't speak proper English, use made-up words."
Hallis opened his mouth to vigorously challenge her assertions before closing it again because objectively she wasn't entirely wrong, her own fluency in English notwithstanding. "You should have heard me speak a couple of years ago, I'm still trying to relearn to use contractions consistently" he responded instead.
"We both need talk to people that speak proper English more then. I mostly talk Mandarin or Russian to friends and family" she told him. "I was better at it before I left school" she admitted. "Got rusty fast working for uncle over there" she continued, indicated the man who had been sitting with her earlier. "All his workers at clothing factory also Capellans. I boss them around all day" she continued before grinning. "Only usually use English there for extra swear-words when I run out of Chinese and Russian ones" she joked.
"I am shocked, shocked I tell you!" Hallis responded, trying to sound as if he was appalled by her confession. "I would never swear at my troops to get them to do something more quickly" he lied, blatantly and unconvincingly. "Although I can threaten to have them shot, or thrown out of an airlock, which you can't and that has got to be bad for labour relations."
"Since when I can't threaten to have them shot?" the girl asked, feigning visible confusion that lasted a few seconds before she laughed. "Uncle say much easier to do business back home in Capellan Confederation, none of this 'Workers Rights' nonsense like there is here" she joked again. "So what are you? Major? Maybe Colonel?"
"Lieutenant-General" Hallis replied. "Technically only an Acting Lieutenant-General of brevet rank, so I get all the extra work without the extra pay."
The girl looked dubious about his claim. "You're lying" she replied eventually.
"No. I really don't get the extra pay" Hallis confirmed deadpan, fully realising that wasn't what she meant.
"Franklin Hallis Lieutenant-General of Wolverine people. You not him, he like fifty, same age as my father, born before Kerensky left, it say so in the newspaper" the girl stated with conviction. "You no older than… thirty maybe?"
Hallis laughed. "I was about twenty years ago" he told her, reaching down under his collar and pulling out his dog tags with his name on them, showing them to her as proof of identity before putting his tags back in place. "Hegemony anti-aging treatments as a kid" he explained. "So now you know my name, can I get yours?" he requested.
"Barbara" she replied. "You too old for me" she told him flatly after a pause.
"I'm sorry?"
"You going to ask me on a date but you too old for me" Barbara repeated her assertion.
"What makes you think I'm going to ask you on a date?"
"Aren't you?"
"At this point I'm not even sure" Hallis told her. "I'm apparently too old for you" he said wryly. "Although you might want to consider that in fifty years people will think I look way too young for you."
"Sixty maybe, Capellan Chinese genes, we age better than you caucasians without fancy Terran drugs" Barbara replied before something suddenly occurred to her. "All the women your age on planet look too old for you now!" she realised before pursing her lips and looking thoughtful. "Alright, one date… out of pity" she offered magnanimously.
Hallis looked at her incredulously for a few moments before grinning. "If you didn't seem like this much of a challenge, and didn't look that good in that dress, I'd have too much self-respect to take you up on that offer."
"One date" Barbara repeated. "Out of pity" she reminded him. "Uncle coming over, don't tell him you don't get full pay for being Lieutenant-General" she advised seriously. "Do tell him I look good in dress. He made it for me."
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Note from the Author:
Back in the 2720's the Alphard Trading Corporation (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Alphard_Trading_Corporation) (ATC) from Alphard (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Alphard_(FWL)) in the Free Worlds League (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Free_Worlds_League) (FWL) decided to expand its holdings in the periphery and set up subsidaries out there looking for investment and development opportunities. One of these subsidaries staked a claim on a world a few jumps anti-spinward of the FWL and promptly named it after themselves. The other Alphard (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Alphard_(MH)), the one in the periphery, proved to be incredibly blessed in mineral wealth and would have made ATC rich beyond the dreams of avarice if not for the Periphery Uprising (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/New_Vandenberg_Uprising) (2765-2766) which was followed by the Amaris War (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Amaris_Civil_War) (2766-2799) and then the First Succession War (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/First_Succession_War) (2786-2821) all of which conspired to shatter the economy of the Inner Sphere and bankrupted the corporation.
Most of the land surface of Alphard (the periphery one) is very hot and arid, with only a small area in the two northern continents cool enough to farm with water available for irrigation. When ATC folded a few settlers were left behind but being cut-off from civilisation by decades of war never developed much beyond subsistance farming. The mining operations of the ATC were much further south in the parched inhospitable regions where nobody went (it wasn't like they could export anything they dug up and anything that looks like wealth in the periphery draws pirates).
The Capellan Refugees that turned up in the Niops system must had got there somehow, they weren't rich and and there were a lot of them, so I thought why not an old Leviathan (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Leviathan_(JumpShip_class)) jumpship. The Niops Association buying the thing off the owner to prevent them leaving (endangering the system's isolation) was a more civilised course of action than they might have adopted but they were still faced with the problem that even an obsolete jumpship is worth a staggering amount, hence having to pay for it by installments.
The popularity of nerdcore (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nerdcore) rapping being a unique cultural trait of the Niops Association was a notion I had that struck me as hilarious. The Niops Dollar (based on the old Star League Dollar) having famous scientists on it rather than First Lords of the Star League is the reason why it's 'All about the Newtons son'.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz posse represents!
Oh, and Trish Ebon is very right about Ellie Kinnison (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Ellie_Kinnison), Khan of Clan Steel Viper.
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+1 for that ATC J. Edgar! :)
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Part IX
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"It didn't occur to me until after we left Camelot Command why all the tables in the big mess-hall there were round. I mean the barracks rooms were all named after Arthur's Knights but I still never clicked the round tables. Why people think I'm smart and perceptive I'll never know."
Major Marcelo Gao - 2835CE
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(FLASHBACK) Camelot Command – Dark Nebula (Lyran Commonwealth) – 2825
Fortunately the stations atmospheric recirculation system was still operational, so the scout team sent over first didn't have to fix the thing before Jenna Romanov and her entourage shuttled over from the Zughoffer Weir. The view on the way in had been worth giving up a comfortable chair in the shuttle's passenger compartment for the tiny jumpseat in the cockpit behind the pilot, the old SLDF facility completely dwarfing the McKenna now floating in space beside it.
The so-called 'Dark Nebula' had once been located within territory claimed by the Rim Worlds Republic but later found itself inside Lyran space after the Republic-Commonwealth War. Despite suspicions and rumours of there being a secret Star League naval base located somewhere in the region, one that had helped the SLDF considerably against Amaris, it had never been found thanks to the entire area being absolute hell for sensors.
It wasn't just the vast cloud of ionised dust and gas itself, dozens of light-years across, multiple pulsars also threw out levels of electromagnetic radiation that were off the scale. Forget detecting emergence waves from incoming jumpships unless you were practically on top of them and for that matter the notion of tracking someone down by looking for stray radio transmissions was an exercise in futility.
If you didn't know exactly where to look it was extremely likely you would readily locate the non-descript planetoid within an asteroid field that contained Camelot Command, even if you knew which diminutive Red Dwarf within the nebula it orbited, which you would almost certainly not. The system itself was unremarkable, with no habitable planets within the star's goldilocks zone, which was exactly why the SLDF chose it.
It wasn't exactly necessary for her to go see the station for herself but Romanov wanted to demonstrate that she was a commanding officer that did that sort of thing. The overwhelming majority of people in the fleet were Hallis's people, the so-called Wolverines, and they took the notion of 'lead from the front' very seriously, very much expecting it from the people they followed as a matter of course. If she wanted their acceptance, and it was still early days for that, then being a command-safely-from-the-rear general officer wasn't a good look.
Once a roughly cylindrical asteroid, Star League engineers had finished shaping it to the desired external dimensions before getting to work hollowing part of the thing out, stuffing an entire base in there with several floors and then setting it spinning on its long axis to create artificial gravity on the inside.
The outermost floor from the central core nearest the surface felt like just over half a gee, with the effective gravity on each level below that getting progressively lower until you reached the core. Externally the huge jumpship-scale double airlock that led to the internal shipyard was positioned right in the centre of one end of the cylinder, where the artificial gravity was entirely negligible and the rotation when you came into dock easiest to deal with.
For reasons unknown to Romanov, as the airlock opened to let her shuttle inside the pilot was whistling the Blue Danube. If she had asked him about it he would have told her he didn't know either, it was just something that was kinda traditional to do.
Robotic docking equipment reached out and took hold of the shuttle once the pilot steered it close enough to the appropriate internal bay, flashing lights having guided him to the correct spot whereupon he cut the engines and thrusters and relinquished control. There must have been a dozen bays for small craft like the shuttle, almost as many for dropships and of course the cavernous one large enough to dock a Black Lion class battlecruiser like the fleet's own Michigan.
The smaller hanger that held the station's complement of Voidseeker drone fighters was to be found at the other end of the cylinder with its own launch tubes. It was a good thing that Camelot Command's computer had accepted the recognition codes that Cape Bon had broadcast in response to its automatic radio challenge because it turned out there was an entire regiment's worth of the damn things in there. They were still fully armed and fuelled and had been patiently waiting for decades for the opportunity to pounce on unwelcome visitors.
Voidseekers gave veterans of the Amaris War who had fought against them the creeps, though not as much as the larger M-3 drones and in particular the M-5 Caspar warships did. The SDS systems subverted against the Star League by the Usurper had proved a considerably more dangerous opponent than the Rim World Republic Navy itself ever did, and without them the SLDF would have retaken the Terran Hegemony in a fraction the time with far fewer losses.
Disembarking the shuttle Romanov was greeted by Major Marcelo Gao of the 331st who had commanded a reconnaissance unit for the Wolverines during Operation Klondike. Rated as 'good at recon work, scouting and generally poking around' by Franklin Hallis, he had been placed as second-in-command of the boarding party after the captain of the Cape Bon who had been here before, albeit decades ago as the XO of a corvette. "Welcome aboard Camelot Command Ma'am" Gao greeted Romanov with a salute which she returned. "Captain Moore is stuck in the station command post trying to get more of the systems running. You requested a summary report as to the condition of the station on arrival?"
"I did. Go for it Major" Romanov replied.
"Well for a start we have power… and air" Gao noted.
"That would explain the lights being on and the lack of asphyxiation, but if you're trying to be funny Major then don't" Romanov warned him seriously.
"No Ma'am. Sorry Ma'am" Gao apologised for his attempt at levity. "The warehouses are almost empty, the Exodus Fleet must have cleared the place out. There's still some ammunition and spare parts to be had though, a bunch of replacement Ferro-Carbide and Lamellor Ferro-Carbide armour plating for warships and a few tons of ration packs" he told her. "Station defences are partially operational, a few of the laser turrets would have certainly engaged us along with the Voidseekers if we didn't have the recognition codes, and we can either get the rest running or strip them for salvage."
"Naval weaponry?"
"A mix of anti-shipping and anti-fighter defences, all automated" Gao replied. "The ammunition bunkers for the various missile launchers on the surface are empty unfortunately, part of the Exodus Fleet likely topped up their own stocks from them."
"Hydroponics?"
"It's FUBAR. Water corroded the pipes and they look like they've been leaking for at least five or ten years" Gao told her. "Half the contents of the stations main water tank is currently a swimming pool in the storage room below hydroponics and given enough time it'll eventually flood the level below that too."
Romanov frowned. "Repairable?"
"Engineers think so. We can patch the leaks and get rid of the water by venting it into space if we have to" Gao replied. "We're just lucky we got here before the water got into some of the equipment that requires something more than welding gear and duct tape to fix."
"What about the shipyard?" Romanov asked. 'Operational?"
"Not fully but I was told it just needs a little TLC, not a whole new set of replacement parts" Gao told her. "Three to four weeks if we throw enough labour and technical expertise at the problem" he continued. "The battlemech repair workshop will need more work, Tech said it wasn't properly mothballed when they shut it down so a lot of it will need stripping down and putting back together. No time estimate on how long that will take yet."
"Manufacturing?"
"Better condition than the battlemech workshop, not as good as the shipyard" Gao replied. "They got the computer that runs the automated factory working though and there is bad news on that front. It does not have the design schematics for the Potemkin so we cannot tell the thing to churn out the parts we need for Ulithi even when we get the production lines going."
"It doesn't? Why not?" Romanov asked reasonably.
"Someone decided when it was installed that because nothing larger than a Black Lion class battlecruiser can fit in the dock it would never be working on something like that" Gao explained. "It can't make parts for Zug or Bismark either. This was the base for the 12th Fleet, two navy Pursuit Squadrons and one Reconnaissance Squadron, so mostly smaller stuff like destroyers and corvettes. It wasn't a homeport for a Line squadron with battleships and a Potemkin is even longer than a McKenna."
Romanov rolled her eyes. "So what you're saying is it never occurred to some bureaucrat that just because nothing bigger than a cruiser could dock here that didn't mean they might never have to produce spare parts for one in an emergency" she theorised. "Wonderful" she added sardonically.
"I guess back when the Star League was at its height, they just assumed a Newgrange yardship would be sent out to do the job" Gao reasoned.
"You could be right there" Romanov concurred. The SLDF had operated a couple of hundred of the colossal jump-capable mobile shipyards. If you were a battleship needing repairs you couldn't handle yourself you could simply get on the HPG and call the closest one to come and patch you up.
The large majority of the Newgrange yardships which survived the Amaris War followed Kerensky on his Exodus, but unfortunately only a few of those subsequently made it through the Pentagon Civil War and later Operation Klondike as well so they were closely guarded resources as a result. The Wolverine's couldn't just 'borrow' one for their secession like had had Bismark or Thunderer. The Successor States might still have a handful of Newgranges in service, but it was unlikely they would be willing to loan one out, Romanov thought to herself wryly.
"Most of the dropship repair bays are still operational, they were properly mothballed and shouldn't need much more than few kicks and some Teflon spray before we can use them" Gao continued his report. "One piece of good luck. The maintenance facility for the Voidseekers at the other end of the station is still fully up and running and can also handle other types of aerospace fighters if we want to bring them in for maintenance. The designers knew that those would be coming here, possibly needing repair, so they didn't limit the facility to only handle the drones."
Romanov nodded. "Captain Moore's preliminary report stated that you found the skeletal remains of some of the station personnel?"
"Yes Ma'am, near the command post. Computer records are mostly scrubbed but we believe they stayed behind to finish destroying paper and digital records, expecting another jumpship to pick them up so they could join the Exodus" Gao responded. "No such jumpship ever arrived and at some point, maybe years later, they realised they were going to be stuck here forever with no prospect of rescue and…"
"They decided on a suicide pact" Romanov finished for him.
"Looks like it. They still had water, food and air but no hope" Gao confirmed.
"I want their remains treated with the utmost respect. They will receive a proper burial with full military honours as soon as practicable" Romanov ordered.
"Yes Ma'am, of course Ma'am" Gao replied.
"So, is there anything else noteworthy before you lead me to the command post?" Romanov checked.
Gao smiled. "The anti-mech trenches are a sight to see. They really wanted to make sure that just because the corridors are big enough to let them through, hostiles getting past a certain point during a boarding action would be a pain-in-the-ass. Personnel quarters on the top floor where the effective gravity is strongest are gigantic, we can transfer a lot of the civilians over here, and there's a canteen with a kitchen attached that looks like it was made to feed a small town. Robot ovens you could practically fit a whole Corridani Grazer in, or a small Ashio Mammoth."
"I don't suppose there's any meat left in the freezers is there?" Romanov asked hopefully.
"Sorry Ma'am, took a look myself. If there was any left in there by the Exodus Fleet the poor bastards they left behind ate it all" Gao told her. "I've got to wonder if finishing it off the last of it, facing nothing but ration packs and vegetables from hydroponics the rest of their lives, was the final blow to their morale. Also, there's nothing left in the bar."
Romanov chose to believe that he knew about the bar because it was on the way to somewhere important and let that pass without comment. "Lead on Major" she instructed as he set off towards their destination.
Caught up in micromanaging the fleet, the man clearly still mentally adjusting to the fact that in barely two years he had gone from a mere Star Colonel to saKhan then Khan and found delegation uncomfortable sometimes, it was another six hours before Franklin Hallis made his own way over to Camelot Command. By that time Romanov had already summoned a couple of hundred additional engineers and technicians, the first batches of which to arrive were already scurrying around the facility in preparation for bringing the station back into service, and she had moved onto addressing longer-term issues.
Turning down the offer of a ten-cent tour of the station on arrival, choosing instead to head straight for the command post, Hallis arrived there to find that the technicians had already gotten the holo-projector in the centre of the amphitheatre-like room working. Not merely the place where Camelot Command was run from, but also a Fleet Headquarters, there were multiple consoles and workstations that ringed the room, facing inwards so everyone could see whatever was being projected which was currently a 3-D map of the inhabited systems within a few jumps of the Dark Nebula.
Jenna Romanov was listening as Captain Cole made an impromptu presentation, indicating stars as he did so with a laser-pointer.
"On best bet for finding spare parts for our larger warships is probably salvaging them from the sites of major naval engagements during the Amaris War" Cole suggested. "Unfortunately most of these took place in the Terran Hegemony but there were a few in the territory of the Rim Worlds Republic and the Lyran Commonwealth" he noted, now pointing to a specific system. "Devin is only four jumps from here and was a major slugfest."
"I remember hearing about that one" Romanov recalled. "One of our battleships got knocked out of orbit, hit the ground like an asteroid strike."
Cole nodded. "Texas Class, one and a half million tons worth of her" he confirmed. "We're not likely to get anything useful out of the wreckage, and I'll bet the locals are already picking her clean, but other ships that were lost on both sides will be in higher orbit around the planet and likely others near the jump-points."
"I don't suppose we're lucky enough for there to be a Potemkin left drifting there?" Romanov asked hopefully.
"Not at Devin but we lost sixty or so of them fighting Amaris so the chances are fair we'll eventually find one somewhere if we look in the right places" Cole replied. "I know for a fact two Potemkins were lost in the fighting at Nusakan, I was there praying that the Caspars didn't choose my ship to attack next, but that's sixteen jumps away."
Hallis coughed to announce his presence, attracting their attention away from the hologram.
"Welcome to Camelot Command" Romanov greeted him. "Camelot's not in as good a condition as we hoped, but it's much better than we feared" she told him. "If we're done for now you can get on with what you were doing Captain' she told Cole.
"Thank you General" Cole replied. "If you need me I'll be over at the Voidseeker bays, I want to see some up close when they're not trying to kill me like they were at Nusakan" he said, smiling. "General Hallis" he acknowledged the man with a nod.
"Captain" Hallis responded with a nod of his own before the naval officer headed off.
"I'd tell you pull up a chair Franklin" Romanov addressed her second-in-command, "but they're all fixed to the deck" she said, leaning back against a console.
"I read the summary report you had sent over to me Jenna" Hallis responded, taking up a parade-rest stance. If she was going to be informal using first names then so was he, although as the ranking officer she naturally had to do so first. "It's a good thing we fixed up Bismark as best we could at Columbus Station while we were there, she can't fit in the shipyard here" he observed. That was one problem with taking ships from the Boneyard to assist with Operation Switchback, the big Texas Class battleship had taken a battering during the Amaris War and her keel was damaged enough that she had been mothballed rather than absorbed into a clan touman. She could still jump without problem, but in combat she just couldn't absorb as much punishment as she could back in her glory days. On the subject of glory days her bridge still contained a brass plaque noting that the old girl had actually won the 2708 SLDF Martial Olympiad, though for some reason her name was misspelled 'Bismarck' on it.
"Pity you couldn't bring Columbus with you" Romanov joked.
"It was even less portable than this place" Hallis replied, smiling. "We hauled off everything we could easily take apart and had the cargo space for."
"Which has turned out useful" Romanov told him. "One of the engineers I talked to thinks that we can jury-rig some of the tech you stripped from Columbus to get Camelot up and running faster. They're not always identical systems but it should be mostly compatible."
"Pity there isn't a habitable planet here like there was there" Hallis observed. "Would have made keeping everyone fed easier" he remarked. "Our scouts reported back saying that the four inhabited systems within the Erit Cluster managed to get through the wars without getting blasted so we can trade for food with them, but we might not want to make ourselves too obvious by going there too frequently" he advised. "It's a lot further away, but if the story about an Avatar Class Heavy Cruiser at Paran is true that might work out for us. Paran was a breadbasket system for the Rim Worlds Republic so they might have a food surplus…"
"And be somewhere that might be interested in trading food for Naval Autocannon ammunition, or maybe spare parts, which some 'lucky explorer' found in an old Star League cache" Romanov finished the thought for him.
"My thoughts exactly" Hallis confirmed. "They're a currency we would have trouble spending anywhere else, and Paran is six jumps away so we wouldn't necessarily risk drawing unwanted attention in our direction. We can send one of the L-F Tramps if you want to get a ship there quickly."
Romanov frowned. "I thought you wanted all the L-F ships to go find your misplaced warship once everyone's jumpdrives are re-charged?"
"Only the warships" Hallis told her. "It could be a trap laid by Kerensky, have one of their own Riga II's making waves pretending to be the Yukon to lure us in. I doubt it somehow, he'll want to avoid stirring up the Inner Sphere even more than we do, but if we run into angry clanners the pop-guns on a Tramp aren't going to be much help. The L-F Tramps are more use here, you can use them to scout out the region… and maybe trade some spare ammo for food up at Paran."
"You know if the Yukon isn't where you hope it is you'll have a hell of a job finding her" Romanov warned.
"Can't argue with that but the reports indicate that the 'Canada Tribe' is hitting Combine systems in what used to be the Principality of Rasalhague before the Dracs conquered them. That's close enough to the Theta Carinae Cluster for Yukon to be using that as a bolt-hole between raids and they know they're pretty safe in there. That's why we gave all Clan Wolverine warships sealed orders that if they got separated from the main Switchback Fleet they should head there as a rally point. We just ended up taking a route after Epsilon Pegasus that went nowhere near it, and we had no idea Yukon made it out of Clan territory and was on the Exodus Road behind us. Last we heard from her she was conducting hit-and-run ops to keep Old Nick's boys and girls off-balance and distracted."
"Good choice of ship for that" Romanov opined. A Riga II wasn't the most heavily armed warship, but they were fast, with decent thrust and an L-F battery. They were also built tough, with twice the armour tonnage of some other destroyers, and for raiding they could carry six squadron's worth of aerospace fighters in their internal flight-bays plus haul two assault dropships along. "You think they would keep that close to the start of the Exodus Road even if they're worried about the clans searching for them?"
"Finding something in Theta Carinae makes finding something in the Dark Nebula look like child's play" Hallis told her. "It's an Embedded Cluster, a star nursery, surrounded by an ionised molecular cloud that will eventually be a whole new set of baby stars. In any case the rally point is in interstellar space between a trio of protostars, so even if someone checked every nadir and zenith point in Theta Carinae they still wouldn't find Yukon."
"You know the clans could have captured her and seized the sealed orders" Romanov noted.
"Possibly but I'd expect her crew to destroy them before capture, also they were written in code with only the Captain and XO knowing the cypher" Hallis told her. "The crew would have committed suicide rather than risk the clans finding the rest of us. All of them have friends and loved ones in the fleet."
Romanov blinked. "How detailed and comprehensive was this damn escape plan of yours?" she asked rhetorically.
"We put a bit of work into it" Hallis replied, smiling at his understatement. "There's a section dealing with adequate provision of women's sanitary products for the journey."
"If I didn't know your old boss was female too that would have confirmed it" Romanov told him. "If it's not the clans then your crew on the Yukon aren't exactly being too subtle in trying to attract your attention."
"The unencrypted signals between dropships and aerospace fighters designating target locations as 'Whitehorse, Mount Logan and Kluane' you mean? Or using First Nations Tribes from the area as callsigns? I'd have to agree" Hallis responded, chuckling. "Worked though."
Romanov laughed herself. "It's so blatant the clans might think it's a trap laid for them" she suggested, not entirely in jest. "If most of them think it was you that started flinging nukes around, not their side, they might be wary of jumping in and getting a face-full of fusion devices."
"Not like Kerensky can tell them the truth" Hallis concurred. "I wouldn't use them though, that would just prove to them we are the monsters they say we are."
Romanov narrowed her eyes. "Don't you dare put keeping the moral high-ground ahead of practical considerations, or protecting your people" she told him sternly. "If it's an ambush, and the only way to escape is to you blast your way out with Alamos and Santa Anas, then nuke 'em till they glow, that's a direct order. They let the nuclear genie out of the lamp, even if most of them don't know it, the consequences are on them."
"I'm not sure I'm comfortable with that order Ma'am" Hallis told her honestly.
Romanov looked him in the eyes. "If it eases your conscience, if there's a Widowmaker ship present blow that one to hell first to try and get the others to realise you're not ****** around. That might give them pause for thought at least" she advised.
Hallis pursed his lips. "A Widowmaker ship?" he pondered the scenario. "That might be easier to stomach" he decided after a little consideration.
"Think of it as a really effective and well-deserved warning shot" Romanov told him. "The computer records here are mostly wiped with the locations of SLDF facilities and anything classified as Top Secret or above erased and I'm told we can't restore the data."
"That's a pity. It would have made gathering supplies easier" Hallis replied.
"Admiral Bremman has an idea we could go through the maps and navigation records of all the ships in the fleet to see where they don't match up" Romanov told him. "We've got boats that originally came from several different fleets, not to mention a few transport jumpships that probably travelled all over the Inner Sphere delivering cargo, so the chances that we don't already have the locations of some out-of-the-way classified depots and supply caches are probably slim" she suggested. "For that matter, if we put out a fleet-wide communique asking if anyone old enough to have served against Amaris was ever stationed at, or visited, some Secret Squirrel kind of places we might get some lucky finds out of it too. The Lyran Commonwealth and the old Rim Worlds Republic was the old stomping ground for both our divisions so we're definitely in the right place to start with. There's a couple of places not much more than half-a-dozen jumps from here that I know of personally which we never told the Steiners about."
"Anywhere you can get a battleship serviced?" Hallis joked.
Romanov shook her head. "No such luck. Our best bet for spares is salvaging old battlegrounds and bringing them home."
"Home? Is that what this place is already?" Hallis queried, smiling gently.
"Temporarily at least" Romanov replied. "At least the gravity deck is bigger here than what you've gotten used to right?" she asked rhetorically.
"We've got people that have spent so much time cooped up on dropships with only an hour or two on a grav deck every day that this place might give them agoraphobia" Hallis replied, semi-seriously. "Pity this place doesn't spin up to one gee but I guess that was to make it easier for the shipyard."
Romanov shrugged. "Beats the hell out of floating though, things stay put for a start" she said. "Just have to remember to put more weight on the bar when you're in the gym."
"I was always more of a track guy" Hallis told her. "I'm leaving Trish Ebon behind with you, she can play the saKhan card if you're having trouble with the civilians."
"Just bring back the McKenna, I'm just getting used to my new ride" Romanov responded. "I've been meaning to ask. Why did you use Michigan as your flagship when you had the Zug?
"General Custer at the battle of Gettysburg 1863" Hallis explained, Romanov looking suitably confused by his answer. "He was commanding the Michigan Cavalry Brigade and yelled out 'Ride you Wolverines!' as he led the charge."
"Ah. So is 'Ride you Wolverines!' your battlecry then?" Romanov queried.
"No. We just yell 'Wolverines'… and, at least according to what Dwight Robinson told me once, it's because of a really old movie Sarah's dad liked" Hallis told her. "Have you seen 'Red Dawn'?" he asked, grinning.
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Note from the Author:
Camelot Command (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Camelot_Command) in the Dark Nebula (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Dark_Nebula) was abandoned by the SLDF during Kerensky Senior's Exodus (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Operation_EXODUS). I'm going to assume that the handful of personnel left behind were supposed to be collected but it seems they were not (it's mentioned in the Rhonda's Irregulars (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Rhonda%27s_Irregulars_(scenario_pack)) that they found skeletal remains there when the mercenary company located Camelot Command in 3050). The Dark Nebula is not uninhabited, the Erit Cluster (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Erit_Cluster) contains a few populated systems, but it's nightmareish to navigate or search.
The hollowed-out asteroid that houses Camelot Command is noted to be spinning to create internal gravity in Rhonda's Irregulars (which is the souce for much of what we know of the place including its condition). Since they would have had a choice of asteroids I'm assuming they would have chosen one that was a rough cylinder to make things easier (artificial gravity highest on the highest deck nearest the surface, none at the central axis). It would be much, much easier to dock a starship in the centre of the ends of the cylinder because of rotation and a lack of 'down'. It's sort of like an O'Neill Cylinder (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Neill_cylinder) with multiple internal floors.
It was estimated in 3050 it would take two years to make the station functional again (Snord's Irregulars (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Snord%27s_Irregulars) eventually began construction of a Black Lion) but it's in much better condition in 2825 when found here.
About the only place better to hide than the Dark Nebula is the Theta Carinae Cluster (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Theta_Carinae_Cluster) just outside Draconis Combine territory not far from the start of the Exodus Road (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Exodus_Road#Operation_EXODUS_Route). It's a stellar nursery, an Embedded Stellar Cluster (http://'https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embedded_cluster') where dust and gas forms into new stars. As such it's a mess of ionised particles and no where you would want to go. Not a bad choice for a rally point for Operation Switchback (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Operation_SWITCHBACK) (or a bolt-hole) but unfortunately the main fleet had no idea Yukon (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Yukon) had gotten away from the Clan Homeworlds (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Clan_Homeworlds) and was following on behind.
Operating from Camelot Command they're going to visit every old SLDF facility they know of, along with the systems they know of where naval battles took place. Volders (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Volders) is one of the former, Devin (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Devin) one of the latter.
The Battletech Universe is sometimes described as the future of the 1980's (when it began to take shape). Of course the Wolverine's reference Red Dawn (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Dawn)!
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I see what you did there with the Blue Danube reference. :laugh:
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Beat me to it! :D
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I can just see a Union docking...
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Part X
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Germanium fever, has gone and got me down
Germanium fever, it's spreadin' all around
With a Geo-Scanner in my hand
I'm a-goin' out to stake me some periphery land
Germanium fever has done and got me down
Anonymous Prospector - Early 23rd Century
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Association Council Building – Niops Association (Niops VII) – 2828
Still sat at his desk late in the evening, long after most of his staff had gone home, Giles Olson read the report which he had just been handed personally by Admiral Bremman who had requested an urgent meeting. He blinked and then read it again more slowly, this was certainly not the meeting he had been expecting. The one scheduled in his diary was a briefing about jump-point defence and fleet dispositions. "Not to cast aspersions on the typing skills of your staff, but by any chance was there an extra zero inadvertently added to this figure" he asked, pointing to the page. "Or perhaps two extra zeroes?"
"No Sir" Bremman replied evenly.
Olson looked the man in the eyes. "And this isn't some piece of military humour that civilians don't get?" he checked. "Or dare I say it, a prank being played at my expense?" he asked suspiciously.
"No Sir" Bremman replied once again, denying the accusation. "On both counts" he added.
Olson frowned. "So, and let me absolutely clear on this point, you are informing me, in all candour, that the salvage team you sent to check out the old ATC mining complex on Alphard discovered a germanium deposit worth fifty billion dollars?" he exclaimed incredulously.
"Negative" Bremman responded, shaking his head. Olson as a result looking even more perplexed than before. "Our team discovered fifty billion dollars' worth of germanium that had already been dug up and refined and was just sitting there in a secure warehouse, presumably waiting to be shipped out" he told the High Associator. "It's probably been there for decades gathering dust. How much more germanium remains in the ground is unknown, but until we get a team of geologists in there to perform a proper survey our best estimate is…" he paused. "…most of it."
Olson squeezed his eyes shut for a few moments before opening them again. "Why in the name of Copernicus did someone dig up fifty billion dollars' worth of germanium and just leave it in a freaking warehouse?" he asked reasonably. Interstellar travel was critically reliant upon the metal, with the jump-core of any starship requiring a massive quantity of a germanium-titanium alloy to even work. That was why there was never enough of it to be had, with demand far outstripping supply. It was also why the Star League Dollar had been so strong during the Golden Age, it was backed not by mere gold bullion but by Terra's huge reserve of the vital resource stockpiled at Fort Knox.
"Our assumption is that all the people who knew about it came to a bad end, perhaps the transport they were on was destroyed in the fighting, or maybe they just misjumped" Bremman suggested. "They presumably never told anyone else about their good fortune beforehand, that being considered a highly plausible scenario because, well let's face it, people have been killed for far, far less" he pointed out. "The Alphard Trading Corporation went bankrupt during the war, and with the Inner Sphere enthusiastically blasting itself back to the Stone Age nobody else was sending out expensive jump-ships to a periphery backwater."
"But there are people living on the planet. How did they not find it?" Olson queried, again reasonably.
"Everyone on Alphard lives on one of the two large northern continents, where the climate isn't quite as harsh and there's the only regions on the planet with arable soil and fresh water to irrigate it with" Bremman explained. "The ATC mines were on the smaller island continent near the equator, it's about the size of Australia but even drier, and frankly it makes Death Valley on Terra look temperate by comparison. Nobody, and I mean nobody, lives there."
"Surely there was at least a workforce for the mines when they were operating?" Olson could not help but assume. I wasn't like there were artificially intelligent robots around to do that kind of work like in some science-fiction novel.
Bremman shrugged. "The mining equipment was mostly automated, we assumed it would be given the conditions which is partially why we went there hoping to salvage something more advanced than a few mechanical diggers, but there should have been some mineworkers, I agree. It's just a guess on my part but perhaps they were all off-worlders brought in for their expertise and all left on the same ship when news about the war reached them?" he responded. "As for why the corporation settled people elsewhere on the planet, it's possible the ATC may have intended lower-tech mining operations there, or perhaps they intended on building factories to turn raw materials into finished products for export?" he hypothesised. "Alphard isn't just rich in germanium incidentally, we might want to consider placing our mining operations for rare-earth metals there too, our electronics industry would benefit greatly I'm told, the really fancy doohickies need fancy metals to make them work."
Olson looked thoughtful. "I'm assuming that if they left all that germanium behind, they also left all the mining equipment too?" he surmised. They obviously thought they were coming back, and it seemed implausible that they wouldn't want to extract even more of the stuff given the likelihood of a severe case of what prospectors called 'Germanium Fever' setting in.
Bremman nodded. "Yes Sir" he confirmed. "Thanks largely to the dry climate it's all still in excellent condition too, our engineers and technicians should be able to get the whole mining operation up-and-running before the end of the year if you give the order to go ahead with that" he told the High Associator.
Olson laughed. "If I found a continent full of germanium I'd think it was worth investing some capital expenditure in too" he responded.
"We may even want to reverse-engineer some of the equipment in order to make copies. It looks like the ATC brought in some very expensive cutting-edge mining technology from the Terran Hegemony that requires minimal labour to operate" Bremman noted. "It would be very helpful given our manpower shortage. As you know we simply don't have the numbers to operate a pick-and-shovel mining operation while meeting our optimal production targets for weapon upgrades, let alone setting up additional production lines for other equipment."
"More advanced than what we use on Niops V?" Olson queried, that in itself was a little surprising. The Terran Hegemony had not skimped on advanced technology when establishing itself in the Niops system. Most everything was either state-of-the-art or else of proven reliability.
"I'm no expert but I got the impression from the full report that it was designed and optimised for larger-scale material extraction than takes place here. Which I suppose makes sense because Niops was intended to be a self-sufficient science colony, not an exporter of raw materials or an industrial powerhouse" Bremman replied. "I doubt replicating the equipment is beyond the ability of our Project Workshops, they seem to be able to make most anything, which is also useful if we need replacement parts because it's not unlikely the factory that originally made the equipment is now a radioactive crater."
Olson sighed. The man was probably correct, much of whatever survived Amaris was lost to the squabbling infants that called themselves 'Archon', or 'Captain-General, or 'Coordinator' or whatever. "So, who does it belong to legally?" Olson queried. "The germanium I mean."
"From my perspective as a military man I'd argue it belongs to the closest world with the warships and battlemechs to back up their claim, possession being nine-tenths of the law" Bremman replied with a chuckle. "Or perhaps in even more strident terms, 'Stop quoting laws, we carry weapons', if I may be permitted to quote Pompey the Great" he continued, still smiling. "More seriously it's a periphery world so I'm honestly not sure on the actual legal position, again it's just not my field of expertise, however I suppose it could be argued that the Pollux Proclamation of 2575 applies."
The High Associator smiled. "I'm not sure if the Successor States regard that particular document granting free-reign to do whatever the hell it takes to ensure unification of all colonies under the Cameron Star as being legally binding or remotely authoritative these days" he responded with amusement.
"As far as the SLDF is concerned the power and authority of both the Star League and the Terran Hegemony rests with yourself as the de facto and de jure Acting First Lord" Bremman reminded the man. "And I for one could not care less what those clowns think" he declared. "Star League law trumps petty local jurisdictions and always has done" he stated firmly.
"I admire the strengths of your conviction, however the ability of the Terran Hegemony to strong-arm the rest of the Inner Sphere in compliance left with Aleksandr Kerensky and, although your redoubtable faction returned, a lighter touch is required these days" Olson told him. "More diplomatic niceties, less 'political power comes from the barrel of a gun'.
"You can get further with a kind word and a battleship than you can with just a kind word, but the military will, of course, defer to your judgement in such matters" Bremman replied. "Rest assured however if diplomacy ever fails the navy stands ready to present a convincing rebuttal of its own to our opponent's legal arguments."
"I hope you don't hold to the notion that might makes right, Admiral?" Olson chided.
"No Sir. But it does determine who is left" Bremman replied, trying not to sound too pleased with himself about the reply.
Olson decided to let it go as an unrelated thought popped into his brain. "You know, even if the ATC went bankrupt the companies name, and licenses to mineral rights filed with different jurisdictions, might still be available for purchase from their creditors" he voiced his thinking aloud. "If we want to establish diplomatic relations and trade with our closest neighbour at some point, we probably don't want any legal troubles in the Free Worlds League getting in the way, military options notwithstanding" he reasoned. "I'd really prefer to argue it out in court rather than a battlefield anyway."
"Your decision of course, but keep in mind that if things ever do go south we are in an excellent position to present our case very effectively on a battlefield, High Associator" Bremman counselled.
"Indeed we are Admiral, however a man with fifty billion dollars can also afford an exceptionally skilled set of lawyers" Olson countered. "And if we lose the case, as you contend, we've still got your warships and General Romanov's battlemechs if we lack a legal avenue of appeal against the judgement."
Bremman smiled, Olson was clearly a man of reason and not one that was afraid to think outside the box. "My advice would be to deploy ground troops and other military equipment to Alphard before you go ahead with any legal chicanery. That way if anyone wonders why we're buying the corporate rights, and is suspicious enough to investigate, they're going to find claim-jumping a far riskier proposition than they may believe beforehand" he said. "We can have an entire regiment there within three weeks. Raise the flag over Alphard and make it official. Although we could play it safe and not make any overt moves until the Successor States get back to killing each other with a vengeance. They'll be too busy to take notice of what's going on way out here in the boonies."
"I imagine a smaller force, one that was only operating under instructions to secure the mining complex, would be unlikely to be noticed however?" Olson queried.
"Yes Sir, a combined-arms battalion, infantry, mechs and vehicles, could dig in there and hold off just about anything as long as they had supplies" Bremman told him. "Given the climate we would want to deploy a cargo dropship with a Jamerson-Ulikov Water Purifier in the hold as well, so that it can process seawater into potable fresh water. Wiser to meet the needs of the garrison without having to repeatedly visit the more populous areas of the planet to top up the tanks from rivers and lakes. The latter might well be noticed and trigger some curiosity as to what the hell we're up to."
"I'll consider the more limited deployment" Olson replied. "I confess I'm loathe to formally annex the entire system, given that it does have a local population" he noted. "Maybe I should talk to the Association Council regarding making Alphard a protectorate if the locals there are amenable to the idea?"
Bremman scratched his chin. "If we undertook to keep pirates away from them and invested a couple of billion into raising their standard of living by building schools, hospitals and such, I doubt we would see much vocal opposition" Bremman opined. "Life in the periphery is hard after all, and they're mostly subsistence farmers" he said. "At least they are for now anyway, it could be an industrial powerhouse of a planet if enough infrastructure was built, and a decent amount of capital expenditure was ploughed into the economy there, instead of just ploughs being pulled through fields."
Olson considered the man's words. "Interesting position to take Admiral, I would have expected that you'd want to spend our new-found wealth on more warships" he said eventually.
"Sir, I can't even properly crew the ones I already have. The vessels we seized from the fleet boneyards were running on skeleton crews all the way here" Bremman responded. "I can't even justify not mothballing both Potemkins immediately after they gotten back here and unloaded their dropships and cargo. I simply lack a use for them" he said. "Realistically what I need is the ability to maintain the ships that offer the most utility and firepower for the fewest resources, although I will say that in the interim, by which I mean until we get a shipyard and fleet manufacturing operational, I do need a better source of replacement parts."
Olson sighed. "I'm sorry but as you've been told before the Project Workships have a backlog of increasingly urgent work to do already, I simply cannot prioritise your requests."
"I realise that Sir, I would simply like you to consider a proposal that our new circumstances allow for" Bremman responded. "Not all of the items on the to-do list for the Project Workshops are bespoke for Niops, nor are they all high-tech Terran Hegemony only products, why not simply purchase those items in from elsewhere to free up a Project Workshop for another task."
"Making warship spares you mean" Olson presumed.
"No Sir, making more Project Workshops" Bremman replied. "One of which could be assigned to naval production" he continued. "If we're going to be breaking from isolation anyway, and have the funds, then why not?" he asked rhetorically. "It would only be a temporary expedient, we certainly don't want to become dependent on imports in the long-term, but between that and perhaps buying in more mining equipment and low-tech heavy industry to feed our high-tech manufacturing base, it's not so much that our industrial development plans will hit the ground running, they'll be on overthrust."
Olson opened his mouth to reply, frowned then closed it again before smiling. "I was about to say, 'do you have any idea how expensive that would be?' before I realised how stupid it would have sounded because we can actually afford that now" he admitted. "It's a complete paradigm shift."
"Be grateful that our survey team are too honest to have stolen it all themselves and then hijack the jumpship" Bremman joked.
Olson laughed. "Should we reward them in some way do you think?" he asked.
"Not financially, they're not mercenaries, but a glowing unit commendation and some press coverage seems apt" Bremman suggested. "You might want to handle that personally perhaps?"
Olson nodded. "I'm more than happy to do so" he replied. "Would it mean a lot to them?"
"It'll look good on their records, and the press coverage and name recognition might get some of them laid, so I can't see them not being happy about it" Bremman supposed. "In public relations terms it'll be very positive for the SLDF personnel, help demonstrate that all the talk of 'honour and duty' isn't just talk for us. We genuinely mean it" he continued. "I will caution you that the next time a pay-rise is due for the military that if we don't get it the troops will go absolutely apeshit after we dropped a First Lord's ransom in your lap."
"I'll keep that in mind" Olson assured the man. "If you don't want more warships can I assume that General Romanov isn't going to be asking for another division's worth of battlemechs?"
"I cannot speak for the Army Sir, the inner workings of their minds are frequently a mystery to me, however if you are asked to sign off on the purchase of thirty-thousand Locust light battlemechs, which we could afford to buy now if there were that many for sale, which there aren't, just make sure that it's not just because they want to unleash 'a literal plague of locusts upon the foe'."
"A plague of locusts you say?" Olson responded, chuckling.
"Or perhaps a seven-thousand strong horde of barbarian Marauders" Bremman posited.
"So how many McKenna class battleships could we buy with the money then?" Olson queried out of interest.
"Two" Admiral Bremman told him.
"Two?" High Associator Olson exclaimed.
Bremman shrugged. "There's a good reason why only the Star League operated hundreds of battleships. Nobody else could afford to build them and still do everything else a government has to" he said. "If you're thinking about selling one of ours to a Successor State with deep pockets, even a ship we've mothballed and aren't using, I advise against it because if nothing else it'll raise a few awkward questions we don't want to answer" he said, clearly amused by the notion of putting a capital ship up for auction to the highest bidder.
"My life is already complicated enough without that kind of attention" Olson agreed before another thought crossed his mind. "With all that germanium and a shipyard we can make a metaphorical killing constructing civilian jumpships and selling them on" he realised. "As opposed to the literal killing that our warships are intended for."
"In the long term it might be best to have two shipyards, one for civilian construction, one for the navy Sir" Bremman told him. "We might not be planning to build more warships yet, but I'm sure we will eventually, and in the meantime we need to maintain and upgrade what we have."
Olson looked at his quizzically. "What upgrades are you thinking of Admiral Bremman?" he asked.
Bremman smiled. "It's blue-sky thinking, or perhaps 'black-sky' would be the better turn of phrase in the circumstances, but we've come a long way in PPC technology for battlemechs in the last five centuries but we're still using the same basic design of Naval PPC as we did before the Age of War" he said. "Surely we can apply some of the advances that resulted in the lighter and more compact Improved PPC and the more powerful Enhanced ERPPC to their larger cousins?"
"This is going to cost me an awful lot in terms of Research & Development funding isn't it?" Olson asked suspiciously.
"Germanium Sir, we have lots of it" Bremman reminded him. "I guarantee that the Army will be pushing for grants to fund their own pet projects too incidentally. If he wasn't off duty on a date General Hallis would be waiting in the room outside wanting to talk about a new Mercury III battlemech with modular weaponry, it's what we were eventually working towards before we had our spat with Nicky K" he said. "That and further development of battlemech PPC technology amusingly enough."
"You know that fifty billion in germanium won't stretch infinitely right?" Olson asked sardonically.
"Yes Sir, so we'd better get to digging up some more" Bremman replied, completely ignoring the man's tone. "I'll await your sign-off on that, and the troop deployment, with anticipation" he added brightly.
Elsewhere in town Franklin Hallis, feeling a little self-conscious in civilian clothing, was hoping that the latest food imports from Alphard had reached as far in the distribution network as the restaurant and bar up ahead. If they hadn't they could be in for some very bland fare because rationing was still very much a thing in the Niops system. Unless you wanted fish, and he didn't want fish again.
By next harvest everything would be fine. The arrival of he SLDF fleet had seen far more acreage put under the plough and fertilized by seaweed, but until then anything that couldn't be harvested from the sea, or imported from the farmers and ranchers on Alphard, was in short supply.
As he held open the door for his date the sound inside of people having fun and the smell of steak sizzling somewhere inside made Franklin Hallis both inwardly sigh with relief and start to drool. According to something he had read on the matter because of the climate there, the cows raised on Alphard were a genetically-engineered crossbreed of the American Brahmin and the Sudan Buffalo but all he really cared about was how the things tasted, and that was pretty good in his opinion. "Smells like booking a table here was a good idea" he remarked.
"Just so long as you the one paying" Barbara replied. "They charge too much because meat rare these days."
"Meat should always be rare" Hallis responded. "Or at worst cooked medium-rare" he joked. "Unless it's chicken. That needs to be cooked through."
Barbara rolled her eyes. "I can't believe you talked me into another date" she bemoaned her situation.
"This is our third date. You must like something about me" Hallis defended himself as they stepped inside.
"It definitely not your jokes" Barbara told him as much of the sound of merriment abruptly stopped.
Crap, Hallis thought to himself as someone called out "Attention on Deck" and there was a flurry of chairs being pushed back and diners starting to stand up while most of the people already standing at the bar snapped to attention.
Franklin Hallis looked around. "I'm off duty and so are all of you" he said loudly. "Get back to eating and drinking" he told everyone. Just his luck that the place was packed full of Wolverines. He had expected them to be hanging out in the bars they usually frequented, not this place. Perhaps they heard rumours about the restaurant having decent food for sale?
"If you're off duty how come you're still giving orders" someone called out anonymously from the other end of the room, provoking a little laughter.
"Because I get off on it" Hallis retorted, this resulting in a greater amount of mirth. "Seriously, forget I'm here, you're embarrassing me in front of my date" he requested.
Immediately everyone who had stood up sat back down and those at attention at the bar returned to what they were doing.
"It's good to be the Khan" Hallis remarked wryly. "Let's find out which table is ours" he said heading towards the woman stood behind a desk he assumed was the restaurant manager or at least a senior member of staff. She was looking at him very oddly as he approached, likely because of the short-lived scene she had just witnessed. "I booked a table, it should be under Hal Franklin, not my real name."
"That is the worst alias ever" Barbara couldn't help but interject.
"Okay… so I see you on the list" the woman behind the desk confirmed, looking over her paperwork. "Would I be correct in assuming you are actually General Franklin Hallis" she rightfully concluded.
"See, worst alias ever" Barbara contended. "I thought you said you once ran a spy agency?"
"I never claimed to be good at it" Hallis replied. "And it was counter-intelligence, not undercover intelligence gathering" he noted, recalling the period when Khan McEvedy assigned him to root out the Widowmaker trash spying on them. Fortunately the other clans tended not to be good at spooky tricks either for the most part, it went against the way their society was structured.
"We're honoured to host you tonight, General Hallis" the restaurant manager told him. "Your table is right this way" she bade him to follow, making a mental note to tell the chef to put in his best effort for their order. "I'll take your coats" she offered, doing so after leaving them with some menus to look through as Hallis ordered a couple of beers.
As they sat down and started to look through the menu, items not available due to rationing having a mark against them, Franklin Hallis noticed his companion for the evening looked a little uneasy. "Something wrong?" he asked quietly.
"I'm being looked at" Barbara whispered back.
"I continue to be impressed at your uncle's dressmaking skills, and how you look in them" Hallis told her.
Barbara frowned. "It not that, it your Wolverine people judging me."
"Are you sure it's not everyone else wondering how I got you to go out with me?" Hallis suggested.
"Some of them maybe, but mostly your people judging me. Probably think I am some gold-digger trying to get her claws into their king" Barbara decided.
"My people like claws" Hallis couldn't resist the joke.
Once again Barbara rolled her eyes. "It a pity they don't know I am the one out of your league" she told him.
"Only way for that to happen is to keep dating me" Hallis suggested.
Barbara looked at him askance. "Bad at jokes, bad at spying but good at tactics and planning I'll give you that" she told him.
A waiter arrived with their beers and Hallis ordered himself a steak, Barbara doing likewise although she wanted hers less bloody than he did. They hadn't started eating when the waiter returned with two more beers Hallis hadn't ordered. "Complements of the inebriated fellows at the bar" the waiter told them.
Hallis looked over to the bar. "Khan, My Khan!" one of the men there called out to him, holding up a half-empty beer of his own.
Returning the salute with a raised glass of his own Hallis told the waiter not to accept any more such orders but he should tell the 'inebriated fellows' to have another beer each on him.
"They love you" Barbara observed.
"They loved Sarah more" Hallis replied. "I just led them out of bondage and through the wilderness to the promised land" he continued. "Although it's lacking in the milk and honey department right now" he added looking at the desert menu sadly, more than half the usual choices on there being currently unavailable.
"I was wrong. You not their king, you their mechwarrior Moses" Barbara told him, clearly more amused by that notion than his attempts at humour.
Hallis chuckled. "Pharaoh Kerensky should have let my people go without a fuss" he suggested. "One day we'll go all ten plagues of Strana Mechty on the clans. Mark my words."
"So, what are your ten commandments?"
"First Commandment. Thou shalt not cook steak well done" Hallis told her solemnly as their food arrived.
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Note from the Author:
In canon the Marian Hegemony (http://https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Marian_Hegemony) was founded on Alphard (http://https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Alphard_(MH)) in 2920 by Johann Sebastian O'Reilly (http://https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Johann_O%27Reilly) a man who stumbled upon fifty-billion C-Bills (http://https://www.sarna.net/wiki/C-bill) worth of germanium (http://https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Germanium) sitting in a hidden warehouse that used to belong to the Alphard Trading Corporation (http://https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Alphard_Trading_Corporation). It seems reasonable that everyone that knew about it had died or it would have been found much earlier. Also if they left the germanium I doubt they didn't also leave behind the mining equipment.
Comstar's C-Bill didn't actually exist until 2835 but I'm going with the notion that they set its value the same as the old Star League Dollar (and hence the Niops Association Dollar). The C-Bill is actually worth quite a bit, you can estimate an exchange rate in modern terms of about ten USD to one C-Bill so fifty billion C-Bills is worth about half-a-trillion US Dollars today. O'Reilly was a very lucky man (although his obsession with Ancient Rome went a little far).
The issuing of the Pollux Proclamation (http://https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Pollux_Proclamation) of 2575 was when the Terran Hegemony Star League formally stated its goal to unify all worlds under their flag, whether they wanted to be or not. Those worlds not interested in being assimilated soon found out what it was like to have the SLDF descend upon them like a ton of bricks, beginning the era when the Star League enforced its dominance with large armies and excessive numbers of very expensive warships (AKA the 'Golden Age').
Niops has plans for all that new-found wealth that does not include cosplaying as Legionaries.
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AWESOME update! As a Lothian patriot, I'm SO amused by Niops (of all people) taking over Alphard early on. :D
Hallis' humor is indeed suspect, but totally funny! ;D
And I hope he eventually lands Barbara... ;)
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30,000 Locusts.... that would be mind-blowingly amazing.
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30,000 Locusts.... that would be mind-blowingly amazing.
Imagine if they're all LCT-1Es, too. Plague of Locusts indeed.
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LCT-1M.
Who needs armor when you have 60,000 LRM5s? ;D
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LCT-1M.
Who needs armor when you have 60,000 LRM5s? ;D
The people being targeted by 60 thousand LRMs certainly do.
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The people being targeted by 60 thousand LRMs certainly do.
I wonder if there is actually any way to fit 30,000 mechs within 21 hex range of a single target... Are there any stacking limits in AT2?
Btw, just to be nitpicky, it would actually be 300 thousand LRMs - 5 per launcher! Or by weight; 2,500 tons of missiles per 10 seconds. :grin:
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You may be interested in the seriously insane videos on YouTube with literally MILLIONS of mooks against slightly less mookish troops defending a strong point. The literal lakes of blood are eye opening to say the least... ;)
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defending a choke point is historically a winning move, at least until heavy artillery came into play, and even then, it still can win
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That's the main complaint I have against most of those videos: lack of artillery...
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If they feel like inventing it early, the UM-AIV UrbanMech is only 2,488,200 c-bill equivalent. How many of those could they buy?
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LOTS! ;D
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A Saladin with an Arrow IV instead of the AC/20 is only about 1.1 million... ;)
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A Saladin with an Arrow IV instead of the AC/20 is only about 1.1 million... ;)
And an Arrow IV is such a versatile, nasty weapon.
ASFs? Air Defense Arrow.
Mechs? Homing Arrow.
Infantry/Vehicles? Inferno Arrow/Cluster Arrow.
Deter pursuers? Arrow IV Thunder/FASCAM.
Urban Renewal? Davy Crockett-M
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Artillery covereth a multitude of sins... ;)
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Part XI - Section 1 of 2
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"Superstition has always been a part of a sailor's life whether they crew a wooden sailing vessel or a starship. Some ships are seen as being lucky, or unlucky, and a rare few as both depending upon the situation. In the case of the SLS Saratoga she was thought to be beset by weird timing and coincidences that saw her frequently being a pivot point around which major events occured. Starting during the Amaris War, a poor decision by her then captain, who was leading a squadron of warships as part of a fleet going up against the Keid SDS system, resulted in the entire squadron being caught out of position and destroyed, except the Saratoga herself which was only crippled. This could be seen as entirely negative, but, and only because so many drones went chasing after Saratoga's squadron, the rest of the 16th Fleet was able to quickly smash through the rest of them to win the wider battle. It was the damage she took at Keid, only partially repaired before Kerensky's Exodus, that saw Saratoga eventually mothballed in one of the Clan Boneyards where years later she was 'borrowed' for Operation Switchback during which the fortuitous timing of her jumpdrive failure may have saved Clan Wolverine from utter destruction.
In one of the stranger examples of sychronicity involving Saratoga, for a while after the battle of Keid she was nicknamed 'The Cockroach' because, despite the fierce pounding she took at the hands of multiple M3 and M5 drones, she just wouldn't die. Half a century later her crew adopted the Mexican folk song 'La Cucaracha' as the ship's song, and for completely unrelated reasons.
To quote one of her crew, serving upon Saratoga wasn't a job, it was a ****** adventure."
Admiral Bud Robertson III, Tales of the Hegemony Navy - Niops Press, 3025
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(FLASHBACK) Zenith Jump-point - Isfahan (Draconis Combine) – 2825
A parched desert world on the edge of the periphery, Isfahan had once enjoyed a rising population and a growing economy but in the last few years it had fallen so far that it did not even appear on some star-charts anymore. Like many systems in a similar situation this was because of war, although strangely the fighting had never actually reached as far as there. Isfahan was a destitute and failing colony because five-hundred light years away the Free Worlds League had unleashed thermonuclear fire on a factory complex in order to keep it out of the hands of the Capellan Confederation.
The lack of a cheap and reliable source of fresh water for both human consumption and supporting agriculture had held back the development of many worlds within the Inner Sphere, and indeed had once prevented some planets being colonised at all. All that had changed however with the invention of the Jamerson-Ulikov Water Purifier in 2622, simply connect one or more of the large industrial-sized units to a power-source, fusion reactors being commonly tasked for the purpose, and they would happily convert seawater to fresh water in vast quantities at a low operating cost.
An extremely high-tech machine, one that was complicated and difficult to manufacture, the J-U system also required frequent filter replacement and a steady supply of replacement parts for its mechanical pumps. Fortunately, the advanced manufacturing technology of the Terran Hegemony was more than up to the job, and long production runs kept the system affordable to everyone, thus within a century of its invention the Jamerson-Ulikov was seen everywhere.
This all changed in 2811 when the Free Worlds League tried and failed to conquer Brownsville, a former world of the Terran Hegemony. Not wanting to risk it falling to the Capellan Confederation instead, that state having also attempted to absorb it recently, the League cratered the industrial heartland of Brownsville and went home.
Unfortunately for Isfahan, and many other worlds that relied upon the Jamerson-Ulikov Water Purifier, the things were primarily made on Brownsville which meant that replacement filters and spare parts were no longer available, at least not affordably.
It's worth noting that several worlds within the Free Worlds League itself were utterly screwed by this unpleasant turn of events. Though clearly not as screwed as the poor unfortunate people living on Brownsville, not that sympathy for them was as great as it might have been if the planet had not, unusually for a Terran Hegemony planet, sided with Amaris against Kerensky.
Whether or not what happened to Brownsville was extreme karma in the form of thermonuclear fire was of little concern to the people of Isfahan. They now found themselves not only dealing with a severe economic downturn, because of the fighting going on elsewhere messing with interstellar commerce, but now they couldn't get enough water to irrigate their crops as well. Most people left if they could, and if it wasn't for the trickle of gold that could be extracted from the desert sands so would have everyone else.
None of this really mattered in practical terms to the captain or crew of the Saratoga when it jumped into the system, following the planned series of jumps the vessel had been assigned. Part search-pattern, and partly an attempt at misdirection, the sequence had started at Porthos, a periphery world near Santander and then took a route calling in at other inhabited systems just coreward of the Combine border including Labbezanga, Durham and Cable. Eventually the deliberately circuitous route would lead to Isfahan itself, a world that was, at least nominally, within the Inner Sphere and ruled by House Kurita, even if it was hardly Luthien.
The Draconis Combine were undoubtedly looking for Yukon and if they could be lured into looking into a sector of space that was close enough to where they had been raiding, but far enough away that they wouldn't start poking around the Theta Carinae Cluster any time soon, that was ideal. There was just enough interstellar traffic on the edge of the Inner Sphere that they should get noticed by someone, but just in case they were deliberately lax when it came to sending transmissions that could be picked up by anyone listening.
The various rumours of the 'Canada Tribe' that had reached the Switchback Fleet were vague, but they did seem consistent in a couple of areas. These being firstly that the Tribe ran without their IFF system turned on and secondly that they had painted over the names and markings on their ships, including the destroyer their two dropships and aerospace fighters operated from.
If someone had gotten close enough to Yukon that they knew she was a destroyer then it was likely known that she was a Riga II class vessel, although the stories didn't mention that fact. If this was the case that meant that only one vessel available to Franklin Hallis could be sent out to both look for Yukon and perhaps attract unwelcome attention away from her.
Saratoga was being shadowed in interstellar space by the Lola III class Protecteur. Having belonged to the 295th she could not be sent out alone to look for Yukon herself, the Switchback Fleet not having fielded any of that class so Yukon would likely assume she was hostile if they met. In the event Saratoga ran into something she couldn't handle she could immediately jump again, using her L-F battery to rejoin Protecteur. Between the two of them the destroyers could wipe the floor with most anything the Draconis Combine Admiralty had in service, with a Riga II making up for what it lacked in main-battery firepower with her large aerospace fighter complement and the Lola III being armed and armoured practically to cruiser standards.
Running without IFF as Yukon was, and with her own external markings also painted over, Saratoga did not deploy her jump-sail on arrival at Isfahan and began to recharge her drive from her fusion powerplant instead. Unfortunately, the engineering limitations of the jump-core meant that you couldn't safely charge it any faster than you could with the sail, and so it was just as long and tedious procedure as ever, trickling power into the Kearny-Fuchida drive for days.
Saving her Lithium-Fusion batteries in case she needed a quick getaway Saratoga scanned for any other vessels or radio sources in the system but other than detecting stray radio signals from Kerman, the largest city on Isfahan, and a few smaller towns, everything came up blank. The day before she left, the next system they planned to visit was Richmond a little deeper into space ruled by the Dragon, Saratoga would make herself very 'noisy' to make absolutely sure she was detected, there being nothing as pointless as a distraction that went unnoticed.
It was so quiet in the Isfahan system that they might as well still be skulking around the periphery. At least Richmond had both a military garrison worthy of the name and an active and a far more active Hyperspace Pulse Generator station that could quickly spread the word of the 'Canada Tribe' being around.
After four days of tedium aboard Saratoga, a period brightened only by a multi-lap race around the main grav-deck that was won by an engineering technician, much to the chagrin of the marines aboard who had bet heavily on their own man, everything suddenly became much less dull as an emergence wave was detected indicating another jumpship was about to arrive.
Calling all hands to action stations and dashing to the bridge Captain Jaime Merino prepared to scramble his aerospace fighter squadrons and ordered nuclear ordinance to be prepared if necessary. Khan Hallis had been clear in his instructions, if you meet the clans and have to blast your way out of there to preserve your ship and crew then do so without hesitation.
When a Tramp class armed-merchantman appeared instead of a warship Merino relaxed a little, though now the Khan's other instructions would come into play, be mysterious, evasive and ideally utterly confusing. Exactly how this should be undertaken was left to the captain's discretion, in fact they were vague enough to feature the phrase 'just play it by ear', but the overall goal was clear, throw people off the trail and muddy the waters. Obfuscation was the aim of the game as the clans might know exactly who and what Yukon and her crew was but the Great Powers of the Inner Sphere should be kept well and truly in the dark.
It was too late to keep totally under the radar, the raiding undertaken by Yukon had seen to that, but if they played their cards right they could at least keep the Inner Sphere thoroughly baffled and perplexed, which was almost as good.
"Receiving an IFF signal from the Tramp Sir" the tactical officer reported, looking a little surprised at what was coming up on his display screen. "Ship is identified as the Papsukkal and has a modified SLCOMNET registry code that flags it as belonging to ComStar."
"ComStar? What are they doing out here I wonder?" Merino asked rhetorically.
"HPG installation or maintenance maybe?" the ship's navigator suggested.
Merino considered that theory for a moment "You could be right" he reasoned. From what they had learned since arriving in the Inner Sphere SLCOMNET, under its rebranding as 'ComStar' was considered a neutral power with everyone accepting their sovereignty and control of the Hyperspace Pulse Generator network. They had all even agreed and signed a treaty along those lines, Jerome Blake's Communications Protocol of 2787, one of scarce few cases where all the Successor States had reached an accord on something. Since ComStar was neutral, and everyone needed them, they could likely go wherever they liked unmolested. If you messed with them they could simply cut you off from their services, which would give your rivals a major advantage over you until you apologised and/or made restitution.
Everyone knew how a Hyperspace Pulse Generator worked in theory but that wasn't much help if you needed to manufacture, repair or even just run one yourself. SLCOMNET had been careful to keep the precise details of their equipment a secret, hence you either accepted ComStar's monopoly or you did without easy interstellar communication.
"Are we ready to jump if necessary?" Merino checked.
"Aye Sir" both the navigator and helmsman reported immediately.
"Receiving a hail from the ComStar vessel" the communications officer reported. "They're close enough that you shouldn't notice much comms lag if you want to respond."
"Alright then, let's see what Jerome Blake's minions have to say for themselves. At least we can be sure word of the 'Canada Tribe' will spread far and wide after an encounter with these people" he reasoned then paused for a while. "I'm going to mess with them" he decided, "anyone that laughs loud enough for them to hear once the channel is open gets put out of the airlock" he threatened. "Put them on loudspeaker" he ordered, activating the microphone on his own headset.
"I repeat. This is the Papsukkal to the unidentified warship. Are you receiving us?"
"We are receiving your transmission, Papsukkal, please state your business" Merino replied.
"Thank you for responding to our hail. We represent ComStar and have been looking for you for some time" the jumpship signalled back in return. "Several of our ships are involved in the search, I consider us blessed to have been the one to find you."
Merino frowned, why in the name of the First Lord was ComStar out looking for Yukon, he wondered? "If this is about that unpaid phone-bill I already told your collections department that the cheque is in the post and that I refuse in principle to do wire-transfers until you improve your end-point encryption" he replied deadpan, most of the bridge crew grinning in response.
A lengthy pause at the other end was eventually broken by a very fake laugh. "Very droll" the ComStar vessel responded, the tone of voice indicating they thought it was anything but. To be fair Merino doubted he was the first person to yank their chains in a similar fashion, or the thousandth. "If we can be serious for a moment may I safely assume that I am speaking with the commanding officer of the vessel generally referred to as belonging to the Canada Tribe?"
Merino smiled. Yep all Riga II destroyers look alike alright, he thought to himself with satisfaction before being struck by inspiration. "Canada Tribe? No, you must be looking for one of our sister-ships" he replied. "We're the Mexico Tribe" he announced. "Buenos dias" he added politely.
Another lengthy pause at the other end of the line presumably indicated that the ComStar personnel knew they were being messed with, although they certainly misunderstood exactly how. "Given that we can logically dismiss the notion that there is more than one Riga II class destroyer preying upon the Draconis Combine in this region of space, can we please dispense with the blindingly obvious masquerade?" came a request that sounded pretty heartfelt.
"Nonsense? Mascarada? What are you accusing us of gringo?" Merino replied, putting on an exaggerated fake Mexican accent that he was certain his grandfather originally from Oaxaca would have beaten him with a stick for.
"You know who we are" the Comstar vessel persisted, "but since you are not transmitting your IFF codes, and the markings and insignia on your hull have been erased we cannot say the same" they observed. "This would be a far more civilised and productive exchange if you identified yourselves, even if only by using your regular nom de guerre for now."
Merino took a breath to steady himself mentally for his response, he had to do it without laughing or it just wouldn't be as funny, or as bamboozling and annoying as he was aiming for, as he continued with the accent. "Identity markings? Insignia?" he responded with evident distaste at the very idea of such in his tone. "You mean like badges?" he asked. "We ain't got no badges. WE DON'T NEED NO STINKING BADGES!" he practically bellowed the last line.
The helmsman corpsed and had to stick his fist in his mouth to stop himself from breaking out into convulsive laughter.
Merino would have happily given a year off his life to see and hear the reaction over there on the ComStar jumpship. After yet another lengthy pause it seemed that whoever was in charge had decided to push on regardless with their original plan. "Since only the Star League Navy ever fielded the Riga II, and the only ones that we know of that survived the Amaris War left with General Aleksandr Kerensky, we assume you are affiliated with his people" the ComStar vessel signalled. "Rest assured that ComStar considers Kerensky as a friend and ally, since it was he that arranged for other SLDF forces under Major-General Lauren Hayes to assist our founder Jerome Blake to take control of Terra, protecting it for the good of all mankind. Is it possible to make contact with him through you?"
"Kerensky? Sounds Russian. You should try the Russia Tribe. Last I heard they were heading for Kazanka to pick up some vodka" Merino advised. "I prefer tequila myself" he added.
They were still pointedly ignoring the obvious sarcasm and continued to ask questions about things they were curious about. "We've noticed that you have only attacked government-owned ships and facilities in the Draconis Combine, is there a reason for this?"
"We haven't attacked anyone in the Draconis Combine" Merino denied the accusation, honestly though they were naturally certain he was lying. "That was the Canada Tribe" he told them sincerely. "We asked them about it though and they told us it was 'Because of the Kentares Massacre, Eh' and said something about the Dracs decapitating innocent civilians with swords which seems more brutal that just nuking them" he continued, before pausing a moment. "Then they repeated themselves in French" he added, trying to sound earnest and barely succeeding. "At least I think it was French. Apart from English yo solo hablo español."
The ComStar people must have decided there was a grain of truth to be extracted from that. "Were you originally from the Federated Suns?" they asked. "The Davions are a mix of English and French nobility, and Canada is a mix of English and French people, is that it?"
"Ay, chihuahua! For the last time we are not the Canada Tribe, we're the Mexican Tribe, pendejo" Merino replied, almost wishing they could see his smirk.
"Persisting in this infantile pretence does neither of us any favours" the man from ComStar on the other end of the line stated firmly, starting to sound very annoyed. "We came as civilised men and women in good faith offering to render assistance, if that proved necessary, or perhaps even shelter and succour, but you seem undeserving of our magnanimity. Would you have preferred to encounter a warship in service of Kurita who would have dealt with you in a far less measured and reasonable manner?"
That was interesting, Merino thought to himself. Despite their earlier description of Yukon 'preying upon' the Combine they seemed all to willing to ignore that just so long as they could get their hooks into the Canada Tribe, generous offers of aid coming ahead of vague threats. Presumably they wanted intelligence, or perhaps to get their hands on a valuable warship, or most likely both. Captain Merino doubted they would really be all that happy to see the return of Aleksandr Kerensky, ComStar had developed a power-base on Terra amidst the vacuum left by the SLDF's exodus, and people with power don't generally like to give it up.
ComStar naturally had no idea that Kerensky Senior now rested in his tomb aboard the warship McKenna's Pride orbiting Strana Mechty, having died of a heart attack two decades earlier. He had died relatively young by the standards of a man born in the Terran Hegemony, being only a hundred years old at his death, although at least he did better than Jerome Blake who passed at a mere eighty. From what undercover teams of Wolverines conducting covert intelligence-gathering operations had learned of contemporary Inner Sphere politics, it seemed that Blake's replacement, Conrad Toyama, was making waves as he sought to expand ComStar's influence more overtly with several diplomatic initiatives to the Successor States. Toyama, unlike Blake, was not a technician and bureaucrat that knew he only reached the heady heights of power he did because Amaris killed everyone in SLCOMNET more senior than him, and this seemingly resulted in a very different style of leadership. It was certainly one that was outwardly more proactive, and perhaps clandestinely too.
"If you were civilised you wouldn't accuse us of lying about not being the Canada Tribe" Merino retorted. "Rest assured we will warn the rest of the United Tribes of your insult to our honour, cabron. If you were more than a lowly telephone repairman, I would demand satisfaction and run you through with my blade, but as a descendant of the great Zorro himself I would not sully one of my rapiers with your peon blood" he declared snootily. "Or one of my Tomahawks or Gotha's either."
Two of the six aerospace fighter squadrons in his flight bays actually were Rapiers, which to Merino made it all even funnier. They were the Wolverine-upgraded model of the RPR-100b with Improved Pulse Lasers and LRM launchers which had seen good service during both Operation Klondike and the Secession.
"This is farcical. You are quite clearly dissembling at best, outright spinning an egregious falsehood at worst by purporting to not be the so-called Canada Tribe. To feign offence at being called out upon your lies is rank hypocrisy on your part. There is only one Riga II class destroyer in the entire Inner Sphere and you are aboard it" the speaker aboard the ComStar jumpship stated indignantly. "We know you are the Canada Tribe, you know it, if they were here everyone in the entire galaxy would know it."
"Ha! That is where you are wrong again telefonista estúpido" Merino retorted. "The United Tribes have a shipyard building great masses of Riga II's at our base in the Lambda Orionis nebula" he announced, simply naming just about the most distant and hard-to-search place he could think of in case they actually believed him and went looking.
Presumably someone over there was checking where the hell that actually was because the next response took a couple of minutes to arrive. "More lies. It would take over a year to get there from here" the ComStar vessel dismissed Merino's claim.
"For you primitivos perhaps, but only a third of that for us thanks to our twin lithium-fusion-batteries that allow us to travel an incredible ninety light-years a week. Moving more swiftly than my forebear's mighty steed Tornado as we thunder across the stars" he declared. "Why, on a good day even the great Speedy Gonzales himself would eat our dust" he added, barely managing not to join in himself as his navigator involuntarily burst out laughing until he could choke it back down.
They obviously overheard the laughter on the other ship. "ComStar will not be mocked nor made a fool of" came a seething response to the clowning. "From your unseemly and unprofessional attitude we can only assume you are deserters from the Star League Navy and have been raiding and acting like pirates because that is all you are!"
Captain Merino smirked. "That is foul slander, and now, after you have accused us of being faithless deserters, we cannot ever be amigos you uncouth hijo de puta" he replied, feigning hurt feelings. "We are not now, have never been, and never will be traitors to the cause. We remain eternally loyal to the United Tribes, the great Pancho Villa and the memory of the martyred President Francisco Madero" he declared haughtily. "Down with Huerta, Amaris and Jerome Blake. Viva la revolución!"
Merino gestured to his bridge crew to join in and was rewarded with an enthusiastically echoed "Viva la revolución!" from all of them except the Executive Officer who was facepalming because of the absurdity of it all when Merino made his gesture.
"How dare you insult the memory of Jerome Blake by linking him to Stefan Amaris. Blake's foresight and vision is all that stands between us and a new Dark Age!" came a clearly incensed response from the ComStar jumpship. "He is the Blessed Founder and Joshua Hoshiko was his prophet."
Having no idea who Joshua Hoshiko was, Captain Merino made a mental note to check later. It turned out the man was Minister of Communications and Director of SLCOMNET when the HPG was invented centuries before. Apparently these ComStar people had already come up with their own prophets to venerate, perhaps before too long they might even turn into a full-fledged pseudo religion with saints and arcane rituals too, Merino had pondered for a while before dismissing that notion as extremely far-fetched. "Only the Holy Catholic Church is worthy of such devotion. You should confess your idolatrous pagan blasphemy to a sanctified priest and make penance for your sins" he told them. "Just make sure that the priest is not one of those heretics from the New Avalon Catholic Church or you would risk extending your time in purgatory, or even face eternal damnation" he warned them helpfully.
"We are done with you, at least for now. Be advised that unless you behave in a more rational and sincere manner during your next encounter with ComStar then your bridges with us will be burnt for all time and you will have to face the tender mercies of the Draconis Combine alone."
"The Mexican Tribe is never alone. Our hermanos in the United Tribes will always be there to support us" Merino replied pompously.
"For the love of Blake will you stop pretending to not be the Canada…" the ComStar ship was cut off abruptly as the communications officer on Saratoga pulled the plug.
"We are detecting an inbound jumpship Sir" the operations officer reported to Captain Merino. "Looks like too much mass to be another civilian jumpship" he added, looking at his display. "Too much to be a Drac Samarkand as well" he continued to update the bridge. "Could be a Narukami class destroyer" he suggested, a best guess given the lack of information.
"Good thing the Mexican Tribe keeps a couple of Santa Ana's under their sombreros, and we remembered the Alamo's… if not fondly" Merino said wryly. "We'll try to jump out, if we can't we'll make a fight of it" he said with determination. "WOLVERINES!"
"WOLVERINES!" the bridge crew echoed.
"Jumpship emerging from hyperspace. Vessel is identified as… holy shit it's a Riga II, no IFF."
"Madre de dios. It's the Yukon" Merino said quietly to himself disbelievingly, wishing he still wore the crucifix his mother gave him. What were the chances of them appearing right now?
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Part XI - Section 2 of 2
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"Receiving an encoded tight-beam transmission from vessel identifying itself as Yukon, signal confirmed as using Clan Wolverine recognition codes and encryption" the communications officer reported. "Text only" he continued, reading the data appearing on his display before grinning. "They've been routinely checking the rally point at Theta Carinae and found Khan Hallis there waiting for them the last time they poked their noses into the cluster" he continued. "They volunteered to go collect us before the fleet set off back to Camelot. Thought they owed us one for playing decoy. General Hallis gave them our intended mission route. Star Captain Francis on Yukon sends his complements, Sir."
"Not as inexplicably an unlikely coincidence as them just happening to decide to visit Isfahan when we did then" Captain Merino said with a sigh of relief that he hadn't just witnessed a near-miracle of probability. "Send their captain my complements in return and tell them it's great to see them return to the fold" he instructed. This was turning into one hell of a day.
"Hey, they rescued the kits. Managed to get them the hell out of Dodge before Nicky K could get his filthy hands on them" the comms officer told the bridge crew, grinning.
"The kits?" Merino queried.
"Sibling Company Gamma" The comms officer explained. "They transferred them to the Khan's flagship."
"In that case tell Star Captain Francis the drinks are on us" Merino replied, smiling.
"Hope he likes tequila" the navigator joked.
The Comms officer received a new transmission. "They're asking about our ComStar companions" he reported.
"Send them a compressed digital audio file of our conversation with the telephone company" Merino instructed him. "They'll love it, he said confidently just as a thought occurred to him. "You know, if we were surprised by Yukon turning up can you imagine how Blake's fan club is feeling right now?" he asked rhetorically. "At least we knew we really weren't the ship that's been sticking it to the Dracs" he added, chuckling as he wondered if Francis on Yukon could manage a Canadian accent, or maybe a different one?
Over on the ComStar vessel the Precentor in charge was still trying to get to grips with the fact that there was more than one unmarked Riga II class destroyer operating in this part of space, which meant that the one he had been talking to might not, in fact, be the 'Canada Tribe'. Unless they both were, or, in the worst case scenario, perhaps even neither of them were.
Was the 'Mexico Tribe' really a thing? He had been one-hundred-percent certain they were just messing with him, but then he had also been equally certain that there was only a single Riga II out here. What about the 'Russia Tribe'? Was that an actual thing too? Surely not?
How many of them were there anyway?
As his subordinates looked to him to make a decision as to what they should do next, he was temporarily at a loss how to proceed until the second Riga II suddenly started transmitting unencrypted on an open wide-band channel, not directly to the ComStar ship but they could overhear it readily enough.
"G'Day, how are you mezcal-swilling tamale-munchers doing? Australia Tribe here." The newcomer asked in perhaps the worst antipodean accent this side of Altair.
"Ah, Australia, good to see you amigo!" the first Riga II responded, Mexican accent very much in force. "Out looking for beer? Or senoritas?"
"Nah Mate, trying to find New Zealand. The drongo was supposed to meet us at Alpheratz but he never showed up. You seen any sign of him?"
"Nada."
"Bugger. No worries, guess I'll have to keep looking. Who's that bloke with you?"
"ComStar. They're out here looking for Canada. Don't help them, they're odioso."
"Crikey! You don't say? I ran into Canada a fortnight back. Traded him some vegemite for some maple syrup and heaps of poutine."
"Is verdad?"
"Fair dinkum. Say, you got any time this arvo to help me look for the Kiwi? He might be heading for Valentina. Give it a fair go and there's a few tinnies in it for you. Sending you jump-coordinates."
"Bueno."
"Bonzer. Let's go!"
"Vamonos!" the first Riga II gave its final response as the two warships engaged their Kearny-Fuchida drives and jumped out leaving the ComStar Tramp behind on its own.
Alright, they were definitely ****** with him, the Precentor decided, which didn't mean for certain that there weren't really more than two of the sons-of-bitches out there unfortunately.
A horrible realisation suddenly struck the ComStar official. He was going to have to report this bizarre encounter to his superior, Precentor Emilio Travis, who was in overall command of the search operation. Worse than that Travis might insist on him personally reporting it upwards to the Precentor ROM Michelle Dupreas, or even Primus Conrad Toyama himself.
If either Dupreas or Toyama were entirely humourless, which seemed a distinct possibility, this could go very, very badly.
Maybe it would have been better if he hadn't made it through Toyama's purge of ComStar back in 2819 when he first took over, the Precentor considered bleakly? Being stuck for a few years in one of those re-education camps didn't seem quite as unappealing right now.
No, wait, there was a way out of this, the Precentor realised as he was struck by an inspired idea. All he needed to do was volunteer to immediately go check out the Lambda Orionis Nebula, just in case the 'Mexican Tribe' mentioning it was a double bluff intended to make ComStar look elsewhere. That would earn him at least two years stay of execution and with luck a big war would break out and nobody would care about a couple of mysterious warships captained by wannabe comedians anymore by the time he got back.
He was wrong about another major conflict breaking out again quite so soon, and the Primus still wanted to talk to him personally about these 'United tribes' when he eventually got back to Terra. Unfortunately, Conrad Toyama wasn't interested in seeing his very pretty and artistic photographs of the Lambda Orionis Nebula either, so that didn't work as an ice-breaker.
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Note from the Author:
Isfahan (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Isfahan), and many other worlds where water was fresh water was scarce, relied upon the Jamerson-Ulikov Water Purifier (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Jamerson-Ulikov_Water_Purifier). Unfortunately the Terran Hegemony world that specialised in making such things was Brownsville (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Brownsville) which was razed by the Free Worlds League in 2811 eventually resulting in a lot of systems being depopulated and abandoned. The First Succession War caused a lot of indirect deaths even on planets that weren't blasted back to the Stone Age by nuclear weapons.
In canon ComStar (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/ComStar), and Conrad Toyama (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Conrad_Toyama) himself, were obsessed with the appearance of the Minnesota Tribe (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Minnesota_Tribe) and sent out a fleet of jumpships to go find them (they suceeded, at least in part, salvaging the Zughoffer Weir (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Blake%27s_Sword) and renaming it Blake's Sword). Weirdly, encountering a couple of Riga II (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Riga_II)'s here should be less perturbing than the battleships the actual Minnesota Tribe were running around with, at least in terms of a potential military threat. As an inexplicable and confusing encounter however, the 'Mexico Tribe' and the 'Australia Tribe' is going to drive ROM (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/ROM) analysts up the wall for decades to come!
At this point in history ComStar is still in transition from a secular telecommunications concern to the pseudo-religious entity it would become (for example they didn't start making their technicians wear robes instead of jumpsuits as uniforms until after 2837 under Toyama's successor, Raymond Karpov (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Raymond_Karpov)). It was under Toyama that this process began in earnest however, with any opposition to his rule and vision being dealt with harshly and decisively. One of the first things he did after the death of Jerome Blake (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Jerome_Blake) in 2819 was to organise a purge, later known as The Purification (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/The_Purification), during which the head of ROM, Michelle Dupreas, rid him of his opponents.
I'm running with the notion that the Saratoga (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Saratoga_(Individual_WarShip)) which fought at Keid (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Keid) as part of Operation Chieftain (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Operation_CHIEFTAIN) was the same ship as the Saratoga (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Saratoga) that the Wolverine's took out of the Clan boneyards for Switchback. The battering she took at Keid being the reason why she had a quirky jumpdrive (since fixed) lines up pretty well in my opinion.
Yukon (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Yukon) was the last Wolverine vessel to escape Clan Space. On his way out Star Captain Francis rescued Sibling Company Gamma, one of the earliest batches of Wolverines to come out of the Iron Wombs. They also had an interesting encounter with Clan Ghost Bear (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Clan_Ghost_Bear) on Liny, a moon of Arcadia (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Arcadia_(Clan_System)) (when he found out that the Wolverines he ran into there were mostly just kids gathering supplies the Ghost Bear officer in charge let them go because slaughtering children wasn't something he was prepared to do, Trial of Annihilation or not).
Captain Merino's Mexican ancestry does not mean he speaks much Spanish, but he made up for it with enthusiasm (and yes, both he and I know the "badges? badges?" line is a misquote of the dialogue in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Treasure_of_the_Sierra_Madre_(film))). Also it's meant to be 'kits' not 'kids', young wolverines are called kits much like young foxes are called cubs.
Finallly, have no fear muchachos, the Mexican Tribe Saratoga will ride again! Vaya con dios, amigos!
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THAT is how a good conversation is done! :D
Thought I was kind of expecting a "boring conversation anyway (pew!)" at the end... ;)
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Absolutely hilarious.
Can we have some more please :)
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Good thing they didn't see the Minnesota Division patches. "We don't need no stinking badgers!" would have been a little too on the nose, eve if they belong a state over.
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and I thought the Badges was from here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1lyNt5km8U)
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Brilliant play! That Captain deserves a star... :D
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Nicely trolled.
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Good thing they didn't see the Minnesota Division patches. "We don't need no stinking badgers!" would have been a little too on the nose, eve if they belong a state over.
UHF - We don't need no stinking badgers! (YouTube) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gx6TBrfCW54)
Captain Mitchell and the crew of the Badger (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Badger_(Individual_Vincent-class_WarShip)) are deeply offended.
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UHF - We don't need no stinking badgers! (YouTube) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gx6TBrfCW54)
Captain Mitchell and the crew of the Badger (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Badger_(Individual_Vincent-class_WarShip)) are deeply offended.
But aren't they too busy fighting off the hyperspsce squids to notice?
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Part XII - Section 1 of 2
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"As soon as Jenna Romanov started the tune playing on the radio, the dropship captain had it piped into the mech bays and the old geezers from the 295th started singing along. Then some of the kits joined in as well, I guess they must have learned the lyrics from their parents and grandparents who fought for the SLDF against Amaris. By the time we hit atmo at Algenib everyone was singing it, and I'm told it was happening on the other dropships too. After that it became a tradition to always sing it before we went into battle, or even just a small skirmish, the other tradition we kept after Algenib being to always bring a battery of two of Vali's and at least one squadron of Stukas because those things chew up entrenched defensive positions and spit them out."
Major Karin Kumar - 2849CE
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NAS Ian Cameron – JP-P-815 System Nadir Point – 2829
The first Star Lord class jumpship in the transport fleet to be re-named, and then adorned with the Red Cameron Star that Niops had recently adopted as its military crest, the Niops Association Ship Ian Cameron had set out for this operation ahead of the others. This wasn't just because she was named for the first man to rule the Star League, it was because the paint wasn't even dry yet on the NAS Nicholas Cameron, and the other Star Lords in the fleet weren't even that far along in the process.
Massing over a quarter-of-a-million tons, and capable of hauling half-a-dozen dropships along with her, the Ian Cameron was running with empty docking collars and had been since it left the Niops system, although that situation should be changing imminently.
She had arrived at the uninhabited JP-P-815 system eight days ago, along with her companion and escort ship for the journey, this being the Congress Class Frigate SLS Rickenbacker which unlike the Ian Cameron was in fact carrying dropships on her own two collars. At least according to her IFF and external markings she wasn't the Rickenbacker however, she was the SLS James Sever, and there was a story to that.
While operating out of Camelot Command they had found the battered hulk of the James Sever drifting in high orbit around a star in what had once been the Finmark Province of the Rim Worlds Republic. From the looks of her she had been caught without anti-fighter escort by at least a couple of Rim Words Republic Navy corvettes supported by multiple aerospace fighters and had lost the fight, badly.
So notoriously weak against fighter threats that the Pentagon assault dropship was developed specifically to defend the Congress class against them, why the James Sever seemed to have been running without any escort was a mystery. What was known upon her rediscovery in 2826 however was that she had been so thoroughly pummelled and blasted that she was completely beyond repair.
After being stripped of anything still worth salvaging in terms of spare parts, which wasn't much, the SLS James Sever was shunted into a rapidly decaying orbit that would soon dump her into the star and her sister ship the SLS Rickenbacker, would get to pretend to be her. This gave Rickenbacker more utility to Niops than she would have had otherwise as, unlike several other vessels in the fleet, it now wouldn't be a catastrophe if she was seen by outsiders.
For this operation Rickenbacker/James Sever still lacked a Pentagon, but the Titan carrier dropship she was hauling more than made up for it. The Titan had herself been salvaged from the former site of another battle that took place during the Amaris War then repaired at Camelot, and she was currently embarking three squadrons of aerospace fighters that were normally assigned to Zughoffer Weir. The Intruder dropship on the frigate's other docking collar wouldn't be as much help against fighters, though she was perhaps still better equipped to deal with them them than an unescorted Congress, and was there to transport a company of marines.
On arrival at JP-P-815 both Ian Cameron and 'James Sever' had deployed their jump-sails and began charging their Kearny-Fuchida Drives for their final jumps onto Algenib once the rest of the spacecraft assigned to the expedition caught up with them. With jump-drives now recharged, and jumpsails being drawn back in, if everything was going according to plan then another Star Lord, most likely the aforementioned Nicholas Cameron, should arrive any time now to transfer over her dropships.
Like the vast majority of stars JP-P-815 only appeared on specialist maps used by jumpship navigators who couldn't always plot routes where every stop along the way was a colonised system, or else on the stellar atlases of astronomers. Most people were only interested in the locations of places worth going, these being inhabited worlds with populations large enough to warrant at least an occasional visit by a merchant jumpship, but in galactic terms these were few and far between. Of course, it didn't help that three-quarters of stars were Red Dwarfs and what kind of weirdos chose to live around one of those dull and depressing things?
Even in the 'densely populated' Inner Sphere of systems, those within five-hundred light-years of Terra, less than one percent of stars had planets with anyone living on them and once you headed out into the periphery that percentage dropped off fast. In the Magistracy of Canopus or the Taurian Concordat it was more like one system in a thousand, and by Deep Periphery standards even those star-nations were positively teeming with colonised worlds.
The Ian Cameron had jumped out of the Niops system six weeks ago, while the dropships she was about to receive had left there only yesterday. This was the kind of operation you carried out when you didn't want to deploy your ground troops away from home for too long, but you also had more starlift than you knew what to do with. A week after Ian Cameron set out another Star Lord would have done so, then a week later a third would have followed and so on until there was a line of jumpships queued up, each about thirty light-years behind the next, that now stretched from JP-P-815 all the way back to Niops itself. The navy called it a Command Circuit, informally it was called a 'Pony Express', but how it worked was that a jumpship would ferry its dropships to a star system where another jumpship was waiting to collect them. If the second jumpship had its own K-F drive already charged and ready then as soon as the dropships were docked it could jump to the next system, where yet another jumpship was waiting to receive the dropships and so on, and so on.
Normally a long interstellar trip took several weeks or even months, each jump followed by six or more days of re-charging the drive ready for the next, but if you had the jumpships to spare, the time to set it all up beforehand, and had a few dropships needing to get somewhere fast, then a Pony Express style dropship hand-off was the way to go.
Before the fall of the Start League the SLDF used to do this sort of thing frequently, even some of the member states did occasionally, but that was back when jumpships were more common. So many had been lost in the Amaris War, and then the Succession War, that Command Circuits were now more of a novelty than a not completely uncommon means of getting from System A to System G (via B, C, D, E and F) in a day rather than a month-and-a-half.
Sensors reported an inbound jumpship and judging by its apparent mass it was Nicholas Cameron right on time, this being confirmed by the appearance of the Star Lord in question along with the dropships she was hauling.
If it hadn't been the expected vessel, well that would have been for the Rickenbacker and her batteries of naval autocannon to deal with, but as it was IFF signals were confirmed, hails were sent and received, dropships detached from one Star Lord and started heading across to the other, and the captain of the Ian Cameron looked forwards to the arrival of not one but two generals aboard his ship.
Both flag officers arrived on his bridge and were breathing down his neck only minutes after the pair of Overlord dropships they were aboard had docked, this taking place within an hour after Nicholas Cameron jumped in. At least Admiral Bremman had stayed back home, having him along too would have been almost too much to bear, the ship's captain grimly.
Maybe I should have stayed as XO on Saratoga rather than accept promotion and being handed my own ship, the captain of the Ian Cameron thought to himself. It was, after all, only an unarmed transport that would rarely if ever see much action, not a prestigious warship with a chance at glory. Then he remembered those nightmarish evenings on Saratoga where he had to put up with performances by that god-awful Mariachi Band which Captain Merino had permitted the crew to form, and being a mere jumpship captain living a mostly dull, repetitive existence suddenly didn't seem as bad a fate after all.
Seriously, how the hell did they get hold of those sombreros anyway?
Almost as soon as pleasantries were exchanged and hands were shaken on the bridge of the Ian Cameron Jenna Romanov was on the ship's intercom, her words carried onto the dropships by the internal wiring that connected up via the docking collars so everyone could hear her.
"Alright boys and girls, this is it" she began. "Once we make the next jump we're in bandit territory and I expect you all to stay sharp and keep your wits about you" she instructed everyone. "Remember that these ****** aren't your typical cowardly and inept pirate scum" she continued. "They're an entirely different kind of scum and we shouldn't expect them to be pushovers" she warned. "General Hallis, if you would" she bade her second-in-command to take over, handing him the microphone.
"Listen up, kits" Hallis began, "and non-kits" he added, inwardly chuckling at Romanov's eye-roll at his use of the Wolverine's informal descriptor of themselves. "This is your final reminder of who the enemy are, why we can't take them lightly, and why they deserve all the violent mayhem and destruction we can wreak upon them" he stated seriously. "Once we determined that the pirates operating in this region of space were the Blood Rain we knew two things for certain; firstly that we couldn't allow them to continue to prey unchallenged upon periphery worlds from the Illyrian Palatinate to the Magistracy of Canopus, and secondly that it was high time that they faced a reckoning for their past sins as well as their recent ones" he continued. "They might call themselves the Blood Rain now, but they're still the same bunch of murderous war-criminals that they were when they called themselves the 141st Amaris Dragoons. This is the Rim Worlds Republic regiment that brutally supressed civilian uprisings against the traitor's rule on Terra, butchering their way across the American Southwest to do it, and they were the troops used to keep the other Amaris regiments toeing the line. The hardest of the hard liners, Amaris loyalists to their rotten core" he said, fighting back the urge to spit on the deck. "After the liberation they stayed true to themselves, turning pirate and looting and pillaging their way through the Inner Sphere while the Successor States were too busy slugging it out with each other to stop them, but when the fighting petered-out they headed out to the periphery where it was safe, or so they thought. That's how they ended up in our neck-of-the-woods and boy is that going to cost them" Hallis vowed. "They're going to rue the day they came within two-hundred light-years of Niops and we'll make them wish they had taken on the armies of the Successor States instead" he said with a distinct growl, passing the microphone back to Romanov.
"Remember, we could be facing two battalions of these bastards" Romanov added for herself. "Hopefully understrength and with worn-out equipment, but we can't count on that. We know for certain they've seen plenty of action in the last few years, more than the 295th for sure, and that their senior officers are men and women that went up against the SLDF at its height, so don't go thinking they're only fit for bullying farmers in the periphery. If they've kept even some of their old skills and professionalism then they're going to go down hard, which is why we're bringing three battalions of mechs, a combined arms battalion, artillery, and enough air support to block out the ****** sun" she declared. "This will be the first time the 295th and 331st have fought in a real battle side-by-side since we booted these self-same ****** and their friends out of the Terran Hegemony, and it'll the first time we've gone into battle wearing the Red Cameron Star of our new home painted on our machines, so let's make Niops proud and continue to uphold the traditions of the Eleventh Army."
Franklin Hallis unconsciously touched the spot on his fatigues which had once born the insignia of the 331st and Clan Wolverine but now held fabric patches depicting the Niops Star and the medieval gauntlet-and-sword insignia of the Eleventh Army of the SLDF which both divisions had belonged to.
"They'll know us by our reputation, just like we know them from theirs" Romanov continued to talk to the troops. "The Eleventh Army spearheaded the landings on Apollo, their own capital world, and we raised the Cameron Star flag over their homes while they despoiled ours. We went up against their very best in battles waged from the periphery all the way to Terra itself and it wasn't them who held the ground afterwards" she continued. "Mark my words, we will raise the Red Cameron Star over Algenib and finish the job we started on Apollo" she declared. "Romanov out" she added before switching off the microphone.
"You know there's still Von Strang's groupies living up in the former Rim Worlds Republic, the Blood Rain aren't really the last of the Amaris Loyalists out there" Hallis pointed out.
"They're a tribute act led by a war-criminal's cousin, and the Eleventh Army already dealt with that ****** when the 146th Royals pounded Gunthar Von Strang's Eighteenth Amaris Chasseurs into scrap just outside New York" Romanov replied, smiling as she still vividly recalled hearing the welcome news decades before. "The Blood Rain are what's left of the original band" she added, continuing the metaphor.
Oddly enough it wasn't the case that they had ended up in this situation because they had gone out looking for a fight. They had gone out looking, that was certainly true, but because of curiosity and a desire to explore, not so much an urge to flex some military muscle. Using their trio of lithium-fusion-battery equipped Tramp jumpships as fast scouts had enabled the SLDF on Niops to not only explore and patrol an ever-increasing expanse of the periphery, but to do so quickly and safely. If a Tramp transport carrying a Pentagon assault-dropship for protection jumped into a system and found trouble it couldn't handle, or someone they didn't want to talk to, it could just jump right back out using its L-F batteries. During these increasingly routine reconnaissance and survey missions it had become apparent that there was a pirate band operating too close to Niops for comfort, and after making clandestine contact with settlements who had been unfortunate enough to be visited by these miscreants their identity had been soon established.
If it had been most any other group of pirates the SLDF on Niops might not have experienced such an overwhelming gut reaction to go hammer them , and would have likely not advocated to the High Associator with such passion that it was time to clean house in their region of the periphery, but in this case it was the 'Blood Rain', the ****** formerly known as the 141st Amaris Dragoons, and they definitely had it coming. Pirates were legally and by tradition hostis humani generis, enemies of all mankind, anyway and any military unit that encountered them would enthusiastically seek battle at the first opportunity, but these particular guys were a special kind of ****** deserving of a special kind of treatment. Fortunately, the High Associator and the ruling council had not required too much encouragement to approve military action, at least not after being shown images of the methods used by Amaris Dragoons regiments to pacify areas where civilians had risen in rebellion. Given that a favourite tool of the 141st Amaris Dragoons for such operations was the liberal employment of flamethrowers, or their habit of firing flechette and cannister rounds into crowds of demonstrators to break them up, the High Associator's willingness to let his isolationist instincts temporarily slide a little was understandable.
Just about the only other mechwarriors in the entire Inner Sphere that Jenna Romanov would have wanted a piece of more were the mercenary regiment 'Raymond's Redcoats', and that was because they had been pretending to be part of the 295th for over twenty years before the real deal secretly arrived back in the Inner Sphere. Who the Redcoat's actually were she didn't know of course but given their efforts to hide their true identity it was reasonable to assume they were former pirates themselves, or perhaps more leftover Amaris goons with a rep from the war that would get them killed.
With the Redcoats annoyingly out of reach, they were on the payroll of the Lyran Commonwealth at present and well respected by the Archon for their combat skills apparently, and the real 295th still operating incognito, Romanov would just have to vent her frustration on other people instead. Unfortunately for the Blood Rain, bludgeoning them to death seemed like it would be both justified and very cathartic.
Realistically most of the Blood Rain were likely the children, or even grandchildren of the 141st Amaris Dragoons by now, with only the oldest of them directly responsible for the massacres the regiment had perpetrated on Terra in the name of Stefan Amaris, but since they chose to stick with their ****** forebears and live the outlaw life that wouldn't earn them much leeway. Jenna Romanov had issued instructions that civilians were to be spared, and that none of the enemy combatants who surrendered should be summarily executed, but she wasn't going to offer generous terms to encourage any of them to lay down arms. It would be unconditional surrender or death, and surrender would mean hard labour in a mine on Alphard until the government of Niops felt in a merciful mood.
The majority of the people on Niops having had lost relatives, or at least pre-war friends and acquaintances, to Amaris and his bloody dreams of empire, mercy would likely be a long time coming.
Jenna Romanov looked thoughtful as the two generals headed back to their respective Overlord dropships so they could get underway as soon as the jump was made. She would be directly commanding one battlemech battalion, Hallis another, while Colonel Jax Benedict still aboard his own Overlord led the third. The combined-arms battalion under Colonel Rory Fallstaff was loaded on their single Fortress dropship while Colonel Daniel Hammerick had a Triumph loaded with additional combat vehicles, artillery and plenty of ammunition for it. Their sixth dropship was another Titan, bringing three additional squadrons of aerospace fighters to ensure air superiority over the planet. "You know I haven't done this for about half-a-century" Romanov pointed out to Hallis before smiling. "Thanks for letting me and the rest of the old farts pilot the lion's share of the heavies and assaults, our reaction times aren't up to sprinting around in a Hussar or Hermes anymore."
"Pity we had to run this op before the Ulithi delivered all your mechs" Hallis observed.
"Eh, the ones we're borrowing from you are generally better anyway, at least until we can get ours upgraded with your improved weaponry" Romanov replied. "Got to say, a few of my people are stoked that they're finally getting to drive a Royal, getting that title back was the dream of the 295th ever since some damn fools lost it."
"Just as long as they give them back in one piece" Hallis replied, smiling.
"Good thing you had a spare Nightstar I could take out, I'd be lost trying to command in the field without it" Romanov admitted. "I still remember when my own arrived to replace my old Marauder, that was just before Operation Chieftain kicked off. It took me a while to get used to all the extra comms gear and the battle-management system but once I did I couldn't believe I'd ever done without it."
"I just wish I could take out my Pulverizer instead of a Highlander" Hallis replied glumly.
"The Highlander is a decent command mech itself… and it doesn't matter if someone sees one" Romanov reminded him.
"Yeah, I know, it's just that I was so stoked when I got it. You know I actually rode a Shadow-Griffin for years before that" Hallis recalled.
Romanov frowned. "What the hell is a…" she began, "oh, let me guess, half a Shadow-Hawk and half a Griffin bolted together."
"More like two-thirds of a Shadow-Hawk, but the PPC on the Griffin arm came in handy" Hallis told her. "I mean it was ugly as hell, a real Frankenmech of a machine, but it had character."
"But not enough character to be sad when you upgraded your ride to an assault with a new-fangled ERPPC that could blow another mechs head clean off" Romanov surmised as they reached the point in the corridor running along the spine of the jumpship where they would part ways to head for their own dropships.
"Maybe a little sad" Hallis admitted. "Especially when they stripped my old Shadow-Griffin down for spare parts" he said with a sigh. "See you in person again down on Algenib when we raise the Cameron Star over the bastard's corpses" he bade her farewell.
"If any of my geriatrics under your command for this one cause you any strife tell them I'll take away their walking-sticks" Romanov joked.
"Same goes for any of my juveniles under your command, just threaten them with a time-out" Hallis replied, grinning. All three battlemech battalions were made up of a mix of lances from the 331st and 295th because while the latter had plenty of experience, they were, in a word, rusty.
The combined-arms battalion however was almost one-hundred-percent Wolverine, with a token single lance of mechs and one of tanks from the Niops Militia who wanted to show what they could do. Even with their Terran Hegemony anti-agathic treatments men and women who were now mostly in their seventies, eighties and even nineties don't make for the best infantry, humping around with rifle, pack, helmet and body-armour was a young person's game.
An L-F Tramp sent to scout ahead, arriving at Algenib too far out for its emergence wave to be detected, had confirmed from signal monitoring that the Blood Rain were still present. Their dropships still down on the ground at their base on Algenib and their jumpships at the zenith point around the star. They seemed to follow a pattern of behaviour, go on a campaign of raiding for a few months then return to their current home in the ass-in of nowhere until supplies ran low again.
The Amaris Dragoons turned pirates operated three jumpships. The smallest was a Merchant Class they had picked up somewhere, the second a Star Lord of their very own, but the third was something special and was the main reason the Rickenbacker had tagged along for this operation.
The Royalty class jumpship had been produced in fair number for the military of the Rim Worlds Republic, though most had been destroyed by the SLDF during the Amaris War. Despite being about the same size as a Star Lord it could only carry four dropships to a Star Lords six, with the spare mass and volume devoted to fairly heavy armament and armour for a non-warship instead. It also had internal flight-bays large enough to hold at least two squadrons of aerospace fighters as well as shuttlecraft for boarding actions.
A Royalty was no match for an actual warship, not as long as the warship had enough fighter support anyway, but it would eviscerate most any other transport jumpship and the thing had likely been the Blood Rains ace-in-the-hole in the years since they fled Terra ahead of several divisions of angry SLDF soldiers.
If the armed jumpship decided to try and make a fight of it the Rickenbacker was under orders not to pussyfoot around trying to take it intact, just to pound the damn thing with large calibre naval guns until it surrendered or was reduced to a debris field. Meanwhile assault shuttles full of SLDF marines, supported by aerospace fighters from the Titan, would be dispatched to take control of the pirate transports.
While Rickenbacker and her two dropships jumped to the zenith point of Algenib to capture or destroy the opposition jumpships, Ian Cameron would instead jump to a Lagrange 'Pirate-point' closer to the target planet, the nickname for such non-standard jump-points being amusingly ironic for this particular operation. By greatly reducing the enemy's opportunity to prepare for the assault it was hoped friendly casualties could be reduced still further, particularly as the Blood Rain would clearly not be expecting someone to suddenly drop in on them all guns blazing all the way out here.
If it wasn't for the fact that the pirates were known to take slaves from the worlds they raided Romanov might have been tempted to have the navy simply obliterate them from space with an orbital bombardment. If you accepted the deaths of innocents as acceptable collateral damage however then you were on a slippery slope to being little better than a foe you despised, it was important to minimise your own losses but of what value was your life if you couldn't live with yourself?
If all went well, then as far as the rest of the galaxy was aware the Blood Rain would have just inexplicably vanished one day, never to be seen again. Not that anyone would mourn them. That was the disadvantage of them hiding way out in the boonies, it meant that someone else also trying to avoid the undue attention of the more powerful factions had the opportunity to crush them underfoot, and without leaving boot-prints behind that someone was likely to find and be curious about.
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Part XII - Section 2 of 2
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When Romanov issued the go order the Rickenbacker jumped first, arriving at the Zenith Point of the Algenib system shortly before the Ian Cameron arrived at the L2 Lagrange point of its only inhabitable planet. Since the ships arrived hundreds of millions of miles away from each other, and light isn't that fast when you're working on that kind of scale, the Ian Cameron was already in the process of launching its dropships before a signal from Rickenbacker reached them confirming that it too had arrived safely and was now moving to engage the pirate jumpships.
By the time the half-dozen dropships offloaded by Ian Cameron had formed up into an impromptu squadron, and then began accelerating towards the planet, a subsequent signal from Rickenbacker advised them that the enemy Star Lord and Merchant jumpships had wisely surrendered, with marines soon be dispatched to board them. Meanwhile the captain of the Royalty class ship had been less prudent, his vessel had suffered battle damage during a short exchange of fire that 'wasn't just going to buff out' and a few aerospace fighters that the Royalty had launched before Rickenbacker's guns could be brought to bear upon her were now having to be rounded up by fighters launched by Rickenbacker and her dropships to do so.
As had been expected the pirate jumpships had managed to get off a distress signal to their compatriots down on the planet, Rickenbacker had jumped in just too far away from them to effectively jam the transmissions, but it wasn't like Romanov hadn't intended to loudly advertise the presence of the Eleventh Army anyway once they neared their objective.
Down on the planet Stefani Marcus, once a captain (and brevet major) in the 141st Amaris Dragoons and now the self-styled 'Pirate Queen of the Blood Rain', though that affectation was mainly intended just to spook cowardly periphery chuckleheads, was wondering what the hell was going on. Her duty officer had woken her from a pleasant sleep to tell her that a 'warship' had attacked her jumpships at zenith, and that a Star Lord's worth of dropships was inbound fast from the L2 pirate point. Once she determined that she was actually awake, wasn't having a nightmare, and it wasn't a practical joke being played upon her she issued orders for the regiment to stand to for action and started pulling on her uniform.
It said a lot for how professional and well-trained the Blood Rain still actually was that they managed to get themselves ready for battle quite as fast as they did, although the number of her mechwarriors and pilots who were hungover after the previous nights partying, or in some cases were still drunk, was less than ideal.
The Blood Rain fought hard and they played hard, the latter being the reason that they generally only attacked settlements in the afternoon by preference. Her immediate predecessor as commander of the unit had run a slightly tighter ship, but that was when they occasionally still raided into the Capellan Confederation and the Free Worlds League which meant tougher opposition and battles that might last more than a couple of hours.
As her company and battalion commanders hurried to put their units together into a cohesive force that could take the field Stefani Marcus was trying to learn more about the opposition. If they really had a warship, and given that her Royalty had apparently been knocked out of the fight pretty fast that was plausible, then that really narrowed down who it might be.
In this corner of space only the Free Worlds League still definitely maintained warships, although the Magistracy of Canopus might also still have some too since at one point before the Periphery Uprising they had a couple of dozen, albeit mostly Pinto class corvettes either purchased directly from the Rim Worlds Republic or of licensed local manufacture. The Magistracy was probably more motivated to go after the Blood Rain of late, Marcus had made sure not to poke the Mariks since they stopped fighting their neighbours, but it didn't really matter who was coming, only that she beat them.
If she could defeat the enemy ground forces and take plenty of POW's she might be able to exchange them and any battlefield salvage for the return of her jumpships. If they didn't want to play ball initially just start executing prisoners one at a time until they were willing to negotiate.
One thing was for certain, they wouldn't be expecting to face the machines she could put up against them. When raiding the Blood Rain had always kept back their best battlemechs, saving them for what her old commander jokingly called a 'bloodrainy day' because they were irreplaceable, but it was sure as shit raining now. Raining dropships.
As the inbound dropships neared the atmosphere they began transmitting a high-powered, wide-band signal. After listening to it a while Stefani Marcus took it as an indication that they must be one of the former Star League regiments that had stayed behind and turned mercenary after Kerensky went AWOL. Some of them, the Eridani Light Horse for example, still affected to be an SLDF unit and acted like they were, although nearly half-a-century after the fall of the Star League they were really just cosplaying at this point.
She had to admit though, the singing on the radio really brought back some old memories of being a young Rim Worlds Army officer in Europe on Terra when Kerensky's divisions arrived.
"Oh we'll rally round the flag, boys, we'll rally once again,
Shouting the battle cry of freedom
And we'll rally from the sphere, we'll gather from the rim,
Shouting the battle cry of freedom
The Star League forever, hurrah! boys, hurrah!
Down with Amaris, up with the star
While we rally round the flag, boys, we rally once again,
Shouting the battle cry of freedom"
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Note from the Author:
JP-P-815 (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/JP-P-815) is an uninhabited system used by jumpships heading to Algenib (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Algenib) because the latter is more than 30LY from the nearest other habitable system (the use of such places as waypoints is typical in the periphery where systems appearing on the standard maps can be quite far apart. It takes two jumps to get from Niops to Alphard 48LY away for example).
The Niops Association is re-naming its Star Lord (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Star_Lord_(JumpShip_class)) jumpships after the various First Lords of the Star League (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/First_Lord_of_the_Star_League), starting with Ian Cameron (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Ian_Cameron_(26th_c.)). They couldn't exactly operate under their original names and it helps with their efforts to project themselves as the continuation of the Star League/Terran Hegemony.
The two-hundred or so Congress (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Congress) class frigates produced, including the SLS James Sever and the SLS Rickenbacker (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Rickenbacker), had a lot of trouble dealing with attacks by aerospace fighters which resulted in the Pentagon (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Pentagon) class dropship being created to defend them. An alternative to hauling along a Pentagon to protect your Congress was to bring a Titan (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Titan_(DropShip_class)), or ideally a Vengeance (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Vengeance) class carrier-dropship along instead (the 295th/331st don't have a Vengeance unfortunately). The six dropships being carried by the NAS Ian Cameron are three Overlord (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Overlord_(DropShip_class)) class, one Fortress (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Fortress) class, one Triumph (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Triumph) class and another Titan for air-support.
A Command Circuit (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Command_Circuit), or 'Pony Express', is a way to get around a lot faster than the typical 30LY per week (or 60LY if you have a Lithium-Fusion Battery equipped vessel) but you need a lot of pre-positioned jumpships to do it.
The Blood Rain (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Blood_Rain) pirate band, formerly the 141st Amaris Dragoons, managed to escape Terra in 2778 just before the SLDF closed the noose. The 141st raided Spica (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Spica) in the Capellan Confederation for supplies while fleeing the death throes of the Amaris Empire (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Amaris_Empire) and found their skills as a bunch of war-criminals transferred very well to piracy. It is not an exaggeration to say that Jenna Romanov would very much want a piece of them, ideally hanging on the wall above her mantleplace.
To help you get your bearings here's a quick map for you, by the way. You'll note that the L-F equipped Tramp (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Tramp) jumpships out exploring the region for Niops haven't chosen the same name for some of the systems that the Marian Hegemony (http://'https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Marian_Hegemony') would have (Copernicus instead of Suetonius, Galileo instead of Pompey, Kepler instead of Horatius, Herschel instead of Marius Tears). For scale, as mentioned above it's 48LY from Niops to Alphard.
(https://imagizer.imageshack.com/img923/1694/L0H3ts.gif)
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Small point - you reported Potemkin assault dropships - must be Pentagon ones, right?
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So notoriously weak against fighter threats that the Potemkin assault dropship was developed specifically to defend the Congress class against them, why the James Sever seemed to have been running without any escort was a mystery. What was known upon her rediscovery in 2826 however was that she had been so thoroughly pummelled and blasted that she was completely beyond repair.
...
For this operation Rickenbacker/James Sever still lacked a Potemkin, but the Titan carrier dropship she was hauling more than made up for it.
You get the name right in your author notes - this should be the "Pentagon"-class dropship, not the "Potemkin". Bit of a size difference.
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Small point - you reported Potemkin assault dropships - must be Pentagon ones, right?
You get the name right in your author notes - this should be the "Pentagon"-class dropship, not the "Potemkin". Bit of a size difference.
Thanks, fixed.
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Are you going to stat out the Royalty? She sounds pretty useful... I bet the SLDF wanted something like her in their convoys.
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Given how simple JumpShips are, I think he pretty much DID stat her out... ;)
And excellent updates there, good sir! :)
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Well Blood Rain meet up with Star League Defense Forces with Royal Machines
And Go!!
and yes I would love to see a stat for a Royalty Jumpship...
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Has the Lothian League actually expanded to Paulinus yet? I thought that happened after the disastrous 2930's "merc" raid...
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Has the Lothian League actually expanded to Paulinus yet? I thought that happened after the disastrous 2930's "merc" raid...
I just used the 2830 map from Sarna but I think you may be right what with the original member systems all having names starting with "L" of course.
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Hmmm... Sarna's maps start listing it as Lothian on the 2786 map, but the text lists it as "no data" until 2930.
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It is not the most relevant planet in the IS setting after all, so no wonder there are such inconsistencies.
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Hey... I've read your fic on AO3!
It's one of my favorites! Good work!
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Part XIII - Section 1 of 2
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"To borrow an old quote, we didn't hate the Amaris Dragoons during the war because they were incompetant in the devil's work, we hated them for their competance at it. Admiration for the technique was part of the process."
General Jenna Romanov - 2835CE
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Najd Plateau - Algenib – 2829
When the Blood Rain had first arrived at Algenib they found a small but growing population already living there, not too surprising for a habitable world that might be in the periphery but was still closer to Terra than half the systems of the Outworlds Alliance. Almost entirely lacking in military capability beyond hunting rifles, and a single lance of archaic Korvin tanks that some army offloading its obsolete equipment had sold off as surplus before the Reunification War, the locals had little choice but to accept their new overlords and begin to provide tribute.
Naturally the pirates had sent out their 'Insurrection Suppression Lance' consisting of an old Locust, their infamous black-painted WTH-0 Whitworth and a couple of Firestarter battlemechs to shoot-up and torch a couple of villages anyway. It always paid dividends to teach the local yokels what the price of future resistance would be after all, but so long as they paid their 'taxes' without kicking up a fuss the people of Algenib would be left largely alone after that. Stefani Marcus considered it bad policy to shit where you eat, and she wanted the people on Algenib frightened and compliant, not angry and defiant, so she didn't outright enslave the locals, or abduct any of them for recreational purposes. What she did instead was take people from other worlds by force and bring them back to Algenib both in order to perform manual labour and undertake other less savoury duties.
Most of the 'Pressed Labour', as Marcus liked to euphemistically refer to it, hailed from Comstock, an abortive former colony of the Terran Hegemony situated not too far from Algenib and which appeared on even fewer maps. Originally intended to become a logistical hub for the SLDF in the region between the Free Worlds League and the Magistracy of Canopus, the colony had been barely established when the Periphery Uprising began, and it quickly fell on bad times as the Inner Sphere lurched into the greatest bloodbath since the Age of War. The only industry that had been established on Comstock before it was cut off from the Hegemony was the manufacture of boots for the Star League Defence Force, utilising leather imported from Francas, another colony in the region, though given the sheer size of the SLDF with its fifteen-thousand regiments constantly marching around wearing out shoe leather just that one contract would have permanently employed a lot of people on the planet if things had turned out different.
The Blood Rain didn't come to Comstock looking for boots of course, though they did all take a few pairs each from the warehouses full of them there, they wanted labourers to build them a township on Algenib so they didn't have to live on their dropships anymore, and they weren't exactly asking for paid volunteers.
Deciding to set up home on a large plateau on the edge of a mountain range, a number of streams running down from the mountains converging into a river there that snaked across the plateau before ending in an impressive waterfall, the Blood Rain had chosen a rise located near the waterfall to build their settlement. Situated next to the rise an expansive and conveniently flat area of firm ground was not only ideal for parking their dropships and operating VTOL aircraft from, part of it also served as a parade and training ground because they weren't fighting or partying the Blood Rain still tried to keep up some basic military standards. Other pirate bands might sneer at the notion of being made to march in formation, or forced to do regular exercise including a fairly harsh PT regimen that would have been familiar to every professional army since the Roman Legions, but in a fight the Blood Rain would hammer those amateurish ass-clowns into the ground like tent-pegs.
With much of the plateau covered by an alpine plain, one occasionally dotted with small forests, it was easy to send logging parties of slaves upstream to cut down groves of native trees situated near the river and roll them into the water, letting the slow current carry them down to where the lumber for construction and firewood for cooking and heating was actually needed.
That pool of manual slave labour was now also coming in very handy for other reasons, as the Blood Rain's captive workforce was encouraged to dig trenches and revetments for tanks with haste. That 'encouragement' including the liberal application of both a whip and a threat of being thrown under the tracks of an Ignis combat vehicle, or worse having one of its flamers turned on them.
It would take some time to construct a worthwhile defence line however, time that Stefani Marcus wouldn't have if she just sat and waited for the enemy to come to her. She knew she needed to be proactive, meet them half-way and conduct a fighting retreat back towards her base. She wasn't looking to fight a decisive battle, at least not yet, she wanted to delay their advance, hopefully screw up their dispositions, and make them cautious. Cautious meant slow, and slow meant that by the time her two battalions had conducted the planned series of withdrawals she envisioned she would be properly entrenched and in a much better position to receive and hopefully defeat an attack by a larger force.
One of the organisational changes since their days as the 141st Amaris Dragoons was the adoption of the habit of many pirate bands to elect their leader. Unlike most of the others however the successful candidates in the Blood Rain did not typically stand on a platform of 'I'm the toughest' or 'I'm the best mechwarrior' but rather 'I'm the smart, experienced one that actually knows what they're doing' which was why Stefani Marcus won the vote. Even the runner-up in the election grudgingly conceded she was a better tactician and strategist than him, but a few years after the fact he was still aggrieved at just how much he lost the vote by.
Marcus sitting him down and explaining that while he was probably the best company commander in the Blood Rain these days, and still a gifted mechwarrior in his own right, one widely respected for his skills in the cockpit of an assault mech, he was also an abrasive, and generally unlikeable, octogenarian psychopath with notoriously poor personal hygiene. Frankly, that just didn't play too well with the electorate, and his platform of having suspected potential deserters flayed alive simply wasn't the vote-winner he thought it would be either.
Anyhow, she didn't really care how bitter he was as long as he continued to do his job, and to his credit he was professional enough to obey the orders of someone he reluctantly accepted as having a better grasp of how to command a force of battalion size or larger than he did. There was a good reason he was still only a captain more than half-a-century after his glory days on Terra while Marcus was not.
It helped that he knew the truly monumental price on his head meant that he was safer sticking with the Blood Rain than he would be anywhere else. The job opportunities for elderly war criminals don't tend to be that good, and only other war criminals will willingly socialise with you and laugh at your war stories that anyone else would find gut-wrenchingly sickening and offensive.
The opposition had set down at the other end of the thirty-five kilometer long plateau. A Fortress class dropship landing first to secure their landing zone, then the Overlords set down next to it and finally the Triumph which was escorted in by a pair of aerospace fighter squadrons from the Titan that stayed in orbit.
Those were some serious machines, Marcus had to admit, particularly the Fortress which had soon begun lobbing large-calibre artillery shells at any Blood Rain scout mech that tried to approach. They may have assumed that she had a Long Tom or similar howitzer of her own, or else they would have surely set down close enough to shell her with theirs directly. This was an erroneous assumption on their part, the only artillery she had was a single battery of Thumpers, but she was grateful for their imperfect intelligence as to her TO&E.
A half-hearted attempt to disrupt the enemy landing with the bulk of her aerospace fighters, and her two Leopard CV's, had only managed to confirm that their Titan was carrying its full complement of three squadrons and their Overlords three more between them. On average the Blood Rain aerospace fighters were heavier, nearly half of them were Vulcan's and she also had a few Eagles and Ahabs, but the other side had both weight of numbers and generally more modern designs.
Better to retain an air-fleet-in-being than to throw her preponderance of heavy aerospace fighters into a fight they couldn't win, even if they might inflict heavier losses than they took, Marcus decided, calling off the attack on the inbound dropships almost as soon as it began. As long as she kept her fighters mostly in reserve, only carrying out the occasional needling attack to keep them fixated away from her ground forces, she denied her foe unchallenged air supremacy and prevented them from bombing the crap out of her battlemechs and tanks at whim.
Looking up you could see vapour trails in the sky high above, as fighters from multiple squadrons on both sides tested each other out, the occasional bright flash from a PPC visible as someone got a little too close. Eventually it would have to be settled as to which side owned the sky, but for now both seemed willing to delay aerial armageddon, ordered only to prevent the other side from conducting reconnaissance and ground-attack missions.
For their part the SLDF fighter-jocks had been unpleasantly surprised by just how many Vulcan heavy aerospace fighters the former Amaris Dragoons were fielding. Being a classic Rim Worlds Republic design they had of course expected to run up against a reasonable number of the things, but not considerably more than every other type combined. Moreover, quite a few of them were seemingly the upgraded VLC-6N model, the one with the autocannon in the wings swapped for far punchier gauss rifles. It was known that a lot of former Rim Worlds pilots had turned mercenary, or flat-out went pirate after the war, and it seemed that the Blood Rain had managed to recruit more than their fair share of them. Whether this was because the pilots were die-hard Amaris Loyalists to whom signing up with the former 141st Dragoons was appealing, or because the Blood Rain simply paid well, didn't really matter so much as the fact they were there with their machines.
As far as their other fighters went, they had a few Lightning mediums and a handful of somewhat less archaic Swift and Zero lights but they were clearly a Vulcan orientated force that valued raw firepower over speed and manoeuvrability.
Taken all in all, it was a good thing that the SLDF weren't just bringing plenty of the upgraded 'Royal' versions of their fighters to the fray, but further up-gunned and up-armoured versions of them. It was only a shame they didn't have even more machines with Enhanced ERPPCs.
The other clans might have bid away some of their fighters to make it a fair fight, but Wolverine doctrine, not to mention Jenna Romanov's notions of how to fight a battle, followed the classic SLDF policy that fair fights were for suckers. That of course was why they had historically liked to send battleships to deal with anything bigger than a corvette, war being serious business, not a sport. Frankly it was far less unbalanced in favour of the SLDF than they would have liked, even if they did have something particularly nasty to unleash on those gauss-rifle armed VLC-6N fighters when they stopped dancing with the Blood Rain and went for the throat.
While the fighter-jocks jousted and skirmished above, neither side looking to fully commit to a massive furball of a dogfight as yet, down on the ground companies of tanks and battlemechs started moving as both Stefani Marcus and Jenna Romanov moved their pieces on the board.
The geography of the plateau meant that the SLDF forces could not conduct a wide, sweeping flanking manoeuvre and would have to advance more-or-less straight towards the Blood Rain settlement. This was less than ideal because by preference Romanov would have pinned their two battlement battalions with two of her own while the third, accompanied by the combined-arms battalion smashed into their side or rear, but as usual alas it was the privilege of the defender to choose the ground.
With the battalion of battlemechs under her direct command taking the centre, Franklin Hallis on the right, and Jax Benedict on the left, Jenna Romanov formed up her reinforced regiment regiment in front of the dropships and ordered the advance, the mechanised combined arms battalion and the self-propelled artillery following on as a reserve.
Sending fast scouts equipped with specialist electronic warfare gear ahead to reduce the chances of falling headlong into an ambush, these being Beagle hovercraft and three battlemech types; Hussar, Mongoose and Hermes lights, the SLDF made good progress at first, unopposed by anyone until they were out-of-range of heavy artillery support from the Fortress dropship.
They soon ran into their first Blood Rain units, a couple of lances of PPC armed LTV-4 hovertanks supported by a larger force of Jackrabbit light mechs that seemed reluctant to throw themselves headlong into a fight, but neither were they skittish, more cautious perhaps. The Jackrabbit was a late Star League design that had been mass-produced on occupied Terra for the Rim Worlds Republic Army, becoming a signature machine for them as it simultaneously became tainted in the eyes of many SLDF mechwarriors.
The original model of Jackrabbit, the JKR-8T, was a classic example of a well-engineered machine that suffered due to some very poor design criteria that had saddled it with a single AC-2 autocannon that had plenty of range but was more of an irritant to whatever it hit than a threat. After plenty of complaints from RWR mechwarriors handed a JKR-8T that they would be better off using harsh language against the enemy than their autocannon, the original model was replaced by the JKR-9R that swapped the AC-2 for a Large Laser that was actually a pretty potent weapon for a light mech.
In combat the biggest pain-in-the-ass for SLDF mechwarriors facing the Jackrabbit turned out to be a mixed lance of the things, with a pair each of JKR-8T's and JKR-9R's. Two of them would annoy the crap out of you by sandblasting you with AC-2 fire from too far away to hit them back and when you just couldn't take it anymore and charged at them the other two would open up with their lasers.
Upon encountering the Blood Rain units the lightly-armed and armoured SLDF scouts immediately requested support. This soon arrived in the form of Panther and Talon mechs that were themselves only classified as lights according to their tonnage, but they carried a PPC and an ERPPC respectively letting them punch above their weight. A short-lived firefight then broke out in earnest that ended with the pirates withdrawing, perhaps because a stray hit from any particle projector cannon could utterly wreck a hovertank or a Jackrabbit and an AC-2 didn't outrange an ERPPC by nearly enough for comfort.
Suspecting that it might in fact be a feigned retreat intended to draw her light mechs into an ambush by more powerful mechs, mainly because the Jackrabbits didn't seem to have taken much if any damage before, well, jackrabbiting, Romanov issued orders not to launch a headlong pursuit and to resume a steady advance instead.
Romanov was correct, two kilometres further on, concealed by trees and with an easy route of escape when the time came, two companies of medium battlemechs lay in wait, the majority being the Phoenix, a native Rim Worlds design, plus a lance each of Shadow Hawk and Griffin mechs. Although they missed out on the opportunity to spring a perfect ambuscade they still performed adequately enough, though opening up at fairly long-range before they risked being detected by either Beagle Active Probes, or the Mark One eyeball, and losing any of the element of surprise they might have. The SLDF lights immediately disengaged rather than try foolishly slug it out with machines that could soak up a lot more punishment than they could, and they were smoothly replaced on the front lines by those better suited for the task.
This was around the point at which the SLDF learned that they weren't the only ones bringing upgraded machines to the fight, because a lot of those PX-3R Phoenix mechs seemed to be packing ERPPC's instead of the regular PPC's that they should. It was discovered later that while stomping around the Terran Hegemony decades before, taking advantage of the sources of better grade equipment readily available to them there, the 141st Amaris Dragoons had undertaken a program of field upgrades for their most common medium battlemech. These upgrades included installing double-heat-sinks and ferro-fibrous armour, replacing the original SRM-2 launchers with the superior Streak SRM-2 (already used by their Jackrabbit mechs so ammunition supplies were readily available), the aforementioned ERPPC replacing the original PPC on one arm and adding a medium laser to the other.
Not all of the PX-3R's belonging to the Blood Rain had all, or even some of the upgrades, but the large majority did which was why when their own mediums clashed with the Phoenix Hawk, Dervish and Wolverine mechs bearing the Red Cameron Star which now moved against them it was a more even fight than Romanov would have liked. If it wasn't for so many of her own war-machines being the 'Royal' PXH-1b and WVR-7H models the fight would have actually been lopsided in the pirate's favour, and she would have been forced to bring up heavies to deal with mere enemy mediums.
Given that much of the fighting so far consisted of plinking with particle projector cannon and LRM's at ranges where accuracy was lacking, and therefore placing precise shots on weak points was nigh impossible, most of the limited amount of damage that had been incurred by either side only consisted of armour plates being ablated away and a few lost heatsinks and damaged weapons. That situation wouldn't last forever of course, as armour was scorched or blasted off the more critical systems underneath would be completely exposed to incoming fire with subsequent shots in the same location causing catastrophic levels of damage. Eventually battlemech limbs would be blown off, engines damaged and gyros crippled bringing mechs on both sides crashing down. Fortunately for the SLDF their advantage in numbers meant Jenna Romanov and her battalion commanders were better able to rotate which machines were fully engaged and taking the most hits, pulling back any which were starting to lose too much armour and replacing them with a fresh machine. The longer the engagement lasted the worse it would get for their foe who were accumulating too much damage to keep this up for long.
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Part XIII - Section 2 of 2
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Once more the former 141st Amaris Dragoons started to withdraw, the weight of forces being skewed badly against them as more SLDF battlemechs arrived on the scene. They weren't interested in a bloody fight to the death as part of a mere delaying action, and, as they pulled back, they scattered smoke grenades while the LTV-4 hovertanks and Jackrabbit mechs from earlier appeared again to provide some cover-fire and a temporary distraction.
Stefani Marcus had been buying time, not just to fortify the settlement but in order to get all of her heavy and assault mechs to the piece of ground where she could mount the best forward defence and inflict some real damage before falling back yet again.
When the lead Hussar scout caught up with the Blood Rain's mediums again it found them formed up in a line on a long ridge that ran across the path of advance, the approach to the ridge being a steep escarpment that could only be climbed slowly, unless you had jumpjets of course which was presumably how they had all gotten up there so fast.
The spacing was odd though, leaving gaps between them so wide it would limit their ability to properly concentrate fire against a single target, the most efficient way of reducing the number of machines assaulting the ridge.
As the rest of the SLDF arrived the reason for the spacing became clear as more Blood Rain battlemechs started to appear from behind the ridge, plugging the gaps.
This was going to be interesting, Jenna Romanov thought to herself as a mixed lance of enemy heavies and assaults came into line-of-sight slotting themselves between some of the Phoenix and Griffin mediums. The Awesome, Battlemaster, Marauder and Warhammer battlemechs alone would have frightened the life out of most mechwarriors in the Inner Sphere that had to go up against them but then came the real surprise as five lances of AEM Dragoon heavies and three more of RMP-5G Rampage assaults appeared.
They had suspected that the 141st Amaris Dragoons might still have a few such machines. The Rampage was an indigenous Rim Worlds design which had equipped quite a few assault lances in their army, while the Dragoon had been produced specifically at the order of Stefan Amaris to replace older less capable machines in his elite Amaris Dragoon regiments, hence the name, but that was a lot of the things now stood up there on the ridge any observer would have to admit.
The AEM Dragoon was inarguably one of the most advanced war-machines of its era. Not only was it powered by an XL fusion engine, carried ferro-fibrous armour and mounted a Guardian ECM system, an ERPPC and a pair of LB-X autocannons, all hallmarks of a 'Royal' battlemech, it had an almost unique modular design. That modularity, based on that of the advanced Mercury light mech, allowed it to be not only easily maintained and quickly repaired after taking battle damage, it could also have its weapon-systems swapped out for alternate configurations without resorting to welding gear and some serious McGuyvering.
As Romanov took stock of the enemy she noted that most of the Dragoon battlemechs were the standard AEM-01 model, but there were at least three of the AEM-04 type that kept the ERPPC but swapped the autocannons for a Gauss rifle. Then, as the final lance of Blood Rain mechs arrived on the ridge, Archer and Catapult LRM throwers, it became apparent that the enemy massively favoured long-range weaponry and had drawn the SLDF battalions here where they could use it most effectively.
Almost as soon as the SLDF units started to advance towards the foe they would start to receive incoming fire from anything carrying an ERPPC or gauss rifle, then a little further on it would start raining LRM's, and then LB-X autocannon rounds and then standard PPC's would join in the party too.
Normally you would counter this by using terrain, or else sending in your most heavily armoured mechs to soak up the hits on the way, closing to brawling range as fast as possible and overwhelming the long-range specialists with more powerful short-range weaponry such as the AC/20, or even just massed medium lasers or SRM's. Unfortunately, since 'heavily armoured' and 'fast or has jumpjets' generally tended not to be found on the same battlemechs, climbing that escarpment to get into brawling range would be slow-going and that typically meant taking a lot of damage before you could effectively shoot back.
Sat in the cockpit of her personal AEM-01 Stefani Marcus looked down at the regimental sized force arrayed against her and smirked. If she was right her opponent was down there right now, sat in that fancy Nightstar command mech looking up in the other direction and calculating just how many machines they would lose pushing the Blood Rain off this ridge.
"You're thinking 'Is this really the hill I want to die on?' aren't you" Marcus assumed, speaking out loud to herself as she continued to imagine what was going through the mind of her opposite number. They were putting on a good show of being the actual SLDF though, she had to admit. Lots of nice looking, well-maintained battlemechs painted up in olive drab and they had kept a nice, ordered and properly spaced formation as they advanced, looking just like a real Star League regiment would have.
They could simply go around of course, but only a complete moron would leave two battalions to their rear, and if they split their force she could take them on one at a time with what she assumed were her generally superior machines.
If they went all-in they could, and would, push her off her ridge, Marcus knew that. They had more than three battalion's worth of mechs to her two, plus combat vehicles for support as well from the looks of things, but it would cost them, and battlemechs and trained soldiers were getting harder to replace these days. Would they want to negotiate rather than pay the butcher's bill maybe?
Marcus recalled facing the Onverwacht Guards regiment on Ype-Jhu more than a decade earlier, that was during the Blood Rain's extended campaign in the Outworlds Alliance that her predecessor as commanding officer had embarked upon because 'the problem with always fighting Capellans is that an hour after you've raided one of their towns you want to pillage another'. That day on Ype-Jhu she only had a single understrength battalion under her command, and the Onverwacht Guards could have probably beaten her decisively, but they were a combined-arms unit mostly made up of mere armour and infantry and they didn't want to take the severe losses required to do it. After some words were exchanged, as well as a token amount of autocannon rounds, they agreed to let the Blood Rain just pack up and leave as long as they promised to depart Alliance space and bothered someone else instead.
An unencrypted radio channel opening up, a signal that could only be coming from the opposition seemed to answer Marcus's quiet prayer. They indeed wanted to talk, not fight.
"I repeat. This is the commanding officer of the SLDF forces on Algenib to the commanding officer of the piratical force occupying the planet. Please acknowledge transmission" a woman's voice requested.
"This is Stefani Marcus, Pirate Queen of the Blood Rain, who are you and what do you want?" Marcus responded, trying to sound bored and generally disinterested as if she had nothing to gain from the conversation and was only replying out of courtesy. It was an open channel, and she knew all her people would be listening in so she wanted to play this right.
"This is General Jenna Romanov, formerly commanding officer of the 295th Battlemech Division, now commanding the Eleventh Army of the Star League Defence Force as constituted in the systems belonging to, or protectorates of, the Niops Association" came the reply. "And I want you to lay down your arms and surrender."
Marcus laughed. "The 295th?" she repeated. "There's already someone else pretending to be them. Find your own schtick" she advised, amused by the lack of originality.
"We're the real 295th, we've got nothing to do with those imposters and.." the person claiming to be Jenna Romanov began before trailing off. "Wait, you know they're imposters? Do you know who they really are?"
"Sure do" Marcus confirmed, honestly.
"Care to tell me?"
"Nah, if it's bothering you I'd prefer you stayed miserable" Marcus replied. "Whoever you really are I'm assuming you were paid by someone to push us off this rock? The Magistracy or maybe the Mariks? Either way I'm prepared to negotiate, I'd rather leave here with my regiment intact so if you grant us free passage, and give me back my jumpships, we'll be on our way. I'll even agree not to attack your employers for five, maybe even ten years so they aren't too pissed off at you" she offered.
"We're not mercenaries, we don't negotiate with pirate scum, and we certainly don't negotiate with the rabid attack dogs of Stefan Amaris you Dragoon bitch".
"Rabid?" Marcus repeated the word, laughing. "There's only one of us that snarls and drools and isn't house trained and he's not one of my Dragoons, he's just a stray we picked up on Terra before we left."
"Go ****** yourself Stefani" the familiar voice of a man interjected. She knew full-well he wouldn't be able to stop himself responding to the jibe. The man had little self-control and even less decorum.
"Stay quiet Captain or I'll offer you to them as part of the negotiating process" Marcus threatened her subordinate who was currently sat a few hundred metres away at the controls of his Rampage. It wasn't a serious threat however, at least not unless it proved absolutely necessary to seal a more favourable deal. "I apologise for the interruption General. You were calling me pirate scum as I recall? Oh yes, and a Dragoon bitch. That seems rude, not untrue I'll grant you, but rude nonetheless" she continued, her accent and educated manner of speaking betraying her rather aristocratic upper-class origins. "Since we're not going to lay down our arms then I suppose we're at impasse, although you should be asking yourself the question, 'is this really the hill I want to die on' because I guarantee that if you lead your troops up that slope a lot of them will come back down in a body bag."
"You're very confident in your position. Given that you have no idea exactly what cards I'm holding, consider that might be hubris on your part."
"I play poker too and it sounds like you're trying to bluff" Marcus replied, smirking. "I'm very cognisant of how much long-range firepower I have up here, and I can see what machines you've got down there. You don't have the fire-superiority needed to overwhelm my tactical advantage of holding the high ground" she stated confidently. It wasn't just her long-range direct-fire weapons that needed to be factored in here, launched from a height advantage her LRM's would carry further than ones going the other direction as well. "Tell me the truth, what surprised you more, all the Dragoon heavies or running up against Phoenix mediums mounting an ERPPC?"
"Hard to say, wasn't expecting either, not that it'll change the outcome. This is your last chance to surrender with a promise that the death penalty is off the table for your trials, which is frankly more than a bunch of pirates and war-criminals deserve but I was instructed to make the offer in an attempt to reduce bloodshed. I don't have the authority to offer any deal better than that and I sure as shit don't have the inclination. Take it while you can. The clock is ticking."
Nobody ever expected the ERPPC's, Stefani Marcus knew, ignoring the ultimatum. They had been the trump card of the Blood Rain for decades, allowing them to sweep aside planetary militias, and occasionally rival pirate groups, with impunity because those types never had the effective counter of either heavily-armoured assault mechs or equivalent long-range armament. After fleeing Terra in 2778 the 141st Amaris Dragoons had headed for the periphery, stopping only to raid spica in the Capellan Confederation for supplies, with the objective of rebuilding themselves as an effective fighting force at one of the Rim Worlds Republic's outposts in the Deep Periphery they knew of situated rimward of the Taurian Concordat at the edge of the Perseus-Cepherus Cloud Complex.
When they arrived they found the outpost was well-stocked, unusually so in fact because it was being used as a way station for supplies being shipped to other facilities even further out in the Really Deep Periphery, and that the small garrison was only too pleased to see them and invite them to stay. They had been there nearly four months when a Royalty class armed jumpship appeared, having just returned from delivering a shipment of ammunition and spare parts all the way out to Rim Worlds Republic Outpost 11, a base that was so far away the crew didn't even know that Apollo and much of the rest of the Rim Worlds Republic had been conquered and absorbed by the Lyran Commonwealth during their absence. Finding themselves with their homeworlds under occupation, the Amaris Empire reduced to a few hold-outs fighting to the last man on Terra and with no better prospects the captain and crew of the Royalty signed up and the 141st Amaris Dragoons got themselves a another jumpship plus the two squadrons of Vulcan aerospace fighters it carried.
With more than enough spare parts at hand for their Jackrabbit and Rampage battlemechs, and their Dragoon heavies actually designed to be easily maintained, the 141st soon reconstituted themselves and with Amaris dead and the Rim Worlds Republic itself no more they became to recruit from the ranks of the angry and dispossessed former RWR military that drifted out to the periphery looking for work as mercenaries or pirates.
Upon learning in time that Kerensky had thrown a tantrum, picked up his ball and went looking for a new home the 141st had known it would only be a matter of time before the entire Inner Sphere erupted into open warfare. When the inevitable outcome of the SLDF not being there to keep everyone else in line came to pass the Amaris Dragoons, now rebranded as the Blood Rain, had come thundering back out of the Perseus-Cepherus Cloud Complex and starting by plundering and pillaging their way across the rimward portion of the militarily overstretched Capellan Confederation. Later, after their sojourn up to the Outworlds Alliance and the end of the Succession War, they had raided periphery worlds from the Magistracy to the Concordat before deciding to see what opportunities might present themselves further afield.
They had been so successful in the early years that several Capellan worlds they had raided, often more than once, had ended up abandoned, including Kimi, Weldry, Sunnywood and Merdal. In one battle they still celebrated the anniversary of they had knocked the hell out of the 7th Sian Dragoons on Itrom, reducing them to a third of their full-strength and recovering a fortune's worth of salvage.
In almost all cases this success had been made possible by the simple expedient of fighting the enemy at ranges where they only weapon they could hit back with were AC-2 popguns. It was a simple battlefield doctrine that relied on the fact that only the SLDF had ever fielded large numbers of machines armed with ERPPC's, Gauss Rifles and large-calibre LB-X autocannon and that once you got out as far as the rim they were all as rare as rocking-horse shit.
If it ain't broke don't fix it, as the saying goes, and so as the Blood Rain under Stefani Marcus prepared for battle on Algenib they put their trust in their ERPPC's once again.
Unfortunately for them, Jenna Romanov's troops also had a doctrine based on fighting at long-range and they were putting their trust in the Enhanced ERPPC, plus a few other fancy gimmicks.
It looked like they were going for it, Marcus decided as 'Romanov' ordered her assaults and heavies to the front of the line ready to advance into battle.
Oh well, didn't haul my ass up here for nothing, she thought to herself, issuing orders to her battlemech lances on the Blood Rain's encrypted channel to make ready to fire on her command. Then she contacted her artillery unit that was positioned several klicks to the rear and should be already prepared to ballistically deliver hefty packages of high explosive on demand.
As the 'SLDF' began to form up for an assault up the hill, moving their most heavily armoured machines to the front Marcus ordered her Thumper battery to open fire, that should shake them up she decided with satisfaction as large-calibre indirect-fire artillery rounds soon began to fall around the enemy battlemech lances. Not many shells, it was only a single, and slightly-understrength, battery of five guns after all, but there was little in life as disconcerting as being under indirect-fire artillery bombardment, in large part because you didn't have the cathartic option of shooting back yourself.
Her good mood was short-lived and ended abruptly however when multiple fast-moving shapes leaving streaks of rocket exhaust behind them arched up from below the horizon ahead of her and sailed overhead, following a trajectory that headed back down to the ground a few kilometres to her rear. "****** me" she swore, not having seen the like since fighting the SLDF on Terra. "Arrow IV's" she realised with dismay as multiple batteries of enemy MLRS systems, firing guided missiles with warheads that could bring down a hundred-ton assault mech brough fire down on where her Thumper self-propelled-guns would be.
A titanic explosion in the far distance behind indicated that at least one of the Thumpers took a direct hit, with all its ammunition going off at once in a secondary explosion that would have sent pieces of the thing flying clear off the plateau.
That was some nicely played counter-battery fire, Marcus had to admit before a second volley of missiles came streaking through the sky in her direction. Once more she watched them sail overhead, though in an arc that would end much closer than the last batch. For a moment she thought the enemy gunners had aimed right at her position and simply missed, overshooting her mechs, before she saw the missile housings break open and dozens of small black shapes rained down from each of them.
Arrow IV FASCAM rounds, instant minefields deployed by missiles that scattered the things wherever you wanted them. The bastards had dropped a minefield right behind her to prevent her retreating, or at least not without paying a hefty price for it.
The FASCAM mines had barely landed when at least two batteries of conventional artillery now opened up directly on the Blood Rain line, the shells exploding around her battlemechs landing too close for comfort, and all too accurately for a first, uncorrected salvo. That probably meant Thor Self-Propelled-Guns with forward observers using the fancy trans-optical aiming system that connected back to a ballistic computer in the SPG.
Not a bluff then after all apparently, Stefani Marcus, Pirate Queen of the Blood Rain, former Captain (and brevet Major) in the 141st Amaris Dragoons and distant cousin to Stefan Amaris himself concluded gloomily.
On the plus side, sat in his Rampage over there poor old Bernard Critchly, formerly of the Legos's Lancers mercenary company, AKA the 'Greenhaven Gestapo', must be shitting himself even more than I am right now, Marcus decided with a certain amount of schadenfreude tinged with morbid satisfaction. She might get out of this alive, he wouldn't under any circumstances. She wasn't the one whose commanding officer had executed the Pope in Rome and then personally murdered a few Cardinals, had her own portrait painted over the Sistine Chapel, slaughtered a few hundred monks for complaining about it all and then spent the next half-century checking under their bed for agents of Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
Critchly had always expected the Inquisition to get him one day, he got the return of the Star League Defence Force instead which in the balance of probabilities had seemed far more unlikely.
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Note from the Author:
House Marcus (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/House_Marcus) were one of the most influential families in the Rim Worlds Republic and married into House Amaris at some point (making them maternal cousins from that point). Stefani Marcus was named for her distant cousin and her background got her a commission in a well-respected regiment (well respected in the RWR anyway. despised by everyone else).
Thanks to his penchant for planning ahead, and his paranoia, Stefan Amaris had military bases constructed in numerous places in the Deep Periphery (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Deep_Periphery), some of them ludicrously far away from the Inner Sphere like RWR Outpost #11 (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Rim_Worlds_Republic_Outpost_11) and RWR Outpost #4 (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Rim_Worlds_Republic_Outpost_4). The one the 141st holed up in after they fled the SLDF on Terra in 2778 is much closer than some, being situated on the edge of the Perseus-Cepherus Cloud Complex (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Perseus-Cepherus_Cloud_Complex). These facilities were often well-stocked with supplies and equipment that could even include reserves of battlemechs and aerospace fighters. After putting themselves back together, and a recruitment drive, they started hitting worlds on the rimward edge of the Capellan Confederation (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Capellan_Confederation), then raided the Outworlds Alliance (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Outworlds_Alliance) for a while, then the Magistracy of Canopus (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Magistracy_of_Canopus) and the Taurian Concordat (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Taurian_Concordat). They've been at this for decades doing very well for themselves because they have good training, large numbers for a pirate band and excellent equipment.
You can fairly say that the signature aerospace fighter of the Rim Worlds Republic was the Vulcan (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Vulcan_(Aerospace_Fighter_class)) which they used in profusion. As far as battlemechs went they produced the Jackrabbit (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Jackrabbit) light, the Phoenix (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Phoenix_(BattleMech)) medium, the Dragoon (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Dragoon) heavy and the Rampage (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Rampage) assault which are all effective machines (even the Jackrabbit once they started making the JKR-9R model). Given their predilection for war crimes involving incendiary weapons they also liked the Firestarter (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Firestarter_(BattleMech)) and the Amaris Dragoons in particular their rare custom WTH-0 model of the Whitworth (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Whitworth) that complemented their beloved Ignis (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Ignis) flamethrower tanks nicely. The RWR also used a lot of LTV-4 Hovertanks (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/LTV-4_Hover_Tank).
Undoubtedly the worse regiment in the service of Stefan Amaris was a mercenary command, the Legos's Lancers (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Greenhaven_Gestapo) (later the 'Greenhaven Gestapo', meant as a derogatory nickname but they liked it) commanded by his good friend Antilos Legos (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Antilos_Legos). Having been given control of Italy on Terra, Legos had fun with the locals and when Pope Clement XXVII failed to meet his tribute demands Legos shot him and then had his men slaughter the College of Cardinals.
The Greenhaven Gestapo met their end at the Battle of Ferrara in 2777, although they did manage to inflict some quite heavy losses on the SLDF first (they were more than happy to use WMD in combat, including artillery shells full of Nerve Gas). One of their most notorious officers, Bernard Critchly, survived the battle and went missing with his Rampage never to be seen again. Known as the 'Ogre' Critchly really did have his portrait painted over the Sistine Chapel in canon, and personally killed six hundred of seven-hundred-and-fifty protesting monks who were staging a hunger strike in John Paul II Square.
The Arrow IV (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Arrow_IV_Artillery) missile artillery system (and its various launch vehicles) became extinct lostech in the Inner Sphere by 2835 (only the Terran Hegemony had the manufacturing plants to make them, and they were destroyed in all the fighting). They're just not something you would ever expect to encounter in the Periphery (the last remaining stockpiles were used up right at the start of the Second Succession War). The SLDF used the Thor (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Thor_(Combat_Vehicle)) self-propelled-gun but everyone else made do with the inferior knockoff the Thumper (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Thumper_(Combat_Vehicle)).
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Tagged
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Good update, and the 141st are properly equipped to be a real nemesis, rather than just a walk in the park, which makes for a better story.
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Good update, and the 141st are properly equipped to be a real nemesis, rather than just a walk in the park, which makes for a better story.
Pretty much anyone else they might run into out in the Periphery would just be fodder for ERPPC's, Gauss Rifles, Artemis IV, NARC beacons etc. etc. but the Amaris Dragoons were intended to be able to take on SLDF Royals so they've got the gear (eg. the Dragoon has Guardian ECM, the Rampage has an AMS). I needed to upgrade the Phoenix a bit though (albeit with things like DHS and Ferro-Fibrous that would have been readily available on Terra and wouldn't require a full re-build).
In story terms I also needed someone that even most ardent isolationists on Niops would balk at not stomping when the opportunity arose.
Anyhow, I suspect my old teacher Sister Ruth Mary (I went to Catholic School) would not like the idea of Bernard Critchly getting away with it so there's that too. :grin:
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Artillery is the ultimate solution to any "long" range opposition... ;)
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Nobody expects the SLDF! Especially not the guy who expected the inquisition instead.
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Now that's a good one! :D
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Another good chapter. You build up the potential danger like David Weber.
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Nobody expects the SLDF! Especially not the guy who expected the inquisition instead.
:smilie_happy_clapping:
Blood Rains, enjoy the rain of Artillery
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:smilie_happy_clapping:
Blood Rains, enjoy the rain of Artillery
Don't you mean steel rain? :grin:
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to quote the cab
"EAT METAL RAIN!"
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Part XIV - Section 1 of 2
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"Frederick the Great said that 'Artillery adds dignity to what would otherwise be a vulgar brawl' but as an artilleryman myself I'm not sure how much dignity there is to being hit with a 155mm shell that scatters your bodyparts over an area the size of a football stadium. Don't let the egotists riding battlemechs fool you, artillery reigns supreme when it comes to the business of killing your fellow man on the battlefield and we don't glorify the process by pretending to be chivalrous when doing so."
Colonel Daniel Hammerick - 2830CE
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Najd Plateau - Algenib – 2829
It was perhaps almost inevitable if your name was Hammerick that you would end up with the nickname 'The Hammer', and if you got a few drinks into him Daniel Hammerick would admit the reason he decided to become an artilleryman was that it was just so damn apt.
Putting aside nominative determinism he had actually shown considerable aptitude at dropping high explosives on people from a great distance over the years, earning much acclaim from Khan McEvedy for how well he served his clan during Operation Klondike whilst simultaneously receiving the opprobrium of ilKhan Kerensky for just doing his job.
It was at the Battle of Stavka on Circe, where Clan Wolverine defeated the rebel Pentagon faction calling themselves the Rasmussen Elite, that Hammerick had come to Nicolas Kerensky's attention in a bad way. The ilKhan had a soft spot for the Rasmussen Elite because of their preference for honourable single-combat between skilled mechwarriors, indeed he once described them as the 'shadow brothers' of the clans. As such he had decided to come observe the battle taking place personally, presenting Khan Sarah McEvedy with specific rules of engagement that her Wolverines should meet their foe valiantly one-on-one like the knights of old.
McEvedy took stock of the situation, determined how many of her people would likely die if she fought the battle with one hand tied behind her back, and on the basis that the whole idea was just wasteful and ****** stupid she ignored the ilKhan's 'request' and brought up artillery.
Daniel 'The Hammer' Hammerick's artillery unit, they called themselves 'Ravager Battery', blasted Rasmussen Elite right out their lair with indirect fire from maximum range, Hammerick eating a ham sandwich between correcting his fire according to the calls from his artillery spotters.
Nicholas Kerensky, ilKhan of the Clans was not impressed.
Things had changed a lot for Daniel Hammerick in the eight years since then of course. The Wolverine Secession had seen him leave Circe far behind, he had been promoted all the way up to Lieutenant-Colonel and now commanded a far greater and more varied artillery park, with multiple batteries of guns and MLRS systems. The enemy that day on Algenib was much better equipped than the Rasmussen Elite had ever been, though less numerous overall, and the sandwich he was eating as his artillery was pounding the crap out of them was tuna mayo.
A sonic boom overhead caught his attention and he looked up to see a squadron of SLDF Tomahawk aerospace fighters, followed by a flight of the larger Rapier, burning hard towards the battlefield. General Romanov must have given the order to stop messing around with the pirates and get them out of her sky and they were undoubtedly only too happy to obey. Clan Wolverine was fond of the Rapier, having upgraded the fair number of the already excellent 'Royal' model already in their touman still further with improved weaponry even before McEvedy declared independence from the Clans. The Tomahawk fighters up there weren't quite as much of a step up from the standard model, Hammerick knew from briefings, but all of them would had gotten their original armament of Large Lasers replaced with the Improved Large Laser, the tonnage saved by that switch-out devoted to mounting additional heatsinks.
"Vali batteries alpha, bravo and charlie switch to cluster for the next three salvos. Fire at my command" Hammerick instructed his crews via his radio headset, getting back to business. General Romanov wanted their aim thrown off when her assault up the hill began and cluster-munitions tearing up the whole ridge they were stood on would do that nicely. "Delta battery, reduce your rate of fire, you'll overheat your tubes and it's a long way back to Niops to get more ammo as well" he added, warning his Thor crews not to get too carried away.
The crew of one of the Thor SPG's had stencilled a phrase in Latin on the side of their machine, Ultima Ratio Regum, the final argument of kings, that one being an artillery classic. It always put Hammerick in mind of the notion that after their invention battlemechs had replaced infantry as the so-called 'Queen of Battle', that paradigm shift failing to alter the fact that artillery had ruled over the battlefield before mechs came along and still reigned supreme now as long as it was correctly employed.
Battlemechs might be the queen of battle, but artillery was king, and you know what kings do to queens in order to make princes.
The real bitch of it was, just prior to this operation he had spent some time modifying a pair of Lightning reconnaissance hovercraft to carry both a NARC Missile Beacon launcher and a specialised TAG system (Target Acquisition Gear) that could paint targets for the homing version of the Arrow IV. As a result he had brought along multiple reloads of the high-tech guided missiles for his Vali launchers as well as standard loads, cluster and FASCAM, only finding out mere minutes ago that the Rimjob pirates were loaded down with Guardian ECM pods and Anti-Missile-Systems that would negate his damn NARC beacons.
Fortunately, each of his Vali launch vehicles had pulled a trailer load of extra reloads along with them so he could still put plenty of munitions down-range, but it was a shame he couldn't poleaxe a few enemy assaults with a direct hit. Getting struck by an Arrow IV carrying a single full-sized warhead as payload was like getting hit by an express train.
Oh well, could be worse, could be on the receiving end of that, he thought to himself before giving the order to fire, taking another bite of his sandwich as his three missile batteries, eighteen Vali launchers between them, rippled off a full salvo of cluster rounds off towards the enemy.
Up at the frontline Colonel Jax Benedict commanding one of the three SLDF battalions was waiting for the signal to advance, that signal being the ridge up there where the enemy was being rendered very difficult to see by an epic mass of explosions.
Formerly the commanding officer of Clan Wolverine's 444th Cluster, the battalion Benedict now commanded contained fewer battlemechs than he once had at his disposal but thanks to the upgrade program they had been through probably more firepower overall. This was particularly noticeable for machines like the Stalker he was currently piloting, a mech that relied on LRM's for their long-range firepower. The Improved LRM launchers only weighed half what the original models did, so in the case of the Stalker they swapped out the twin LRM 10 launchers for LRM 15's and added Artemis IV fire-control and CASE protection against ammunition explosions for the same mass. Then, thanks to the additional two tons in weight saved by switching from Large Lasers to Improved Large Lasers they added more ammunition for the launchers so you could be much freer as to when you let rip with your missiles.
Which would have been fantastic if the damn pirates didn't have so many battlemechs with Guardian ECM or Anti-Missile-Systems that would respectively jam his Artemis IV FCS and shoot down some of his now effectively dumbfire missiles before they hit, Benedict thought bitterly to himself, wishing he had taken out that spare Thug rather than let that old duffer from the 295th use it. All Benedict could do now was throw LRM's like crazy and count on the fact that if you threw enough shit at the wall some of it was going to stick.
Benedict switched his radio to his battalion's command frequency. "Your lance commanders will designate your targets. We want to reduce the number of guns shooting back as fast as possible so I want four mechs engaging a single machine to knock it out of the fight quickly before switching to the next target" he ordered. "If possible engage their Phoenix mediums first, they've got an ERPPC and they'll die a lot faster than their heavies and assaults" he advised before switching to the frequency being used by his own lance. "Donovan, I know it might be tempting to try and blow some heads off with those Enhanced ERPPC's but you'll never score hits at long range so aim centre-mass' he instructed the old mechwarrior to his left piloting the Thug. "Same goes for you Sampson, I know you're hot shit in that Marauder but wait until we're closer until you try and prove it" he continued. "As for you Engels, just because you've got more armour on that Orion than you used to that does not mean you're an assault mech, so don't be in a hurry to get close enough to use your autocannon."
"Nice to be officially recognised as 'hot shit' Sir" Sampson responded, perhaps sounding a little smug. "Seeing as how I'm not proper 'Warrior caste' and all."
"Can we go one day without the labourer caste hero bullshit please Sampson?" Benedict requested pointlessly. He was sure that Hallis had only assigned him the man because it was well known Benedict had some misgivings at the time about Khan McEvedy's loosening up of the castes which had resulted in the likes of Sampson swapping a shovel for a battlemech. It wasn't like Sampson had even been labourer caste very long, certainly not long enough to have developed a genuine grievance about it, the man had been a mechwarrior in the Rasmussen Elite that was captured after the fight at Stavka went very badly for them. Sampson was not generally well liked because the Rasmussen Elite had been monumental dicks that had basically ran a protection racket on Circe, but you couldn't deny he was one hell of a mechwarrior.
"Yes Sir, today I'm happy to only be a regular hero" Sampson replied, sounding even more pleased with himself.
"My God son, are you always on?" Donovan interjected. He had been mostly lost in his own thoughts, concerned about his wife Claire who was out on the other flank sat in the cockpit of a Pillager, but was still in the game enough to listen to what was being said.
"If there's an off-switch short of knocking him out we've never found it" Engels told him.
"Enough with the chit-chat, focus on the job at hand" Benedict ordered. "Everyone ready for action?"
"Aff" Engels confirmed.
"Affirmative Sir" Donovan added for himself as he offered a silent prayer that the XL engine in his wife's Pillager didn't take a hit because those things were more fragile than you would want them to be. At least the upgrade package they had received included CASE to protect it from being crippled due to the capacitors exploding if one of the gauss rifles took a hit, and you couldn't fault the amount of armour it carried.
"I was born ready" Sampson declared. "Ready for anything."
"Except artillery you mean" Engels responded, chuckling. "How did Klondike go for you anyway?" he asked rhetorically, needling the younger man.
Imagining Sampson's expression, even the generally humourless Benedict almost laughed himself as the order arrived from General Romanov for the entire regiment to advance.
Considering the bigger picture as he led his heavy and assault mechs up to the ready line, just out of ERPPC range, Benedict had to admit that the old lady in charge seemed to know her business very well, despite not being a Wolverine. The Blood Rain had the high ground, plenty of long-range weaponry and would be stationary when the fight started, giving them the advantage in accuracy, but she had a plan to deal with that.
What the SLDF needed was to throw them badly off their game. Given that hardly any of them up there were likely old enough to have ever been on the receiving end of an artillery barrage like the one about to drop on their heads that should do nicely, Romanov has reasoned.
It wasn't so much that a cluster submunition was a mortal threat to a battlemech, at least not one that had all or most of its armour still intact, it was that the experience of being right in the middle of a bombardment of Arrow IV cluster for the first time was, in Romanov's own words, 'absolutely ****** terrifying'.
Each of the eighteen Vali MLRS vehicles had unleashed five Arrow IV missiles, each one of which carried three dozen HEAP (High Explosive Armour Piercing) submunitions that had about the same explosive yield as a bomb from one of the 60mm light mortars infantry platoons humped around.
As the missile housings broke open just before they arrived, scattering their payloads, three-thousand, two-hundred and forty submunitions rained down all over the former 141st Amaris Dragoons over the space of less than half-a-minute. The ridge they were standing on turned into a sea of fire, explosions rippled right along the line, shrapnel and pieces of dirt and rock being sent high into the air as it seemed like the planet itself was being torn asunder.
Spectacular as a description in no way did it justice, though describing the sight as hellish would be fairly apt as the SLDF began their advance towards the Blood Rain.
Right in the middle of it all Stefani Marcus gritted her teeth as memories came flooding back of being under bombardment by Arrow IV cluster a couple of times before when she was fighting for Amaris and the Rim Worlds Republic. It wasn't so much that the damage caused to something as heavily armoured as most battlemechs was all that severe, although you wouldn't want to be in a light mech with submunitions coming down like hail, it was that even when you knew you weren't going to die it was very hard to concentrate on what you were supposed to be doing when the entire world around for a few hundred metres in all directions turned into explosions. The only thing that was worse subjectively was being hit by a massive salvo of LRM's from an Archer or similar, because those would rattle your mech around something fierce and you never knew when a lucky missile would hit something important, but that didn't go on for anywhere near as long and didn't happen to your entire force at once.
Given how few of her mechwarriors had ever been through this before themselves Marcus rightly assumed that they were freaking out more than a little, her thoughts confirmed by just how ragged and inaccurate their fire was when the cluster stopped falling and she ordered them to open fire on the now advancing enemy.
For her part Marcus kept her own nerve and began firing methodically, imploring her people to do likewise via radio. To their credit the overwhelming majority of her mechwarriors had actually opened up with ERPPC and gauss rifle fire almost as soon as the enemy got into range, unfortunately their accuracy was for shit and far below what they usually achieved in battle, let alone on the firing range during training. They weren't coordinating their fire properly either, despite their superiors imploring them to do so, simply shooting at whatever was in front of them instead of concentrating the fire of several mechs on one target.
The blinding bright-blue flash of particle projector cannon, lightning crackling around the bolts of energy as they blazed across the battlefield, was mixed with bursts of shells from LB-X autocannon and the occasional crack of a hypersonic projectile from a gauss rifle.
Leaving sonic shockwaves in their wake the gauss rifle rounds distorted clouds of smoke left behind by propellant gases and explosions, and when they hit their sheer momentum staggered even hundred-ton assault mechs and dented or shattered armour plate.
The trouble from Marcus's perspective was that too few Black Rain mechs were making their hits at the start of the fight when they should have had the biggest advantage. It's said to be better to give than receive, and that is certainly a truism on the battlefield when you were receiving incoming fire. Now stood on what seemed to be a lunar landscape covered in a mass of small craters, and the occasional larger one caused by incoming Thor SPG rounds that still arrived periodically, battering any mech that was anywhere near the point of impact, she took stock of the situation and decided it wasn't great.
With scores of battlemechs engaged in a colossal slugfest it was hard to keep track of what was going on but even in the early stages of the fight there was a nagging feeling Marcus couldn't shake that something was wrong. The other side was making their hits better than she would have hoped for, they were clearly well trained, but they also seemed to be getting very lucky when it came to how much damage their ERPPC's were inflicting she thought to herself as one of her Phoenix mediums nearby took a couple of hits from particle projector cannon that just shouldn't have stripped quite that much armour from her.
Shaking off their initial nerves the Blood Rain had just about got their act together, reliably scoring hits and properly coordinating their fire, when a second salvo of cluster munitions arrived and the ridge thundered under another thirty seconds or so of continual explosions. In the back of her mind Marcus wondered if the timing there was deliberate because the enemy had nearly closed to LRM range and the bombardment screwed up her peoples opportunity to get a well-aimed full salvo off before the other side could. It was either military brilliance or sheer good luck, and she didn't like either possibility one bit because the only thing worse than finding yourself up against Alexander the Great reborn was fighting some bozo that couldn't help but correctly predict a random coin toss every time.
Amidst all the new set of falling submunitions the inner calm in the centre of Marcus's mind that was ignoring them noticed a Stalker moving up the slope that would soon be close enough to let rip with its LRM 10 launchers, to her it looked like a lance commander since it was leading three other mechs. Taking aim with both of her LB-X autocannons and her ERPPC she pressed the fire button on her controls and sent HEAP rounds and weaponised ball lightning down range. If they were messing up her people's aim she was sure as hell going to mess with theirs too.
Benedict's Stalker shuddered with the impact of autocannon rounds against its armour just after the energy bolt from a particle projector cannon had seared into the battlemech, leaving a vivid scar on the front torso and turning armour plate to vapour. Heedless of the damage, he was driving an assault mech and soaking up incoming fire was what they were for, Benedict identified the machine that had just took a potshot at him and continuing forward a few more steps until he was in range he let rip with a full salvo of LRM's, thirty in total, though he knew the number that actually hit their intended target would be a fraction of that. Freaking pirate sonofabitch riding a freaking Dragoon with a freaking Guardian ECM system, he muttered to himself as his Artemis FCS refused to achieve lock-on.
"Donovan, Sampson, that Phoenix you're still shooting at is done, light up that Dragoon I'm exchanging fire with" Benedict ordered his lance-mates. His LRM's might not be scoring the hits they should but let's see how that pirate enjoyed having four Enhanced ERPPC's turned on them, he thought to himself before switching to the battalion command frequency and instructing one of his companies to try and force a breach in the enemy line where it seemed a Thor had scored a direct hit on an enemy Rampage, sending it crashing down, and the Awesome beside it had gotten its cockpit, and the man or woman inside, completely smashed by a gauss rifle.
The last time Donovan had seen action he had been thirty-five and had done so sat in a Thug doing battle with a regiment of the Amaris Dragoons on Terra. Now, five decades later, he was sat in a Thug shooting at a different regiment of the Amaris Dragoons hundreds of light-years from Terra, and he couldn't help but wonder if the huge grin plastered all over his face was a sign that he was regaining his lost youth or losing his mind. Even if he died, hell, at least it wasn't as a reluctant farmer on Buffalo Meadows, so that was pretty sweet compared to the alternative.
Back during the war his Thug had been a THG-11E model, standard issue for non-royal SLDF units, and he would have given five years off his life to have swapped it for a THG-11Eb Royal that had ERPPC's instead of PPC's. Now he not only had an THG-11Eb, those ERPPC's were the new 'Enhanced' type that hit twenty-percent harder. "Baby, where have you been all my life" he said to himself gleefully as he scored a hit on the Dragoon heavy that he had been ordered to engage, burning a huge section of ablative ferro-fibrous armour right off the thing.
Donovan would have been feeling pretty damn pleased with himself if Sampson in his MAD-2R Marauder hadn't put eERPPC bolt into the Phoenix they had been previously engaging to finish it off completely, while simultaneously scoring a hit with his other particle-projector-cannon on the Dragoon and at the same time peppering a third enemy machine with his autocannon. Sampson's given name was apparently Wilhelm, which in conjunction with his age and the North American culture of the 331st had inevitably earned him the nickname 'Billy the Kid'. Having seen a few soldiers back in the day who had been through the SLDF's so-called 'Gunslinger Program' intended to produce elite mechwarriors Sampson's nom-de-guerre certainly seemed apt. Samson hated the nickname incidentally, which only helped guarantee that it stuck.
Sat in the Dragoon heavy that had now found itself, at least temporarily, subject to the unwelcome attention of an entire enemy lance Stefani Marcus was enjoying herself rather less than her opponents. While issuing demands for assistance from her own lance-mates, or anyone else on her side close enough to help, she considered the current situation in as calm and measured a manner as she could manage under the circumstances.
That Stalker had opened up on her with twin LRM 15's launchers, not the LRM 10's it should mount, and unless she was badly mistaken the Orion in the enemy lance had an LRM 20 not the LRM 15 it should be carrying. The only way that could be done was to devote weight and space saved elsewhere towards the larger, heavier launchers and since she could see they still carried their other shorter-ranged weaponry they must have reduced armour and/or fewer heat-sinks.
That tallied with reports coming in from right up and down the line. The self-declared 'SLDF' battlemechs were hitting her people harder than they should be, increasingly so as the distance between the two sides shortened and more weapon types came into range.
That could only mean one thing in her experience, there was no such thing as a free lunch so if you re-built a mech to hit harder that meant you had to sacrifice survivability and endurance. More tonnage devoted to weaponry, LRM launchers with more tubes for example, meant less tonnage available for armour, or heatsinks.
If they had less armour then at some point they would hit a tipping point and their machines would start coming down in droves, if they had fewer heat-sinks then they couldn't keep firing their energy weapons much longer, particularly ERPPC's which were far from heat efficient. A mech that was overheating to the point it was close to shut-down was just a liability, not an effective weapons platform.
Just got to hold on, Stefani Marcus determined and started issuing orders and instructions to her people following that chain of thought, explaining why if they did the Blood Rain would win this because the other side must be riding glass cannons that could dish it out but not take it. Once they were stripped of what little armour they had then the Dragoon and Rampage firing cluster rounds from their LB-X autocannons would tear their internals apart.
It never occurred to her at the time that the opposition might be using weaponry that was lighter and more compact than normal so the normal rules of battlemech construction simply didn't apply. None of the upgraded SLDF machines carried less armour or fewer heatsinks than the original models they were based on, most had more of both, and in a plurality of cases they not only had increased armour they had both more firepower and the heatsinks to keep them running cooler than before.
As more and more battlemechs mounting LRM launchers as part of their weapons loadout got into range the sky filled with hundreds of the things every second, leaving smoke trails that were soon dense enough that they dimmed the battlefield below. The SLDF had proportionally fewer machines with AMS or Guardian ECM systems so the Blood Rain's Rampage assaults with functional Artemis IV fire-control punched above their weight here for a while until the sheer number of incoming missiles overwhelmed the ability of their Anti-Missile-System to shoot them down. If this went on much longer then any AMS would simply run out of ammunition anyway so it would be a short-lived advantage.
The third and final barrage of Arrow IV cluster missiles arrived in the midst of the massive exchange of LRM's and between all the explosions it became impossible for Stefani Marcus to maintain any kind of grip on the wider situation.
Because battlemechs are built tough, heavily armoured and resilient, and more stable on their feet than those unfamiliar with them might assume, a battle involving them can go on quite some time before losses on either side become heavy. You have to burn off a lot of armour before you can score a hit on something important, like an engine, or a gyro for example, so to an outside observer it might look like both sides are evenly matched because they've been shooting at each other for seemingly ages but neither side is actually losing machines, or mechwarriors.
In reality one side can be losing badly, it's just that they're only losing armour so far not actual mechs or men, at least they're not losing mechs or men yet.
There is a phenomenon in battlemech warfare known as 'Combat Loss Grouping' which tends to be the point at which you notice just how badly things are going for one side. A single battlemech that has been stripped of its armour protection takes a hit to something critical to its ability to fight, or just stay upright. Perhaps a bolt from a particle-projector-cannon hits an exposed ammunition storage bin for an autocannon in a battlemech's right arm and the ton or so of ammunition there reacts just as badly to such treatment as you would expect.
The battlemech in question is nearly knocked off its feet by a titanic explosion that sees it's right arm completely blown off, severe blast damage to the centre torso, and the mechwarrior inside left with a ringing in his ears that might stop sometime next week, or it would have if the next salvo hadn't killed him outright because his mech was now a complete wreck.
Because the lance he was part of is now down a mech his lance-mates are now at a numerical disadvantage, one not helped by the fact that they've also already lost most of their armour as well so they simply can't take any more hits than they were already taking.
A single battlemech going down quickly turns to two, then three because now things are going really badly.
Combat Loss Grouping, because once you lose a mech you tend to lose several more in quick succession and it just snowballs from there.
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Part XIV - Section 2 of 2
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Captain Bernard Critchly, formerly of the Legos's Lancers though the mercenary company was better known by it's adopted nickname the 'Greenhaven Gestapo', was not enjoying himself. He would swear on a stack of bibles a mile high that the ERPPC hits he had been taking were more powerful than they should be, assuming that he didn't burst into flame the instant he touched a bible because both current Catholic Popes wanted his head on a plate and they reputably had friends in high places, and his Rampage was hurting bad. Worse, if he switched to the radio channel used by the Blood Rain's badly outnumbered, and according to them also badly outgunned, aerospace fighter squadrons they were screaming about getting their asses kicked so there was no prospect of calling in air support.
If it wasn't for the minefield behind him he would have been tempted to do what he did during the Battle of Ferrara and use his MASC gear to beat a hasty high-speed retreat, a Rampage could move fast on its feet for an assault mech when it had to, but that damn FASCAM dropped earlier had him pinned.
Already underneath a storm of incoming LRM's, the barrel on his anti-missile-system must be glowing red by now trying to knock at least some of them down, the arrival of yet more Arrow IV cluster missiles threw up so much dirt and smoke he could barely see.
Someone must have decided to use all those explosions to get closer, using jumpjets to leap some of the way because as the smoke and debris from the last of the cluster submunitions cleared he found himself with a Pillager in SLDF colours bearing a Red Cameron Star right in front of him.
The Pillager fired both its gauss rifles before he could react, the heavy hypersonic slugs slamming into his Rampage and hitting like wrecking balls that sheered off much of his remaining torso armour. Following up with an alpha strike of directed-energy weapons, four ruby-red medium lasers and two of the more powerful Large Lasers that fired a coherent beam of high-energy gamma rays, since when did a Pillager mount two Large Lasers, a little voice in the back of Critchly's mind wondered, every warning light in the cockpit of the Rampage lit up just before a ton of Streak missiles exploded internally crippling it.
His mech burning Critchly reflexively hit eject as soon as it looked like the fire was going to spread to the rest of his ammunition stowage. As well as the Stream SRM launchers, the Rampage had an autocannon, an LRM launcher not to mention rounds for its AMS so there was a lot in there to go boom. It only crossed Critchly's mind that it might have been better to have just blown up after he ejected because now he might have to shoot himself instead.
After the battle Claire Donovan salvaged part of Critchly's Rampage and hung it over the mantlepiece of her home next to the picture of her, her future husband and the other two members of their lance taken after the liberation of Terra in 2779. If you're going to drive a Pillager it behove you to pillage the battlefield at least a little, she maintained, and it was something she and her husband could show off to their kids once the Iron Wombs gave them some.
Losses amongst the Blood Rain started to cascade, particularly once the SLDF got close enough to use their Improved SRM launchers that just flat-out outranged those of their foe. Not knowing exactly how this was all happening, but not deluded enough to not accept that it was, Stefani Marcus played her final card and used an old trick to get as many of her remaining battlemechs off this damn ridge.
The Dragoon heavy mounted an ERPPC on one arm and an LB-X autocannon on both of them. Thanks to its Lancelot inspired design it could flip either arm around to shoot backwards so keeping the arm with the ERPPC firing at the enemy she aimed the other towards the ground behind her and started walking backwards, firing shotgun-like cluster ammunition from the LB-X into the dirt to set off the FASCAM mines as she went.
Having made sure years before that all her mechwarriors in Dragoon's knew you could, at least partially, clear a minefield with LB-X cluster, she ordered the rest of them to do likewise. Then once clear fire more cluster to try and clear a path for the rest of their surviving machines.
You wouldn't get all the mines that way, it would limit damage not eliminate it, but in conjunction with her Phoenix mediums using their jumpjets to escape, and Rampage's adding in their own LB-X cluster to assist, Stefani Marcus managed to pull back more of the Blood Rain than Jenna Romanov had ever expected her opponent to.
It was all for naught however, the remaining Blood Rain mechs had only just pulled out of the line of fire when two squadrons of SLDF Stuka aerospace fighters, each armed with an AC-20 in the nose and a pair of Enhanced ERPPC's in each wing began a series of devastating strafing runs.
Later, trapped in the wreckage of her Dragoon, Marcus considered taking her pistol and shooting herself in the head but curiosity got the better of her. Who were these ****** anyway? And where did they get such wonderful toys?
I've got to at least ask, Marcus decided, waiting patiently to be captured as she listened in to radio transmissions from the settlement where her light mechs and tanks were now getting their asses handed to them royally, despite being dug in.
Faced with entrenched positions at the settlement, Romanov had called up her artillery and ordered rolling air-strikes before advancing her battlemechs into range because fair fights were for idiots like Nicholas Kerensky.
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Note from the Author:
Daniel Hammerick (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Daniel_Hammerick) commanded the artillery for Clan Wolverine during Operation Klondike (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Operation_KLONDIKE), the conquest of the Pentagon Worlds by the clans. When his clan faced off against the skilled (but unpleasant) warriors of the Rasmussen Elite (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Pentagon_Powers#Rasmussen_Elite) ilKhan Nicholas Kerensky wanted the matter settled in a fair fight, but Sarah McEvedy saw things rather differently and was never one to treat the ilKhan's instructions as holy writ that had to be obeyed without question.
The Vali (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Vali)combat vehicle carries a Arrow IV (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Arrow_IV_Artillery) missile launcher and enough ammunition storage so you can bring a selection of missile types (plus you can always drag a trailer along with you carrying spare ammo). The most effective against a battlemech is the Arrow IV homing missile which delivers a stonking great warhead right on top of the target but Guardian ECM jams those. If you want to obliterate an entire area there's always a payload of Cluster Submunitions (I've got with the notion that these are larger and more powerful than the ones used today because battlemechs are heavily armoured all over). An Arrow IV launcher throws five 200kg missiles at once, which gives you plenty of payload mass per missile (they're much shorter ranged than a real-world M270 MLRS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M270_Multiple_Launch_Rocket_System) for example).
As well as messing with Arrow IV homing missiles and Artemis IV (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Artemis_IV_FCS) fire-control systems Guardian ECM (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Guardian_ECM_Suite) also stops NARC (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Narc_Missile_Beacon) beacons working (and AMS (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Anti-missile_system) can shoot down incoming NARC beacons anyway) otherwise the Imprived LRM launchers of the SLDF here would have utterly pulverised the Blood Rain (Improved LRM systems only way half as much so you can carry far more of them).
LB-X (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/LB-X_Autocannon) autocannons are both longer-ranged than standard autocannon and can fire cluster ammunition (think gigantic shotguns). The use of LB-X cluster to clear minefields isn't in the game rules, but it does comes from canon fiction, so it's not an ass-pull on my part.
Battalion, company and lance commander Jax Benedict (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Jax_Benedict) has a upgraded Stalker (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Stalker) assault mech. Improved model LRM's means he has more missile firepower and Artemis IV FCS now but the latter isn't working (in this battle). Lance-mates Engels and former Rasmussen Elite member (and Labourer Caste (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Clan_Caste_System#Laborer_Caste)) Wilhelm Sampson have an ON1-K Orion (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Orion) and a MAD-2R Marauder (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Marauder) respectively (also upgraded).
Donovan is riding a Thug (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Thug) THG-11Eb, upgraded with Enhanced ERPPC's (eERPPC), his wife Claire has an upgraded Pillager (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Pillager) which has benefitted greatly from lighter (and more compact) improved weaponry.
The STU-K5b Royal version of the Stuka (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Stuka) aerospace fighter isn't fast or manoverable but it's extraordinarily hard-hitting (especially if you switch out the four ERPPC's for eERPPC's). The Blood Rain mechs that made it off the ridge are only lucky the Stuka's weren't carrying a wing-load of Inferno Bombs (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Inferno_Bomb) because they had been fighting Vulcan's earlier (and you don't carry Inferno Bombs into a dogfight).
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Glad to see things went as they should with properly applied artillery... ;)
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The Blood Rains did not enjoy fighting in the Shade
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Boom boom boom!
https://youtu.be/nUUyFrHERpU?si=ca9_VDBqZEGJd6Rn
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two things. Steel Rain!!! some good salvage might be had.
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That was a well written battle!
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As a person who brought 1700 points of artillery in a 3000 point game of Epic 40k I approve of this strategy! :D
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As well as messing with Arrow IV homing missiles and Artemis IV (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Artemis_IV_FCS) fire-control systems Guardian ECM (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Guardian_ECM_Suite) also stops NARC (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Narc_Missile_Beacon) beacons working (and AMS (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Anti-missile_system) can shoot down incoming NARC beacons anyway) otherwise the Imprived LRM launchers of the SLDF here would have utterly pulverised the Blood Rain (Improved LRM systems only way half as much so you can carry far more of them).
As far as I know, ECM doesn't affect Arrow IV homing missiles? It doesn't interfere with TAG as far as I can tell, and I don't see anything in the homing missile rules that it would care about.
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Part XV - Section 1 of 2
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"My opponent asks of my campaign promises during this election, 'Where's the beef?', saying that they're vague and insubstantial. To that I say, the beef is on the plate of everyone on Niops that wants it because I was the one that ensured the Cameron Star flew over Francas again. With Giles Olson you get a proven record of action."
Re-election Campaign Speech by High Associator Giles Olson - 2835 CE
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SLDF Headquarters – Niops VII – 2829
Stefani Marcus had never been handcuffed and chained to a piece of furniture before. She had certainly ordered other people to be put in chains on many an occasion, albeit for entirely practical reasons to stop the forced labour from escaping, but now the shoe was on the other foot she couldn't for the life of her understand why some people supposedly enjoyed this sort of thing. For a start the handcuffs chafed at her wrists, you couldn't scratch your back when it itched, and it was just so damn inconvenient not being able to get up and stretch your legs when you needed to.
The breakfast served earlier in her cell had been bread and water, such a classic, and while it had been enough to stop her stomach rumbling she would kill for a cup of coffee, literally. The orange jumpsuit she had on just wasn't her colour and they had taken her jewellery, including her wristwatch despite her protestations it wasn't pirate booty like the rest of it. After voicing some surprise she still wore them they did at least let her keep her Rim Worlds Republic Army dogtags, which provided some small hope they might treat her as a POW not a pirate, and they addressed her as 'Major Marcus' once she told them that despite it stating her rank as captain on her tags she had in fact been accorded the status of a brevet major before the 141st decided that the war was lost.
Trying to get them to take her more recent title of 'Pirate Queen of the Blood Rain' seriously was an excise in futility and had only prompted a response that if she was a queen then they might have to construct a guillotine for her instead of a gallows.
Frankly anything would be better than getting flushed out of an airlock, so decapitation was fine with her when it came to methods of execution. Not that she actually expected a merciful beheading.
Thanks to the judicious use of some kind of drugs to render her comatose shortly after she was dragged out of the wreck of her Dragoon and identified as the one in charge, Marcus had no idea how long it had been since the battle on Algenib or where she was, only that she had woken up in a cell yesterday. They had obviously treated her injuries, and they weren't near to be fully healed yet including the more minor cuts and bruises, so it couldn't have been that long, or her present location that far away.
After being escorted from her cell to another room by a couple of hulking soldiers in SLDF uniform, presumably for interrogation, she had been sat chained to this damn table for a couple of hours now. The white-painted room was devoid of any furniture apart from the table and two chairs, the one she was sat on and the other across the table from her, and she was getting bored. "I'm going to need to visit the restroom at some point, just saying" she said loudly, knowing someone would be listening in. "I don't have the right plumbing for peeing accurately into a bucket if bringing one in was going to be your plan instead."
The door opened and an older woman with grey hair wearing civilian clothes entered, incongruously dabbing at herself with a towel as she walked in. "I believe you mechwarrior types have some other contraption for dealing with that issue in the cockpit" she remarked, smiling.
"The men's version is a lot more comfortable to use from what I've been able to determine" Marcus replied. "Where are we and who are you?"
"Regarding where we are, you're in a facility belonging to the 11th Army of the SLDF, the closest we have near the Inner Sphere, it also happens to be the headquarters of the 295th Battlemech Division. As for myself, you can call me Gloria" the woman replied. "It's actually my real name because we're not in the least concerned about your escaping to tell anyone" she continued, still smiling as she draped the towel around her shoulders like a scarf and sat down. "Apologies if I drip any water onto the table, I've just been waterboarding your friend Critchly, hard to stay dry doing that unless you're being extremely half-hearted about it."
Marcus did not let any emotional reaction or response show on her face. "He's still alive then. Did he talk?" she asked, sounding only mildly interested as to whether he did or not.
"No" Gloria replied, shaking her head.
"I'm surprised, I've always thought he was a bit of a blow-hard who would fold under real pressure" Marcus responded, wishing she could cross her arms but the handcuffs and chain would have made that awkward.
Gloria chuckled. "Oh, he tried to talk but the damp cloth over his mouth made that very difficult" she said brightly. "I find it best to break them first before getting around to actually asking questions, saves an awful lot of trouble and effort when they know you're not bluffing" she explained her methodology. "Time was, during the war when we found out what you people were doing in the Hegemony and General Kerensky took the gloves off SLDF Intelligence, I would have worked on the man with a set of pliers and a blowtorch but alas our peacetime civilian administration is rather squeamish."
It was hardly a surprise that the woman was an intelligence spook of some description, they were usually unassuming and seemed innocuous and harmless in Marcus's experience, at least they did until they slit your throat or started pulling out your fingernails. "Aren't you a little long in the tooth to still be doing this kind of work?" Marcus queried. The woman looked like she had at least ten years on her, and if she was Terran born that could be more like forty or even fifty.
"Oh, I'm mostly retired My Dear, usually just a couple of days a week to teach classes in espionage and counterintelligence, though I do still find time to give the occasional lecture on interrogation techniques or advanced knife-fighting when they ask me nicely" Gloria explained. "A couple of my more gifted interns were in with me when I worked on your friend, it's so nice to get the chance to pass these skills on. A little like when I showed my granddaughter how to make a souffle last week" she continued then smiled once more. "Listen to me rambling on. You know in my youth I was quite taciturn but these days I'm positively loquacious. Comes with age I suppose" she continued with a sigh. "I've been told in confidence that I'm still quite terrifying so there's that" she added happily.
Stefani Marcus envisioned thumbscrews in her near future but shook off the mental image. "How many of my people did you take alive?" she asked. "What have you done with them?
"Not as many as we could have, quite a number chose suicide I'm told, the older ones in particular. Not unexpected given how war-criminals tend to be dealt with when justice eventually catches up with them" Gloria replied. "There are still more than enough in custody to make for an impressive sight if we impaled them all on wooden spikes in the vein of Vlad Dracul, or crucified them in a long line beside a roadway taking inspiration from a namesake of yours, Marcus Licinius Crassus I mean, but again I doubt our politicians would allow it" she said sadly. "Naturally your friend Critchly would have to be burned at the stake instead, it would be only fitting given his crimes against the Catholic Church don't you think?"
"You keep calling him my friend but he is absolutely not that" Stefani Marcus replied flatly. "He's my subordinate, one of my company commanders."
"I can say without hyperbole that he is one of the loathsome individuals to have ever lived" Gloria stated as a matter of fact. "I have literally garrotted or disembowelled people I thought of in more positive terms."
Marcus smiled herself, wrongly assuming that last part was hyperbole. "If you're expecting me to argue otherwise then you're talking to the wrong pirate" she responded. "His own people didn't even like him, the Legos's Lancers I mean, his body odour alone meant nobody wanted to be around the man."
"But you gave him a home and helped him escape Terra" Gloria pointed out.
"That was the decision of our commanding officer at the time, and only because Critchly bribed him with gold bars that were probably made from melted down crucifixes or something" Marcus replied. "He stuck with us and as a longstanding part of the band by the time I took over I couldn't just kick him out. It would make everyone else concerned that I might do the same to them" she explained. "It was merely a matter of expediency and reassurance that was necessary to maintain loyalty, although, to be fair, he is a surprisingly good mechwarrior and company commander and the man has a gift at making prisoners behave themselves."
Gloria smirked. "Interesting to hear loyalty being valued by a traitor" she observed sardonically.
"My loyalty was only ever to the Rim Worlds Republic not the Star League, which was basically just the Terran Hegemony wearing a fake moustache" Marcus spat back. "We were forced to join during the Reunification War, our people never wanted foreign overlords."
"I was actually referring to when the 141st Amaris Dragoons fled Terra before the war reached its conclusion, abandoning Stefan Amaris to his fate" Gloria replied wryly. "That he happened to be your own cousin as well doesn't exactly strike one as indicative of much fidelity on your part."
Marcus narrowed her eyes. "A rather distant cousin, we ran into each other in family gatherings exactly twice, once at a wedding and the other a funeral" she responded, ignoring the slight to her character. "I played tennis with his eldest daughter a few times when she visited our family estate though, lovely girl, very sweet natured, Aleksandr Kerensky had her executed along with every relative I had that was named Amaris."
"So he did" Gloria conceded, "not his finest hour perhaps. I believe the rest of House Marcus fled to the Outworlds Alliance just in case the SLDF decided to get rid of them too" Gloria noted. "Did you run across any of them while you were raiding systems there a few years ago? A nice family reunion to go along with the piracy and murder."
Marcus smirked. "No, but I wouldn't have minded meeting my cousin Arthur, he used to pull my pigtails when I was a little girl. It would have been fun to have a few of my people give him a thrashing."
"Interesting that you don't deny, or even seem to regret, preying upon the people of the periphery yourself despite complaining about the Star League's actions against the periphery realms during the Reunification War" Gloria observed. "It wasn't just the Outworlds Alliance either, you've also raided worlds in the Magistracy of Canopus and the Taurian Concordat who were surely just as much victims of the supposed rapacity of the Star League as your own nation was."
"Maybe I think they should have fought back harder" Marcus suggested.
"I'm sure the Taurian Concordat thought that about the Rim Worlds Republic, your people folded much faster and accepted the supremacy of the Star League far more easily than they did" Gloria countered.
"But which one of us later burned half the Terran Hegemony and rid the galaxy of House Cameron?" Marcus asked rhetorically. "And since you mentioned the Concordat and the Alliance, and still presumably think that I should be held accountable for any 'war-crimes' I may have committed in the past, you people would have better standing if a certain General Amos Forlough had been punished for what he did to beat them, instead of lauded for bringing them to heel" she contended. "I've heard it said before that the Amaris Dragoons treated the articles of the Ares Conventions like a to-do list but it's not like we set the precedent there. You might bitch about Critchly and his people using nerve gas against the SLDF in Italy, or regiments of the Amaris Dragoons deploying bioweapons against our opponents when they were stubborn, but Forlough used both against the Taurian military two hundred years earlier and you people put up a statue of the bastard. How does it go, he who is without sin shall cast the first stone, right?" she asked rhetorically.
"Touché" Gloria responded looking thoughtful. "Alright, you've convinced me. After we execute you we'll dig up Forlough's corpse and try him for war-crimes too. Does that sound fair?"
"Works for me" Marcus responded placidly. "I suppose my own trial is a foregone conclusion?"
"Oh, you'd be surprised at how many of your people offered to testify against you in order to save their own necks, or in some cases just seeking to have their families spared our wrath" Gloria remarked, leaning back in her chair to make herself more comfortable. "Not to mention all those poor souls from Comstock and elsewhere that you kept in bondage. They're not your greatest fans to put it mildly."
Marcus laughed. "Unless the number of my people that offered to testify against me is less than a quarter of them I most assuredly would not be surprised, believe me. It's not the old days, we've been progressively more pirate than professional soldiers since the turn of the century" she told her interrogator. "I must say, I'm enjoying your efforts to build up a rapport before getting to the point. What is it that you want to know anyway?" she asked. "Hoping for useful intelligence of some description or merely gathering information to throw at me during my show trial?"
"A little of column A, a little of column B" Gloria replied. "One of your jumpship captains already told us the location of your old bolt-hole in the Perseus-Cepherus Cloud Complex, but it seems like you stripped that of anything useful years ago. He also mentioned another facility he knew of, Rim Worlds Republic Outpost 11, but that's so far away we may not bother with it" she continued. "We are curious about where your former colleagues in the 141st retired to when they gave up the pirate life, and there was mention of another outpost that you may be aware of that's a lot closer to home."
"If you mean Outpost 25 I've never been there, I just heard about it from the Colonel who had never been there either. He just knew the officer assigned to run the place from attending the Military Academy together, and from him that it was supposedly a few jumps anti-spinward of Republic territory" Marcus told her. "I occasionally mentioned it to the troops because we never heard of anyone finding it, meaning there might be a few other Amaris loyalists still out there other than those weirdos that worship that overrated self-publicist Von Strang."
"Overrated?"
"Very. Our colonel always said that Von Strang's regiment, the 18th Amaris Chasseurs, were only fit for looting and terrorising civilians" Marcus replied. "I mean we did that too, I'm not denying it, but at least we took on and beat plenty of SLDF regulars in our time as well."
"I see" Gloria responded, pursing her lips. "And the name of the commanding officer of Outpost 25 was…"
"General Ephram Offenbach, if memory serves" Marcus told her. "You can try torturing me for the outpost's location, or pumping me full of truth drugs, but you'd only be wasting your time because if we knew where it was we'd have gone there years ago looking for new recruits when the Old Guard started to age out" she said then paused. "You're going to go with the 'enhanced interrogation techniques' later anyway right?"
"Not my decision" Gloria replied, "although I will advise we do so."
Marcus blinked. "That's… refreshingly honest of you."
"Although a gifted liar I often find that being brutally honest pays dividends" Gloria replied, the latest appearance of her rather warm and disarming smile becoming increasingly disconcerting. "In that spirit I will reiterate that we really are the Star League Defence Force, just as the general told you we were on Algenib."
"And she's the real Jenna Romanov" Marcus said, shaking her head. "Which would make sense given that she sounded like she genuinely wanted to know who Raymond's Redcoats really were."
"It's a sore point with her, as I'm sure you'll understand" Gloria explained. "Care to spill the beans?"
Marcus laughed ironically. "Would that get me spared execution?"
"I'd be lying if I said yes, but the more cooperation we get I suspect the more the bleeding hearts in government are likely to commute it to life imprisonment, no guarantees of course" Gloria replied. "General Romanov herself suggested we offer to hang you as a pirate instead of as a war-criminal if you told us."
"How is that any better?"
"Pirates get the long drop and the sudden stop. War criminals just dangle there until they asphyxiate" Gloria explained. "It's quite a fascinating procedure really, the long drop I mean, they weigh you and measure the circumference of your neck to determine how far you need to drop to break it. Drop you too far and it might rip your head off, so there's less margin for error than you might think."
"You must be a lot of fun at parties" Marcus wryly observed.
"We can't all regale the crowd with entertaining tales of how we put someone's town to the torch, stole all their goods and abducted their daughters into sexual slavery" Gloria replied flatly.
Marcus looked her in the eyes. "For the record, sometimes I abducted their sons into sexual slavery too, I'll not have it said that I discriminate based on gender, or worse that I'm a self-hating misogynist."
"I do find your own candour refreshing as well, I'll give you that" Gloria admitted, truthfully. "I can see why you ended up leading your little band of cutthroats and thieves."
"They do say that the cream always rises to the top" Marcus observed.
Gloria snorted with derision. "In your case a better analogy would be the scum floating atop a river of sewage, but everyone is the hero of their own story I suppose."
"That's hurtful. I've got to ask, are you trying to play both the good cop and the bad cop here because it's an interesting combination of nice and nasty you've got going on?" Marcus inquired, genuinely interested.
"Oh, if I was being nasty you'd know it, believe me" Gloria told her sincerely. "I'm just trying to get a handle on your personality so far, it helps when figuring out what buttons to push when I get around to asking questions properly."
"Properly? By which you mean when I'm the one with the damp cloth over my face or the truth drugs being injected into my arm" Marcus surmised.
"Obviously" Gloria confirmed. "Regarding the truth drugs, by any chance are you frightened of needles?" she asked.
"No" Marcus replied, shaking her head.
"Pity, I'll just have to use a blunt one so that you are for the follow-up sessions" Gloria said sadly. "So much easier if the subject is under stress before the drugs hit their system, plays havoc with their resolve not to answer the questions."
"Can I ask a favour?" Marcus requested. "When you waterboard me maybe you could apply some shampoo and conditioner to my hair, it's not usually this lifeless" he said, projecting more bravado than she currently felt.
Gloria shook her head. "Oh, we'll be shaving all of that off presently, but I do admire your poise" she said admiringly.
Stefani Marcus considered her situation. "Raymond's Redcoats used to be the pirate band Cameron's Curse" she suddenly announced. "Before that they were the Thirty-eighth Amaris Fusiliers" she said. "Please ask your superiors to take into account that I told you that when they're deciding what to do with me and my band."
"Oh my!" Gloria exclaimed. "I'm sure General Romanov will be positively livid to hear that the people pretending to be her people used to be your people" she said, shaking her head sadly. "I might have to delay full retirement for a few more years because I'm sure she'll want to have a full and frank discussion with them regarding the matter" she rightly supposed. "Giving them up like that isn't a good look for you though, although there being no honour among thieves, pirates and war-criminals is hardly a shock."
"I wouldn't have given up any of my own" Marcus responded before pausing. "Maybe not even Critchly."
"We'll see if that's true when we have a meaningful conversation as to where your retired personnel may have headed off to once age set in and piracy lost its appeal."
"I guess we will. You can also tell the people in charge that I'm happy to make a public confession, and personally accept responsibility for the actions of those under my command, in return for a formal undertaking not to have my people executed."
"How noble."
Stefani Marcus straightened her stance as much as she could. "I may be an evil bitch in your eyes but I'm damned if I'll go out like a whiny one" she declared, deciding that she owed it to herself to die like a good leader and an Amaris Dragoon should.
Gloria clapped her hands together a few times in mocking applause. "We'll see" she said. "Now if you'll wait here, I'll go ask permission to work you over properly. Don't worry, I'll make sure a doctor confirms you're healthy enough to proceed. I wouldn't want you to suffer a stroke or a cardiac arrest before I'm sure you've told us everything you know."
"Very considerate of you."
"Mere professionalism on my part I assure you" Gloria replied, standing up, turning around and heading towards the door. "If you want to get anything else off your chest that you think might demonstrate a degree of cooperation deserving of mercy, just say it out loud while I'm gone. Everything is being recorded."
"Before you go" Marcus spoke up again. "The curiosity is killing me, how is the 295th back? Did they catch up with Kerensky? Is he leading the whole SLDF back to the Inner Sphere?"
Gloria stopped at the doorway and laughed. "The 295th never really left you silly goose, we just pretended to be chasing after the rest of them and doubled-back" she replied, trying out the cover-story Niops was planning to use once the presence of the SLDF there went public. Did you really think that Amaris was the only one with hidden outposts and supply dumps?" she asked rhetorically. "We spent decades building up our forces to the point that we didn't have to worry about the degraded militaries of the Successor States doing to us what they did to the rest of the Terran Hegemony."
"The rest of the Terran Hegemony?" Stefani Marcus repeated quizzically, raising her eyebrows.
"Rumours of our destruction have been grossly exaggerated, although I will say our self-imposed isolation was abruptly curtailed by you blundering into our part of space. We couldn't have lived with ourselves if we didn't put a boot up your ass when the opportunity presented itself."
Marcus smirked. "Nice to hear that we've been living rent-free in your heads all these years."
"Rent free? Oh no. You've just built up arrears and it was nigh time to collect" Gloria told her, opening the door and walking out, closing the door again behind her as she acknowledged the guards outside in the corridor with a nod.
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Part XV - Section 2 of 2
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Striding off down the corridor Gloria passed the first couple of rooms by before knocking on the door of the third and entering when bade to do so. "Generals" she greeted Jenna Romanov and Franklin Hallis who were sat at a table there drinking coffee as they watched a large screen showing the video feed from the interrogation room. "I assume you were listening in?" she checked.
"We were, Gloria" Hallis confirmed, "And may I say that you were as disconcerting as ever" he added.
"Why Khan Hallis, I may blush" Gloria replied, choosing to take that as a complement. "If I may be so bold as to ask, General Romanov, what were your first thoughts as regards the revelation as to the real origins of Raymond's Redcoats?"
"That I can understand why they preferred to pretend to be someone else" Jenna Romanov replied. "Not that I've heard of a pirate group calling themselves 'Cameron's Curse' before, likely because none of us were anywhere near the Inner Sphere when they were still calling themselves that."
"The name says a lot though" Hallis observed.
"Doesn't it just" Romanov concurred. "I'm not that familiar with the 38th Amaris Fusiliers either to be honest."
"Unless my memory is failing me they were stationed on Castor and devastated the planet with nuclear weapons as part of Amaris's plan to delay the SLDF's offensive towards Terra" Gloria recalled. "Then they went missing with most of their equipment and personnel still intact, which is why I know about them" she explained. "Shortly after we won the war Star League Intelligence became concerned that units like theirs might re-form in the periphery and give it another try, so we were instructed to keep a special eye out for them just in case. Since the pirate queen down the corridor seems to know all about them I'm now wondering if they did make contact with each other and I'll have to make sure to find out during our next session."
Hallis nodded. "Seems from the name they chose to call themselves as pirates that they definitely still held a grudge" he surmised. "I mean 'Cameron's Curse' isn't exactly subtle."
Romanov rolled her eyes at the name. "Raymond's Redcoats appeared in about 2803, I've been studying their career with interest for obvious reasons but before then there was nothing to go on" she said. "I guess they got tired of the pirate life after twenty-five years, but they were smart enough not to revert to their old name when they adopted the mercenary lifestyle instead" she said.
"Former employer, Rim Worlds Republic Military. Job description, Professional War Criminals. For employment references please contact the frozen corpse of Stefan Amaris, care of the University of New Samarkand" Gloria said drily. "Not exactly the ideal thing to have on your résumé when applying for work."
"Not within the Inner Sphere but it might get you a second interview in the Tortuga Dominions" Hallis quipped. "I'm sorry to tell you this Gloria but we've still not heard back from the High Associator as to his decision on how to proceed with Marcus. Getting the okay to work over Critchly was easy enough, he's infamous to the point of being practically a household name, but Olson isn't convinced that her own history necessarily warrants a no-holes-barred approach."
"It's not like he's going to pardon the bitch, and if the courts pass a death sentence he'll be fine with that he says, Olson's just not used to signing off on your kind of specialist treatment of prisoners" Romanov explained. "Critchly notwithstanding of course, because we all want to make sure that if he knows the location of any other former members of the Greenhaven Gestapo that information is quietly passed on to the Catholic Church."
"Which one?" Gloria queried.
"Both, I'd wager that the Pope in Rome and the other one on New Avalon are in full agreement on this, if not necessarily much else" Hallis replied. "If we ever decide to turn over Critchly himself, or more likely his remains one day, we'll let them both make a case for who wants him more."
"Half each? Judgement of Solomon style?" Romanov suggested. "Anyhow, we don't need to hang around here so if you want to head home for now we'll call you when we need you" she told Gloria.
"The day after tomorrow is my daughter's birthday so if you need me then it'll have to be in the morning, I need to bake her a cake in the afternoon" Gloria warned.
Hallis blinked, the woman's ability to emotionally compartmentalize the different parts of her life was almost as disturbing as some of her anecdotes, and her anecdotes were unsettling to a major degree. "We'll try and work around your schedule" he replied.
"Very considerate of you. Now if there's nothing else I really should be going, I might still be able to get to the diner to help out with the lunchtime rush. It's been terribly busy since we made contact with Francas and arranged regular shipments of more affordable beef" she noted.
"Best burgers in town by far" Hallis stated with conviction. "Frederick says that all the kits, sorry I mean 'kids' from his new school hang out there."
"It took a little time for word-of-mouth to spread but we're certainly not short of customers these days" Gloria replied. "You should try our new 'Juicy Lucy' stuffed cheeseburger, they come from Minnesota on Terra you know" she told him. "Good day General Romanov, General Hallis. I'll await your call" she said before heading off.
Romanov waited until Gloria was gone and had closed the door behind her before giving Hallis a wry look. "Are you sure her husband was killed when your city on Circe was nuked? She didn't just eat him after mating the first time?" she suggested sardonically.
"I remember meeting him in the family diner they had in Great Hope, and a couple of their kids worked there too, so I'm pretty sure" Hallis replied. "You really should try their food if you haven't already" he advised.
"The days when I could eat fatty junk loaded with cholesterol and still fit into my cooling suit are long gone" Romanov told him. "You're spending more time with your son now?"
"Frederick is not technically my son" Hallis pointed out. "I just had to sign paperwork taking parental responsibility because social services had issues with the legal situation regarding sibling companies and I was his closest relative. Genetically speaking."
Romanov gave him a look. "Right, if he was only your son he wouldn't be as closely related to you as he is" she remarked. She still remembered the first time she met Frederick, the boy had escaped the clan homeworlds on Yukon along with the rest of his sibling-company, and he looked like his genetic donor to the point you would think someone had taken Franklin Hallis and de-aged him somehow.
"He's not a clone, he's just…" Hallis momentarily struggled for the right phrase, "…clone adjacent" he said eventually. "Trish has taken responsibility for Jennifer, Khan McEvedy's sort-of daughter now, which got me off the hook fortunately."
"How does Barbara feel about it all anyway?" Romanov asked.
"I'm only glad she has enough of a sense of humour to find what happened the first time she met Frederick really funny" Hallis replied. "He looked at her, said 'You're pretty', turned to me saying 'Nice work Dad' before asking Barb if she had a younger sister his age."
Romanov smiled. "He's what, twelve now?"
"Nearly thirteen, one of the first to come out of the Iron Wombs. There weren't that many in the first couple of generations, they didn't get the technology working smoothly until 2819 and it was like a production line after that" Hallis told her. "The elementary schools are supposed to be having trouble coping with all the kits aged between six and ten being foisted on them now."
"Eh, they coped before when the Capellan's turned up I'm sure" Romanov replied. "We still need to talk about Francas and Comstock, it's fifty-fifty whether we're going to have to deploy garrison troops, the politicians can't agree but legally they're our problem and responsibility."
"They were Terran Hegemony colonies, albeit ones located in the periphery, and they haven't been claimed by any foreign power since" Hallis responded. "As I see it, our position is that the High Associator is, by default, Director-General of the Terran Hegemony so on that basis they're our legal and moral responsibility" he said. "They're not like Alphard, an informal protectorate because it's in our interests for it to be so, the people on Comstock and Francas are Hegemony citizens that are bound by Hegemony law but they're also entitled to our assistance and protection as a result."
"What if they don't see it that way?"
"I just can't see anyone there kicking up a fuss if we tell them we're going to defend them against pirates and, oh yeah, drastically improve their standard of living over the next few years" Hallis maintained. "Hell, outside the Alliance Core most Hegemony worlds were largely self-governing anyway, let them run their internal affairs if they want to, I don't want to occupy and oppress anyone and it's not like the Hegemony political structure and constitution was ever hideously tyrannical like the old Terran Alliance was."
"True enough" Romanov agreed. It had had actually been the military that had overthrown the government of the old Terran Alliance way back in the 24th Century. Under the leadership of Admiral James McKenna it's successor state, the Terran Hegemony, was established with a more stable system that was considerably more democratic and gave it's colonies far more autonomy. "We're still dealing with an awful lot of Niops Association Council members that aren't happy with how much we're already veering away from isolationism though."
Hallis snorted. "If I know Olson he's savvy enough to have the press interview the poor bastards we rescued from the Blood Rain on Algenib, and point out that the ones from Comstock were Hegemony citizens just like the people here. The 'Manifest Destiny' and 'Guardians of Civilisation' stuff makes for great electioneering."
Romanov frowned. "You don't think he really means it?" she asked.
"It's more the case that the messianic quality reminds me of Old Nick, but honestly I think Olson is just being a clever politician and his hearts in the right place" Hallis replied. "I hope he spends enough time today working on that speech he's giving at the funerals tomorrow."
"I made sure to tell him to go mournful and not bombastic despite our victory" Romanov replied. "We didn't lose as many people as we might have if things had gone badly, but every soldier we're laying to rest tomorrow is still a personal tragedy to their friends and loved ones. He'll have our victory parade next week if he wants to sound triumphalist" she said. "The honour guards are looking slick, they're drilling hard to make sure everything goes properly."
"Does Olson still want us to march what's left of the Blood Rain through town in chains as part of the Victory Parade?" Hallis checked.
Romanov nodded. "He thinks it'll go down well with the masses."
"Seems tacky to me but he's in charge I guess" Hallis replied with a shrug. "What are you going to do about 'Raymond's Redcoats'?"
Jenna Romanov narrowed her eyes. "Let me put it this way. We might get some more use out of those chains" she said coldly.
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Note from the Author:
Comstock (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Comstock) and Francas were Terran Hegemony colonies established in the periphery between what would have been the Marian Hegemony and the Magistracy of Canopus. They are both mentioned in the Periphery Sourcebook (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/The_Periphery_(sourcebook)) as being established to help provide logistical support to the SLDF (Francas was all grassland and open plains ideal for ranching, leather from there was shipped to Comstock for making boots). Both worlds fell on very bad times when the Star League collapsed, Comstock eventually became a pirate base.
The return of (semi) retired Star league Intelligence operative, and small business owner, Gloria who we last saw back in Part VII. She has a skill-set that makes her valuable for certain kinds of work (and people find greatly disconcerting). At some point the recon ships from Niops were bound to run across Francas (it's really not that far away in astronomical terms) and start importing meat from there (as a burger variant from Minnesota the Juicy Lucy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jucy_Lucy) is popular with the 331st, Gloria's new family diner sells a lot of them).
Thanks originally to a garbled communication there are actually two Roman Catholic Churches by this point in battletech history, the Roman Roman Catholic Church (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Roman_Catholic_Church) and the New Avalon Catholic Church (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/New_Avalon_Catholic_Church). They argue with each other a lot, but they do however agree on the subject of Bernard Critchly.
The clans started using Iron Wombs (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Iron_Womb) in 2816, improving the technology quite a bit by 2819 and then incrementally improving them further over the years. Twelve year-old Frederick Hallis of Sibling Company Gamma was made using DNA from Franklin Hallis (he's not a true clone though). The sibko system and Niops Association Social Services were bound to come to an impasse eventually, Franklin had to formally adopt Frederick (he's still mostly raised by the sibko system) and the kits from the Iron Wombs now have to attend regular school... which can only go smoothly surely?
The Terran Hegemony (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Terran_Hegemony) wasn't like the old Terran Alliance (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Terran_Alliance) (or most Successor States for that matter) in that its colonies were allowed to mostly govern themselves, at least internally. Using that precedent if Niops decided to absorb Comstock and Francas, they are Terran Hegemony citizens after all, it doesn't mean they lose all their autonomy. Terran Hegemony worlds often kept their own (well trained and equipped) armies for example, some of them putting up a hell of a fight against the Successor States after the SLDF left.
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Now I'm hungry! ;D
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I reckon old hatreds are not a reason enough to go through all the trouble to get a shot on Raymond's Redcoats, they are simply too far away.
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i just wonder what they will do with the salvage. i might want to trade it to someone in the Inner Sphere.... a few parts at a time.
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As a person who brought 1700 points of artillery in a 3000 point game of Epic 40k I approve of this strategy! :D
Evil I love it :drinking01:
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Marcus smirked. "Nice to hear that we've been living rent-free in your heads all these years."
"Rent free? Oh no. You've just built up arrears and it was nigh time to collect" Gloria told her, opening the door and walking out, closing the door again behind her as she acknowledged the guards outside in the corridor with a nod.
I don't know why, but those lines brought a smirk to my face. Yes I am enjoying this fic, a lot.
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"Not within the Inner Sphere but it might get you a second interview in the Tortuga Dominions" Hallis quipped. "I'm sorry to tell you this Gloria but we've still not heard back from the High Associator as to his decision on how to proceed with Marcus. Getting the okay to work over Critchly was easy enough, he's infamous to the point of being practically a household name, but Olson isn't convinced that her own history necessarily warrants a no-holes-barred approach."
Freudian slip, or an intentional turn of the phrase?
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Freudian slip, or an intentional turn of the phrase?
Intentional and justified by changes in the English language by the 29th Century.
(I wouldn't have used it if the interrogator, and the officer commanding, hadn't been female though).
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Part XVI - Section 1 of 2
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"If we keep this rate of expansion up then one day soon the rulers of the Successor States are going to look at a map of the Inner Sphere feeling very puzzled. All of them wondering where the hell that great blob of systems coloured orange on the map, a whole new interstellar nation sitting between the Free Worlds League, the Magistracy and the Palatinate, suddenly came from and then they're going to bawl out their intelligence agencies."
Admiral Jacob Bremman - 2840 CE
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Robert H Goddard Spaceport (Niops VII) - Niops Association – 2829
With so much more traffic to cope with the spaceport had been expanded drastically over the previous two years, not only in terms of landing pads but also additional warehousing, hangers for aerospace fighters and a large concrete office block that now housed Fleet Headquarters.
Admiral Bremman had chosen an office for himself on the top floor, one that overlooked most of the spaceport. Although, apart from his chair, the furniture and decor was utilitarian in the extreme, and the rushed nature of the construction showed in the build quality, he was becoming quite fond of the place. He even enjoyed the way the windows rattled in their frames whenever a dropship took off, it gave the place character he felt. On the other hand though if the large viewscreen mounted on the wall opposite the windows ever did fall off its bracket, like it constantly threatened to, he would have somebody shot.
The viewscreen was currently showing a live projection of the Niops system. It was telling as to just how small the system really was that you could just about visually detect the planets closest to the star moving in their orbits on the screen. An orbital year on Niops I was only a day and a half long in Terran measurement, which almost made the eighteen-day-long years here on Niops VII seem almost reasonable.
"That's a Mule heading out for the asteroid belt to deliver supplies to the fleet and bring back metal ore" Bremman announced from his chair, not even looking up from the noteputer on the desk in front of him as behind him a huge cargo dropship could be seen lifting off atop a column of fire.
"You know all the launch schedules?" Trish Ebon asked, surprised. She had recently been assigned the job of liaison between the government and the military, in part because General Romanov was stumped at what to do with a 'saKhan' otherwise, and she had just arrived at the spaceport to come see him via the passenger VTOL that now ran hourly between there and the capital. The VTOL ride had been shakier than Bremman's windows, but not by as much as she thought was appropriate for a building rather than a rotorcraft.
Her chair sucked too. Bremman's looked far more comfortable, in fact it looked like he had requisitioned it from some spaceship with a grav deck. Probably a Star Lord, they were pretty luxurious for a transport jumpship which was why crews competed for a spot on one.
"It's the only thing that large heading up this morning and nothing less than ten thousand tons in mass feels like that" Bremman told her as the sound of the dropship faded away into the distance. "Is Olson kidding about this?" he asked, looking up from the screen on his portable computer. Ebon had come bearing gifts, or rather instructions from the High Associator.
"Neg" Trish responded. "I mean negative, or nope. Pretend I said nope" she corrected her phrasing. "Amazing how that still slips out sometimes."
Bremman smiled. "I think a lot of us found it easier to get used to using contractions in speech again than it was to give up on state-mandated abbreviations" he wryly observed. "I called one of my junior officers a 'Ristar' instead of a rising star in a performance evaluation last week" he told her. "He does know that this will mean we can't mothball a couple of the Star Lords as well as all the Monoliths, right?" he checked. "We might even need to keep the one we took off the damn pirates in service too if he wants to maintain an effective military presence out as far as Algenib" he continued. "It's not just the number of commitments, it's the need to rotate the ships through a maintenance cycle."
"I thought you'd be pleased at not having to downsize the fleet so much?" Trish queried, seeming a little puzzled by his unenthusiastic reaction to the news.
"Just so long as it doesn't come off the budget I've been allocated to maintain some of our warships in a operational state I'm fine with it, and we'll have a few older crewmen that were facing compulsory retirement that'll be ecstatic, but I'm frankly surprised at Olson's decision given that we haven't started selling off the jackpot we hit on Alphard yet" Bremman replied. "I know it looks like the Inner Sphere is about to start tearing itself apart again but until they do, and everyone's too busy killing each other to notice some pissant, obscure periphery nation making suspiciously large purchases and paying for it all with germanium, we're way overstretched trying to do what we're already doing" he said. "Those retired crewmen would have probably ended up doing zero-gee construction work, they're all EVA qualified and the navy pension isn't exactly great."
"Can't say I necessarily disagree, but I give it less than a year before those idiots on Tharkad, Atreus and the rest have another go at it myself" Trish opined. "They've had time to lick their wounds and put their militaries mostly back together by now. We wouldn't have seen the Capellan attack on the Federated Suns last year trying to reclaim the Chesterton Commonality otherwise. That was multiple regiments slugging it out over the ownership of several systems, not just a raid or skirmish. Honestly, I'm kinda surprised it didn't trigger an all-out war, but I guess the FedSuns are still too worried about the Dracs to hit back against the Cappies hard."
"Given that the Dracs never really stopped attacking their neighbours despite everyone saying the war ended back in '21 can you blame them?" Bremman asked rhetorically. "They might have resorted to gathering up convicts, putting them in old mechs and throwing them at the Davions and the Steiners because their line regiments weren't in a fit state to keep fighting themselves, but you can't really call that peace, just war on a restricted budget."
"Restricted budgets everywhere I guess" Trish responded smiling. "Did you know the Tsarina put me on the committee deciding what we want to import and making long-term future economic and industrial projections. I'm the token military representative" she told him. "I mostly got stuck dealing with everything that got put in the suggestion box because I'm the only one on there without at least two doctorates."
"Anything good in there? The suggestion box I mean" Bremman asked.
Trish grinned. "That whack-job Farnstrom asked for a million bucks worth of capacitors and a fusion generator so I guess he's having another go at building his own naval laser" she told him.
"Again? After they took away the last one he tried to put together?" Bremman asked incredulously. The story had been front-page news a few months before. A newspaper, the Niops Sun, even printing a cartoon with a caricature of the professor complaining about what the galaxy was coming to when a mad scientist couldn't build his own death-ray without 'The Man' interfering.
"Yep. And when we told him no straight-away he put in the request again under a false name" Trish confirmed. "I don't know if he thinks we're idiots or he's losing what's left of his marbles" she added, rolling her eyes. "There was an interesting suggestion and sensible from a NAM officer though. He says that eventually we'll need more battlemechs for garrison duty and he thought we should go for the Blackjack and explained why he thought so."
"I thought that thing was a piece of crap?" Bremman queried, confused.
"It's a lot better than most people think, but it's actually that lousy reputation that works for us here" Trish replied. "The factory that made the things on Kathil was destroyed back in '96, and because everyone thought it was ****** awful nobody has ever bought the rights from General Motors to make the things themselves. We might be able to get the license, blueprints and maybe even the full technical package from GM for next to nothing."
"I assume there's more to this than saving money, judging from your expression" Bremman correctly surmised.
"Oh, it's genius" Trish enthused. "If we use an endo-steel chassis we can swap out the AC/2 peashooters for Improved AC/5's which helps the firepower a lot, even before a change to ferro-fibrous armour makes it a bit tougher and double heat sinks lets you use all the lasers as much as you like without overheating" she said. "Taken together with its rep It'll be badly underestimated by anyone that decides to try and hit one of our colonies, which is good for us tactically, but more importantly it'll also hopefully mean we're underestimated strategically by the Successor States too."
"Because if we're relying on supposedly crappy mechs like the Blackjack to protect ourselves how strong can we really be?" Bremman followed through her chain-of-thought. "it'll also make them wonder how much money we have if we went for a cheap licensing deal."
"Yeah" Trish confirmed, nodding. "We can do something similar with the Hussar light. They've got a reputation of having tinfoil for armour, because most people don't know just how much better protected the Royal version of the machine is, but even the better informed won't have a clue about our new model Extended-Range Large Laser giving it the ability to hit without being hit back."
"They finally got it to work?"
"It's still not ready for mass production yet but it won't be long. The Nova Cats had a prototype working before Klondike so it's taken us a few years to catch up, okay a full decade more or less, but we're just about there. We'll definitely have it ready before we're able to put the Hussar into production anyhow."
"Remember that the navy is going to want those too, so don't think you ground-pounders are going to get to monopolise the production run" Bremman told her flatly. "I've already complained to General Romanov that we're not getting our fair share of the Enhanced ERPPCs coming off the line."
Trish was about to disagree with that notion when the windows started to rattle again, albeit a little less than when the Mule had lifted off earlier. "That should be an Overlord bringing back the latest cargo of salvage from Algenib" Bremman told her. "Hopefully we'll be able to abandon the Command Circuit and bring back all our ships soon."
"Your engineers managed to get that Royalty Class jumpship running again yet?" Trish asked out of curiosity.
"Not since the last time I checked. Rickenbacker had to fill her full of holes before she struck her colours" Bremman replied. "Her jumpcore didn't take a hit, so she is repairable, but even once they get her working well enough to get her back here that Royalty is going to need a long time in the yard before she'll be all that useful. Her armament is mostly a memory, and half her armour needs replacing, and without those a Royalty is just a second-rate Star Lord."
"The yard we don't even have yet you mean" Trish noted.
"True. Even when Thunderer and Rawhide get back with what they could strip from Camelot it's not just a 'some assembly required' scenario, we'll still need to build an orbital structure over Elizabeth to house the yard" Bremman said glumly. "We've nearly got the orbital forge operational now at least, and the flow of asteroidal metals to feed the thing is ramping up, but a yard isn't even in the top five of priorities for my zero-gee construction crews."
"Still going with the recharge stations first?"
"Yes, but after the zenith station is put together here the next one is going to be at AJC before we place one at Alphard according to the latest plan" Bremman told her.
Trish looked confused. "AJC?" she queried.
Bremman grinned. "You haven't heard yet? It's what they decided to call the system we're going to use to quick-charge ships travelling from Niops to Alphard" he explained. "There were a few candidates but we eventually picked an F7V star that's just within jump-range of Niops, so about two-thirds the way to Alphard. It didn't have as large an asteroid belt as the alternative choices, so it's not quite as good for mining operations as we would have wanted ideally, but from AJC you can get to Alphard, Stafford and Copernicus in one jump so it's more useful strategically."
"Why are we calling it 'AJC' though?"
"That's just the initials. It's actually 'Annie Jump Cannon' but AJC is quicker to say" Bremman explained. "She was a real person, a twentieth-century astronomer apparently. Face it, we have a government that is going to name every system they can after an astronomer or astrophysicist."
"So you're telling me we're seriously calling somewhere we'll be using for quick-charging Kearny-Fuchida jump drives to speed up deployments, 'A jump cannon'?" Trish asked him, nonplussed.
"It was that or call it Tycho Brahe and that's not funny at all" Bremman responded, grinning again. "Astronomers have a sense of humour, who knew?" he asked rhetorically. "On another matter, that Blackjack idea made me think. We're going to need more dropships at some point, not military ones those we've got more than we realistically need, I mean civilian cargo transporters" he continued. "If we could get a license and blueprints to produce the CargoKing from Federated-Boeing that would be ideal, and because they never managed to get anyone to order enough to warrant putting them into production it might not even be expensive."
"Is there something special about these things?"
"They were intended to replace the Mule, and probably would have if the Star League hadn't collapsed. They can carry more cargo and they're more automated, needing less crew to run during transit while the loading and unloading of cargo is handled by robotics" Bremman told her. "Unlike most everyone else these days we've still got the high-tech manufacturing needed to produce them, or we will when the production lines and dropship yard from Camelot arrives, what we don't have is a manpower surplus."
"So, basically the same reason we're looking to buy as many mining robots from Earthwerks as we possibly can, the committee was discussing that yesterday" Trish replied, nodding her understanding. "I'll run the CargoKing proposal past them, but they usually love technological solutions so I'd bet you'd get sign-off if you put in a written request."
Bremman smiled. "There was a military version of the dropship too, the CargoMaster, so if the price Federated-Boeing wants us to pay for the CargoKing plans is really low we might want to try and get those too" he advised. "We could even agree to not export either type if they're concerned that we might eventually eat into their existing market share of Inner Sphere dropship production."
"Oh, while we're on the subject of selling dropships I heard you want to off-load the ones we got from the pirates?" Trish asked suddenly.
"Our Overlords are better than the old Dictators they were using as battalion transports so if we kept them they'd just be gathering dust somewhere" Bremman replied. "The Magistracy might go for them, I'd bet they'd pay more for them than the Free Worlds League at least and I'd be less worried about the Magestrix ever using them to try and invade us than I would the Captain-General."
"If we told the Magistracy we took them off the Blood Rain after we kicked their ass that would probably go down well too, everyone in the periphery from Illyria to Alpheratz hates those bastards" Trish reasoned. "Thinking about it that might be a really good way to introduce ourselves properly to the neighbours" she suggested, considering the diplomatic side of the equation. "We were probably going to try and strike a deal with Majesty Metals and Manufacturing for purchases of industrial plant and machinery anyway, low-tech heavy engineering stuff like rolling mills, so their government putting in a good word in our favour would be useful there. Good PR pays dividends."
"Those guys also produce a licensed copy of the Sabre if we're ever thinking about stationing a squadron or two of aerospace fighters at Alphard, or Comstock or wherever and want to keep our better machines back here" Bremman suggested. "They'd be good enough to keep pirates away and it wouldn't be hard to upgrade them later if we had to. The Royal Sabre was basically just a regular one with an XL engine, double-heat-sinks and six medium lasers instead of three. It's not practically a complete rebuild from the ground up like some of the Royal ASF's were."
Trish smiled. "What would we do with the old fusion engine we took out?"
"Hell if I know. Modify it for use in a ground vehicle instead and stick in a tank or something maybe?" Bremman suggested with a shrug. "I was just spitballing really. We've got more fighters than we need right now, but if we're going to start claiming systems then eventually we won't, and it would be easier to buy them from elsewhere than set up a production line. We've got the money and the tech, we just won't have the people to staff another factory complex anytime soon" he pointed out. "If we wanted a mix of light and medium fighters for a more balanced force we could see if the Free Worlds League will allow Andurien AeroTech to sell us the Stingray as well. It's a lot harder hitting than a Sabre, and pretty manoeuvrable in an atmosphere, but it's not that fast so we wouldn't just want those on their own."
"More your area of expertise than mine so I'll take you word for it" Trish replied. "Bringing the conversation back to why I'm here how quickly would you be able to have the forces in place needed to secure the systems the government wants made unofficial protectorates?" she asked. "Olson is going to ask me, and I'd like to be able to answer authoritatively."
"If he wants it done properly, ten to twelve weeks minimum and a free hand to transfer aerospace squadrons around, maybe including a couple from the NAM. The biggest source of delay is that all our Star Lords are still stuck in the Command Circuit to Algenib for now, with some of them several weeks away even if we recalled them early" Bremman told her. "I can deploy a couple of smaller jumpships to Comstock and Francas in the interim if he wants, stick an Overlord on each with a squadron of fighters and maybe a couple of companies of mechs loaded aboard, but the mechs are more your department."
"We'll have to run this all past Romanov and Hallis anyway, but I'm sure Olson will be pleased if we can do something quickly. Between you and me I think he's looking for something he can campaign on in the election next year" Trish confided. "The noble and mighty Niops Association defending our poor, benighted neighbours from those that would do them harm."
"And with the dynamic Giles Olson leading the charge for Truth, Justice and the Hegemony Way" Bremman responded with a chuckle. "If he plays up Comstock and Francas being Terran citizens that might actually work for him pretty well. The press coverage about the Algenib operation focused a lot on the rescued slaves from Comstock in particular."
"Easier to identify with people whose families emigrated to the periphery straight from Terra, Caph or Dieron I guess" Bremman supposed. "You know, given our manpower problem we could think about hiring from Comstock and Francas, assuming that the civilian leadership would find that more acceptable than signing up people from Alphard, for example."
"Franklin already had that same basic idea" Trish told him. "He thinks if we started out by recruiting, training and equipping a couple of infantry battalions to help them defend their own planets we could move on from there to asking for volunteers to serve other places."
Bremman looked thoughtful. "Thinking about it we could even do it all Roman Empire style. Garrison other periphery worlds with Terran Hegemony citizens from Comstock and Francas and give the grunts land on the planet they were guarding to settle on after they retire" he suggested. "I can't see many people from Niops wanting to relocate, we're going to have a higher standard of living here than anywhere else in our corner of the galaxy for the foreseeable future, but maybe that isn't the only way to make Alphard and the rest a bit more culturally Terran."
"Olson has the notion that once we eventually go public we might see an influx of immigrants from former Hegemony worlds looking to live under the Cameron Star again" Trish told him. "It might even happen if the next Succession War is remotely as bloody as the last one, and people go looking for somewhere safer to live out on the Rim where they only have to worry about pirates not thermonuclear exchanges and orbital bombardment."
"If it's remotely as bloody as the last one it might not just be refugees from the old Hegemony worlds that start turning up looking for a new home" Bremman responded. "According to our intelligence gathering there's maybe half-a-dozen inhabited systems nearby belonging to the Free Worlds League that won't survive much longer unless the Mariks start pumping in some serious money and resources, and they can't if they're spending everything they can on the military" he told her. "And that's just the ones within two jumps of here."
Trish frowned. "You know if a couple of million refugees from the League suddenly turn up at our doorstep uninvited, and if we're not going to just tell them to get lost, we'll have to try settling them somewhere."
"Several somewheres unless we want a world with a majority population of former Marik subjects" Bremman responded. "If that committee you're on is looking for suggestions then suggest they make contingency plans to deal with that scenario" he advised. "Just feeding them means we're going to need a lot more farm equipment."
"Even more tractors, combine-harvesters and agromechs for the list then I guess" Trish replied. "If we can still lay our hands on any agricultural robots we'll be reserving them for Niops" she said, noting that, as-ever, Admiral Bremman was thinking in the longer term. High Associator Olson thought very highly of Bremman, he had mentioned on a few occasions that the admiral had 'vision', though she also suspected that Bremman's ability to follow an academic conversation about astronomy was a factor there too. Naval officers just tended to know a lot more about types of stars and planetary orbits than ground-pounders did, and for good reason, it stopped them crashing into celestial objects.
"Yeah, we're definitely going to need them if that projected population growth I saw in the newspaper last week is accurate" Bremman responded, rolling his eyes as he remembered reading it incredulously over breakfast. "How many damn Iron Wombs did that journalist think we brought here with us anyway? A hundred thousand?"
"She must have. You know she'll be very disappointed when the first new batch of Ironborn decanted next year isn't even a hundred strong" Trish replied, laughing. There were plans to set up a production lines to make a lot more of the machines, but not for a while yet. As usual there was just something that was always a higher priority.
"Talking of Ironborn, how's McEvedy junior doing?"
"Jennifer's doing well. Handling going to school better than most of the rest her sibko fortunately."
"Sounds like McEvedy genes. Adapting to changing circumstances, not rigidly adhering to prior tradition and codes of conduct" Bremman observed, albeit only semi-seriously.
"I'm just waiting for the inevitable arguments with the principal when she breaks a rule that she thinks is stupid" Trish joked. "She'll persuade her class to secede and go start their own school somewhere else."
Bremman laughed. "Just make sure she keeps wearing her hair long, if she goes for a pixie cut like Khan McEvedy she'll freak everyone out. She already looks even more like her genetic donor than most of the cannister kids do."
"Just as long as she doesn't dye it blonde. Do you remember when Sarah did that, it looked terrible on her. I kept wanting to tell her so, but I was just some lowly Star Captain and didn't even have a blood-name yet" Trish recalled.
"I think Dwight told her eventually. It's the saKhan's prerogative to tell the Khan what they're doing wrong" Bremman replied. "Not usually about choice of hair colour but you're right, it didn't suit her at all" he agreed. Sarah McEvedy had been a tall, striking woman with piercing eyes and having blonde hair had detracted from that somehow.
"Franklin thinks I abuse that privilege" Trish confided, smirking. "What can I say, it's funny to yank his chain, especially when he's in that 'I have to live up to the standards Sarah would have expected of me' mood he gets into sometimes when he's being dour and introspective. She was never that damn formal or intransigent, and Dwight was downright amiable, so I say Wolverine Khans and saKhans shouldn't have a stick up their ass, it's just not who we are."
Bremman nodded. He had always liked the way Khan McEvedy didn't just tolerate disagreement, she wanted to be told if you thought she was doing something wrong, which worked for him because she didn't understand naval operations nearly as well as she had ground ones. "Out of interest has Hallis persuaded Romanov that she should get a kid of her own out of the Iron Wombs yet?" he asked. "It might help persuade the rest of the 295th to embrace the concept, and it's not like they're going to have any more children the natural way at this point. If nothing else it would help widen the warrior-caste gene-pool."
"The 'Warrior Caste' Admiral? How Kerenskyite of you" Trish chided. "I might not have the military rank to rap your knuckles for that, but I do in the clan hierarchy" she said impishly in a manner that betrayed her relatively young age, still being barely thirty and a couple of decades younger than Bremman.
"You know what I mean, saKhan Ebon" Bremman responded, only somewhat abashed by his faux-pas. "Chances are most of the Association military is going to be carrying genes from our people or Romanov's going forward, a lot of what makes for a good soldier are inheritable genetic traits and the 295th have plenty of people that have proved they were damn-fine soldiers."
"I completely agree" Trish told him. "Even Colonel Benedict has come around to the same line of thinking, although his idea of tempting the Tsarina around was for us to create a Romanov bloodname, thinking it couldn't possibly fail to sway her."
"New bloodnames not sanctioned by the ilKhan? Isn't that heresy?" Bremman joked.
Trish smiled. "To be honest it's not really such a bad idea. If nothing else think how much it would annoy the crap out of Nicky K if he ever found out" she said. "I have my doubts that General Romanov would go for it though. She thinks clan-stuff is weird."
"Objectively, it is weird" Bremman observed. "I mean, what kind of society allows a mere colonel to rap the knuckles of a flag officer, an admiral for example, for a slip of the tongue" he asked rhetorically, trying not to laugh. "It's bad enough that we're on our second khan, and third saKhan, and they've all been mechwarriors" he complained. "I should have joined the Snow Ravens, they don't discriminate against swabbies."
"And they only nuked their own capital city by accident once" Trish quipped. "Too soon?" she added in response to Bremman's look of disapproval for that one.
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Part XVI - Section 2 of 2
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The building began to shake again, though not nearly as much as before, as another dropship started to lift off. "NAM Confederate on the way to Niops V" Bremman said, not looking around to check.
"If it is then it might be carrying the lance of upgraded Burke tanks Brigadier Nellis was talking about at a meeting I sat in on a few days ago" Trish theorised. "The council is still insisting that the NAM remain separate from the regular army, but also want it integrated, so Nellis reports directly to Romanov and Olson which makes the chain-of-command a lot messier than it needs to be and all the extra paperwork is driving Nellis up the wall."
Bremman shrugged, what else could you expect from politicians and bureaucrats, he thought to himself? "From what I heard the NAM guys who tagged along did okay on Algenib" he said.
"Franklin certainly says so, they helped mop up what was left of the Blood Rain after the big battle and fought a decent-sized skirmish with a few lances of Jackrabbit and Firestarter lights too after our lights flushed them out of hiding. They captured a freaking Warcrime Whitworth as well, you know a WTH-0, it was with the enemy lights. Damn nice trophy, I'll bet they put it in a museum."
"They'll have to build the museum first. Something else for your list" Bremman told her. "Just make sure it's low-priority."
"I'll try but I spent an hour yesterday arguing that a factory to make J-U Water Purifiers was a better use of resources than building a new neutrino observatory, so I probably used up some goodwill there" Trish told him.
"If we can get those things turned out in meaningful numbers then there's a fair few extra systems we can think about colonising at some point" Bremman said, considering the possibilities. "Our survey teams turned up several that would be viable if they had a decent supply of fresh water" he said, picking up his noteputer, standing up and walking over to the viewscreen on the wall pushing buttons.
The image of the large viewscreen changed to a map of the local systems and Bremman pointed to one. "Here's one example. We named it Huygens" he said. "It's within jump-range of both Algenib and Islington and it's got a planet in the goldilocks zone that's marginal for habitation right now, but it does have oceans and with a little help from our old friends Jamerson and Ulikov, well it'll probably be nicer to live there than Niops V and it'll have better weather."
Trish smiled. "You're thinking further ahead than I was. I was arguing we needed the purifiers to allow development of the island continent on Alphard."
"And here I was thinking we were going to call it 'New Australia' and fill it full of convict labour" Bremman replied.
"We can't call it that. Captain Francis and his Australia Tribe would claim ownership" Trish joked.
"Okay then, Crux, we should rename it Crux" Bremman suggested.
"Crux?"
"Constellation visible ifrom the southern hemisphere on Terra" Bremman explained. "They also call it the Southern Cross, it's on the Australian flag."
"I'll suggest it to the committee" Trish told him grinning. "Anything to do with stars and they're bound to…" she continued being cut-off by sudden beeping alarm and the viewscreen suddenly switching to a different image automatically.
"Unscheduled inbound jump-signature" Bremman said looking at the screen, frowning as he did so. "We're networked with the Monitoring Station at NAM Headquarters" he told her as another smaller image appeared superimposed on the screen. "Orbital telescopes re-training to the Zenith point. The astro-nerds are going to be pissed, they hate it when we borrow their toys unannounced."
Scrolling data started to appear on the viewscreen. "Multiple inbounds, and they're big" Bremman said, reading the estimates. "Really freaking big" he added. "Aerospace Defence Condition raised to Level Two. Duty squadrons and warships being alerted to possible hostile incursion."
"You guys practice for this a lot don't you?" Trish observed, it seemed like everything was running like clockwork to her. The Admiral didn't even have to issue any orders, it was all smooth and meticulously rehearsed.
"Drills twice a week, never know when Nicky K is going to turn up" Bremman replied calmly, continuing to read the data. "We keep two squadrons of Ahabs carrying nukes on standby at all times" he said. "Yukon, Saratoga, Protecteur and Cape Bon ordered to action stations."
Because of the light-speed time-delay the incoming vessels would have already arrived and been identified by the guard vessels at the Zenith jump-point well before that information reached Niops VII. You just had to wait and cross your fingers that the telescopes weren't about to record the momentary flash of nuclear detonations going off in a vacuum.
"Hot damn. It's the Ulithi" Bremman announced gleefully as the ships arriving were identified. "She's got Buccaneer and Maverick with her, they must have managed to get her working almost as soon as they go to Buffalo Meadows" he said, grinning. "The jury-rigged jumpdrive repair worked."
"Crap. I had fifty bucks on Rawhide getting back here before Ulithi made it" Trish grumbled. "I was sure she'd break-down again on the way and that would cost her at least another few months."
"Oh ye of little faith" Bremman responded sounding a little smug. "It might have been a kludge fix but it was a well-engineered kludge" he said. Having been fortunate enough to have another Potemkin in their possession while working out how they might be able to get around the problem with Ulithi's drive had been a blessing, almost as much of a blessing as having a Project Workshop to actually make the bespoke custom gadget required. "You put your money on the wrong Potemkin."
"You had money on Ulithi didn't you?" Trish asked him suspiciously, narrowing her eyes.
"Nah, I might have been accused of wagering using insider knowledge" Bremman told her honestly. "Could be really noisy around here for a while if we've got six regiments worth of battlemechs that need to be ferried down and unloaded" he observed. "I hope you ground-pounders have somewhere to park them because I don't want them cluttering up my spaceport and making it look unsightly."
"Unsightly? I like to think of them as ornamental features" Trish disagreed. "I'd much rather have a mech in my front yard than a garden gnome" she said. "Unless it's a JagerMech, those things look like a Rifleman whose parents were brother and sister. Franklin's old Shadow-Griffin was prettier, swear to God" she said, holding up one hand as if making an oath.
"Romanov is going to be pleased that the rest of her people are finally here too. At least we've got housing for them and the food situation is better than it was when we turned up" Bremman noted. "I guess we'll have to throw the latecomers a party, as well as get them caught up on recent events."
"I can't wait to see their reaction when we tell them we probably just won the last battle of the Amaris War and we've got Bernard-******-Critchly locked up in a cell" Trish exclaimed, grinning. "They are going to be ****** pissed that they missed it by volunteering to stay behind until we could go fetch them."
"No good deed goes unpunished" Bremman sagely observed.
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Note from the Author:
As saKhan Tricia Ebon outranks Jacob Bremman within the clan structure, but he outranks her in military terms. I can readily imagine General Romanov wondering what the hell to do with her and concluding that making her the military liason to the civilian government was the solution (because it could be viewed as having high-status but avoids some chain-of-command issues).
With a great deal of rushed construction going on build-quality is likely to suffer. the SLDF Navy got themselves a new HQ at the spaceport but it's not exactly a pretty or particularly refined structure (plain concrete box with windows that rattle).
I personally think that Annie Jump Cannon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annie_Jump_Cannon) is a great name for a system where you want to build a Olympus Recharge Station (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Olympus) for Kearny-Fuchida jumpships. You can't get from Niops to Alphard in one jump so you need to stop somewhere and AJC is well placed to get to other inhabited worlds too (Stafford (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Stafford) and Copernicus (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Suetonius)).
The BJ-1 Blackjack (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Blackjack_(BattleMech)) medium mech has a lousy (though largely undeserved) reputation because the early production machines had a litany of faults that weren't fixed until after it's bad rep was fixed in people's minds. It's main long-range armament of a pair of A/C-2 autocannon are pretty lacklustre (long-range, no punch) but Niops easily has the technology to make a better, harder-hitting Blackjack.
The clan version of the Extended Range Large Laser (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Extended-Range_Large_Laser) was in prototype by 2820 (so before the Wolverine Secession) but it wasn't actually put into production (by Clan Nova Cat (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Clan_Nova_Cat)) until 2825. Niops wasn't starting from scratch on the technology but they won't have the things until a few years after the other clans do. The HSR-200-Db 'Royal' version of the Hussar (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Hussar) mounted the older Star League era ERLL but by the time they have them in production they'll have a clan equivalent weapon to put on them instead. The HSR-200-Db used a 270XL fusion engine like the one used by the Stag (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Stag) so they already have a production line for those. As an advanced light scout mech it also carries a Beagle Active Probe and a Guardian ECM system (which proved their worth recently on Algenib) and they have production lines for them too (the Mercury II (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Mercury_II) carries both). Taken altogether choosing an upgraded HSR-200-Dbn Niops version of the Hussar for eventual production just makes sense (less retooling needed).
If you've got a high-tech industrial base, but lack manpower, then the CargoKing (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Cargoking) and CargoMaster (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Cargomaster) might be a good choice for transport dropship production. Federated-Boeing-Interstellar (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Federated-Boeing_Interstellar) never managed to get anyone to buy them (the First Succession War made budgets very tight and eventually technological sliding made the robotics inside LosTech (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Lostech)) so if someone approached with a sack of money looking to buy the blueprints for licensed production they might jump at it. Again, if manpower is an issue, Earthwerks Incorporated (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Earthwerks_Incorporated) started out making mining robots and they're not LosTech (yet).
The Sabre (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Sabre) light aerospace fighter is made in the Magistracy, the Stingray (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Stingray) medium ASF in production by the Free Worlds League. Since setting up a factory to make new aerospace fighters domestically isn't going to be a priority then importing any additional ones required from the neighbours is likely to seem like a better option for a while.
The 295th's Potemkin (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Potemkin) class jumpship Ulithi (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Ulithi)finally reaches Niops along with the Sovetskii Soyuz (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Sovetskii_Soyuz_(WarShip_class)) class cruiser Buccaneer (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Buccaneer_(Individual_WarShip)) and the Monolith (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Monolith) class transport Maverick (http://'https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Maverick') that were sent to fetch her. She comes bearing gifts, the six regiments of battlemechs that the 295th mothballed on Buffalo Meadows (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Buffalo_Meadows).
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+1 for AJC! :)
And I'm surprised they didn't connect the Blackjack discussion to the ER Large Lasers... ;)
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You can do a a lot with a Sabre SB27, my preferred light aerospace bird. And because everyone but the FWL has a plant, getting parts is never an issue.
of course they have the tech to do the SB27b and hopefully the SB-27b-EC as well and they maybe have access to the plans to upgrade to the SB-28.
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supplying MMM with funds could help them expand lines or just keep them better repaired. it also will keep the comms lines open if they need any special tools to keep a line open or reopen one (jumpships)
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Part XVII - Section 1 of 2
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Breakin' rocks in the hot sun
I fought the law and the law won
I fought the law and the law won
Unofficial anthem of the Crux Germanium Mine & Penal Colony on Alphard (played on loudspeaker every morning to wake the inmates)
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Arecibo City – Niops Association (Niops VII) – 2829
"I still think you should move into town. Get a nicer house, more rooms, bigger yard" Barbara maintained, looking out of the window of the living room in Franklin Hallis's new quarters, a small two-story home. It was one of several dozen identical prefabricated concrete buildings that lined both sides of a road that had only recently been paved with gravel, and the best you could say about it was that at least less depressing than living in one of the massive grey apartment blocks that loomed over the newly incorporated community. "My apartment in capital smaller but nicer, not look like so much like prison" she observed. The metal and plastic furniture was ugly too, cheap mass-produced designs usually seen in government buildings.
Fundamentally if your favoured architectural style was grey, brutalist, centrally-planned dystopia then you would absolutely love Arecibo City, the SLDF township that had still been just rows of tents and grounded dropships a year ago. If that was your opinion however, that just begged the question why you didn't move to the Capellan Confederation instead?
"There's nothing wrong with this house" Hallis told her. "Everyone else with a place this big has kids. I only accepted it because Romanov told me that a Flag Officer needs to be able to entertain guests at home, although she also said it would look bad for her if she moved into one of these new houses while I still stayed in that apartment building down by the river."
"You have kids" Frederick called out loudly from the kitchen where he was sat at a table doing his homework. If he got it done now he would have the whole weekend to enjoy himself.
"You don't count" Hallis called back.
"Stop telling him that" Barbara responded quietly, giving her boyfriend a disapproving look.
"He doesn't count because he doesn't live here, he lives in the sibling-company dorms with most of the other Ironborn kids" Hallis defended himself. "If I never visited their barracks to inspect them, and you didn't insist on him coming here for dinner a couple of times a week, I'd barely even see him."
"A boy needs a father. Not a Khan" Barbara stated flatly. "Anyhow, paper you sign say he your son."
"Legally maybe" Hallis grumbled. "It's one thing going to watch him play baseball but If I'd known it meant having to go see his damn principal every time he got into trouble too I wouldn't have signed so easily."
"I didn't start that fight" Frederick called out.
"You didn't have to finish it like that either. You dislocated that little ******'s shoulder with that move" Hallis retorted.
"At least you're admitting he's an ****** now" Frederick replied, sounding a little too smug about it for Hallis's taste.
"Watch your language" Barbara snapped.
"He said it first!" Frederick protested.
"Privilege of age and rank" Hallis told him, smirking. "And get on with your homework."
"I'm stuck. Do you know how much bigger an M1V class Red Dwarf is than a M5V?" Frederick asked. "We got an assignment to compare Niops with Buffalo Meadows."
"No idea" Hallis told him.
Barbara rolled her eyes. "Can tell you don't go school here, Franklin" she remarked. "An M5V has mass of around 0.16 that of Sol, M1V has mass of 0.5" she told Frederick. "If Buffalo Meadows much bigger would be K class star, Orange Dwarf not Red."
"Thanks" Frederick responded. "It's hotter too right? That's why the goldilocks zone for Buffalo Meadows was so much further out?"
"Right" Barbara confirmed.
"Buffalo Meadows is four days from its standard jump-points, Niops VII only two" Hallis felt the need to interject, being the only person in the room who had actually undertaken both journeys. Frederick had been aboard Yukon, and so had never visited Buffalo Meadows, while Barbara had never even left Niops. "Why are you comparing those stars anyway?" he asked out of curiosity.
"The kids from Buffalo Meadows started school last week" Frederick explained. "The school thought it might be a way to get them to fit in."
"I thought Romanov's people not have any children?" Barbara queried, confused.
"They had some kids, they just didn't have enough children to sustain their population in the long term" Hallis told her. "Most of them with families chose to stay on Buffalo Meadows until we found somewhere worth settling down on and could come fetch them."
"The Meadows kids keep complaining about how cold it is here, and that it's always dark and not green enough" Frederick told them.
Hallis laughed. "It's not like where they came from was exactly a sunlit tropical paradise" he noted. "They're right about it being greener though. They had forests, and the grasslands stretched on forever."
"My science teacher said they're going to see if they can get plants from there to grow here" Frederick added from where he was still sat in the kitchen.
"Yep" Hallis confirmed. "Because our engineers managed to get Ulithi to work they had more spacelift than they needed so they tried fill the ships up with other things, like samples of fauna and flora" he said. "Did you know Buccaneer arrived with ninety thousand tons of lumber and a sawmill in her hold?" he asked rhetorically, "And that two of the dropships Maverick was hauling were carrying nothing but farm equipment? The people Romanov left behind had masses of stuff packed up ready to load onto ships as soon as their transportation arrived. Guess they were eager to leave."
"It doesn't sound like it was a great planet to live on" Frederick said, entering the room so he didn't have to keep speaking up. "I don't know why the Meadow's kids seem homesick. I never missed being in Clan Space."
"Did you consider that they didn't have people actively trying to kill them on Buffalo Meadows, like you did in the Clan Homeworlds?" Hallis asked him drily. "That sort of thing is going to colour your memories."
"I guess" Frederick conceded. "Can you requisition a VTOL so we can go into the capital and get Capellan food tonight?" he asked hopefully. "It is Friday night, we usually eat out."
"We are eating Capellan food tonight. Barbara made it specially at home and brought it here to heat up for us later."
"Those venison dumplings aren't Capellan food" Frederick grumbled.
"Yes they are" Barbara told him flatly. "My families Pelmeni recipe not Chinese food, but it is Capellan food" she said. "I don't know why everyone think we all originally from China. My family on mother's side mostly Russian from Tikonov."
"You don't look Russian" Frederick told her.
"Because of eyes and skin colour or because I not always carrying bottle of vodka and wearing ushanka fur hat?" Barbara asked, clearly amused. "Your people not Caucasian-American because you not always eating a hamburger?"
"Bad example. He is always eating a hamburger" Hallis interjected. "But otherwise you're making your point."
"Alright, alright!" Frederick conceded. "The venison dumplings are Capellan food. Can you requisition a VTOL so we can go get Chinese food in town?" he persisted.
"No, we damn well can't, and you should thank Barbara for making you something nice to eat and not ask for something else instead" Hallis told him sternly.
"Thank you Barbara, for the food I mean" Frederick said eventually, correctly reading the Khan's expression that he would really be in trouble if he didn't. "I apologise if I offended you in any way by stereotyping Capellans too" he added.
"It okay. Terran Hegemony people not only ones that stereotype others" Barbara replied. "Capellan's tell jokes about Federated Suns. Say that because they are half French and half English they hate themselves and eat food like Frog's Legs in the Hole" she said, smiling.
Frederick grinned. "Heard the one about how they root out foreign spies in the Lyran Commonwealth? They gather everyone into a big room and tell a joke. Anyone that gets it and laughs is taken out and shot."
"That one was old when Ian Cameron was your age" Hallis told him. "I heard one the other day about the Free Worlds League. That's it's not really a state it's just a load of different systems spinning around the galaxy in loose formation" he added his own joke. "Have you finished your homework?" he suddenly remembered to check.
"Almost" Frederick replied.
"Meaning you haven't. Go finish it" Hallis ordered.
"It's to read a chapter in my history book about how the Age of War allowed the Terra Hegemony to regain a dominant position in the Inner Sphere after the old Terran Alliance threw it away" Frederick replied. "I know all that stuff. I was taught it years ago."
"Bet you five bucks that the version of the story you were taught back on Circe concentrated on different factors than the one in books here" Hallis wagered. "Less about the invention of the battlemech and the consequences of the Ares Conventions, more about economics."
"Now I really don't want to read it" Frederick muttered.
"Economics is logistics" Hallis told the boy. "Amateurs talk tactics and what do professionals talk?"
"Logistics" Frederick replied immediately.
"Right. Old Nick didn't really get that while Khan McEvedy did, which was why our Touman was becoming so much stronger than that of most of the other clans. We sorted out our economy first so we could afford to outspend the others" Hallis explained why it was so important. "Like Admiral Bremman always says, 'No bucks, no Buck Rogers'."
"I love that holovid show" Frederick said, grinning. "But those evil bird aliens that they're always fighting look and sound really stupid."
"They're from the kitschy re-make. I always preferred the original hard-sci-fi version of the show made back in the 25th Century, not the one some soulless corporate execs churned out later to try and cash in on the nostalgia" Hallis told him. "I used to watch it with my dad when we were travelling with the Exodus Fleet" he recalled fondly. "Really great intro sequence at the start, always got me excited to watch it. How did it go? Oh yeah, 'The year is 2487 and the Explorer Corps launches the last of the Terran Hegemony's Deep Periphery probes. In a freak misjump Ranger 3 and its pilot, Captain William 'Buck' Rogers, are frozen in hyperspace, not to arrive at their intended destination until five hundred years later'."
"You remember that from a holovid show you watch years before I was born?" Barbara asked incredulously. "Last week you forget we were supposed to go visit my parents and you go off playing with battlemechs instead."
"Yeah, but I probably watched every episode at least a dozen times, mostly because there wasn't much else to do" Hallis told her. "And I wasn't 'playing with battlemechs' we were conducting a combined-arms training exercise to see if we could coordinate better with airpower and artillery than we did on Algenib" he said. One of the more interesting suggestions that came out of the whole thing was that it would be useful if they could quickly swap-out the nose armament on the Stuka aerospace fighter. The four eERPPC's in the wings were always useful, but the Improved AC/20 was too situational, so if you could quickly change it out before a mission for say an Improved Gauss Rifle instead, that would be ideal. A few technicians even thought they might be able to make that happen using salvage from the Blood Rain's Dragoon heavies, their modular design being something they thought they could work with.
"That kind of thing fun for you" Barbara stuck to her position.
"More fun than having dinner with your parents probably" Frederick suggested, smirking.
Hallis glared at him. "Go to your room Frederick" he ordered.
"I don't live here" the boy pointed out.
"Then go back to the kitchen and read that book you're supposed to" Hallis told him.
"Yes, My Khan. Right away, My Khan" Frederick responded, bowing as he shuffled away deferentially.
"And less tween sass badly disguised as obsequiousness" Hallis told him sternly as the boy disappeared from view.
"Why don't you like my parents?" Barbara wanted to know.
"I've got nothing against your parents whatsoever. They don't like me" Hallis replied. "For a start your father thinks I'm too old for you…"
"You are too old for me. You just not look it."
"… and your mother thinks that because I didn't ask you to marry me after like our third date that I'm just looking for some pretty and docile, Capellan girl to be my concubine or something" Hallis continued, ignoring her interruption. "I mean docile? Has your mother inexplicably somehow never met you?" he asked rhetorically. "I can think of many words to describe you but 'docile' is not one of them."
"What words?" Barbara responded suspiciously, narrowing her eyes.
Hallis blinked. "Complementary ones" he said after an awkwardly lengthy pause.
"Nice save Dad" Frederick called out from the kitchen.
"Thanks" Hallis replied. "And stop eavesdropping" he added.
"I was being sarcastic" Frederick told him.
"I always assume you are" Hallis replied evenly.
Barbara decided to let the 'many words' thing rest for now, although she made a mental note to bring it up again later when it would serve her purposes best. "Mother not say that to me as often now" she said instead. "Now more likely to say that you just looking for wife to help raise science-devil son for you."
"Science devil?!" Hallis exclaimed.
"Sound better in Mandarin" Barbara told him. "Still not very nice though. I tell her so."
"It's obnoxious. Bordering on hateful" Hallis stated firmly. "I mean, it's not necessarily inaccurate but…"
"Hey!" Frederick voiced his objection.
"He just testing to see if you still listening in" Barbara told him. "You are? Aren't you?" she asked Hallis quietly to check.
"Right" Hallis confirmed. "As far as know" he added deadpan. "Seriously though, I'm not going to win over your parents and I'm less convinced now than ever before that I even want to. At least beyond the bare minimum of them just about tolerating our relationship."
Barbara frowned. "They just need get to know you better" she suggested. 'Maybe meet Frederick, see he no different than other boy… except look just like you."
"He's actually a little taller than I was at the same age, they spliced that in from someone, along with a lot of genes from a fighter pilot they found with exceptional eyesight and weirdly good hand-eye-coordination" Hallis told her.
"Ah, so that why he has different colour eyes than you do" Barbara realised. "Fighter pilot here on Niops?" she asked.
"No, she got left behind as part of the rearguard during Operation Switchback" Hallis replied. "I suppose she was the closest thing he had to a mother, in that other than mine she contributed the most genetic material to the goop they grew him from."
Barbara looked thoughtful. "Frederick know about her?"
"Of course, not that I think they ever met" Hallis replied. "You've got to remember that we only really re-introduced anything that remotely resembled a normal family structure into what used to be the Warrior Caste after we told Nicky K to go ****** himself and then left" he said. "I didn't really think of him as my son and strongly I doubt she did either."
"Does he have a picture of her? He should have a picture" Barbara decided. "You have records in computer somewhere, get him a picture."
"You know if you keep treating him like a real boy he's going to start thinking he is one" Hallis remarked, giving her another wink to let her know he was kidding.
"Hey!" Frederick again voiced his objection from the kitchen.
"I think they also spliced in the hearing of a Tellman Bat" Hallis joked. "But they clearly left out some of my brains because he just keeps on falling for it" he said. "For the last time stop eavesdropping and read your book."
"I'm multitasking" Frederick defended himself. "Genetically-engineered science-devils are good at that."
"Not according to some of his grades they're not" Hallis told Barbara. "Look, if you want to plan another dinner with your parents, with or without dragging junior along, go ahead and I'll try my best to make it this time" he offered. "I promise to be at my best behaviour, even if your parents aren't."
"I tell them to be nice too, especially if Frederick there" Barbara replied. "Maybe uncle be there too. He like you."
Hallis looked slightly dubious. "I'm never sure if he likes me or if he's just hoping to get the contract to make new uniforms for the SLDF."
"It both" Barbara told him. "Always ask me how you are, also ask a couple of times when we going to get married. Tell sister, my mother, you good catch. Take over from General Romanova one day, good for whole family."
"I knew it!" Hallis exclaimed. "Mom warned me about girls like you that were only pretending to like me so they could get hold of my battlemech regiments."
"No. I just want fancy title" Barbara deadpanned back. "wifeKhan."
Hallis laughed. "You know we used to call Jennifer Winson, Nicky Kerensky's wife, 'Wifflekhan' as in 'Wife of the ilKhan, but only behind their backs because only Old Nick got to invent new words."
"She the one that pretended to be missing Cameron girl?"
"Yeah, but she was smart enough not to say it out loud publicly, just hinted at it sometimes. The other rumour was she was really an Amaris that Kerensky Senior didn't have the heart to have killed because she was such a cute kid" Hallis recalled. "You know, propaganda from the Pentagon rebels used to say that Nicky was just a puppet, and that she was the one pulling the strings" he said before lowering his voice. "Sarah thought that she was probably just really good at handling something else of his" he whispered so Frederick couldn't hear.
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Part XVII - Section 2 of 2
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They were interrupted by a knock on the front door. "Expecting anyone?" Barbara asked.
"No and that had better not be some messenger from Romanov" Hallis muttered in annoyance as he headed for the front door. "She knows I'm off duty this weekend."
Hallis unbolted the door and opened it. "Trish?" he responded in surprise seeing her standing there along with her ward Jennifer McEvedy. "Do you want something?" he asked.
"Not from you Boss" trish replied. "Is Barb here? You said she was staying over tonight."
"Yeah" Hallis confirmed, "come in" he told them, stepping aside. "We were just talking about your namesake actually Jennifer" he told the girl.
"Khan McEvedy?" the girl replied quizzically.
"No. The other one" Hallis told her.
"Urgh, Jennifer Amaris" the girl said with distaste as she and Trish walked inside.
"Keep in mind that when Sarah decided to name you that we were on much better terms with Jennifer Whatever and her husband" Hallis noted. "And her being an Amaris really is just a nasty rumour that's about as likely as her being the last Cameron" he told her.
"My parents name me after Barbara Liao. She not very nice either" Barbara commiserated with Jennifer. "One of better Capellan Chancellors, but bar not set very high" she said sadly.
Trish smiled. "Hi Barb, glad you're here. Jennifer wanted to ask a favour" she told her.
"From me?" Barbara asked in surprise.
"Yes, I mean if you don't mind" Jennifer said awkwardly. "I've been asked to go to the school Christmas dance by a boy and you're supposed to wear a dress, a fancy one, and I don't have one of those. Or know much about them really" she admitted. "I know you make clothes, I mean you work for a company that makes clothes, and you always dress really nice, so I was hoping you might help me out."
Barbara smiled. "Trish not much help?"
"Other than sneakers I own one pair of shoes that aren't army boots and precisely zero fancy dresses" Trish told her. "Not my field of expertise" she admitted.
"Who is this boy?" Hallis wanted to know. "One of the other kits?"
"No. Just a boy from my class. He's nice" Jennifer told him.
"Don't tell me Ralph finally got the guts up to ask you" Frederick interrupted, emerging from the kitchen again. "I was sure he'd chicken out" he said. "Nice to see you saKhan Ebon" he greeted Trish, bowing slightly.
"Nice to see you too Frederick" Trish replied.
"Other than his name what do you know about this 'Ralph' kid?" Hallis asked Frederick suspiciously.
"He's just a kid and before you ask to meet him no you can't, no matter how much you feel like enjoying yourself terrifying the poor child" Trish interjected before Frederick could reply.
Hallis frowned then sighed. "You know me so well it's aggravating" he complained.
"Your fault for having woman as best friend. Keep you in check, not encourage you to do stupid stuff like man would" Barbara told him.
"And it's aggravating" Hallis repeated himself for emphasis.
"So can you help me?" Jennifer asked Barbara pleadingly. "I've got some money to pay for one, I just wouldn't know where to go to get one, or which one to get that would suit me."
"No need to buy one. I probably have old dress that fit you and if not can have it altered" Barbara told her, smiling. "You tall, slim girl, easy to make dress look good on tall, slim girl. Hang on you like manikin" she said professionally, looking her up and down. "Shoes might be more difficult if you same height as boy though" she considered. "Boy not usually like girl tower over them, might mean wearing flats" she added sadly.
"That would be really nice of you Barb" Trish told her. "Is Ralph taller than you?" she asked Jennifer.
"A little taller" Jennifer replied, "maybe twenty-five mills" she guessed.
"Can probably get away with short heels then, look better than flats at least" Barbara told her. "Those you have to buy for yourself. All my nice shoes high heels so no good for you even if we did have same size feet, and probably don't" she said. "First pair of high-heels I ever buy was for first school dance about your age. Big mistake not practising dancing in them as well as walking, fell over on dance-floor and looked like idiot" she recalled, wincing at the memory. "Date laughed, I slapped him. It totally humiliating for both of us."
Jennifer looked mortified. "I don't know how to dance!" she suddenly realised.
"Don't worry, boys on Niops not know how to dance either. Just watch some old holovids on how to do it and move in time to the music" Barbara advised. "My second school dance went much better" she said. "Third not so much, boy grabbed my ass, he get slapped too."
"Docile my ass" Franklin Hallis muttered to himself. "Jennifer, as your Khan I will only say one thing about that" he addressed the girl seriously, speaking up. "If a boy ever gropes you like that, don't slap him. Do it properly, go for a palm strike to the nose. Smush the cartilage all over his face" he instructed. "Don't worry about getting his blood all over your clothes, it'll wash out."
"Yes, My Khan" Jennifer replied reverently, bowing slightly as she did so.
"He joking" Barbara told the girl.
"I really wasn't" Hallis told her flatly. "Are you going to this dance too?" he asked Frederick.
"Yeah, I asked Clarissa Anderson from my history class" Frederick confirmed. "I've already found a suit to wear" he added, sounding pleased with himself, mostly because she was really cute.
"It's easier for boys" Jennifer complained, "but you're not going with Clarissa Anderson" she told him, smirking. "She's going with Dave. He asked her too after you did."
"Dave? David Jones? The goofy kid with the squint?" Frederick responded, nonplussed.
"No. Not David Jones. I mean our Dave, Dave Robertson" Jennifer explained.
Frederick's jaw dropped for a moment before his expression changed from bewilderment to anger. "He knew I asked her" he said through gritted teeth. "That backstabbing son of a…"
"Language" Barbara interrupted him sharply before he could finish.
"… canister" Frederick corrected himself. "Why is she going with him not me anyway?" he wanted to know.
"Because he's better looking than you maybe?" Jennifer suggested with a shrug.
"Hey!" both Frederick and amusingly Franklin Hallis objected simultaneously, the timing making both Trish and Barbara laugh.
"David Robertson looks just like Dwight. Dwight wasn't better looking than me, was he?" the Khan of Clan Wolverine asked his saKhan.
"Yes" she told him flatly. "I mean, you're not bad looking, but Dwight was a real dish."
"You're joking" Hallis concluded.
"I really wasn't" Trish told him, mimicking his response to Barbara not long before.
"I see old photo of Sarah McEvedy and Dwight Robinson together once" Barbara spoke up. "You right, he very handsome man" she agreed with Trish.
Hallis looked puzzled. "I'm just not seeing it" he said.
"That's because you're a guy, and not one that's into other guys" Trish explained. "You know you really should have come with me to watch the last day of the Marcus trial" she told him, changing the subject before he became fixated on it. "I know that the death penalty was taken off the table early but it was still worth being there to watch her reaction when she was found guilty and sentenced."
"Plenty of people think she got off light" Hallis observed, still not sure if Trish and Barbara were messing with him about Dwight.
"Anyone that thinks that hard labour in a germanium mine on Alphard while not being eligible for parole for thirty years is getting off light has no idea how hot it gets there, and hasn't spent much time swinging a pickaxe" Trish replied before grinning. "Did you hear what she said when the judge told her she was getting thirty years minimum? It was on the holovid news."
"No" Hallis replied.
"She said that she wasn't Terran born and she wasn't going to live another thirty years" Trish told him. "The judge looked at her, thought about it and said 'Good point. Well just do as many as you can' before ordering the guards to take her away. I almost choked trying not to laugh at her expression" she said, grinning at the memory.
"I suppose pirate labour is cheaper than robots, and it's poetic justice considering they enslaved people to do that kind of work for them" Hallis replied. "It's just a shame Critchly isn't fit enough to join the rest of them."
"Give him a few months in solitary and I'll bet he'll be begging to go breaking rocks, even if his heart gives out after a couple of days" Trish replied. "They've already told him that when he dies we're going to freeze his corpse until we can pass it on to the Vatican. No dignified end for that scumbag."
"He'd just better hope they're not right about the afterlife because no heaven or even a spell in purgatory for him, it'll be straight down to the lake of fire getting chased by demons riding infernal Ignis tanks" Hallis suggested wryly.
Trish shrugged. "Maybe, but I'd be more concerned that Satan might tell him he's a big fan and give him a job instead" she replied. "You know he'd want an autograph and a selfie with the man at least before he starts with the eternal torment."
Jennifer wasn't listening to the banter, instead she looked thoughtful. "You should ask the new girl to the dance, Alice McArthur" she advised Frederick.
"The ginger one with glasses that keeps complaining about the weather?" Frederick replied dismissively. At least the glasses helped hide the fact that she kept staring wide-eyed at everything like her peers. To the Meadow's kids even Arecibo was a huge town, while the capital thirty kilometres away where they now went to school was an exciting bustling metropolis.
"She's getting laser-eye surgery, they didn't have that on Buffalo Meadows, she'll look a lot prettier with a nicer hairstyle and without the ugly spectacles" Jennifer told him, they weren't exactly stylish eyewear having likely been made for her in an old machine shop. "Think tactically and get ahead of the game, ask her before other boys see her without them" she suggested. "You know, her great-grandmother, Leigh McArthur, commanded the 295th before General Romanov did, Khan Hallis" she told the man.
"I didn't know that" Frederick said, frowning. "She didn't mention that to the class when the new kids introduced themselves."
"Did you think it was a coincidence her name was McArthur?" Jennifer asked him in disbelief.
"I didn't really think about it" Frederick admitted.
"I mean no offence to you Khan Hallis, but he's really not the sharpest bayonet in the armoury sometimes" Jennifer observed sadly.
Frederick glared at her. "I'm offended" he complained.
"Yeah, but I meant to do that" Jennifer told him.
"Is this the new annual beat-up-on-Fred day" Frederick Hallis grumbled. "If so can I get more warning next year so I can put it in my calendar."
"I thought we agreed it was going to be held monthly?" Franklin Hallis queried deadpan, looking to the others.
Barbara gave him a disparaging look. "It good thing he know you think you funny" she told the older Hallis. "If other people hear you being so mean to child they think you being serious. Think you horrible father."
"I hate you and you're not my real Dad" Frederick told him, amused.
"Don't encourage him by playing along" Barbara told the boy sternly. "It bad enough you tell woman from social services I like wicked stepmother. She no have sense of humour, not get joke about treating you like servant, making you clean fireplace. Had to show her electric heater because she no get Cinderella references."
"Be fair, she really should have realised I was yanking her chain when I talked about getting to ride shotgun in the new PMK-1N Pumpkin battlemech" Frederick defended himself.
It wasn't necessarily a bad argument, Barbara considered, but he still shouldn't have done it. "Not saying she not dumb as rocks, but need to consider that not everyone on Niops is some kind Rocket-Surgeon" she told him. "She was going to write in report that it bad home environment for you if I ever move in with father before I explain you just messing with her."
"Sorry" Frederick sheepishly apologised, looking down at his boots.
"Just think next time okay?" Barbara told him. "When dance?" she asked Jennifer.
"It's in two weeks" Jennifer told her.
"Good, got plenty time to make adjustments to dress if have to" Barbara said, nodding. "I busy tomorrow. You free Sunday?" she asked.
"Yes" Jennifer told her, smiling.
"You come to my place, try on couple of dresses. All good" Barbara told her. "I tell you which store to go to for shoes. Very cheap now we importing them from Comstock. I already buy several pairs."
"Alice might need a dress too. You'll have to ask her" Jennifer told Frederick.
"I never even said I was going to ask her to the dance, that was your idea" Frederick protested.
"I suppose your plan is to mope and maybe punch Dave in the face?" Jennifer replied sardonically.
"He'd better not" Hallis said darkly, fixing the boy with a look that said he wasn't joking around.
"Can we talk privately in the kitchen over there?" Jennifer asked Frederick, tone of voice indicating that 'no' would not be an acceptable response and he knew it as he followed her out of the living room, the adults finding her bossing him about pretty funny, though they tried not to show it.
"What?" Frederick asked when they got there, closing the door behind them but still keeping his voice low.
"You'll get through this with more dignity if you don't take revenge but do turn up for the dance with a date, Fred" Jennifer told him, putting her hands on her hips. "It's easy. All you need to do is go knock on Alice's door tomorrow, her family only live a couple of streets over, and ask her to go to the dance with you" she continued. "And it has to be tomorrow, not just because you want to ask her before another boy does, but because you need to tell her what happened with Dave and Clarissa Anderson."
"Eh?" Frederick responded in confusion.
"She's going to find out eventually that you asked Clarissa first, so you need for her to hear that from you not someone else" Jennifer told him "That way you can tell her that you're not just asking her out because the girl you wanted to go with the dance with is going with someone else."
"But that's the truth" Frederick responded, confused.
"It's the partial truth, a version that she isn't going to like one bit" Jennifer replied. "If you tell her that you were going with Clarissa, but she went back on her word and is going with your backstabbing ****** of supposed friend instead, that's a better summary of events from your perspective" she explained. "Tell her you're upset about it, and she'll be doing you a really big favour if she goes to the dance with you because if you still turn up there with a pretty girl you won't feel like such a chump. Play on her empathy, she seems like a sweet girl when she's not moaning about the weather."
"Isn't that like tricking her or something?"
"Are you saying you're not upset and don't feel like a chump?" Jennifer asked rhetorically. "If it's the truth then it's not a trick, it's just being honest creatively, and to your benefit" she argued. "As long as you make sure she has fun at the dance it's to her benefit too remember."
"I guess" Frederick conceded.
"Think about it. If she thinks she's being nice by going with you, and also that you think she's pretty enough to make you look good by going to the dance with you, then that's a lot better than thinking she's just your second-choice back-up plan which would hurt her feelings" Jennifer told him. "Also, if she says something in response like, 'I'm not that pretty' or 'there's prettier girls you could ask' then say, 'I like girls with red hair' and she'll probably accept that."
"So lie?"
"Do you dislike girls with red hair?"
"No. I just don't care one way or the other."
"Not technically a lie then is it? I mean if you like girls with any colour hair then you do like girls with red hair" Jennifer argued.
Frederick thought about it. "I guess so" he conceded. "Always the one doing the strategizing and rules-lawyering" he praised her.
"Another masterplan from the genes that brought you Operation Switchback" Jennifer replied sounding pleased with herself. She might have been less confident that it would all work out if she hadn't already known that Alice had wanted someone to ask her to the dance. It was of course important not to let him know that information, mostly because he might not approach the girl in the right manner if he came across as being sure of himself, which for Frederick always came across as cocky. He needed to seem like she was doing him a favour when he asked her, not the reverse, to achieve the desired outcome.
Frederick grinned. "And if it doesn't work and she says no I can always still slug Dave" he said brightly.
Jennifer sighed. "Violence isn't the answer. Please don't slug Dave, it'll make you the jerk and I might need him as my saKhan one day. Preferably without brain damage from being punched in the head."
"Gottcha. Bodyshots to the gut only" Frederick agreed, missing the overall point more than a little.
Jennifer decided not to bother explaining. "Oh yeah, and like I said, Alice is a sweetie so if you're mean to her I will kick seven shades of shit out of you" she vowed. "Just so you know."
"I thought violence wasn't the answer?" Frederick responded, confused.
"Depends on the question" Jennifer told him.
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Note from the Author:
Two years after the SLDF dropships first landed on the Arecibo Plains on Niops VII the place is now a small city (it's a city by Niops standards, other places would call it a town). The original inhabitants have now been joined by the rest of the people who stayed behind on Buffalo Meadows (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Buffalo_Meadows) having arrived with Ulithi, Buccaneer and Maverick.
It's noted in Requiem for a Blue Star (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Requiem_for_a_Blue_Star) that the star that the 'Blue Star Division' (the 295th) ended up stuck at when their Potemkin broke down in 2785 was red, but the planet seems a lot more verdant than Niops VII (and it's further out from the star's zenith point) so I'm going with it being an type M1V Red Dwarf and therefore quite a lot larger than an M5V like Niops. The 295th's colony was not successful in that they never had enough children to sustain themselves in the long term (once all the long-lived Terran Hegemony people eventually died out the population would have severely crashed. There were a few children of course, like our new character Alice McArthur, descendant of Leigh McArthur (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Leigh_MacArthur), but the Meadow's children are going to be blown away by the number of kids at their new school, not to mention finding themselves living somewhere where there are hundreds of thousands of people in one place.
As the timeline progresses we'll be seeing a lot more of these kids. If you'll forgive the pun, ironborn Jennifer McEvedy (named for both her genetic donor Sarah and Jennifer Winson (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Jennifer_Winson) wife of ilKhan Nicholas Kerensky) is clannish and looks after her fellow kits. Jennifer wishes she wasn't named after a possible Amaris and Barbara sympathises being herself named after Barbara Liao (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Barbara_Liao).
If you're short on robots and volunteers to labour in the baking hot sun of Alphard, well captured pirates represent a very useful (if unenthusiastic) labour force.
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So many plusses, I lost count! EXCELLENT update! :)
I eagerly await your next post! ;)
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Finally remembered one of my comments: I've had LASIK surgery... I was literally 20/10 the next day with no pain. If there are two weeks between "now" and the dance, she'll have NO trouble with that at all! :)
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I had PRK. D+30 20/15 down from 20/200. Life changing!
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School drama, something I was not expecting
but well done
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Clanners having to adapt to human society would be a great material for a sitcom.
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At the end of the Hunchback review by Tex there is a 'commercial' with Duncan Fisher and Ilana Magnuson being in a 'crime movie' "Solaris Piranha", that would be on the 'far' end of 'Comedy' movies (as in so bad as it's actually funny... as with most things 'Duncan Fisher', additionally have a Clanner involved just adds that extra 'something...). This feels more like a Clanner version of 'Blossom' or 'Big Bang Theory'... :cheesy:
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what would a PNK-1N be anyway
what weight would it be?
are we basically talking about a 100 ton urbie? No that actually would make sense, its called a mobile field turret.
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Part XVIII - Section 1 of 2
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"That the least clan-like of Khans produced the clanniest clanner of her generation via the iron wombs is an irony I'm not sure Sarah would have appreciated. For the last time Jennifer, would you please stop encouraging your friends to settle their disputes with a Trial of Grievance."
saKhan Trish Ebon chastises her adopted daughter - 2832 CE
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Capital City – Niops Association (Niops VII) – 2830
According to the sign outside the place was called 'The Great Hope American Diner', being named for the old capital city of Clan Wolverine back on Circe, but almost everyone just called it 'Gloria's'. This was despite the fact she didn't work there anything like full-time and the place actually belonged to her daughter.
Ironically most people who had lived there back on Circe didn't actually call their city 'Great Hope' either, to a majority of the population it was 'The City of McEvedy', 'McEvedy City' or even just 'McEvedy'. Gloria and her late husband, who had once run a diner there together, had never dreamed of naming their burger joint 'McEvedy's' however. The Khan herself might have gone along with it but you couldn't be quite sure of just how much of a reach the astronomically wealthy and infamously litigious chains of Terran fast food restaurants really had.
Just because a retired officer, Star Colonel Sanders of Clan Widowmaker, had seemingly got away with setting up a fried chicken place on Roche called Kerensky Cluster Fried Chicken (KCFC) didn't necessarily mean anyone else would.
Shortly after it first opened its doors Gloria had of course infiltrated Sanders's operation and had stolen the recipe he was using to flavour the chicken. A few years later it was now one of the more popular items on the menu of the Great Hope American Diner, though disguised by a misleading claim that the secret eleven herbs and spices used were intended to honour the 11th Army. It would totally destroy the business if anyone found out they were serving Widowmaker food.
Blissfully unaware of Gloria's darkest secret Frederick Hallis politely held open the door to the diner to let Alice through first. "Working today Gloria?" he greeted the old woman stood there minding the till. The place was less than half full, it would get busier later when people left work, and most of the customers were watching the viewscreen on one wall that was tuned into the news channel. The lead story was still the return of Thunderer and Rawhide a few days before, hauling much of Camelot Command back with them, the television news pundits arguing about how long it was going to take to get some of the production lines recovered from there running, and which should take priority.
"No rest for the wicked Frederick" Gloria replied. "What's wrong with your face?" she asked, getting a better look at him.
"My eyes are a little too close together. It's all the Khan's fault" Frederick deadpanned.
"I meant the bruises, as you well know" Gloria replied, wagging her finger at him.
"Oh, yeah, those. Picked them up at an informal Trial of Grievance yesterday" Frederick explained. "Got some cracked ribs too they had to strap up" he continued. "Jennifer was sick of me not talking to Dave, said giving him three months of the silent treatment was more than enough, so she told us to settle our dispute in a civilised manner. I issued a batchall, we agreed to fight unarmed and unaugmented in the Circle of Equals and I won."
"Good for you. Best not to let these things fester for too long" Gloria replied brightly, the old woman's upbeat reaction to a pair of boys in their early teens beating each other to a pulp making Alice wonder once again if she had stepped through the looking glass when she came to this planet. The Wolverine people were just so damn strange, she thought to herself, far more alien in the way they sometimes thought and acted than the original population of Niops was, or even the Capellans that arrived later.
"Chilli cheeseburger to go?" Gloria asked Frederick, that being his usual order.
"Nah, two double cheeseburgers and a large fries to share" Frederick ordered. "We're eating in."
"Good choice, it's cold out there" Gloria replied. "Table over by the window there is free. Strawberry milkshake too?" she checked.
"Yes please" Frederick replied.
"What about you Alice?" Gloria asked the girl.
Alice opened her mouth to reply then close it. "How do you know my name?" she asked. "I've only been in here a few times before and I've never told you what it was" she said. For that matter she wasn't sure if the old woman had even been here during all her previous visits.
"Maybe I overheard someone else saying it" Gloria suggested, smiling.
"Or maybe you're just inexplicably well informed" Frederick countered. "So, what's Alice's grandfather's name Gloria?" he asked knowingly, testing her.
"Oh, Frederick. How could I possibly know that?" Gloria asked sweetly. "I mean I could randomly guess that it's Major Robert D. McArthur of the 295th Battlemech Division, but what are the chances I'd be right?" she asked rhetorically.
Alice blinked. "Is this some kind of magic trick?" she asked eventually.
"Not really. But rumour is that she's been known to make people disappear" Frederick said wryly. "You should have one of the strawberry milkshakes too if you haven't tried one before" he advised Alice. "They're good."
"Okay, I'll have one of those" Alice responded, giving the old woman a strange look as she took down their food order.
"I'll have your food brought out to the table when it's ready" Gloria told the teenagers as they headed for their table and sat down.
Alice put aside the mystery of the 'well-informed' diner owner for now. "So…" she began. "About what happened yesterday after school…"
"Sorry about that. I did say you shouldn't come and watch" Frederick apologised quickly.
"I didn't think you'd really fight him, I mean not fight him like that" Alice told the boy. "You could have killed each other."
"Nah. We were both pulling punches and not using any moves that might have resulted in anything worse than a broken bone" Frederick told her. "In a real fight it would have been all eye-gouging, crippling side-kicks to the knee and hitting below the belt."
"You throttled him!" Alice exclaimed.
"It was a chokehold, that's the idea. He tapped out before he went unconscious and I would have let go as soon as he did" Frederick explained. "We've hurt each other more than that just sparring" he told her. "He knocked out two of my baby teeth when we were little. I put them under my pillow at night and gave him half the money that was there instead the next morning. I'm pretty sure it was Star Captain Francis that put it there, not the tooth fairy though" he said, grinning.
Alice looked at him. "God. You people are so weird" she stated firmly.
"Yeah, we know" Frederick responded with a shrug. "We're not as weird as we used to be though, we've abandoned a lot of clan stuff, a most of what's left is just ceremonial for the majority of people, Dad thought it would promote social cohesion to keep a few traditions" he told her honestly before leaning closer and lowering his voice. "I asked you to come grab a burger because I really wanted to apologise about the other thing" he told her awkwardly. "I mean what I said before the fight after Clarissa Anderson said what she did."
"The part where she told everyone 'The boys are fighting over me' looking really pleased with herself, you mean?" Alice rightly assumed.
"Yeah. If she hadn't looked so freaking smug and self-satisfied I wouldn't have responded the way I did" Frederick told the girl. "It just annoyed the crap out of me. It wasn't really about her at all, it was about me being pissed at Dave for what he did. I wasn't jealous of him, I was…" he paused as he searched for the right word.
"Aggrieved" Alice suggested.
"Yes, aggrieved" Frederick replied, nodding. "Good choice of word, what with the Trial of Grievance and all" he added.
"I thought so" Alice replied drily.
Frederick really hoped he looked as remorseful as he felt. "All I could think of to shut her up was to say that we weren't fighting over her. Why would I fight over her? I already had a really great girlfriend who actually kept to her word."
"Yeah. There was one slight issue I had with that. It would have been nice if you had, let's say, asked me to be your girlfriend before telling everyone that I was" Alice told him, glaring. "Just because I went to the Christmas dance with you, and we've hung out a few times since, doesn't mean we were going steady" she said. In reality it had been more than 'a few times' however. He was good company being fun and likeable, but they certainly weren't dating or anything. If they were she would have been a lot more annoyed that he usually came here with his 'sibko' friends and not her, not that they were normal enough to just call themselves 'friends', they were 'trothkin' which sounded like it had been lifted from some High Fantasy novel about dragons.
"I know, and I'm really, really sorry" Frederick replied, wincing. "Your being 'aggrieved' about it is like, totally understandable' he continued, trying a weak joke.
"No. I think using your word 'pissed' is closer to how I feel about it" Alice told him, narrowing her eyes. "Beyond the fact it wasn't true, it was like you used me as a prop in a story" she complained as their food was brought out and placed on the table between them.
For once Frederick wasn't interested in his burger as the waitress left their table again, although Alice picked hers up and took a small bite before popping some fries into her mouth as well. She still missed Buffalo Meadows, it was her home where she was born, but the food was way better here. Especially given that you didn't have to grow it yourself.
She also still missed sunlight. Not that most people in the Inner Sphere would think Buffalo Meadows was sunny, not compared to a normal colony world orbiting a G class star anyway, but at least back home you didn't have to lie under a sunlamp every so often to fight depression and get enough Vitamin D.
It wouldn't be quite so bad if her damn freckles didn't always seem to come out with a vengeance after every session with the sunlamp, but they did. While getting changed for gym class one of the Wolverine girls had made a joke about her looking like she was completely painted up in disruptive pattern camouflage and it was just tragic that the bright orange hair ruined the innate tactical advantage nature had gifted her otherwise.
What passed for humour amongst the 'Ironborn' took some getting used to, though not as much as them thinking that beating the hell out of each other was normal behaviour.
"I don't know if it helps but everyone believed me because, well, you're really cute now without the glasses" Frederick told her. "Not that you weren't still cute with them" he added quickly. "I mean you're nice and smart too, and between the nice, the smart and the really cute then me not giving a crap about Clarissa Anderson sounded plausible I guess."
Alice suddenly laughed, nearly choking on her food. She managed to swallow and took a quick swig from her milkshake to stop herself coughing. "It's not as plausible as you think" she said. "I was asked earlier what I see in you."
Frederick couldn't think of a better response than "I hope you made something up" and reached for his own milkshake.
"What, so now you expect me to lie?" Alice replied, giving him a look of reproach.
"It would really help me out a lot if you did" Frederick pleaded. "Maybe you could tell people you dumped me because of the fight? That would get us both out of this fast."
"No" Alice told him flatly. Taking another bite out of her burger.
"You know that I'll look like an ****** if you tell people you aren't, or weren't, my girlfriend right?" Frederick checked.
Alice chewed and swallowed. "Yes" she confirmed. "I'm not your girlfriend and I won't lie and say that I am, or was."
"Crap" Frederick responded gloomily, picking up his burger and taking a huge bite. It tasted like ashes in his mouth, and ketchup.
"Ask me to be your girlfriend" Alice instructed him..
Frederick gulped down his barely-chewed mouthful of cheeseburger. "What?!" he gasped out.
"If you ask me to be your girlfriend, and I say yes, then I'm your girlfriend" Alice told him. "That way I can dump you and not be lying when I say you used to be my boyfriend."
That was the kind of rules lawyering that would have made Sarah proud, Frederick decided. Alice really was smart, and maybe more underhanded and sneaky than he ever thought she was. "Really?" he asked.
"Ask me" Alice instructed him.
"Okay… um… would you like to be my girlfriend?" Frederick asked.
"No" Alice told him.
"Eh?" Frederick responded in confusion, now looking utterly bewildered.
"Your face!" Alice said, giggling.
"Oh, come on!" Frederick complained when he realised she was yanking his chain. Nice girl my ass, he thought to himself.
Alice adopted a serious expression. "Okay, I've reconsidered. After further consideration I'm officially your girlfriend now" she solemnly agreed.
"Great. So do you want to dump me in front of other people because I totally deserve the public humiliation?" Frederick asked, pretty sure he did under the circumstances. Sometimes you just had to fall on your sword.
"I'll think about it. Until then, and as my boyfriend, you're paying for all my junk food because the cheeseburgers here are great" she enthused. "I've heard the fried chicken is good here too, so when you take me here next time we'll have that" she told him. "Also, you're taking me to the movies and paying for my ticket and popcorn, and…"
"What?!" Frederick exclaimed, cutting her off mid-sentence.
"Did you really think I'd let you off that lightly?" Alice asked him. "I'm going to teach you a lesson bucko."
Frederick pondered what she was saying for a moment. "Couldn't you just punch me in the face or something instead?" he suggested as an alternate course of action. "I can get a medic to patch me up for free, but my allowance only goes so far."
"Not. That. Lightly" Alice repeated for emphasis.
Frederick sighed dejectedly then his expression brightened as a thought occurred. "So, while you're officially my girlfriend do we get to make out?" he asked hopefully.
Alice rolled her eyes. "What do you think?" she asked him sardonically. "We'd probably better hold hands sometimes to maintain appearances though."
Figuring his options here were sorely limited Frederick groaned and admitted defeat. "If I'd wanted to get manipulated and bossed around I'd have dated Jennifer" he muttered to himself, taking another bite from his cheeseburger.
The door to the diner opened again and a familiar face walked in. "Hey Dave" Frederick greeted him.
"Hey Fred, how are the ribs?" David Robertson asked.
"Kinda sore, not too bad though" Frederick replied. "No hard feelings about the chokehold?"
The other boy shook his head. "Nah, my own fault for letting you get close enough to grapple like that" he replied. "Best man won and all that, I knew I was being a jerk when I asked Clarissa to go to the dance" he admitted.
"That's why I knew I'd beat him. The fight is usually over before it starts, you've got to have your heart in it" Frederick told Alice, Dave Robertson nodding his agreement with that assessment.
Alice looked from one of them to the other incredulously. They hadn't said a word to each other in three months, and yesterday they were beating each other senseless, but now it seemed like they were right back to being friends. Jennifer had explained to her the clan concept of 'surkai', the right for forgiveness if you conceded you were wrong, but completely abandoning a grudge quite that easily just seemed outlandishly bizarre.
"Hey Alice" Dave acknowledged her. "If you ever decide to trade up for a better boyfriend look me up" he told her, giving her a wink.
"Seriously Dave? Seriously?" Frederick responded, shaking his head in disbelief as Dave went to order some food. "It's like he needs me to let him know who the hot girls are or something."
"I'm hot?" Alice asked in surprise, that was a step up from being cute earlier.
"Well not like Inferno Round hot but yeah" Frederick told her. "Part of that is probably the hair. Did you know that when it frizzes up in the wind and rain that from a distance you sometimes kinda look like someone set you on fire" he told her earnestly.
Alice looked utterly bemused for a while by what he had just said then frowned as she reached for the bowl of french fries again. He could just be a freaking idiot, but maybe he was being clever and was trying to get dumped sooner by saying something like that? "You should have stopped at 'hot' because then I might have reconsidered the whole 'making out' thing" she told him.
Frederick blinked. "******" he swore and dejectedly took another big bite of his cheeseburger as Alice hid her grin behind a handful of fries.
After ordering his food Dave took a seat at the counter rather than join them, he probably didn't want to interpose himself between what he assumed was a couple, Alice supposed. Or maybe he didn't trust himself not to flirt and wanted to avoid the violent consequences Frederick possibly becoming 'aggrieved' again.
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Part XVIII - Section 2 of 2
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"Can you turn the volume up on the TV?" one of the other customers requested, Frederick looking over to the viewscreen to see why and seeing that a 'Breaking News' banner was being displayed.
Gloria used her remote control to increase the sound level as a newscaster replaced the pundits. "We have just been notified by the government of important developments within the Inner Sphere" the newscaster began. "In the wake of full-scale offensives launched by the Draconis Combine against both the Lyran Commonwealth and Federated Suns, Archon Marcus Steiner has formally declared war on the Combine and has ordered full mobilisation" he reported. "These developments, following in the wake of the continuing clashes between the Federated Suns and the Capellan Confederation over ownership of systems within what the Confederation calls the 'Chesterton Commonality', appear to indicate that the period of relative peace in the Inner Sphere that began with the end of the so-called 'Great Succession War' of 2786 to 2821 is now at an end."
"Jesus Christ. There are still worlds out there glowing from all the nukes thrown about last time these morons went head-to-head" one of the customers observed, groaning. "At least the Free Worlds League isn't involved yet."
"Just you wait. As soon as they figure the Lyrans and Capellans have their hands full they're going to try and take back the Bolan Thumb" Frederick spoke up. "Those systems had been under Marik rule for centuries before the Steiners kicked them out during the Great Succession War. There's no way that the Captain-General on Atreus doesn't want them back" he stated with certainty. "The League might try and take even more territory off the Confederation too if they get the chance" he added. The Capellans hadn't done too well for themselves last time, some of the worlds that the refugees who sought shelter on Niops were originally from were well inside the borders of the Free Worlds League these days.
"I guess we're not going to be calling it the 'Great Succession War' any longer though" Gloria wryly observed. "They'll have to change the history books to call it the 'First Succession War' now" she supposed, wondering how out-of-date the news was, days or weeks? Admiral Bremman routinely sent civilian jumpships into the Free Worlds League disguised as periphery traders, mostly for the purposes of gathering intelligence of course but it was also an opportunity to purchase small quantities of goods not readily available to the Association. These goods happened to include some of the spices required for her fried chicken recipe, it paid dividends knowing the spooky intelligence types running the operation.
"Maybe it'll be their own people that they get killed in droves this time not innocent Terrans" someone said darkly. "Kerensky should have stayed and taught them a lesson."
"If he'd known that many people were going to die maybe he would have" Gloria suggested, not being entirely sure either way. Aleksandr Kerensky had certainly expected war to break out with the SLDF gone, but maybe not at the scale it actually did. When they reached the Inner Sphere the Wolverines had been shocked to discover to the death toll of a war that had only ended a few years earlier at that point. More people had died in the Great Succession War than in every other war humanity had fought since the Bronze Age combined, with some worlds having populations that were once counted in the billions now effectively dead. If Kerensky had only been expecting something more akin to the so-called Age of War that existed prior to the formation of the Star League he had badly underestimated what was going to happen.
Back in 2412 the deaths of a mere three-hundred-thousand civilians as a consequence of a nuclear exchange on Tintavel had so horrified the Great Houses that they signed the Ares Conventions. During the Great Succession War the deaths of a third of a million people was just a Tuesday.
That so much death and destruction had apparently not convinced the Successor States that they should probably find a better way to settle their differences did not speak well of their morality, let alone their intellects.
"The Hegemony Worlds are going to burn again aren't they?" Alice asked quietly.
"Any of them that still have enough industry and resources to be worth fighting over. Yes, probably" Frederick replied sadly. "They've razed entire cities, whole planets even, just to stop the other side getting them in the past" he said. "Do you know if you have any family living in the Hegemony still?"
Alice shook her head. "I don't think so. According to my parents most of my family were from Lone Star, Killbourn and Lockdale. They're all basically dead worlds now" she said. "I might have some really distant cousins on Terra still I suppose. You?"
"Not in the Hegemony, but maybe elsewhere in the Inner Sphere" Frederick told her. "My Dad's older brother didn't join Kerensky's Exodus, he went to live on Royal in the Federated Suns when the Star League started to collapse. The Drac's took Royal off the FedSuns early in the war and they took it back later on, so if they survived both invasions I might have family there" he said. "I don't know if they'd consider me family though, what with being made in a lab."
Alice forced a smile. "Come on. Genetically you're probably the most Hallis, Hallis that ever Hallised" she joked. "Unless you had ancestors that were brother and sister that is."
"True. I'm also probably the most Hallis, Hallis that ever will Hallis, because after they turned out the first generation Ironborn they decided it would be a bad idea to let anyone be routinely made from much more than fifty-percent of the DNA from one donor in future. Too much long-term risk of the kind of problems inbreeding can cause."
"That worried people on Buffalo Meadows" Alive told him. "Not enough children being born to avoid us all being related just a bit too much for comfort in another generation or two."
"On the plus side, you'd have had the best six-fingered banjo-playing inbred rednecks in the whole periphery, which is really saying something because the Taurian Concordat exists" Frederick joked.
Alice giggled, smile not forced this time.
On the television the newscaster momentarily looked down at the noteputer in front of him. "The High Associator has issued a statement saying that the SLDF is not planning to raise their alert status at this time, but may do so later if the Free Worlds League also mobilises for war" he said. "Given how far we actually are from the borders of any other Successor State, and therefore any likely zone of conflict, this in itself would only be a precaution since it is deemed highly unlikely that there will be any fighting within two hundred light-years of the Niops Association or its protectorates."
"If Charles Marik goes to war he'll move any regular formations and warships he has near the periphery up to the front lines" Gloria reasoned. "Anyone want to annex Romita?" she joked, that Marik controlled system was actually the closest inhabited world to the Association, less than half the distance than Alphard was and the only one that lay less than one full jump away.
"Nah. We should take Revel and Stettin, make the maps look tidier" one of the customers responded, grinning.
Frederick thought about that. "That would make the maps look tidier" he had to agree. Because of those systems the Free Worlds League claimed ownership of space to either side of Niops making the Inner Sphere/Periphery border in that region of space less than ideal for the Association if they ever went to war with the League.
"Who do you think will win? The new war I mean" Alice asked Frederick, it seemed like something he would know a lot about.
"The Dracs wouldn't stand a chance if the Lyran's weren't so bad at leveraging their industrial superiority into battlefield success" Frederick replied after a moment's consideration. "They've just got too many senior officers who only got to where they are because of their connections and a noble title, not actual ability" he told her. "The FedSuns are much better led, but they're going to be overstretched fending off the Capellans at the same time as the Combine is at their throats" he reasoned. "My guess would be the Dracs will do pretty well at first, they never really demobilised after the last war so they're hitting the ground running, but it could really bite them on the ass that with the League staying out of it for now the Steiners can shift forces from their border with the Mariks to reinforce the front lines."
Frederick took a gulp from his milkshake. "The longer it is before Atreus gets involved the worse it's going to be for Luthien. They might not be able to general their way out of a wet paper bag but once they've pulled their finger out of their ass Tharkad will just throw their wallet at the problem and all the Bushido Code in the Inner Sphere won't help against that."
"Doesn't the Draconis Combine know that too?" Alice queried.
"Yes, of course, they just don't care" Frederick told her. "It's a honour thing. You know, 'Duty is heavier than a mountain, death is lighter than a feather' that stuff" he explained. "I wouldn't mind betting that a lot of their General Staff advocated hitting either the Lyrans or the FedSuns to knock them out of the war first before opening another front" he opined, "but others deemed that suggestion cowardly because it implies that Combine valour couldn't triumph over Steiner money and Davion tactical skill at the same time."
Alive pursed her lips. "Who do you want to win?"
"Personally you mean?" Frederick asked, receiving a nod of confirmation in return. "They're all ****** to a greater or lesser degree but I can't see the people running Tharkad or New Avalon ordering their troops to do something like the Kentares Massacre, or their troops actually doing it if they were ordered, so they're a lighter shade of grey than Luthien at least" he said. "Of course, they've all deployed WMD heedless of causing massive civilian casualties so that's not saying much. If I had to pick someone to lose than that's easy, Sian."
"The Cappies not the Dracs?" Alice responded, mildly surprised.
"They don't even treat their own people well, 'Servitor' is just a fancy word for serf or even slave, so you can bet that the people on any planet they conquer are going to be worse off than they were before" Frederick justified his answer. "As to their police-state of a society, well they really put the 'total' in totalitarian. It's like they read 1984 and thought to themselves, 'this Big Brother guy is on the right track but he's just not authoritarian enough'."
Alice seemed surprised by how animated he seemed to be about this. "I've never heard you talk politics before" she remarked. "I didn't think you cared this much about it."
"I wasn't very old when we escaped Nicholas Kerensky's Brave New World but it left enough of an impression on me, and the people around me, that the right to criticise the people in charge without getting put up against a wall and shot is kind of a big deal" Frederick told her earnestly. "Just think about the news channel playing up there. You can tune in most days and listen to people saying how they think the High Associator is screwing up and we think that's normal. The thing is, for most people these days that's not normal at all" he stated flatly. "Having a democratically elected government, an independent judiciary and a free press is an outlandish notion in a lot of the Inner Sphere but it's our reality and I'm not sure enough people appreciate just how lucky we really are."
Frederick suddenly laughed. "Sorry. I must sound like Jennifer when she goes off on one of her rants" he apologised. "There's reason we call her the standard-bearer for the Far Centre."
"The Far Centre?"
"You know. There's a political Far-right and Far-Left, so why not a Far-Centre?" Frederick explained. "Give me political moderation or give me death!" he declared, grinning. "Imagine thousands of angry people at a demonstration chanting, 'What do we want? Gradual change. When do we want it? As soon as reasonably practical' and you're kinda there" he joked. "Or you could think of it as an ideology based on being really suspicious of people with radical ideologies based on some economic theory or another, those that want to remake the world in a hurry without properly considering the consequences or entertaining the possibility they might be wrong. There's no flexibility in any system whose faith in itself verges on religious dogma."
"Sounds like the Clans" Alice knowingly observed, finishing her cheeseburger and washing it down with her milkshake. Frederick still had some food to finish off, he had been talking more the last few minutes. Probably more than she had ever heard him talk before to be honest, the girl assuming this was just something he cared about.
"Damn straight. Sometimes they couldn't even arrange enough food production because it was so damn hard to move people between jobs" Frederick told her. "According to my Dad Khan McEvedy once got her knuckles rapped for putting mechwarriors into agromechs to ensure a better harvest the following year" he said before munching on a French fry. "One day they're going to have a ****** famine and they'll let people starve rather than change course, because that would be admitting their utopia has flaws" he said. "There are some advantages to having a Planned Economy like the Clans or the Cappies, you can really get shit done fast when you have to, like organising big infrastructure projects, but you need to be able to tear up the plan when unforeseen events pop up and bite you on the ass" he continued. "If adaptability is restrained by chalcas then chalcas is a flawed concept."
Alice didn't know that word. "Chalcas?" she queried.
"Something, or sometimes someone, that is unacceptable to clan culture and challenges it" Frederick explained.
Alice nodded her understanding. Just another weird clan word she thought to herself, adding it to her mental list.
There was definite irony in just how critical Frederick and his compatriots from Sibling Company Gamma were of much of clanner society given that they seemed to have kept more clan traditions alive than most anyone else on Niops. It was likely a result of their unique history, not merely being the first generation of kids, or 'kits', to come out of the Iron Wombs, but also having made the journey to the Inner Sphere on Yukon rather than with the rest of the fleet. While Franklin Hallis had relaxed enforcement of most clan laws almost as soon as the Switchback fleet departed Clan Space, scrapping some entirely, the Yukon, it's passengers and crew continued following the old ways for another two years until they reunited with the rest of the Wolverines.
Not merely trained from birth to be the ultimate clan warriors, but actually created for that purpose, and steeped in clan tradition and culture for most of the first decade of their lives, it was too engrained to let it go as readily as most had. The majority of the civilian population had only been Wolverines since Operation Klondike, less than two years before the secession, and because the clans themselves only even came into existence in 2807 even most of the adult warrior caste had memories of their lives before.
It was a good thing that Sarah McEvedy's approach to how the sibkos of her clan were raised favoured promoting rather more freedom of thought than other clans or the Gamma kits would have found adjustment even more difficult.
Alice smiled as Frederick resumed eating. "So, are you planning on going into politics?" she asked him in jest.
Grimacing theatrically when you were trying to swallow a mouthful of burger wasn't easy but Frederick managed it. "Joining the army as soon as they'll let me, staying in the army until they say I'm too old and boot me out" he told her. "Ideally getting killed in action the day before forced retirement."
"My gast is well and truly flabbered" Alice replied wryly and upon witnessing his confused look in response she giggled. "You know, as in I'm flabbergasted" she explained. "It's something my Dad says."
"And people say we talk funny, query affirmative?" Frederick replied, grinning.
"Affirmative" Alice replied, smiling. "I'm surprised you didn't request surkai when you apologised earlier."
Frederick raised his eyebrows. "I didn't even know you knew what that was, but you're not part of the clan anyway so it wouldn't really be binding on you even though I did admit guilt and request punishment" he told her.
Alice smiled evilly. "So, if I offered you a choice of forgiveness without making out, or still being in my bad books but with making out which would you choose?" she asked sweetly.
As he tried to determine which was the lesser of two evils Frederick's pained expression of distress and mental anguish made her giggle once again. "Oh, come on! There's no right answer to that!" he protested eventually after thinking about it for an extended period, impaled on the horns of a dilemma between his ethics and his hormones.
"Unless that was the right answer" Alice suggested.
"Was it?" Frederick asked, nonplussed and extremely confused.
"I'll let you know later."
"Just to make absolutely sure, is you just punching me in the face to make things square between us completely off the cards because I'm not sure I can handle this" Frederick told her honestly.
"Think of it as character building" Alice suggested.
"Having to escape millions of deranged clanners that wanted to murder me before I was even ten years old was character building" Frederick replied. "Trying to choose between those options was soul destroying."
Alice rolled her eyes. "And people say teenage girls are overly dramatic" she retorted, reaching for her milkshake.
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Note from the Author:
Exactly how clan a Wolverine on Niops is going to be will vary enormously on a case-by-case basis. Someone from the Pentagon Worlds (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Pentagon_Worlds) who had only bee integrated into the clan after Operation Klondike in 2822 is going to be barely clanner at all whereas someone born into the warrior caste in the Kerensky Cluster (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Kerensky_Cluster) after 2807 (when Nicholas Kerensky founded them) will be very clanner indeed. There's going to be great variation even within the former warrior caste as well. To give an example, Franklin Hallis might be the Khan but he was already a full-grown man in 2807 and was raised in a Terran Hegemony/Star League cultural environment, that is not true of Frederick Hallis (and the rest of sibko Gamma) who were raised in very different circumstances. Letting go of clan culture is going to be easier for some people than others.
The kits of Sibling Company Gamma are no fans of Nicholas Kerensky (they know he wanted them killed) but they're still carrying his cultural baggage more than most.
In some ways the First (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/First_Succession_War) and Second (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Second_Succession_War) Succession Wars were actually one long conflict, naturally they didn't call it the 'First Succession War' until the second one broke out, untl then it was the 'Great Succession War' although some people refer to both wars together as that. The fighting never really completely stopped between 2821 and 2830, it just scaled back significantly for a while and then started to ramp back up until it was another full-blown conflict with WMD being thrown around again. The Free Worlds League was the last of the Successor States to get involved (though only a few months later) and being the one closest to Niops it's the one they're most concerned with.
With the Inner Sphere about to become too busy to notice what's happening in the periphery Niops is now in a position to start making some larger moves.
Finally, yes Sanders (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Sanders_(Bloodname)) is a Clan Widowmaker bloodname and while a Star Colonel Sanders setting up a chicken place called KCFC would be funny, the real tragedy for potential mirth is that Sanders isn't a Clan Jade Falcon (or perhaps Snow Raven) bloodname instead. Star Colonel Sanders secret recipe would never remain so with Gloria on the case!
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The "Great Succession War" bit was BRILLIANT, and totally apropos! :)
And ALL the points to Alice here... she's playing him like a fiddle, and he can't even bring himself to complain! ;D
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I'm loving Alice, but Gloria is downright creepy..
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Gloria is supposed to be creepy... she's like a cuddly Beria... ;D
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i wounder that after a few years a solar mirror is started to direct more light to the day side of the planet. maybe pitch it that one side helps the planet, but the other side is really half a dozen telescopes. then there would be the group that is upset by the "light" pollution.
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And ALL the points to Alice here... she's playing him like a fiddle, and he can't even bring himself to complain! ;D
Fred is a silly fool. Redheads like Alice are wonderful people to date, but not for the inexperienced. She'll chew him up and then spit him out if he doesn't up his game. :evil:
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I'm here for that ride either way... :D
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Part XIX- Section 1 of 2
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"The impossible we do immediately, the merely difficult was finished the day before yesterday"
Unofficial Motto of the Star League Department of Mega-Engineering
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Association Council Building – Niops Association (Niops VII) – 2830
The holographic projector that a technician had set up in the middle of the conference room had once sat in a much similar room in Columbus Base in the Epsilon Pegasus system. Even if you travelled in a straight line it would take a year to get there from Niops, and the circuitous route the device had taken to end up where it had was anything but direct.
Most of the people in the room had never even left the Niops system, let alone be as remotely well travelled as the projector, and it occurred to Trish Ebon that the only person in the room with more mileage on them than her was Colonel Roger Callahan, the man currently presenting his report on the world being projected up there as a visual aid.
"Due to a lack of anything resembling a central government we ended up having to visit most every settlement on Comstock, both to introduce ourselves and inform them we intended to make the planet a protectorate of the Niops Association" Callahan told the steering committee and their invited guests. "In the majority of cases they were deeply suspicious of us at first, assuming reasonably that we were pirates or other ne'er-do-wells merely pretending to be the SLDF, but once we managed to establish our credentials their reaction was overwhelmingly positive to the news."
"I imagine that returning the people abducted by the Blood Rain helped immensely?" Samantha Hollister, the new chair of the committee and a nuclear chemist, suggested. The previous committee chair had resigned because of a disagreement with the High Associator over a need to cut the university budget to help fund a new technical college.
"It did Ma'am" Callahan confirmed. "As did them learning from the abductees that we had decisively defeated the pirates in open battle, demonstrating our martial prowess and ability to take on and beat even the best trained and equipped threats out here" he continued. "As an aside, although I certainly wouldn't claim to any expertise in agriculture, my impressions of much of Comstock from travelling around the place so extensively are that it could easily become a breadbasket world with the right investment. I know the Star League wanted to develop it for industry, starting with leatherworking as there was a ready supply of materials from Francas, but from what I could see the soil across much of the planet is prime farmland waiting for the plough."
Hollister nodded. "There are a couple of worlds we've surveyed that have even more potential for arable farming, but since neither of them have an existing population near as large as Comstock we're already advocating developing the planet as both an agrarian and industrial world in the long-term" she told him. "Since you mentioned Francas I'll note that we've already decided it will continue as a world devoted to livestock farming because its vast swathes of grasslands and wide open plains are so suitable for the purpose. Fortunately they managed to maintain a functional central government of sorts there so we're much further along the track with them diplomatically."
Callahan smiled. "I'm not sure if you're aware but apparently there's always been a friendly rivalry between those two worlds, they actually remained in contact after the fall of the Star League because the jumpship that transported meat and leather from Francas to Comstock continued operating. If it hadn't then the food shortage on Comstock would have been even more severe" he told them. "If we're ever at the stage of asking systems to formally band together to form a new Hegemony then tell Comstock that Francas is working hard to becoming the second member to sign up after Niops, that'll motivate them" he advised, grinning.
"We'll make a note in our report to that effect Colonel, thank you" the Hollister replied. "Returning to Comstock, what do you think the prospects are for them forming a government we could negotiate with on a more formal basis as we did with Francas?"
"If we facilitate the process it's possible, but it could be a few years before they're in a position to elect a government, even with our assistance" Callahan replied. "The food shortages they suffered once grain shipments stopped arriving took a wrecking ball to their political structure. They lost faith in their planetary government because it was unable to cope with the situation, it was never really that strong to start with anyway because most important decisions were made by officials on Terra, and it could be a while before they get that faith back even if we try and nudge them back towards a more centralised and less factionalised society."
"How would the local populace react if we appointed a governor from Niops to take over running the colony until they were ready to do so themselves, do you think?" one of the other members queried.
Callahan frowned. "There's no simple answer to that, Sir" he responded. "A large number, perhaps even a majority would accept it as long as we could keep order, fend off pirates and steadily improve their standard of living, but a significant minority are still going to object to outside rule being imposed" he warned. "Though most people seemed glad to see us there were more than a few who were angry that the Star League seemed to forget about them and occasionally directed that anger towards my personnel. They seemed to accept our cover story that the reason the Niops Association didn't show up before was a fear of being blasted into oblivion by the Great Houses, who had already razed other developed Terran Hegemony worlds necessitating an isolationist policy until we could amass a sufficiently large nuclear deterrent to feel somewhat secure, but there remains an undercurrent of resentment."
"I know it's not your field of expertise Colonel, but having witnessed the situation on the planet first-hand what methods would you advocate?" Hollister asked him.
Callahan thought about that. "Nothing revolutionary, just following much the same approach as we took on Alphard in order to get the locals on side would work wonders on Comstock too" he replied. "Building more schools and hospitals, providing farming equipment and agricultural technical expertise to improve their food situation would quickly bear fruit" he continued with a mild joke. "As regards law and order issues, well as long as we make clear that the legal system we expect them to follow is simply a book of Terran statute law and precedent which we wrote 'Niops Association' on the cover of there shouldn't be any major objections. There are still people on Comstock that were born in the Hegemony and will happily tell the people around them that it was far from totalitarian" he said. "On that note I'd argue that acting like the Terran Alliance would get quicker results, but the Terran Hegemony approach of leaving domestic affairs up to the member worlds leads to fewer rebellions in the long term" he observed wryly.
"What of law enforcement?"
"The SLDF is already planning on training and arming a local militia which could help with that, but I can't see why the NAPD can't train them up a few professional cops too" Callahan replied. "They have local town sheriffs and the like there already, it's not a foreign concept" he said. "Keep in mind that civilisation on Comstock may have collapsed shortly after the Star League did, but that wasn't so long ago that they don't remember what civilised society actually is" he said. "There are still more than a few people on Comstock who emigrated there from the Hegemony after receiving the same anti-agathic treatments that some of the people in the room here today did, including myself."
"You served throughout the entire war against Amaris, Colonel?" one of the committee members asked curiously.
Callahan laughed. "I look good for my age, but not that good" he replied. "I was only in it right at the end when we took back Terra, barely eighteen years old and green as grass" he explained. "I've got a few years on General Hallis if you're wondering, he was only a kid during the Exodus."
Trish knew that Roger Callahan and Sarah McEvedy had actually played together as children, he was her oldest friend and when the clans were formed had naturally joined her in Clan Wolverine. As to why Sarah had wanted Dwight Robertson and later Franklin Hallis to be her saKhan instead of Callahan the answer was pretty simple, they were much better administrators and he just wasn't interested in a job that was far more politician than it was mechwarrior.
The committee chair leaned forward. "Colonel. If we advocated a more interventionist approach, not outright annexation of Comstock but taking temporary control of the planet until they were able to govern themselves, would you be open to accepting the position of Military Governor?" Hollister asked him seriously.
"I would not, and my wife would divorce me if I did" Callahan replied flatly. "That would require moving there, not just being there for a mission lasting a couple of months. We've uprooted ourselves more than enough already" he stated with conviction.
Unlike most of the rest of the senior leadership of the 331st Roger Callahan was a family man. He already had a wife and a couple of kids when he followed Nicholas Kerensky on the Second Exodus from the Pentagon Worlds to what became the Kerensky Cluster, and those kids were now mechwarriors themselves, two of them having fought against the Blood Rain on Algenib.
Thanks to the Iron Wombs he also had a son in Sibling Company Gamma, one that his wife insisted they take in, and he was finding it was pretty fun to be a dad again, even if the Gamma kits were weirder than his own had ever been.
"Furthermore," Callahan continued, "while I realise that as a colony of the Terran Hegemony we have some legal grounds for going that route, even putting aside the sweeping authority provided by the Pollux Proclamation, I would like it placed on the record that I personally consider it a very bad idea" he said. "We want the people of Comstock, and of Francas for that matter, to see themselves as Hegemony citizens again, not oppressed denizens of the periphery with an SLDF boot planted firmly on their necks" he continued. "Again, it's a personal opinion, albeit one based on experience, but after Operation Klondike the clans that treated the population of the Pentagon Worlds badly ended up tying down much of the military strength in keeping the lower castes from rising up against them, and I imagine that will be an ongoing problem" he opined, thinking of the Smoke Jaguars in particular because their labourer caste despised their military caste and with good reason. "Loyalty is earned, not taken, and we want our protectorates to follow us into a bright future by choice, not harbour seething resentment towards us."
"A simple 'no' would have sufficed, but we appreciate both your candour and your perspective" the committee chair responded, seemingly mildly amused by his impassioned argument. "Are there any more questions for Colonel Callahan before we move on to the next item on the agenda?" Hollister asked the others, everyone shaking their heads. "In that case, thank you for your time Colonel Callahan, we might wish to get back to you after studying your written report but until then you are free to go."
"Thank you" Callahan replied, turning to leave as Trish smiled at the irony that once again on Niops the military seemed to have less of an authoritarian streak than the civilian administration. She idly wondered how many other places that was true of in the Inner Sphere and doubted it could be too many.
How the Niops Association might have evolved as a society if the SLDF-in-Exile had not turned up at their door one day was a scenario she found diverting to contemplate sometimes. The technocratic instincts of a bunch of academics could have readily morphed over time into a 'benevolent' oligarchy of sorts, as they tried to maintain a decent standard of living, sacrificing some personality liberty for security and making sure everyone had their basic needs met.
The planetary image of Comstock being projected changed to that of Alphard as the next person arrived to make their presentation. Their tan certainly indicated plenty of time spent recently in the blazing sun of Alphard, although it would have looked less comedic if the area around her eyes wasn't so pale by comparison with the rest of their face.
"Good Afternoon, Professor Jeffs, nice to have you back" Hollister greeted the geologist they had invited to come talk to them.
"Nice to be back Sam," Stephanie Jeffs replied sincerely. Much as she enjoyed fieldwork there was much to be said for being able to take regular showers, eat something other than what the military considered healthy and nutritious rations, and go out to a bar if you felt like it.
"Would I be correct in assuming you spent much of your time on Alphard wearing sunglasses?" the chair asked, trying to keep a straight face. They had known each other long enough for her to get away with it.
"Haven't you heard. The reverse racoon look is all the rage" Jeffs replied wryly, knowing full well she looked daft. At least they couldn't see her legs, they were tanned brown to just above the knees while remaining their normal pasty white above.
"At least you didn't get sunstroke" Hollister commiserated.
"I didn't but one of my grad students did" Jeffs told her. "That'll teach them for not wearing the boonie hat that were given because it messed up their hair" she added without much sympathy for the hapless, and hatless, girl concerned.
Trish had already heard this story from Major Gao whose unit had been providing security and transportation for the geology team. The girl concerned had been flirting relentlessly with one of his VTOL pilots and had prioritised looking pretty over staying cool as a result.
Gao had also joked that it was a good thing that the survey ended when it did, because the arguments that his male personnel were having over which of the female grad students looked best in the khaki shorts they all seemed to wear were becoming more heated than the arid terrain. His female troops however had remained cool and aloof, albeit mostly because they unanimously agreed which of the male geologists had the best ass.
As Jeffs began her presentation with a summary of the scale of the germanium deposits already starting to be extracted at the Crux facility, and her geological survey of other sites on the island continent that showed signs of being almost as rich in the strategically vital resource, Trish jotted down some notes. With the Great Houses having once again set the Inner Sphere ablaze the High Administrator wanted to move ahead with plans to purchase the plant and machinery necessary to rapidly develop the Niops economy, requesting that the committee provide him with their final recommendations as soon as possible. To this end they had urgently called in various subject matter experts to provide last-minute evidence, not wishing their report to be less than thorough.
"Moving on to the rest of the planet" Jeffs continued her presentation, "while the northern continents of Typhon and Echidna are extremely mineral rich, I concur with others that it would be a criminal waste of arable farmland not to devote as much of them as possible towards food production" she said. "The soil samples we collected confirmed that with better irrigation there is no reason to believe we cannot eventually grow enough crops there to support a population on Alphard well in excess of a billion people, though it will certainly never be a garden world."
"Over a billion people on such an arid world? Really" Hollister queried.
"Typhon and Echida are both very large continents with vast areas of land potentially available for cultivation" Jeffs responded. "You have to remember that Alphard is only 55% percent covered by ocean compared to just over 70% for Terra" she said, pointing to the holographic globe. "There's not enough potential farmland to support anything like the population of Terra, or Atreus or Capella for example but low single-digit billions, perhaps three at the top-end, that would be feasible."
"That would certainly provide a sizeable workforce for future industrialisation" one of the other committee members observed.
"As regards industrial development I would point you at the largest continent, Hydrae" Jeffs suggested, pointing to it on the globe. "Most of it lies in the Northern hemisphere, but it straddles the equator making much of it even hotter than Crux if anything" she said. "It does however benefit from several mountain ranges, a couple of which are high enough for sufficient precipitation to fall to form rivers. These either flow into either the ocean or the large inland sea known as Lerna" she continued. "Hydrae has great mineral wealth, but it is also somewhere we could develop as a centre of industry because, unlike Crux, some of it is reasonably habitable. Building homes and factories on the coast where the larger rivers meet the ocean would seem ideal, because not only could food be shipped in by sea from Typhon and Ecidna, we can use the river itself for bulk cargo transportation inland until a maglev network is constructed."
"This mineral wealth you spoke of is conveniently near these rivers?"
Jeffs smiled. "If you'll forgive the hyperbole, Hydrae is practically made of metal ores" she said. "While the richest deposits we found aren't near the rivers alas, the ones that are located nearby are still well worth digging up. I'm not just talking germanium either, though it's there, we also found copper, aluminium, titanium, tungsten, magnesium and practically anything else you might care to mention, and without even having to look very hard" she continued. "It's not even like we have to worry about despoiling the environment. Much of Hydrae away from the rivers is practically a barren, lifeless wasteland and frankly open cast mining would only be improving the view" she joked.
"You mentioned the inland sea, I assume it's salt-water not fresh?" Hollister asked.
"Freshwater, but too much evaporation for it not to be a bit salty, it has some potential for irrigation projects but the land around it doesn't exactly have great soil" Jeffs replied. "There are fish in there and it would make a great place for a tourist destination, all the sunshine you could ever ask for, if that happened to be your thing, and the water is warm enough to make swimming in it an absolute pleasure."
Hollister looked amused. "You took time off to go swimming?" she asked chidingly.
Jeffs blinked. "We were testing the buoyancy as a measure of salinity" she replied unconvincingly. "We also collected examples of various aquatic species for the biology department, including a very interesting one we're calling the Alphard Mudskipper that might be on the evolutionary track to becoming a land animal eventually."
"I thought you geology people were only interested in rocks" someone joked.
"We're mainly interested in rocks, that doesn't make us incurious about the other sciences" Jeffs replied evenly. "On the subject of other disciplines, before I forget can you please make sure that the credit for our expedition to Alphard is shared with the geography department" she requested. "Without the help of a couple of their people who tagged along our report wouldn't be as thorough and would lack a broader perspective."
"There's a geography department at the university?" someone on the committee queried in surprise.
"It's like six people and a bunch of maps" another responded. "They're basically an adjunct of geology, they just refuse to merge with them."
"The fields are radically different" Jeffs responded. "Why not just merge us with geometry too" she growled, her reputation as being the academic more prone to threats of violence of any on Niops causing everyone to quickly abandon the topic.
Rumours that she had once beaned a student with an accurately thrown whiteboard eraser, the student concerned having fallen asleep during one of her lectures, were widely believed though officially denied.
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Part XIX - Section 2 of 2
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"A complete planetary survey would have taken longer than we had, but if you read my full written report you'll find it already provides a list of sites my team believe are either worth further investigation or are worth setting up a mining operation there straight away" Jeffs told them. "I doubt there are many strategically important minerals that Alphard does not boast in abundance."
Hollister nodded. "On the subject of germanium in particular how long do you think we can expect to extract it from Alphard at meaningful rates until it runs out?"
"I'm not sure how you define 'meaningful' but there's enough germanium that we could pull in excess of a billion dollar's worth of the stuff out of the ground every year for over a century before we even had to go looking for deposits I can't already point to on a map" Jeffs replied. "Incidentally, if anyone wants a few billion in platinum and palladium let me know and I'll tell you where to start digging" she added, chuckling.
"I assume that a century of mining at over a billion of germanium per year is a high-end estimate?"
"No. It's a rather conservative one actually" Jeffs replied, shaking her head. "The old ATC were doing noticeably better than that themselves, and they concentrated all their mining efforts at one primary site on Crux only. Which is admittedly the location holding the richest deposits, but ore that would be considered low-grade by Alphard standards is still better than most of what's dug up in the Inner Sphere" she told them. "I really must warn you that we don't want to dig it up any faster than that because if we did we could actually end up lowering the market price considerably and that's not in our interests."
"That seems unlikely given the massive demand for germanium to build jumpships" one of the other committee members responded dubiously.
"That would be the case if there were still as many shipyards in the Inner Sphere still making the things as there used to be but there aren't are there" Jeffs asked rhetorically. "The bottleneck to production used to be germanium supply, hence it always maintaining its value and making it an excellent means of backing the Star League dollar, but if the Great Houses don't stop blasting each other back to the Stone Age then eventually they'll have a stockpile of germanium and be unable to build enough jumpships to use it all up. I can't see it being a good idea to speed up the process of them building up a reserve so they become less interested in buying it at the usual process even sooner."
"Logically the price per kilo would start falling dramatically if supply starts to exceed demand" Hollister concurred. "We've already considered that we might want to be careful how fast we spend the germanium we already have, monitoring the markets to make sure we aren't hurting our own profits, but we weren't really thinking about having to do that well into the 30th Century and how much demand might potentially drop off in the long-term."
"That's actually a good argument for starting to construct our own jumpships from the germanium earlier than initially planned and selling those instead" Trish spoke up. "They're only going to increase in value as more shipyards are destroyed."
"It's a good point but our orbital manufacturing capability is already sorely overstretched which is why constructing a shipyard is as far down the list as it is" one of the others chipped in. "That is unless we look again at the proposal to only partially construct the Olympus stations in our own system and Annie Jump Cannon. Instead of eight batteries at each, only build four for now, and only complete one grav deck and the larger of the three repair bays, completing the work when we're not as stretched."
"The smaller bays are for dropship maintenance and with luck we'll have the actual dropship yard from Camelot Command operating before the year is out anyway" Trish added for herself. "If we are able to get the licenses and blueprints needed to build the CargoKing we might not need to devote as much effort to maintaining our older dropships, we'll be building brand new ones and by the time they need servicing the Olympus stations might be fully completed and available for the task."
The committee chair looked thoughtful. "We're certainly not short on dropships in any case so we could simply mothball any that are becoming unsafe to operated" Hollister observed. "We should probably call in the engineering people again to discuss this all again in detail" she said. "I'm slightly surprised you seem to have placed such weight on the implications of the scale of your find in terms of market economics, Professor Jeffs" she remarked. "Not exactly your field of expertise I would have thought."
"My department literally teaches courses in Economic Geology" Jeffs responded, seeming amused by the comment. "If you'll forgive the pun, geology is a little more 'grounded' than many of the other sciences. We don't just dig up rocks for fun, a big part of it is to go looking for the valuable ones so other people can dig them up to make money" she said, "and we're often called in to help advise how to dig them up too because local geology can make a difference to how you want to handle that" she continued. "Less pure science just for the sake of it, more profit motive you might say."
"Consider me better informed as to your department then. Moving on, in the light of your survey of Alphard should we be considering diverting some of the planned efforts to expand mining output in the Niops system to there instead?"
"If you wanted to maximise output then as regards the plans to dig new open-cast mines on Niops V and Niops VI I would say yes, although that decision should really be balanced with the presumed need not to have all our eggs in one basket strategically" Jeffs replied. "I would certainly advise to still go ahead with mining rare earth metals on Niops III for that very reason, and of course the expansion of the asteroid mining program because when you're talking about the tens of millions of tons of material needed to construct orbital and jump-point infrastructure, and then supply zero-gee factories and shipyards on an ongoing basis, you don't want to have to haul it all up the Alphard gravity well in dropship sized chunks and then cart it all here by jumpship."
"I would have to agree" an astronomer on the committee concurred. "Moreover, one of our greatest advantages is just how close everything in this system is to everything else, our asteroid belt is only a stone's throw away, forgive my own pun, so we can easily and quickly ramp up orbital factory production when required" he said. "We can grind up a big floating rock, feed it into an arc furnace and have the metal to the factory weeks before we could do so if we relied upon imports instead."
Jeffs nodded. "My colleagues and I discussed this in consultation with some of the engineering department and an authority in meteoritics and there are a few strategic metals that aren't found in abundance in the Niops asteroid belt that we are going to want to import" she told the committee, "but as regards iron, titanium, aluminium and so on, the ones we use in bulk, there's no good reason to import them and several good reasons not to" she said. "We'll still want to mine them on Alphard, but only to feed the industries there."
"Out of interest who did you talk to about the makeup of our asteroid belt" the astronomer queried. "I'm not aware of anyone from geology approaching my department."
Stephanie Jeffs looked shifty for a moment as if reluctant to say. "He's not actually from your department although…"
"Farnstrom" the astronomer realised with distaste. "He's a fruitcake."
"He does know a lot about our asteroid belt though and he was readily available without making an appointment to answer a few quick questions' Jeffs defended herself, "mostly because they don't let him lecture the undergraduate students anymore after the incident with the particle accelerator and the cheese sandwich" she undermined her case. "He really does know a lot about the subject. I can't be the only person he's droned on to about floating rocks at parties surely?"
"A knowledgeable fruitcake is still a fruitcake" the astronomer replied, "and we don't let him anywhere near any of the social events my department organises" he told her in a tone that indicated mystification that anyone would. "For obvious reasons I'll be double-checking any information he gave you."
"I'm always open to peer review" Jeffs responded with a shrug. "You should have already all received copies of my full report so there really isn't too much more to say at this juncture other than one particularly interesting discovery on the smaller of the northern continents, Heracles, situated roughly between Typhon and Hydrae."
"That being, Professor Jeffs?" Hollister asked.
"It looks like Alphard might have taken a hit from a particularly hefty comet at some point, the remains of part of the impact crater can be seen on land with the rest underwater" Jeffs told them. "We're talking about something on the scale of the Chicxulub crater on Terra, but the lack on an Iridium layer indicates big ball of ice not big rock as the culprit on Alphard" she continued. "Preliminary estimate gives an impact date of approximately twenty-five million years ago. If we had a palaeontology department I'm sure they would want to start digging into the fossil record to see what impact the impact had on how the planets native species developed."
"That is interesting" the committee chair enthused, everyone else apart from Trish seeming equally interested in news that was apparently aeons old.
The next person to be invited to speak was apparently running late so the committee members and guests talked among themselves for a while before an annoyed looking engineer wearing a dishevelled SLDF jumpsuit arrived, being immediately directed to a spot next to the projector so he could provide his report.
"Thank you for coming, Captain Murray" the committee chair greeted the engineer. "I'm afraid we do not seem to have received your written report regarding the electronic auto-factory project" Hollister noted.
"That's because I thought it was more important to get the thing running than it was to stop working on it and tell you about it" Murray replied gruffly. "I should be back there right now" he complained.
Trish fought back a smile. SLDF orbital engineer James Murray had recently passed his hundredth birthday and was also long past the stage in his life where he cared much for civility, or paperwork other than blueprints and operating instructions for that matter.
The committee chair sighed. "We will try not to detain you longer than we have to" she replied. "I assume you know our role here? That the recommendations of this committee will be used to determine the spending priorities of the Niops Association for perhaps the next decade."
"Yeah" Murray confirmed.
"Good, then I hope you realise that it is important that we hear from you given that once the auto-fac you are constructing is operational we can use it to produce important replacement circuitry that would otherwise have to be made in a Project Workshop" Hollister checked. "Workshops that could be used to make something else instead so we don't have to import them."
"Obviously" Murray nodded.
"In that vein can you please give us an update on when exactly the auto-factory for producing electronics that was stripped from the Camelot Command facility might be running."
Murray crossed his arms. "Yesterday" he replied.
"I'm sorry?" Hollister responded in surprise.
"Yesterday. We started it running yesterday" Murray told them. "We're still putting it together but because we know what we're doing we started with the module that processes raw materials and puts them into storage, connected up a fusion reactor and turned it on" he said. "We've been feeding it copper, silver, silicon and various other materials while we connect up the other modules that can convert the processed materials into components."
"I'm sorry but how have you 'turned on' an automated factory that as far as I know is still packed up in crates?" Hollister responded nonplussed.
"Only part of it is still packed up in crates, the part that actually produces the finished product because obviously that can be left until last, but judging from your expression I'm assuming that you think the auto-fac is like one big machine" Murray surmised. "It's not, it's a lot of separate auto-facs bolted together that all do different things" he explained. "Okay, so I'll give you an example. This morning we put together the module that makes resistors, that's all it does, it takes raw materials from the storage hoppers containing those and turns them into a few dozen different types of resistors, which it then places into other storage hoppers ready for when the module that actually makes the finished circuit boards needs them" he said. "This afternoon we'll be plugging in the module that makes diodes and if it goes smoothly then hopefully get started on the module that makes capacitors next"
"You make it sound like a big construction kit!" one of the other committee members exclaimed.
"That's exactly what it is" Murray replied. "The SLDF needed something that could be made in manufacturing plants in the Terran Hegemony, taken apart, shipped to where it was needed and bolted back together so that's exactly how they designed the things" he said. "We took it apart on Camelot Command, properly labelled the boxes, and now we're just reversing the process, being smart enough to do it in the right order so we can get it running while we do so."
Hollister frowned. "I'm just surprised that you don't have to completely assemble the thing before turning it on."
"If all you needed was a couple of non-standard transistors to fix something with, a type that weren't already in the storage bins you could just reach in and take, you wouldn't want to have to turn on an entire factory to get them would you?" Murray asked rhetorically. "The way it's designed you can just tell the computer running the entire thing to tell the transistor module to make them and wait for a few minutes until it has, with most everything else still powered down. They'll pop out in a drawer on the side" he said. "The biggest pain in the ass is actually fitting all the conveyer belts and other internal connections that lets the whole thing work together. Some of the robotic systems that collect components from all the various storage hoppers and feed them to the circuit-board module are clunky. They were designed to be hard-wearing which, makes them bulkier than they would be ideally. You have to squeeze past them sometimes to get to where you need to be, we might need skinnier maintenance people to look after it in the long-term" he joked.
"It all sounds like you've got quite a project to manage, Captain Murray" Hollister remarked, though it did seem like he knew what he was doing.
"I started out as an apprentice engineer working for the Star League Department of Mega Engineering before signing up with the SLDF Ma'am" Murray replied. "Anything less than terraforming an entire planet seems less than daunting to me" he said. "The more complicated modules will take longer to install, the big one that makes microprocessors could potentially cause us problems too, but you can safely assume I'll have the entire thing up and running, spitting out any circuit board you might need, inside of five weeks" he said, pretty sure it would take less than three, but it looked good to come in well ahead of schedule.
Hollister raised her eyebrows. "That's… rather quicker than we assumed" she said.
"I'm a miracle worker, what can I say?" Murray responded wryly. "Just don't forget that this type of auto-fac was never intended for ongoing mass production, running around the clock. It was intended to make replacement parts for equipment on Camelot Command that went wrong, and to do the same for ships that went there" he warned. "You can use it to make the electronics needed to run a manufacturing plant like that, but it's no substitute for one."
"We're aware" Hollister told him.
"Can I get back to my job now please" Murray requested. It wasn't so much that the big ugly concrete warehouse just outside of town where they were reassembling the auto-fac was an appealing place to be, he just wanted to get it finished so he could move on to bigger and better things. To be specific he wanted to start putting the orbital dropship factory together, partially just because he liked working in an EVA suit in orbit, it reminded him of his youth placing orbital mirrors above planets as part of a terraforming project.
Much to his chagrin the Niops Association had refused to allow big orbital mirrors to be constructed above Niops VII. They might warm the planet up to a more comfortable temperature, thanks to all the extra reflected light hitting the surface, but they ruined the sky for astronomy.
"Any more questions for Captain Murray that cannot wait for now?" Hollister asked the committee, "It seems like his time might better serve the interests of the Niops Associator spent elsewhere" she observed, with nobody seeming to disagree.
Hollister watched with amusement as the centenarian engineer dashed off. "If he's right then one of the Project Workshops currently tied up in making replacement electronics might be available for other duties sooner than expected. Are we in agreement that it should be put to work making parts for additional Project Workshops as soon as possible?" she asked with nobody voicing any objections.
For decades whatever manufacturing capability Niops boasted had been tied down making replacement parts for things that broke down, and the Association lacked the excess capacity within the system to get ahead. The Terran Hegemony had intended the science colony to be self-sufficient, not an industrial powerhouse, and what limited headroom for production they had barely coped with the increased demands on the system resulting from the arrival of the Capellan Refugees and then the SLDF.
If they could get ahead of themselves however, free up a Project Workshop to start turning out additional manufacturing capability starting with duplicates of itself, now then they could really start to get things moving.
Now we're cooking, Trish thought to herself with satisfaction. Imagining a half-dozen Project Workshops beavering away to make the machines, needed to make the machines, needed to make fully-automated robotic battlemech and aerospace fighter production plants.
And if those morons running the Great Houses keep blowing up each other's shipyards we'll sell them jumpships at a horrific mark-up in price so that they end up paying for it all, she realised, grinning inanely.
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Note from the Author:
Roger Callahan (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Roger_Callahan_(28th_c.)) started his military career as a SLDF mechwarrior in the 331st Royal Battlemech Division and found himself back in the same job decades later (albeit at a much higher rank). I'm assuming there was a reason his childhood friend Sarah McEvedy (they were military brats following the unit around until old enough to fight themselves) never picked him to be her saKhan and him not wanting to get involved with the bureaucratic side of things seemed plausible. As an experienced old-hand he was assigned the task of making contact with Comstock (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Comstock) and starting to strike up relations with that world (a job made tricky by just how far society had fallen there after the Star League collapsed). I can imagine most people being pleased to see the SLDF again, but quite a few being annoyed they hadn't showed up before to help. The Niops Association using a cover-story that they wanted to keep their heads down despite having inherited a sizeable military has a plausible ring about it, Terran Hegemony colonies were being routinely razed during this whole period. I've placed Comstock on the map between the Magistracy and what would have been the Marian Hegemony. In canon pirates (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Corsairs_of_Comstock_IV) from there raided Campoleone (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Campoleone) in the FWL which is another reason why I put it (and Francas) where I did.
The return of short-tempered geologist Stephanie Jeffs, last seen in Part VI. I've not used the names the Marian Hegemony did for the continents on Alphard (because it's not full of Roman cosplayers). Italia (where Nova Roma, the capital city of both the planet and the Hegemony was located) becomes Hydrae, the most northerly continents of Alba and Gaul become Typhon and Echidna, Hispania becomes Heracles and Ostia become Crux. The large inland sea in Italia Hydrae is now called Lerna (not Stella Maris). All that germanium coming on the market at the same time that there are fewer shipyards using it to make jumpships should logically have an impact on market prices.
A half-built Olympus recharging station (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Olympus) is still a big step up from no recharging station at all. Getting the things partially operational then moving the construction crews over to another project for the time being might be a better use of them given limited resources.
Since the battletech universe doesn't have Star-Trek style replicators their automated robot factories (raw materials in one end, complex finished product out the other) are logically a lot of mini-factories stuck together doing different things. One auto-fac manufacturing circuit boards presumably has a part making LED's, another making microchips etc. etc and the last part of the production line takes the various manufactured components and slots them into the boards. This basically all being a big modular kit seems to make the most sense because they had to be taken apart and transported from Terra to other places (and easily maintained in the case of auto-facs on space stations that are months of travel-times away).
The Department of Mega-Engineering (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Department_of_Mega-Engineering) was well-named, they really worked on some big projects.
Niops will surely be keeping a close eye on when jumpships are becoming scarce, ready to pop up saying "So you need jumpships do you? Here's an Invader at only half again as much as they used to cost. What do you mean that's extortionate? It's not a buyer's market now is it? I'm sure the Taurians would be only too happy to... okay great, just sign here. Delivery should be in six to eight weeks."
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Quick map for you (you can see where I've placed Comstock and Francas).
(https://imagizer.imageshack.com/img924/8046/Hkkm34.gif)
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"It's like six people and a bunch of maps" another responded. "They're basically an adjunct of geology, they just refuse to merge with them."
Suggesting academic departments merge? That's a material for a lifetime vendetta right there.
Rumours that she had once beaned a student with an accurately thrown whiteboard eraser,
Weaksauce, our teachers were not afraid to throw chalk or a key bundle, to wake up a sleeper or shut up a chit chatter.
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Awesome update! And I can validate academic vendettas are a thing... ;D
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Will the ELH being rejoining the SLDFiE, in the next generation, the 2850s, when they are stationed on Circinus, or the SLDFiE will see them to far gone as mercs?
After all it'd make a interesting story showing the next generation of the SLDFiE characters.
Besides it'd kill two birds with one stone, gain another potential brigade, get rid of another bandit kingdom.
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Rumours that she had once beaned a student with an accurately thrown whiteboard eraser, the student concerned having fallen asleep during one of her lectures, were widely believed though officially denied.
my mother told me a story a long time ago about her mother,
My grandmother was born in 1912, and went to medical school at Tulane in the mid to late 30's for reference.
As an alumni of that school, she was often asked to return and give lectures to current medical students, she would always place a tennis ball on the lectern at the beginning of class as she was laying out her stuff. One day, she was giving a lecture in their auditorium, and a student nodded off in the back of the room. she picked up the tennis ball and beaned him from the lectern without ever missing a beat. "Tomorrow it will be a baseball," she tells the class as the tennis ball bounces back down the auditorium towards her.
The next day she walked into the class and unwrapped a brand new Rawlings Baseball and sat it on the corner of the lectern.
for note, my grandmother was all of 62inches tall, and 120lbs at that point in her life. make of this story what you will, i have more.
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Part XX- Section 1 of 2
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"The only thing that frightens badly-trained infantry more than a thirty-ton battlemech running towards them at over a hundred and fifty kph, fifty-cal machine guns blazing away and breathing fire, is when the damn thing just blew up their APC with a freaking great laser cannon first."
Major Marcelo Gao - 2836CE
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Reykjanes Island - Niops VII – 2830
One advantage to living on a planet that was slightly larger than Terra, but barely had the population of a small city, was that when you requested a piece of land to conduct live-fire exercises on the government response was to ask whether an unpopulated island roughly the size of the Indian Subcontinent would be enough, or was that too small for the intended purpose?
General Jenna Romanov wasn't sure if they interpreted 'live fire exercises' as being that they thought the SLDF would be testing multi-megaton yield thermonuclear devices or something, but she had the presence of mind just to nod and say that would be fine as she found herself with four million square kilometres to do with whatever she felt like.
Situated halfway around the world from the capital, although fortunately at roughly the same latitude so it wasn't the frozen wasteland Niops VII was nearer the poles, an active chain of volcanoes ran across the island like a spine, the older extinct ones snow-capped and the remainder a little too hot at the summit for that. One of the latter kind was currently erupting in the far distance, providing a somewhat epic backdrop to the rows of battlemechs, and the dropships that brought them there that lined up across an ancient lava field that Romanov had chosen for the exercise that day. "If the Army Corps of Engineers ever finishes their ever-expanding list of high priority projects we should build a permanent base here, maybe even a budget Castle Brian" Romanov observed to Franklin Hallis as they walked along the first row of mechs together.
It was a rather impromptu parade of the two full regiments assembled in ranks. After the general officers had made their informal inspection the units would separate into two teams and head for the where they would start from for the exercise. With six battalions involved the exercise would cover a pretty large area, which was why Romanov and Hallis would be observing proceedings from a VTOL overhead rather than from the ground.
Colonel Hermann Bostick would be commanding the regiment formed of mechwarriors from the 331st. Formerly the commanding officer of the 102nd Strike Cluster, part of Clan Wolverine's old Beta Galaxy, he wanted to climb the ladder demonstrating that he should be put on the fast-track for promotion to Brigadier-General by obtaining a quick decisive win over the regiment from the 295th, itself commanded by one Colonel Alexi Kaempen. For his part Kaempen was too old and frankly a little too jaded to care much about getting to wear a shiny star on his collar, he only wanted to show that his people still had plenty of fight left in them and to not let down either the Blue Star Division or General Romanov herself.
"Maybe we build a little further away from the volcanoes than this though" Hallis suggested wryly, looking over towards the eruption. The sky on Niops was a dull red at the best of times, and despite it approaching mid-day all that ash spewing into the sky, and the glow of distant lava flows was making the whole place look as ominous as some kind of apocalyptic Swords and Sorcery style fantasy movie. It was a reminder of why Niops utilised geothermal energy as well as fusion reactors to power their society. Dig down deep enough anywhere on the planet and you would soon find out what effect the star's gravity was having on the planet's molten core as it tried to tidally lock Niops VII as it already had all the other worlds orbiting it.
"It's a big enough island that we don't have to worry about the whole place going Krakatoa on us" Romanov replied. "I hope you told your people not to go easy on mine just because they've hardly worn a neurohelmet in half-a-century?" she checked. "The whole point of this exercise is to let them know just how much they've forgotten."
"No Ma'am" Hallis responded, shaking his head. "They all know they're supposed to put aside any respect they might have for their elders and give them a whupping" he told her. "If these boys and girls get back up to speed as fast as your other people did who fought on Algenib then the rustiness shouldn't last too long though."
Romanov laughed. "The youngest of them is past seventy-five, so I'm not sure calling them 'boys and girls' is an accurate description" she observed, "but it was nice to get the chance to prove the adage that old warhorses can still kick ass" she said. "This all remind of one of your clan trials a little, does it?" she asked curiously.
"They were rarely fought on anything like this scale, no more than a handful of mechs per side was the norm" Hallis replied. "Plus of course we didn't use dialled-down lasers and training rounds in the autocannons" he said, smiling. "Nicky K treated it all like a sport, or a game, but it was played for keeps."
Romanov stopped next to a Flashman heavy, one that had arrived from Buffalo Meadows on the Ulithi and had yet to be either upgraded or re-painted with the Red Cameron Star. "I've been thinking about that, the notion of a military force that are all shit-hot mech-jocks like they've come straight out of the Gunslinger Program but they don't train for combined-arms operations and they don't train for large-scale engagements" she said, looking thoughtful. "Once we've gotten both expeditionary brigades put together we should probably think about running annual, or even bi-annual training exercises, pitting them against each other. Three regiments of mechs, two armoured cavalry regiments and an artillery regiment per side."
"Most of the clans don't favour artillery that much so in some of those exercises we might want to have one of the brigades running as an OPFOR without that kind of support" Hallis suggested. "A lot of their aerospace fighter jocks lean heavily towards the honourable 'Knights of the Sky' thing too, training much harder for air-superiority missions than they ever do ground support, so that's something else to consider."
Romanov nodded. "It's a pity we can't just adopt a military doctrine aimed specifically at countering clanner tactics, and specialise towards that aim, because we have to plan to take on the militaries of the Great Houses too" she said regretfully.
Hallis smiled. "The Great Houses fight smart, well most of them do, but have bad gear and the clans fight dumb but have good gear" he observed. "Guess we're going to have to be the ones to show them both what an army that fights smart with good gear can do."
"On the subject of good gear the prototype of that new model Hussar should be ready for testing soon" Romanov said, starting to walk again. "I was surprised at how quickly your engineers and technicians managed to get it done considering it was practically hand-built apart from the endo-steel skeleton."
"We were still mostly hand-building mechs not long before Klondike" Hallis replied. "If you've built a Devastator from scratch like the one over there a Hussar doesn't seem too daunting a project" he said, pointing to the towering assault mech a couple of hundred metres away. "If we ever put those things into serial production we're going to need to come up with a good cover story as to how we got the plans, because all the prototypes left with Exodus. Maybe something like the SLDF sent out back-up copies of the blueprints to Niops at the start of the Amaris War for safekeeping?" he suggested, thinking about it.
"Less suspicious than us suddenly producing a brand-new type of assault mech from scratch anyway" Romanov observed, "even if it's not a Pulverizer" she said, smiling. "You're still leaning towards the idea that we should choose the DVS-2 as our heavy assault once we're at the stage of expanding the army?" she asked.
Hallis nodded. "It just makes sense in terms of the image we're going to be trying to project" he replied. "The Niops Association as the continuation of the Terran Hegemony and the Star League, but not just stuck in the past" he said. "The Devastator would have been the SLDF's next big thing if the Star League hadn't fallen. That, the Rifleman II and probably an Atlas III if Kerensky Senior was still calling the shots."
Romanov chuckled. "Oh, we'd be on the Atlas IV by now at least. He really loved the look of those things, like a gigantic anthropomorphic personification of death wearing a bulky suit of armour instead of a black cloak" she said. "You can't imagine how surprised I was that he had the corpse of Stefan Amaris cryogenically frozen and given to that university, rather than using his skull as a paperweight."
"If he loved them that much I wonder why he commissioned the Devastator as well" Hallis remarked. The battlemech had been specifically designed according to his own specifications, albeit to replace the flawed Titan rather than his beloved Atlas.
"Two gauss rifles and a pair of PPC's have their own charms" Romanov observed, smiling. "Not that you people didn't look at that and think 'undergunned' did you?" she asked rhetorically.
"Swapping out the PPC's for ERPPC's for the ones we made for Klondike just made sense" Hallis replied. "Same range on all the primary weaponry" he explained the thinking. "Later swapping out the ERPPC's for our Enhanced ERPPC's once we had them was just as obvious an upgrade, and it also means that while the Atlas may look like death incarnate, at long range our model of the Devastator actually is death incarnate" he boasted and not without justification. The big assault mech mounted four long-range weapons, all of which could blow another mech's head off with one shot if it managed to score a hit there. Trying to take one on at its preferred engagement range was therefore just an astonishingly bad idea, even if you were big and mean enough to survive the sheer battering it could inflict on you for a while. Eventually it might get lucky and end you there and then, and the ****** thing had four chances every salvo to get lucky.
It would be years before they had the spare production capability to even consider putting something like the Devastator into mass production of course, more's the pity. Thanks to that treasure trove of refined germanium discovered on Alphard the budget was available to make it feasible to start turning out the new model of Hussar soon, and maybe also the Blackjack for garrison duties if they could get the blueprints and sign a licensing agreement for its production, but they weren't going to be making any new heavies and assaults until the end of the decade at the earliest.
Given that it was likely going to take another three to four years just to upgrade all the battlemechs and aerospace fighters they already had with improved weaponry, a considerably more cost-effective means of increasing SLDF firepower than building new machines anyway, it was hard to argue the point with the bean counters.
Realistically, the two new expeditionary brigades, the off-world garrison troops and the Niops Association Militia was more than adequate a military force to defeat anything short of a full-scale invasion by the Free Worlds League or the Clans. With another three whole regiments of battlemechs being mothballed as an emergency reserve, they could even absorb fairly severe battlefield losses and still be able to put a very formidable army in the field for round two of any conflict.
Of course, since the SLDF wasn't going to keeping every battlemech it had in active service that meant they found themselves with a surplus of mechwarriors, hence the training exercise of the day. A lot of the old soldiers of the 295th who thought they were going to get their old jobs back were going to be disappointed, and it would hopefully help them accept the situation if they could be shown, not just told, that they weren't as sharp as they used to be.
Even with Terran Hegemony anti-agathics, a man or woman near a century old did not have the reaction times they had when they were in their thirties.
"The latest report from the R&D people seemed promising" Romanov commented as they passed by a Royal Sentinel, the gauss rifle mounted where the medium mech's left arm should be always making the thing look more than a little ungainly and lopsided. "I'm not sure if I would have prioritised some of the things they did, but at least we should be ready for the next round of upgrades by the time all my machines are up to your spec."
Hallis frowned. "Anything in particular you're querying, research wise?" he asked.
"Well, better flamers and machineguns for a start" Romanov explained her comment. "It's not like we're not already well equipped to do horrible things to infantry."
"Oh, that just because the clans already had those in advanced prototype before we left, so it's something we could get to the production stage faster than we could with something complicated and finicky like better pulse lasers with more range" Hallis explained. "They're really going to help with the new model Hussar anyway, they're light enough that we can hang a couple of machineguns and a flamer on the thing, as well as the new model ER Large Laser replacing the old one, so we'll get more use out of them than just scouting."
Jenna Romanov thought about that and then suddenly laughed out loud. "Did you know that the Hussar was originally supposed to be an anti-infantry mech?" she asked.
"No" Hallis replied honestly.
"Well, it was. Back when I was an officer cadet, that was when mechs ran on coal and targeting computers were clockwork" she joked, "I read an article about the development of the thing because I had the notion that I might be easier to get a place in a Royal Division if I said I always wanted to ride a HSR-200-Db, knowing that most people didn't because of the Hussar's rep. After not achieving the required specs they just decided to make it a reconnaissance platform instead" Romanov told him. "You've managed to achieve the original design goals by accident without making it a worse scout."
"It's even a better machine in a fight against other lights as well" Hallis noted, smiling. "The new laser has more range, and we might be able to increase the armour by another half-ton too" he continued. "It'll have the speed to keep out of range while still getting in its own hits, and unlike those Jackrabbit mechs with peashooter AC/2s we ran into on Algenib it'll do more than just annoy what it's shooting at, they'll feel it."
Romanov nodded her agreement. It was no eERPPC but she had seen the prototype of the new laser being tested and it definitely brought the hurt. "If there was ever a mech that needed more armour it's the Hussar" she stated with absolute certainty. The original model boasted a mere ton-and-a-half of armour, which could make riding around in one practically suicidal, hence the bad rep. The Royal version upped that to a considerably less horrifying five-and-a-half tons, and if the new model raised that to a full six it would actually have four-times the armour of the original machine.
They might even have to change the unofficial motto of mechwarriors that rode a Hussar. Live fast, die young and leave a badly mangled corpse.
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Part XX- Section 2 of 2
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"You mentioned the old Gunslinger program just now, I know some of your people went through it, maybe any of them that don't make the cut to still do the job can teach it instead?" Hallis suggested.
"More of my people went through it than most did in units that weren't Royal" Romanov confirmed. "A lot of that was down to Leigh MacArthur and her quest to get us our fancy title back. That and transferring anyone out of the unit that wasn't Hegemony born" she recalled. "It's certainly an idea, maybe have a few instructors from your people too, the boys and girls that won you all those trials they boast about winning when they've got a few beers in them at the bar."
Hallis shrugged. "We did win more than our fair share of trials, but because we didn't specialise as much in training for that kind of duelling there were a few clans that were still better at it than we were overall" he freely admitted. "I mean, we'd have kicked the shit out of them in a real battle, mostly because they thought combined arms warfare and proper logistical planning was cheating, but there are some really good mechwarriors to be found a couple of thousand lightyears coreward of here."
"Another reason to set up our own program then" Romanov replied. "It would also give us an excuse if anyone ever queries why the military of a Periphery nation that has supposedly barely fought anyone for half-a-century seems weirdly well-practiced at it."
"Something else for the cover-story. Like if anyone asks my people are your people's kids" Hallis agreed. "Right Mom?" he asked, tongue-in-cheek.
"Pah, you only wish you heathens from the 331st were really part of the glorious Blue Star Division" Romanov retorted.
"Aren't we all the Red Star Division now?"
Romanov thought about that. "I don't like it. Makes us sound like a load of commies" she eventually decided. "We should get moving, I want to see how many of your people get to learn the hard way that age and guile is a better match for youth and enthusiasm than your bunch of juveniles think it is."
"Yeah, we'd better mount up on the VTOL. If we don't start soon your people will have forgotten why they're out here" Hallis replied, smirking. "Maybe we should have a Project Workshop manufacture a few mech-scale Zimmer Frames to help them dodder to the objective points."
"No matter how much you try and provoke me I'm not stupid enough to bet on my people to win Franklin" Romanov replied knowing full well what he was up to with a crack like that. "Most of them spent decades ploughing fields while yours were getting into firefights. I might be proud of my unit but I'm not gullible, Junior."
Hallis sighed. "It's bad enough that my girlfriend can see right through me, my commanding officer being able to do it as well is disheartening" he said sadly. "What if I offered favourable odds?"
"No" Romanov told him with finality, wondering if the man was developing a gambling problem or if it was just another weird clan thing.
"It was worth a try" Hallis conceded defeat, in the sense that they were both sure his regiment would emerge victorious, the only difference being that Romanov expected her old farts to put up a much better fight than the kids expected.
It was always possible that a few of the 295th facing retirement would find a home in an expanded Niops Association Militia. Brigadier Nellis was pushing for his ground forces to actually field a mech-heavy brigade-sized unit and to this end the salvaged mechs that had once belonged to the Blood Rain had been allocated to him. Once they were all repaired the handful of Dragoon heavies, a couple of Rampage assaults and a company's worth of Phoenix and Jackrabbit medium and light mechs would not only give the NAM a noticeable increase in firepower they helped round out his equipment roster.
Given that they were all Rim Worlds Republic designs the SLDF regulars were only too happy to hand them over. They had plenty of machines that weren't tainted by the touch of pirates and war-criminals, and if the NAM weren't as fussy about what they rode that was their choice.
Two hours later, watching the proceedings below from the vantage point of a Vector VTOL, Romanov observed that they had certainly chosen a cinematic place for the clash between her 295th and Hallis's 331st. Even dialled way down from full power, so they would only scorch paint, not sear off armour plate, the laser and PPC fire looked spectacular in the dim red fight especially when a change in wind direction brought the vast pall of volcanic ash heading their way.
Mixed in with all the dust being kicked up by six battalions of battlemechs on the move, the smoke from blank autocannons rounds and the exhaust from training missiles the oncoming cloud began to look positively apocalyptic. Hundreds of SRM and LRM warheads exploding as they struck their targets looked just as spectacular as they would have if the missiles were arriving with HEAP high-explosive-armour-piercing warheads fitted rather than mere flash-bangs, and they only added to the overall illusion that armageddon was here.
Romanov quietly wondered to herself if she was about to be faced with several dozen cases of PTSD being triggered among her people. Visually it was all too reminiscent of fighting under the twilight of a recent nuclear exchange, something the 295th had done more than once during the campaign to liberate the Terran Hegemony from Amaris.
It did look epically cool though, she had to admit. Hallis certainly seemed to think much the same judging from his awed expression as they continued to monitor the exercise, pointing out important losses and interesting developments to each other.
Both sides had been instructed that this was supposed to be a testing of the skills of the mechwarriors concerned, it was not meant to be an opportunity for the two commanders to demonstrate their tactical brilliance, which was why Romanov had chosen an arena which was fairly flat and utterly devoid of vegetation.
If one side won because of some fancy feigned retreat, a flashy sweeping flanking manoeuvre or just a fortuitously timed counter-attack that wouldn't answer the questions being asked. Romanov and Hallis wanted a slug-fest, they wanted to see who among the 295th could still hack it and hopefully show some of them that still thought they could that they couldn't.
A disproportionate number of the 295th on the field that day were in fact those considered by their commanding officers to be too much of a liability to still be doing the job. They skewed above average in age, which was saying something, in many cases had never been regarded particularly highly compared to their peers anyway, but were all invariably all too damn stubborn to admit it.
It showed particularly among light-mech pilots, where you needed quick wits and quick reactions to stay alive because you didn't have the armour to help you dodge incoming fire or survive an error of judgement. A ninety-five year old might still feel twenty-five in his heart, although a cardiologist might disagree with that assessment, but when you reached late middle-age (by Terran standards) you weren't quite as well suited to running about in a Hermes at 151 kph being shot at with missiles as you used to be.
Faced with a healthy dose of reality being injected into them by getting their ass shot off, albeit figuratively, would hopefully lead a few of those in the 295th that were utterly convinced they were just as good as the kids that they weren't. Some would undoubtedly still disagree, stubbornness was not a trait that diminished with age after all, but that could be handled with a combination of medical screening and perhaps by running some basic drills to show them that it wasn't just bad luck why they lost a firefight to an actual twenty-five year old.
It would be a little different for officers, particularly senior officers that weren't ever expected to run around like lunatics in MASC-equipped light-mechs, because experience was more important to a command position than trigger-pulling ability. Hallis freely agreed that officers like Colonel Kaempen, for example, knew a hell of a lot more about how to handle a regiment as part of a brigade or particularly a divisional-sized engagement than he any of his own serving officers did. The clans did actually have a formation that size, the Galaxy, but that was mainly just an administrative designation with variable numbers of unit assigned to each, it wasn't really intended to fight as a cohesive unit.
With the VTOL pilot warning that if the ash cloud got any closer he would have to either land or fly further away, because he wasn't sure how his rotors would handle it, Romanov gave him permission to get clear. She had already agreed with Hallis that once the exercise degenerated into the expected slugfest that, as expected, the skill gap between the sides was largest in fast-moving light mechs and smallest between lumbering assaults where speed mattered less than careful shot-placement.
With the computers inside each machine registering the hits they took, and automatically disabling systems that would have been destroyed if they were doing this all for real with full-powered guns, eventually combat-loss-grouping started to become an issue. What had begun as equal sides, both numerically and in equipment quality, gradually shifted in the former category as the regiment from the 295th was being whittled down in number faster than the younger mechwarriors of the 331st were.
Despite getting the better of their foe Romanov pointed out that some of Hallis's people still had an apparent tendency to fight as individuals not a group, and that this was causing them to take a some entirely unnecessary losses because the ones that went rogue were soon knocked out of the fray by her 'team-players' that ganged up on them. The mechwarriors of the Blue Star Division had learned their trade in large-scale engagements and were soldiers, not warriors, and she drew an analogy with how the Draconis Combine and Federated Suns had fought differently in the Second Hidden War of 2725 to 2729 which she had studied as a cadet. The average Combine mechwarrior was often more skilled than their average FedSuns equivalent, but while that mattered a great deal in single-combat, or even a small skirmish, in larger engagements unit-cohesion and the concentration of firepower on a single target had more than made up for it.
Combined arms warfare was not a completely alien concept to the clans of course, but a cultural bias towards 'Trials' that were often just duels of skirmish size or smaller, was probably something that could be used against them.
If nothing else it would be academically interesting to see what one of her new expeditionary brigades, these being modelled in part on an SLDF Regimental Combat Team, would do to a Clan formation of similar size. It was one thing to understand large-scale combined arms warfare theoretically, it was another thing entirely to be any good at it in practice.
The 295th were stubborn and experienced but when everything degenerated into a confused mess as the endgame approached they found themselves with a serious problem as the larger number of fast light and medium mechs remaining on the other side used their mobility advantage to flank around Kaempen's battalions, hitting them in the sides and rear.
As Romanov and Hallis continued to watch the exercise from above as it gradually drew to a conclusion, the 331st 'bloodied' but looking to be victorious, they had no idea that someone else was monitoring events from below, if unwittingly, as on the other side of the world the seismographs buried on the island to monitoring volcanic activity had been going absolutely nuts.
Since the geology department at the university had never imagined that anyone would be stomping across the unpopulated region in a couple of hundred bipedal war machines, each massing at minimum twenty tons and with some, like the Devastator for example, five times as heavy as that, their equipment was deeply confused and started giving warnings that the entire area was about to resemble the Toba eruption on Terra seventy-five thousand years before. The one that nearly made homo sapiens extinct as a species.
After issuing some urgent warnings to the government, and being told after a few minutes of frantic, panicked conversation that the SLDF were conducting some-kind of large-scale military exercise there so that might be why the monitoring equipment was giving such anomalous readings, a deeply irate Professor Samantha Jeffs blew her top in a somewhat volcano-like manner. After issuing several graphic and convincing threats of violence to the various idiots that hadn't bothered to keep her department properly informed, despite it being official registered they kept a virtual electronic presence there, she slammed down the telephone, becoming the subject of a judicial restraining order that barred her from entering the Administration Council building the next day.
With the election coming up Jeffs was so angry she momentarily considered throwing her hat into the ring and running against Giles Olson for High Associator on a platform of putting science back to the fore on Niops. She quickly dismissed the notion, mostly because she didn't think she had a chance of winning, but also because the man delivered a hell of an inspiring speech at his election rally that made Jeffs, and others, reassess the Association's place in the galaxy.
With the Great Houses seemingly intent on rolling back at least a thousand years of technological progress, while simultaneously making sure that a few billion more people who were lucky enough to make it through the First Succession War alive weren't going to survive the Second, there was a growing feeling that in the end that it might actually be up to Niops to save civilisation.
This was certainly not a role that the Association had ever envisioned for itself, and not one that it was even sure it could achieve, but that didn't mean it was wrong to try.
Let's face it, who else was there? The Clans were still out there true enough, but that wasn't the kind of society anyone on Niops wanted to see ruling over humanity, and the only other candidate at present was the ****** telephone company, and there was definitely something badly off about ComStar as they increasingly started to resemble some kind of pseudo-religious cult.
If the future of humanity was going to end up in the hands of the psychos, the weirdos or the nerds then the latter were pretty sure they were the best alternative, not just because they were smarter, but because they were frankly a lot less unhinged.
Giles Olson's rallying cry that 'We might live under the dim light of a Red Dwarf but we have it within ourselves to ensure our values will shine out from Niops like a Blue Hypergiant. A beacon to the galaxy, a shining city on a hill, the champion of liberty and scientific progress not oppression and ignorance' resonated with the public and helped him achieve a decisive victory in the general election the following month. It helped of course that food imports from other systems had ended rationing, and that tens of billions of dollars in germanium meant that taxes wouldn't have to go through the roof to support an outsized military-industrial complex, but he was offering something other than a continuation of technocratic government, something larger and more inspiring.
Thus it was that after the election that when General Jenna Romanov jokingly declared, 'To hell with it. We'll make our own Star League with Blackjacks and Hussars' she was taken very seriously by the press, and Olson was forced by public opinion to dispatch the trade mission to obtain the licenses and blueprints for the BJ-1 battlemech way ahead of schedule.
It would of course be a few more years before the Blackjack factory on Alphard even started construction, let alone be fully staffed, up and running, but the first production model Hussar HSR-250-Dn strode out of the manufacturing plant on Niops V in 2835, the same year that the Beagle Active Probe it carried effectively became lostech in the Inner Sphere because nobody else could make them.
That was also the same year that ComStar introduced the C-Bill, making interstellar commerce easier, the year Niops reestablished HPG contact with the Inner Sphere, and because of that also the year in which Niops told ComStar to stick their 'Communications Protocol of 2787' where the sun don't shine because the Niops Association never signed it and was perfectly capable of maintaining their own Hyperpulse Generators thank you very much.
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Note from the Author:
In canon the Niops Association utilises geothermal power, as well as building its own fusion powerplants. This makes sense in that Tidal Heating (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_heating) is a thing and the processes that saw the star Niops tidally lock all its planets except Niops VII are going to be working on the molten core of the latter. The continent where most people live was chosen because it was less geologically active but you are going to find other locations like Reykjanes Island here where things are a little more exciting. Because of the chain of volanoes, and no shortage of less geologically dynamic places, to set up home nobody lives on Reykjanes and this led to a belief that nobody would care what happened there. Unfortunately the geology department cared very much because what other people hate about the place they love.
The Devastator (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Devastator) was a late Star-League design assault mech that never entered service beyond a full prototypes. The Clans hand-built a few for Operation Klondike and the Wolverines upgraded the ones they had later with their Enhanced ERPPC. Like the Atlas (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Atlas) it sprang from the creative mind of Aleksandr Kerensky but he didn't insist upon the head resembling a human skull.
The Hussar (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Hussar) was originally intended for infantry support but ended up in the scout role with a very different weapons load-out. Thanks to several clan weapons already being at the prototype stage a few years before the Wolverine Secession, and the clans cooperating on research projects until after Klondike, they are able to get them into service only a few years after the clans manage that themselves. These include the Clan ER Large Laser (in prototype 2820), the Clan Machine Gun (in prototype 2820) and the Clan Flamer (in prototype 2821). These lighter, and more compact versions of Inner Sphere weapon designs make it possible to make a Hussar that's still just as good as being a scout but can now do other work as well.
The SLDF's Gunslinger Program (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Gunslinger_Program) was developed in response to Draconis Combine mechwarriors continually challenging them to duels during the First Hidden War (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/First_Hidden_War). The Combine produced some truly first-rate mechwarriors but the result of several battles during the Second Hidden War (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Second_Hidden_War) between them and the Federated Suns showed that made them far from unbeatable when up against better tactics.
And we finally reach the point in the timeline where the quotes at the start of Part I and Part V are actually said, and Niops veers into a less isolationist future.
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Loving it! Heading down to the design forum in hopes that you already posted the Hussar and Blackjack you mentioned... :)
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Love it. Also I gotta say I am surprised the Devastator never got the Clantech treatment given the history of it. A DVS-C with two Clan ERPPCs, two Gauss Rifles, and four Clan Medium Pulse Lasers along with a Clan ECM suite would be a nightmare to fight.
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It's very possible to make a Devastator with Clan weapons saving so much tonnage that it's not necessary to use an XL engine - which lets it nail the long range firepower and the durability options.
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It's very possible to make a Devastator with Clan weapons saving so much tonnage that it's not necessary to use an XL engine - which lets it nail the long range firepower and the durability options.
Just tried in Megamek Lab. 100% doable - 15 tons of Clan Ferro, two cERPPCs, two cGRs with four tons of ammo, three cERMLs and 17 DHS gets you there on the dot. Would be a very useful and powerful Second Line mech that could easily outshoot most assault omnis too.
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Just tried in Megamek Lab. 100% doable - 15 tons of Clan Ferro, two cERPPCs, two cGRs with four tons of ammo, three cERMLs and 17 DHS gets you there on the dot. Would be a very useful and powerful Second Line mech that could easily outshoot most assault omnis too.
'
Thank you for the nightmare fuel!
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'
Thank you for the nightmare fuel!
Nightmare fuel? Nah, that's going to be my go-to when my opponents bring in Gausszilla or other munchkin designs. Either that, or an equal point value of pikes on a floating map. sure, I'm plinking away with a paltry 2 damage per shot, but that's a lot of AC2s, and I will sandblast away your armor and internals from outside your weapons range, clanner.
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No need for rolling maps... Look at this BV and consider just how many TACs you can take before you get mission killed!
Plinker
Mass: 100 tons
Tech Base: Inner Sphere
Motive Type: Tracked
Rules Level: Tournament Legal
Era: Clan Invasion
Tech Rating/Era Availability: E/X-X-E-A
Production Year: 3070
Cost: 3 936 667 C-Bills
Battle Value: 852
Power Plant: 200 I.C.E.
Cruise Speed: 21,6 km/h
Flanking Speed: 32,4 km/h
Armor: Ferro-Fibrous
Armament:
8 LB 2-X ACs
1 Unknown CASE
Manufacturer:
Primary Factory:
Communications System:
Targeting and Tracking System:
================================================================================
Equipment Type Rating Mass
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Internal Structure: Standard 50 points 10,00
Engine: I.C.E. Engine 200 17,00
Cruise MP: 2
Flank MP: 3
Heat Sinks: Single Heat Sink 0 0,00
Control Equipment: 5,00
Lift Equipment: 0,00
Turret: 5,00
Armor: Ferro-Fibrous AV - 188 10,50
Armor
Factor
Front 48
Left/Right 38/38
Turret 32
Rear 32
================================================================================
Equipment Location Heat Spaces Mass
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
8 LB 2-X ACs T 8 8 48,00
CASE BD - 1 0,50
@LB 2-X (Slug) (45) BD - 0 1,00
@LB 2-X (Cluster) (135) BD - 0 3,00
BattleForce Statistics
MV S (+0) M (+2) L (+4) E (+6) Wt. Ov Armor: 6 Points: 9
2t 1 1 1 0 4 0 Structure: 5
Special Abilities: CASE, EE, TUR(1/1/1), FLK 1/1/1
As a random test I ran four of these against a Dire Wolf once on 2x2 standard maps. The DW got to fire once before the pilot died from ammo TACs and head hits. :evil:
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No need for rolling maps... Look at this BV and consider just how many TACs you can take before you get mission killed!
*snip*
As a random test I ran four of these against a Dire Wolf once on 2x2 standard maps. The DW got to fire once before the pilot died from ammo TACs and head hits. :evil:
The LB 2-X is definitely the very definition of a long range sandblaster, however I find the humiliation factor of being killed by 3025 periphery tech the extra "frack you" needed to cut a munchkin down to size. YMMV of course, and your Plinker is definitely scary fun. Especially since most munchkins I've played against prefer a slow 100 ton mech, so staying out of range is childs play.
But we've gotten away from the story, so this is probably the last post I'm doing on this here.
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Somewhat more on topic regarding long-range plinking, which kinds of upgraded ACs can Niops produce?
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I'd expect at LEAST the Improved AC/2... ;)
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Part XXI - Section 1 of 2
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"I'm honestly in two minds as to whether it's really clever or really stupid to call it 'Project Hittile', and if they get it to work before I'm dead of old age I'll be surprised, but for what it's worth I do like the tagline on the proposal, 'Taking the miss out of missile'."
Brigadier-General Craig Nellis - 2840 CE
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(FLASHBACK) Camelot Command – Dark Nebula (Lyran Commonwealth) – 2826
Frederick of Sibling Company Gamma had not known what to expect when they arrived at Camelot Command. Despite the fact his sibko had transferred over from Yukon to Zughoffer Weir for the journey from the Theta Carinae Cluster to the Dark Nebula, for some reason when they arrived at their destination a dropship had carried them back, reuniting them with Star Captain Francis just before Yukon came into dock.
Looking out through large windows made of thick armoured glass Frederick and the rest of his sibko watched transfixed as the massive airlock opened to allow Yukon to enter the massive internal bay of the station on thrusters. Although not nearly large enough to allow a battleship like the Zug to dock inside, a Riga II destroyer could do so easily, and it made for an awesome experience as the warship did so, huge spotlights inside the bay playing over the ship.
Flown with precision Yukon reached her final destination and stopped, mechanical clamps coming out to grab hold of her as the thrusters cut out. Once secure an airlock tunnel from the station snaked out and made a seal with one of the external locks on the destroyer so everyone aboard could disembark.
Apparently most of the vessels of the Switchback Fleet that could fit inside the station had either already been serviced here, or else at somewhere called Columbus before they even got this far, so Yukon had been bumped up the maintenance schedule for attention. The ship had come a long way, most of it completely alone and unsupported, so the engineers and technicians wanted to strip her down and make sure she was still in good shape as soon as possible.
That explained why they wanted Yukon to come in and dock of course, but it still didn't explain why they transferred the kits back to her before she did.
The answer to that came when the crew of Yukon and her passengers, Sibling Company Gamma, filed through the airlock and were directed on through a corridor and then onto an elevator large enough to carry a lance of assault mechs up to the higher levels where there the rotating station provided gravity.
The massive elevator door slid open inside a massive chamber on one of the decks where gravity was around half-a-gee.
The cavernous space was large enough to hold thousands of people, which was good because it actually was filled with thousands of people.
"Holy crap!" Frederick heard Star Captain Francis mutter under his breath as the crowd erupted in cheering and applause.
Momentarily stunned the crew of the Yukon didn't initially know what to do but they were beckoned to leave the elevator, space having been left by the crowd enabling them to do so.
A woman Francis didn't recognise approached, as she did so the Star Captain took note of her SLDF rank insignia that indicated she was a Colonel.
The colonel held out her hands and the cheering and applause ended immediately.
"Star Captain Francis?" the woman checked.
"Yes, Ma'am" Francis confirmed.
"Star Colonel Tricia Ebon, saKhan of the Wolverines" she introduced herself.
"Attention on deck!" Francis ordered sharply, the crew of the Yukon and the children with them instantly snapping to attention as Francis saluted.
Trish Ebon returned the salute then smiled. "I bet Franklin did not do this, but you deserve it for getting your ship and crew out of clan space and especially for saving the kits" she told him before pulling a very surprised and then extremely embarrassed Star Captain Francis into a hug as the crowd began to cheer and applaud once again.
When this hug was described later as a 'bear hug' Trish Ebon objected to the phrasing. Wolverines don't get on well with bears, or Ghost Bears in particular.
"I think they're happy to see us, quiaff?" Frederick whispered to the other kits of sibko Gamma who were all bunched up together.
"Aff" Jennifer whispered back. The crew of the Zughoffer Weir had reacted in a similar fashion to seeing them but it just wasn't all at such a scale.
"No shit, Sherlock" David responded instead, he had hung around the engine room of Yukon quite a lot and the language in common usage down there was almost as bad as that of the marines.
"Let us get you all to the canteen for some fresh food and after that we will give you a tour of the place" Trish Ebon yelled at them over the noise of the crowd. "None of you will have to pay for your own drinks at the bar for a while" she added, grinning.
Half an hour later Sibling Company Gamma were sat together around a large round table in the mess-hall. The fact that they could all fit around a single table was indicative of just how much of an exaggeration calling them a 'company' really was, because even calling them a 'Sibling Platoon' instead would have been overstating things as there weren't even enough of them to fill out two squads.
Having been born in 2816, or perhaps it might be described as decanted instead, as some of the first batches of children to emerge from the Iron Wombs, the kits of sibko Gamma were badly outnumbered by later sibling companies, particularly those from 2819 onwards when the technology was improved. They were prototypes in effect, not even early production models like the first batch from 2819 were, and it was a sad truth that quite a few of their potential 'brothers and sisters' never made it to full term in the wombs.
Everything about them was an experiment in effect, not just how they came to be, but also how they were raised because of what they were intended to become, or more actually made for a specific purpose.
In ancient Sparta boys were taken from the mothers at age seven to begin training as soldiers, by the time they were that age the kits of Sibling Company Gamma were already several years into the process and instead of playing with construction kits and toy battlemechs they were stripping down Mauser 960 Laser Rifles and getting used to wearing baby's first neurohelmet.
Needless to say they were all considered very, very weird by those raised in a more normal environment whose 'parents' weren't a gene-sequencer and a cannister full of slimy goop.
They were still enough like normal children that Trish Ebon had noticed they seemed to be getting overwhelmed by all the attention and she had ordered for them to be left alone to adjust to their new circumstances.
Having each collected a tray of food before choosing an empty table for themselves, Star Captain Francis sat nearby with other officers from Yukon, they chatted among themselves while eating some kind of thick unfamiliar vegetable stew called 'shiro' that was served on a large flatbread called 'Injera'. According to the catering staff who had served them the food was imported from a planet called Nakfa, one of the worlds in a different region of the Dark Nebula to Camelot called the Erit Cluster, and while it wasn't exactly what they were used to eating it was actually pretty tasty.
"What is in this again?" Frederick asked curiously, spooning up some of the stew.
"They told me it is chickpeas, onion and garlic" Jennifer replied, having asked. "Tomorrow we get something called qulwa that has meat in it."
"Anything that is not a ration pack is fine by me" David said with conviction, digging in.
"Ration packs are very healthy and meet all dietary needs" Jennifer pointed out.
"They just forgot to add flavour" Frederick observed, 'and texture."
"And flavour" David added.
"I already said flavour" Frederick responded, rolling his eyes.
"It needed repeating for emphasis."
"Why is the table round, not rectangular like normal?" one of the other kits, Henry, asked.
"I guess because of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table" Frederick theorised. "His castle was called Camelot so Camelot Command gets round tables" he said, recalling the bedtime stories they had been read while they were little about the days of yore when valiant knights in armour did battle against each other in honourable single combat.
"That was my assumption too, and someone deleted the database here so we can't check if we're right" a woman interjected.
The kits looked around and found an older woman, maybe ilKhan Kerensky's age, stood there. She was wearing an SLDF duty uniform which hardly made her stand out, but her rank insignia certainly did.
"Attention on deck!" Jennifer ordered, the kits of Sibling Company Gamma dropping their spoons onto their trays and getting off their chairs, snapping to attention.
Jenna Romanov couldn't help but smile at the sight of a bunch of ten-year-olds, all of them wearing the smallest jumpsuits anyone could find for them, sleeves and trouser legs rolled up to make them fit as best they could, reacting like trained soldiers.
"At ease" Romanov told them. "I thought I should introduce myself to the newest additions to my command" she said. "Major-General Jenna Romanov, 295th Battlemech Division, Acting Commander Eleventh Army."
"We know who you are Ma'am" Jennifer responded for the group. "Khan Hallis explained the situation to us aboard the Zughoffer Weir" she said. "The Sibcadets of Sibling Company Gamma stands ready to serve the Star League Defence Force in any capacity you require" the girl announced formally.
Having been raised on stories of the SLDF fighting Amaris, not just mythologised tales of times of old when knights were bold, Sarah and the other kits had adjusted quickly to the notion that the person in charge now was not actually a member of the clan. After all, Jenna Romanov had led her division into battle against the usurper alongside James McEvedy and his 331st, it was the Eleventh Army they both belonged to that took Apollo, the capital world of the Rim Worlds Republic, and they both went on to rid Terra of the foul stench of Amaris.
"At the moment I just require you to finish your meal, so all of you please sit back down" Romanov told them, amused by just how serious they all were.
Jennifer and the others complied and reached for their spoons again to resume eating.
"Are we going to go back and fight the clans soon General, quiaff?" Frederick asked. "I have both mechwarrior and aerospace fighter pilot genes, so I do not mind which you want to put me in" he added.
Romanov chuckled. "Probably best if you're big enough to reach the controls first before we think about sending you to take on Nicholas Kerensky, don't you think?" she asked rhetorically, hoping she didn't sound patronising.
Frederick thought about that and had to admit the woman made a valid point. "Aff" he conceded reluctantly.
"You have got to be General Hallis's son" Romanov decided, taking a good look at him.
"Yes, but also no" Frederick replied. "I mean I am not really his son, I am more like his clone, but again not really" he said, failing to clear up the matter. "The majority of my genes came from Khan Hallis, not that he was a Khan then, or even a saKhan yet."
"My genefather was Dwight Robertson" David spoke up. "He was saKhan before Franklin Hallis."
"And my genemother was Sarah McEvedy" Jennifer told the general. "She was Khan before Franklin Hallis."
"He got promoted fast because back-stabbing clanner ****** kept murdering us" Frederick growled. "They talk about honour but then they bring King Crab assault mechs to what should have been a fair fight, or they nuke your city, lying that you did it to yourself, and then frame you for nuking another city knowing that it was an accident and one of their nukes that did it."
"Bastards" David concurred. He still vividly remembered how he felt when Star Captain Francis took him to one side and told him of Dwight Robertson's death just before he told the others. It wasn't just that the Widowmakers had brought assaults to fight the heavies that saKhan Robertson and Khan McEvedy were using, that was simply cowardly, but they had also broken the rules of engagement by both attacking the Robertson's Black Knight together to knock him out of the fight before then ganging up on McEvedy. It was supposed to be a pair of one-on-one duels, formal ritual combat practiced according to the ilKhan's rules, and even Khan McEvedy who thought applying those rules to an actual battle was pretty stupid still followed them for Trials.
"They will get what is coming to them" Jennifer declared. "Did you know that ilKhan Kerensky had every member of our warrior caste who surrendered summarily executed and every one of our civilian castes who did not escape chemically sterilised?" she asked rhetorically. As the last Clan Wolverine ship to escape, Yukon had still been deep inside clan territory when that order was sent out, which was why it had come as a blessed relief that the star-captain from the Ghost Bears they ran into on Liny while they were gathering supplies had been merciful enough to let them go. According to his orders he should have slaughtered them, but apparently even the ilKhan's commandments mattered less to him than having the deaths of children on his conscience did.
"So I've heard" Romanov replied, more than mildly disturbed by just how serious and intense the little girl was.
"Then you know why we are going to go back" Jennifer said coldly. "They sowed the wind and they are going to reap the whirlwind" she added, deliberately invoking what her gene-mother had told the other Khans was going to happen.
The other children nodded solemnly before one of them suddenly smiled at she had a bright idea. "We should design a new mech called the Whirlwind, quiaff?" she suggested.
"Neg. There is already a class of destroyer called that" Frederick pointed out. "Badger is a Whirlwind."
"So? There is a type of tank called a Fury and a type of dropship that is called a Fury too, but nobody gets them confused" the girl, Katrina, countered. "It is not like anyone is going to think you are talking about the warship when you say that there is a lance of Whirlwinds on the way to reinforce the line, quiaff?"
"Aff, I suppose" Frederick reluctantly conceded the point.
"Maybe you could all brainstorm what you think a Whirlwind mech should be like" Romanov suggested, thinking it might be a good activity to keep them busy.
"And then give the ideas to the Scientist and Technician castes you mean?" David reasoned. That was what the 'Great Father' Aleksandr Kerensky had done with the Atlas after all, came up with the design specifications and let the experts actually work out how to make a machine to meet them.
"There are no castes anymore. Khan Hallis told us that Khan McEvedy abolished them" Jennifer reminded him. "We are just supposed to call them scientists and technicians now."
"She changed other things too" Henry spoke up, frowning. "I do not know if I am happy that we are allowed to call ourselves by our blood-names without earning it."
"Perhaps we should ask permission from our gene-parents first at least, quiaff?" Henry suggested.
"Aff" Frederick agreed. "But that is easier for some of us than for others" he noted, looking to Jennifer and David.
"I will ask Khan Hallis if I can call myself Jennifer McEvedy" Jennifer decided.
David nodded. "And I will ask him if I can call myself David Robertson" he concurred.
"If he says no you could always call yourself David Robertsonson instead" Frederick joked, David finding it somewhere less amusing judging by the glare he directed at him.
Henry laughed however. "And if they ever use Dave's DNA to make a new Trueborn they could call him Davidson Robertsonson."
"I do not think we are supposed to say 'Trueborn' either because it makes us sound like we think we are better than other people" Jennifer noted. "Khan Hallis suggested we call ourselves 'Ironborn' instead, because of the Iron Wombs, but it was not an order."
"But we are better than other people are we not, quiaff?" Katrina responded. "We were genetically engineered to be."
"I think the problem is that 'True' implies some kind of moral, not physical superiority" Jennifer supposed, looking to General Romanov for confirmation.
"That's partially correct" Romanov told her carefully. "It's also that when people think they're better than other people then they can use that as a justification to mistreat them" she explained as best she could, trying not to overcomplicate it all given the age of the children. "It also divides a society because the people being looked down upon will be discontent and unhappy."
"Like the labourer caste in Clan Smoke Jaguar" Katrina realised. "Star Captain Francis said that the reason we did not need to use warriors to force our labourers to work like the Jaguars did was because their labourers hated their warriors, and ours did not."
"The other clans were stupid not to let people move between castes" Jennifer declared. "It only wasted talent and made the other castes feel less like members of the clan" she said. "Khan McEvedy was too smart for that."
"Yes, she was" Frederick agreed. "It is a pity that they gave you her looks but not her brains, quiaff?"
"NEG!" Jennifer responded angrily. "They gave me all her DNA that related to intelligence" she stated with utter certainty. "Take that back or face me in a Circle of Equals!" she challenged him angrily, glaring at the boy.
Frederick grinned. "I apologise, though my greater regret is that I did not save that jibe for when we spar because your anger would have surely caused you to act rashly and lose the bout" he said.
"The suggestion that you would win the bout regardless of how rash I was is by far the funniest thing you have said all week" Jennifer replied, smirking for a moment before sticking out her tongue at him.
The juxtaposition of their strangely formal speech patterns, they seemed to eschew normal contraction even more than the adult Wolverines, with the little girl sticking out her tongue at the little boy nearly caused Romanov to burst out laughing but she held it back. "I should go talk to Captain Francis and the Yukon crew" she told the children. "Nice to have met you all" she added.
"General Romanov" Jennifer responded, acknowledging her authority with a slight bow.
"Remember to try some of the fruit" Romanov remembered to tell them, pointing over to where another table seemed to be piled high with various types. "It's good for you, plenty of vitamins" she told them. "An apple a day keeps the doctor away" she added something her mother always said.
"They are full of sugar though" Jennifer responded. "An apple a day keeps the dentist in pay" she countered the old saying impishly, looking pleased with herself.
"The lychees are worth brushing your teeth for, trust me" Romanov told the girl, smiling.
"Of course, we trust you, General" Jennifer replied seriously, the other kits of sibko Gamma nodding their agreement. "Although… what is a lychee?" she asked.
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Part XXI - Section 2 of 2
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Elsewhere in Camelot Command Franklin Hallis was looking at the bowl of fruit sat on his desk dubiously. At least nobody else had take over his quarters during his long absence from Camelot Command but he strongly suspected that Trish had been using his office because nothing was in the same place it had been before he set off to search for Yukon.
Trish herself was sat on the other side of the desk waiting to give him an update on what had been going on in his absence.
"Did you 'borrow' my stationary saKhan Ebon?" Hallis asked suspiciously. "I am certain that there used to be more pens in that pen holder" he told her.
"I have no idea what you are talking about, Khan Hallis" Trish replied sweetly.
Hallis narrowed his eyes at her and muttered something under his breath. "What is with the fruit basket?" he queried.
"I thought it might make for a nice homecoming present" Trish told him. "We had a big shipment in from Paran a couple of days ago."
"Paran? Were the rumours of an Avatar being there true?" Hallis asked.
"Affirmative" Trish confirmed. "It belongs, or maybe belonged to the Star League Expeditionary Brigade, one of their fleet of survey and exploration ships" she told him. "Most of the crew are the descendants of the original crew now, although there are apparently still a few old hands aboard keeping the thing running as best they can. Their jumpdrive slagged itself after jumping into Paran back in 2819, probably from going too long without being serviced, so they've been stuck there ever since."
"We made contact with them?" Hallis queried.
"Only incognito" Trish replied. "The Tramp we sent out told them they were investigating the rumour of them being there because they found an old cache of Star League Navy supplies they could not sell to anyone else. There's not really much of market for naval autocannon ammunition and the like if you don't want to deal directly with a Great House so I guess that sounded plausible."
"We traded them naval ordinance for alien fruit, query affirmative?" Hallis responded, raising his eyebrows.
"Aff, although we traded them some ammunition for a lot of fruit, and a dropship hold full of frozen fish as well" Trish replied. "And it's not alien fruit, they only grow Terran transplants on Paran."
"Except the bananas I've never seen fruit like this in my life" Hallis replied, taking another look at it.
"Those are lychees, those are starfruit, those are dragon fruit and those are mangosteens" Trish pointed to each in turn. "Paran is covered with tropical islands. We've got lots of coconuts and pineapples too, but they're not really fruit-bowl appropriate" she said. "There is breadfruit as well, but that's more of a staple you can use instead of rice or potatoes… or bread."
Hallis took another look at the basket of fruit, at least if they were of Terran origin they were probably not going to trigger the kinds of weird allergic reactions that alien foodstuffs sometimes did. "Did our people find out anything else?"
"They were smart enough to say that they found a load of old spare parts in the cache too and wondered if the crew of the Pioneer, that is the name of the Avatar by the way, were interested in anything on the list we made up to show them. That hopefully gave us some inkling of the state of the ship, it's far from a wreck but other than spares for weapon systems they were very interested in spares for manoeuvring thrusters and the station-keeping drive so those might need replacing. We also learned that there is some tension between them and the locals. Not exactly surprising given that Paran was part of the Rim Worlds Republic, having a warship belonging to the other side turning up on their doorstep was bound to ruffle some feathers."
Hallis nodded. "Do we know how screwed their K-F core is?"
"None of our people got to take a look first-hand, but they got the impression that back in the old days it would have been written off and completely replaced" Trish replied. "As in, cut the ship in half, yank the whole damn drive out, put in a new one and weld the ship back together" she said. "The last time that ship was in drydock Simon Cameron was still First Lord, and I would bet that the Expeditionary Brigade really put some miles on her even before the Star League collapsed."
"That is unfortunate" Hallis responded, sighing. "Getting hold of a Expeditionary Brigade ship might have come in really handy if we end up having to leave the Inner Sphere completely, and if it's true they're on bad terms with the natives it should not have been too hard to get them to tag along. We need to start thinking ahead, it's not like we can stay here forever."
Trish nodded. "We might have a lead on somewhere to go" she told him. "It is not technically in the Inner Sphere but it's only one jump out."
"Yeah?"
"Captain Mitchell from the Badger suggested we check out a colony that the Terran Hegemony placed just outside Marik space" Trish said. "The system is called Niops."
"Never heard of it."
"Seems like nobody has except Mitchell" Trish replied with a shrug. "He only knew where it was because way, way back when he was a navigation officer on a transport jumpship attached to XXXIV Corps and he used to unofficially run supplies to and from there."
"Unofficially?"
"From what he told us, the CO of XXXIV Corps, I think her name was Von Corvden or something, could not get all the logistical support she needed for her troops so she turned to unorthodox methods to get hold of them instead" Trish explained. "Some things were easier to get than others, she did a deal with the Illyrians for certain raw materials for example, but high-tech equipment, especially Hegemony high-tech equipment was trickier so she made arrangements with Niops."
"They're an industrial colony?" Hallis queried.
"No, they're a scientific research colony, astronomy and astrophysics, but they were established to be entirely self-sufficient with the ability to fix or replace any piece of equipment that went wrong" Trish told him. "According to Mitchell they could make anything you provided the blueprints for" she continued. "That's not hyperbole either, I mean anything" she said. "One of the things they turned out for Von Corvden was a replacement mobile HPG, and they made spares for her Royal mechs and aerospace fighters too."
"Those are restricted technologies" Hallis pointed out, doubtfully.
"Right, restricted to the Terran Hegemony only" Trish confirmed. "The thing is, because Niops was a Terran Hegemony colony Von Corvden figured she could get away with it without getting put up against a wall and shot" she continued. "Mitchell knows that SLDF High Command were told, but he thinks they turned a blind eye because technically XXXIV Corps wasn't breaking any laws and it stopped them bugging Terra for more supplies."
"Plausible I suppose" Hallis decided after thinking about it. "So why are we interested in the place?"
"Because not only has nobody in the entire fleet except Mitchell even heard of it, when we dug through every piece of news reporting we could get our hands on regarding the Great Succession War it is not mentioned once either" Trish replied. "There is an actually possibility that they were just so damn obscure and off the beaten track that Niops is the only Terran Hegemony colony that is still completely intact."
"If they were entirely self-sufficient they could have kept their heads down right through all the fighting you mean, query affirmative?"
"Aff" Trish responded, nodding. "Turned off their HPG and hoped like hell not to get noticed by anyone more dangerous than pirates" she said. "Pirates they could deal with easily enough, the SLDF provided them with a bunch of cast-off equipment to arm a local defence force."
"Worth checking out the place at least" Hallis decided.
"Romanov thought so too, she sent Mitchell off in a jumpship to go take a look not long after you set out to find Yukon but do not expect to see back anytime soon" Trish told him. "Niops is about thirty jumps from here, so even in an L-F Tramp it's quite the trip there and back."
"Thirty jumps? That's most of the way to the Magistracy!"
Trish grinned. "For anybody but us that would be a long journey, but compared to how far we travelled since we left Strana Mechty behind it is practically next door" she joked.
"Just as long as Mitchell doesn't die of old age before he gets back" Hallis remarked drily. "Any other news?"
"We have had some success in locating caches of SLDF equipment in and around the Lyran Commonwealth" Trish replied, nodding. "The ship we sent out to the old Finmark and Timbuktu provinces of the Rim Worlds Republic really raised the bar on that."
"Go on" Hallis requested.
"Well for a start they found a derelict Congress Class Frigate near Finmark, the James Sever" trish told him. "Not much worth salvaging on her but they had the bright idea to nudge it into a rapidly decaying orbit. All we have to do is paint new markings on the Rickenbacker, reset her IFF to squawk she is the SLS James Sever and we have another warship we don't have to hide away."
"That could be damn useful" Hallis responded, thinking about it. They already had the Cape Bon and Protecteur that they could risk being spotted without bringing the Clans running, but a congress class frigate had a larger cargo hold, and unlike the destroyers could also haul a couple of dropships with her. "It's not like we can send Yukon or Saratoga out without Old Nick blowing a gasket" he noted. "With or without fake accents" he added, grinning.
"Fake accents?" Trish asked, confused.
"Oh, you are in for a real treat when you get to listen to their communications with ComStar" Hallis told her, laughing. "I won't spoil it but Captain Meriño on Saratoga earned himself a commendation for comedy above and beyond the call of duty" he continued. "Also, we need to find him a sombrero."
Trish looked at him suspiciously for a moment, wondering if he was yanking her chain somehow, before dismissing it from her mind. "Okay, getting back to what I was saying, after they found the wreck of the James Sever they checked out the two supply depots we had records for, starting with the one near Vortalcoy."
"Any luck?"
"They found two companies worth of SLDF mechs there" Trish told him. "Not just junk either, pristine condition and nearly half of them were heavies or assaults, including a King Crab."
Hallis nodded, smiling. "That's a damn fine haul. Good thing we found them before some ****** pirate did out there" he said seriously. Much of the former Rim Worlds Republic had fallen to piracy and general lawlessness, due in no small part to the Lyrans annexing many of its most productive worlds and then actively making sure the others were prevented from recovering from the Amaris War. "What about the other depot?"
"The one at Rosetta? Not quite so good in terms of mechs, only a single company and the largest machines were a lance of Rifleman heavies" Trish replied. "Are you going to eat anything from that fruit basket?" she asked, changing subject. "Rude not to considering I put it together for you as a welcome home gift."
Hallis groaned, if he didn't at least eat something from there she would nag him about it. After weighing his options he chose the banana, mostly because he knew what it was.
Trish waited until he peeled the banana and took a bite before speaking again. "We also found a data core, nothing on it that we did not already know except for some missile research data concerning FTL LRM's."
Hallis chewed and swallowed. "Never did think much of Follow-The-Leader guided warheads" he told her. "When they work they're great, first missile hits and all the rest impact in the same place one after the other, but when they go wrong they all follow an LRM that missed so you do not hit with any of them."
"That is what the research is about. They were trying to fix that flaw" Trish told him.
"Did they?" Hallis asked hopefully. An FTL LRM system that always worked as intended would be a nightmare in a long-range firefight.
"No" Trish replied flatly.
"Crap" Hallis swore glumly, taking another large bite from his banana.
"Although we did also find four and a half thousand crates of Starfire Mark 2500 guided SRMs" Trish told him casually, having timed saying it for when he had a mouthful of fruit.
Franklin Hallis nearly spat out the chunk of banana but instead just managed to swallow it instead, in one piece, unchewed, triggering a minor coughing fit. "Headhunters?" he eventually managed to gasp out.
"Headhunters" Trish confirmed. "Thousands of them. We assume that they and the data core were transferred from a missile research facility somewhere in the Hegemony to keep them out of the hands of Amaris, and they eventually ended up at the depot on Rosetta."
Hallis stared at her, mind still catching up. "Do you have any idea what those things can do?" he asked rhetorically.
"Hopefully exactly what it says they do on the booklet of instructions inside the crates" Trish replied, grinning. "Do not get your hopes up too high though, we took one apart and there is no chance we can reverse-engineer them to make more because the electronics inside are more advanced than our technicians have ever dreamed of" she cautioned, "but if we save them for a rainy day we have one hell of an ace up our sleeves."
"Mixed metaphor aside I would have to agree" Hallis concurred, mind abuzz with the ramifications of the find. The 'Headhunter' guidance system was not merely cutting-edge military technology, it was bleeding edge at least on a par with the AI systems that ran the Terran Hegemony's SDS network, if not beyond it.
Anecdotally the problem with the things was always that they were quite ludicrously expensive, to the point that even the Royal Divisions with their vast equipment budgets were many years away from getting hold of any when the Star League fell apart.
An Artemis IV guided SRM or LRM cost twice as much as a standard missile, which was bad enough, but a Headhunter SRM or LRM was expected to be at least five times as expensive as their Artemis IV brethren, and that would be after they were put into full production reducing the price per unit.
There was a good reason why all the old test footage of the Starfire Mark 2500 being fired against old mech targets showed them being launched singly, not as a volley. To say the pre-production missiles were literally worth their weight in germanium would be a massive underestimate of the reality.
The Starfire Mark 2500 was akin to the guided weapons of the twenty-first century, the time before ECM systems requiring wattages only a portable nuclear powerplant could provide rendered fire-and-forget weaponry, and many electronic targeting systems, obsolete. They earned the 'Headhunter' nickname because they were best employed for exactly that purpose, target them on the cockpit of an enemy battlemech and watch with glee as they hurtled across the battlefield and smashed straight into it with the intent of turning the man or woman inside into mush.
In furtherance of helping it achieve that noble goal the Starfire also carried a fancy new type of tandem-charge warhead, one that was extremely bad news for the ablative armours that battlemechs utilised because of the prevalence of direct-energy-weapons on modern battlefields.
"I guess after we've tested a few we will put the rest in a vault with a sigh on the door saying 'Open only in the event of Clanners' right Khan Hallis, query affirmative?" Trish suggested, grinning.
"Affirmative. Well, we sure-as-shit won't need them to guarantee a whupping for anyone else, saKhan Ebon" Hallis replied as a matter of certainty. The Great Houses of the Inner Sphere couldn't even make NARC beacons anymore, to them an M2500 would be like some kind of dark sorcery practiced by evil wizards.
Trish reached for a lychee. "It is a pity they could not get their solution to the problem with the Follow-The-Leader missiles to work" she said. "I will have to tip my hat to whoever had the bright idea though."
"What was it?" Hallis queried.
"Fire a modified Headhunter LRM first and get the much cheaper FTL LRM missiles to follow that" Trish told him, nibbling at the small fruit.
Hallis blinked. "Oh, we are definitely going to be taking another look at that project if we ever get the chance to throw money and resources at R&D" he stated firmly.
"Thought you might like it" Trish replied, reaching for another lychee.
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Note from the Author:
Thanks to escaping the Clan Homeworlds aboard Yukon (the last Wolverine vessel to make it) the kits of Sibling Company Gamma are still a great deal more 'clanner' than the rest of the Wolverines at this point (they always will be to some extend given their history but it is particularly noticable in 2826 when they reunite with everyone else. They're only ten years old, having been born, or decanted, in 2816 so very much still children, but they're hardly normal kids. The Clans were still making it up as the went along this early so the crèche (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Cr%C3%A8che) and sibko (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Sibko) arrangements are not what they were later.
Paran (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Paran) VI was a breadbasket world for the Rim Worlds Republic, a little hotter than Terra and known for its islands. Tropical fruit seemed like something they might be growing in abundance, as well as having a large scale fisteries industry. The crew of the Star League Expeditionary Brigade ship Pioneer (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Pioneer) who ended up stuck on Paran when their jumpdrive failed there in 2819 were not well liked by the locals when they first arrrived. Relations improved immensely however in 2830 when the people of the Paran system learned how useful it was to have an Avatar (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Avatar_(WarShip_class)) Class Heavy Cruiser backing them up when a load of pirates jumped in and found themselves a tiny bit ougunned (the jumpdrive on Pioneer might not work but her weaponry still did).
When she found herself placed in charge of XXXIV Corps (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/XXXIV_Corps_(Star_League)) in 2764 Major-General Lijsbeth van Coevorden (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Lijsbeth_van_Coevorden) solved her supply issues creatively, including trading with Niops the closest advanced Terran Hegemony colony to where her Corps her based on the periphery edge of the Free Worlds League. SLDF High Command turned a blind eye to these unofficial, and unauthorised, schemes for whatever reason.
The two companies of mechs they found in an old Star league depot near Vortalcoy (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Vortalcoy) are the ones that Hopper Morrison (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Hopper_Morrison) would have found in canon in 3032. The other depot, SLD-601 (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/SLD_601) on Rosetta (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Rosetta) would have been found by Hansen's Roughriders (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Hansen%27s_Roughriders) in 3028 but mostly because of unfortunate timing they never managed to secure the small number of mechs found there, the datacore present, or the thousands of Starfire Mark 2500 Headhunter (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Headhunter_Missile) missiles left in the depot. My assumption for why the SLDF didn't quickly mulch the RWR Army with Headhunter missiles during the Amaris War was that they were so advanced (and expensive) that they barely had any (the ones of Rosetta might have been the large majority existing and were intended for scale-scale testing when the coup started).
Another late Star League missile type was the Follow-The-Leader (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Follow_the_Leader_Warhead) (or FTL) that worked either really well, or really badly, depending on whether the 'leader' was going the right way. I couldn't help but think that a more reliable 'leader' in the form of a Headhunter would make the things live up to their potential.
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Well found! I'm sure Niops will be able to do SOMETHING with those... ;D
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I was wondering what a Faster-than-light missile might be used for... then I read the next sentence.
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Nice !!!
Yeah, I kept thinking "Faster Than Light" too. :rolleyes: :grin:
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ALWAYS read the next sentence (/paragraph/chapter/etc.)... ;)
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I was wondering what the minimum safe distance for an FTL missile would be & if it's measured in AU?
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Part XXII - Section 1 of 2
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"You can easily spot someone from Niops when they're visiting Alphard, it's so much brighter than what they're used to that they always wear sunglasses. If they're from Frobisher instead they're wearing really big sunglasses."
Lieutenant-Colonel Karin Kumar - 2840CE
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Association Council Building – Niops Association (Niops VII) – 2832
High Associator Giles Olson stared across his desk at the naval officer. "I'm sorry" he interrupted. "Can you run that by me again?" he requested of Admiral Bremman and the younger female naval officer wearing the rank insignia of a ship's captain stood next to him.
"As you wish, Sir" the younger officer began again. "We took a direct route to Ballad in the Magistracy as planned, it's a regional capital so it was thought it would be a good place to try and get our hands on the equipment we were after" she said, "but after we made contact with the local office of Magistracy Metals and Manufacturing, telling them we were from an old Terran Hegemony scientific colony looking to trade, they seemed really confused because usually we deal directly with the Head Office on Canopus, and they also wanted to know since when did we have a Star Lord class jumpship"
"At this point everyone was probably confused, needless to say" Bremman interjected.
"Right" the captain agreed. "So, we soon realised that they thought we were someone else entirely, and eventually upon further investigation we found out that another Terran Hegemony colony where the Star League had placed a scientific research station had been making supply runs to the Magistracy for the last few years."
"Can you get back to the fish people already!" Olson insisted. Why the hell was it always Bremman and his minions that turned up the most implausible stuff out there anyway, he wanted to know?
"I'm getting there, Sir" the captain told him. "We do the deal, we've brought back some mining equipment, a couple of electric arc furnaces and some industrial mechs incidentally, and after asking some more questions we are able to find out a little more about this other colony, specifically where it was and its name, Frobisher. Turns out it's not going to take us too far out of our way to return to Niops via there, it's almost precisely ten jumps rimward of us, so on my own initiative I decide that under the circumstances we should probably go take a look."
"And this is where you met the fish people?" Olson said slowly.
"Eventually Sir. First, we had to deal with the problem that when we jumped in and made radio contact the authorities on Frobisher thought we were pirates, and it took me a couple of days to convince them that we weren't before they gave us permission to land."
"To be fair introducing yourself as 'Captain Blood' probably raised some suspicions Anne" Bremman observed, trying to keep a straight face.
"It's Blüd, not 'Blood' Sir, as you well know, and it's not my fault that when Khan Hallis said we should start using family surnames again that was mine" the woman replied defensively, this was far, far from the last time anyone had intimated that which a name like hers she should have really opted for the buccaneer's life. "Anyhow, once we set down on this island where they have their landing pads, and they seemed satisfied that we were who we said we were, they seemed very happy to see us."
"The fish people?" Olson said once again, dearly wanting them to get to the damn point.
"We didn't meet any of them at first, only a few of the scientists and a couple of security people" the inconveniently named Captain Anne Blüd of the transport jumpship Michael Cameron replied. "It turned out that the Star League, or rather the Hegemony, established a colony on Frobisher back in the 2690's, a few years before they colonised Niops, and built a massive research facility there, mostly underwater."
Olson narrowed his eyes "To make fish people" he said flatly.
"Yes Sir" Blüd finally confirmed. "Someone back on Terra, someone with enough seniority to get the project funded and approved, had the bright idea that since so many habitable worlds were more sea than they were land then why not genetically engineer a race of amphibious human beings" she said. "With gills, and webbed hands and feet to better suit the environment."
"Christ" Olson exclaimed, burying his head in his hands.
"Yeah, they've got some serious Island of Doctor Moreau shit going on down there, Sir" Blüd agreed wholeheartedly with the High Associator's reaction.
"And they did it? I mean they actually got it to work?" Olson asked incredulously, raising his head once more.
"They did, although when the Star League collapsed the project went all to hell because they couldn't get replacement parts for all their fancy scientific gear anymore" Blüd told him. "They could still trade with the Magistracy for certain things, but not the high-tech Hegemony equipment the project needed to keep running as it had been. They've been doing their best to keep as much of it operational as they could but it's been half-a-century and the Hegemony did not see fit to give them their own Project Workshops."
"My guess is that Terra wanted to keep them on a leash by keeping them dependent on the Hegemony for replacement parts" Bremman correctly theorised.
That seemed plausible enough, Olson decided. It was quite telling that trusting a bunch of people with doctorates in physics on Niops with the ability to manufacture their own nuclear weapons was considered reasonable, but the geneticists on Frobisher needed to be handled with care. "And you've seen these, fish people, first hand?" he asked Blüd doubtfully, still finding it all more than a little hard to accept.
"Yeah, they all seemed nice enough, the ones I got to meet. They're really no different than most other people in terms of intelligence or personality wise, you just need to get used to them looking a bit funny" Blüd replied. "It's the eyes mostly, they're a little larger than normal, gives them more of an uncanny valley look than the webbed hands and bald heads do actually."
"Bald heads?"
"Only body hair they still have are eyebrows and eyelashes, and the hairs up their nose too I guess" Blüd told him. "Their hands are only webbed to the first knuckle so that's not nearly as immediately noticeable as the eyes" she said. "They could swim better if the webbing went to the second knuckle, or all the way to the end, but it would mess with their ability to use tools, or say type properly, so the scientists compromised on that."
Olson frowned. "How exactly do these fish people feel about being the product of some madman's vision?" he asked.
"The test subjects didn't seem to have any problems with it to be honest, though if I was born with gills, and there were thousands of other people with gills around, I probably wouldn't think it was all that weird either" Blüd replied. "It's not like they're treated like lab rats or anything by the scientists, they're free to come and go as they please, although most of them live and work at the research station."
"I assume this is paid work and not forced labour of some kind" Olson wanted to know. "If this is a Terran Hegemony colony then I will countenance no slavery under the Cameron Star" he firmly declared.
"A mix of paid work and voluntary labour" Blüd told him. "Most of the support staff and technicians are genengineered humans, and have been for a couple of generations now. You might be surprised how similar the society is to here, I mean here before the Capellans and then ourselves turned up anyway, Hegemony cultural norms. Just with the majority of the population being, well, amphibious."
"Hegemony cultural norms you say" Olson queried.
"Yeah, so, to give you an example I was shown an elementary school and I swear they were using the exact same textbooks I've seen my niece reading for homework" Blüd told him.
"Did you introduce yourself to the kids?" Bremman asked.
"Yes Sir" Blüd replied.
Bremman smiled knowingly. "Did they ask if you were a pirate?"
"Yes Sir" Captain Blüd confirmed with a pained expression.
Olson pursed his lips. "I've got to ask. Did you take any photographs of these, ahem 'people', by any chance?" he inquired, more than a little curious to see one for himself.
"No, but I did bring one of them back here. Or rather I brought her parents here and she insisted on tagging along" Blüd replied. "The director of the research station is hoping that Niops is going to be able to help them out with new equipment, so he dispatched his deputy and her husband to come talk to you."
"You brought a fish person here, to Niops?!" Olson exclaimed, eyes widening.
"No Sir, I brought an administrator and her husband, who's a genetic engineer by the way, to Niops and their teenage daughter came with them" Blüd replied. "She's adopted incidentally, they don't have the gills but she does" she said. "They don't like being call 'fish people' though, just thought I should warn you."
"What do they like being called?"
"People" Captain Blüd replied. "Or Homo Sapiens Amphibia, if you want to get technical about it" she said. "One word of warning, it's best not to call them mermaids, particularly the men among them, one of my crew nearly got slugged for repeatedly doing that."
"The deputy director and her family are currently being detained, politely, at the spaceport" Bremman informed the High Associator, swiftly changing the subject. "For security reasons we were loath to bring them to the capital but that's your call, Sir" he added.
"If they weren't Terran citizens I wouldn't have brought them back, but they are, and the scientists on Frobisher are offering something in return for us fixing their equipment Sir" Blüd said. "They say with their gear running properly again, and the right funding, they can reproduce Hegemony anti-agathic gene-therapy treatments and help out with biosciences in general. I know that's not exactly our strength, at least not compared to physics and chemistry."
"Frankly, compared to making people with gills, extending lifespans has got to be a breeze" Bremman wryly observed. "I think I can safely say that Frobisher is leagues ahead of us when it comes to genetic engineering, and there are definite military applications as well as civilian ones to that kind of technology."
Blüd nodded. "There's something else too, something I didn't talk to them about, there aren't enough of the bioengineered humans to sustain a stable population. They've had trouble achieving high enough birth rates for that, but they don't have Iron Womb technology like we do" she said, knowingly.
"You think we should help them make more of these… people?" Olson asked, surprised.
"Not a decision for the military to make Sir, although I can't help but think that the SLDF's CAAN Regiments would have given their right arms, or other body parts, for a few special forces teams that could breathe underwater" Bremman said, chuckling at the notion. "I will say on a personal basis however that it sounds like the scientists on Frobisher skipped a few lectures on scientific ethics at university, so the galaxy at large might be better off if they weren't entirely self-governing regardless."
Olson frowned. "Annex them you mean?"
"Encourage them defer to a higher authority than their own conscience" Bremman suggested diplomatically. "I'm not totally convinced that their moral compass reliably points north, so some assistance with navigation may be advised."
"They all seemed very nice, they just seemed to have a blind-spot when it came to human experimentation" Captain Blüd observed with a shrug.
Giles Olson looked at them both askance. "You do realise that what you Wolverine people did to your sibko kids was human experimentation too, right?" he asked rhetorically. "He who is without sin, etc."
Admiral Bremman and Captain Blüd looked at each other. "It's not exactly the same thing" Bremman said eventually.
"Of course it isn't" Olson responded sardonically. "Okay, I guess I'll go there and meet them at the port. Make a decision on whether or not to allow them into the capital based on how the meeting goes" he said. "Rather than hitch a ride in your own VTOL I'll take Bureaucrat One, her pilot probably needs the flight hours anyway."
"As you wish Sir" Bremman replied. "Do you want to bring your own security detail?"
"Given that there has to be at least a battalion's worth of soldiers and marines stationed at Goddard to protect me against a pen pusher, a scientist and a teenage girl I'll take my chances without them" Olson replied, chuckling. "You can ride with me Captain, fill me in on anything else I might need to know on the way."
"Of course, Sir" Blüd replied, snapping to attention.
Olson stood up. "Just one thing Admiral, if on their travels your people should ever find a lost Cameron heir, an advanced alien civilisation, the Ark of the Covenant or God forbid, the clone of Stefan Amaris, can you please keep it to yourself until after I retire from politics" he requested, tongue-in-cheek.
"You didn't see the memo I sent last year about recovering the Ark of the Covenant?" Bremman replied, feigning confusion.
"No. What did you do with it?" Olson asked, playing along.
"We have top men working on it right now" Bremman told him.
"Who?"
"Top men."
Blüd laughed. "I love that old film" she said. "I still think that the fourth one where he finds Atlantis was the best in the series though."
Olson nodded his agreement. "You know, technically Captain you just found a lost underwater city belonging to a fallen civilisation" he pointed out, smiling.
"It wasn't really lost, the Magistracy knew about it even if we didn't" Blüd replied. "That said, if we're going to station some aerospace fighters there to protect them from pirate raiders we should definitely go with the Trident."
It was certainly appealing in the humorous sense, but after a little sober contemplation Olson decided that it might lead to a diplomatic incident due to cultural sensitivity.
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Part XXII - Section 2 of 2
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Three quarters of an hour later Olson found himself knocking on a door inside a small office building on the outskirts of Robert H. Goddard Spaceport. There were a pair of SLDF marines stood guard outside the room and they had snapped to attention when he approached, one of them opening the door for him after he knocked, stepping to one side so he could enter. "No need to follow me in" he told the marines who looked like they weren't sure if they should or not.
"As you wish, Sir" the more senior marine, a sergeant, replied. The sergeant hoping like hell that the weird looking kid in there wasn't going to go nuts and assault the High Associator, because if he got hurt the non-com would surely get the blame.
At least the military hadn't stuck their guests into a cell, being nice enough to place them in a break room with comfortable furniture and some drinks machines instead, and Olson put on his best politician's smile as he entered. "Administrator Johanson?" he addressed the woman slumped on one of the chairs. She looked to be in late middle-age like himself, but if Hegemony born she could actually be decades older than the Niops-born Olson.
"Yes?" the woman responded quizzically, looking at the man wearing the expensive, well-tailored suit who had just walked in.
"Giles Olson" the stranger introduced himself. "High Associator of the Niops Association and its Protectorate Systems."
Johanson sprang up from her chair in surprise. "Eleanor Johanson, Deputy Administrator of the Frobisher Research Colony" she introduced herself in turn. "We weren't expecting you to come to us" she told him awkwardly. "This is my husband, professor Doctor Ian Johanson PhD, and our daughter Philomena" she introduced her companions.
"A pleasure" Olson said, shaking hands with the administrator first, then her husband and finally the girl, grateful that he was so practiced at maintaining a warm smile regardless of his personal feelings. The girl didn't look quite how he had expected, the bald head certainly did, albeit looking incongruous on a teenage girl, but her eyes were something else. Weirdly they were smaller than he had imagined, less cartoonish, but they were certainly larger than those of a regular human and were, to risk a pun, eye-catching.
They just made her face look a bit, well, wrong. Uncannily so, Olson decided, not letting his reaction show on his face at all. in much the same way as he did if encountering a particularly deranged weirdo on the streets with a political axe to grind.
"Sorry that you weren't transported to the capital to meet me in my office" Olson apologised to Eleanor Johanson, "but if you weren't Terran citizens from a Hegemony Colony you wouldn't have gotten any further than our Zenith point, and we would have had to chat via video-link" he told her.
"Yes, Captain Blüd explained your, understandable, isolationist and secretive ways" the administrator replied.
"Secret, in the sense of it being an open secret that we don't want to risk letting the Great Houses know any more about the Niops Systems than they have to, including the locations of our military installations and industrial sites" Olson observed. "I assume that you are well aware of what happened to practically every other Hegemony colony that possessed something worth fighting over, or simply destroying to keep it out of the hands of one of the others?"
"We are, my family originally came from Lone Star" Eleanor Johanson replied, "while some of my husband's people lived on Inglesmond" she added.
"Oh, I'm so terribly sorry for you both" Olson commiserated. "Some of my family on my mother's side were from Haddings" he told them. "I should have cousins there, but I strongly doubt that I do" he said sadly. "The decision of my predecessors as High Associator to maintain a strict isolation seems to have been a correct one given the course of wider events, it has only been in the last few years that we started to look outside our own system and become involved elsewhere."
"If it's not a secret, may I ask why you changed your policy?" Ian Johanson asked out of curiosity.
"Because we are far more heavily armed than we used to be, and the Great Houses are considerably weaker" Olson replied. "After the fall of the Star League we inherited quite a number of SLDF units, thanks to our prior ties with them as a source of resupply out here in the periphery, and since then we have invested considerable money and resources into expanding our military-industrial base" he said. "To be perfectly frank if the Free Worlds League, or anyone else, turns up at our doorstep these days looking to make mischief then they had better all be wearing factor five-thousand sunblock because a great number of physicists and nuclear chemists, plus plenty of military hardware to study and the time to do so, results in a very impressive nuclear stockpile."
"And they'll assume you won't be shy in using them after what happened to the other Terran Hegemony colonies" Eleanor Johanson surmised.
Olson nodded. "I suspect that if the Marik's ever poke their nose into our affairs then a mention of what they did to New Dallas, and our…" he paused, "…feelings about that, in conjunction with some unsubtle sabre-rattling, will at least give them pause for thought."
"And if they think you're bluffing?"
"Then they find out the hard way that we're not" Olson stated firmly. "Fortunately, we have ways to make them reconsider short of a full-scale thermonuclear exchange" he said. "There aren't many periphery nations that can dispatch a couple of warships to raise hell, but we can."
"Warships?" Ian Johanson responded with a gasp of surprise.
"Yes" Olson confirmed. At some point soon the Inner Sphere would find out that the 295th ended up on Niops, even if the presence of the 331st as well would be kept firmly under wraps, and the records would show that the 295th had warships with them when they disappeared, so he wasn't revealing anything they planned on keeping secret in the long term. "With the navies of the Great Houses tied up hammering each other again, our analysts consider it unlikely they're in a position to send enough ordnance our way to simply sweep us aside. If they try and grab Niops for themselves with anything less than a full-scale invasion right now then they'll draw back a bloody stump."
"That's a rather, graphic, mental image" the administrator responded, looking to her daughter who seemed rather less than perturbed.
"My apologies, too much time spent talking to those of a military persuasion perhaps" Olson replied. "I doubt back in my younger days working in the field of radio astronomy I would have phrased myself quite the way I do now."
"You were a radio astronomer?" Ian Johanson queried.
"According to my own PhD yes" Olson replied, "although to be honest I was never at the top of my field" he continued, smiling. "My wife convinced me that it would be easier to win an election than it ever would be to obtain tenure at the university, so I turned my back on academia and went into politics" he said. "But enough about me, I believe your intention in travelling to our corner of space was to request technical assistance with some of your scientific apparatus?"
Eleanor nodded. "We've been able to keep most of it operational until recently but a lack of advanced domestic production capability, and our inability to get hold of spare parts elsewhere, means that much of our equipment is doomed to eventual failure" she said. "Frankly the situation is grave because we need that equipment to keep Homo Sapiens Amphibia genetically stable."
"We're not genetically stable and we're in danger of becoming inbred because there's not enough of us" the girl, Philomena, spoke up, sounding surprisingly blasé about it.
"Inbred is an exaggeration, at least so far" Ian Johanson responded. "Despite low birth rates we're still above the Minimum Viable Population threshold, if below the optimum number to prevent unwanted recessive genes rearing their ugly heads every few generations, so as long as we can deal with random mutations we should be fine" he said. "Without our equipment however, problems are likely to cascade in the long term. If we can't keep control of the extra genes we spliced in it's possible we might overshoot our goal."
"Overshoot how?" Olson queried.
"We'll end up more fish than human" Philomena said wryly. "It doesn't help that pretty soon we'll all be cousins."
"Could be worse" Olson remarked. "We've run across isolated colonies out here where the population is so inbred the greetings cards say 'Happy Birthday Uncle Dad' and the family tree is a telegraph pole" he joked, trying to get a laugh out of her.
The girl didn't laugh but she did at least grin. "Do they have webbed hands and feet too?" she asked holding one of hers up, fingers splayed to show him.
"No, but at least you've got the right number of fingers and thumbs which is more than I can say of a few of them" Olson replied. "Great banjo players though thanks to the extra digits" he joked again before turning back to Eleanor. "I certainly can't promise we can help you out with your technical difficulties, for one thing until our engineers can take a look we'll have no idea if it's something our Project Workshops can replicate, but I will say that historically there has proven to be precious little our experts can't copy or fix so feel free to be optimistic" he said.
"You'll help us?" the administrator responded, surprised.
"If we can" Olson told her. "You're a Hegemony colony, that makes you our responsibility. You're not even the first other than ourselves we've encountered. We already have people working on Comstock and Francas to get them back on their feet."
Eleanor frowned. "I've never heard of those worlds" she admitted.
"Don't worry, neither had we until we tripped over them" Olson replied, smiling. "They're about three jumps rimward from here, Francas was established to farm cattle and other livestock, Comstock was a low-tech industrial colony. Believe it or not they mainly made footwear."
"Footware?"
"Initially boots for the SLDF, it was a big military contract that got them started, but when we ran across them we found warehouses full of all sorts of shoes" Olson told them. "Of course, when the Star League fell they found they couldn't sell them, and they certainly couldn't eat them, so their society collapsed. Naturally we're making sure that their economy is going to be a lot more diversified in future although that is going to put some strain on our finances."
"Finances, yes" Eleanor said. "I assume that Captain Blüd mentioned our offer to assist you in recreating the anti-agathic treatments available on Terra in return for your assistance?" she asked. "That research will needed to be mostly funded by yourselves though, I'm afraid. Our own economy is tiny compared to yours."
"She mentioned it, I'm sure we can come to an arrangement there" Olson replied. "However, if you want us to assist with your population issues we're going to require a little something more from you."
"What?" the administrator replied, frowning.
"Acceptance of protectorate status and yielding authority over your diplomatic and interstellar trade agreements to ourselves" Olson explained.
"No, I meant what do you mean you can help out with our population issues?" Eleanor told him.
Olson crossed his arms. "Come with me, I've got a VTOL waiting outside to take us somewhere" he told them. "Trust me, it'll be worth the trip" he promised, giving them his most winning politician's smile.
Two hours later the Johanson family were stood in a research facility north of the capital staring at rows of unborn babies in their third trimester of development, all floating in tubes like they were some kind of macabre display, except they were all very much alive according to the monitoring equipment.
"What the hell is this?" Ian Johanson wanted to know.
"Artificial wombs able to carry a child from gestation to birth, or perhaps decanting might be a better word" Olson told them. The facility staff had been given fair warning he was coming there with guests so most of them were taking a break, although a couple were present towards the back of the room making sure everything was fine with the machines.
"Are they… clones?" Eleanor asked, more than a little taken aback by what she was seeing.
"No, these particular infants aren't even genetically engineered to any appreciable degree, think of it as artificial insemination except that the egg isn't inside the mother" Olson explained. "Our people do screen for genetic diseases of course, we're not nearly as advanced in the field as you seem to be but our scientists can fix things like that readily enough."
"How did you get hold of this technology? I'm not aware of the Hegemony working on anything like this" Ian Johanson asked, nonplussed.
"Military R&D project, a super-soldier program if you will" Olson replied, leaving out a great deal of superfluous detail. "Currently we're using them to help out members of our society that want children but for various reasons are unable to do so naturally."
"Super-soldiers? Really?" Eleanor responded dubiously.
"Honestly. Is it any harder to believe than people with gills?" Olson asked rhetorically. "I can probably arrange for you to meet a couple of them, the oldest is probably about your daughter's age" he said. "The program is on hiatus at the moment, our resources are overstretched as it is, but resources could be reallocated if we found ourselves faced with solving a problem such as your own."
"You want to create more Homo Sapiens Amphibia in these… what do you call them?" Ian Johanson asked.
"Iron Wombs, and the question is really whether you want to do that?" Olson replied. "It would surely assist with your issue of a stagnant population, and I doubt you're ever going to get a better offer from anyone else" he said flatly. "Cards on the table. Your expertise in genetic engineering is something that the Niops Association would dearly love to get hold of, bioscience is the one major scientific field that we probably don't lead the Inner Sphere in these days, but you still need us more than we need you and our conditions are far from onerous. Becoming a protectorate doesn't mean becoming a vassal, for the most part your domestic affairs are your own to decide."
Eleanor looked him in the eye. "In what way aren't they ours to decide under this arrangement?"
"We would expect you to govern yourself under the legal system of the Terran Hegemony, as we do so ourselves" Olson replied. "We expect you to have an elected government, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, the right to a fair trial… the usual trappings of a liberal democracy" he explained. "Oh, and I'll warn you that if your webbed-fingered citizens are treated as some kind of lower caste then our surprisingly anti-authoritarian military will take a very dim view of it" he advised seriously.
"That's it?" Eleanor replied, raising her eyebrows.
Olson chuckled. "Did you expect I'd demand that you drop to one knee and swear allegiance to me as First Lord of the Star League?" he asked, smiling. "We're a democracy, a somewhat technocratic one admittedly, but we're not the Capellans or the Combine that want to control every aspect of our people's lives" he said. "I mean we're not as chaotic and disorganised as the Free Worlds League, but we're hardly some kind of centralised autocracy. Our long-term goal is to try and create a new Terran Hegemony out here, not a new Terran Alliance."
Ian Johanson stared at the High Associator. "A new Hegemony? Seriously?" he asked incredulously.
"Well, calling ourselves the Star League would be a little grandiose don't you think?" Olson replied, amused by their reaction to what he had just told them. "Look at it this way, we hang together or we hang separately. Eventually someone was going to look at worlds like ours with envious eyes, technology is already backsliding in the Inner Sphere which puts us at greater risk each and every day of looking like a very juicy target. All that Hegemony tech you have on Frobisher is going to be well worth invading you for, and I'm not just talking about your genetic engineering equipment, just the electronics from your other devices will soon be worth a fortune."
"You think?" Eleanor replied, frowning.
"Do you know how expensive basic mining robots are to buy now?" Olson asked rhetorically. "We've been mostly buying up broken ones and fixing them ourselves the last year because the trickle of new ones that Earthwerks are still turning out cost more than some battlemechs" he said, grimacing. "Inside of ten, twenty years at the outside, there's going to be a whole list of things that nobody in the Inner Sphere can make anymore. The only people that will still have technology that was common a century ago will be ourselves and ComStar, and ComStar won't be sharing."
"What makes you think so about ComStar?"
"Because they've been doing very nicely for themselves with their monopoly on Hyperpulse Generators and having the monopoly on other things only makes them stronger relative to everyone else" Olson replied. "If they can retain a mid-twenty-eighth century tech-base while everyone else is sliding back towards the Bronze Age it's only good for them."
"You're assuming ComStar think in those kinds of realpolitik terms" Eleanor replied, not completely convinced.
"Jerome Blake took control of Terra with eight divisions of SLDF troops, which would indicate he had a certain grasp of the way Great Power politics is done" Olson responded drily. "ComStar's altruism is a fig-leaf, they're playing their own game and seeking ways to enhance their power base. That's not an assumption on my part either, we've seen them playing the game ourselves" he said, recalling the concerning though hilarious 'Canada Tribe' incident. "All this talk about the nefarious scheming of the Telephone Company aside, we're offering by far the best deal you're going to get. As well as repairing your equipment I can have a full battalion of troops with battlemech and aerospace fighter support on the ground on Frobisher well before the end of the year to protect you from ne'er-do-wells and we can do something to help with your low birthrates too."
"Frankly this is all a little overwhelming. I'll need time to consider all of this" the Deputy Administrator replied honestly.
Olson smiled. "I'm sure you do. We'll find you somewhere to stay overnight at the spaceport while you think about it" he said as one of the staff poked their head into the room and coughed to attract attention. "Yes, what is it?" the High Associator queried of the interruption.
"My apologies Sir, but there are a couple of people here that were hoping to visit their unborn son" the staff member by the door told him. "Serving military officers" he added.
"Oh, okay let them in. We were just about finished here anyway" Olson replied.
Claire Donovan of the 295th Battlemech Division had not been expecting to run into the High Associator when visiting the facility with her husband, but they were both seasoned enough to snap to attention when they were directed into the chamber where the Iron Wombs were situated and found him there with a couple of strangers and a rather odd-looking teenage girl.
"At ease" Olson told them. "I think I've met you before" he addressed Claire.
"Yes Sir, you awarded me a special citation for my role in apprehending the war criminal Bernard Critchly" Claire replied, trying not to stare at the girl's eyes.
"Ah yes, you were the one that blew the bastards mech out from under him as I recall" Olson remembered. "Excuse my language in front of your daughter Eleanor but if there was ever a man that deserved to be called a bastard it was surely him."
"Critchly?" Ian Johanson repeated, "as in the man that slaughtered all those monks at the Vatican? I thought he was never caught?" he asked, confused.
"Oh, justice caught up with him eventually, in the form of a battlemech wearing Niops Association insignia" Olson told him. "You're visiting your son I'm told?" he asked Claire.
"Yes Sir, he's in the third cannister over. We never thought we would be able to have children but fate intervened I guess" Claire replied. "My husband fought on Algenib too, it helped bump us up the waiting list."
"That's wonderful, children are a blessing" Olson replied warmly, "you might not think so when they reach their teenage years though" he cautioned, smiling.
"Hopefully we'll have grandchildren before we're much past a hundred and twenty-five, be nice to see them grow up too" Claire replied, smiling back.
Olson nodded. "You know, with any luck, and with the assistance of our new friends here from Frobisher, your son there might still be alive a hundred and fifty years from now" he told Claire. "They're from another Hegemony research colony that specialised in genetic engineering."
"Really?" Claire responded in surprise.
"Don't worry, the eyes aren't compulsory" Philomena interjected having noticed them trying not to stare. She had gotten used to it travelling with the crew of the Michael Cameron and knew full-well how weird she looked to anyone not from Frobisher.
"Bringing back the Terran Hegemony one system and one technological miracle at a time" Olson declared proudly, deciding that might make for a decent election slogan when he ran again in 2835.
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Note from the Author:
Frobisher (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Frobisher) was another Terra Hegemony scientific research colony in the periphery but they were working in a very different field. The goal on Frobisher was to produce genetically-engineered humans that were amphbious and they actually managed that, although the fall of the Star League soon caused problems because they could no longer obtain the high-tech equipment required to keep going. The genes they spliced in weren't quite stable enough and needed repairing periodically, and the population was never high enough that inbreeding was not an issue (they seemed to be barely above Minimum Viable Population (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_viable_population) (MVP) and in canon they were basically utterly screwed by the late 31st Century.
It's still not too late for Frobisher in 2832 however, most of the equipment still works (the pirate raids by those looking for lostech aren't a big thing yet) and only a few of the scientists have left for the Magistracy of Canopus. Incidentally, since it's canon that some scientists from Frobisher did relocate to the Magistracy there must have been contact between them (either Frobisher had a jumpship or jumpships from the Magistracy went there). My supposition is that Frobisher was trading with the Magistracy for supplies and spare parts (spare parts that weren't Hegemony-only tech).
The SLDF had a few CAAN Regiments (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/CAAN_Regiment) (Cavalry, Armored, Aerospace and Naval) that were mainly deployed on ocean planets. Frobisher seems like a place where one of those would be very handy (and the locals are pretty optimised to recruit for them).
As regards the fourth Indiana Jones movie being about Atlantis (not Crystal Skulls) the Battletech Universe diverged from ours in the 1980's (Reagan got the Strategic Defence Initiative, AKA 'Star Wars' operational in 1985 for example) so I thought a little nod to that was warranted.
We last saw the Donovan's in Part XIV, they never managed to have kids on Buffalo Meadows but thanks to the Iron Wombs they now have a son on the way. Claire had the luck to be the mechwarrior that brought down Critchly's Rampage which looks very good on her record.
Oh yeah, and with a name like that Captain Blüd really should have been a pirate.
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The Indiana Jones series could also be rebooted at any time between 20th and 28th century. I would imagine once a holovids became popular many older franchises got rebooted. With Indy, after certain moneymakers that are the first three movies, they might have gone with the Fate of Atlantis scenario, as you really can't go wrong with nazis.
"They all seemed very nice, they just seemed to have a blind-spot when it came to human experimentation" Captain Blüd observed with a shrug.
And Dracs are also nice people who have a blind-spot when it comes to human rights :laugh:
Also at least she is not a Colonel Blood, then it is ''lock ya crown jewels'' time.
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Nice going Hotpoint, I like what you've done with the story so far. :thumbsup:
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This is simply AWESOME on SO many levels! :)
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I think I agree with the TH that geneticists are more dangerous than nuclear physicists. One can destroy planets while the other can destroy life.
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I think I agree with the TH that geneticists are more dangerous than nuclear physicists. One can destroy planets while the other can destroy life.
Eh, I'm going to have to disagree with you on this. Life is extremely resilient, and has survived in some very extreme conditions and very hostile environments. Our species might not survive the tender mercies of either group of scientists, but life in general ought to.
As for Captain Blud, give her a jumpship, an appropriate mix of military dropships and crew, and a Letter of Marque and Reprisal, and she would be an excellent pirate hunter privateer. This could almost certainly become a popular holoseries drama NIOPS could market, especially in the periphery states.
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Holy crap, Niops and Frobisher together. Is the galaxy ready for that much “Science!”?
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Holy crap, Niops and Frobisher together. Is the galaxy ready for that much “Science!”?
I think you meant to say "SCIENCE!" :cheesy:
If only Skyfog PROJECT LIBRA UMBRELLA (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Skyfog) hadn't been abandoned when the Star League collapsed they could have joined too.
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I'm thinking it would take a bit to evacuate 2 million... there might still be some for Niops to find and collect (gotta catch 'em ALL!) ;D
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Also at least she is not a Colonel Blood, then it is ''lock ya crown jewels'' time.
No, just the German word for it.
I do wonder if they can put a few workshops at that factory, if only to help with general upkeep of the place.
Just in case.
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Part XXIII - Section 1 of 2
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"Those old rumours about Amaris having a secret underwater battlemech factory somewhere on Kwangjong-ni gave me the idea that maybe the old Star League facility on Frobisher might be eventually expanded to make things other than people with gills."
General Jenna Romanov - 2837CE
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Joseph-Louis Lagrange Memorial High School – Niops Association (Niops VII) – 2832
"Perhaps our new student would like to introduce herself to the class" the teacher suggested having directed her to a position next to his desk in front of everyone.
Philomena could have really done without this but her adoptive parents were not the sort that were going to allow her not to attend school, even if Niops Social Services would have, which they would not.
"Hi, I'm Philomena" she introduced herself to the teenagers who were all staring at her with a mix of various expressions on their faces ranging from intrigue to something verging on disgust in a couple of cases. "I'm from Frobisher" she added redundantly given that the local press had been discussing the other Terran Hegemony research colony way out in the periphery ever since the story broke. "Yes, my people were genetically engineered to make us amphibious. Yes, I have gills. No, I'm not more fish than I am human or anything close to it. Yes, my eyes are pretty big, but no I don't see in widescreen or panorama. No, my legs don't turn into a tail when I'm in the water, I don't know why that needs saying but for some reason it does, and finally, yes, I have partially webbed hands and feet to help with swimming" she concluded, holding her hands up fingers spread to demonstrate. "Any questions?"
"Are you wearing that scarf indoors to hide your gills?" a girl with ginger hair asked, sounding more genuinely curious than she did mocking.
"No, I'm wearing it because it's freezing cold here and I'm still trying to warm up from being outside more than a few minutes" Philomena replied honestly. "I'm not trying to hide my bald head with the woolly hat either" she added just in case that was going to be the next question. Because she was a minor the newspapers had not published her photograph, but that seemed a little redundant given that anonymity wasn't really an option. She was the only member of Homo Sapiens Amphibia on the planet, and for that matter the only one of her kind on any planet other than Frobisher, and if she wore sunglasses to hide her very distinctive eyes that would only attract more attention out in public because blindingly bright the local star was not.
If she hadn't already been overwhelmed by most everything else she encountered on Niops VII the fact it was actually safe to look directly at the sun here would have made more of an impact on Philomena than it did. In reality she was still too busy adjusting to other things to pay it much mind. Visiting the planetarium a couple of days back had been particularly mind-blowing, not so much the holographic presentation but the realisation that there were enough seats in there to hold the entire population of Frobisher twice over.
Her father's somewhat insensitive 'Dad Joke' about her gawking 'wide-eyed' at everything like a kid from a hick town had not been appreciated. Albeit mostly because she was already concerned that she was staring at everything in the 'big city' like some slack-jawed yokel from ****** Nowhere while everyone else was staring at her.
Hoping her time as an unwilling celebrity would be short-lived Philomena had been reassured somewhat that yesterday, and for the first time since they arrived, her family, had not been the front-page story in the morning newspaper. Instead the headlines had been lauding that the recharge station at the Niops zenith point had charged its first jumpship, and this was apparently considered some cause for celebration. Still under construction, and only partially operational, the station had yet to even be officially named, but it was by far the largest structure built in space by the Niops Association and judging by the headlines they all seemed pretty damn proud of the thing.
"Ah yes, the climate where you're from, that's something we might wish to talk about for today's lesson which will be a departure from the original lesson plan" the teacher said. "Please take a seat there Philomena" he directed her to an empty desk.
"We're not going to talk about me the whole hour are we?" Philomena responded in dismay.
"Oh, dear me no" the teacher replied, "that's mostly a matter of biology, we're studying astronomy and astrophysics this morning, although we will be talking about your home as the system de jour" he told her as she sat down. "Any more questions for Philomena before we begin?" he asked, best to just get it all over with he decided pragmatically.
"What's your star-sign? Pisces?" a boy joked to some laughter.
The teacher glared at the boy. "I will tolerate many things in this class David, even a certain amount of frivolity, but references to astrology is not one of them" the usually laid-back and relaxed teacher uncharacteristically snapped. If the Niops Association ever came to dominate the galaxy it would be very bad news for anyone that subscribed to that particular nonsense, astrologers were held somewhat lower in public esteem there than people that claimed to be able to divine the future by studying goat entrails.
It wasn't like the constellations were even in the same place in the Terran sky that they were when the Ancient Babylonians first invented the ridiculous pseudoscience, the teacher thought angrily to himself. If the charlatans were remotely rigorous in their approach they would have added a thirteenth starsign, Ophiuchus, to the zodiac over a thousand years ago.
"Sorry Sir" David replied sheepishly, it was always a bad idea to hit the teacher's berserk button.
"Any serious questions?" the teacher asked, expression indicating that they had better be serious questions from now on.
"How long are you going to be on Niops before you go home?" a girl asked. "I'm asking because I'm on the swim team and we're competing against Bernard Lovell High next month. Any chance you'd be interested in being a ringer?" she asked hopefully.
"Jennifer that would be deeply unethical" the teacher chided.
"It's the only sport we don't always beat them at. We already won our case that genetic engineering shouldn't disqualify any of us from inter-school athletic competition" the girl argued. "Lovell is just bitter that all the Ironborn attend Lagrange."
Philomena blinked. "Wait, are you the 'super-soldier' kids I've heard about?" she asked looking around to see if she could notice anything different about them.
"Only some of us, there's a few more in another class, but we prefer being called 'First Generation Ironborn', not 'super soldier kids' if you please" Jennifer McEvedy replied. "I guess they stuck you in with us because people in this school are used to having gene-spliced freaks around" she suggested wryly.
"Guess so" Philomena agreed, wondering if her parents knew.
"Just be grateful that Niops isn't exactly a hotbed of religious fundamentalists that'll call you an ungodly abomination to your face" McEvedy told her. "I'll bet that would happen a lot more elsewhere."
"Some might call you a science-devil in Chinese though" a boy spoke up. "Happens to me all the time."
The teacher frowned. "Frederick, I hope you tell your parents when that happens so they can remonstrate with the person concerned" he checked.
"They know. It's mainly my stepmom's mom that does it" Frederick Hallis replied, shrugging. It wasn't like she liked his father either, albeit for very different reasons.
"Oh" the teacher responded awkwardly. Well, what did General Hallis expect if he married into a Capellan family, he thought to himself dismissively, deciding to move on swiftly. The teacher pressed a few buttons on his noteputer and a colour projection of what Philomena recognised as her home system appeared on the wall behind the teacher's desk.
"This is the Frobisher which can be found approximately ten jumps, or three hundred light years, Rimward of Niops" the teacher began. "It's slightly atypical in that the star Frobisher is not a main sequence star, it's a type K5IV, an orange subgiant, with a luminosity you would normally expect of a hotter G type star like Terra but while maintaining the spectral class of your more regular K type" he said. "Since the system's habitable planet is also only second out from its sun the planet Frobisher is also considerably warmer than the standard baseline for habitability, Terra III, with an average equatorial temperature of 37 degrees Celsius."
"Damn, that's even hotter than Alphard" one of the boys exclaimed.
"Indeed Henry, and unlike Alphard the surface of which is only fifty-five percent covered by ocean, the same cannot be said of Frobisher" he noted, looking to the girl for comment.
"We're ninety-five percent ocean, everything else is islands and none of them are very big" Philomena told them.
"Extreme humidity for most of the year and so-called 'wet bulb' temperatures are far from unusual on the surface making it feel up to twenty degrees hotter than it really is" the teacher told them. "Would you care to explain to the class what that means given your first-hand experience Philomena?" he asked the girl. "It's not something that's exactly an issue here on Niops VII" he said, smiling.
"You can't cool down by sweating" Philomena told them. "We don't just spend a lot more time in the water than we do up on the islands because we can breathe down there, we do it because you can easily die of heat exhaustion up on the surface."
"We'll discuss thermoregulation more in biology class, but I suspect you can all see why Philomena finds our own climate rather chilly" the teacher said, smiling.
"I'd never seen snow in real life before I came here" Philomena remarked. "When does summer begin anyway?" she asked.
"This is summer" Jennifer told her apologetically. "We're near the equator, and there's not that much axial tilt anyway, so it doesn't get that much colder though."
"You don't swim in the sea here do you?" Philomena asked, grimacing. Back home the sea was always warm, at least it was unless you dived really, really deep, but they had actual icebergs here. She had seen the polar icecaps from space and they were huge.
"Sometimes, but not for competitions" Jennifer told her, rightly assuming that if it meant diving into the frigid waters of Niops VII there was no way that Philomena would want to join the swim team whether she was certain to win the event or not.
"Getting back to Frobisher II" the teacher cut them off. "The gravity there is slightly higher than our own, not that it matters if you're floating of course, and they have a moon called…" he looked to Philomena again.
"Ayde" Philomena told the class. "A.Y.D.E" she spelled it out for them because it was pronounced exactly the same way as aide, and actually meant the same thing. Not that she was sure why anyone had considered that particular moon more helpful than any other.
"As you already know, except you perhaps Philomena, Alphard is itself a subgiant star, which is why Alphard IV is actually hotter than Terra III, despite both stars being otherwise similar type G yellow stars" the teacher noted. "Specifically G3 in the case of Alphard and G2 in the case of Terra."
The teacher then got very technical about subgiant stars for the next fifteen minutes, then about the goldilocks zones around different stars and Philomena started to wonder if the teenagers on this planet were geniuses because they all seemed to know a ridiculous amount about such things judging by their questions and comments. Unable to follow it all very well she ended up zoning out for much of the rest of the lesson and was relieved when the Math and English classes with different teachers later on were more her speed. Math class even seemed to use the same textbooks as school back home, which probably shouldn't have come as a surprise given that the Terran Hegemony probably printed billions of them and shipped them out to every system it controlled.
The last class of the day was biology with the same science teacher as before, and it was at this point Philomena realised that the kids weren't scientific geniuses. They must just have a cultural bias towards teaching their children astronomy and astrophysics here, she concluded, because she was well ahead of them in her grasp on the topics being covered in the biology lesson.
Then it occurred to Philomena that the reason she seemed to know so much more about the biological sciences already than they did was likely because Frobisher had its own cultural biases in that direction.
She was still thinking about that when it came time to head home, wondering how science was taught on 'normal' worlds for a while before she realised that in much of the galaxy these days it might not even be taught that much at all.
The apartment the government had assigned her family was far enough away from Lagrange High that she needed to take the school bus home, not that she was particularly unhappy not to have to walk given how damn cold it was. The same youngsters who had stared at her on the bus on the way to school in the morning did so again on the way back, although a couple of kids from her class did talk to her now at least, including the girl with all the ginger hair who she had since found out was called Alice. Alice wasn't one of the 'Ironborn' kids herself, but she was dating one, and Philomena figured that meant she was a little more relaxed about genetically engineered humans than some other people might be.
The Ironborn kids all went to some kind of weird army cadet meeting after school a few days a week apparently, so none of them were on the bus that afternoon. Alice claimed that the week before her boyfriend had been playing with live shoulder-launched inferno missiles, but Philomena sincerely doubted that was true. Who on Terra would let sixteen-year-olds do something like that?
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Part XXIII - Section 2 of 2
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Not having her own key yet Philomena had to knock on the apartment door to be let in when she got home and her father did so. "Mom's still at some meeting" Ian Johanson told his adopted daughter.
"When isn't she, either here or back home?" Philomena replied rhetorically, hanging up her coat on the rack near the door as her father closed it again. At least it was toasty warm inside the apartment, in a place that had cheap fusion power generation and bountiful geothermal energy nobody worried about turning up the thermostat, electricity was practically too cheap to be worth metering.
"How was your first day at school?" Ian asked.
"Pretty good, only got asked if it was true that I could entice sailors to crash onto rocks by singing twice" Philomena replied sardonically.
Ian Johanson laughed. "Nobody that has ever heard you sing would ever accuse you of being a Siren" he replied. "Odysseus wouldn't have been begging his crew to untie him from the mast, he would have been begging them to fill his ears with beeswax too."
"Gee, thanks Dad."
"Just calling it as I see it, Honey" Ian replied as the girl now took off her hat too as she warmed up. "You have many fine talents, being able to hold a tune is not one of them."
If that was merely a subjective opinion, and not an objective fact, Philomena might have argued with him but melodious her singing voice was not. Part of that was down to the gills and how they connected up to her regular respiratory system, it messed with hitting the high notes somehow, but most of it was down to her being tone deaf. "How was the biology department at the university?" she asked, changing the subject.
"Friendly people, some of the lab equipment was a little quaint compared to what we have back home, and their library resources leave a lot to be desired, but I think I'll be happy enough working there for a while" Ian replied. "Oh, and I got you a pet while I was there" the genetic engineer added, smiling.
"A pet?" Philomena queried, wondering if it was some kind of genetically-engineered cat or something.
"They had quite a few of them at the lab, they breed pretty fast so when I asked if I could borrow a tank and take one home they were okay with it" Johanson told her. "It's in here" he continued, heading off towards the living room with Philomena following.
When she got there Philomena took stock of the large fish tank now resting on the dining table and its inhabitant. "That is one ugly fish" she opined, looking at it.
"Ah, but what it lacks in good looks it makes up for in character" her father declared. "This one is used to be handled" he said, reaching into the tank and gently taking hold of it, the fish not trying to evade but placidly seeming to accept being picked up.
To Philomena's surprise her father lifted the fish out of the water and placed it on the table beside the tank. Rather than immediately seeming to panic and thrash about like a normal fish would as it began to drown in air the creature remained placid and just seemed to look around.
"It's amphibious" Philomena realised.
"Species name Amphibius Alphardis, usually called the Alphard Mudskipper" Ian Johanson told her. "Not quite fully grown, it'll reach just over twenty centimetres when it is" he continued, reaching for a small plastic container, taking the lid off and pouring some food on the table near the fish.
The mudskipper immediately spotted the food and the reason why its fins were so misshapen compared to an ordinary fish became obvious as it employed them like legs to make its way across the table towards the food which it started to devour.
"Back home on Alphard they eat algae, but they find the algae from the sea here too salty so they prefer cabbage of all things" Johanson told her as the mudskipper devoured the green plants.
"Not a saltwater fish then?" Philomena assumed.
"Native to a freshwater inland sea called Lerna on the Hydrae continent" her father replied. "They climb out of the water to feed on the mudflats by the water, and to avoid predators if necessary. They're a true amphibian, just as happy breathing air as they are water, although they don't spend too much time out of the water in daytime. Poor little things get sunburn."
"You'd better put that back in the water before it wanders off" Philomena advised as the mudskipper finished off what it was eating and started looking around. "Pet fish shouldn't need a leash."
Ian Johanson gently picked the mudskipper back up and placed it back in its tank. "It's adorable, isn't it?" he asked as it started swimming. "We should get it some aquatic plants for its tank. Ones that it won't eat but aren't toxic either."
Philomena looked at the fish askance. "You only think its adorable because its amphibious" she decided, wondering if some of her DNA would have come from this thing if it had been native to Frobisher instead of Alphard.
"Nonsense. You're amphibious and I don't think you're adorable" Johanson replied, trying and failing to look serious about it.
"Hey!"
"I mean you used to be fairly adorable when you were small, but the taller you got the less adorable you became" Johanson told her, tongue-in-cheek. "Whatever traces of adorableness you still had vanished right about the time you turned thirteen and started talking back and swimming off in a huff when you were angry with us."
"Okay so you think its adorable because it's amphibious and small" Philomena slightly adjusted her position.
"You don't think it's neat that we're looking at a species that is probably in the process of doing what our ancestors on Terra did nearly four hundred million years ago, crawl out of the oceans and start to colonise the land?" Johanson asked.
Philomena thought about that. "As a member of a human sub-species heading in the opposite direction I can't help but think that one of us has it badly wrong" she eventually replied.
"I guess we'll just have to rely on natural selection to sort out who has it right then. Loser goes extinct" the geneticist replied in jest. "While we're on the subject of extinction, or rather the need to avoid it, the head of the biology department came to me with a warning that keeping all our eggs in one basket on Frobisher might be unwise given that your sub-species is only one global cataclysm away from going the way of the Trilobite."
"The seas here are too cold for us" Philomena replied quickly.
"Nonsense, you are all perfectly capable of surviving in the waters here" Johanson replied.
"I don't mean it would kill us, I mean nobody with any sense would want to live in these waters" Philomena explained. "They have icebergs, actual icebergs here" she exclaimed, shivering just from thinking about it.
"The department head was actually thinking about Niops VI which is a few degrees warmer, at least on the side that always faces the sun, although the strength of the ocean currents generated by the temperature differential between the two hemispheres could cause problems of their own" Johanson noted. "I actually suggested a small colony on Alphard within the Lerna Sea, that should be comfortably warm enough for you."
Philomena frowned. "Freshwater though?"
"Think of it as an opportunity to test if we were successful in making you a euryhaline species" the genetist joked.
"I already know I can breathe fresh water, I used to do it in the bath remember, it's just that we've always lived in the ocean."
"Only because Frobisher has barely any rivers and is entirely lacking in lakes" Johanson replied. "I remember the time you forgot to rinse away all the residue left behind by your mother's scented soaps first before putting your head under and opening your gills in the bath."
Philomena nearly gagged with the memory. "They itched for a week after that and everything, and I mean everything, smelled like lavender for days" she recalled with an involuntary shudder. "That scent still makes me gag now."
"Maybe that's my fault for not considering that eventuality when I helped engineer your grandparents" the genetic engineer remarked. "The need for lavender-proof gills just wasn't on my sonar I suppose" he admitted, smiling. "Any cute boys at school? You know mother will ask about that."
"None with a fish fetish as far as I could tell" Philomena replied sarcastically, ignoring her father's look of disapproval in response to that. "I don't think bald, built-in flippers and huge eyes is considered all that attractive here."
Ian Johanson nodded. "Having once been a teenage boy myself, admittedly many, many decades ago, I can offer some advice there" he said.
"Yeah?"
"Wear a low-cut top and they won't be looking at anything higher than your neck" Johanson suggested, holding back laughter.
"DAD!" Philomena exclaimed, her cheeks going bright red with embarrassment.
"All I'm saying is that if you want them to think something other than 'fish' then drawing attention to your mammalian features is a sure-fire way to do it" Johanson told her. "Scientifically speaking."
"I can't believe you sometimes" Philomena told him, shaking her head in disbelief.
"If your Mom hadn't given much the same advice to your biological mother when she was working as my lab assistant, and trying to get your biological father to notice her, you wouldn't even exist" Johanson told the girl. "The bikini had a lot more impact than the lab-coat ever did."
"GAH!"
"You know we didn't just take you in when they died in that accident because we loved you and your parents, we did it because we were both partially responsible for your existence, me with the gene-splicing, Eleanor with the matchmaking."
"Okay, that's enough. I don't want to think about this anymore" Philomena told him seriously. "What are we having for dinner?" she asked.
"Your Mom is picking up take-out on the way home" Ian Johanson told her.
"Those noodles again?" Philomena asked hopefully. The weather might be awful but the food here was great, much more variety than on Frobisher.
"Either that or fried chicken."
"Also sounds pretty good" Philomena replied, frankly anything that wasn't the usual fish and edible seaweed from back home was fine by her. She didn't like people staring at her here but the food on Niops was fantastic, almost as good as the movies and gameshows they had on television.
"What did they feed you at school?"
"Some kind of salad with ham in it. At least I think it was ham, it was okay though" Philomena told him. "They seemed surprised I didn't have any special dietary requirements."
Ian Johanson rolled his eyes. "I take it as a personal insult that we would have engineered you to be restricted in what you can eat" he said. "The whole idea was to make you more adaptable not less."
"That's what I told them" Philomena replied. "I'm not sure if they believed me when I said I could eat stuff with so much ammonia or other chemicals in it that it would make them ill" she said. "Not that I like the taste or smell of ammonia."
"We'll we didn't want to mess with your tastebuds, we might have accidentally stopped you appreciating a good steak, not that you ever had one before we got here" Johanson replied, reaching for the television remote. "I wanted to catch the news in case they mention us again."
"Maybe you need to splice together some amphibious cows so we can have steak and burgers back home?" Philomena suggested, grinning as he switched on the viewscreen which was already tuned to the news channel.
"… continues to top the rankings in the Gunslinger Program. When asked for comment by our correspondent reporting on the competition, mechwarrior Wilhelm Sampson, better known by his nom de guerre of 'Billy the Kid', attributed his outstanding victories in both the Heavy and Medium weight classes to taking recreational drugs, drinking to excess, and dropping out of school" the male news presenter said with a disapproving expression, an image of the mechwarrior in question appearing in one corner of the screen.
"Hey, I've seen that guy, Sampson I mean," Philomena realised. "A couple of the girls at school have his picture in their lockers."
"In response SLDF High Command have issued a press statement saying that mechwarrior Sampson was only joking and that he will be reprimanded for doing so in a manner that could have led impressionable youth astray" the newscaster reported.
Ian Johanson chuckled. "So, the most skilled mechwarrior on the planet is a young, good-looking guy with a rebellious streak" he observed. "Really makes you wonder what the teenage girls might see in him" he said sardonically before grinning.
"It's a mystery" Philomena replied deadpan.
"In other news, record grain harvests on Alphard this year are expected to lower the price of staple foods significantly over the next few months" the newscaster announced. "The Office of the High Associator has claimed that this is another example of how investing taxpayer's money in other systems pays dividends to our citizens in the medium-to-long term, noting that the grain yields per acre that have been achieved his year were only possible thanks to irrigation projects funded by the Niops Association. Those of us who have come to enjoy a large glass or two of imported Alphard Ale at the bar of an evening have extra reason to celebrate, as increased production of wheat and maize on Alphard means that more Fonio, the type of millet used in its production, is available for the brewing industry rather than being made into porridge or bread" he said happily.
"I've tried that beer, it's not bad" Johanson remarked. "Better than what we could make on Frobisher anyway."
"Germanium production on Alphard also continues to increase month-by-month, although the government refutes as 'scurrilous' the rumours that this is because guards at the Crux Penal Colony have been issued electric cattle-prods from Francas to motivate the prisoners into working harder in the mines" the newscaster said. "Increased automation and heavy-duty mining equipment imported from the Free Worlds League are stated to be the sole reason for the increase in the output of germanium ore, and the government has offered to allow both the press and independent observers access to the facility to investigate for themselves if the allegations of mistreatment of the inmates have any merit."
"Penal Colony?" Philomena queried.
"Someone mentioned it in the university when we were talking about Alphard earlier, it's on a different continent than the inland sea where the mudskippers live" Johanson replied. "Captured pirates and slavers put to work swinging pickaxes so I heard."
Philomena thought about that. "Pirates and slavers? Well ****** those guys then" she decided eventually.
"Language!" Ian Johanson rebuked her sharply.
"Sorry" Philomena apologised.
"… in other mining news, recruitment on Comstock for people to work in the new coltan mine on the Hydrae continent continues, although take-up has been reportedly worse than expected due to both lower unemployment and an improving standard of living on Comstock itself as it recovers from its decades-long economic and societal malaise" the television newscaster said. "The fifty percent government-owned Hydrae Mining Corporation that was established last year has warned shareholders that it may need to increase wages in order to meet recruitment targets and that this will negatively impact expected dividends for the next few years. Deemed a strategically vital resource, the extraction and processing of coltan ore has been deemed a high priority by the government's Strategic Planning Committee since the ore contain large amounts of tantalum, necessary for our expanding electronics industry, and niobium, itself used in both the production of specialised steels and superalloys. Any viewers interested in knowing more should make sure to tune into our special report on mineral extraction in the protectorates, and its implications for the future of the Niops Association scheduled for Tuesday evening."
"Sounds riveting. I'd make sure to watch it but I'm washing my hair that evening" Philomena said wryly. "Can we switch to the gameshow channel instead?" she requested. "The show where you have to answer questions while they throw beanbags at you is on soon" she told him. That was hilarious, especially the bonus round where the mechanical flinger was sped up.
"Not yet" Johanson replied, he wasn't a fan of the gameshow channel which was a weird mix of education, comedy sadism and complete idiocy.
"And finally, before we switch over to our other studio where our regular panel of experts will be discussing the latest news from the Inner Sphere and the ongoing war there, High Associator Giles Olson answered questions today regarding how the Associator will approach the Frobisher controversy."
"You know, all things considered, I'd prefer my very existence not to be controversial" Philomena remarked drily.
"Unwilling to comment on government policy that is yet to be decided the High Associator did however offer his personal thoughts, saying that if he had been in charge on Terra back when the Frobisher project was begun he would have vetoed the whole thing due to the ethical issues involved in human experimentation."
"Not great" Johanson replied, frowning.
"However, he then went on to add that since the human sub-species known as Homo Sapiens Amphibia had, in fact, been created well over a hundred years ago, then he believed it would be morally wrong to let an entire race become extinct when the Niops Association could help prevent that. This he said was particularly the case as the people of Frobisher were Terran Hegemony citizens who had the same legal rights and protections as any other citizens and the government therefore had a duty of care towards them."
Philomena rolled her eyes. "Hey, we might be freaks but at least they accept we're people."
"I have a dream that one day my creations will live in a nation where they will not be judged by the sequencing of their DNA but by the content of their character" Ian Johanson declared in a haughty tone of voice, his expression indicating he was being rather less than serious however.
"You know if you keep referring to yourself as 'the creator' then one day God might get pissed and decide to teach you a lesson about hubris and humility Dad" Philomena warned.
"Total amateur, he didn't even make his own creations flood-proof like I did. What kind of half-assed species needs an ark to survive a global deluge anyway?" Johanson joked.
Philomena looked at him. "You know your sense of humour is more blasphemous and contrary to the will of the almighty than anything you've ever done in a lab" she told him. "It's a good thing that the only people that might face getting burned at the stake here are the ones that claim to have invented perpetual motion."
"A little harsh, but objectively what more suitable punishment could there be for anyone that doubts the inviolable truth of thermodynamics?" Ian Johanson wanted to know, sounding so sincere about it Philomena didn't know if he was kidding or not.
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Note from the Author:
The Rim Worlds Republic under Amaris actually did have a secret underwater battlmech factory on Kwangjong-ni (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Kwangjong-ni) although the SLDF never found it (Defiance Industries (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Defiance_Industries) did eventually) so military gear being produced in secret underwater bases is very much a thing in Battletech.
In canon Frobisher only had a population of only 4500 by the year 3095, depite the colony being four centuries old by that point. Even though it likely had a declining population over the years there were never very many people living their (gentically engineered or otherwise) so to Philomena born there the capital city of Niops VII is going to seem like a huge metropolis (there are more teenagers attending Joseph-Louis Lagrange Memorial High School alone than there are children in total on Frobisher). Niops VII is also going to seem very, very cold to her.
I somehow suspect that astrology is unlikely to be thought of too highly in a society founded by astronomers and astrophysicists.
Jennifer McEvedy is a great believer in the notion that winning is what really counts and that playing fair is for suckers. As such she looks at Philomena and doesn't think 'big-eyed freak' but rather 'easy win for us in the swimming competition'. Where she gets that attitude from is of course a mystery.
Mechwarrior Wilhelm Sampson, AKA 'Billy the Kid' (last seen fighting the Blood Rain in Part XIV) has become a minor celebrity, thanks to performing so well in the Gunslinger Program. His scores are much higher than his promotion prospects.
If Homo Sapiens Amphibia were not engineered to be a euryhaline (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euryhaline) species (able to cope with waters of differing salinity) then the scientists on Frobisher really messed up their design requirements for an adaptable human sub-species. Having a colony of Frobisher originated people living in the freshwater Lerna Sea along with the Alphard Mudskipper amused me as an idea. According to Handbook: Major Periphery States (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Handbook:_Major_Periphery_States) mudskippers are eaten on Alphard as a delicacy, though an acquired taste apparently, but Frobishers keeping them as pets instead has appeal. Handbook: Major Periphery States also notes that large amounts of Tantalum and Niobium are produced from Coltan (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coltan) ore on Alphard (both very useful materials).
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astrologers were held somewhat lower in public esteem there than people that claimed to be able to divine the future by studying goat entrails.
The wonders of living in such a rational place.
His scores are much higher than his promotion prospects.
Rational place indeed.
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Ahem... [Astronomy Minor]Terra is Sol III.[/Astronomy Minor]
Otherwise, yet more highly amusing story telling! :D
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Ahem... [Astronomy Minor]Terra is Sol III.[/Astronomy Minor]
Not in Battletech (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Terra). :wink:
At some point they adopted a policy of naming the star after the most important world in the system.
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Clearly, I need to talk to the Sarna admins... ;D
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Have some Niopsian "MTV": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7TUe5w6RHo
;D
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Part XXIV - Section 1 of 2
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"It'll be a good long while before we've got anything to compare to one of the huge automated factories the Terran Hegemony used to build their battlemechs in, but if the Successor States had any inkling at all what we've already got in the way of armaments manufacturing capability on Niops V they would be queueing up to try and invade us while they still could without getting their teeth kicked in."
Colonel Trish Ebon - 2840CE
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Project Workshop III-A – Niops Association (Niops V) – 2832
Samantha Hollister had never particularly wanted any kind of long-term position in government, she found all the bureaucracy annoying as hell, but because no good deed goes unpunished her success in chairing the old steering committee had led to her being appointed to head the Department of Trade and Industry in Giles Olson's second administration.
In Hollister's opinion 'appointed' was a misleading description of what had actually happened, with 'railroaded' being closer to the mark, but now two-and-a-half years into the job it had at least become somewhat tolerable, at least when she managed to get out from behind her desk for a reason she could justify like an inspection tour of the expanding manufacturing facilities on Niops V.
Long the industrial heart of the Association Niops V was not merely home to Project Workshop III but other manufacturing facilities as well. Factories that turned out I.C.E. powered vehicles, domestic appliances and consumer goods surrounded Chapterhouse, the only city on the planet remotely worthy of the name, and away from the civilian population a pair of munitions plants that had been built by the NAM to supply their war machines with missiles and autocannon ammunition could be found.
As the smallest of the three habitable worlds in the system Niops V also had the lowest surface gravity, being about two thirds that of Niops VII, or indeed Terra. That was enough to not cause major health problems for long-term residents but still made life just a little easier for construction workers and indeed mining operations. As the closest to the star it was also the warmest of the three, at least on the light side of the tidally-locked world, and because it was far more arid than Niops VI the weather wasn't as unpleasant either.
It was always windy of course, the atmosphere was constantly trying to transfer heat from the light side to the dark one, but at least there wasn't enough surface water to result in perpetual, torrential rain falling across much of the planet like there was on oceanic Niops VI the least populated of the three.
A spring in her step thanks to the lower gravity Hollister watched the workshop staff beavering away through a viewing window in the supervisor's office that overlooked the workshop, the supervisor himself down there somewhere sorting out some kind of problem. She found herself thinking upon the truth that being fortunate enough to possess the facilities like this one when civilisation collapsed was what had really set Niops apart from the rest of the galaxy, well that and not being complete lunatics bent on destruction. During the Amaris War, and then the First Succession War, the ability of these workshops to reproduce most any piece of advanced technology had allowed the Association to maintain a Terran Hegemony level tech-base and a standard of living that most other worlds could only dream of, and they did so despite decades of isolation.
Effectively a stable autarky until the SLDF-in-Exile arrived at their doorstep, Niops was now steadily abandoning its isolationist stance, looking for resources elsewhere and building new manufacturing capability as needed. No longer were the workshops merely replacing worn-out-parts or building the occasional war-machine for the NAM, they were being used to create an entire interstellar industrial civilisation, one piece of equipment at a time.
Putting the Hegemony back together like a giant kit, was how one commentator had described it.
The workshops were a miracle of engineering with only one major downside. Niops had exactly three of them, one having been being built by the Star League on each of the habitable worlds in the system, and because they only had those three and a myriad of jobs for them to do they had always a crippling industrial bottleneck.
Worse than that, currently they only really had two available to meet orders because Project Workshop III on Niops V, or to be more accurate III-A since the renaming, would be completely tied up and unavailable for other tasks until at least late 2834, or more likely early 2835.
For over a year now Project Workshop III-A had been working nearly flat-out, sometimes the staff even working double-shifts, to speedily construct Project Workshop III-B which was being installed in the identical building constructed to house it right next door.
Through the viewing window Hollister watched a hefty piece of equipment that seemed to be a powered hoist that had just been manufactured was picked up by an identical powered hoist and loaded onto a cart ready to be wheeled into the next building.
It was the sort of sight that gave truth to the joke being told by the staff that Project Workshop III-A had been turned into a Von Neumann machine with unionised labour.
If it had not been for the automated factory producing electronic components that had once graced Camelot Command, but was now happily working away for the Association instead, they would not have been able to free up Workshop III-A for nearly that long. There was always something important breaking down somewhere after all, but with the autofac churning out replacement circuit-boards as required Project Workshops I and II could just about cope with all the other work alone.
Pushing III-A hard to get III-B finished was putting a strain on the machinery there though, for a major maintenance overhaul. Then it would be put straight back to work manufacturing III-C although at a rather more sedate pace.
The backlog wouldn't start reducing until III-B was online, and they certainly couldn't think about pushing ahead with another major project, like an orbital shipyard for example, until III-C was completed and available too, but at least they were making progress.
Naturally progress would have been faster if the High Associator didn't keep coming up with new 'High Priority' jobs for the workshops. Repairing or replacing the aging and overworked lab equipment at Frobisher would tie up a workshop for months at least, and if they were really going to go ahead with turning out Iron Wombs for them as well something else was going to have to be shelved for now, most likely the manufacturing line for Arrow IV missiles that the military was pressing for.
If Olson's ambitions could be reined in a little then eventually they would have enough workshops to do everything they wanted them for, just not for a couple more decades at least. The long-term plan was to have one new additional Project Workshop on-line every five years starting with III-C, which should be up and running by 2840. They could be brought online more quickly, but then Niops would just run into another bottleneck instead, not enough skilled people with the necessary technical qualifications to staff them all properly. Sweating the manufacturing equipment in III-A to breaking point to get new workshops operational ahead of schedule when you didn't have the engineers and technicians needed to run the things anyway would just be stupid.
The new Technical College on Niops VII might have annoyed the university when some of their funding was diverted to there, but it should start churning out the people that would be needed to staff both the workshops and other factories being planned. Olson was at least smart enough to have pushed for that, facing down the academic lobbyists who still wielded considerable influence over society.
At some point it would likely be politically necessary to make a few new orbital telescopes for installation in other systems, most likely starting with Alphard for convenience, but Olson certainly couldn't announce that anytime soon, it would be interpreted as a bribe to keep the astronomers happy.
The only departments that actually were happy already, ecstatic even, were Geology, because they were having money and resources thrown at them to survey new worlds for potential mineral wealth, and High Energy Physics, because the SLDF wanted better lasers and particle-beam weapons and had a good sum of money in their budget to fund R&D projects.
The SLDF had of course stipulated that Professor Ogbert Farnstrom was not to be left unsupervised near any directed-energy-weapons. He might well be the smartest man in the department, perhaps even the smartest in the entire star system, which was really saying something for Niops, but genius or not he was also one mech short of a full lance in their opinion.
As a nuclear chemist by background herself, with contacts in several related departments, Hollister also knew that the materials science people were chasing a share of that military budget as well. Unfortunately for them they had been told point-blank that unless they could come up with how to make a better heat-sink, or superior armour plate, then they weren't going to get money thrown at them anytime soon.
"Excuse me Madam Secretary" Hollister's aide interrupted her thoughts.
"Yes Daniel?" Hollister replied, looking away from the viewing window towards him. The guided tour of the workshop earlier had actually turned out to be more interesting than she had expected, and afterwards she had found herself looking at the facility and the workers there with more respect.
"Just to remind you that we still need to visit the new defence plant this afternoon, and that you also told the High Associator that you would make your decision today on what you think we should do about the steel shortage" the aide reminded her.
Hollister checked her watch. "Still plenty of time to get to the new factory complex" she told him. "I don't want to get there too early, we'll just have to sit through another lecture about battlemech construction if we do, and probably suffer through a war story or two from the retired SLDF people they put in charge of getting it running on schedule" she replied. "If you've heard one rambling tale about righteously putting Stefan Amaris's goons to the sword you've heard them all."
"I don't know Ma'am, I think it largely depends on who's telling the story" the aide disagreed. "Some of them are pretty funny, at least they are if you can cope with the gallows humour" he opined. "What about the steel shortage?" he nudged again for a decision.
Samantha Hollister sighed. "We drastically overestimated how many mining robots we could get our hands on didn't we?" she asked rhetorically. "Ones that still worked anyway."
The aide nodded. "I guess Earthwerks are putting most everything they have into meeting their military contracts these days, and most of the other suppliers had their assembly lines destroyed by either Amaris or one successor State or another" he said. "We did manage to find plenty of them in scrap yards that we got cheap enough" he added in a more upbeat manner, smiling.
"Most of which are going to take us forever to get running again" Hollister replied glumly. "If it wasn't for the Engineering Department at the university offering course credits to students if they fixed them it would be ten years or more before we had the number we need to meet existing resource commitments, let alone any new ones Olson comes up with."
"Strange to think we've got a glut of germanium, but not enough iron of all things" Daniel remarked.
"We've got more of every type of metal than we know what to do with, the problem is that most of it is stuck in floating rocks and we just don't have the manpower or the necessary EVA equipment to dig it out by hand" Hollister noted, groaning at the situation they found themselves in. Mining robots, particularly the first-rate ones made by Earthwerks, could not care less if they were working in a vacuum and they could work right around the clock without ever needing to rest bar the occasional service or repair.
If they had a spare Project Workshop or two available then they could made a few of their own robots to help out, but they didn't so they couldn't.
"Screw it" Hollister eventually decided after considering the options again. "I'm going to recommend we trade with the Illyrian Palatinate" she told her aide. "They've got enough in the way of steel production to meet our needs until we can get our own up to speed, and we're not exactly short of transportation to haul it back here."
The aide nodded. "There is the matter of what we might have to trade for the metal to get the best deal" he pointed out. "They don't have much call for germanium and that's the only thing we have to trade except for…"
"Weapons" Hollister finished the sentence for him.
"The SLDF might not be happy about that" the aide warned.
"They're not using the damn things" Hollister replied, unmoved by what the military might think about it. "All those Star League era lasers and autocannons are just sitting in a warehouse gathering dust since they replaced them with improved versions. It's not like they're ever intending to use them, they're already planning to replace their new gear with even newer gear, like that fancy new Extended Range Laser they're hoping to put into mass production soon, it's more use to us now for trade than it'll ever be for our defence needs."
"Part of their objection is likely to be us arming a potential hostile neighbour" the aide reminded her. "The Palatinate does have a history with the Star League, and it wasn't always an amiable relationship."
Hollister laughed. "If our military argues that the Illyrian Palatinate is a threat then you know that they're stretching for an excuse not to give up their aging reserve stockpile of increasingly obsolescent guns" she said, amused by the very idea. "Romanov herself says she's confident that our military could give the Free Worlds League enough of a shellacking to make them back off from an attempted invasion, and the Palatinate itself barely has a military. That's why we can get a good price for our old guns from them, they have enough of a problem fighting off the larger pirate groups. We're so far out of their league we're not even playing the same sport."
The aide frowned. "They do have battlemechs" he pointed out.
"According to the data I've seen we've got more battlemech regiments than they have battlemech companies" Hollister retorted, "and that's putting aside the fact that half their hardware dates from the Reunification War or earlier" she continued. "Hell, I'd bet good money that the NAM could probably take them on its own these days. They're certainly much better trained and equipped than they used to be. "Did you see that a NAM mechwarrior got into the top ten in the heavy battlemech division in the latest Gunslinger ratings?" she asked rhetorically. "We all used to think of them as nothing but paper tigers, only fit for taking on pirates, but Romanov and her people really whipped them into shape."
"Yeah" the aide agreed. "Jason Carmichael, that mechwarrior you mentioned, I've actually met him a couple of times, my sister went to school with the guy" the aide replied. "Joined the NAM because his grades weren't very good according to her. She put a Newton on him to win his last match just because she knew him, got six-to-one odds because nobody thought a NAM guy would pull it off."
"It's all about the Newtons" Hollister replied, chuckling as she quoted the line from many a popular rap song, and at least one children's rhyme about the laws of motion.
"Don't let the Leibniz posse hear you say that" the aide warned in jest, grinning. "You know the military are going to ask why we don't just import steel from somewhere else."
Hollister shrugged. "I'm happy to argue it out in front of the High Associator" she replied. "Steel from the Palatinate is a lot cheaper than from the Free Worlds League, that's why the Mariks import from there themselves, and if we bought from the League, or the Magistracy for that matter, we'd have to pay in germanium and do we really want either of them to know we've got that much of the stuff yet?" she asked rhetorically. "We had no option but to pay in germanium for the industrial plant and machinery we needed to import from them, but we're being careful to spread out our purchases over time, so it looks like we're gradually digging it up, not that we've got warehouses full of the stuff already."
"It's a balancing act certainly, Ma'am" the aide agreed. "It's really just a shame the team of geologists sent to Copernicus to investigate the iron ore deposits discovered there by the initial surveys found they weren't as sizable as first thought."
"Meh, not every system we plant a flag on is going to be a treasure trove of easily extracted mineral wealth" Hollister replied. "It was still important to claim it before someone else did, it's only one jump from AJC after all, same reason we're talking to the people on Stafford."
"Regarding Stafford, the Department of Agriculture is still pushing for us to move the purchase of agricultural robots to a higher priority, and it we can't get any we should build a manufacturing plant for them" the aide told her. "They are adamant that Stafford is a breadbasket world waiting to happen and it's likely Islington will be too further down the road."
"Robots harvesting grain from fields twenty-kilometres across might make for quite the mental image but they'll have to make do with tractors and combine harvesters for a while yet because there is no way we'll be building our own factory for agricultural robots, or any other kind of robots, for a generation" Hollister stated flatly. Niops had hit the ground running when it came to industrial development, but all the infrastructure that would have to be put in place first before they could get to that stage was staggering to contemplate. "Wait. Why were the Department of Agriculture looking at Islington?" she asked, nonplussed. "That's got to be five jumps from here, halfway to freaking Frobisher for Pete's sake!"
"It's closer than Algenib and the people there are actually asking to be made a protectorate, so I can't imagine the High Associator not wanting to raise the Red Cameron Star over them before the next election" the aide supposed. "My guess is that people are just looking at the map and assuming that we're going to claim every system rimward from here all the way to Frobisher any day now."
"And populate them with who exactly" Hollister asked rhetorically, rolling her eyes.
"I doubt they're really considering that particular issue Ma'am" Daniel the aide told her. "At the risk of a little hyperbole people are drawn to dreams of empire and glory. It's the vision thing, aspiring to being something greater than ourselves."
Hollister rolled her eyes to the ceiling. "I blame Olson and his 'Manifest Destiny' schtick" she muttered to herself. "All those speeches about the Niops Association lighting the way to a glorious future for humanity are rotting people's brains. Everyone is losing their freaking perspective and sense of scale" she continued before turning back to look through the viewing window. "We're practically hand-building the future, and that takes a little time" she said drily.
Daniel, the aide, laughed. "Yes. Ma'am" he agreed.
"It's a damn good thing that the SLDF arrived with their own production lines for equipment because I've got no idea how we would have been able to build those ourselves this century" Hollister remarked, only exaggerating a little bit. "If they kick up a fuss about trading their surplus weaponry to the Palatinate maybe we should tell them we need the steel to make all that reinforced concrete they're pushing for."
"That might work Ma'am" Daniel replied, thinking about it. "It was a pretty smart idea to build their battlemech factory at the bottom of an old open-cast mine, but it'll need one hell of a second roof on it so it doesn't collapse when they dump a few million tons of backfill on top of it."
"Still a lot quicker and cheaper than digging a bunker complex that size from scratch" Hollister noted. "I'll bet they're looking at all the other mines right now thinking 'budget Castle Brian' or whatever so we'd better make sure they know they can't have them until they're no longer economically viable."
"I heard that someone was talking about maybe using fusion reactors to melt rock into lava and pouring that on top of the first couple of layers of backfill like cement" the aide told her. "Stabilise the whole thing, reduce the load bearing down on the structure and have a shield against orbital strikes and bunker-busters."
Hollister stared at him. "Letting those old guys from the Star League Department of Mega Engineering loose in the university was not the smartest thing we have ever done" she opined. "It's unleashing everyone's inner mad scientist I swear" she said, shaking her head in disbelief. "One sniff of building a secret underground lair surrounded by liquid hot magma and they all start laughing maniacally" she said. "Yes, I know it won't actually still be liquid rock" she added before he could correct her. More like a layer of basalt or similar igneous rock, cooled off and set, maybe several metres deep with more backfill then dumped on top. "How do you get to find out all this stuff anyway?" she asked suspiciously. "You're often better informed than I am."
"Humble minions like myself are wont to talk to humble minions in other departments Ma'am" Daniel explained. "As long as its not actually secret we try and share useful information."
"What do you tell them about me?" Hollister wanted to know.
"Nothing you need to worry about. The occasional hint that you care enough about doing your job that it annoys the crap out of you when people mess with your plans" the aide replied.
"Do you tell anyone how often I moan about the High Associator?"
"No point, everyone knows that already including him" Daniel told her. "It stopped even being interesting gossip when you bawled him out over the Francas investment thing in front of everyone in the council."
"That was a mistake, he cashed in on it by saying that in his administration he welcomed opposing views because in his heart he was still a scientist seeking objective truth, and if your hypothesis cannot stand up to counter-argument then it's a crappy hypothesis" Hollister complained. "My life would be so much easier if he was just a blithering idiot like all too many of his predecessors" she said dejectedly. "If anything the most aggravating part of the whole thing was that he wasn't mad enough about it to hold a grudge."
"I suspect he's wise to any attempts you might make to get yourself replaced by someone else" the aide theorised. He knows you're far too diligent and professional to deliberately screw up so pinning your hopes on an 'irreconcilable personality clash' with the boss might be your escape plan" he said, smiling. "We really should get moving if we want to inspect the new factory complex and still have time to get something to eat before catching the dropship back home though Ma'am" he told her.
"You're probably right on both. Where would I be without you Daniel?" Hollister asked, smiling back at him.
"Late Ma'am, you would always be running late" the aide replied. "And you would have to read more of the memos that cross your desk instead of trusting me to only put the important ones in front of you" he added, knowing full-well that she still occasionally checked a few of the others just to make sure he was doing his job properly.
Hollister grimaced. "Why anybody thinks I give enough of a crap to copy me in on what particular jumpship is going where, or recruitment decisions outside my own department, I will never know" she said, bemused as to the logic there. It was oner thing to be a details person but knowing the minutiae of issues outside your own remit was all too rarely useful, at least in government anyway, in science a decent grasp of other fields could pay off on occasion. "I'll say my farewells then we can get going. The VTOL ride should be fun" she said sardonically, the fierce crosswinds that were a constant feature of air travel on Niops V were something that were best avoided if you were a nervous flyer and Hollister wasn't exactly an enthusiastic one.
"It's a little too far to travel by road given how valuable your time is Ma'am" Daniel replied apologetically as she headed for the door.
"Remind me to sign off on building more maglev on this planet" Hollister told him.
"Will do" the aide replied, mentally filing that instruction in the category 'probably not being serious', as he followed her out of the supervisor's office.
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Part XXIV - Section 2 of 2
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One slightly hair-raising VTOL trip from the Project Workshop facility to a now defunct open-cast mine later Hollister stepped out of the tilt-rotor craft onto the landing pad where she was greeted by a handful of workers, including the man in charge of building the factory there. Hollister was pleasantly surprised to find that down at the bottom of the enormous pit that had been dug into the ground by heavy machinery the air was actually quite still, and she could not help but feel it was a pity that they intended to fill the hole back up eventually.
"Weather's quite decent down here, isn't it?" the engineer in charge observed, seeming to read Hollister's mind somehow. "Reminds you how much nearer the star we are here when you can actually feel the sunlight hitting you, and not just the breeze."
Only calling it a 'breeze' was underplaying the constant prevailing winds here, Hollister thought to herself, but she nodded anyway as she was led towards the manufacturing plant. Basically just a collection of blocky concrete buildings that were entirely lacking in external windows because they were all going to be deep underground eventually. Before they were buried concrete arches would be constructed right over them to support a second roof above the first, this being required so that millions of tons of rock dumped on them from above as back-fill didn't simply squish the factory flat, but they weren't nearly at that stage of construction yet.
Inside the first and largest building the production lines were already taking shape. Most of the engineers and technicians involved were SLDF personnel, rather than the civilians workers of the Project Workshops, and Hollister noted the difference in working environment almost immediately as they seemed to be operating at a near frantic pace.
"Got to get everything finished ahead of schedule" the chief engineer told her. "No point having new battlemechs rolling off the production line too late to influence the outcome of the war" he stated with quite some authority.
"You're speaking from experience I imagine?" Hollister replied, watching as a crew of engineers were assembling what she thought were a set of giant rollers for some kind of battlemech-sized conveyor belt.
The chief engineer nodded. "If we'd had the production lines for the Pulverizer, the Stag and the Mercury II running on Circe a year earlier, hell maybe even only six months, the other clans would have been a lot more reticent to take us on" he said confidently. "We were the first to get our shit together in terms of new production, excuse my language, but just not soon enough to get meaningful numbers of the new machines in the field before we really needed them."
"We're not exactly short on war material at the moment" Hollister pointed out.
"No, but if the clans find us in the next five years, or the Free Worlds League invades us, then having a warehouse full of brand-new HSR-250-Dn Hussar mechs and another rolling off the line every two weeks is going to come in handy" the engineer suggested. "With the new laser and the anti-infantry armament they're good for more than just scouting even if they are a great scout mech."
"Only one battlemech every two weeks? I thought production was supposed to be faster than that?" Hollister queried, frowning.
"It's not producing the mech itself that's the problem in terms of speeding up production" the engineer told her. "The Guardian ECM system it carries, and the Beagle Active Probe it mounts as well, take a while to put together, they're highly advanced and technically demanding pieces of kit" he said. "We're only lucky that the Mercury II mounted both, so we already had the production lines for them, they're just not capable of turning them out as fast as we would want in a ideal galaxy."
"Somehow I got the impression that the tricky part was the fusion engines?" Hollister responded, frowning.
"The extralight fusion engines used in more advanced battlemechs like our Hussar are certainly 'tricky' to make, the Successor States were well behind the Hegemony when it came to manufacturing those, but fortunately for us the Stag medium we had in production utilised a 270XL engine that has the same mass and power output as the one needed by our new Hussar so we're just using those" the engineer told her. "The production line for them is next door" he added. "We should be capable of turning out one of those a week once we're operating at full production rates if we need to, the excess ones not needed for the Hussar might come in handy for other purposes."
"Such as?" Hollister asked him, curiously.
"The Royal version of the Phoenix Hawk battlemech uses a 270XL engine, if we ever want to put those into production at some point and we might because it's a good machine" the engineer told her. "Until then we can also use them to replace the regular 270 fusion engines fitted to our standard model Tomahawk and Ahab aerospace fighters, upgrading them to Royal configurations with more mass available for weaponry and armour" he explained. "They'll even fit into a Highlander assault, but I'm not convinced having more mass for weapons and armour is worth it in that case. XL engines can't take as much punishment as regular ones and the Highlander is supposed to stand there and take it. It can't just run away when things get too hairy like a fighter or a fast mech can."
Hollister nodded, she had heard before that there as a trade-off if you wanted one of the lighter engines in your battlemech, that being the war machine couldn't take as much abuse before it went down. Mechs with XL engines were sometimes described as 'Glass Cannons' in military parlance, the extra weaponry they could mount meant they could dish it out harder but they couldn't take it nearly as well. "How much of the machine is actually going to be made here?" she asked. "As opposed to being merely assembled from parts made elsewhere?"
"In some ways it's as much assembly as it is manufacture to be honest" the engineer told her. "The endo-steel frame has to be manufactured in a freefall or zero-gee environment, so most of the chassis and limbs are going to be produced at the orbital facility up there and brought down by dropship" he said, pointing upwards. "The fusion engines, myomer muscles and electronics will be made in-house, but armour plate will also be made elsewhere. Another engineering team is putting up a plant that'll produce ferro-fibrous armour in quantity, but I've heard a rumour that they might be running way behind schedule, if they are we might be forced to use standard plate for the first few Hussars that roll out."
Hollister frowned, thinking to herself she should look into that rumour because that was the first she had heard about it. "Weaponry?" she asked, moving on.
"One day they'll all be manufactured at a new armaments factory that will eventually be installed in one of the buildings we're putting up here, but for the foreseeable future we'll be relying on weaponry made elsewhere" the engineer replied. "Once we've upgraded all the mechs belonging to the 295th our existing armaments production capacity will be freed up, and for now we can't really justify having far more capacity to turn out weaponry than we actually have machines to hang it off" he said. "I know there's a debate on whether or not to re-tool the line that makes the Improved Large Laser to make the new model Extended Range Large Laser instead, or to make a whole new one, but that's not my department."
"I suppose the ability to make spares is the reason why you would want to keep the old line as well?" Hollister asked him.
"That, and I guess if we ever found ourselves needing something to sell to pay the bills the Successor States would offer their first born for them" the engineer replied, grinning. "They might be a generation behind our new toy but they're still a generation ahead of what everybody but the clans have."
That was certainly worth considering as a long-term investment, Hollister considered. Mothballing rather than re-tooling old production lines so they could be used to make money in the future meant more up-front expenditure right now to replace them entirely, but the pay off in a few years could be truly massive.
They would have to make sure that the qualitative edge over the Successor States remained just as large as it was now of course, or ideally even larger. They weren't just potential future customers they were potential future enemies.
As she was given a tour of the rest of the facility Hollister realised that the reason everything seemed to be going to smoothly here was that the engineers and technicians putting the machinery together were the same ones who had made and assembled it in the first place way back in clan space. Not only that, they were also the people that had taken it all apart again and loaded it onto the ships which had carried it from Circe to Niops.
They all seemed happy in their work too, which largely seemed to be due to the fact that all the bulky equipment weighed noticeably less here than it had the last time they had to hump it around.
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Note from the Author:
Niops V is the closest of the three habitable worlds in the Niops System to its star and in canon seems to be the one where the Association maintains most of its industry (Project Workshop III (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Niops_Project_Workshop_III) was where Niops manufactured their Nighhawk powered armour in canon, though not for a couple of centuries). I'm placing Project Workshop I on Niops VII (the most populous world in the system) and Workshop II on Niops VI (seemingly the least populous) with the assumption that you wouldn't want all your eggs in one basket production wise.
Project Workship III-A (formerly just III) is currently busily putting together III-B and after that will make III-C and eventually there will also be additional workshops on the other planets too (I-B, II-B etc.). Given how advanced the workshops seemed to be, and the requirement of trained staff to operate them, I'm running with the idea that it'll take about five years to add another new one each time (eventually an A, B, and C Workshop on each planet but that's for decades in the future).
The only reason why they can get their version of the Royal Hussar (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Hussar) into production this soon is because they already had a production line for a compatible fusion engine (the 270XL used in the Stag (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Stag)) and the ability to manufacture the specialist electronics needed for the Guardian ECM and Beagle Active Probe (both carried by the Mercury II (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Mercury_II)).
We saw Samantha Hollister back in Part XIX. She was punished for the competance she demonstrated chairing the Steering Committee by having a job foisted upon her by the High Associator after he won the 2830 election. Every new thing he wants done requires something else to be delayed, robbing Peter to pay Paul as it were, because Niops has limited resources. The Illyrian Palatinate (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Illyrian_Palatinate) was a fairly major exporter of steel to the Free Worlds League in canon, and quite unique in that the usually isolationist Niops was seeking diplomatic relations with them so they must have been thought of by the Association in a more positive light than most.
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The emerging Niops empire has strong asabiyya (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asabiyyah#). Not surprising, given they're on a frontier and expanding, with a frontier can-do mindset and determined to expand fast enough so that they won't be easy pickings for the other powers.
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I LOVE this bit:
Putting the Hegemony back together like a giant kit, was how one commentator had described it.
And it's only odd to me that Niops didn't try building more workshops earlier... ;)
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I LOVE this bit:
And it's only odd to me that Niops didn't try building more workshops earlier... ;)
They probably did. I suspect that, originally, Niops V and VI weren't particularly inhabited, and their expansion and settlement came later, after the Capellan refugees arrived. The additional Project Workshops probably accompanied that settlement, and took a significant amount of time to accomplish.
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I see the problem regarding building new Project Workshops as the existing ones tending to always be running at near full capacity doing work that cannot be easily postponed (eg. if you only have a handful of dropships in your multi-planet polity, and one of them breaks down, you've got to fix the thing ASAP).
Freeing up some capacity to turn out the occasional battlemech is one thing, but building an additional workshop is potentially going to tie up a large percentage of the manufacturing base for years.
Devoting Workshop III to ongoing Nighthawk production in the 3070's could well have put some serious strain on the system, but they probably considered they had little choice because the Marian Hegemony next door was being even more belligerant than usual.
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Part XXV - Section 1 of 2
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"I don't know who had the idea for all of you to get the greek letter gamma tattoos, but you'd better make sure that none of Sibling Company Zeta, or any of the other sibkos, copy you until they're at least eighteen as well."
General Franklin Hallis lays down the law to Sibling Company Gamma - 2834CE
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Capital City – Niops Association (Niops VII) – 2833
The neighbourhood near the university where Philomena's parent's apartment block was situated was by no means the bad part of town. Not that any part of the city was particularly run down as Niops was too wealthy, and the building stock generally too new to have actual slums, but as she followed her two friends along the sidewalk into the indisputably 'good' part of town it was pretty obvious when they had got there. This was not just because of how nice the houses actually were, though they were very nice, but also from how expensive most of the cars parked outside them looked and the fact that there seemed to be a car in front of every house, rare in a city where public transportation was good enough that most people didn't even bother to own one.
If she had not been as deep in conversation as she was Philomena might have made comment about the ornate architecture of some of the buildings, that being something that had come interest her after growing up in an underwater habitat designed by engineers that valued functionality far more than form, but at that moment she had other issues to address.
"I still say that I looked ridiculous" Philomena contended. "If I'd known you were going to dress me up like that, I would have never agreed to wear a costume you chose" she complained. "I knew I should have been more suspicious as to why you wouldn't let me see it until it was far too late to find a different outfit to wear."
"You looked great!" Alice wholeheartedly disagreed, setting the pace because she was the shortest of the three. "Everyone thought so, you won the prize for best costume didn't you?" she asked rhetorically, thinking that was a slam-dunk argument in itself. The previous nights party, held at a venue hired for the purpose by one of the richer kids in class, had been entirely awesome in her opinion and she couldn't understand why the Frobisher girl was still sore about it.
"You dressed me up as a character from that stupid anime cartoon from the Draconis Combine you like" Philomena exclaimed. "I don't know what part was worse, the blue wig or the skirt that was so short that if I had body hair I would have needed to get it waxed. All of it" she said, grimacing. It wasn't like skirts that length were ever seen on Niops normally, especially without leggings underneath, the climate was less than suitable for them.
"I did warn you to wear panties that were skimpy but not too skimpy, but besides that it's not a stupid anime it's great" Alice replied. "Getting to watch that old anime series on television is the best thing about me ever coming to Niops" she defended her favourite show.
"Hey!" Frederick objected. "What about meeting me?"
"Calm down, you make the top three on the list" Alice told her boyfriend.
Frederick pouted. "That means I don't even rate the number two spot" he realised.
"You're a great boyfriend, but you were edged out of second place by the fried chicken at Gloria's Diner" Alice told him apologetically. "You ranked above her bacon cheeseburgers though" she consoled him.
Frederick thought about that. "I'll take it" he decided eventually.
"You thought Philomena's costume was great didn't you?" Alice asked him, seeking an ally.
"Yeah" Frederick agreed, smiling and nodding enthusiastically.
Philomena frowned. "You don't think the blue wig looked stupid?"
"You were wearing a wig?" Frederick replied, feigning to be visibly confused.
"See" Philomena exclaimed, throwing up her hands.
"He's joking" Alice told her. "Right?"
"Yeah" Frederick said again, unconvincingly.
"Well, I still think it was an absolutely inspired choice of costume for the party last night" Alice declared, looking pleased with herself.
"Because my eyes make me look like a freaking cartoon character?" Philomena retorted. "Even if that wasn't hurtful nobody was looking at my ****** eyes."
"Other than the blue wig your eyes were the best asset towards making it the costume absolutely perfect" Alice contended.
"In that skirt my ass was the only asset that was getting any attention unless I was stood bolt upright" Philomena muttered bitterly to herself, loud enough to be overheard.
"That's not true is it?" Alice checked with Frederick for verification.
Frederick shrugged. "Henry walking into that table just when she dropped her purse and bent down to pick it up might have been a coincidence" he posited uncertainly.
"Right, you're only guessing that it was because of your skirt" Alice told Philomena.
"No, it was definitely because of the skirt" Frederick responded, "it's just that Henry told me he thought you had nice legs after he saw you in your swimming costume the first time, so it might have been them not your ass that caused him to not look where he was going" he suggested.
"Aargh!" Philomena exclaimed, wondering how she was going to face everyone again at school come Monday. "I'm not going to forget that you didn't choose a costume for yourself that showed anything like as much skin" she told Alice menacingly.
"I couldn't" Alice defended herself. "Frederick and I wanted matching costumes, he was Buck Rogers so I had to be Colonel Deering" she argued. "That flight suit was pretty tight though, and I did unzip it a little to show some cleavage like she did in the show."
"You could have gone as Princess Ardala instead" Frederick suggested.
"All she wears is a jewel-encrusted bikini and a see-through silk skirt!" Alice exclaimed. "Compared to her Philomena was dressed like a Catholic Nun."
"Just saying" Frederick replied, wondering if he could talk her into wearing that at the next costume party they got invited to.
"If it wasn't for what Clarissa Anderson was wearing I would have had the sluttiest costume in the party" Philomena complained, she was not letting this go. "And she is a slut so she can get away with it."
Alice looked appalled. "You can't say that about another girl. It demeans all of us" she chided.
"Even if it's true" Philomena asked, smirking.
"Yes!" Alice exclaimed. "Not that I'm saying it is" she added awkwardly.
"Here we are" Frederick announced stopping outside a townhouse. "My stepmom's in, that's her car" he pointed out the sleek electric vehicle parked on the road outside. "She works Saturday mornings at the factory catching up on paperwork so I wasn't sure if she would be back yet."
"This is your house?" Philomena asked. "This is really nice" she said, looking it over. It was a three story building made of brick and stone and far removed from the austere concrete tower block near the university where she lived with her parents.
"It's not really mine, I mean I've got a room here but most of the time I actually live in barracks" Frederick replied, punching a combination into an electronic keypad on the door.
The door lock disengaged and Frederick pushed it open.
"Why do you like in barracks if you've got a room here?" Philomena asked reasonably.
"Because he's a masochistic weirdo that likes to be woken up by bugle call at 6 AM" Alice told her, grinning.
"Nah, it's the daily bed inspections and the 5K run before breakfast that I can't get enough of" Frederick replied deadpan. "Give me a second, I'll make sure the coast is clear" he requested, stepping inside after cleaning his boots on the welcome mat.
"Are we trespassing or something?" Philomena asked, concerned.
"Nah, he just wants to make sure that his stepmom's mom isn't visiting" Alice explained. "You don't want to have to deal with that" she said. "To be honest neither does Fred, she's not a fan of you genetically engineered people."
Philomena sighed. "And I don't even look like a regular person like he does" she replied with a shrug. The number of people that stared at here was a lot lower now than it used to be nearly a year ago when she first came to Niops but some people still did, and there was even a little noticeable hostility to her presence on occasion. Alice had offered to have her boyfriend beat up anyone that stepped way out of line, but that wouldn't exactly be in keeping with a desire to hold the moral high ground.
"All good" Frederick told them, appearing at the door again and ushering them inside.
The house was even nicer on the inside than it was on the outside. "How does your Dad afford this place? How much do generals get paid anyway?" Philomena wanted to know, checking out the expensive décor.
"Well Barbara's got a good job too, but it's mostly down to the fact the bank let him have a fifty-year mortgage" Frederick told her. "He'll be over a hundred before it's all paid off, so definitely no early retirement for him" he continued, chuckling. "Barbara pretty much strong-armed him into it not long after they got hitched. He was happy enough living in married quarters in Arecibo but they had only been married a couple of months before he knocked her up and then she really wanted a nicer home and she was hormonal and terrifying."
"I was not terrifying, I was persuasive" a woman's voice interrupted them. "Maybe a little terrifying" she conceded after thinking about it a little more. "Wasn't expecting to see you Frederick, thought you were spending all day at mall with Alice."
"I'm not staying too long" Frederick replied, "Barbara this is Philomena from school, Philomena this is my stepmom, Barbara" she introduced them. "We're all going to the movies later, I hope it's alright that I brought Alice and Philomena back here until then?"
"Just as long as you not expecting to bring two teenage girls into your room with door closed it just fine" Barbara replied. "Father not approve of you having more fun as teenager than he ever did" she added, trying not to laugh.
"Geez Barbara" Frederick responded, blushing.
"Nice to meet you Philomena" Barbara addressed the Frobisher girl, doing her best to ignore her uncanny 'not quite right' appearance. According to Frederick after a while you mostly stopped noticing after a while. "Frederick mention you become friends with Alice" she said. "Alice very nice girl, bad taste in men" she added, looking pointedly at the boy.
"Oh, come on!" Frederick objected. "You married Dad and I'm practically his clone."
"Not trying to say that my taste in men any good" Barbara countered causing Alice to laugh. "Hang up coats and hats, come through into living room" she told the girls, leading the way. "Soda in fridge if you want one?"
"Not for me thankyou Mrs. Hallis" Alice replied. It somehow felt wrong to call her 'Barbara' like Frederick usually did himself. Although he did refer to her as his 'Stepmom' he rarely called her 'Mom' for whatever reason, though of course he also called his father 'Khan Hallis', 'General', or 'Sir' more than he did plain 'Dad' and you couldn't say that their family dynamics were exactly typical in many regards.
"Me neither, Mrs. Hallis" Philomena added for herself, using the style of address her friend had, as they arrived at the living room which contained some very comfortable looking chairs and a crib that was against one wall.
"Is Judith awake?" Frederick asked, walking across to the crib.
"Was a few minutes ago when I change her diaper" Barbara replied.
"Hey sis" Frederick said, leaning over the crib and looking down at the baby inside. "Yep, still awake and still more interested in looking at this thing than she ever is me" he said, tapping the mobile hanging over the baby so it moved a little more. "I still think that tiny model aerospace fighters and battlemechs would be better than stars and planets" he criticised it as his infant sister lay there seemingly transfixed by the random movement.
"Battlemechs don't even fly" Alice pointed out, going over to join him.
"LAM's only, obviously" Frederick replied, wondering why that needed to be explained. "Or maybe regular mechs with jumpjets" he added, thinking about it. Land-Air-Mechs had never really worked that all well in practice.
"Come take a look, she's adorable" Alice told Philomena.
"Wait until she throw up on you, opinion change a little" Barbara told her sagely.
Baby Judith might not have been particularly interested in looking at her brother, but when Philomena's face appeared above her as well the mobile became rather less fascinating. The infant stared at her, somehow looking almost puzzled.
"Everyone always stares at the eyes" Philomena wryly observed.
"I thought we already determined that depended on the length of the skirt?" Frederick joked, earning himself a poke in the ribs from Alice for his trouble. "Alternatively, she's thinking, 'holy crap, someone with even less hair on their head than I have' instead" he then offered an alternative explanation, one that now caused Alice to glare at him.
Philomena thought about that and couldn't entirely dismiss the latter theory. Having Alice stood next to her certainly made for a contrast, what with the girl's great mass of wavy copper-coloured hair that was barely restrained from chaotically sticking out in all directions by several scrunchies.
Naturally enough Frederick wore his hair short in a military style, something that made his look even more like his father than he would have otherwise. The girls in his sibko tended to wear it a little longer, like Jennifer with her pixie cut, but genuinely long hair was frowned upon, not just because it looked more unkempt but because it was something to grab hold of in a fight.
"I saw on television news that mother appointed ambassador from Frobisher to Niops, Philomena" Barbara commented while she slumped down on one of the chairs. Judith might be being quiet right now, but the infant had kept her up most of the previous night crying for no discernible reason and she was tired. Annoyingly Franklin was away so he hadn't been there to do half the work.
"I think they're calling her 'Envoy' rather than ambassador because Frobisher is legally going to be a self-governing protectorate, not a fully independent foreign state with diplomatic recognition" Philomena replied, looking away from the baby towards its mother. "That's assuming that the people back home agree to the terms your government wants us to, anyway."
"Do you think they might not?" Alice asked, frowning.
"Not really. Without Niops Frobisher is screwed six ways from Sunday" Philomena stated flatly. "You're probably the only people that can fix all our broken equipment and almost certainly the only one that can help us out with our population issues" she continued. "And that's putting aside the fact that the technology we have that does still work is becoming more and more valuable every day, valuable enough to attract pirates or worse, and we need protection from them too."
"Worse being the Mariks I guess" Frederick surmised. "You're further away from the Free Worlds League than we are, but just not far enough for comfort" he said while pulling faces at his baby sister to try and make her laugh.
Philomena nodded. "We've never been that worried about the Magistracy, they've always been decent neighbours, but while the Marik's aren't Kurita or Liao, thank God, they've still done some pretty heinous stuff themselves. If they could justify to themselves the killing of billions of normal people on other Hegemony worlds then they're not going to have many qualms killing a few thousand that look like me to take what we have."
"Your people safe with Niops" Barbara said confidently. "Anyone turn up looking to make trouble, General Romanova send my husband to teach them lesson not ever forget."
"Where is Dad? I thought he was off-duty this weekend?" Frederick asked, sticking his tongue out at baby Judith to try and get a reaction.
"Still off playing soldier on Reykjanes Island, should be back tonight" Barbara replied.
Frederick smiled. "Military training exercises aren't 'playing soldier' you know" he replied.
"Then why they call them 'War Games' then?" Barbara replied, smirking. "Battlemechs just big toy for overgrown boys to play with."
"How do you explain all the female mechwarriors like General Romanov or Aunt Trish then?" Frederick countered.
"Girls only humouring them like do always" Barbara replied, winking at Alice. "Nietzsche said that men like war because only time they absolutely sure women not laughing at them behind back."
"Nietzsche?" Philomena queried.
"German philosopher, 19th Century" Barbara explained, she had originally started reading philosophy because she liked to quote them to people when they seemed to be assuming that because her spoken English wasn't perfect she must be stupid and ignorant, but she actually ended up enjoying it. There was more to intellectual pursuits than just studying the hard sciences regardless of what the social hierarchy on Niops thought.
One day she hoped to get Frederick to look a bit further afield than Immanuel Kant and Georg Hegel when it came to philosophy but it was an uphill struggle so far. The only reason she managed to get him to even read those was because Karl Von Clausewitz was a fan which he considering a ringing endorsement.
After some polite chit-chat between Barbara and the girls Frederick asked Alice and Philomena if they wanted to listen to some music in his room before they headed off to the movies. Given that his room was on the top floor, and Barbara wasn't, Philomena wasn't sure what use leaving the door open was as a deterrent to unapproved of teenage activities but he left it open anyway.
"Sorry about the mess" Frederick apologised for the state of his room.
"What mess?" Philomena asked confused, looking around. There was barely a book, magazine or item of clothing out of place.
"If anything in barracks is more than a millimetre out of place he gets a demerit" Alice explained. "You can bounce a quarter on his bed after he makes it and I swear he'll happily sit there shining boots for hours" she said, not exaggerating nearly as much as Philomena assumed she was.
"If you were taught to march almost as soon as you learned to walk you'd be a bit weird too" Frederick responded with a shrug.
Alice giggled. "Tell her how you learned the ABC's at kindergarten, or whatever it is you weirdos called it instead" she told her boyfriend.
Frederick sighed. "A is for Alfa, B is for Bravo, C is for Charlie…" he began.
"You're kidding?" Philomena responded incredulously.
"No, really. I thought he was making it up too, so I checked with Jennifer" Alice told her. "You should hear some of the nursery rhymes they were taught like: 'Jack and Jill charged up the hill, to take the heavy mortar, bombs rained down and cut Jack down, and Jill came tumbling after'."
Philomena looked at Frederick more than slightly appalled.
"It's a lesson about needing cover-fire to supress enemy artillery when you attack a fortified position" Frederick explained awkwardly.
"It was brainwashing" Alice contended, and not entirely without cause.
"That's an exaggeration" Frederick replied, unconvincingly.
"It really isn't" Philomena agreed with Alice. "Isn't that how they did it in Ancient Sparta? Train the boys for war from when they were little?"
"Not exactly. In Sparta they left it a little late to really benefit from how fast kids learn when they're young" Frederick replied. "They didn't start training them until they were seven, I already knew how to read a map and call in an artillery strike by the time I was six" he said proudly. "By seven I knew where to stab a man so he bled out fast, and I could field-strip and reassemble a Mauser 960 blindfold" he said. "Lasers are a good choice for teaching little kids to shoot, no recoil, although the Mauser was way too heavy for us at that age so we usually shot it off a bench rest."
"The mind-blowing thing is that his people were genuinely the least unhinged clan as far as I can tell" Alice responded sadly, shaking her head. Most of the time her boyfriend came across as pretty normal, but then he told a few childhood stories, or spent the weekend playing with demolition charges, and it brought home that he really wasn't.
If it wasn't for the ever-present spectre of impending doom if Kerensky's clans ever found them, or one of the Great Houses attacked, the government would have almost certainly forced the SLDF to scrap the remaining parts of the sibko system that were still running. Unfortunately it was a dangerous galaxy, and Sibling Company Gamma and the younger sibko's might come in very handy in a few years if the Niops Association found itself in great need of some very good, and very enthusiastic, mechwarriors and fighter pilots.
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Part XXV - Section 2 of 2
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"I'm not surprised you make plastic models of battlemechs as a hobby" Philomena observed, noticing a couple of them sitting on a desk.
"Only the ones I've gotten to pilot" Frederick replied. "That's a Locust, the first mech they let me take out, that one is a Wasp, I got to fire the guns on that one, and I'm working on a Phoenix Hawk because I got to try one out last month, but it's taking longer because I have to customise the model" he said. "The one I got to take out was a Royal with an ERPPC instead of a laser and the model shop only sells the PXH-1."
"There's a model shop on Niops?" Philomena asked, wondering how there was enough local demand to keep a business like that running. Niops VII might have a huge population compared to Frobisher but there were villages in some places with practically as many people living in them as on her homeworld.
"He means the toy shop downtown" Alice explained. "If he calls it a 'model shop' instead it doesn't sound as lame."
"You're as bad as Barbara" Frederick muttered to himself, pouting.
Philomena noticed a few photographs stuck to the far wall. "Who's that with you on the beach?" she asked. The picture looked recent judging by how old Frederick looked, but clearly hadn't been taken anywhere on Niops however, way too sunny.
Frederick grinned. "That's not me" he replied.
"That is definitely you" Philomena stated with certainty.
"There's a Frederick Hallis in that picture but it's not me, and it's not the one you think it is either" Frederick told her. "The older guy is my grandfather, the original Frederick Hallis, the kid is my father when he was fourteen or so."
Philomena stared at the photograph. "I know you look a lot like your dad but are you sure you're not a clone?" she asked, looking at the boy in the picture and then back to Frederick.
Alice laughed. "Look at the woman in that other photo next to it, the one wearing the flightsuit, and then look at Fred again" she suggested. "Pay attention to the eyes."
"They're the same" Philomena realised.
"Yep, exactly the same, and I don't just mean the colour" Frederick told her. "That's my biological Mom, well kinda anyway" he continued. "I'm something like sixty-five percent dad, twenty-five percent her and ten percent a few other people combined" he told her. "I've got her 20/10 eyesight, her reaction times and her hand-eye coordination too, they're all better than my father has. I should end up a little taller than him too when I'm fully grown, but that's because of someone included in the ten percent, not because of my bio-mom."
"She's a pilot?" Philomena asked, correctly identifying what she was wearing and the insignia upon it. You couldn't live on Niops for a while and not learn that sort of thing, current and former SLDF personnel made up a fair proportion of the population and there was a definite degree of militarisation of society that she assumed had not existed before Fredericks people turned up.
"Fighter pilot, or at least she was. She was killed fighting the Clans as part of the rear-guard holding them off during the secession" Frederick told her.
"Oh, I'm sorry" Philomena replied awkwardly.
"It's okay, I never even met her in real life, but she was kinda my Mom so Barbara thought I should have a picture of her, and Dad managed to find a decent one in an old personnel database" Frederick said, smiling. "I do see her eyes every time I look in a mirror, so I suppose I have sort-of met her in a way at least" he continued. "I've read her files. She day before she died she shot down a couple of Snow Ravens, the first of which was the tenth aerial kill of her career making her a fighter ace twice over. She made ace the first-time during Operation Klondike, so I guess they made the right decision using her genes as part of the program, which is something nice to know about myself."
Philomena nodded, though unsure if she really understood exactly how his thinking processes worked there. In many ways the Ironborn kids, or 'kits' as they preferred, were far stranger than her own people, gills and all. The culture and society on Frobisher was very much Terran Hegemony in the way they did things and saw the galaxy around them, in that they were actually very much like most people on Niops that weren't of Capellan extraction, with some of the sometimes downright odd hard-core Wolverines really standing out from the crowd.
"That's Fred when he was six" Alice spoke up, pointing to a larger picture, one showing two groups of young children formed up next to each other in front of an imposing stone building, all wearing cadet uniforms. "I bet you can recognise a few other faces too" she added, grinning.
Philomena took a closer look. "That's Jennifer, and that's definitely Dave" she decided. "I think that's Henry right there" she pointed to another child.
"Yep" Frederick confirmed. "That's us stood outside city hall in Bearcat, the Wolverine city on Strana Mechty the clan's capital world" he said. "Just after they took that photo they stuffed us all in a VTOL for a visit to Katyusha City where they gave us a tour of the Hall of Khans" he said. "We actually met the ilKhan there, Nicholas Kerensky, if I'd known what was going to happen less than a year later I'd have shanked the bastard" he said regretfully.
"I don't recognise any of the kids in the other group stood next to yours" Philomena remarked, trying to rid herself of the mental image of an angry six-year-old stabbing a man to death.
"That's sibling company Beta, the sibko just ahead of ours, so a year or so older than we were" Frederick told her. "They were just regular humans like…" he paused, "well not like you but like Alice I suppose" he corrected what he was initially going to say.
"Do they go to a different school than us?" Philomena asked.
"No, they never made it to Niops, we think they all got incinerated when Great Hope got nuked, but if any of them survived then they were probably executed after being taken prisoner" Frederick told her, something cold and dark in his eyes when he said it though his tone remained even.
Philomena stared at the photograph. "But they were just little kids" she responded, appalled.
"They were Warrior Caste little kids" Frederick replied, voice still calm. "Kerensky ordered that every one of us should be killed, and that everyone in one of the civilian castes, labourers, technicians and the rest should be sterilised. When we say we were escaping from attempted genocide we weren't kidding. Once all the Wolverines that got left behind for whatever reason eventually die of old age we'll be the only ones there are anywhere."
"Fred helps out training the younger sibkos, don't you Fred?" Alice asked him rhetorically.
"Sometimes" Frederick replied. "Sibko's Zeta, Theta and Iota, the Ironborn generations from 2819, 2821 and 2822, are pretty numerous compared to us Gammas, they had expanded the program a lot by the time the Zeta's came along and also improved the Iron Womb tech. We give the instructors a hand with them sometimes. It's kinda fun with the Iota's, having a bunch of eleven year-olds running cadence behind you I mean. Zeta and Theta don't treat it as more of a game than they do serious business so you do as well."
"Cadence?" Philomena asked.
"He sings a line, they all echo what he just said" Alice explained. "People used to do it on Buffalo Meadows too. Usually just the adults trying to keep fit, not the kids though."
Philomena nodded her understanding. She had seen some of the SLDF and NAM soldiers doing that around town on occasion but hadn't known what it was called. "What about the 2820 batch?" she asked Frederick. "You didn't mention them."
"Sibling Company Eta? They didn't make it out of the clan homeworlds, we're not entirely sure what happened to them" Frederick told her, immediately making Philomena regret asking because it wasn't likely to be good whatever it was. "Kappa, the 2823 kits, was never really a thing so they'll probably re-start the program with that name eventually. That'll probably be delayed even longer now because they'll want to get the anti-agathic treatments working before they spend a load of resources on more Ironborn" he reasoned. "Mechwarriors that are still able to take the field past their tenth decade are much better value for money than ones like me that never got the gene-therapy. There's actually a good chance I'll die of old age before my Dad does, which kinda sucks for both of us when I think about it. I just hope we get the treatments before Judith hits puberty so she can have them, dad really wouldn't want to outlive his baby girl too."
Alice nodded. "My grandfather looks the same age as my father because Pop-Pop was Hegemony born but Pops was born on Buffalo Meadows like me" she said.
Developing the anti-agathic treatments, or at least making reasonable progress in that direction, was something that Philomena was hoping for too, although for a somewhat different reason. She could not help but suspect that until Frobisher and Niops were more closely intertwined at all levels that she might never be able to go home.
Given what she and her parents now knew about Niops the authorities would surely want to make sure that none of it leaked out to the wider galaxy. That meant they were going to be extremely loath to let the 'Envoy' for Frobisher and her family leave, at least not until they were certain Frobisher could be completely trusted, that trust largely predicated on utter dependency.
Frobisher was probably screwed without military protection that Niops could provide. Moreover, they were definitely screwed in the long term without technical assistance from the Association, including the provision of Iron Wombs as a remedy for Frobisher's population issues. Frobisher providing the genetic know-how to recreate Hegemony anti-agathics in return would at least make the arrangement less of a one-way street, and Philomena knew it was better to be a partner than a dependant when it came to negotiation.
The Niops Association wasn't some kind of authoritarian dictatorship that harboured dreams of ruling over its 'Protectorates' with an Iron Fist, but they definitely saw themselves as the 'Terra' in their vision of a new Hegemony. While that was probably inevitable Philomena much preferred her homeworld to be accorded status more like a regional capital such as Tyrfing once had in that arrangement, rather than effectively being a poorly-populated colonial fief like Sirius, for example.
Frederick grinned. "I still can't believe you call your grandfather 'Pop-Pop' he responded.
"What would you have called yours?" Alice wanted to know, narrowing her eyes.
"Sir, he was a general" Frederick replied.
"My great-grandmother was a general too, but I wouldn't have called her 'Ma'am' like one of her soldiers" Alice retorted.
"I think I need more friends that aren't army brats" Philomena wryly suggested. Alice was certainly more 'civilian' in outlook than the Wolverine kids but the Buffalo Meadow's people were still very SLDF in origin. Alice's great-grandmother Leigh MacArthur had commanded the 295th before General Romanov, which was why her grandfather had ended up joining that particular unit and ended up stranded in the middle of nowhere as a result.
"Any problems with maybe getting yourself an army brat for a boyfriend, because it sure seems like Henry likes you?" Alice suggested.
"Nah, that's not on the cards" Frederick interrupted, "he's still smarting from getting burned when he tried to make a move before."
"Burned? How?" Philomena asked in confusion. "Also, when is this supposed to have happened?" she reasonably wanted to know, having no idea what he was talking about.
"You know, when he asked you if you wanted to grab a milkshake after school and you gave him the brush-off with a lame excuse" Frederick replied.
"What?" Philomena responded, no more enlightened than before, maybe even less so.
"He told me you gave him a lame excuse why you had to go straight home" Frederick persisted.
"You didn't give him the old 'I can't, I'm washing my hair' line, did you?" Alice asked rhetorically, 'because that's a crap one even if I said it and I have hair, and mine does take a long time to wash and then get dry."
"No, I told him the truth why I couldn't go get a milkshake. I didn't know he thought I was making it up" Philomena replied.
"Well, what did you tell him?" Alice wanted to know.
"I told him that I had to go home and walk my pet fish" Philomena told them. "Both my parents were working late and he needs to exercise every day, we've got a schedule for him."
Alice and Frederick both stared at her. "Do you know how stupid that sounds to someone that doesn't know your pet fish is amphibious and really does need to be taken out of his tank to exercise" Alice asked eventually.
"But everyone does know, I talked about it during biology class when we discussed xenobiology and types of alien fauna" Philomena reminded them.
Frederick pursed his lips. "And you're sure that wasn't when Henry was off school for a couple of days after he got that concussion playing football?" he asked, trying to remember himself.
"Oh" Philomena responded, looking and feeling extremely perturbed as to that possibility. "Telling him 'I've got to go home to walk my pet fish' does sound pretty made-up in that scenario" she admitted.
"To the point of insulting his intelligence, albeit because of his ignorance of your pet mudskipper I'd say" Alice concurred.
"I should probably talk to him to explain" Philomena decided, wondering how best to handle that.
"Good idea" Alice told her drily.
Frederick thought about the situation. "If you want to make reparations, and maybe get asked again if you want to grab a milkshake, just wear that skirt from yesterday" he advised.
"I am never wearing that skirt again" Philomena told him forcefully.
"Okay, but don't tell Henry that" Frederick replied. "You already pissed him off because he thought you insulted his intelligence with a really BS excuse for a rejection, you shouldn't break the poor guy's heart too."
If looks could kill Philomena's large-calibre glare would have vapourised Frederick and blown out the wall behind him, which would have been a shame because it was a very nice house.
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Note from the Author:
Finding a leash to fit a pet Alphard Mudskipper is not easy, though not as hard as teaching them tricks (getting them to stand up on their hind flippers to beg is particularly difficult). :-p
It's not Philomena's fault that girls in anime shows from the Draconis Combine (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Draconis_Combine) with all their Japanese cultural influences look more like her than they do regular humans (except the hair of course, not many bald Drac anime girls). The 'Big Eyes' thing in Japanese manga and anime well pre-dates the 1980's which is when the Battletech Universe diverges from our own incidentally.
Naturally, in the version of 'Where's Waldo' books Frederick had as a small child Waldo was in a forest wearing a camouflage gillie suit (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghillie_suit).
If Sibling Company Gamma were the 2816 generation (the first Wolverines from the Iron Wombs (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Iron_Womb)) then running with that Alpha and Beta (2814 & 2815) were regular kids and they're generally a lot less weird. Sibko Zeta (2819) was the first after the system was properly up and running and they and later sibkos are considerably more numerous than the Gamma kits.
Part XXVI will be entirely lacking in teenage crap... but I hope you all got a few laughs out of this part regardless.
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"You dressed me up as a character from that stupid anime cartoon from the Draconis Combine you like" Philomena exclaimed. "I don't know what part was worse, the blue wig or the skirt that was so short that if I had body hair I would have needed to get it waxed. All of it" she said, grimacing. It wasn't like skirts that length were ever seen on Niops normally, especially without leggings underneath, the climate was less than suitable for them.
... you madman. You dressed Philomena up like Aqua from Konosuba?
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An amusing read, teenage crap notwithstanding! ;D
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Suggesting academic departments merge? That's a material for a lifetime vendetta right there.
Don't worry.. that will take years to happen, and there will be blood to pay..
Weaksauce, our teachers were not afraid to throw chalk or a key bundle, to wake up a sleeper or shut up a chit chatter.
I have a friend who had a nun who used an eraser, but was good enough to bounce it off way to hit you on the rebound.
Part XXVI will be entirely lacking in teenage crap
the teenage crap, is what keeping this from just being another stock AU. and the kids give us an interesting insight into the world.
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Part XXVI - Section 1 of 2
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"I drive a Crosscut loggermech all week to put food on the table for my family, but my ride at the weekend is a Blackjack to help keep all our families safe."
Slogan from a recruitment poster for the Stafford Planetary Guard - 2845CE
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Hartwood Township – Stafford – 2834
Roger Callahan wasn't sure if the majority of the town's population had turned out to watch as a mark of respect, or mostly just out of curiosity, but as his two companies of infantry and one of dismounted mechwarriors brought their rifles and carbines up in salute, and the Star League anthem started to play over a loudspeaker, at least the locals didn't seem to react negatively as the newly adopted flag of the Niops Association Hegemony was slowly raised over their community.
If he was forced to describe Hartwood in one word it would have been 'rustic' thanks in large part to the fact that the vast majority of the buildings here were made of wood, even if a few of them were quite large three-story constructions. Given the easy availability of lumber it was unsurprising that wood was the building material of choice on Stafford, but as a result the place very much resembled the stereotypical periphery backwater, with little more technology on display than you could have seen on Terra more than a thousand years ago.
There was a certain amount of mining going on up in the mountains yonder, Callahan knew, and a few small-scale industries had been established to supply low-tech farming, logging and mining equipment, but considering that their ancestors had arrived here in interstellar spacecraft it was hard to deny that Stafford had seen its technological level slide more than a little over the years.
They hadn't been completely ignorant of events in the wider galaxy before dropships from the Niops Association started arriving regularly in the last few years. Once or twice a decade a wandering jumpship had turned up looking for trade, not to raid, and they knew from them that the Star League had fallen and the Successor States had subsequently plunged the Inner Sphere into the bloodiest war in human history, so on that basis a little forced isolation wasn't a bad thing they considered. As they had gradually regressed from computers to incandescent lightbulbs powered by waterwheels being as advanced as their society got however some pining for a long-lost 'Golden Age' of less back-breaking labouring in the fields, and more microwave ovens in the kitchen, was perhaps inevitable.
As the flag reached the top of the pole a squadron of aerospace fighters hurtled overhead providing their own salute, keeping their speed below Mach 1 for the sake of both the windows in the town and everyone's hearing. Simultaneously pulled up into a steep climb as they cleared the town, accelerating off into the stratosphere and finally going supersonic once they were far enough away for that to be safe, a few people clapped and cheered which was at least encouraging.
Roger Callahan cleared his throat and took a deep breath before he began his speech. "By the lawful decree of High Associator Giles Olson and the Governing Council of Niops, by the authority invested in me by the Star League Defence Force, and with the agreement of the free people of Stafford" he began, "As of this date I hereby declare this system a protectorate of the Niops Association and its native population as Hegemony citizens from this time forward" he said grandly, hoping that he didn't look and sound as much of an officious, self-important idiot as he felt like he did standing in front of all these thousands of people in his dress uniform, a sword hanging by his side. "And now, as the people of Stafford joins those of Niops, Comstock, Francas, Algenib, Copernicus and Frobisher in becoming Hegemony citizens, living safe and free under the Cameron Star, I ask all present to offer a silent prayer to the God, or Gods, you may worship to watch over us all as we continue to expand outwards, bringing the light of civilisation, progress and the rule of law to those living under the shadow of tyranny, barbarity and ignorance."
It wasn't the speech he might have written for himself. It frankly had the fingerprints of Giles Olson all over it as the man loved this kind of phrasing, but enough people in the crowd bowed their heads at this juncture for Callahan to think it hadn't been too overblown and heavy on bombastic sentiment.
Getting the people of Hartwood onside in recent months by building them a school and delivering a half-dozen farm tractors and a combine harvester had certainly paid dividends, as a similar approach had done previously on Alphard and Comstock. The one slight difference in approach on Stafford was gifting a couple of dozen chainsaws to each of the larger logging camps too, while dangling the possibility of maybe even handing over a loggermech or two later if the lumberjacks supported Stafford signing up for this 'Hegemony' thing.
Winning hearts and minds was also the reason that for the flag-raising ceremony they had laid on a massive barbeque for afterwards, with meat imported from Francas and beer from one of the newly expanded breweries on Alphard. Whether it tipped the balance as regards local public opinion was in question, but it most likely boosted their attendance by quite a lot. The smell of burgers, hog roast and fried chicken drifting across the town square was certainly making Roger Callahan himself feeling pretty positive about how the day was going so far, as well as making him salivate.
In order not to appear too intimidating Callahan had left his battlemechs loaded aboard the battalion dropship that had set down in a clearing a couple of kilometres out of town, but after checking with the town mayor he would likely march them around later just to remind everyone why becoming a protectorate was a good thing. The next bunch of pirates that attempted to raid Stafford would soon come to regret their choice of victim as the SLDF was always looking for an opportunity to relieve some peacetime boredom, and more importantly get some use out of the mountain of unused war-materiel they had to justify the government paying for.
Hartwood Township was the largest city on Stafford, with a population well into the double-digit thousands if you included the farming communities and logging camps nearby that supplied it, but that had meant it had historically also been the subject of the most attention from various bands of scum with a jumpship and a few battlemechs to their name. Most of the other communities on the planet were village sized at best, although there were a good number of them so their combined population was larger than lived in the Niops system as a whole.
Smaller communities were less attractive for pirate raids, not much to steal, not many people to take as slaves and not as easy to spot from the air. It was thought likely that the presence of a permanent SLDF garrison would lead to greater urbanisation across the planet in the future, but that cultural inertia would see Hartwood itself, the de facto planetary capital and the hub of interstellar trade, expanding first and to the greatest degree.
Persuading the population that they weren't pirates had taken the first survey teams that visited Stafford quite a considerable amount of time, effort and careful diplomacy. In one case a gunship VTOL that was being used to scout some forested hills had even been shot at by a bunch of farmers with old hunting rifles, presumably trying to scare them off thinking they were pirates. After a couple of rounds bounced off the armoured canopy the gunship had turned back and hovered above them, the pilot on the loudspeaker patiently asking them to knock it off as they continued to fire at her tilt-rotor combat aircraft ineffectually.
Eventually, the pilot's patience exhausted, the gunship had turned its 30mm autocannon on a nearby grove of trees and blasted them to kindling with a long burst, ordering the farmers to surrender whereupon the panicked farmers immediately threw down their guns and did so as the cannon swung in their direction instead.
The pilot had then landed the VTOL, walked over to the farmers and angrily told them not to do that again, especially not to anything wearing the Red Cameron Star insignia, before getting back in her aircraft, complaining on the loudspeaker about trigger-happy hillbillies with no sense of self-preservation as she flew off.
Most encounters with the locals involved a lot less shooting fortunately, and the appearance of a VTOL in the sky above soon became a welcome sight across Stafford. The extreme number of small and widely scattered settlements that were spread over the main continent had made building a medical clinic in each of them simply unviable, Niops just didn't have sufficient personnel or all the required medical equipment to spare, but fortunately someone had a bright idea on how to solve the issue.
A couple of old Cobra transport VTOL's that once belonged to the NAM had each been fitted out with a small clinic and operating theatre in the cargo bay, which along with a high-tech Eligus Medical Diagnoser and a trio of medical personnel could handle most medical issues. The VTOL's would fly around visiting each settlement every few weeks to provide basic clinical care and check-ups, and in case of emergencies a settlement could radio for urgent help.
Although not the fastest machines in the sky the Cobra's had unlimited range thanks to their fusion powerplants, and they could set down most anywhere making them a good choice for the job. The SLDF had actually used a version of the very same machine for casualty evacuation where they were attached to a MASH unit, and Callahan pondered that could have been what gave someone the idea for a flying surgical and medical team flitting about the Stafford skies in the first place.
Considering how little it actually cost to run the service in the big scheme of thing it was probably the most cost-effective means Niops had yet devised to get the population of a world the Association wanted to raise the Hegemony flag over to freely agree. It also looked good in the press back home as feel-good stories in the newspapers about the Association being out there saving lives as it restored civilisation one world at a time made the voters, and hence the politicians, very happy.
The appeal of Stafford to the Niops Association was due to it being a very green world, offering something that Alphard most certainly did not, a potentially massive agricultural surplus. Much of the planet's surface was covered by forest and grassland, with only a few sparse patches of desert terrain and a small quantity of tundra near the poles unsuitable for farming. It was a generally pleasant world to live on too, orbiting a G type yellow dwarf that greatly resembled Sol in the Terran system and with similar gravity to the homeworld of humanity as well. Oceans covered around two-thirds of the surface, although the native fish were not regarded as particularly appetising so Terran species would need to be imported if they wanted to develop a large-scale fishing industry here as well as agriculture.
Stafford also greatly resembled Terra in climate, not so much the climate of Terra during the present Holocene era that had lasted since the last glacial period however, but rather Terra during the latter part of the Eocene epoch some thirty million years ago. It was some eight degrees warmer than modern-day Terra at the equator, with the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere several times higher than they had been there even before the development of fusion power had helped clean up the environment.
Warm weather with decent levels of annual rainfall across much of the planet and a goodly amount of CO2 to absorb made Stafford a veritable paradise for plant life, practically a planet-scale greenhouse. Plough up some grassland, or clear a few hectares of native forest, and you could plant most any crop and reap a good harvest for yourself.
It was so suitable for human colonisation that it was a wonder why the total population of Stafford III was only slightly larger than that of Alphard IV, despite it being so much more hospitable than that arid world. There were far less pleasant planets that were much further out from the Inner Sphere than Stafford which had vastly greater numbers of people living there by the early 29th Century that only an unlikely chain of events could explain it. Events which had, of course, actually transpired.
Jumpships belonging to the Free Worlds League exploring outwards into the periphery, looking for new worlds to eventually colonise as the Mariks gradually expanded their borders, had actually come across Stafford as early as the 2390's. Unfortunately, in 2398 the Capellan Confederation invaded Andurien, then part of the Free Worlds League, an event that is generally regarded as being the start of the Age of War that kept the Mariks and every other Great House far too busy fighting each other to devote as much of their resources towards outwards expansion as they had previously.
A century and a half of near continuous interstellar warfare later the Age of War had eventually ground to a halt, although as much because of Terran Hegemony diplomatic efforts as it was because the Great Powers had been struck by the sudden realisation that decade after decade of fighting had not really gotten them anywhere so far and that was unlikely to change anytime soon.
After the formation of the Star League in 2570 the Free Worlds League had started to expand outwards again, though resources devoted to the Reunification War of 2577 to 2597 and the costs incurred by rebuilding efforts afterwards did hamper this somewhat, and it might have come to pass that Stafford would have been colonised by the Mariks during the 27th century if not for another development, this one technological rather than political.
The invention of the Jamerson-Ulikov Water Purifier in 2622 made hundreds, if not thousands of previously uninhabitable worlds already within the borders of the Great Powers of the Inner Sphere suddenly viable for colonisation. Why keep pushing out into the periphery to found new colonies when you could establish them right on your own doorstep only a jump or two away from systems you already had? It already took months to travel from one side of the Free Worlds League to the other, and shorter supply lines and trade routes were cheaper and more profitable, so it was only good economics after all.
Someone eventually did land settlers on Stafford III, which is why it had a name on the maps rather than a number and of course why there were people there already when scouts from the Niops Association first got there. However the founders had arrived only a couple of decades before the New Vandenberg Uprising of 2765 had plunged the entire periphery into war, cutting them off from civilisation and any further waves of colonists.
From what Roger Callahan had heard the story was much the same for Islington, another periphery world with breathable air, good soil and a benign climate itself situated about half-way between Niops and Frobisher. Both Stafford and Islington could have been established breadbasket worlds with large populations by now if events had turned out different, but that they weren't was only good for Niops because it meant nobody had planted a flag on them yet.
His orders from headquarters were to mingle and play nice with the locals, and so after all the formalities, which included a speech by the town mayor that was about five times as long as his own had been, Colonel Roger Callahan put on his best smile and plate of barbeque in hand he mixed with the crowd making conversation. After showing off a few battlemechs later, and maybe giving a few kids a ride inside an APC or on top of a tank, the infantry and the mechwarriors were planning to take each other on in a softball competition before it started to get dark which should make for good entertainment. The locals might not play the sport themselves, but they would surely be able to tell that both sides really wanted to win, hopefully drawing a decent-sized crowd of spectators.
Contact and survey teams had been visiting Stafford for a few years now, it was less than twenty lightyears further out from the Niops Association than Alphard was after all, and with the exception of a few backwoods types the populace tended to regard them with interest rather than intrigue these days which was not to say they didn't voice doubts when they were told something that sounded deeply implausible.
"When you say you fought against Amaris you mean your unit right? Not you yourself personally?" a young farmer who had come into town for the ceremony said in response to Callahan mentioning how the 11th Army had liberated Moscow from the Rim Worlds Republic Army back in 2777.
"No, I was there" Callahan replied honestly, though if pressed for details he would have to lie and say he was with the 295th flanking to the south, rather than with the 331st assaulting the city directly from the north.
"Bullshit, you can't be older than what, forty-five?" the farmer replied dubiously.
"I'm seventy-five" Callahan replied, grinning. "I've got kids in their late forties" he told the farmer, wondering if it would look greedy if he went back and got some more fried chicken.
"He's Terran, they live forever" someone else interjected. "Special drugs they never let anyone else have."
"They weren't available outside the Terran Hegemony, but Stafford is part of the Niops Association Hegemony now so you're one of us, not one of them now" Callahan responded. "Once we've reinvented the treatments, and can mass produce them cheaply enough for all, we're going to offer them to people on every world with our flag flying over it" he said, nodding towards the flagpole. "I'd better warn you that they only works if you get them when you're a kid, so don't start thinking you're going to get a jab one day and live another fifty years because of it" he told them apologetically.
"Why does it only work on kids?" the farmer wanted to know.
"Partially to do with telomeres I think, you'll need to talk to someone smarter and better educated than me to explain it all to you properly though" Callahan replied. "Not really my field of expertise, I shoot holes in people that are a lot larger than a needle makes for a living" he added with a grin.
"How much are you people going to charge for that?" someone asked suspiciously.
"Nothing" Callahan told him. "Don't go thinking that's it's entirely altruistic though, if you're healthy another fifty or more years then you're also working and paying taxes another fifty or more years, so from that standpoint it's a great investment" he said. "Most people on Niops that weren't born on Terra like I was get to retire at my age with a pension, I'm not eligible for mine until I'm a hundred and twenty-five."
"No such thing as a free lunch I guess" the farmer remarked.
"Technically you're all eating one right now" Callahan joked.
The farmer smirked. "Are we? I'll bet you want something in return" he suggested. He didn't like the sound of these 'taxes' but if you actually got something back from the government to show for what they took off you that wasn't too bad.
"Maybe you're right" Callahan conceded. "We need Stafford to help us feed people on worlds where it's a lot more difficult to grow food, like your neighbours Alphard and Copernicus" he said. "We'll provide the tools needed to help you do that but it's a two-way-street, Alphard can provide the raw materials to feed industrial growth and you can feed the workers in their mines and factories. Working together we can make everyone better off. It's not just doing the morally right thing to help each other out, it's enlightened self-interest too, working together we can build a better future. One that none of us could manage to achieve alone" he said. "Niops is probably the only world apart from Terra itself that hasn't regressed technologically in the last half-century, but we don't have the numbers or resources to make that really count, we all need each other to make this Hegemony thing work."
"Plenty of folks say you aren't to be trusted still" the farmer observed.
"I don't doubt it. But ask yourself why we're going about this the hard way instead of just making you all do what we want with battlemechs and orbital bombardment" Callahan replied. "We could take the food you grow by force instead of paying for it."
"So why don't you?"
"Because we're not ******" Callahan explained earnestly. "There's more than enough of them already without us joining in. I know it seems like a radical notion these days, but the galaxy might actually benefit from a little more cooperation and a lot less confrontation" he suggested. "It's not that weird an idea is it surely?" he asked rhetorically.
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Part XXVI - Section 2 of 2
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"I heard someone say that you're moving people from Comstock to Alphard to work in mines and factories there?" another person asked, their tone indicating they possibly thought that was a forced transfer of labour and Callahan was full of it.
"More like we offered a good wage and they queued up to board the dropship" Callahan replied honestly, smiling. "Most of them signed a five-year contract, earn enough cash to go back home and build a house" he said. "Niops money is good, the paper money is backed by germanium like the Star League Dollar was, and we're minting gold and silver coins now too that you can spend in places that don't take paper money" he told them. "I spent some time on Comstock myself, you were lucky that you weren't as dependant on food imports as they were when the Star League fell and everyone in the Inner Sphere started slaughtering each other" he said with a sigh. "It's taking us a while to help them put their society back together, it kind-of collapsed when most of the supply shipments stopped coming and if it wasn't for Francas continuing to send them as much refrigerated meat as they could, hundreds of thousands more people would have starved to death. They're good people on Francas, hardworking ranchers that look out for each other, good meat from there too" he added, picking up a chicken leg from his plate and taking a bite out of it.
"That was darned neighbourly of them" an older man observed. "Sending food to Comstock I mean."
Callahan swallowed the chicken in his mouth and nodded. "It's always nice to see that just because the Great Houses are selfish jerks that there's still some people that actually do give a shit about their fellow man" he agreed. "If we weren't so worried about the Marik's turning up in Niops one day and doing to us what they did to the rest of the Terran Hegemony we'd have turned up here to say howdy decades ago, but after what they did to Brownsville, New Dallas and other places we thought it was better to keep our heads down. At least until we were strong enough to fend them off" he told them, sticking firmly to the cover story. "You guys aren't worth a full-scale invasion, neither is Alphard, Comstock or Francas for that matter, but we are because we've got more advanced technology than them. Tech that's worth stealing or just blowing all-to-hell to stop someone else stealing it first."
"I thought you had some old SLDF warships to defend yourself with already though?" someone queried.
"A couple of destroyers and a frigate might be enough to scare a pirate band shitless but the Free Worlds League and the rest started the First Succession War with over a hundred warships each and we don't know how many they still have, we've got to assume dozens to play it safe" Callahan replied with a shrug. "Just telling them we were neutral wasn't going to get us left in peace. We needed enough nukes stockpiled to convince them they sure as hell didn't want to stick their dicks into our hornet's nest" he said laughing, his language a little more salty and coarse than it usually was with civilians because he had noticed the locals often swore a lot themselves.
The people nearby listening all laughed along with him. "My pappy always said you can get further with a two-by-four and a kind word than you can with just a kind word" a farm-hand agreed.
"Mine used to say that when you've got them by the balls their hearts and minds soon follow" the Town Mayor interjected approaching to join them with a grin on his face.
"Sir" Callahan greeted him. "Tried the food?" he asked.
"I have, as well as some of that fine ale from Alphard, even if it tastes a mite different from ours" the Mayor replied, a few people making room for him to stand closer to Callahan.
"Different grain, they grow a lot of something called fonio because it doesn't mind drier soils than barley or wheat" Callahan explained. "You'll probably make good money exporting thirstier kinds of crops to them as their population increases, most of their planet is dry as a bone so they have to be careful what they grow."
You couldn't feed an entire planet with imported food of course, not unless it had a small population anyway because even a Star Lord jumpship hauling half-a-dozen Mule dropships could only carry about fifty-thousand tons of cargo per round trip, but a world or two producing an export surplus would certainly help with temporary shortfalls elsewhere.
With enough irrigation projects Alphard could potentially sustain a population in the low single-digit billions, orders of magnitude more than it did now. This however would require most of the northern continents there to be turned into arable farmland, an infrastructure project which would take decades to complete even if there was the manpower and heavy equipment needed to get it done, which there wasn't. If they could import enough food from Stafford to temporarily feed say another million or so workers on Alphard for a few years on the other hand, they wouldn't just be able to staff all the mines and factories the High Associator was dreaming of, they could actually turn the planet into a populous industrial powerhouse able to feed itself.
"One of your survey teams suggested we might want to grow cotton for export, that needs plenty of water, rice, sugarcane and soybeans too" the mayor told him. "Not that there won't be plenty of call for wheat or maze I guess."
"I like tropical fruits so make sure to grow plenty of those too" Callahan suggested, "Niops really doesn't have the climate for those. Most of the fruit we grow back home has to come from greenhouses heated by geothermal power and lit by UV lamps because we just don't get much sunlight."
"Yeah, we noticed a lot of you people were pale like ghosts when they first started to visit" the mayor told him. "At first we thought it was because you had been cooped up in spaceships for months or years on end but then we found out we were only three weeks away from where you come from and it just never gets bright there, even at midday."
"Theres a good reason why you'll find more people living around stars like yours up there, rather than ones like ours, even though there's ten Red Dwarf's like Niops in the galaxy for every Yellow Dwarf like Stafford" Callahan replied drily. "There's no such thing as a bright summer's day and it depresses the hell out of you if you were born and raised somewhere else like I was" he said. "Doesn't bother my youngest, he's coming up eighteen and doesn't really know how nice it is to spend time outside somewhere like this instead" he added, looking up at a bright blue sky instead of a dim red one.
"How many kids have you got Colonel?" the mayor asked him.
"Five, oldest two have kids of their own and it don't matter if I look younger than I am, the first time one of them called me 'Grandpa' I swear I felt ****** ancient" Callahan said with a grimace, a few people laughing at his expression of dismay.
There was a good reason why Roger Callahan was assigned to these jobs where making nice with the locals was required. It wasn't just that he had decades of command experience and could think on his feet, Callahan was amiable and friendly with a relaxed manner that made it easy for people to get on with him.
If the SLDF ever wanted to provoke a war with someone they would send the abrasive Colonel Jax Benedict instead. It paid to have a diverse group of senior officers to choose from.
"Someone said you've got no trees on Niops?" a man that seemed to be a lumberjack from his build and clothes asked Callahan curiously. "That true?"
"Used to be until we got hold of some from another system with a star not that much hotter than ours that we're just starting to grow now" Callahan replied. "It'll take a while though, too cold for them to grow near as fast as they do here."
The lumberjack nodded his understanding. "Best timber for construction here comes from up in the mountains where it's colder" he noted. "Slower means tighter grain and denser, stronger timber than for the exact same species of tree down here closer to sea level" he said professionally.
"Algenib has some decent forests, not massive like yours it's a bit cooler and drier than here, but I liked it there" Callahan told him. "Reminded me of climbing trees as a little kid on Terra."
"Their trees look like ours?" the lumberjack asked.
"It's surprising how much alike trees on different planets actually look" Callahan confirmed, recalling how the Circean Oaks that grew in profusion in the forests around Great Hope had been named that because of just how much the alien tree resembled oak trees back on Terra.
The lumberjack nodded. "Convergent evolution" he explained. "Plants everywhere finding the same solution for the same problem of surviving in a certain ecological niche" he said, the man surprising Callahan with his depth of scientific understanding. "Learned about it in school" he said. "Did you know that the Horse Chestnut tree on Terra is more closely related to broccoli than it is the Sweet Chestnut tree?" he asked rhetorically.
"Really?" Callahan replied, raising his eyebrows.
"Yup" the lumberjack confirmed. "Convergent evolution" he said once more. "Like how dolphins, sharks and ichthyosaurs on Terra all ended up the same shape eventually, even though they all evolved from completely different species."
"Yeah, I knew that one, never heard the broccoli thing before though so thanks for that" Callahan said, smiling.
"Don't go thinking that because we don't have fancy holographic televisions that we're all ignorant rednecks Colonel" the mayor interjected, deciding that this was a good opportunity for him to make a point. "We never stopped teaching our kids science here, we just couldn't maintain the industrial base needed to keep making all the fancy toys that you could."
"Fair enough, Mr Mayor" Colonel Roger Callahan responded, mentally reassessing his view on the people of Stafford and other colonies that had technologically regressed. "But trust me on this, if you think owning a holographic television is a mark of an advanced, sophisticated society then you've never watched some of the crap the gameshow channel broadcasts back home on Niops" he told the man in all seriousness.
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Note from the Author:
According to Handbook: Major Periphery States (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Handbook:_Major_Periphery_States) the planet Stafford (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Stafford) is one of the breadbasket worlds of the Marian Hegemony (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Marian_Hegemony), along with Islington (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Islington) and New Venice (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/New_Venice), which indicates that it's considerably more hospitable than most colonised worlds. Since it doesn't have a romanesque name I'm assuming it had a decent sized population even before Imperator Johann O'Reilly (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Johann_O%27Reilly) turned up and added the world to his growing empire, but it wasn't present on the star maps before him so it couldn't have been particularly developed.
Mostly for the sake of novelty on my part while Stafford is much like Terra, in terms of climate it's like Terra during the late Eocene (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eocene) rather than it is today (hotter, more humid and with a lot more CO2 in the atmosphere so plants love it).
Having most of the people on Stafford living in small scattered communities seems like one way to avoid dealing with too many pirate raids but it made it difficult for Niops to help each one. On Alphard where most everybody lives in the same part of the planet (the cooler parts of the Northern continents) it was easy to make medical care available to most everyone, simply by setting up hospitals and clinics in a few locations everyone could reach, but that wasn't so easy on Stafford hence the Flying Doctor service in their Cobra (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Cobra_(Combat_Vehicle)) VTOL aircraft. The Eligus Medical Diagnoser (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Saffel_Medical_Institute) was a technological miracle of the Golden Age of the Star League (and it's a lot more portable than all the equipment it replaced).
Alien trees looking much like trees on Earth on sci-fi shows doesn't require near as much suspension of belief as some may think (the Horse Chestnut being more closely related to broccoli than it is the Sweet Chestnut is apparently true, convergent evolution at work).
Stafford will export lumber as well as food to other worlds in the new Hegemony. You can fell a lot more trees in a short space of time with a Crosscut (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Crosscut) loggermech than you can with a chainsaw (or especially an axe) and as a bonus your part-time weekend warriors in the Planetary Guard get in plenty of cockpit time during their day jobs.
And finally, as the Niops Association Hegemony nears the day that it reveals itself to the wider galaxy by reestablishing HPG contact here's the flag they're raising over their member worlds beforehand.
(https://imagizer.imageshack.com/v2/800x600q70/923/euDsIb.jpg)
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Love it! The only thing wrong with that flag is the words... it doesn't need them! :)
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Love it! The only thing wrong with that flag is the words... it doesn't need them! :)
Seconded.
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Thirded; the words look out of place. It’s also a very weird name with both "association" and "hegemony" in it? I'd just keep calling it the Niops Association!
An idea for the flag: it's three orbitals for the three planets, I assume? How about adding one more for each planet that joins? And to make it really nerdy, add them in "shells"?
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Quadrupled.
Flags don't need words to project their meaning in my opinion.
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As regards the flag you've got to think about it in in-universe terms, this is a flag designed by committee in the Niops way of doing things.
Imagine the discussion:
- We want to signal our connection to the star League on our flag
Let's put a Cameron Star on it.
- We want it to be distinctly Niops though
Make the star red
- We're astronomers
Have planets orbiting the star
- We're not just astronomers, we're all about science generally
Why not make the planetary orbits look like the old model of the atom?
- Okay, so how about three planets/electrons, because Niops has three habitable worlds
Good idea, we're also three societies that came together, the original scientists, the capellan refugees and the SLDF
- Nobody is going to recognise the flag. Even people that might have heard about us by now
Yeah, better put our name on it
Aesthetics aren't really all that high up on the list of criteria. :wink:
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Remove the words and move the Star + Atom to the left more, also background could be a different color. The blue kind of contrasts badly.
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Flags are for the people who know who you are. For those that don't, a flag's only function is to NOT look like theirs... :)
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Since they are the 'bastards' of the Star League just have a black Cameron star on a silver background, that or have Jon Stark's banner... Just for S&Gs and breaking the wheel without breaking worlds :grin:
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Part XXVII - Section 1 of 2
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"She might be be the one missing an eye, but the ilKhan is the one who is blind if he cannot see how completely deranged that woman is."
Stephen Cage, Khan of Clan Ice Hellion - 2834CE
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Hall of Khans – Strana Mechty – 2835
Sat in the ilKhan's chair Nicholas Kerensky looked around the Great Hall, regarding not only the faces of the nineteen Khans all faithfully in attendance but also the building itself. Not for the first time he judged that the engineers who had rebuilt the place after its destruction over a decade ago now had not quite gotten it right. There was, in his opinion, definitely something off, despite his explicit instructions that it should be restored to the state exactly as it was before the spite of Franklin Hallis had reduced the original hall to rubble.
The problem was that he just couldn't figure out what was different from before, other than the vacant chair at the table where Sarah McEvedy had once sat everything was exactly as he remembered, so he couldn't get it fixed.
It vexed him, as did a great number of other things these days, but that particular vexation should have been something that was easily remedied, but annoyingly wasn't.
Pushing thoughts of the inexplicably imperfect building aside Kerensky leaned forward in his chair, striking a serious pose as he meshed his fingers together on the table in front of him. "My Khans" he began to speak in an authoritative voice, a tone he had secretly practiced with his late lamented wife who had coached him on how he should present himself. "I assume you have all read the intelligence reports our scouts brought back from the Inner Sphere, quiaff?" he checked, rightly assuming they all had from their grave expressions. Usually before these meetings there was a some boisterous banter between the Khans, levity even, along with good-natured, or not so good-natured insults and ribbing, but today that had been entire absent as they filed in.
"Aff" they all chorused.
"Good. Then you all know why this may well be the darkest day of my life" Kerensky stated. "Darker than when I lived through the occupation of Terra by the foul usurper Amaris, darker than when the Chalcas Clan escaped justice, darker than when my beloved wife Jennifer died or even than when my own father, the Great Father, died" he told them. "My father was a visionary, he knew that when he led the SLDF into exile that in his absence the Traitor Lords would engulf the Inner Sphere in fire and blood, a new Age of War, but I cannot believe that he would not have stayed and fought if he had known then how large the scale of slaughter was actually going to be."
Most of the Khans nodded their agreement as Kerensky looked near to weeping, more than one of the Khans rightly assuming however he was just putting on an act, though naturally they would never voice such dangerous thoughts aloud. "Billions dead, nay tens, hundreds of billions" Kerensky resumed speaking. "WMD employed against civilian targets so often that I can only believe that these monsters, for monsters is what they surely are, were simply blasé about raising whole cities with thermonuclear fire or poisoning entire worlds with chemical or biological weapons" he declared. "Even Amaris, Amaris, was not so cavalier when it came to unleashing his strategic arsenal."
"Savages" Khan Ellie Kinnison of the Steel Vipers responded, shaking her own head in apparent dismay though as ever her gaze was possessive regarding the ilKhan. There was a time that she had looked at him with her one working eye with fawning adoration instead, but it was self-evident to anyone paying attention that at some point she had clearly gotten her fangs into him. Those of a cynical nature assumed that she had exploited the death of the ilKhan's wife in a tragic accident to her own ends, his brother-in-law certainly thought so, but even the more naïve of observers was pretty sure she was sharing the ilKhan's bed these days.
It was generally considered a crying shame that Andery Kerensky, the ilKhan's younger brother, had fallen in battle during Operation Klondike, not least because in his absence there was nobody to tell Nicholas bluntly that regardless of whether or not the woman concerned gave off vibes that she ****** like a crazed weasel, and Ellie Kinnison very much did that, you just don't stick it in the crazy.
To be fair it wasn't like Jennifer Winson had been particularly well-liked either. The rumours that she was actually Jennifer Amaris certainly didn't help, and she was undeniably ruthless and calculating with great influence over her husband, but at least she wasn't completely unhinged like her replacement and as a result her stock in the public's affections seemed to rise with each year that passed.
Continuing his address to the Khans Nicholas Kerensky leaned forward. "Our intelligence analysts inform me that not only was this so-called 'First Succession War' the bloodiest in history, if you were to include the multitudes who perished due to indirect consequences, such as hunger, environmental collapse and an inability to obtain medical care, more may have died than in all other wars humanity has ever fought…" he paused for emphasis, "combined" he said sounding genuinely aghast.
Elizabeth Hazen the Khan of Clan Jade Falcon had a stony expression but her eyes were full of fury. "Aaron was right" she said. "We should have placed Aleksandr on the throne in 2781 and beaten back the barbarians when they sought to invade the Terran Hegemony" she continued, everyone knowing who she meant. As the rumoured lover of General Aaron DeChavilier before his death in the Pentagon Civil War she was perhaps not the most unbiased judge of the man and his opinions, but several other khans nodded their agreement, including surprisingly Jerome Winson of Clan Wolf who was usually a bitter rival of both Hazen herself and her clan as a whole.
"I long believed my father would never have accepted the role, but if he had known what we do now I am no longer so sure" ilKhan Kerensky responded. "If only we could turn back time" he added wistfully. "I must say however at this juncture that the news I personally found hardest to believe is that after slaughtering each other on an industrial scale for thirty-five years, many of their own worlds rendered as lifeless as those of the Hegemony, that the ceasefire between the Traitor Lords lasted less than a decade before they started right up again where they left off!" he exclaimed incredulously. "This insane 'Second Succession War' was already in full swing when our scouting parties arrived in the Inner Sphere and only seemed to be escalating when they set out for home with their findings."
"It is naught but madness" Khan Stephan Cage of the Ice Hellions firmly agreed. A reasoned, compassionate man with a strong sense of justice, as well as being a skilled warrior proven in the field, what had occurred during their absence completely appalled him.
"At least we now know why we never heard of the Chalcas Clan again" Kesar Jerricho of Clan Coyote interjected. "They must have arrived at the Inner Sphere and realised that there was no prospect of rallying the Great Houses together against us" he suggested.
"They would have arrived during the peace, or should I say temporary ceasefire, between the Succession Wars" Raymond Sainze of the Fire Mandrills noted.
"What of it?" Jerricho asked rhetorically. "After over three decades of unleashing thermonuclear fire upon each other I doubt they were on good enough terms to suddenly bury their differences" he said wryly. "They were still skirmishing with each other throughout it seems."
"I assume we are all in agreement that this so-called 'Canada Tribe' was in fact the Chalcas Clan gathering intelligence and supplies, quiaff?" Kerensky asked the room, once again responded to by a chorus of 'Aff' in reply. "They only seemed to raid the Kuritans for supplies from what our scouts could ascertain, I have my own theory as to why but am interested in hearing the views of others" the ilKhan requested.
"It may have simply been because the Draconis Combine lies closest to the Exodus Road" Stephen McKenna of the Snow Ravens replied, "although if they learned of this 'Kentares Massacre' as we now have that may have also played a role" he suggested. "Even amidst all the other horrors that episode stood out to me as an act of utter barbarism" he opined.
"You think the Chalcas Clan would be so bothered by civilian deaths that that would seek a measure of vengeance in their name after what they did you your own Snow Ravens at Dehra Dun, quineg?" Sandra Tseng of the Ghost Bears asked, frowning.
Before looking to Tseng to reply McKenna's gaze briefly met that of Nicholas Kerensky. Both knew that it was not a Wolverine nuclear device that had initiated over Dehra Dun despite the official record. "Pushing a button to incinerate people from afar is not the same as looking an unarmed man, woman or child in the eyes before you cut them down with a sword" he told her. "The Combine murdered, no perhaps I should say they butchered tens of millions of people on Kentares in a way that seems to have horrified even the other Traitor Lords" he said. "I have even more reason to hate the Chalcas Clan than the rest of you, but even I will credit them with enough humanity that when they learned of Kentares it would have made raiding the Combine for supplies a guiltless, nay satisfying, course of action" he said. "If I was there with my fleet when the people of Kentares were being slaughtered I would have smashed my way to Luthien and bombarded the Imperial Palace from orbit until the rubble itself was reduced to dust" he stated through gritted teeth.
Several of the khans beat their fists on the table in thundering agreement. "The blood of the first Director-General still flows true it seems" Mitchell Loris of Clan Mongoose spoke up, he and McKenna nodding to each other in what seemed like mutual respect.
Kerensky frowned. Quite how or why the Snow Ravens and Clan Mongoose had grown so close in recent years was a mystery that even the Watch had failed to ascertain. After the Wolverine's escaped it had seemed initially that Loris was planning to take advantage of the weakness of the Snow Ravens to expand his clan's holdings on Circe but then suddenly they became great allies instead. Did McKenna have something on Loris perhaps, the ilKhan wondered? Jennifer had seemed to think so before her death and he had learned to trust her instincts as regards dark deeds and political machinations, if so what was it?
"Yes. Kentares" Seth van Houten of Clan Burrock now spoke. "Surely a proof that the so-called honour of the Draconis Combine, and that of the bushido code of the samurai class in particular, is a mere fiction" he said, smirking at Raymond Sainze of the Fire Mandrills who visibly bristled at the remark. Sainze was himself born in the Combine to a noble samurai family and would have demanded a Trial of Grievance against van Houten for this clearly deliberate public insult if he wasn't having to deal with so many internal problems and divisions within his own clan at that moment. In some ways factions within the Fire Mandrills hated each other nearly as much as they collectively hated the Burrocks, and it was a constant chore trying to keep them all in line. Despite Sainze himself being raised in a culture of unthinking obedience and deference to authority the clan he built was anything but that, others joked that the Fire Mandrills were so fragmented internally that they were effectively the Free Worlds League of the clans and Sainze himself was the Captain-General with a Combine accent.
"In the light of this information do we still fear an attack by the Great Houses or are we to stand down much of our naval strength again?" Jason Karrige of the Widowmakers queried. "Returning most of the capital ships to the Norfolk and San Diego boneyards would free up considerable manpower and resources" he pointed out. "The ilKhan was wise to mobilise us against possible invasion by the Traitor Lords when he, I mean we, lost track of the Chalchas Clan but battlemech production suffered as a result and that meant we could not fight trials in the number and scale we did before."
Nicholas Kerensky narrowed his eyes at Karrige, yearning for the day he had the opportunity to get rid of the man for good. It was only a shame that the Wolverines had not rid him of the conniving, odious creep before they escaped. "It was to learn if we could do that safely that I chose to dispatch our scouting parties to reconnoitre and investigate the Inner Sphere" he responded. "While it is true that battlemech production dropped off as resources were devoted towards our naval assets, I made sure that Research and Development continued as before, with no reduction in funding so the long-term impact should be minimal."
"Indeed, ilKhan Kerensky" Elizabeth Hazen loyally backed him up. "In fact, by not building more of the older designs that were going to be rendered obsolete almost immediately, the average quality, if not the quantity of our ground forces is rising steeply" she said, ignoring the old adage that quantity has a quality all its own. "My clan's new Wakazashi assault mech is superior to any Star League era machine in the same weight class, and I will freely admit that the Ghost Bear's Minsk and the Nova Cat's Vision Quest are superlative, to name but two."
Jerome Winson nodded. "Even the up-gunned and up-armoured versions of the Marauder and Battlemaster that turned them into assault mechs puts the machines we rode during Operation Klondike not so long past firmly in the shade" he agreed. "To think we once considered our lighter and more compact improved versions of SLDF weaponry as the pinnacle of military science" he continued, smiling. "What I would not give to have a few of our latest model ERPPC, Gauss Rifle and Pulse Laser designs back when we fought Amaris" he said, acknowledging the Khans of the Snow Ravens, Burrocks and Coyotes in turn, their clans having developed those particular weapons.
"I would rank the Bane assault mech that my own clan developed as a match for any other" John Fletcher of the Hell's Horses interjected, feeling left out.
"If the fight took place at extreme range and finished in less than ten minutes before the ammunition ran out perhaps" Elizabeth Hazen responded sarcastically. "Assuming that most of the autocannons did not jam after only a few salvos" she added dismissively. Only an infantryman like Fletcher with little understanding of battlemech warfare would come up with a machine that mounted ten ultra AC/2 autocannons as its main armament she thought. True, in ideal circumstances they would sandblast the armour right off you at ranges where you could barely hit back, but the Bane only carried four tons of autocannon ammunition, ultra-autocannons chewed through ammo like it was popcorn, and they were not nearly reliable enough to entirely depend upon for her tastes anyway.
"The Bane is intended as part of a combined-arms formation, it is not a toy for one-on-one trials against a single foe" Fletcher replied, his tone similar to what you might use to lecture an ignorant child. "If the Great Houses of the Inner Sphere come for us, or the Wolverines return, neither are going to play by our rules" he said. "Why do you think the ilKhan prefers us to call them the Chalcas Clan?" he asked rhetorically.
"Your words verge on praise for the ways of the Chalcas, Khan Fletcher" Ellie Kinnison told him, glaring with her one good eye. "A dangerous position to take" she warned coldly.
"Failure to recognise that an enemy is formidable is more dangerous" Fletcher retorted. "I defeated many a battlemech unit of the Rim Worlds Republic because they thought little of infantry and tanks and paid the price for their hubris" he stated from experience.
"The Khan of the Hell's Horses makes a valid point" Nicholas Kerensky interjected. "We learn more from our mistakes than our successes, and we underestimate our foes at our peril" he said. "Although for the sake of decorum at least it behoves all to not mention the Chalcas Clan by the name they had when they still had a seat at this table" he added.
Kinnison appeared hurt that Kerensky had not sided with her completely and Stephen McKenna fought back a smile not only at her expression but the thought that the ilKhan might have to metaphorically sleep on the couch tonight. It may have been politically expedient to go along with Kerensky's lies regarding what had happened at Dehra Dun, but the lack of remorse shown by the ilKhan regarding the whole affair meant that the leadership of the Snow Ravens was never going to trust the man again. His saKhan, Joyce Merrell, had been a close friend of Khan McEvedy and it was through that connection that McKenna discovered that McEvedy herself was not the only Khan that had issues with the way the ilKhan ran things. In fact when Mitchell Loris had tried to exploit the temporary weakness of the Snow Ravens after the nuclear destruction of much of Dehra Dun he had been 'motivated' to change his plans when presented with a recording of a conversation between him and Sarah McEvedy where they both criticised the ilKhan harshly.
While it was a threat of exposure that made Mitchell back down to begin with, both clans quickly realised that since neither of them were apparently deluded enough to blindly follow Nicholas Kerensky like the more sycophantic clans did, both would greatly benefit from cooperation between the like-minded rather than competition between them. When let in on the Snow Raven's darkest secret, that it was not the Wolverines who had struck Dehra Dun but the Raven's themselves by accident when one of their aerospace fighters carrying a nuclear strike package was shot down, Mitchell had been understandably shocked for a moment, even more so when McKenna added that in retrospect he was now by no means certain who was responsible for the earlier destruction of Great Hope.
It would certainly explain one mystery if the nuking of Great Hope was a set-up by either the ilKhan himself or a clan that was particularly hostile to the Wolverines. When Franklin Hallis hijacked the battleship McKenna's Pride in orbit over Strana Mechty, with the notable exception of blasting the Hall of Khans, all the targets he struck with orbital bombardments were military ones as he covered the withdrawal of his people from Bearcat and their other holdings on the planet. With the firepower he had at hand it would have been trivially easy for Hallis to devastate much of the planet, but he refrained from doing so.
A ruthless willingness to destroy one of your own cities to prevent it falling into enemy hands was difficult to square with a reluctance to destroy enemy cities, and although they did not know this Stephen McKenna and Loris Mitchell were not the only khans harbouring suspicions about the whole thing.
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Part XXVII - Section 2 of 2
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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 (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/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 (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Jason_Karrige), Khan of Clan Widowmaker (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Clan_Widowmaker), who in canon was killed by Franklin Hallis at the Battle of Barbados (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Gamma_1551_AW) 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 (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/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 (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Rite_of_Absorption) it means that Cyrus Elam (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/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 (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/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 (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Dehra_Dun) the khan of Clan Mongoose (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Clan_Mongoose), Mitchell Loris (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Mitchell_Loris), tried to take advantage of the weakness of Clan Snow Raven (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/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 (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/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 (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Jennifer_Winson) (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!
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Interesting that the saKhans aren't in attendance. Normally, at least in the 31st century, both Khans of a Clan attend the Grant Council. It's possible this was different initially but I don't know anything to that effect.
Also Jerome Winson (or his replacement if he's died) is rather conspicuously not mentioned. He was both Nicholas' mentor and his heir as ilKhan so it's odd that he's quiet.
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At least it seems Niops doesn't have to worry about threats from that direction for a while...
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So Ellie Kinnison managed to eliminate her competition and everything went as planned?
Interesting that the saKhans aren't in attendance. Normally, at least in the 31st century, both Khans of a Clan attend the Grant Council. It's possible this was different initially but I don't know anything to that effect.
Also Jerome Winson (or his replacement if he's died) is rather conspicuously not mentioned. He was both Nicholas' mentor and his heir as ilKhan so it's odd that he's quiet.
Perhaps the omnipresent fear of Wolverines doing something underhanded is influencing them to leave saKhans as designated survivors during such meetings, in case of decapitation terrorist strike?
Also Jerome Winson is mentioned
Jerome Winson nodded. "Even the up-gunned and up-armoured versions of the Marauder and Battlemaster that turned them into assault mechs puts the machines we rode during Operation Klondike not so long past firmly in the shade" he agreed. "
When Clans will embark on their great crusade, they will be much better prepared for IS warfare than OTL, the help of Terran Hegemony In Exile will be crucial if the IS is to withstand the onslaught.
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Thanks for the Clan view of your storyline.
Keep up the good work, much appreciated.
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Great update here. I wonder if this will affect Clan combat doctrine here too, since all of the Khans still remember vividly Operation KLONDIKE and the Amaris campaign. This could very well mean that while Clans will Trial against each other and hold other Clans accountable to zellbringen, they will revert to classic SLDF tactics when facing off against the Inner Sphere or against Niops.
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Their reduced numbers preclude classic SLDF tactics, though...
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Also Jerome Winson is mentioned
My bad for missing that.
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No worries, it happens to all of us now and then... :)
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Not a nitpick but my son just read Betrayal of Ideals and we've been discussing the period- where was the source of:
"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). "
Thanks!!!
He's coming in fresh and I haven't read that period in years.
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so alot of the clan warships are going to be more ready for recalling. maybe this time the Dragoons will get some bugeyes for scouting. i do have to wonder what would happen if the wolverines captured a bugeye that Nicky sent to spy on the IS>
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so alot of the clan warships are going to be more ready for recalling. maybe this time the Dragoons will get some bugeyes for scouting. i do have to wonder what would happen if the wolverines captured a bugeye that Nicky sent to spy on the IS>
The Tracker and Nightwing are other viable options as well.
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Their reduced numbers preclude classic SLDF tactics, though...
However Nicholas did say they will need a lot more troops for the war on Inner Sphere, so their numbers will be higher, but their obsession with duelling will influence their planning, even if they brush up their SLDF manuals before the invasion.
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Not a nitpick but my son just read Betrayal of Ideals and we've been discussing the period- where was the source of:
"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). "
Thanks!!!
He's coming in fresh and I haven't read that period in years.
Other than Betrayal of Ideals the relevant source is Field Manual: Warden Clans which contains a couple of interesting passages from Stephen McKenna's personal journal.
The first passage speaks of no longer trusting the other clans in the wake of Dehra Dun, and his Snow Ravens facing absorption by Clan Mongoose, and the second how he got Loris Mitchell to back off. I'll quote the second because I find the phrasing hilarious (McKenna seems to have a very wry, sardonic sense of humour).
"Loris proved most understanding when I presented our case to him this afternoon. He was also most appreciative that rumors of tapes describing his association with the Khan of the Not-Named proved false. As he so vehemently told me. any claim that he was in league with that treacherous woman is preposterous. He is lucky that we intercepted the tapes and prevented them being presented to the Grand Council."
:cheesy:
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However Nicholas did say they will need a lot more troops for the war on Inner Sphere, so their numbers will be higher, but their obsession with duelling will influence their planning, even if they brush up their SLDF manuals before the invasion.
True, but also from this passage, I got the impression that at least Nicky and Jake Fletcher were fully aware that the IS was not going to play by Clan rules at all in an actual conflict, and that the Clans would not either. Keep in mind, even though these are Clan Khans now, all of them are Amaris and KLONDIKE veterans who distinctly remember how to run an actual war.
Clan trial/dueling culture is starting to settle in but hasn't taken over completely yet unlike the Clans of 3050 who were written so poorly and idiotically that none of them even tried to explain who they were or how Trials worked before issuing challenges to IS regiments that had never even met them before.
"The Bane is intended as part of a combined-arms formation, it is not a toy for one-on-one trials against a single foe" Fletcher replied, his tone similar to what you might use to lecture an ignorant child. "If the Great Houses of the Inner Sphere come for us, or the Wolverines return, neither are going to play by our rules" he said. "Why do you think the ilKhan prefers us to call them the Chalcas Clan?" he asked rhetorically.
"Your words verge on praise for the ways of the Chalcas, Khan Fletcher" Ellie Kinnison told him, glaring with her one good eye. "A dangerous position to take" she warned coldly.
"Failure to recognise that an enemy is formidable is more dangerous" Fletcher retorted. "I defeated many a battlemech unit of the Rim Worlds Republic because they thought little of infantry and tanks and paid the price for their hubris" he stated from experience.
"The Khan of the Hell's Horses makes a valid point" Nicholas Kerensky interjected. "We learn more from our mistakes than our successes, and we underestimate our foes at our peril" he said.
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I would counterargue that once some of these old Star League era legacy characters phase out there's still potential for doctrinal drift. The Clans may still go full dumb, especially if there's enough of the next generation that's bought Kerensky's Kool-Aid. That being said, I'm interested in seeing how the flavor changes ever so slightly...
Also, awesome that you mentioned the Carmichaels a couple chapters ago. I can't wait to see what unfolds for their legacy.
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Other than Betrayal of Ideals the relevant source is Field Manual: Warden Clans which contains a couple of interesting passages from Stephen McKenna's personal journal.
The first passage speaks of no longer trusting the other clans in the wake of Dehra Dun, and his Snow Ravens facing absorption by Clan Mongoose, and the second how he got Loris Mitchell to back off. I'll quote the second because I find the phrasing hilarious (McKenna seems to have a very wry, sardonic sense of humour).
"Loris proved most understanding when I presented our case to him this afternoon. He was also most appreciative that rumors of tapes describing his association with the Khan of the Not-Named proved false. As he so vehemently told me. any claim that he was in league with that treacherous woman is preposterous. He is lucky that we intercepted the tapes and prevented them being presented to the Grand Council."
:cheesy:
Thank you very much! And a perfect capture of the Snow Ravens' machiavellian nature. I hope we get some more backstory from his POV. :smilie_happy_thumbup:
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Hoo boi, how they'll be goggling to discover in the 31st millenium, that the Wolverines survived and thrived in an society that will match if not overmatch their own by that time with equipment on par if not better to their own...
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I can see one major set of goals that NIOPs and the SLDF will have. That is to have a Navy, Army, and enough replacement programs to fight the whole Clan forces.
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I can see one major set of goals that NIOPs and the SLDF will have. That is to have a Navy, Army, and enough replacement programs to fight the whole Clan forces.
What's going to really piss the clanners off is that the new NIOPS Hegemony with a Wolverine/SLDF military is on the wrong side of the IS. It would take at least another 18 months to over two years to circumnavigate the IS completely to attack them, so they're effectively unassailable unless they somehow steamroll through everyone. That's extremely unlikely with NIOPS most likely playing the role of well armed arsenal of democracy er freedom er the people less bad than Nicky's cult.
Trying to get at them by going around the IS would just about double their supply lines, and while theoretically they could try going through abandoned or empty systems within the IS, it would be extremely risky given that there could be pirates, smugglers or other unregistered/off the grid colonies in some of those systems, and the various Great Houses probably have some occasional patrols through those systems or some hidden military, intelligence gathering or other clandestine resources that have been kept off the official maps. Even worse, the phone company has similar assets throughout, and it would only take tripping over one to blow the whole operation. It's not like anyone has forgotten that the SLDF and Hegemony routinely hid things in uninhabited systems frequently.
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Clans: First we take Terra, then we take Niops
Comstar: U WUT M8?!
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They always had the misconception that taking Terra would magically make the rest of the Inner Sphere fall in line... ::)
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Part XXVIII- Section 1 of 2
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"Given that we weren't going to let them take over running our Hyperpulse Generator stations, but we did want to take advantage of the new C-Bill to conduct long-distance trade deals, a decision had to be made on how we were going to handle that. After some negotiations I offered to send the Precentor back home to Hednesford where he was based with a shipment of germanium that he would effectively convert into a credit note for C-Bills that we could use. I don't think he expected us to hand over a billion dollar's worth judging by the expression on his face but I suspect his superiors weren't too unhappy. We were certainly unhappy ourselves though when ComStar put an interdiction on the Free Worlds League a couple of years later because all our transmissions were routed through the stations there and not only were we effectively cut-off too, ComStar was holding a lot of our money we now couldn't spend."
Samantha Hollister - 2845 CE
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Zenith Jump- Point – Niops System – 2835
The Invader class jumpship Hikyaku was in a better state of repairs than most of its type these days, ComStar was wealthy enough not to skimp on regular visits to a shipyard for routine maintenance checks, and as a result Precentor Alan Stockdale was a little less nervous than he was when he was when forced to travel on a vessel belonging to someone else, but it nevertheless came as a great relief to him when they arrived intact at their intended destination.
Statistically jump-ship travel was supposed to be perfectly safe as long as you didn't do something stupid like try to jump more than thirty light-years, quick-charge your drive, or use a pirate-point, but Stockdale knew those statistics dated from the Star League era and standards had slipped since then. As a nervous interstellar traveller that it had only taken two jumps to get from Hednesford to their objective had also helped his mental wellbeing, every additional jump was another chance for something going wrong, and the fewer the jumps the easier it was to try and ignore them.
Having no desire to end up collateral damage from someone else's war being handed a cushy job as Precentor Hednesford had come as a great relief to Alan Stockdale, even if the long journey to get there from Terra in the first place had been hellish on his nerves. Hednesford was situated on the outer edge of the Free Worlds League a long way from the frontlines, and not much ever happened out there which would require him to get on a jump-ship either. Thanks to having the reasonably well-trained and well-equipped twenty-seventh Marik Militia regiment as its garrison force people on Hednesford didn't even have to worry about the pirate raids that were an all-too-common part of life that far out, pirates liked to keep clear of anyone that could shoot back.
Life had, in fact, been pretty sweet and uneventful for Precentor Alan Stockdale until the day an HPG signal arrived at Hednesford from a station that had been completely dark since the early days of the Amaris War, triggering a series of events that led to him being ordered to go make contact in person since he was the most senior member of ComStar available in the region.
As ComStar continued its program of restoring the Hyperpulse Generator network, so many of the old SLCOMNET stations having been lost over the years for various reasons including sabotage, lack of spare parts or even outright military action, there were always a few ComStar vessels travelling around the Inner Sphere and the closest of these was re-directed to Hednesford to collect Stockdale and ferry him to where the First Circuit ordered him to go.
Professional enough to do his research Stockdale had requested to be sent everything ComStar had on file about this old Star League scientific research colony that called itself the 'Niops Association' and he had made sure to learn all there was to know about the place before arriving. Basically just a bunch of astronomy nerds way out in the boonies, it was pretty obvious why they had remained in hiding all these years trying not to attract anyone's attention, the only mystery as far as Stockdale was concerned was why they had been starting to make their presence felt more recently. Over the last couple of years there were reports that they had been sending ships out to trade with neighbouring systems, and now they had seemingly decided to switch their HPG back on, and the authorities on Terra were somewhat curious as to why.
That was the problem with systems without a ComStar presence. It was a lot easier to know what was going on there if you could secretly read all their outgoing mail and there were also a few ROM agents disguised as technicians working in the local ComStar controlled HPG compound.
The first indication that there was a lot going on in Niops that ComStar wasn't aware of, and that the files the organisation had on the place were far from complete, was that when the ComStar jumpship arrived it was immediately hailed by an Olympus class recharge station at the Zenith point that had not been there during the Star League era and the second indication was a Blake-damned Essex class destroyer floating nearby, the warship transmitting an IFF signal that identified it as the former SLS Cape Bon now operating under Niops registration.
"What the ****** have I gotten myself into?" Stockdale asked himself quietly, trying to collect his thoughts as everyone else on the ship's bridge looked to him for guidance as to what they should do now. The ship's captain said he would analyse sensor data and check the records for anything on the 'Cape Bon' and he was soon at work while Stockdale collected himself.
Stockdale cleared his throat. "Open a channel to the Olympus" he ordered. "And do please let me know if that warship points its guns in our direction" he added sounding considerably more blasé about the situation than he felt. As well as the station and the warship there were also a half-dozen transport jumpships nearby, two of the Invader class like his own vessel, a Tramp, a pair of much larger Star Lord vessels and a gigantic Monolith, the latter more than a little surprising in itself as they were very, very rare and equally expensive.
"This is the ComStar jumpship Hikyaku, Precentor Alan Stockdale speaking" he began in a clear, unwavering voice. "We are here on the orders of Primus Conrad Toyama to make formal diplomatic contact with the Niops Association and to respond in person to your HPG transmission requesting access to the ComStar network" he said, fighting back his desire to ask about the station and the warship in particular because it would be an admission he had no idea they would be there. ComStar liked to project an aura of omniscience, not dumbfounded ignorance, so acting like you weren't surprised was following standard ComStar protocols for behaviour when you actually were.
"Welcome to Niops, Precentor Stockdale, this is Niops Traffic Control" a woman's voice replied. "Given that recharging your jumpdrive from our system's M5V Red Dwarf will take a while you are welcome to approach and we will beam additional energy from our emitters directly to your jump-sail to speed up the process" came the reply. "As you are on a diplomatic mission, not a commercial one, there will be no charge for the service" the transmission continued. "It's a free-of-charge, charge" they added after a pause, laughing. "Our station commander, Captain Horatio Petroni, is requesting to talk to you so you'll be dealing with him from now on. Have a nice day. Niops Traffic Control Out" the woman added.
Stockdale breathed a sigh of relief, despite the extremely unexpected presence of the warship the locals seemed friendly enough, generous even, ComStar controlled recharge stations in the Terran system would have wanted to be paid. "We appreciate your magnanimous offer of free access to your recharge service and will accept" he replied, grateful that it meant he would be able to return back to Hednesford quicker than he had feared. The problem with jumping into systems where the star was as small and dim as Niops was that it took noticeably longer to recharge your Kearny-fuchida drive than the usual week or so. "According to our files your capital is, or was, on Niops VII, if that is still so I would be grateful if you could arrange for me to be met by a representative from your government when my dropship arrives.
"Captain Petroni here" a man's voice from the station responded this time. "My apologies Precentor but foreigners are not permitted to land on any planet in the Niops system", sounding apologetic about it. "Given what has befallen the other worlds of the Terran Hegemony the Niops Association is a little paranoid about giving anyone the opportunity to mark civilian or industrial targets for orbital bombardment, or possibly learn the location of our orbital and ground-based defences" he explained. "Any negotiations or discussions will have to take place here at the Zenith jump-point though fortunately, given the compactness of our system, you should not find the light-speed communications delay between here and our capital nearly as grating to deal with as in most places" they continued. "You can't go get lunch and watch some TV while waiting for a reply here" he said humorously.
That would be annoying, Stockdale thought to himself, face-to-face negotiations were always to be preferred, and he was about to respond asking if he could talk to someone more senior about that when the man on the Olympus station started talking again.
"Speaking of television, I'm afraid that in order to minimise possible interference with equipment related to radio astronomy, our television and audio-only entertainment signals are all carried via cable, not over the airwaves, so your crew won't be able to tune into local media if they get bored" Petroni said. "It's one reason we were able to stay under the radar all these years, Niops was always a lot quieter than most inhabited systems across that part of the electromagnetic spectrum. If you stay still too long around here then I swear someone will build a Faraday cage around you" he joked. "You should read the letters of complaint in the newspapers from irate radio astronomers every time someone in the military switches on their radar. Trust me If anyone gets painted by a targeting array in Niops they had better take it seriously because nobody wants to fill out all the paperwork for the sake of bluffing."
Stockdale frowned. "Some allowance will have to be made to your rules eventually due to the need to allow ComStar technicians to take over the running of your Hyperpulse Generator anyway, so I'm sure your government will make an exception in my case if you check with them" he suggested, not entirely sure if that last part had been a veiled threat or not given its good-natured delivery.
"Why would we need ComStar to run our HPG?" the commander replied, sounding confused.
"In order to ensure it is properly maintained, they are extremely complicated devices that require great expertise and careful handling" Stockdale explained. "It's something of a miracle that yours still worked when you switched it back on after so many years."
"Actually we didn't switch it off so much as it went wrong back in the early 2770's and given the political situation at the time, what with Amaris and everything, we decided not to fix it until we actually needed it running again" Petroni replied. "When we did we just found the old SLCOMNET people that used to run the thing and put them back to work, replaced the parts that weren't working and fired it back up."
"You made your own replacement parts?" Stockdale asked incredulously.
"It's not difficult if you've got the complete blueprints and the right manufacturing facility" Captain Petroni replied conversationally. "I heard that making a whole new HPG from scratch took them a while the first time but they've gotten better at it since" he added.
Precentor Stockdale blinked and looked around the bridge to gauge the expressions of the other ComStar personnel around him, they looked as perturbed as he felt. "You made your own complete HPG?" he asked dubiously.
"Well yes, what would be the point of getting the one of Niops running again if there was nobody to talk to on it" Petroni replied. "Wait. Did you think we got our HPG here running again recently so we could talk to you?" he asked rhetorically. "No, we got it running ages ago so we could talk to our colonies over NHCOMNET. We just never got around to talking to you until now because we didn't need to until we started visiting the Inner Sphere for trade as much."
"NHCOMNET? What in the name of Blake is NHCOMNET?" Stockdale demanded to know.
"Niops Hegemony Communication Network, you know like SLCOMNET, but on a smaller scale of course" the station replied. "Not all our colonies have an HPG yet but we're getting there. Much less of a pain-in-the-ass than having to send jumpships as message couriers all the time."
Stockdale closed his eyes and took a deep breath to steady himself. "You have your own colonies out here and they're linked by their own HPG network?" he asked slowly. This situation went well beyond normal protocols of pretending to know all of this already, if he feigned to do so they would wonder why ComStar had not turned up before to take over the running of this 'NHCOMNET'.
"Well yeah, I mean it's the twenty-ninth century not the nineteenth. Did you think we were using two cans and a piece of string to communicate with each other out here or something?" the man on the station asked sardonically.
Precentor Alan Stockdale fought back the urge to loudly reply 'YES' and opted for a slightly less abrasive approach. "We were not aware of anyone producing Hyperpulse Generators other than ourselves" he said flatly instead. "At this juncture I must advise you that the Communications Protocol of 2787 places all HPG facilities under the control of ComStar with a guarantee of our neutrality towards all as regards control of the Hyperpulse network. As such each of your HPG stations will need to be placed in the custodianship of ComStar as soon as is practicable in order to comply with the protocol" he informed the man.
"Niops is not a signatory to the Communications Protocol of 2787, and I sincerely doubt my government is stupid enough to add its signature to the others after what happened in 2823 when you shut down your HPG on Tharkad just because you didn't want to pay your taxes" Petroni replied scornfully.
Stockdale was taken aback. "How do you know about that?" he asked.
"They talked about it on the News Channel. Just because you don't know what's happening out here doesn't mean we didn't keep a close eye on what's happening in the Inner Sphere, we even monitor the ComStar News Network even though your commentators self-evidently spin the news like a compact battlemech gyro" Petroni replied wryly. "I might not like what the people at NHCOMNET charge me to send a message to my daughter working on Copernicus, but at least their news agency has some concept of journalist integrity, they pay their damn taxes and they're not owned by a foreign power."
Stockdale turned to the ship's navigator and mouthed the word 'Copernicus' to him, the navigator checked the local star charts and then shrugged to indicate he had no idea where that was.
"I'm not sure there is much to be gained in continuing our conversation at this time Captain Petroni" Stockdale told him, it seemed like the man was not a fan of ComStar for some reason which the precentor attributed to either misinformation or considerably less probably out here from being very well informed. "I look forward to hearing from your government."
"If you think you'll get a better reception from the organ grinder on Niops VII than the monkey sat here then your timing stinks because it's an election year and there's not a politician in this system that wants to look weak on either national sovereignty or allowing tax dodging right now" Petroni told him, audibly chuckling. "I'll notify the authorities that you want to talk and they'll get in contact presently, but I'll warn ya that if you want a treaty with us it'll have to be on much better terms than the Great Houses agreed to. Petroni Out."
Alan Stockdale turned to the captain of the Hikyaku, the next most senior ComStar official aboard whose expression indicated he was also totally nonplussed by the situation they now found themselves in. "Do you think they'd let us borrow their HPG to send a message back to Terra asking what we should do next?" the captain of the jumpship suggested, unlike many ComStar vessels the Hikyaku had not been upgraded with a mobile HPG of its own as yet, the organisation was still prioritising resources towards getting as many of the old SLCOMNET stations running again as possible. "We could encrypt it" he added.
"It's worth considering but I would prefer not to start negotiations with their government with us seemingly owing them a favour in return" Stockdale replied. "Anyhow, for ComStar to have to ask somebody else to send an HPG transmission for them would be embarrassing for us, verging on humiliating" he added, shaking his head sadly.
"They still seem to regard themselves as affiliated to the Terran Hegemony in some way despite its demise" the captain observed thoughtfully. "I've taken a close look with optical sensors and the recharge station itself, the warship and the transport jumpships are all painted up in Star League colours and with insignia and markings matching those of the SLDF and Terran Hegemony, as well as the Red Cameron star we had heard rumours they used to identify themselves."
"Have you learned anything else useful about these people?" Stockdale asked.
The ship's captain nodded. "Boy, have we" he responded knowingly. "That warship, the Essex class destroyer, the external markings on her match her IFF, that being the SLS Cape Bon, and according to our database the last thing we have on file about her is that she was attached to the 295th Battlemech Division and was with them when they went chasing after Kerensky after being left behind in 2785."
"The 295th?" Stockdale queried, "didn't they turn merc after they failed to find Kerensky?"
"Perhaps some of them did, and ended up working for the Lyrans, and the rest chose to come here?" the captain suggested. "That merc group, I think they call themselves Raymond's Redcoats, sure as heck aren't division-sized and don't have the warships the 295th did" he said. "If so, that could explain why Niops isn't what we expected. They inherited most of an SLDF division plus their transport and warship assets."
Stockdale groaned. "And because they were a scientific research colony set up to be self-sufficient, one that was chock full of people with advanced degrees in physics and chemistry and whatever, they were able to keep a lot of that equipment running" he said, groaning again.
"Plenty of smarts, plenty of space lift and enough firepower that they didn't have to worry about anything short of a full-scale invasion by one of the Great Houses, and you end up with what we might be looking at right now. A little piece of the Terran Hegemony still going strong out in the periphery" the captain theorised. "You know, if we're right then they're not really so different than us."
"How so?" Stockdale asked.
"If it wasn't for General Lauren Hayes leading her SLDF divisions to Terra in support of Jerome Blake would civilisation have survived and prospered there?" the ship's captain asked rhetorically. "I doubt it was just the Communications Protocol of 2787 that stopped the Great Houses invading Terra when they did the rest of the Hegemony, the notion of having to deal with eight SLDF divisions would have given them pause for thought too."
"Maybe if we play up that we're also a Star League remnant, SLCOMNET rebranded, and push the line that we had SLDF support in establishing ourselves on Terra that could help things run more smoothly" Stockdale said thoughtfully.
"That was my thinking Sir" the captain replied. "Was it not Blake himself that said you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar?"
Not originally, Stockdale knew, but under Conrad Toyama's rule ComStar had being increasingly less secular and prone to ascribing Jerome Blake with even more wisdom than he had in real life. It was of course dangerous to say anything that might be seen as denying the man's supposed omniscience, so Stockdale nodded instead. In the wake of the so-called 'Purification', as Toyama's purges were known, only an idiot did anything that might lead to ROM investigating them for signs of disloyalty or a lack of belief in the divine plan as set out by Blake and implemented by his successor.
The chances that there wasn't a ROM agent aboard the ship were extremely slim, perhaps there was more than one, and given that a significant proportion of the rest of the crew were potential informers that would pass along anything they heard to ComStar's intelligence branch it was vitally important to always keep to the straight and narrow. Precentor ROM Michelle Dupreas had eyes and ears everywhere, and the woman was dangerously competent and completely ruthless as well as being utterly loyal to Toyama.
"If this an election year, as the man said, then presumably they maintained a democratic system as was the norm in the Terran Hegemony" Stockdale mused aloud. "That may present the possibility of an alternative course of action than in other places where we seek to sway the authorities to see things our way" he suggested. "Public opinion matters more in such a society than it would in the Capellan Confederation, for example, this may be a situation where the Primus might be best served by advice that we should not try and force the issue regarding the Communications Protocol since an opportunity exists to exert pressure from below should we be able to appeal to the masses."
"I would be happy to endorse such a proposal if you wished me to do so" the ship's captain responded, not just because he agreed but because it would see his name on a document presented to the Primus himself. "We could deny them access to the ComStar network, refuse to forward on any HPG transmissions they send out, but that would antagonise them without cutting off their access to the other systems they profess to control. The Lyran Alliance folded quickly when we placed an Interdiction or Tharkad because they could not easily govern their nation without HPG communications but that would not be the case here."
"That is what makes this situation such a potential powder-keg that must be treated gingerly" Stockdale concurred. "We find ourselves in a situation where the thoughtful and careful employment of soft power is the safer course of action. For one thing we still need to learn more, far more, about these people, their capabilities and their intentions" he said before smiling as he considered the great benefit that could be gained by allowing communications from Niops to be forwarded on via the ComStar network in the interim before any agreement was actually finalised, ROM could potentially learn a great deal from reading them as they already did everyone else's mail. For that matter investigating what these additional systems the locals professed to control could be very useful, particularly if they did not hold to the same regulations regarding letting people from elsewhere land. "Given that the Primus and the First Circuit will surely wish to make the final decision anyway, then perhaps it behoves me to downplay my authority still further" he pondered aloud, smiling. "Vagueness and procrastination tinged with an aura of what looks like fair-minded reasonableness while we fill in the blanks."
"Caution and prudence is usually the wisest course of action when dealing with the unknown" the ship's captain agreed. "Spend enough time out here at the edge of civilisation and you learn that lesson well" he continued. "As Blake said, 'knowledge is power'" he quoted the great man once again.
"And what is ComStar but that aphorism incarnate?" Stockdale asked rhetorically, agreeing with the sentiment although he knew it was actually Sir Francis Bacon who wrote that centuries before the birth of Jerome Blake.
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Part XXVIII- Section 2 of 2
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Aboard the recharge station Captain Horatio Petroni, formerly of the Potemkin class cruiser Ulithi but long since reassigned because that vessel was mothballed for the foreseeable future, was grateful he had been advised that ComStar might be showing up in person and had been given an outline of what to say if they did. Putting them in their place without excessively antagonising them, and giving them a few hints as to what the situation was in Niops so they could feel clever by putting two-and-two together, was the order of the day. If Niops simply told them 'this is where the 295th Battlemech division ended up' it would encourage them to keep digging and digging, but letting them work out a lot of things themselves based on some scattered clues and casual remarks then hopefully they would feel pleased with themselves and subconsciously not want their theories to be wrong.
Fifth generation career military, navy of course hence his father lumbering him with the given name 'Horatio', Captain Petroni might have preferred to be still serving aboard a warship but the recharge station was hardly a command that lacked for prestige, despite being barely half-way complete. As yet only half the recharge batteries were in place, so it could only serve only four jumpships at once, only a single grav-deck was installed and spinning and as yet none of the repair bays was fully operational but externally at least it appeared complete and should suitably impress the telephone company.
They would be even more impressed, or perhaps distressed, if they knew that before she was finished the station would be home to several squadrons of Voidseeker AI-controlled aerospace fighters salvaged from Camelot Command, as well as more considerably more firepower of its own than a typical Olympus could boast, but that would be something they, or someone else, would have to learn the hard way. For now just encountering the Cape Bon as guardship should be enough to ensure the security of the station again anyone arriving at the Zenith point with ill intent while the rest of the system was defended by a frankly excessive number of aerospace fighters and armed dropships not to mention several warships that were not mothballed.
It looked like the government really wanted to play nice with ComStar because after reporting back to the capital via encrypted tightbeam signal Petroni was told that Secretary Hollister herself was catching a dropship to come up and meet them, presumably with a spooky intelligence type or two in-tow. There was no particular rush of course, even with the recharge-station beaming power to the ComStar jumpship they couldn't leave for a week anyway, but Hollister should arrive in three days according to her message which Petroni took as her wanting to get the message across that Niops wasn't rejecting good relations with ComStar by denying them access to any of the planets in the system, it was just standard policy.
In a similar vein Petroni offered to send over some fresh food to the Hikyaku if they were interested, even asking if they might want a couple of crates of beer thrown in as a sign of being a good host, but Stockdale rejected the offer of the beer thereby making himself an enemy of several of the ships crew whose promise to abstain until off-duty was apparently just not enough for the Precentor.
Truth be told Samantha Hollister was always looking for an excuse to get away from the office, and having already told Giles Olson that whether he was re-elected as High Associator or not there was no way she was going to stay on as Secretary of Trade and Industry, she wasn't bothered if some trivial administrative paperwork backed up in her absence.
With the first of the new model Hussar light mechs now rolling off the production line, only one every two weeks so far but production should be ramping up to double that by next year, Hollister was happy enough with how she had performed in the job. A few days ago she had signed off on developing a second-generation Niops Hussar with a suite of Improved Sensors based on those of the Stag, and that thing should far outclass anything this side of Strana Mechty for decades to come at least.
Metal imports from the Illyrian Palatinate had levelled off as domestic production finally started to catch up with demand, but the prices the Illyrians charged were so low they would likely continue as long as Niops had the obsolete and replaced military hardware to trade for the imports. You could buy a lot of copper or steel for a shipment of Star league era lasers or autocannons that would otherwise gather dust in a warehouse and some in government were starting to come around to the idea that there was a lot of potential in arms dealing, or rather arms trading and barter.
The Majesty Metals and Manufacturing corporation in the Magistracy of Canopus manufactured a tank the SLDF was well familiar with, the Manticore, as well as an aerospace fighter the Sabre both of which were seen as suitable for equipping planetary militias. What the corporation did not, or could not manufacture was the kind of advanced late Star League equipment that equipped Royal Divisions, such as the ERPPC and the Double Heat Sinks needed to operate them effectively, whereas Niops could.
Niops would have to set up a few new production lines, likely on Alphard, to churn out what was to them outdated gear but the Magistracy would love to have it. Perhaps even greeting the offer with more enthusiasm than they had shown when asked if they might be interesting in purchasing Jamerson-Ulikov Water Purifiers at cost when they were put into mass production. That had been an idea from the diplomatic corps, Niops could charge a fortune for the things but they wouldn't and would even offer the blueprints for free to anyone that asked. It was part of a plan to present themselves as the Terran Hegemony reborn, but a bit nicer than before, to help project a positive image in the wider galaxy.
Given the number of worlds that were effectively dying for the lack of a relatively cheap, reliable source of water for agriculture these days it seemed unlikely that the scheme would not be well received, at least by the general public at large.
That was partially why they wanted access to the ComStar network and also needed to be on good terms with the phone-company, at least long enough for word to spread about the purifiers and also that Niops was looking for people to emigrate to the new Hegemony anyway. They also wanted to make contact with several firms based in different parts of the Inner Sphere, including Terra itself where they were likely under the thumb of ComStar, to negotiate licenses to legally build various pieces of hardware.
Franklin Hallis had taken a look at a sales brochure for the relatively new Schrek tank made by Aldis on Terra and opined that by swapping out the three PPC's for Improved PPC's or a pair of Enhanced ERPPC's they would have a machine that could give armoured regiments the mobile firepower to take on most anything. Of course, given the Wolverine's evident PPC obsession that could have been some bias showing on his part. Funding the development of the Improved Enhanced ERPPC was already eating into the military R&D budget, and Hollister had vetoed outright a request for half a billion dollars to look into whether an Enhanced Naval PCC would be a complete boondoggle or not.
Finding herself with some time to ponder the way things were going as the dropship ferried her to go meet the ComStar Precentor Samantha Hollister was feeling pretty satisfied that under her watch industry was expanding, finances were secure and she had successfully managed to convince Olson not to expand the Hegemony faster than was prudent.
She only hoped that whoever took over from her as Secretary of Trade and Industry was wise enough to follow the same path, because if you weren't prepared to say 'no' to most requests for funding there wasn't enough germanium of Alphard to pay for anything everyone asked for.
You had to be opportunistic though. The news that someone had just nuked the factory on Errai in the Draconis Combine where the Maltex Corporation had made the Thug assault mech was such an opportunity. Under the circumstances it was well worth sending Maltex an HPG asking what they might want for the blueprints and a manufacturing license because they weren't going to be making them anymore and they would really need a cash injection right now. That Niops was perfectly happy to agree not to export the things, so if Maltex eventually got back on their feet they wouldn't be a competitor on future sales, helped seal the deal (although Maltex did still complain about Niops being vultures when being bargained down hard in price).
ComStar's new 'C-Bill' just made the whole process of transferring the money so easy too. Reading all the transmissions going back and forth ComStar was pleased to learn that Niops would only be hand-building the things, needing a few new assaults to replace older ones that were wearing out apparently, but they greatly underestimated what 'hand-building' meant in Niops Association terms.
For that matter if they had known what a Niops built Royal Thug actually mounted in terms of weaponry and armour ComStar would have been downright appalled.
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Note from the Author:
Senior ComStar (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/ComStar) officials are known as Precentors with your rank in the organisation being determined by where you are Precentor for. My OC here, Alan Stockdale, is Precentor Hednesford so he's mid-ranking. The Hednesford (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Hednesford) system, 35LY from Niops, is important emough that the Free Worlds League kept a decent sized garrison there, the Twenty-Seventh Marik Militia (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/27th_Marik_Militia), and unlike many systems on the edge of the periphery it was never abandoned so it's not an important backwater.
At this point ComStar is run by Conrad Toyama (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Conrad_Toyama) and still in transition from being a continuation of the old SLCOMNET (as it mostly was under Jerome Blake) to becoming the fanatical, quasi-religious organisation it became under Toyama's successor Raymond Karpov (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Raymond_Karpov). Don't get me wrong, Toyama wasn't remotely nice but it was under Karpov that ComStar went, well, full ComStar (never go full Comstar). To give one example, under Toyama ComStar technicians still just wore grey jumpsuits as a uniform (like SLCOMNET did) but Karpov made them wear robes like those of a medieval monk and failing to chant over Hyperpulse Generators (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Hyperpulse_Generator) was going to get you into a lot of trouble. Toyama dies in 2837 and then things are going to get... interesting.
The Olympus (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Olympus) station at the Niops Zenith jump-point looks more complete than it really is (the construction crews are working on the station at Annie Jump Cannon) and between gher and the presence of an Essex (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Essex_II_(WarShip_class)) class destroyer like the Cape Bon (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Cape_Bon) the ComStar people are really caught out here. After recieving an HPG from a periphery station that had been dark for decades they expected to find a tiny colony barely hanging on but instead ran into a hitherto unknown interstellar nation. Given that much of the reputation ComStar and ROM (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/ROM) has for excellence in intelligence gathering is simply down to reading everyone's mail the notion that they might let Niops forward their hyperpulse messages via the ComStar network isn't too implausible (they really want to read them) although at some point they are going to insist on taking over NHCOMNET (and won't like the response).
The ComStar C-Bill (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/C-bill) was introduced in 2835 and helped a lot with cross-border commerce (each power has its own currency). Another thing that happened in 2835 was the destruction of the Thug (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Thug) factory on Errai (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Errai) belonging to the Maltex Corporation (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Maltex_Corporation). Despite being based in the Draconis Combine after their factory was destroyed Maltex gave Earthwerks Incorporated (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Earthwerks_Incorporated) a license to produce the Thug in the Free Worlds League (albeit a downgraded version) so Hollister isn't the only opportunist vulture out there. The Wolverines having a thing for PPC's seems like a quirk they'd have so them hankering for the Schrek (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Schrek) seems apt (it's made by Aldis (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Aldis_Industries), a company based on ComStar controlled Terra).
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Quick map update for you:
(https://imagizer.imageshack.com/img924/9490/OTv42n.gif)
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I like this development. Moar! :evil:
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I'm not sure Paulinus was in the Lothian League that early, but I'm liking the rest of the story! :)
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The last few segments of part sounds like they should happen after the Niops/Comstar treaty is signed...? As they imply using Comstar's HPG network?
It's a bit of a weird transition jumping from "going to the meeting" to "And now that the meeting is (a significant) time ago X happens".
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Part XXIX
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"Genetic engineering is a valuable tool, but it needs to be heavily regulated and closely monitored and if you think otherwise I don't think you've been paying close enough attention."
High Associator Giles Olson - 2838CE
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Reykjanes Island Training Grounds - Niops VII – 2835
Mechwarrior Henry Callahan would have preferred to be in the cockpit of almost any other machine than the one he was right that moment, partially because the Mongoose battlemech he was piloting had neither the armour nor the armament for taking on the OPFOR Phoenix Hawk that had appeared in front of him, but mostly because piloting a totem mech of Clan Mongoose made his flesh crawl.
It wasn't even one of the MON-66b Royal versions of the Mongoose, that at least would have been packing an Extended-Range Large Laser and the heatsinks to use it, but with only his trio of Medium Lasers to play with Henry couldn't use his speed advantage to open up the range and hope for a few lucky hits.
He could run, but that would allow the opposition Phoenix Hawk to flank Bravo Lance to the west and put shots into their sides and rear making it an unacceptable choice. They themselves were slugging it out with a couple of enemy Dervish mediums and a Flashman heavy so they couldn't come to his aid, and the rest of his own lance had already been knocked out by a strafing run by a trio of Stuka aerospace fighters.
Practically screaming warnings to Bravo Lance over the comms Henry poured on the speed to make himself a more difficult target as he exchanged fire with the Phoenix Hawk. Naturally everyone was using lasers at their low-powered training setting but it still looked spectacular enough in the reddish twilight of early evening on Niops.
The exercise simulated an environment with extremely hard jamming going on, so the computers in the comms system would not let you talk to anyone more than a klick away. This meant Henry couldn't reach either the battalion or regimental commander to warn them that the opposition had realised there was a weak point in the line and they were pushing it hard. All he could do was hope that someone else noticed the developing situation and had advised the senior officers, perhaps one of the pilots contesting for air-superiority above his head was making sure to keep an eye on the ground too because aerial observation was part of their job description.
You never realised how much easier this all was with well-informed command and control from above until you didn't have that, a little voice in the back of Henry's mind observed as he continued to exchange fire with the Phoenix Hawk. It helped you gain a much better appreciation of what Karl von Clausewitz had called the 'Fog of War' when you lacked the near-omniscience you had fighting a battle when all the sensors and electronic displays were working properly, radio comms were crystal clear and you had a senior officer with a fancy battlecomputer next to him feeding him tactical data automatically sorted in order of importance.
Not that Henry remembered von Clausewitz's book On War all that fondly from having it sections from it read to him as a bedtime story when he was little. It required more concentration than The Art of War by Sun Tzu ever had so it made it more difficult to get to sleep.
Of course, if you wanted nightmares there was always Des Principes de la Guerre by Ferdinand Foch that seemed to argue that with enough moral courage, esprit de corps and personal élan an attacking force could overwhelm any defender through sheer momentum. Given that the repeating rifle, machinegun and quick-fire artillery had all been invented before Foch wrote the book, and trench warfare was already very much a thing, Henry could only wonder as to the man's sanity or intelligence. With the outbreak of Terra's First World War General Foch's theories had run headlong into reality and proved about as successful in practice as you would expect, a bullet doesn't care how brave or skilled you are, it only cares if you're in its way.
As simulated damage built up and the cockpit display started to light up with warnings Henry was still calm enough to register another enemy machine closing in and he started to react to the new threat when a burst from an AC/20 impacted all over the torso of his Mongoose and it was deemed by the computer to have been knocked out with its pilot killed.
Since it was only an exercise not a real battle the AC/20 rounds were flash-bangs rather than the HEAP (High Explosive Armour Piercing) they would have been otherwise, but they were still heavy enough that Henry's light mech had rocked a little with the impact. The Mongoose was only a twenty-five tonner and although the muzzle-velocity of an AC/20 wasn't that high by autocannon standards a shell that was at least 150mm in calibre, the actual size depending on the model of AC/20 in question, had plenty of kinetic energy.
Henry sigh as his mech automatically shut down and he lost the ability to communicate with any 'live' mechs on his own team, dead men don't talk.
The radio switched over to the band 'dead' combatants were on and Henry heard laughter over his headphones. "As Major Prigioni would say, Mechwarrior Callahan sleeps with the fishes" Henry recognised Fred's voice.
"Yeah, and he's dead too" Dave Robertson added for himself, laughing.
"That joke was funnier the first three times you guys said it" Henry growled back at them.
"Hey man, don't date a chick with gills if you can't take a joke" Dave responded, still cackling away.
"At least I'm not going steady with my right hand like you are Robertson" Henry retorted.
"Gross" Katrina's voice interjected. Henry could well imagine her look of distaste he had known the girl his whole life. "You were lucky as hell avoiding that strafing run that got the rest of us Henry" she observed.
"Luck? No, it was pure skill" Henry lied, how his mech had managed to avoid getting tagged by any of the weapons being fired at it during the strafing run was a miracle. A Stuka mounted four Enhanced ERPPC's in the wings and either a gauss rifle or an AC/20 in the nose, any of which could bring down a Mongoose with little trouble. Hell, a Stuka with that loadout would give an Atlas assault mech nightmares.
"If we were lucky Henry would have been knocked out and you would have still been alive Kat" Frederick suggested. "That Talon you're in might have taken out the Phoenix Hawk Henry was tussling with."
"Maybe if she didn't shoot like a girl" Dave responded.
"I'm a better shot than you are Robertson" Katrina defended herself. That was the main reason they had assigned her the only mech in the lance that mounted an ERPPC, she could get the best use out of the thing at long range.
Which was not to say that any of the former sibcadets were actually bad shots, they were all in fact exceptional marksmen both in and out of a battlemech, it was just that Katrina had the highest scores of any of them on the range. Henry thought it was because the girl had just a little more patience when it came to lining up her shots before pulling the trigger or pressing the button.
A thought struck Henry that it was actually pretty funny that being objectively some of the most highly skilled mechwarriors on the planet, if lacking practical experience in combat, their lance had been unceremoniously smeared by a few fighter jocks and they could have done very little about it.
As an object lesson in why combined-arms-warfare was the way to do things it ranked up there with last weeks exercise during which the lance Jennifer was with walked into a simulated minefield and was then virtually plastered by artillery while they tried to pick their way through it.
No doubt about it, Henry decided, never leave home without a few Rifleman mechs to provide air-defence and some combat engineers to sweep for mines.
The scuttlebutt said that once a few more Project Workshops were up-and-running General Romanov intended to start hand-building small numbers of various machines for niche purposes, and that these would include a few lances of the Rifleman II design that had never made it into mass production by the Star League. The Successor States might not have as many warships as they used to these days, but they still had plenty of aerospace fighters and keeping them off her mechwarriors while they brought their superior firepower to bear on enemy ground forces was not a part of modern warfare to be ignored. Even a big, hundred-ton Stuka would not enjoy coming in on an attack run and being lit up by twin Large Pulse Lasers and a pair of LB 10X autocannons spitting flak while they were trying to line up their shot. Anything smaller would likely hightail it out of there straight away because aerospace fighters don't just shut down when enough internal systems are crippled as happens in a battlemech, well they do but after that they crash into the ground hard.
Obtaining useful salvage from a knocked-out enemy mech after a battle is very much the norm, finding anything in a wrecked aerospace fighter that remains in one piece after the airframe intersected with the ground at high speed was miraculous.
"Wanna hit the bar later to drown our sorrows?" Fred asked the rest of the lance in a deadpan tone of voice.
"I'd prefer not to get thrown in the glasshouse thanks Hallis" Henry replied evenly.
"Come on, it'll be fun" Dave said. "We could get T-Shirts made with 'Instant Maniac: Just add alcohol' printed on them" he joked.
"That's not funny Robertson" Katrina complained.
"To be fair the expression on that cop's face when you body slammed him was pretty hilarious from where I was standing Kat" Frederick disagreed.
"You started that shit Hallis, all you had to do was go quietly when he wanted to slap the cuffs on you for throwing that poor off-duty NAM schmuck through the bar window but no, you had to yell out 'Wolverines' and then we couldn't not get involved" Henry complained.
"You have free will don't you?" Fred asked rhetorically.
"I think it's now well established that we don't Fred, not really, not unless we're both sober and not under stress" Henry replied flatly. "If that judge hadn't accepted the testimony from those geneticists that that jerk who stuck those modified warrior and fight-or-flight genes in us messed up we would have all been behind bars instead of being sentenced to the army instead."
"We were all going to join the army when we graduated High-School anyway so no harm, no foul" Dave contended.
"I would have liked the choice" Henry muttered. Philomena was a few months into her bio-science degree now and he had considered going to university with her, albeit studying a different subject, when the fall-out from Gamma sibko's eighteenth birthday celebration the year before had ruled that out completely.
They had always known that the geneticists who spliced them together had tweaked their fight-or-flight instinct, attempting to make the future warriors of Clan Wolverine more closely resemble the temperament of their totem animal that never backed down from an opponent regardless of how much bigger and more powerful it was than them it was. What had not become apparent until they were old enough to drink was that one of those modified genes reacted badly to alcohol, very badly.
All having the same 'birthday', all having been decanted from the Iron Wombs on the same day, and what with the legal age to drink being eighteen on Niops, they had decided to all go to a bar to celebrate. After a few drinks they had all become pretty rowdy but the trigger to what happened next was when one of the off-duty NAM infantry who were drinking at the same bar accidentally jostled Fred, spilling his drink.
Angry words were exchanged, threats made, a punch thrown and then Frederick Hallis went completely mental and threw a man through the bar window.
Several of the NAM people ended up hospitalised before the police arrived mob-handed, the first of them being assaulted by a cute teenage blonde with her hair in braids before electric stun guns and batons were employed to restore order and restrain a bunch of very drunk genetically-engineered lunatics.
They were all just lucky that the judge decided that fines, a few weeks community service and a minimum of thirty years in the army was the appropriate sentence and not jail. What likely swayed her was the argument that since it was Franklin Hallis and his people that had made these ticking time-bombs then he should be the one to have to deal with this shit.
Naturally the judge also ruled that everyone from sibko Gamma, as well as the other younger kits with the same modified genes, was now legally obliged to never touch alcohol for their entire lives. It clearly impaired their higher functions and lowered their inhibitions in such a way as their instincts became unrestrained, and their instincts were not those appropriate to a civilised society.
Just because it was pretty cool to watch a nature documentary where a transplanted Terran Wolverine took on a Ghost Bear several times its size on Strana Mechty, the bear retreating from the sharp teeth, vicious claws and sheer ferocity of the smaller animal, did not mean it was a good idea to let human versions of the things run around free and unfettered.
At least the genetic engineers that made the Ironborn kits had stripped out the genes linked to alcoholism and addictive behaviour so it wasn't as difficult to get them to abstain as it might have been otherwise.
"Do you think we'll still get a place on the next cohort being run through the Gunslinger program after this fiasco?" Katrina asked.
"Only if we do a lot better tomorrow. There's a lot of others wanting on the list and they've all got seniority on us, most have seen a little action too" Fred replied glumly. "Face it, until we get to tussle with some pirates ourselves all that talk about how skilled we are is just talk."
"I Know I've said it before but I'm not sure that hammering some third-rate mechwarriors in fourth-rate machines is really the best arbiter of ability" Henry maintained. "If you put the kits from Zeta or Iota sibkos in SLDF Royals I'd bet they'd tear the average pirate command apart and most of them aren't old enough to shave."
"Romanov is old-school, that's why she made us go through basic training and then the trainee mechwarriors course even though we could have taught those classes" Katrina observed.
Dave laughed. "Do you remember the expression on Jennifer's face when that sergeant started showing us how to strip down and clean a rifle?"
"If she had just kept her mouth shut instead of telling him she could do that blindfold when she was eight not eighteen she would have done a lot fewer push-ups that week" Fred recalled, laughing himself.
"Those Drill Instructors didn't like us very much" Katrina remembered.
"They sure-as-shit didn't after you dislocated that one's shoulder Kat" Henry replied flatly.
"He shouldn't have told me to try and break free of his hold, it wasn't my fault I'm stronger and faster than I look and I caught him by surprise getting the leverage before he could counter my move" Katrina replied. "Unarmed Combat Instructor my ass" she muttered to herself just loud enough for the others to hear.
"Exercise should finish soon, if we're quick we can get back to barracks first and hit the showers before the hot water runs out" Dave suggested. That was one benefit of driving a fast, light mech, the guys and gals in larger, slower machines had to eat your dust.
"The hot water doesn't run out here you idiot, they push pump cold water into the ground through one hole and hot water comes out of another hole drilled next to it" Fred told him. "It's unlimited free geothermal energy, didn't you notice all the freaking volcanoes around here?"
"More to the point how did he not notice that the water sometimes smells sulphurous and put two and two together" Henry asked.
"Is that what that smell is? I though it was someone's shitty deodorant" Dave replied.
"Only if there's a brand called 'Dante: The Tenth Level of Fragrance', you bozo" Kat responded curtly. General opinion was that Dave might have gotten saKhan Dwight Robertson's good looks but clearly not his brains, Fred I fact personally theorised one of the other genetic donors concerned might have even been an Ice Hellion somehow because those guys were dense.
When the exercise ended, somehow amazingly their side had apparently won despite their own minimal contribution to the victory, the four of them trudged their mechs back towards barracks for a shower followed by chowtime, Henry thinking more about the fog-of-war and force multipliers.
At the lowest level just having good sensors on your mech mattered a lot. If you ran into an enemy Hunchback then knowing whether it was a HBK-4G with an AC/20 or one of the HBK-4H models being fielded now that swapped the big gun for a longer-ranged but less devastatingly punchy AC/10 could save your life. On that note the recent intelligence briefing that the Beagle Active Probe was no longer being produced by any of the Great Houses was definitely good news for Niops because it meant that the new model Hussar in production that did mount one was even more of a force multiplier now than it had been when approved for production.
If the Inner Sphere was starting to fall behind that far in electronics then it also explained why General Romanov was starting to make noise about not just wanting those Rifleman II mechs for additional air defence capabilities but also a handful of the CP-10-Z model of the Cyclops. It wasn't so much that they needed yet another assault mech type in service for fighting it out on the front lines it was that the CP-10-Z was equipped with a Tacticon B-2000 battlecomputer that enabled the senior officer sat in the cockpit to effectively command an entire brigade from their chair, put all the regimental and battalion commanders in a Highlander, or ideally a more modern command mech like the Nightstar if enough of them could be made, and command and control would be greatly enhanced.
Naturally if they were going to be turning out the Rifleman II, Cyclops, and maybe even a short production run of the Nightstar then Franklin Hallis's dream of getting his hands on a few lances of new-built Devastator assaults was going to have to be put on hold. They were at least going to get to field a larger number of the lighter and considerably cheaper Thug assault now instead of course, the license having been brought for a fraction of it's true worth from the poor Maltex Corporation who badly needed any money they could get urgently, but the Thug was no Devastator unfortunately.
Compared to what they had to spend to get the license and technical package for the Blackjack the Thug was actually expensive though. General Motors had been clearly amazed that anyone actually wanted to make the Blackjack again, given the mech's piss-poor reputation, and knowing that any they made themselves just weren't going to sell they let it go for a song.
The fact that GM had fixed all the main problems with the design of the machine decades ago had been no help to the company because its rep was already considered unsalvageable by that point. There had been a lot of lousy battlemech designs over the years but the early versions of the Blackjack were pretty unique in that most people expected to be handed a brand-new machine that didn't suffer from the armour being too brittle and falling off in chunks when struck by an impact or the feet not being undersized so the thing had problems staying upright on even moderately broken ground.
If you wanted a machine that potential foes would badly underestimate then the Blackjack was a good way to go however. Not only wasn't it going to randomly fall over in Niops service, nor was its armour plate about as useful as cardboard, by replacing the standard AC/2 popguns with an Improved AC/5 designed to look as much like the original armament as possible the Blackjack in use by Planetary Militias in the Niops Hegemony would not be the machine the enemy was expecting.
If the other side underestimated you then the chances of them being sloppy and unprofessional went up sharply and they would pay for that badly once the autocannon rounds started to fly.
At least with ComStar playing nice, at least for now, Niops was able to make diplomatic overtures to the Great Houses and strike deals with companies throughout the Inner Sphere and Near Periphery without having to send jumpships hundreds of lightyears. The High Associator had agreed that Niops would neither offer to sell HPG technology, blueprints or manuals to the powers who had signed up to the Communications Protocol of 2787 in return for access to the ComStar network while further negotiations were ongoing, and presumably ComStar was happy with the opportunity to read Niops's mail.
Most of the Great Houses barely acknowledged Niops coming to them to say hello, with only the Free Worlds League paying too much attention because of their geographical position and the fact they realised now who it was that had brought the rights to the Alphard Trading Corporation operating in that part of space. A FWL flagged jumpship had arrived in Niops to take a look, seemed suitably surprised to run into the Cape Bon and then headed back to Marik territory only to appear again a month later in the Alphard system where it was told that if it wanted to trade then it would have to go through proper channels via Niops.
The High Associator did manage to score some diplomatic points with House Marik when revealing that the Niops military was actually the old 295th Battlemech Division which then led on to them learning that the people pretending to be the old 295th, the mercenary regiment Raymond's Redcoats, were actually the 38th Amaris Fusiliers who had turned pirate as the Cameron's Curse before rebranding again and going legit.
Since Raymonds Redcoats worked for the Lyran Commonwealth it meant that Marik propaganda had some fun attacking their long-term enemy for being the kind of people that would happily employ pirates and war criminals and they actually went so far as to send an HPG to Jenna Romanov asking for her to comment personally.
All Romanov had to say on the matter was that if any of Raymond's Redcoats ever got within three jumps of Niops territory then she would have them seized, put up against a wall and then shot for sullying the good name of her command.
After that everything had soon calmed back down as the entire Inner Sphere, including the Free Worlds League, went back to focusing on the war. It wasn't like these periphery weirdos claiming to be the Star League or the Terran Hegemony reborn or whatever, really mattered in the big scheme of things.
Ongoing contact with the rest of human space wasn't even the lead news item on Niops for all that long. After the re-election of Giles Olson to what would be his final term of office according to the Niops Constitution the next news item of interest was the discovery of large deposits of diamonds and fire opals on Galileo, and then the discovery of another Star League science colony near Frobisher known by the codename 'Project Sagittarius Umbrella'.
The locals called it 'McEvedy's Folly' which is why they freaked when they saw the nametag on one of the SLDF people sent out to investigate further.
It wasn't Jennifer's fault that she apparently had a distant cousin who put Ogbert Farnstrom in the shade when it came to the top-ten rankings of Mad Scientists was it?
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Note from the Author:
Wanting to imitate some of the traits of their totem animal is very much a clan thing and the Wolverines wanting to add a little of the personality and attitude of the mustelid Gulu gulu (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolverine) into their warrior caste while meddling with their DNA strikes me as very plausible. There are in fact several known 'Warrior Genes' the most well known of which relates to MAO-A (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monoamine_oxidase_A), but a couple of particularly interesting variants were found during a study of Finnish males in prison for violent crime. It was discovered that if they carried two particular genes they were thirteen times more likely to have a history of repeat violent behavior and that being drunk had a triggering effect (there's another similar 'warrior gene' found in the Māori of New Zealand apparently).
The now adult kits of sibko Gamma have a severely borked fight-or-flight (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fight-or-flight_response) response even when sober and their warrior genes go completely off the rails when they're drunk.
Still, if you want to see some really crazy genetic engineering then just visit McEvedy's Folly (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Touring_the_Stars:_McEvedy%27s_Folly) where it makes what the Star League were up to on Frobisher look entirely reasonable!
Jenna Romanov hankering for small numbers of the Cyclops (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Cyclops) as a brigade command mech and the Rifleman II (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Rifleman_II) for air defence is a good, rational choice. Her also wanting the heads of Raymond's Redcoats (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Raymond%27s_Redcoats) on a stick is more of a personal thing.
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I think you mean Lyran Commonwealth, not Lyran Alliance... unless there's been one hell of a timeskip!
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You know, if they swap out the guns on the Rifleman II for Clan equivalents and add more armor, you basically end up with a lighter, non-jumping Emperor C which can happily slap someone with 10-point hits followed by LBX clusters for days on end.
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I think you mean Lyran Commonwealth, not Lyran Alliance... unless there's been one hell of a timeskip!
No K-F misjump shenanigans here, just my mistake. :cheesy:
I'm not sure Paulinus was in the Lothian League that early, but I'm liking the rest of the story! :)
I'm not sure either but Paulinus does show as belonging to the Lothians in 2830 according to the Second Succession War sourcebook (map on page 18). If I had to justify it then maybe it was a Lothian protectorate (or just claimed territory) rather than a member world like the rest.
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I'm not sure that you will not see the Clan we know and love/hate come to be. Right now you have commanders who know "Real War" and what it will take to win. But as they go and are replace with new Khans will they keep training up
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I'm not sure that you will not see the Clan we know and love/hate come to be. Right now you have commanders who know "Real War" and what it will take to win. But as they go and are replace with new Khans will they keep training up
Lord knows. The 3050 Clanners are almost outright caricatures compared to their original Klondike/Founding-era counterparts.
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Sentencing the rest of those sibkos based on the behavior of four with similar genetics is definitely not cool. Establishing that particular punishment for any that break laws in the same way would fly, but not pre-emptively...
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Sentencing the rest of those sibkos based on the behavior of four with similar genetics is definitely not cool. Establishing that particular punishment for any that break laws in the same way would fly, but not pre-emptively...
I think it's less a preemptive sentence and more a poorly worded warning that, now they know how their genetics reacts with alcohol, there will be no second chances if there is a similar incident. Civilized worlds don't look kindly on berserkers rampaging through civilian areas, and now they know that alcohol is a trigger. Part of the issue is that NIOPS is extremely deferential to the sciences, and genetics has a lot to say about free will and how much of what we feel is our choice is actually baked in to our genetics. Knowing that, avoiding known triggers becomes where you must intervene or pay the price.
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Part XXX- Section 1 of 2
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"Not long after we landed at the largest settlement, Camp McEvedy, aerial recon found signs of human life over at Fartown settlement on the other end of the continent. Leaving Major Gao to investigate Camp McEvedy further we relocated the dropship to Fartown where we met our first group of locals who seemed not too sure if they should feel really happy to see us or really mad that it had taken the Star League eighty years to come back for them. They also reacted poorly to meeting Mechwarrior Jennifer McEvedy for perhaps understandable but nevertheless irrational reasons because blaming her in any way for a distant cousin of her grandfather going batshit crazy before her mother was even born isn't all that fair to say the least."
Colonel Rory Fallstaff - 2838CE
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Outskirts of Fartown – Project Sagittarius Umbrella (McEvedy's Folly) – 2836
This was by no means the way that Frederick Hallis expected to die though he was pretty sure he was about to. Sure, he was sat in the cockpit of a mech fighting for his life as he always assumed he would be, but whenever he had idly pondered his eventual fate his imagination had conjured visions of fighting to the last against overwhelming odds, his crippled battlemech surrounded by the wrecks clanner or maybe Marik machines as he screamed defiance to his last breath.
What he had not expected was to be pounced upon by thirty-five tons of carnivorous flightless bird as his Wasp idly strolled down a canyon, and to meet his end lying on his back, battlemech limbs flailing away ineffectually, expecting to be torn apart and eaten any moment. The gyros and myomer muscles of his twenty-ton mech had been completely unable to deal with the collision and the impact had sent him crashing to the ground, at which point the ****** bird jumped on top on him and started clawing at his upper torso and cockpit, massive talons raking great tears in the armour.
Instead of screams of defiance he was mostly yelling for help on the radio and asking anyone that might be close enough to help to "Get this ****** thing off of me!" while still struggling to break free. Given the size of the area that needed to be covered for the reconnaissance sweep, and that the perceived likelihood of encountering a meaningful threat was zero, the scout lance had spread out to cover more ground so he wasn't sure how quickly any of his lance-mates could get there.
An aerial survey would have gone much faster of course, but from above you might not be able to spot any old Star League equipment that might be worth salvaging, simply because it was powered down and most everything was covered in a layer of snow and ice. Finding people had been somewhat easier from the air, the campfires they lit at night had glowed in infra-red and establishing there were largeish groups living in or around what had once been the settlements of Fartown and Strangetown had been easy enough, if surprising, but while the operation had turned into a rescue mission the original purpose of the expedition was to retrieve any tech that might be found.
The world officially known as Project Sagittarius Umbrella was the type of place that reminded you why the Viking's believed hell was cold, not hot. As snow fell all around amidst the orange sky of the system's K type star it looked the part of a personal Ragnarök for Frederick Hallis, but being slain by the serpent Jörmungandr would have a certain dignity to it that getting killed and eaten by a giant chicken would not.
With the right arm of his mech, the one with the medium laser mounted on it, pinned, and the safeties on the SRM launcher refusing to let him fire any missiles because the computer detected something right on top of them, that being a battlemech-sized abomination of science, all he could do was start punching the creature repeatedly with his mech's left fist wishing the thing's neck wasn't so long that he couldn't reach up and poke it in the eye.
If he had been in something larger, like a Thug for example, he could have throttled the thing, or at least pushed it off him, but he wasn't.
The little voice in the back of his head that was now chiding him for not believing the locals when they said the so-called 'Thunderbird' was this big was not helping matters either. At the time assuming that they were exaggerating when talking about hulking ten-metre-tall predatory birds had seemed like a safe bet, but if he got out of this alive Frederick swore to his creator that the next time a fisherman boasted of the size of the 'one that got away' he would believe him.
Frederick's creator not being a deity, but rather a former Clan Wolverine geneticist named Vaun who was currently to be found a couple of thousand light years away in the clan homeworlds, was entirely unaware of the young mechwarrior's vow of course. Vaun had chosen not to join the Switchback Fleet back in 2823, because he was old and thought his place should go to someone younger, and he had been captured by some warriors belonging to Clan Ghost Bear. Subsequently being conscripted into their own scientist caste had grated, though not of course as much as that the bastards had also chemically sterilised him and every other captured member of the Wolverine's civilian castes as per the ilKhan's orders. At the exact moment Frederick Hallis was fighting for his life against an angry avian monstrosity Doctor Vaun was dying of natural causes in a hospital on Arcadia, the medical staff there wondering why he had this weirdly triumphant look on his face. Vaun's only regret was that he wouldn't be there to see the faces of the Spook Teddies when they found out he had been secretly splicing the DNA of warrior caste Wolverines into cannister-born Ghost Bears all this time. It gave him great comfort as he prepared to meet his own maker that the ilKhan fellating sons-of-bitches would surely be apoplectic with rage.
Meanwhile, still pinned and fervently wishing he was in a Crosscut loggermech rather than a Wasp right now, because a mech-sized chainsaw and a huge claw would have absolutely rocked in this situation Frederick decided, he suddenly realised that one of the Thunderbird's legs had shifted so it was now just behind his battlemechs right foot and he immediately hit his jumpjets.
The Rawling 52 jumpjets being designed to lift an upright twenty-ton Wasp vertically into the air, not to propel the currently horizontal mech with a thirty-five ton bird on top of it anywhere useful, they weren't quite powerful enough to throw the beast off him as they simply didn't have enough thrust. However, when the superheated plasma washed over the Thunderbird's lower leg it let out a deafening screech of pain and jumped clear which was still a pretty good outcome from Fred's perspective.
It would take a while to get back up, and his SRM launcher wasn't at the right angle to fire, but with his other arm now free Frederick raised it and fired the Medium Laser mounted on its forearm right into the Thunderbird's chest.
The thing was far too damn big for that to drop it, but it screeched in pain once again as the laser scorched into it, moisture in its flesh instantly boiling and causing a ragged wound that was half bloody gore and half charred overcooked meat.
Frederick was lining up another shot when two streams of tracer fire from a pair of machine-guns coming from the left just outside his field-of-view stitched their way across the Thunderbird which screeched yet again and span to face the new threat.
When they had handed one of the new-model Hussar scout mechs to Jennifer McEvedy for this mission the intention had been to see how it coped with the extremely harsh weather conditions known to exist on the world. It had not been so they could find out how well it did in a fight with a monster from a low-budget monster holomovie, but as it turned out a pair of fifty-calibre machine guns proved pretty effective at getting its attention at least, if not downing it because while those were rounds that were excellent at carving up infantry carving a turkey this size was another matter entirely.
Holding the fire button down McEvedy hosed her dual fifty-cals over the Thunderbird, realising after a few seconds that they just weren't penetrating deep enough to hit any vital organs. While they surely hurt, and sheer cumulative damage would eventually bring it crashing down, so far all she was managing to do was make it extremely pissed off.
The Thunderbird charged her, which while frightening in the extreme brought it close enough for her to use the other weapon the Niops designers had added to the HSR-250-Dbn model of the Hussar to give it a secondary role as an anti-infantry mech.
The flamer mounted just under the cockpit sent out a huge plume of plasma fed straight from the fusion reactor, the flame so hot that up close it could not only melt flesh it would make lead run like water and aluminium burn.
The Thunderbird had no concept of firearms but fire itself was something else entirely because like most animals it was instinctively terrified of it. For the first time it was the one that was scared as Jennifer McEvedy's Hussar bathed it in hot plasma.
It still wouldn't ****** die though. More than twice the mass of a Giganotosaurus, the largest carnivorous dinosaur ever discovered in the Terra fossil record, a creature that had once strode across the homeworld of the human race like a colossus, the Thunderbird was going to need more than mere anti-infantry weapons to bring it down.
Jennifer swung around the four-ton Extended-Range Large Laser mounted on a turret atop the Hussar and taking careful aim shot the Thunderbird in the head.
Thirty-five tons of genetically-engineered flightless bird crashed to the ground like a puppet with its string cut, feathers still burning thanks to the flamer and blood running out of the myriad holes punched in its flesh by the machineguns.
Grateful to be alive Frederick Hallis was still righting his mech and struggling the thing back onto its feet when he heard Jennifer's voice over the radio. "Well, that's going to make for a good war-story to tell at the bar after a few drinks" she said. "I mean, if we were actually allowed to go to a bar for a few drinks" she added wryly.
"****** thing came out of nowhere" Fred replied, steadying his breathing as he defended how he gotten himself into the situation.
"I don't think the sensors flag up biologicals as a potential threat even if they're the size of a freaking Whitworth" Jennifer replied, accepting his excuse. To be fair if you were in a battlemech, even a light one, the chances of there being a predatory animal which represented an actual threat were pretty slim. There were a few places where that wasn't the case of course, during the Star League era wealthy big-game hunters were known to travel to a world dubbed 'Hunter's Paradise' where they could take on huge reptilian Megasaurs with anti-mech weaponry, but that was hardly the normal state of affairs.
They both knew from his reports that Major Gao's recon team had run into a pack of local 'Hook Wolves' a couple of days before while scouting around the original Star League settlement on the planet, but the Dire-Wolf sized predators with oversized talons had proved no match for their Mauser 960 laser rifles. Of course, if they had met a Thunderbird instead their rifles and grenade launchers would not have been much help, and they would have had to hope their single Chevalier light tank and a few shoulder-launched SRM's were up to the job.
"You know, I may be starting to reassess my views on the merits of genetic-engineering" Fred joked, his mech now stood up as he looked at the corpse of the Thunderbird. "Oh, and I've got to say that your family's inclination to ignore those in authority when they think they're wrong isn't always a good thing" he added, his subsequent laughter as much stress relief as it was a belief it was all that funny.
"Bite me Fred" Jennifer replied. "You do know I just saved your life right?" she added, thinking that should warrant him giving her a break on the jokes and wry comments she had to put up with since they had arrived on 'Sagittarius Umbrella' and managed to locate some locals.
Seriously, they find a planet that's actually named after a member of her family, she thought to herself bitterly, albeit a distant cousin, and it's called 'McEvedy's Folly' because he went full-on Mad Scientist to the point that the geneticists on Frobisher who were making fish-people would have regarded him as nuttier than a packet of almonds. Alpheus McEvedy might have been a certified genius, a pioneer in, and a master of the field of genetic-engineering, but his reputation had suffered a little due to his also being certifiably insane.
Fred pursed his lips looking at the Thunderbird. "You know if we had like half-a-ton of Gloria's secret herbs and spices it would go a long way to getting me over the trauma of nearly being lunch for emu-zilla" he told her, making light of the situation.
"You want to eat it?" Jennifer responded nonplussed.
"It only seems fair under the circumstances" Fred replied. "You know the BRV aboard the dropship could pick this thing up and then haul it back to Fartown. We know the locals hunt the little ones, the regular Moas, for food. They might appreciate the feast."
Jennifer thought about that. The Battlemech Recovery Vehicle on their Fortress could certainly manage that. Although huge by the standards of any animal that wasn't aquatic in nature, there were some shark-like alien species on other worlds that could eat a Thunderbird for a snack, the bird was still lighter than some of the machines a BRV was designed to lift off the ground and carry it back for repairs. "Okay, but I want to get a photograph of the thing with me standing beside it before anyone starts carving off any chunks for the barbeque" she replied. "It's not like I've got anywhere to put it if I had it stuffed and mounted, so I want one souvenir at least."
"Flamer ruined it, and besides which if you brought that back to Niops and presented it to a taxidermist the poor guy would have a heart attack" Frederick observed. "You wanna get on the dropship band and tell them to send out the BRV?"
Jennifer thought about that. "I'd best tell them to bring an escort along in case of another Thunderbird, the Shadow Hawk should do and it could help load the bird onto the trailer" she replied. They had a Lancelot and a Hoplite aboard the dropship too, but while they had more firepower than the Shadow Hawk they didn't have hands. Their lone assault mech did have hands, but that would be overkill and would also mean having to deal with Billy the Kid who had been assigned to this mission for the same reason the Gammas had. For all their undeniable skill in the cockpit they were all kind of a pain in the ass, albeit for different reasons.
"Good thing we brought along a few bigger machines in case we ran into pirates" Frederick observed. The SLDF had dusted off a few different battlemechs that had been placed in mothballs a couple of years back for this mission, types that they didn't have in large enough numbers to keep them in regular service but weren't rare enough that spare parts to repair them or keep them running were unavailable.
The comments made by the mechwarrior at the controls of the Shadow Hawk, a cranky old veteran from the 295th nearing retirement, when he arrived an hour later and saw the dead Thunderbird were pretty amusing, though what the combat engineers crewing the BRV had to say about having to recover a dead bird instead of a broken mech was funnier, even if they gave Frederick some shit about the mess the thing had made of his Wasp.
Frederick and his mech returned to the Fartown settlement with the BRV while Jennifer signalled the other two members of the lance to join her so they could continue their recon together as a unit, the three light battlemechs sticking together for safety in case another Thunderbird appeared.
By the time the now three-mech lance returned to Fartown the orange sun was setting and the glow of several large campfires in the middle of what had once been the town square was easily spotted from a distance. The locals were usually loath to make their presence quite so obvious to all the hostile wildlife but they rightly assumed that the Fortress class dropship now towering over the ruins of the old settlement would be more than sufficient to ward off any threat.
If it wasn't for the presence of the massive atmosphere processor positioned just outside the settlement the Fortress would have dominated the skyline of the whole area, but by comparison to the gigantic piece of terraforming equipment even a dropship near a hundred metres in height and wider than that in breadth looked tiny. The Star League's Department of Mega Engineering had tended not to mess around when handed an assignment and two more of the things could be easily seen from orbit, each with another settlement constructed beside it, once drawing power from the fusion reactors than powered the gigantic machines.
The terraforming equipment had been shut down since well before the Amaris War of course, its work incomplete as the Star League abandoned the project though it might have restarted at some point if not for the war, but even as it rusted and decayed it remained the treasure-trove of technology that had drawn Niops to send an expedition to retrieve as much of it as they could.
As she dismounted her Hussar near the camp if Jennifer had been expecting any gratitude from the hundred or so who had set up home in the mostly ruined settlement about all the meat she had provided for the feast underway she was sorely disappointed. The oldest of the grown-up locals still looked at her with expressions of either distrust or dismay while the little kids regarded her like she was more to be feared than the Thunderbird was.
Somehow Jennifer had found herself in the only place in the galaxy where the McEvedy name was hated even more than it was on Strana Mechty. What were the chances?
Jennifer's heartfelt protest that 'If someone named Smith kicked your cat you wouldn't hold it against everyone named Smith would you?' fell on deaf ears unfortunately. Not that anyone owned a cat on Sagittarius Umbrella, they used to have some pet cats in the past, but they were easy prey for the Hook Wolves apparently.
At least I got to slay the feathery dragon, Jennifer decided, finding some solace in that at least as she was handed a plate of roast Thunderbird by one of the dropship crew whose turn it was to help the ship's cook feed everyone. A couple of the medics were still performing medical checks on the locals and providing treatment where needed, while Colonel Fallstaff commanding the expedition was talking to the 'tribal elders', that being an odd description for a couple of guys with doctorates in genetics and a female xenobiologist, all three of them pushing a hundred years old and unlike most Terran-born people very much looking it because the last few decades had been hellish for them.
Between the testimony of people who had actually been there to witness what had happened on the planet decades before, plus the files, data and records retrieved by Major Gao's recon team at the main settlement 'Camp McEvedy', Colonel Fallstaff decided he had a decent understanding of what had transpired. It was a tale worthy of a bad science-fiction novel, or a better-than-average movie, and made this mission a couple of orders of magnitude more interesting than he had ever expected it to be when General Romanov gave him the assignment to travel down here and look around.
With Frobisher signed up for the Hegemony the SLDF Navy had begun scouting the systems around them and eventually, two jumps out from there to rimward and anti-spinward, the Tramp class jumpship being used to survey the area discovered a system that had clearly been settled at some point. This turned out to be the K4V Orange Dwarf system that the Star League Department of Mega Engineering had named Project Sagittarius Umbrella and the reason the Tramp immediately knew that the place was worth investigating was the huge orbital mirrors that SLDoME had placed above the second planet in the system to warm it with additional sunlight.
At some point in the past someone had raided and then orbitally bombarded a Star League facility situated on the planet's moon, but enough had remained behind to help answer a few questions and indicated that there might still be a fair amount of terraforming equipment and other useful salvage to be had down on the planet itself.
It seemed that a couple of centuries ago the Star League Exploratory Brigade had discovered another potentially habitable world not far from Frobisher, but they had initially rejected it as suitable for colonisation because it was in the midst of an Ice Age. This glacial period was so severe that the world looked to be on the verge of slipping into a so-called Cryogenian era, such as happened on Terra seven-hundred million years ago when the whole planet froze over, so it wasn't exactly prime for human settlement.
The Star League Department of Mega Engineering took a look themselves and thought, 'Ice Ages are easy to fix' and set to work reversing the cooling trend, starting with the orbital mirrors but also setting up atmosphere-processors that would increase the levels of carbon dioxide in the air to foster a beneficial greenhouse effect.
The additional heat directed at the oceans had resulted in more storms of course, and an increase in precipitation both rain and snow, but that was better than the northern and southern ice-caps meeting at the equator which is what would have happened eventually without the Department of Mega Engineering who continued to live up to their unofficial motto of, ' The impossible we do immediately, the merely difficult was finished the day before yesterday.'
With the ice being slowly pushed back instead of expanding, it would take centuries to complete the job but SLDoME wasn't in a rush, the Star League then turned its attention to the native fauna living on the planet. There were fish living in the mostly frozen oceans, though not ones you would want to eat because the natural antifreeze they had evolved was toxic as hell, while the large continent on the equator, the only one on the planet that wasn't just glaciers and tundra, still harboured various bird species though many had already died out.
The man they put in charge of repopulating the now warming planet with animal life took a look at the remaining native species, those who had managed to survive the climatic catastrophe, and finding them uniquely suited to being genetically engineered he was struck by the possibility he could create, or rather recreate, new/old life here.
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Part XXX- Section 2 of 2
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Quite what the Star League thought when Doctor Alpheus McEvedy and his team announced that they had brought back the extinct Terran Dodo, releasing the species into the wild before starting work on bringing back the equally extinct Passenger Pigeon, the Bush Moa and then the Giant Moa was sadly lost to history, but a reasonable assumption would be, 'That's actually pretty neat but we don't remember asking you to do that and while we're on the subject who said you were in charge of the whole planet, including the terraforming teams, and not just the biologists? We've had complaints from the engineers about you bossing them around'.
After forces unknown attacked the facility on the moon in 2752, Fallstaff theorised it would have been the Rim Worlds Republic because Amaris was very active in the periphery even well before his coup, the Star League had decided to shelve Project Sagittarius Umbrella and recalled McEvedy, his research team and the terraforming crews. McEvedy and many of his team however had refused to go, opting to stay behind with their families to continue their work.
Unfortunately for the other volunteers, while Alpheus McEvedy had always skirted the line between genius and insanity he now, totally unsupervised by any higher authority and unrestricted in what he could choose to do, crossed so far over that line you would need a Kearny-Fuchida Drive to jump back there. Always somewhat driven, not to mention dictatorial and authoritarian in his approach to his staff, with the Star League stepping back McEvedy quickly went full-blown tyrant and mad scientist.
Since bringing back extinct species of Terran birds had been working so well why not bring back some extinct mammals too, he decided? Thus it was that McEvedy recreated the Mammoth, the Giant Ground Sloth, the Auroch, the Quagga and then, because they would need predators to keep their numbers in check, the Dire Wolf.
Recreated as best he could visually at least, because deep-down they were genetically still local birdlife not Terran mammals and without ongoing intervention they would gradually start reverting to more bird-like features, such as feathers replacing fur for example, Alpheus McEvedy dived into his great purpose.
McEvedy's staff started to become increasingly concerned when he decided that he needed another carnivore and so abandoning his policy of simply copying extinct Terran life he created what came to be called the Sabre-Beaked Tucan. Then he came of the opinion that the merely two metre tall Giant Moa just wasn't impressive enough and started splicing together what became the Thunderbird, retaining some Moa-like features but crossed with those of the extinct Phorusrhacidae family from South America, more usually known as the 'Terror Birds'.
The Terror birds of prehistoric Terra had only reached three metres in height of course, which in itself had made them the apex predator of their age, but that just wasn't enough for Alpheus McEvedy. He more than tripled that height with the Thunderbird, figuring that the Aurochs, Mammoths and the Giant Ground Sloths were all big enough to represent a suitable species of prey animal for his masterpiece.
The first sign that, as expected, his experiments to create mammalian species weren't genetically stable came pretty early as his 'Dire Wolf' gradually evolved, or perhaps de-evolved, into what became the 'Hook Wolf' which kept all the sharp teeth but whose claws became long, vicious talons. Naturally McEvedy's reaction wasn't to question his methods but rather to look for new avenues of research instead.
Alpheus McEvedy's next wave of experiments involved splicing animal and human DNA together, his source of human DNA being his staff and their families regardless of their personal feelings on the matter. When this came to light most of them decided enough was enough, concluding that their boss was completely nucking futs, and grabbing everything they could carry they fled to the hills leaving behind McEvedy and the handful of people still inexplicably loyal to him and his vision behind. Unfortunately the loyalists were the only ones with guns or otherwise the rebels would have approached the situation somewhat differently, put a few bullets into the lunatic and his minions, and then renamed 'Camp McEvedy' something else.
McEvedy lived nearly another three decades after most of his people deserted him, sliding further into madness and obsession as the years passed. Major Gao's team had found indications that the man finally ended it by committing suicide in 2783, leaving behind a mass of potentially valuable genetics research, numerous new or occasionally 'new' species, the most insane diaries this side of Stefan Amaris's personal journals and having become the boogieman for what eventually became a several human tribes on the planet.
During the eight decades since they, very sensibly, deserted Camp McEvedy for the safety of the wilderness, where they only had to worry about genetically-engineered super-predators not a deranged scientist and his equally crazed minions, the human population of the world now known as 'McEvedy's Folly' had grown to perhaps a couple of hundred people. Most lived in large groups near the old Fartown and Strangetown settlements, but a couple of small bands of hunter-gatherers roamed the forests looking to animals to eat while trying not to be eaten by other animals.
Naturally the locals had always felt pretty sorry for themselves, regretting that they or their ancestors had not left with the people that returned home as ordered back in the 2750's. Their reaction to being told by Colonel Fallstaff and the others that most of the Terran Hegemony had been blasted to radioactive, poisoned rubble in their absence, and so in a way being stranded on this frozen hellhole of a planet being chased by battlemech sized carnivorous birds wasn't an entirely unfortunate turn of events, had been utter disbelief, and in a couple of cases complete nervous breakdown.
Fallstaff had told them the SLDF would ferry them all back to Niops to start a new life in just about the one place in the galaxy that resembled the Terran Hegemony the oldest among them still resembled and they seemed happy enough about that at least. Unlike most everyone else that visited Niops VII they wouldn't even find it all that chilly which was a definite bonus.
As regards salvage, other than the Fortress the L-F Tramp jumpship which had transported them to Sagittarius Umbrella had brought along a Mule transport dropship, but such was the volume of equipment that appeared to be worth carting back to Niops Colonel Fallstaff was of the opinion that they might need to dust off one, or perhaps both, of the huge Potemkin class cruisers for a second far larger expedition.
With the solar mirrors still in orbit McEvedy's Folly grew slightly warmer each year, within a couple of centuries it should be on the cool side of temperate and someone might look again at colonising the world if they could deal with the problematic wildlife, but for now everything SLDoME had left behind was of far more use elsewhere.
After discussing it with a few of the locals Colonel Rory Fallstaff determined what was the most valuable items he could load on the Mule, after making space for all the people and some of their personal possessions of course, and he set about making plans to dismantle some of the equipment at Camp McEvedy for transport.
There was one other matter he decided that needed to be addressed, something that might make operations on this planet easier for subsequent salvaging operations.
The Thunderbird, soon to be officially named 'McEvedy's Thunderbird' much to Jennifer's chagrin, was going to be a pain-in-the-ass for anyone trying to work in the zones they inhabited which covered quite a large area because they were usually solitary and had their own hunting grounds.
The problem was that the creatures regarded anything other than another Thunderbird as a potential meal, and they were big enough to make that happen. Doubting that the civilian authorities would be happy if he just wiped the species out with heavy weaponry, airstrikes would have made that a safe and relatively easy task alas, Fallstaff sought suggestions from his people as to how to go about putting the Thunderbirds in their rightful place, that place being lower than humanity on the food chain.
Based on their prior experience Jennifer and Frederick suggested flamers, the creatures definitely feared fire, but Colonel Fallstaff concluded that risked accidentally risked burning down the forests where Thunderbirds liked to hunt, prey being more common there.
The civilians back home wouldn't like them setting all the trees alight either most likely, Rory Fallstaff decided sadly, just before he realised they were thinking about this all wrong.
If the Thunderbird feared no other creature in its native environment what they needed to do was make it afraid of something even bigger and meaner, so when one of them showed up it would run away making the area safe to work in.
Doing it right would require something that looked the part and walked in with exactly the right attitude, and Fallstaff realised he had exactly what he needed to achieve that.
The locals warned that it was mating season, when the Thunderbirds were not only more aggressive but could be encountered in groups. At this time of year nobody walked into the region East of Fartown they called the 'Moa Lands' they said, to which Fallstaff replied that was because you needed to walk in looking like you gave no ****** whatsoever and would eat them if they started something.
On their very last day on the planet, with Colonel Fallstaff and Major Gao observing from overhead in a VTOL, as per his orders Mechwarrior Wilhelm Sampson set about teaching the Thunderbirds of McEvedy's Folly some manners.
The Moa Lands were no stranger to the sound of the stomping feet of massive creatures, in fact the Thunderbirds had helpfully made their own wide trails into the forests and had created large clearings where they fought each other for mating privileges, but that day something a lot heavier than a Thunderbird was on the move.
Sampson, AKA 'Billy the Kid' had been told he needed to try and put some attitude into the way he drove his mech, and that shouldn't be too difficult given just of cocky and arrogant he was in or out of a cockpit. Orders were to walk in like he owned the place, let the oversized chickens know who was boss, beat up a few of them if he had to put don't use your guns unless you really have to Fallstaff ordered.
Realising that he needed to be in the right frame of mind as well as the right machine Sampson had grinned as he worked out his game plan. If the Colonel wanted attitude then he was going to get it.
The Thunderbirds couldn't hear the music Billy the Kid was playing in the cockpit of his twelve-metre-tall, hundred ton assault mech as he stomped through the forest, but Fallstaff and Gao could over the radio and despite finding it hysterically funny both had to admit they didn't think that anyone apart from Sampson could make an Atlas strut.
"Well, you can tell by the way I use my walk
I'm a woman's man, no time to talk
Music loud and women warm, I've been kicked around
Since I was born"
Appearing in a huge clearing where half-a-dozen Thunderbirds were screeching at each other in a mating display the first of them that saw the Atlas immediately charged at Sampson who kept walking straight towards it. As it neared the battlemech opened its right hand and twisted its torso as it brought up its arm.
Sampson back-handed the Thunderbird just as it reached him, sending the creature flying away stunned as he smoothly pimp-slapped it while on the move.
The Atlas stopped, beckoning the other Thunderbirds to attack as well with one hand while clenching its other into a fist.
The video recording of the next ten minutes taken from the VTOL ensured that Sampson's celebrity status as the best Mechwarrior in the SLDF would endure long after his death, with the still image of him throttling one Thunderbird with his left hand of his Atlas while punching out another with his right, ending up as a poster on many a kid's bedroom wall.
By the time it was all over one Thunderbird was unconscious, the rest were limping away, the clearing was covered in feathers and Colonel Fallstaff was wondering how much they would pay on Solaris for a few of these things because watching that beat mech-versus-mech gladiatorial combat all to hell entertainment wise.
He wasn't the only one to think so and in later years the staff of 'McEvedy's Folly Planetary Wildlife Preserve" found themselves fighting off poachers trying to steal Thunderbird eggs all the time. Fortunately seeing as how they were the only Park Rangers in the galaxy that operated assault mechs in order to keep the animals in line that wasn't as big of a problem as it could have been otherwise.
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Note from the Author:
The story of Project Sagittarius Umbrella (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/McEvedy%27s_Folly), otherwise known as 'McEvedy's Folly' is given in Touring the Stars: McEvedy's Folly (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Touring_the_Stars:_McEvedy%27s_Folly) where we learn of what mad scientist Alpheus McEvedy got up to on the world that ended up bearing his name. Maybe if he had stuck to recreating the Dodo and the rest it would have been one thing, but when you're splicing together thirty-five ton Thunderbirds and seeing your staff as convenient sources of human DNA for new experiments you might have gone a little too far.
From a distance the ten-metre tall Thunderbird looks a lot like an extremely oversized Giant Moa (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Island_giant_moa) apparently, but in terms of attitude it's more like a Terror Bird (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phorusrhacidae).
Other extinct Terran birds that Alpheus McEvedy decided to bring back included the Dodo (http://'https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodo'), the Passenger Pigeon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_pigeon) and the Bush Moa (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_moa) before he moved onto mammals like the Giant Ground Sloth (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megatherium) and the Quagga (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quagga), I can't help but suspect that McEvedy's version of the Auroch (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurochs) might have looked like a big cow but it still tasted like chicken not beef!
Sagittarius Umbrella was a project of the Star League's Department of Mega Engineering (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Department_of_Mega-Engineering) (SLDoME) for who fixing a planet well on its way to becoming like the Cryogenian (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryogenian) period of Earth was a doddle (a few orbital mirrors (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_mirror_(climate_engineering)) to push back the glaciers and icesheets to start). Someone attacked their base on the planet's moon in the 2750's which (along with disquieting rumours about Alpheus McEvedy) caused them to shelve the project witrh some people refusing to leave. The Star League might have come back to check on them one day but the Amaris War messed up a lot of plans.
According to Betrayal of Ideals (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Betrayal_of_Ideals) Clan Wolverine geneticist Doctor Vaun chose to remain behind when Operation Switchback (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Operation_SWITCHBACK) was being put together because he was an old man and there was limited space on the ships. Sarah McEvedy considered him a genius and apparently so did Clan Ghost Bear (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Clan_Ghost_Bear) because after they captured him they put him to work on their own genetics projects. In canon they found out what Vaun had been doing in 2839 but it was too late to punish him fdor it because he had died three years earlier. There is some indication that the Wolverines may have had the edge on the other clans as regards genetic engineering, the other clans certainly seemed to think so at least, and after the Wolverines constructed a new Genetics Research Facility in Bearcat (the Wolverine city on Strana Mechty (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Strana_Mechty)) Clan Wolf (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Clan_Wolf) challenged for the research fighting a Trial over it (they lost, that being something that happened a lot to clans fighting trials against the Wolverines at the time).
The Atlas (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Atlas) assault mech was designed to look intimdating. Strutting along to the Bee Gees (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_izvAbhExY) and slapping the shit out of Thunderbirds was not in the requirements that Aleksandr Kerensky set for the machine but with the right person in the cockpit it can do it.
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Brilliant and HILARIOUS! ;D
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oh my god i wish i could write humor like you can. oh, i had an image of a Thunderbird as a "new" battle armor carrier. Transport would be an issue, but it might work on garrison planets that have alot of open range animals.
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I'd put down a few bucks to someone that could make a decent animation of that Atlas fight!
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i bet TEx would have a line on someone that could put that together as a video short
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Something I mentioned over on spacebattles forums (one of the other places I post this story up).
If I could draw I would redraw this scene with three Thunderbirds and an Atlas.
(https://imagizer.imageshack.com/img923/5387/v9sLLJ.jpg)
:grin:
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Matt Plog has VERY reasonable commission rates... ;)
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Part XXXI- Section 1 of 2
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"It was towards the end of his final term as High Associator that Giles Olson introduced tax breaks for any family on Niops that had more than four children, which in conjunction with increasing use of Iron Wombs finally solved the SLDF's ongoing manpower problems, albeit twenty years later. It was just as well because, as the Second Succession War started to draw to a close, the Free Worlds League wasn't quite as preoccupied with their borders with the Lyran Commonwealth and Capellan Confederation as they had been, and it dawned on them that the ever-explanding Niops Association Hegemony on their periphery border were the only people who still knew how all the old Star League technology worked."
Stephen J. Tran, Red Star Rising: A History of Niops 2800-2900 - Niops Press, 2915
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Robert H Goddard Spaceport (Niops VII) - Niops Association – 2836
"Doughnuts?" General Franklin Hallis queried as he sat down with the others at the conference table, finding a large box of them open in front of him.
"Since you're all coming to me for once I thought I should be a good host" Admiral Bremman replied. Being situated out-of-town it was usually easier for him to travel into the capital than for everyone else to come to him at Fleet Headquarters, but since at least part of the meeting would concern the deployment of a much heftier chunk of fleet assets away from Niops than was typical these days it the navy was getting centre-stage for once.
"Meaning that when we hold the meeting of the Joint Chiefs at Army HQ we're not good hosts" General Romanov responded drily.
"I would never say that Jenna" Bremman replied sweetly.
"I would, I've tasted the coffee served at SLDF Army HQ" Brigadier-General Nellis stated for himself, reaching for a doughnut.
"Yeah well, you don't report to her Craig" Bremman pointed out.
"God bless the chain-of-command and the Militia being in a separate one" Nellis joked, taking a bite out of his doughnut. "You know, instead of slumming it we could always meet more often at NAM HQ" he suggested. Unlike the SLDF offices the various buildings belonging to the Niops Association Militia weren't put up in a rush and it showed, he had by far the nicest headquarters of any of them and the largest office.
Romanov chuckled. "Don't push your luck Craig" she warned Nellis. "Whoever takes over from Olson in a few years could decide they want NAM fully integrated with the real military and I might seek revenge for the snark you direct my way and requisition your desk."
"I'll take my chances with that" Nellis replied, letting the 'real military' crack slide, "just not with that lousy coffee you keep giving me" he joked. "Nice doughnuts by the way" he added, Bremman must have gotten them from one of the better bakeries in town.
"You'll find the coffee's pretty good too" Bremman told them all, "there's a place on Stafford where they grow some top-quality beans and they're looking to expand and start exporting. I got one of my jumpship crews to bring me back some to see if it deserved the hype and it does."
"They're already selling tea from Stafford in town" Hallis remarked. "Barbara prefers it to coffee but personally I need my caffeine fix or I get tetchy" he said. "And sleepy" he added.
"Seems like you can grow most anything there, good soil, great climate" Bremman noted, within five years it would be the breadbasket of the Hegemony, maybe sooner if they could get enough agromechs and the workers to operate them. "Incidentally, how's your boy doing Franklin? I've been meaning to ask since they all got back from SLDoME's dark secret and I heard about their wild safari adventures."
"He's fine" Hallis replied, reaching for a doughnut. "I don't think he'll ever look at birds the same way again though" he added with a grimace.
"Yeah, nearly being eaten by a giant chicken seems like something that'll stick with a man" Nellis observed thoughtfully, and all too accurately. "I'll bet he'll have to put up with people making jokes about it for the best of his life too."
"Maybe, maybe not" Hallis replied. "This might be one of those things where people worrying that you could snap without warning and maim them could be of some benefit to the kid."
Bremman laughed. "They always say 'don't poke the bear' but poking the angry wolverine is a lot more hazardous" he joked. "Bears back off if it's just not worth the hassle."
Hallis grinned. "Rory Fallstaff said the Thunderbird was just lucky that Fred wasn't drunk because if he had been then Jennifer would have had to save the bird from him because he would have opened the cockpit and taken it on with his combat knife."
Romanov chuckled. "Jokes aside I can't believe the damage that ****** monster did to that Wasp" she said, shaking her head in amazement having seen the photographs taken after the encounter. "What kind of madman thinks it's a good idea to create something like that anyway?" she asked rhetorically.
"Forget Frankenstein's Monster, or anything cooked up by Doctor Moreau, it seems like Alpheus McEvedy's real-life career puts all the fictional mad scientists in the shade" Hallis stated without hyperbole. "Who knew that Frobisher was where the Star League sent the sane and reasonable genetic engineers?" he asked rhetorically.
"Until now I thought those lunatics that bred the Hell's Horses were as bad as it gets in terms of splicing together an animal" Bremman chipped in, "but boy was I wrong about that" he freely admitted his failure of imagination.
"Hell's Horses? Isn't that one of the clans?" Nellis queried, confused.
"Yep, but they're named for a species that was created in a lab and some whackadoodle set free on Circe" Bremman told him. "Extremely aggressive carnivorous horses designed with greater lung capacity and endurance. They can't even be domesticated because some jerk added in some compatible zebra DNA because… reasons."
"Meat eating horses?" Nellis responded in disbelief. "Don't they teach ethics to people going into the field of genetic-engineering, or, you know, common sense?" he asked rhetorically, rolling his eyes.
Hallis nodded. "Damn things were a nightmare for livestock farmers because they're so fast" he recalled. "We used to shoot them on sight. John Fletcher, the Khan of the Hell's Horses loved them though, released them into the wild on Nellis too, their capital world, so not all the blame can be put on the scientists" he said. "Remember that it was Sarah and Dwight that prompted our old chief geneticist to start working on the extra genes that went into Fred and the other kids though, so not everything is the fault of the people wearing the lab-coats. Our own chief geek guy was supposedly one of top men in the field, a no-bullshit genius, though I only actually met him a couple of times myself. Once when they were taking DNA samples to create Fred, the other time after a Trial of Possession on Strana Mechty when he shook my hand for winning and keeping his research notes out of other people's hands."
"Was that the time when you put your foot up the ass of that Wolf who was trying to get hold of our genetics research data?" Bremman asked curiously.
"Yeah, Star Colonel Ferris Ward, one of their ristars supposedly" Hallis confirmed. "They wanted access to the data in the new Genetics facility we built in Bearcat not long after Klondike, they had the idea we were pulling ahead of the other clans in genetic engineering as well as in introducing new weaponry and they didn't want to fall behind. I bid a lance, he started his bidding at a star and two points because we had heavier machines and then he bid away two mechs to show that he was honourable, and confident of winning" he told the story with a broad smile. "We took out four of their mechs for the loss of two of ours and then finding himself in a Thug up against my Pulverizer and Trish in an Exterminator he brought up the two extra mechs he had originally bid away."
"And that was allowed?" Romanov queried. "I thought Clan Trials were supposed to be fair?"
"It's allowed, but there's no honour in winning if you have to bring in your reserves so it's not done very often" Hallis explained. "Trish and I whupped them all anyway" he noted, grinning. "We knew the ground and having an Enhanced ERPPC let me shoot up his Thug at a range he couldn't shoot back nearly as effectively" he explained then smiled. "He called me a ristar too, which I thought was pretty funny because I was already in my forties."
"Probably didn't know you were Terran born, thought you were a normal person like me that actually looks their age" the Niops born Craig Nellis complained. "Not that I'm bitter about it or anything?" he added, pretending to scowl at the three SLDF officers. Romanov herself was well into her late nineties now but sure-as-hell didn't look or move like it. "So, do you want to kick this off Jenna before I depress myself further thinking about my bad back and stuff knees? You mentioned some news we'd all want to hear?" he prompted Romanov to start the meeting. She liked a certain amount of informality and friendly banter in the way she ran things, off the battlefield at least, and preferred to have everyone relaxed. Serving through the bloodbath of the Amaris War had stripped her of any tendencies towards being a martinet with a stick up her ass that she might have started out with out of the academy, and in some ways Nellis was actually the most strict and formal of any of them because he wanted the NAM to always look and act like a real army not some periphery rabble.
Both Romanov and Hallis had always considered the NAM to be a unknown quantity until they saw some of them in action against the Blood Rain on Algenib, after that the knew they weren't just parade ground soldiers even if only their aerospace forces had ever seen action, taking out the occasional pirate raid into Niops before they got anywhere near a planet.
Romanov nodded. "Okay. To start with I've got some good news and some bad news" she said. "Good news for all of us but bad news for you I'm afraid Jacob."
"Someone found out about my coffee smuggling operation and I'm being court-martialled?" Bremman joked. "That was going to pay for my early retirement and a big ranch on Francas."
"Nah, and if the coffee's good enough I'll sideline any investigation JAG conducts into it" Romanov replied, smiling. "The R&D people think they've figured out how to make the double-heat-sinks Hallis's people put in the Bull Shark economically" she announced.
"The ones that are only two-thirds the size of Star League DHS?" Nellis queried, surprised. Like a lot of the bleeding-edge technology mounted on the Bull Shark prototype they were a prime example of 'blank-cheque-tech' in that they showed what you could achieve if you just threw money at a problem. Unfortunately reproducing those systems at the affordable price needed for mass production without bankrupting the economy had proven tricky to say the least.
"Those are the ones" Romanov confirmed. "I'll not claim to really understand the science, but supposedly the problem was while the Boron-Arsenide crystals they use are better than graphite used in regular heatsinks, or the polymer crystals from our current DHS, growing the flawless B-A crystals needed to make them work was really problematic" she said, understating just how difficult it was to solve. "The failure rate during manufacture was so high that the unit cost for every working boron-arsinide DHS was enormous, but like I said they think they've figured out the process now."
"So, what's the catch, from your expression I'm guessing there's a catch?" Bremman rightly assumed.
"We'll have to grow the crystals for the new double-heat-sinks in freefall, and within an extremely powerful and finely-tuned magnetic field" Romanov told him. "It's a good thing we've got access to plenty of niobium from Alphard because I'm told we'll need it to make the superconductive magnets required, but we're also going to need a whole new orbital manufacturing facility to make these things."
"Which means everything already queued up for our zero-gee construction teams to do after they're finished at AJC is going to get bumped again" Bremman groaned, quickly putting two and two together. "I'm never going to get my ****** shipyard am I?" he said in exasperation, throwing up his hands. "Most of Camelot Command has been sitting in crates waiting to be unpacked and put back together for years. All we need is a pressurised dock and a frame to put it inside and we could start cranking our warships, hell we've actually got the blueprints for anything the size of a Black Lion class battlecruiser or smaller programmed into the auto-fac already."
"Not for a while yet Jacob, sorry" Romanov confirmed. "I know the latest plan was to start putting the thing together once the recharge station at AJC was complete enough to be at least partially operational, and we had an Alliance class station built for dropship repair and manufacture, but if we can get those new heat sinks into production within the next decade or so it'll make another wave of upgrades to our machines viable. ERPPC's and our new Extended-Range lasers run hot, if we can deal with that then we can hang them off a lot more machines."
"What about our existing DHS manufacture?" Nellis queried, the older model of double-heat-sinks were already being cranked out in quantity.
"We'll still be making them for the Blackjack and any other machine we'll be handing over to planetary militias, probably for aerospace fighters and dropships too because volume isn't at a premium with them" Romanov told him. "We'll likely also export any excess production to the Magistracy because it'll make good money and without DHS they'll be less interested in buying ERPPC's from us they can't use."
"Only the original Star League ERPPC designs of course, and we'll definitely be overcharging because nobody else is selling those to the Canopans" Hallis added. "Not as much as we could because the government wants to stay on good terms with the Magistracy" he said. The Magistracy was one of the few powers that weren't monumental ****** with a military that considered it 'War Crime O'clock' twenty-four seven, moreover they had a lot more to offer in terms of trade than the Illyrians for example. It certainly said something positive about them that, despite knowing about Frobisher for years, they didn't invade to try and seize any Star League tech there. Chances were any of the five Great Houses would have done so in their place, the Taurians too most likely although in their particular case the opportunity to stick it to the Star League one more time would have been part of the motivation.
Romanov frowned. "I should probably warn you now that if our materials science people come up with a better endo-steel in the next few years we'll probably want to put that into the production as well before we start building a shipyard" she told Bremman. "I mean we've already got a better endo-steel than the Star League ever did but, as you know, we just can't afford to make it."
"Too much beryllium" Hallis observed glumly. That was another advance incorporated into the Bull Shark that was too damn expensive to put into mass production. Generally the cost of the raw materials wasn't a major expense when building battlemechs, not compared to the fusion engine, the weapons and the electronics anyway, but when the endoskeleton was mostly made of a metal that was twice as expensive by weight as some precious metals, including the silver Niops made some of its various dollar denomination coins out of, things were a little different.
"You're not planning on bumping my Alliance too I hope?" Bremman checked. "Ignoring the fact we've been putting a lot of milage on some of our dropships, and they'd all benefit from regular maintenance, we've been dangling a lot of money in front of Federated-Boeing Interstellar to get the licenses and blueprints for the CargoKing and CargoMaster and if we can start getting those into service it'll help with our manpower issues."
"No, I've talked to Olson and he still wants to prioritise dropship maintenance and production over the new heat sinks" Romanov replied. "He's got a point. Our existing battlemechs are already well beyond anything anyone has except the clans, and we're already looking to replace any older model Extended-Range and Pulse Lasers mounted on our current mechs with the new models over the next few years anyway, so I couldn't exactly argue that the army was being starved of resources" she said honestly. "Increasing internal and external interstellar trade in particular is going to need more transport dropships, and I think we'd all prefer not to have to convert any of our Overlords or Unions to cargo haulers."
"How did Fed-Boeing respond to that incidentally, the CargoKing offer I mean?" Nellis asked Bremman. "Some pissant periphery nation wanting to build high-tech dropships that the Federated Suns wouldn't stump up the money for."
"Surprise mostly, and at first I think they thought we were just pulling their leg" Bremman told him, smiling. "It was only when ComStar confirmed that we had a serious line-of-credit with them that Fed-Boeing took us at all seriously, although they still doubt our ability to make them even if we get the technical package" he continued. "Our last HPG to them said that if we couldn't then it was our problem not theirs and they'd still have the money in the bank so what did it matter?"
"Think the government of the Federated Suns will block the deal?" Hallis asked out of interest.
"They might nix us getting the CargoMaster blueprints on principle, it's a military dropship after all even if a cargo hauler not a mech carrier, but maybe not because we're a long way from them and it'll mean money going into Federated-Boeing that they don't have to stump up themselves" Bremman replied. "Budgets are tight in wartime and while the Davions want to keep them turning out the jumpships and dropships they need for the war they'll not want to subsidise them more than they have to" he continued. "The Fed-Boeing shipyards were hit hard during the First Succession War, the Dracs crippled their orbital facility at Galax and it would have cost them a lot to get them running again, so a few extra bucks coming in to make the company's bottom line look better, and them paying a little more in taxes as a result, might outweigh other considerations."
"If they were closer we could pay them in germanium instead of C-Bills, if you're making jumpships you can never get enough germanium" Nellis rightly observed.
Bremman sighed. "Meanwhile we've got the stuff coming out of our ears and no shipyard to turn it into jumpships" he said glumly.
"Don't whine Jacob, it's beneath you" Romanov responded, trying not to chuckle at the dejected expression on his face.
Bremman looked at her askance. "Do you have any idea how much we could sell an Invader for these days?" he asked rhetorically, "let alone a Star Lord. It's not like I was planning on putting warships into production" he stated flatly. At least not anytime soon, he thought to himself. He had some people quietly working on a design for a modified Black Lion that swapped out some of the naval autocannon for lasers that would make more effective against fighters, albeit at the expense of making it a little less punchy in a fight against another warship.
"Less than what we'll be able to in a few more years if those idiots in charge of the Great Houses keep blowing each other up" Romanov pointed out. "Anyhow, I thought the High Associator wanted the yard to start off building some kind of mining stations at first to go chew up the asteroids at AJC, and anywhere else that there's plenty of floating rocks."
"I've got a team designing them, we'll probably just go with a scaled-up Taurian Snowden with more firepower and twice as many mining robots, assuming that we can get the robots that is" Bremman replied. "Getting engineering students to make them for academic credits and a few bucks in their pockets isn't exactly mass production and Earthwerks isn't making and selling very many new ones these days."
"They might be making even fewer soon, I heard they did what we did and brought the license to make the Thug from Maltex" Romanov told him. "Those'll sell better than robots most people can't maintain themselves."
Bremman pursed his lips. "If they're not going to be making the robots maybe we should offer to buy the tooling from Earthwerks FWL and make them ourselves" he suggested. "It's not military equipment so Atreus is less likely to interfere and we could sweeten the deal by offering them a percentage on any robot we export back to the Inner Sphere, maybe even having Earthwerks as our licensed dealer, they've got the showrooms already."
Hallis thought about that. "I can't imagine they'd go for it" he replied eventually. "Sell us a production license maybe but not hand over the whole production line. They might still be hoping that the war will end eventually and be planning to switch back to peacetime production as soon as it does" he added, Romanov looking like she agreed.
"We could always give it a try at least" Bremman suggested. "We're certainly in no position to build another factory from scratch ourselves anytime soon, probably not until we've got all the mines, ore processing plants and the rest built on Alphard, not to mention the Blackjack manufacturing facility" he continued. "Heck, we'd need a Project Workshop or two to make the tooling and they're booked up even further ahead than the zero-gee construction crews are" he reminded everyone. "If we only had to put up a building around tooling that we imported from elsewhere we could do it though, like we have with heavy industrial machinery we bought from the Magistracy."
"I'll pass on the suggestion to the Department of Trade and Industry" Romanov told him, "But even if Earthwerks is willing our side might be wary of making another big foreign purchase because we don't want people to know just how large our financial reserves really are. It might make us look worth invading" she suggested. "We've all read the latest intelligence reports on the First and Second Battles of Tikonov in '32 and '33, Davion and Liao both deployed several warships to the campaign which to me says that they've still got plenty of naval assets in reserve."
Bremman sighed. "You're probably right" he agreed. "If I was the Federated Suns I wouldn't send warships at the Capellans unless I could afford to lose them and still repel another major attack by Luthien who are an existential threat to New Avalon in a way that Sian just isn't" he reasoned. "We've got to assume the other Successor States have naval reserves too, including our 'friendly' neighbour the Free Worlds League, so keeping our heads down until we're certain we can beat them in a stand-up naval fight before they get close enough to Niops VII to launch nuclear strikes is certainly prudent."
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Part XXXI- Section 2 of 2
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"I still think if they ever jump in we should just give them a look at Zughoffer Weir, Bismark and Thunderer and offer to accept their surrender, it's not like they'll know they're all mothballed" Nellis suggested, grinning.
"Can you imagine the expressions on their faces, especially if we had Michigan and Buccaneer bearing down on them from the other direction" Bremman concurred. "I'd still keep Yukon and Saratoga hidden though, no need to give anyone the opportunity to find out that we're the Canada Tribe, Comstar and the Combine would both go apeshit" he said light-heartedly before adopted a more serious tone. "Don't go thinking that the Marik's don't have anything in their fleet we have to worry about though" he warned. "While everyone thinks they lost all their Atreus class battleships during the First Succession War that can't be taken as gospel because we're not entirely certain how many they built in the first place, or if they had enough spare parts stockpiled to put any of the ones reported as crippled and beyond repair back into service."
Bremman leaned forward in his chair. "I wouldn't want to be in an Atreus if I was up against a McKenna, a Texas or even a Lyran Tharkad but she's a step up on most cruisers, or even a Monsoon, and she'll utterly stomp most frigates and destroyers" he said. "My nightmare scenario would be an Atreus jumping in alongside one of the old Aegis class heavy cruisers they got from the Terran Hegemony as surplus, the Samarkand II carrier they bought from the Dracs to provide fighter support, plus one of those big ****** Soyal class with the mass driver and the heavy naval gauss rifles. The Soyal isn't too hard to take on if it doesn't have any support, but if it does, and it can stand back and put those big guns to work, it's an actual threat to anything we have."
Romanov nodded, she had read the reports from Bremman and ran through the wargames and simulations he had been running as to how an attempted invasion of Niops by the Free Worlds League might go. "The Mariks have certainly gotten their kicks using them to bombard planets into submission, and without leaving behind any nasty radioactive fallout" she observed with distaste.
"We know they started upgrading their old League class destroyers with naval gauss rifles just before the Amaris War too, and continued the program while we were busy taking back the Hegemony, so those things are punchier than I'd like as well" Bremman noted. "We're mostly going off open-source intelligence, media reports and the like, but there are reports of an upgraded League class destroyer taking on a Capellan Du Shi Wang nearly twice her tonnage and winning. I mean, the Du Shi Wang class are absolute pieces of crap by battleship standards, but they are still battleships."
"Since we're already talking warships are you sure you don't want to send both Potemkins to McEvedy's Folly to collect the salvage there instead of making several trips with Rawhide alone?" Romanov asked.
Bremman nodded. "I know it got her here from Buffalo Meadows but what we did to K-F drive on Ulithi to get her running was only supposed to be a temporary fix, and I'd soon as not push our luck by sending her off on another long journey down to McEvedy's Folly and back" he replied. "The James Sever has a decent cargo capacity so she can help with the haulage as well as provide an escort to Rawhide and the transport jumpship going with them."
"Sending a Monolith along?" Hallis queried.
"Yes, probably the Maverick" Bremman confirmed. "Sorry I should call her the El Capitan now" he corrected himself. Much like the Congress Class Frigate Rickenbacker had been renamed James Sever for security reasons the three Monolith class transport jumpships in the fleet had been recently renamed El Capitan, Uluru and Kalamos."
It was supposed to be bad luck to rename a ship of course, but if the somehow clans ever found out that Niops was operating a bunch of vessels with the same names as ones that had belonged to Clan Wolverine then that would be even less fortuitous.
"Remember to tell them to take a detour on the way back to fly the flag at Frobisher" Romanov instructed. "Let them know we're not kidding about having a hell of a navy."
"Will do" Bremman replied.
The odd thing was they weren't actually retrieving all the old SLDoME equipment from McEvedy's Folly because they needed it anytime soon, other than for some of the genetic engineering equipment that Frobisher might want for spare parts anyway, it was all just going to be put in storage once it all got back to Niops. They just wanted to grab it all before anyone else did, assuming that at some point they would find a use for it and of course it was worth an absolute fortune.
"Who are you putting in command of the naval squadron?" Hallis asked.
"Commodore Mbeki, she knows a Potemkin inside and out and she's been itching for a detached command" Bremman replied. "I assume you're sending Rory Fallstaff back as the ranking army officer since he's already familiar with the ground?"
"Apart from a extra detachment of engineers, and some academics that insist on going to look at the place themselves, it'll be the same team as before, only with more heavy and assault mechs and fewer lights now we know that the local wildlife looks at a twenty or thirty tonner like Craig is looking at those doughnuts" Hallis confirmed, chuckling. "Only machines with hands so they can help load cargo as well as slug the occasional Thunderbird that gets uppity."
"Where are you scraping up the crew for Rawhide and all those dropships from anyway? Nellis asked curiously. "I know she's been in mothballs too since she returned from Camelot Command."
"Most of them are retired spacers that were too old to get work in the zero-gee construction crews, some are volunteers from Saratoga and Yukon who are bored sitting around waiting for something to do while we keep them in active reserve, the rest are people with Potemkin experience that we can't do without to actually make her run, so I had to pull them from whatever else they were doing" Bremman explained. "I'm going to have to pull Captain Petroni off of commanding the recharge station because he's the expert on Potemkin jumpdrives and I need him."
"Who are you putting in charge of the station while he's gone?" Hallis asked.
"Actually I was wondering if Craig might have someone in the NAM aerospace contingent that might want the job as station commander until Petroni gets back? One of your dropship captains maybe?" Bremman suggested. "He's coming up on retirement anyway, so someone younger getting up to speed on how the station operates is probably a good thing, Petroni's staff will still be there to help out of course. Naturally we'd have to clear it with both the High Associator and yourself Jenna."
Romanov shrugged. "It's been suggested to me more than once by government officials that NAM should be the one running the place anyway, at least once its finished, so I'd be fine with that" she replied. "The only reason the SLDF took over the running of the place to start with was because it was our people building it, but it's not like it's ever going to leave the Niops system so it being a NAM asset makes sense. It's already tied into traffic control and the sensor grid your people still operate and maintain because what you had already was better than anything we knew how to put together."
"Going to be lots of SLDF people coming up on retirement in the next ten years, good thing that we've got a large tranche of sibko kits that'll reach eighteen soon to help plug the gaps" Hallis remarked. "You'll not hear me say this too often but thank God for Nicky K ordering us to go all-out on the clan breeding program in 2819. Zeta sibling company will be old enough to join up before the end of next year and Theta and Iota two and three years after that" he said. "****** him for us not having Eta sibko too though" he added venomously, none of the ironborn kits from 2820 had made it out of clan territory.
"It's not all good demographically after that though, is it?" Romanov pointed out. "You Wolverines weren't having many children at all over the five years from '23 to '28, natural and Ironborn both, and that'll come back and bite us on the ass in the early to mid '40's."
"Depends how successful we are in recruiting people born on Niops, plenty of third generation Capellan immigrants starting to come of age around then, I guess we just need to work on our recruiting strategy" Hallis replied.
"Just remember that I'm planning on signing up plenty of them for the NAM too" Nellis interjected. "One more full-strength regiment and I'll actually be a Brigadier-General with a full brigade to command and without having to fudge things by including my aerospace assets."
"Where are you planning to find the battlemechs for that?" Hallis asked him. "Those Jackrabbit mechs you got from the Blood Rain been breeding?" he joked.
"Well for a start if you're going to keep turning out those new Hussar lights you're not going to need all the ones you're using now are you?" Nellis asked rhetorically. "Your people can't stand using the Mongoose anyway, and there's not many of Jenna's bunch still driving lights."
Romanov sighed. "I do miss my old reaction times" she said wistfully. "Heavies and Assaults are definitely more our speed these days. The Mongoose is primarily a recon mech like the Hussar though, so it shouldn't cause a major capability gap if we replace one with the other and I'm open to the idea of gifting them to the NAM eventually."
"Great" Nellis responded, smiling. "So… about those Awesome assaults you put in mothballs…"
"Don't push your luck Craig" Romanov told him flatly. They might not have had enough of the AWS-8Q in inventory to choose to keep it in general service, but they were too good not to keep for a rainy day, or rather a day enemy mechs were raining from the skies.
"Had to ask" Nellis replied with a shrug.
They were about to start discussing the next item on the agenda when they were interrupted by a knock on the door.
"This had better be good" Bremman muttered before loudly calling out 'Enter'.
A young woman wearing the uniform of a naval lieutenant opened the door clutching a piece of paper. "I'm very sorry to interrupt" she began, trying not to sound too nervous facing three generals and an admiral, "but we've just received an HPG communication addressed to General Romanov that I thought you might want to hear."
Romanov frowned. "Who is it from?" she asked.
"A Major Samuel Tyson who claims to be the commanding officer of what's left of the mercenary regiment Tyson's Troublemakers, formerly commanded by his mother, Ma'am" the lieutenant replied.
Romanov looked around the room blankly. "Never heard of them" she said looking to see if anyone else had.
"Apparently 'Tyson's Troublemakers' were originally the SLDF's 23rd Heavy Assault Regiment, being attached to XXVII Corps, Eleventh Army. He said his mother knew you, or at least her regiment served alongside the 295th on Apollo, and he's wondering if Niops might be looking to hire a small mercenary command for garrison duties."
"How small?" Romanov asked.
"I get the impression from the HPG that they're down to a handful of lances, the regiment effectively ceased to exist as an effective command working for the Federated Suns during the First Succession War and the survivors have been taking whatever jobs they could ever since, but you can read it yourself Ma'am" the lieutenant replied, approaching her and handing it over.
"Thank you, lieutenant. You're dismissed" Bremman told her, the junior officer saluting and heading out the door, closing it behind her.
"An old XXVII Corps unit? That's a blast from the past" Romanov said, reading through the communication. "Got to wonder if it's a trick to try and get someone onto Niops by claiming to be the son of somebody I might have known."
"It's possible" Hallis replied, scratching his chin. "Of course, if they're genuine we could take it as a sign that the Eleventh Army was destined to reform" he said, smiling to let the others know he wasn't being exactly serious.
"Looks like they found out about us from some propaganda that's been spreading across the Inner Sphere" Romanov explained, still reading. "My announcement that Raymond's Redcoats aren't the 295th, and that as the division's commanding officer I'm pissed that they pretended to be, caught some traction among people that don't like the Lyrans and are enjoying the opportunity to give them shit for hiring a bunch of former pirates and war criminals."
"All we need now is to find someone from LI Corps as well and we'll be on our way to getting the whole band back together" Bremman said, laughing.
"I think that every unit from LI Corps was either destroyed fighting Amaris or left with Kerensky so not much chance of that" Hallis replied. "Seemed like half the people running clans were from the 146th Royals, they were an LI Corps unit."
"Clearly the 146th were the Black Sheep of the Eleventh Army family then" Nellis observed, reaching for yet another doughnut.
"You know, if we did hire a small merc outfit that might be useful misdirection, make people think that we're not strong enough to garrison all our worlds" Romanov suggested, pursing her lips. "I mean I wouldn't want them on Niops for security reasons, but we could stick them on Galileo to help secure the place from anyone looking to make a score stealing from the diamond and fire opal mines Olson wants to start digging there."
"Assuming we can trust them not to steal the gems themselves" Nellis warned.
"If they think they do that and get a dropship off the planet without it getting shot down then they're in for a nasty shock but I'd prefer to give them the benefit of the doubt" Romanov replied. "If they still think of themselves as being the 23rd Heavy Assault in some way then they're still Star League and putting the Star League back together is what we're about isn't it?" she asked rhetorically.
For some reason Franklin Hallis felt like he should say 'Seyla' at this point, which bothered him a little because he thought he had shaken off that sort of ritualistic clanner crap by now.
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Note from the Author:
Alpheus McEvedy wasn't the only genetic engineer with some strange ideas, whoever made the Hell's Horses (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Hell%27s_Horse_(species)) species (and whoever went on to release them into the wild) clearly had a screw loose. Hell's Horses cannot be domesticated, this makes them more like the Zebra than the regular horse but this being due in part to them having some Zebra (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zebra) DNA is just my personal guess (the zebra can't be domesticated either).
When Clan Wolf challenged for access to the data being stored at their new Genetics Facility in Bearcat on Strana Mechty in 2822 it was Franklin Hallis that defeated them in the Trial of Possession (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Trial_of_Possession) (this was while he was still only just a Star Colonel). In the original canon timeline Star Colonel Ferris Ward (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Ferris_Ward), who he defeated that day, was later the man that ended up killing him at the Battle of Barbados in 2824.
Double Heat Sinks (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Double_Heat_Sink) (DHS), either the Star League type or the more advanced Clan model don't have to be made in freefall. A technological divergeance here is that the new Niops version of the DHS, which uses Boron-Arsinide (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boron_arsenide) crystals because of their excellent thermal conductvity, does. Growing semi-conductor crystals in a strong magnetic field within a microgravity environment really does effect how they turn out (it's not just random treknobabble on my part). The metal Niobium (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niobium) which is canonically mined on Alphard is really used to make superconductive magnets too.
Being strapped for manpower, resources and production capability ever time Niops finds itself with another high-priority project the only projects get postponed. In the case of them needing a new orbital factory for the next generation of DHS it means that the plans for a shipyard get delayed again (although they're still going ahead with an Alliance Space Station (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Alliance_(Space_Station_class)) where they eventually hope to build the CargoMaster (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Cargomaster) and CargoKing (http://https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Cargoking) under license. If they ever do get a shipyard as well as jumpships and warships they'll be constructing portable mining platforms much like the Snowden (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Snowden) (although larger).
Warships were still very much a thing in the first half of the Succession War, although some types like the Atreus Class Battleship (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Atreus_(WarShip_class)) were all gone by then (not that Bremman will know that for absolute certain). While they no longer had any battleships by this point the Free Worlds League did still have the Aegis (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Aegis_(WarShip_class)) and Soyal (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Soyal) classes of heavy cruisers in service in the 2830's (the Soyal being favoured for orbital bombardment missions) the League (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/League_(WarShip_class)) class destroyer and possibly a Samarkand II (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Samarkand_Block_II_(WarShip_class)) carrier.
The mercenary company Tyson's Troublemakers (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Tyson%27s_Troublemakers), formerly the 23rd Heavy Assault Regiment of the SLDF, was destroyed fighting for the Federated Suns in the First Succession War. Having a handful of them survive is just my way of getting a unit from XXVII Corps of the Eleventh Army along for the ride. Originally three battalions they're down to not much more than three lances by 2836 and really looking to work for someone that they hope won't get the rest of them killed too.
When you look at who had connections to the 146th Royal Battlemech Division (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/146th_Royal_BattleMech_Division) at some point, and how many of them ended up in senior roles in clan society (including Nicholas Kerensky himself), it starts to look like some kind of secret society. You heard it here first, the clans were just a front for the 146th and their nefarious plans for galactic domination! :p
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i would be nice to see some intel types talking about pattern analysis and work on a tech decline graph. soon merchant class will be worth the effort to make and sell.
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There's an extra ' in the link for the Cargo King.
Great story progression, thank you!
When did the Mariks get a Samarkand?
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Fine progress indeed! I hope the "historical" warning at the start doesn't result in too much damage...
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i would be nice to see some intel types talking about pattern analysis and work on a tech decline graph. soon merchant class will be worth the effort to make and sell.
Alarm bells will really start ringing on the Lostech issue some time after 2843 (and Holy Shroud) as the Inner Sphere suddenly starts regressing towards the Bronze Age. :tongue:
There's an extra ' in the link for the Cargo King.
Fixed thanks.
When did the Mariks get a Samarkand?
At some point the Draconis Combine sold them the Chronos (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Chronos_(Individual_Samarkand_II-class_WarShip)). Maybe it was because neither of them liked the Lyrans. :wink:
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Keeping ComStar out of their HPG net will help quite a bit with that first problem... ;)
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At some point the Draconis Combine sold them the Chronos (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Chronos_(Individual_Samarkand_II-class_WarShip)). Maybe it was because neither of them liked the Lyrans. :wink:
Thanks! I love the references and historical grounding in the story- thank you!
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I can just see the Star League school counselling system:
Student "They call me mad, mad I tell you"
Counsellor: "Excellent, have you ever thought of a career in genetic engineering? You'll get a chance to meet many people of similar views"
😁
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Part XXXII- Section 1 of 2
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"After the ComStar War the Successor States thought of the organisation very differently, having seen what could happen to you if you provoked them. Everyone feared a ComStar interdiction and because of this kissing Raymond Karpov's ass, diplomatically at least, became a leading pastime of many a leader of a Great House.
None would admit it publicly of course but they all likely harboured a certain amount of jealousy towards a certain small, but growing, periphery nation that was at best grudgingly polite to ComStar and on occasion treated Karpov like he was something nasty they had stepped in. His backpeddling on his threat to cut off access to the ComStar network to Niops was generally regarded as hilarious in diplomatic circles, mostly because it happened so fast after NHCOMNET contacted Atreus asking if the Free Worlds League might be interested in changing their HPG service provider."
Stephen J. Tran, Red Star Rising: A History of Niops 2800-2900 - Niops Press, 2915
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Association Council Building – Niops Association (Niops VII) – 2837
Giles Olson, High Associator of the Niops Associator and de facto Director-General of a reborn Terran Hegemony had been expecting or at least hoping, that his last term in office was going to be largely uneventful but so far it had proven to be anything but.
With the Niops constitution barring him from running for a fourth term he was generally regarded as a 'lame duck' High Associator, one that was no longer able to push any more long-term policy decisions through the council because he wouldn't be there after 2840 to see them get done. In some ways that meant he was forced to act like High Associator's had before the SLDF turned up in 2827, that being as a boring technocrat making short-term decisions concerning routine day-to-day issues.
Admittedly even the routine day-to-day issues were still a great deal more consequential and broader in scope than they used to be. Deciding on whether or not to hire that tiny mercenary outfit that was now supposedly slowly making its way towards Niops across the Inner Sphere, their single dropship hitching a ride on jumpships that happened to be heading this way, was a step up from choosing whether or not to raise the highway speed limits or not as he had done back in 2826 in his first term, but it still paled by comparison to the day he had pointed at several places on a star map and ordered the SLDF to raise the Red Cameron Star over these systems before the end of the year.
Retirement was going to be very boring, Olson thought sadly. The money would likely be better, several companies were itching to give him a seat on their boards of directors to cash in on his name recognition and political contacts, but he wouldn't be the one calling the shots and he knew that he was going to miss that.
His wife was suggesting he should write a book, and with his kids now all grown up grandchildren to fuss over were probably going to become part of his life soon, but while that would be nice he doubted it would match the heady thrill of the day he ordered General Romanov to take a task force and go kick the shit out of the Blood Rain.
Exercising power was a rush, an addictive one even, which was why it was such a good idea to have term limits and a separation of powers in government. Someone gifted with untrammelled authority for an unlimited time lacking checks and balances was just another Stefan Amaris or Nicholas Kerensky in waiting.
Leaders operating in a system where there were few if any limits on their power were the reasons why this sort of thing happened, Olson thought to himself as he stared at Admiral Bremman in astonishment. "Charles Marik did what?" he asked nonplussed, not for the first time wondering why it was always Jacob Bremman who reported the weird stuff. It wasn't like Romanov and Hallis didn't also take turns coming to his office to answer questions and brief him on events, it was just that the really interesting events never seemed to be happening when they did.
"You heard right the first time Sir" Bremman replied, wondering why it was always his turn to report to the High Associator when unusual things were afoot. "He had his navy blow up the ComStar facility orbiting Oriente" he repeated himself. "The estimated fatalities lie somewhere between three and four hundred, including both ComStar personnel and visiting civilians, and there are even rumours that his own sister Jeanette might have been aboard. She signed up with ComStar years ago, caused something of a ruckus when she did because she was the heir apparent, not her brother."
Olson blinked. "I'm guessing ComStar took him blowing up their space station badly" he responded wryly after a pause while he got to grips with the information.
"Yes Sir" Bremman confirmed, fairly redundantly. "They've put the whole of the Free Worlds League under interdiction, ordered their people to disable every HPG they have there and then to go to ground. That's the reason our communications with the Inner Sphere suddenly cut out three weeks back because all our external HPG communications route through Marik territory."
"Great. So, we're basically just collateral damage for the whole thing" Olson concluded, groaning. "Why the hell did the Captain-General do something like that anyway?" he reasonably wanted to know. It wasn't like the Phone Company was well-liked politically, although they had been successful in making themselves look reasonable and fair to a lot of regular folks in the Inner Sphere who bought into their propaganda that they were neutral to a fault. Attacking them with warships however went far beyond the usual bitching about their expanding power and influence, their secretive ways, and of course how much they charged for long-distance calls.
"According to the jumpship we sent to Hednesford to try and find out why we stopped getting HPG's from there, it's because Charles Marik found out somehow that ComStar have been informing the Lyrans and Capellans about where the Free Worlds League Military has been deploying its forces, allowing them to gain the upper hand in recent engagements" Bremman told him. "The League has been using jumpships as message couriers to mitigate the problem of the HPG network down so I guess he wasn't stupid enough to think ComStar would let his retaliation slide and he quietly put a contingency plan in place before he pulled the trigger."
"There's no way that he has enough spare jumpship capacity to make up for the ComStar network surely?" Olson queried, frowning. That would have been barely doable even before the Inner Sphere was littered with the wreckage of jumpships destroyed in the fighting, as it was these days.
"No Sir, not even close, probably barely enough to stay in occasional touch with even a relatively important system like Hednesford, and certainly not what he needs to effectively fight a war" Bremman replied. "The longer the interdiction stays in place the less coordinated the Free Worlds military will be, and frankly it'll ****** their civilian economy sideways, excuse my language."
"Cutting your nose off to spite your face" Olson muttered to himself. "Okay, I can see why he'd be pissed at ComStar for ratting him out to his enemies, I sure as hell would be in his place, but I'd hope I'd have the good sense just to send a strongly-worded diplomatic note while I worked out a way to retaliate without ****** my own nation over in the process, language excused" he responded, shaking his head in disbelief.
"On the plus side we know for certain that the Free Worlds is still operating warships now, even if they haven't been throwing them at the other powers quite as much recently" Bremman remarked, thinking that knowledge should be of use to him if anyone started talking about cutting his fleet numbers again. "Drastic overkill against a ComStar space station though, so I guess the Captain-General really wanted to send a message."
"If that message was 'I'm too angry to be calculating and pragmatic about this' then he succeeded stupendously" Olson replied sardonically.
"I suspect that SAFE, his intelligence agency, would have advocated arranging a few 'accidents' for ComStar people instead, and maybe a series of more overt, but still deniable assassinations of Toyama's people that wouldn't stop until the Lyan Commonwealth and the Capellan Confederation stopped being inexplicably well informed of where the Free Worlds League military was deployed" Bremman hypothesised an alternate course of action the Mariks might have taken instead. "Nobody rates SAFE all that highly in the intelligence community but arranging a few unfortunate 'traffic accidents', 'burglaries gone wrong' or whatever should be within their capabilities."
"That all sounds like something that could have come straight from the mouth of the galaxies most terrifying purveyor of fast food" Olson replied, chuckling.
"I've been known to sit in on the occasional lecture she's been giving to our trainee spooks" Bremman admitted, smiling. "I've heard Franklin Hallis bemoan the fact that he didn't have Gloria's résumé to hand when Khan McEvedy assigned him the job of dealing with Kerensky's spies because if he had half the Clan Watch would have ended up mysteriously disappearing, along with Jason Karrige" he said, smiling. "I'll have to disagree with you on Gloria being the galaxies most terrifying purveyor of fast food though, I suspect that the CEO of Triple-F Burgers has a body count that rivals that of Stefan Amaris, albeit coronary heart disease rather than garotte related."
Olson laughed. "You know, a few ranchers on Francas and a couple of businessmen on Comstock contacted us about arranging a loan so they could start a similar burger chain" he told the admiral. "They're saying they want to establish a franchise on every Hegemony world before someone else has the idea."
Bremman thought about that. "Makes a change from people wanting money to build a new armaments factory I suppose" he replied eventually. "I just hope they come up with a better slogan than Triple-F, I mean its accurate but 'Your Local Meat Animal in a Bun' just lacks a certain something."
"Yeah, but if they somehow expanded out here I'd love to try out their branch on McEvedy's Folly selling Mammoth burgers and Thunderbird nuggets" Olson replied. "Of course, all the animals on McEvedy's Folly taste like chicken, even the ones that look like cows.
"Really? That's news to me" Bremman replied quizzically.
"I held a reception for the people we rescued from there, got to chat to them informally for a few hours after I managed to get the press to stop asking them stupid questions" Olson told him. "They're a weird bunch, the tribals from Folly I mean, scientifically literate hunter-gatherers. Integrating them into our society might take a while, at least for the ones born there after they fled Alpheus McEvedy and his vision."
"At least there's only a couple of hundred of them, not like when my people showed up needing a whole new city to be built to house us all" Bremman observed. "You know, when I drive through Arecibo these days it's hard to believe that not much more than ten years ago it was just an empty plain with a river running through it."
Olson nodded. "It's been a busy decade for all of us" he agreed. "I guess we've got no idea how long it'll be before the ComStar interdiction ends. Can we route signals through the Magistracy instead?"
Bremman shook his head apologetically. "Even if we rush getting the HPG station on Francas completed it's still more than fifty light-years from there to Thraxa in the Magistracy so we'd need a relay station between them" he explained. "We've got a Mobile HPG we could use for that if we had to, but do we really want ComStar to know for certain that we have one of those?" he asked rhetorically.
"Perhaps not" Olson considered. The ComStar station on Thraxa would have to be told what system they needed to send HPG's to into order to reach Niops and they would soon realise there was just a temporary relay there not a colony. "Politically it might even be better if we remained cut-off, it'll give us the opportunity to bitch out ComStar royally and give us some ammunition when we start negotiating with them again. I mean they interdicted the Tharkad system once, and now it's a whole Successor State, albeit with better justification this time perhaps, so us being even more stridently opposed to handing over our communications network to Jerome Blake's fan-club shouldn't exactly surprise them under the circumstances."
"Might be useful politically but economically it's going to be a pain-in-the-ass, Sir" Bremman warned. "We were just getting used to how convenient it was to send an HPG to someone to make a deal on getting some industrial plant and machinery delivered and now it's back to sending jumpships on errands that might take months and they might still come back empty if they can't strike a bargain. I'll admit I'm personally annoyed by the timing because we had only just agreed terms with Federated-Boeing on licensing the CargoKing."
"So we may, or may not have paid them for the blueprints and technical data and they may, or may not have tried sending us the first batch via HPG" Olson responded with a sigh. "We may have gotten the plans for less money than I feared they would cost, not that they were exactly cheap by any means, but I guess now we're in a Schrödinger's Production License situation."
"We weren't going to be able to start production until the Alliance station was built anyway, but the longer our engineers have to study the plans before we start making the tooling the smoother it'll likely go" Bremman observed. "Because of the additional complexity of these designs compared to that of dropships we currently operate we're bound to hit some snags even with the university offering technical assistance with regards to the robotic systems."
Olson sighed before something else occurred to him. "This is going to screw the Magistracy and the Illyrians too" he realised. "Most of their external trade is with the Free Worlds League for obvious geographical reasons and they've always been connected to them by HPG so it'll disrupt their economies a lot more than it does ours."
"You're probably right, I mean the size of the Magistracy's internal market, and the fact they can still trade with the Capellans probably gives their economy some resilience but the Palatinate isn't so lucky. Other than what they've been selling us recently, shipping refined metals and ores to the Mariks is basically Illyria's only source of income."
"Right, and if the interdiction goes on for months they're going to be in dire straits" Olson surmised. "I mean unless someone else steps in and supplants the Free Worlds League as their biggest trade partner. This could actually be an opportunity for us as well as an inconvenience" he said deviously. "The merchant families that effectively control the Illyrian Palatinate see the galaxy in terms of profit and trade, rather than power and influence, and if we can get our foot firmly in the door while the Marik's are too distracted to care we could come out of the other side of this in a much stronger position regionally."
"I suspect that if we wanted to pull the Illyrian's permanently into our sphere of influence we would need to do more than just continue to trade them our obsolete guns for resources, even though both sides have been doing pretty well out of that arrangement so far" Bremman responded thoughtfully. "I know they've been getting hit by more pirate raids recently than they used to which I guess is why they were happy to barter steel for some old laser cannon, although I wonder if the pirates might decide to prey on the Marik's for a while instead taking advantage of the HPG blackout. They might be looking to expand their militia forces even further though and we can help with that."
"By shipping them a load of more modern military hardware?" Olson guessed. "Stuff we have mothballed?"
"No, we offer to loan them some money, a loan to be paid back over a long time at a very low interest rate, so they can buy military hardware from the Magistracy" Bremman explained. "Then we offer to help them maintain that equipment going forward for free" he said. "I know that Majesty Metals and Manufacturing make a version of the Manticore tank, and our army uses that one too, so that might be what we'll want to suggest because we have people trained to keep those running already."
"So, we score points with the Magistracy and the Palatinate, as well as a hold over the latter because they owe us money and need us to keep their shiny new tanks running" Olson put it together. "Jacob, have you ever considered a career in politics by any chance because that's pretty sharp" he told him appreciatively.
"Politics? No Sir" Bremman denied. "On an entirely unrelated matter when does your term as High Associator end anyway?" he deadpanned.
"Trust me, you'd hate it" Olson told him sincerely. "I'll have to run this past the Department of Trade and Industry, as well as the Diplomatic Corps of course, but we've definitely got the financial reserves to run with this. The mint has been churning out gold and silver coins for trading with anyone that still doesn't accept C-Bills, so we can even offer hard specie currency to the Palatinate to buy what they usually sell to the Free Worlds League if we have to" he said. "If we start purchasing the bulk of their resource production, then subsequently begin voicing concern to them about their piracy issues, offering the loan to help mitigate the situation, that should sound reasonable" he continued. "After all, we're just making sure our supply of raw materials isn't threatened and being good neighbours as well."
"No ulterior motives whatsoever" Bremman concurred, smirking. The Illyria Palatinate probably was among the best neighbours you could hope for in the Inner Sphere, but if they could steer it towards being a client state not just a friendly one that could serve the interests of Niops very well in the long term.
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Part XXXII- Section 2 of 2
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"Returning to the Interdiction issue, if we do rush completion of the Comstock HPG station I assume we can use a jumpship to transfer messages on from there to Thraxa?" Olson checked.
"Yes Sir, I've already notified one of our three Tramp jumpships, the Tremolino, that we'll likely need to transfer her from her regular duties" Bremman replied. "She's got an L-F battery so she can make it from Comstock to Thraxa to carry urgent messages faster than most anything else we have, although it's right at the limit of her double-jump range. Technically just beyond it to be honest which isn't exactly ideal."
"Beyond it?" Olson queried.
"It's just under sixty light years from Comstock to Thraxa but there isn't a convenient star exactly halfway between them so Tremolino will have to do one jump of just barely under thirty light years and one of just over thirty" Olson explained. "30.48 light-years to be precise which is over the recommended jump limit, if only slightly."
"Isn't that dangerous?" Olson asked, frowning. He knew that while the thirty-light-year limit was technically arbitrary, since it factored in a safety margin of the true limit, there was a reason why jumpships only rarely pushed their drives hard because doing so also meant pushing their luck.
"Any jump over thirty does carry some additional risk but in reality it only gets noticeably dangerous much over thirty-one and insanely dangerous past thirty-three" Bremman explained. "Back when I was just a Lieutenant JG fighting Amaris in the last years of the war, the ship I was on had to carry out a jump from Skye to Mizar, and then a second jump onto Nusakan to deliver urgent supplies. Both jumps were over thirty light-years, nearly thirty-one for Skye to Mizar, but other than there being a lot more praying aboard than usual it went smoothly enough" he said. "I'm choosing Tremolino for the job because her jumpdrive was fully serviced at Camelot Command before we left there, and also because by random chance she's done fewer jumps than the other Tramps since we got to Niops. That should further reduce the chances of a jumpdrive malfunction to an acceptable level."
"Why not jump into interstellar space for the first leg of the journey, that way there wouldn't be any jumps over thirty lightyears?" Olson asked. "I know that's done sometimes."
"It's just standard policy. If your ship suffers a mechanical breakdown in interstellar space, potentially light-years from the nearest star, then you're considerably more screwed than if it happens in a star system, especially one that people know to look for you in if you don't make a planned rendezvous" Olson explained. "If Tremolino was going to have to jump very much further I would actually go with the interstellar jump option as the safer one, but as I noted the math says that a 30.48 lightyear jump isn't particularly risky, it's just riskier than thirty light-years or less."
Olson frowned. "I assume the more times she makes the trip between Comstock and Thraxa the riskier it will become due to putting strain on the drive?" he checked.
"Yes Sir, it's not a long-term solution by any means. For that matter unless the message is considered urgent we'll probably want to do it the slow way. Three shorter jumps or about six-weeks there and back if you prefer."
The High Associator nodded his understanding and agreement. "As regards drive maintenance in the broader sense, if we have to do this a while do you think perhaps we should reconsider completing the jumpship repair bay on the recharge station before constructing the dropship yard, or perhaps the additional orbital factory needed for these fancy new heatsinks?" Olson asked.
"Oddly enough even if it was operation now it wouldn't help matters much" Bremman replied with a shrug. "The repair bay on an Olympus is only big enough to service a regular civilian jumpship like a Merchant or an Invader. You just can't fit something larger than normal like a Tramp or a Star Lord inside the bay. We actually considered completely revising and enlarging the Olympus at one point but it would have delayed both the design work and construction, and at the time we began the project we were hoping to get started on the full-sized shipyard a lot earlier than we intend to now."
There was always something messing up the schedule and biting you on the ass soon enough as a result, Olson thought to himself glumly. "How long would it actually take to build the shipyard itself?" he asked.
"Too long to be worth rushing that instead. Even though it'll be mostly a case of constructing a really large pressure hull and reassembling the shipyard we salvaged from Camelot Command in it, so it's not nearly as big a job as it would be from scratch, the damn thing is still huge and extremely complicated" Bremman replied. "If we threw everything we had at it starting tomorrow morning it would still be a matter of years, not months before it was fully operational" he explained. "Also, since we're planning to build it larger than the Camelot yard originally was, so we can work on something larger than a Black Lion, we're going to need a few custom parts from the Project Workshops which would necessitate putting some of their existing work on hold as well."
"We should have started on the new Project Workshops sooner" Olson said regretfully. Workshop III-B was up and running now, and III-C should be on-line before his term of office expired in 2840 as well, but it would be another twenty years after that until they were all completed and they would largely stop being the industrial bottleneck they were now.
Bremman doubted they could have gone much faster than they did in reality, but nonetheless generally agreed with the sentiment. "As you know the second shipyard we're planning down the road is going to be unpressurised and quite a lot smaller. It'll be for the construction and maintenance of civilian jumpships only, so it won't have to be big enough to fit a McKenna inside, but it'll still take longer to construct than the first one however" he noted. "On a related matter, and since we've been talking about Tremolino, given how useful we've been finding her and his sister ships we might want to consider building ourselves a fourth L-F Tramp before we start producing other types of jumpships for export in the second yard. Between the Lithium-Fusion battery, and the heavier than usual armament for a jumpship, they've really earned their keep because we can use them for jobs that would have otherwise needed a warship."
"You're the expert so I'll trust your opinion on that admiral, but I'll be long out of office by the time we get around to jumpship production so it's not me you'll have to convince" Olson replied.
"Of course, but if you could do me a favour and put something on the record about it being advisable it might make it easier for me to push the idea later" Bremman suggested. "The army will likely point out how many battlemechs they could buy with the same money, but unless we're invaded they'd just gather dust in storage while we'll always have a use for a L-F Tramp."
"Even if it's just acting as a glorified message courier because the damn HPG net was shut down" Olson observed with a chuckle, accepting the man's point.
"Probably not as exciting for the crew as when we send them out to survey distant systems for resources, and they end up tripping over old SLDoME projects instead, but not every jump is an adventure, sometimes it just means delivering the mail" Bremman replied, smiling. There was a little more at stake here than his just getting his hands on another speedy jumpship though. The new Tramp would, by necessity, require a lithium-fusion battery to be made for her, and after that it should be easier to get a larger L-F battery approved to upgrade Michigan now that they had some experience with that. Of course, since the battlecruiser would have to be placed in a yard to have that battery fitted, it wasn't a small job by any means, why not take the opportunity to make some other relatively minor upgrades at the same time?
Of course, compared to cutting a Black Lion open to install a lithium-fusion battery just about anything was relatively minor, including the weapon refit Bremman wanted for her. Dismounting a few of her Naval Cannon for laser armament more suited for dealing with enemy fighters would give Michigan more utility as a fleet asset, as would the L-F battery of course, and with Bismark mothballed there was already a convenient source of NL-45's and heat-sinks just floating there.
That was a project for the future of course, Bremman knew. "With so many spacers assigned to the salvage mission to Folly, crews that we don't expect to see back until the end of the year at the earliest, we are really pushed for fleet manpower at the moment incidentally" he pointed out. "I'm going to have to pull some crew from Michigan and Buccaneer in order to replace Tremolino on the Copernicus-Francas run with another ship, which will be the old Star Lord we captured from the Blood Rain."
"I thought that wasn't in the best state of repair?" Olson recalled being told that.
"It's jumpdrive is alright, it just needs an overhaul of just about everything else, including a lot of the plumbing in the crew quarters, which particularly sucks because normally crewing a Star Lord is a pretty sweet crew assignment" Bremman told him. "I get the impression that the pirates just crapped in bags and ditched them out the airlock" he added, grimacing. "I've held off on officially renaming her the Richard Cameron until we can make her worthy of bearing the name of a First Lord of the Star Lord."
"Some might consider a crappy ship a suitable name for a crappy First Lord" Olson observed wryly.
"I might be one of those to agree" Bremman admitted, "although I'm sure many would take offence. To be frank his historical reputation benefited greatly from his being shot in the head by Stefan Amaris" he opined, Olson looking like he agreed with the sentiment. "We've still got a couple of Monoliths in reserve in case we need to transport an expeditionary force, plus the warships of course, so our ability to deploy military assets as needed isn't compromised, but if we keep expanding our holdings we might have to get that old Leviathan running again soon."
"Does that thing even still work?" Olson queried.
"Just because it hasn't moved since it carried the Capellan refugees here is no reason to believe it can't still make a jump, but I'd certainly want our maintenance crews to perform a thorough inspection before we tried" Bremman replied. "It might be worth using it for the Niops-AJC run because there's going to be an Olympus at both ends of the trip with engineers to hand to help keep an eye on the old girl, even if she's too big to actually dock in the repair bay. I suspect we'll be increasing using AJC as a trade hub in the long term anyway because she's one jump from Niops, Alphard, Stafford and Copernicus, and the Leviathan being able to haul eight dropships of cargo back to Niops in one hit will be very useful. That's almost as much as three Invaders could manage together."
"When we find we're having to use a Potemkin for that run instead I'll start to think we might have become a little too successful in extracting resources from the colonies" Olson joked, that behemoth of a militarised transport jumpship, officially designated a 'Heavy Cruiser' because of its armament, could carry some twenty-five dropships and had an internal cargo bay the size of a cathedral by all accounts.
"Give me four hundred Iron Wombs to breed the crew, and twenty years for them to grow up while I train them how to crew the thing and we can do it" Bremman replied, amused by the suggestion. "At the moment I'm just trying to recruit new sailors faster than they retire. All the kids want to drive a mech or fly an aerospace fighter and the ones that do volunteer for the navy want to crew a warship not a cargo freighter."
"Four hundred?" Olson repeated the figure, laughing. "I only opened the new factory making them last month, and that'll only be turning out fifty Iron Wombs a year until we can open a second line which could take another five years or more" he said. "For that matter we've already promised the first hundred of the things off the line to Frobisher anyway, and I'm sure the army expect the lion's share of Ironborn after that because the 295th are getting old."
"All too true alas, but we are going to have to make sure that the navy gets enough personal and resources not to have to make any further cuts because we're already stretched way too thin, as the current situation demonstrates" Bremman stated seriously. "We're expanding territory fast and while we started this thing with far more starlift that we had a use for that's not going to be the case forever. I mean, what's happening with the ComStar interdiction and the Folly mission is a temporary shortage, but a few years down the line it'll be the norm and you can't suddenly build new jumpships, or even dropships, in a hurry."
"Point made Admiral; point made" Olson replied. "At least we don't have to worry about the Free Worlds League invading us for a while."
"No, they're going to be very busy keeping the Lyran's and Capellan's from stomping them until ComStar turn the HPG's back on, which won't happen until Charles Marik swallows his pride and makes some serious restitution I imagine" Bremman reasoned. "That's why I'm not as reluctant to transfer crew from our cruisers as I would be normally, his fleet are going to be very preoccupied for a while."
"Indeed. The interdiction might be inconvenient for us but I'll guess it'll be disastrous for them" Olson surmised. "I hope it doesn't last too long though, I'd like to be the one to tell ComStar 'After what you just did to the Free Worlds League? Are you ****** kidding?' the next time they insist on taking over NHCOMNET."
"If the interdiction lasts until the next election then I doubt the Free Worlds League will even exist as a viable state, but my guess is that ComStar would end it unilaterally as a 'gesture of reconciliation' well before that happens because it's not in their interests for the balance of power in the Inner Sphere to alter that much."
"Always thinking strategically, aren't you Jacob" Olson remarked.
"It's literally my job Sir" Bremman replied with a shrug. "Assuming that all the Great Powers are self-serving, underhanded and duplicitous is just a result of my paying attention."
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Note from the Author:
The ComStar War (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/ComStar_War) of 2837-2838 and the Interdiction (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Interdiction) placed on the entire Free Worlds League likely changed the way an awful lot of people thought about ComStar (http://'https://www.sarna.net/wiki/ComStar') and its intelligence arm ROM (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/ROM) (though it likely changed few minds about SAFE (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/SAFE) because they weren't thought of very highly already). Captain-General Charles Marik (http://'https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Charles_Marik_(29th_c.)') was perhaps being a tad hypocritical because he had no problem with ComStar feeding him intelligence on his foes but when they did the reverse that was grounds for bringing in warships to blow up the Oriente (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Oriente) orbital HPG station (admittedly his own sister Jeanette (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Jeanette_Marik) being involved probably aggrieved him greatly).
Lacking HPG communication the ability of the FWL to coordinate their military went to hell, and soon resulted in sweeping gains by the Lyran Commonwealth and Capellan Confederation which hoovered up multiple worlds. The civilian economy of the League fared little better, financial markets crashed and production dropped through the floor.
Unfortunately for the Illyrian Palatinate (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Illyrian_Palatinate) the Free Worlds League was by far their biggest (and closest) trade partner so their economy would have been collateral damage in the ComStar War. The Magistracy of Canopus (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Magistracy_of_Canopus) would have also been hit, but not quite as hard, and their borders go out close enough to the Capellan Confederation to route HPG's that way instead of through the FWL.
There are canon examples of jumpships making jumps of (just) over 30LY in battletech but it's not something anyone likes to do. The chances of a misjump (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/JumpShip#Misjump), a catastrophic one, go up the further above the safe limit you attempt. Comstock is just about close enough to Thraxa to make it in two jumps but you certainly wouldn't want to make a habit of it.
Unfortunately for the Palatinate their neighbour directly corewards is the Circinus Federation (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Circinus_Federation) which treats piracy as a means to earn a steady income. They might not have as much worth stealing as the Lyrans and Mariks but they don't have as much military hardware to defend themselves with either.
Triple-F Burgers (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Interconnectedness_Unlimited#Triple-F) based out of the Federated Suns is a large, interplanetary fast-food chain. Because not every world has the same livestock what you get in your burger varies world-to-world. There are of course rumours that Hanse Davion (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Hanse_Davion) of the Federated Suns personally preferred Arby's (https://www.deviantart.com/gunjackvalentine/art/I-m-Thinking-Arby-s-131668806), particularly after a hard day of throttling Capellans.
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"None would admit it publicly of course but they all likely harboured a certain amount of jealousy towards a certain small, but growing, periphery nation that was at best grudgingly polite to ComStar and on occasion treated Karpov like he was something nasty they had stepped in. His backpeddling on his threat to cut off access to the ComStar network to Niops was generally regarded as hilarious in diplomatic circles, mostly because it happened so fast after NHCOMNET contacted Atreus asking if the Free Worlds League might be interested in changing their HPG service provider."
I love to see an expanded version of this.
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Given that Holy Shroud isn't really workable in this timeline - the successor states could get the tech back from Niops eventually - how is this affecting Toyama's plans?
C* needs to really up their game if they want to come out on top!
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I was really expecting to see the offer to Marik in the main story... hoping it comes soon! ;D
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A motto for NHCOMNET "We deliver the mail, we don't read it"
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A motto for NHCOMNET "We deliver the mail, we don't read it"
Niops will read your mail same as Comstar. They would not let such an opportunity pass.
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Honest advertising will say, "Be warned that we might read your mail, so encrypt it properly!" :tongue:
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A motto for NHCOMNET "We deliver the mail, we don't read it"
that would go well on an advert.
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I'd prefer the honest advertising, personally...
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Part XXXIII- Section 1 of 2
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"Unless you want NHCOMNET to build its first HPG outside of the Hegemony on Thraxa then kindly make sure to properly maintain your Hyperpulse Generator there. We're not going back to the days when we had to route all our damn communications through the Free Worlds League."
HPG sent to Raymond Karpov, Primus of ComStar, by the Director of NHCOMNET - 2840CE
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ComStar HPG Station – Thraxa – 2837
There were times when Thérèse Cervoni was glad she captained a transport jumpship, albeit one able to defend itself from typical periphery threats, and not an actual warship, and this was definitely one of those occasions. If NAS Tremolino had mounted heavy naval weaponry she would have been tempted to threaten to pull a Charles Marik and blast the hyperpulse generator facility to rubble from orbit.
Not that it would likely require anywhere near that level of firepower to bring the place down. An old SLCOMNET station that ComStar had simply changed the sign on out front, having seemingly done little in anything else to renovate the building judging by the state of the place, it dated from the time before Amaris, when the Star League Ministry of Communications had used their vast funding and resources to place HPG's practically everywhere. The idea being to tie humanity together with universal communication, linked by Hyperpulse Generators that could send a message from the Magistracy of Canopus over a thousand light-years to the Outworlds Alliance in mere hours.
The Amaris War and then the First Succession War had wreaked havoc on the network, not merely because of stations destroyed in the fighting but in terms of the availability of replacement parts for when HPG's broke down. The Magistracy of Canopus had been spared the orbital bombardments and wholesale deployment of WMD which had riven the Inner Sphere, but their HPG's stations had still gradually fallen into disrepair with fewer and fewer of them still operational and ComStar concentrating its efforts closer to Terra where the vast bulk of humanity still resided despite the tens of billions of dead.
With a population still yet to reach the double-digit millions, though it should reach that mark well before the end of the century thanks to low but steady growth, Thraxa was not important enough for ComStar to prioritise keeping its HPG running if anything expensive to fix ever went wrong with it. If the Magestrix sitting on the throne of Canopus was willing to pay herself then ComStar would be only too happy to install a brand new HPG on Thraxa of course, but that just wasn't going to happen because the world wasn't rich or populous enough to warrant that kind of spending by central government.
Naturally Thraxa not being rich was also the reason why the locals couldn't just pay themselves either, Hyperpulse Generators being expensive as hell (though not as cripplingly expensive as ComStar claimed they were). All everyone on Thraxa could do was hope that their old HPG kept running, knowing that one day it would pack up for the last time and they would join all the other worlds that used to be linked to the rest of the galaxy by more than the occasional jumpship visit but no longer was.
Knowing that there was no point spending money on fresh paint or new furniture the ComStar station on Thraxa was therefore drab and run down, as was the office of the local Precentor when Thérèse Cervoni requested to talk to him personally. At least it was warm in there, unlike the lobby to the building where the electric heater seemed to have failed. Being cold in a building which actually housed its own fusion reactor to power the HPG was ludicrous.
After exchanging pleasantries, including a diplomatic offer of condolence for the death of Primus Conrad Toyama who had apparently passed away shortly after Niops was cut off from the ComStar network, things soon became much less pleasant and civil because what the local Precentor had to say was not what Cervoni wanted to hear.
Standing up and leaning forward over the desk so as to glare down at the ComStar functionary sitting there, Cervoni trusted her body language and demeanour left him in no doubts as to her feelings on the matter. "What do you mean you insist on payment up front for any HPG messages we send?" she asked through gritted teeth. "The Niops Association is literally hundreds of millions of C-Bills in credit in the account we hold with ComStar."
The very young man holding the title 'Precentor Thraxa' smiled up at her, ignoring her anger. "No, the Niops Association is hundreds of millions of C-Bills in credit with the account they opened with our Hednesford HPG station" he replied placidly. "That was a special arrangement with the Precentor there, not with ComStar as a whole. Frankly you were lucky the First Circuit agreed to honour the agreement because it was a highly unorthodox one, especially given that your government owns and operates its own, legally dubious, independent HPG network."
"Legally dubious?" Cervoni queried, narrowing her eyes.
"Well yes, clearly" the ComStar bureaucrat contended. "As a non-signatory to the Communications Protocol of 2787 the legality of your network is greatly in doubt."
"Or, less subjectively, as a non-signatory to the Communications Protocol of 2787 it does not apply to us whatsoever since we are entirely outside any jurisdiction or legal authority it has over the dumbasses that did sign it" Cervoni countered. "With the Free Worlds League in particular likely regretting ever doing so right now" she added coldly.
The Precentor smiled again. "I feel confident that the Interdiction will end soon once the Captain-General admits his full culpability for the current unpleasantness, and makes suitable restitution" he said with certainty. "Once that happens you can resume accessing the ComStar network via Hednesford as before" he continued. "Naturally, once that temporary arrangement ceases and we absorb your 'NHCOMNET' your account with the Hednesford station will be transferred to ComStar as a whole and you will be able to access the funds from any ComStar PHG facility."
"Are you actually trying to say that ComStar Hednesford is separate from the rest of ComStar?" Cervoni growled.
"Oh, dear me no" the precentor denied that was the case, shaking his head. "It's rather that your account with ComStar Hednesford is entirely separate from the rest of ComStar" he explained. "As a special arrangement, a courtesy really, funds are transferred from your account to ComStar as and when this is appropriate, ComStar does not actually hold the money for you as such, only ComStar Hednesford."
Cervoni took a deep breath to steady herself. "Well, can we transfer some of the money from our account at Hednesford to a new account on Thraxa then please?" she requested. "Given that there is already precedent for ComStar facilities doing so?"
"Possibly, with the agreement of the First Circuit, oh and not until our Hednesford facility is operational again and reconnected to the ComStar network of course, so that an electronic transfer can be made" Precentor Thraxa told her.
"If Hednesford is back on the freaking network we won't need an account here!" Cervoni exclaimed.
"Yes, I do see your problem but I'm afraid I'm entirely unable to help" the precentor responded, sounding genuinely apologetic about it which only made it worse. "It's conceivable that a direct appeal from Niops to our new Primus could speed up the process, or at least help it go more smoothly" he suggested. "I must caution however that given our ongoing dispute with the Free Worlds League all his attention is likely fixed on resolving that particular issue as a matter of priority, with what remains of his time devoted towards a smooth transfer of power and what immediate personnel changes and new appointments he may make to wish within the organisation."
Cervoni sighed. At least this wasn't the first time ComStar had seen a change at the top she considered, looking on the bright side, so hopefully it wouldn't take them too long to sort themselves out internally. The death of Toyama had come much earlier than might be expected though, he was only eighty-five when he passed which was very young for someone both born in the Terran Hegemony and with access to the finest healthcare available. Considering that his predecessor Jerome Blake, also Hegemony born, had only made it to a mere eighty had to make you wonder if the top job at ComStar was bad for your health.
At least the new guy Karpov might be an improvement on Toyama, Cervoni considered. Toyama had been an extreme hard-liner to the point that he had purged ComStar of anyone that disagreed with him, and very much looked to be trying to turn them into some kind of weird cult. If Karpov was more measured and moderate the change of leadership should at least give ComStar an opportunity to offer Charles Marik an olive branch, pinning the blame for the espionage directed at the Free Worlds League on Toyama giving Marik a diplomatic way out of this mess without looking weak.
Of course, if Karpov was just as crazy as Toyama that wasn't going to happen. Conceivably he might even be more of a loon of a predecessor, though that was hard to imagine.
"You do realise that ComStar is effectively preventing us accessing our own money, right?" Cervoni checked, trying a different tack.
"We would argue that the intransigence of the Free Worlds League is preventing you accessing that money, perhaps the Niops Association could take it up with Charles Marik?" the ComStar official suggested. "Apply some diplomatic pressure for him to back down and apologise for the good of all concerned."
"Yeah, maybe we should send him an HPG" Cervoni responded sarcastically. "Fine, I'm under orders to send out some urgent messages and then wait here on Thraxa for the replies so I'll go back to my dropship, pick up some money and return here."
"We don't accept whatever it is you use for money on Niops, it's not on my approved currency list, so you might need to exchange it for MC Dollars first, assuming the local banks are willing to accept your bills" the precentor advised.
"We use the Niops Dollar" Cervoni told him, straightening up.
"Ah, how many of those are there to a C-Bill out of curiosity?" the precentor asked.
Captain Thérèse Cervoni was unable to stop herself from smirking. "Zero point nine-eight. We keep trying to peg it to the C-Bill to simplify external trade but ComStar money is flakier than ours and doesn't hold its value as well" she replied. "That's what happens when your paper money isn't backed by germanium like ours is I guess."
To say that the value of a C-Bill was somewhat arbitrary was putting it mildly. ComStar valued the C-Bill as being one millisecond of HPG transmission time, that being equivalent to about a page of text, but because they determined their own profit margin for sending HPG's the whole thing was just a little suspect. Effectively they just decided that their C-Bill was worth the same in purchasing power as a Star League dollar before Amaris and then declared that was worth one millisecond of HPG time.
People old enough to remember sending HPG's back then tended to point out that SLCOMNET charged rather less than a dollar for sending a page of text but they were ignored.
Turning on her heels to leave the man's office, thinking that the place had seen better days to be honest as it was well overdue some redecorating, Cervoni hoped that last jibe had hurt. "It's all about the Newtons" she said, knowing full well the reference would be lost on the man but enjoying saying it anyway.
Hopefully a local bank would accept a stack of hundred-dollar bills printed in the Association, even if Niops currency had the head of a physicist from the previous millennium on them rather than a dead Magestrix like their own currency, but if not the strongbox on the dropship also contained a bag of fifty-dollar gold coins that they were unlikely to turn down. Technically the money had been handed over to Cervoni to pay for anything she found for sale on Thraxa that she thought Niops would benefit from, old mining equipment for example given that it was known they mined coal here, but hopes of making the trip back to Comstock with a lucky find like a broken but repairable mining robot were being dashed by the need to hand over even more money to the phone company.
Uncertain if the issue was simply a matter of officious bureaucracy, or a more nefarious attempt to push Niops into the ComStar fold for the sake of expediency, Cervoni chose to assume the latter applying Hanlon's law to the situation. Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity, as the dictum went. While it was true that ComStar was prone towards the nefarious, just ask Charles Marik, they were also the inheritors of the traditions of the old Star League civil service which was legendarily bureaucratic to the point of being downright obstructionist if you didn't correctly fill out the paperwork.
Her marine bodyguard had waited outside after the Taxi from the spaceport dropped them off, being unwilling to relinquish his sidearm as a requirement to enter the ComStar facility. It had proven to be surprisingly easy to get permission from the authorities at the port for him to leave there armed, with the locals not seeming too fussed about it at all. As it turned out there was a native ursine-like predator known as the 'Snow Bear' which was known on occasion to wander into town, and while it was illegal to go out and hunt them as they were a protected species, the locals didn't expect anyone encountering one of the things by accident to just let it eat them. As such going around armed just in case was considered perfectly acceptable here, even if you weren't a local or even a Magistracy citizen.
Not that a few rounds from the marine's gyrojet pistol would do much more than make a Snow Bear very annoyed, they were the size of a grizzly and more badly tempered, but the sound might scare one off… hopefully.
Ceroni found the marine where she had left him, although no longer alone as he seemed to be talking to a local. The woman in question wearing what looked like a well-tailored business suit in the current Magistracy style with an expensive jacket worn over it.
"Captain Cervoni" the marine greeted her. "The young lady here wishes to speak with you" he told her. "She's been waiting a while" he added.
"I guess that Thraxans are just as used to the cold as we are" Cervoni replied, taking turns standing guard outside fleet headquarters on Niops toughened up SLDF marines very effectively. "Captain Thérèse Cervoni of the Niops Association jumpship Tremolino" she introduced herself. "And you are?"
"Gillian Maynard, the Lady Gillian Maynard in the service of Sarah Trussel, Duchess of Thraxa" the woman introduced herself formally, handing over a business card which Cervoni took and glanced at. "Your physically imposing manservant was just remarking how similar our world is to yours."
"A little too cold for comfort and orbiting a red dwarf star, yes" Cervoni confirmed. "Although Corporal Kent is a marine attached to my command, not my manservant" she corrected the woman. She was right about him being physically imposing however, which was why Cervoni chose him to play bodyguard in the first place nearly two metres in height and he lifted weights as a hobby. "May I ask why you wished to see me?"
"The duchess bade me to invite you to dinner at her home this evening, we assumed that you would be staying on Thraxa overnight given it will take longer for your jump vessel to recharge its drive than it will for your dropship to return to it at the jump point if you left today, or even tomorrow" Maynard replied.
Cervoni raised her eyebrows. "I hope it's not rude to ask why the ruler of this planet is extending such an offer to a mere jumpship captain?"
Maynard smiled. "Ah, but you are not just a mere jumpship captain, we are given to understand that you are a serving officer in the Niops Navy, correct?"
"Technically I'm a serving officer in the SLDF Navy, which is considered seconded to the military of the Niops Association, that being the lawful inheritor of the authority of both the Star League and the Terran Hegemony."
"A grand position for Niops to claim for itself" Maynard replied, seemingly amused by the claim.
"Not really, it's more the case of us being all that's left of the Star League and the Terran Hegemony, so it landed with us by default" Cervoni responded with a smile.
Maynard smiled herself. "The Terran Hegemony in Exile, as it were" she said.
"Not really. You can't be in exile if you never actually left where you started at" Cervoni contended. "Niops was always a Terran Hegemony colony and never ceased to be one, either legally or through force majeure. The Cameron Star was never lowered over Niops."
"But you did change its colour" Maynard pointed out.
"Sometimes a rebranding exercise is good for business" Cervoni joked. "The Cameron Star still makes some people out here in the periphery a little nervous."
"Indeed, being forced to join the Star League at bayonet-point will have that effect" Maynard responded wryly. "Should I assume that you will be accepting the invitation?"
"Under the circumstances how could I not?" Cervoni asked rhetorically. "Niops values good relations with its neighbours and a rejection would be extremely rude if nothing else, given that we are guests on your world."
"Excellent. If you wish I will have a car collect you at the spaceport this evening to transport you to the Ducal Estate. Feel free to bring your corporal along as bodyguard if you wish."
"I'll make my own way thank you, but I do appreciate the offer. "What time should I get there?"
"Honestly I'm not quite sure, it's all being arranged in something of a hurry, I'll send a message to you via the starport security staff to let you know when that's been decided" Maynard replied. "As government employees, much like myself, they're all at the beck and call of the Duchess" she said. "I do know that it will be a formal, or at least semi-formal affair" Maynard noted. "I hope you have something other than your duty uniform with you?" she checked.
"I never travel without my full dress uniform" Cervoni replied, it was going to need to be dragged out of the bottom of her trunk and pressed though, and her boots probably needed a polish, not to mention the sword and scabbard that was always
+ supposed to be worn with her dress whites.
"Excellent" Maynard responded, smiling. "I'll see you at the estate later" she said. "I'd offer you both a lift back to the port to save you having to hail a taxi, but I'm afraid I need to be on the other side of town within the hour for a meeting with the board of one of our mining companies."
"We're fine with a taxi" Cervoni replied.
"All good then" Maynard replied. "Toodeloo" she said, heading off towards where a pricy looking ground car was parked nearby, either her personal conveyance or perhaps a government issued vehicle if she worked for the planetary ruler.
"Ciao" Cervoni called after her, assuming that 'Toodeloo' was local slang for goodbye.
"When she first came up to me and told me she was a member of the local nobility I thought she was going to order me to marry her or something" Corporal Kent said quietly. "They do that here right?"
"They do, and men aren't allowed to reject the proposal" Cervoni told him. "I'm pretty sure that only applies to Magistracy citizens though" she added. "Were you disappointed she didn't?"
"Nah, but she wouldn't have liked my girlfriend coming down here all the way from Niops, demanding a Trial of Refusal based on prior ownership and kicking her ass if it had gone that way" Kent replied. "I'm not even kidding. My girl's a combat engineer and she stresses the 'combat' in the title when she's mad."
Cervoni laughed, imagining how a member of the local nobility might react to a challenge by an angry Wolverine girl. "Yeah, we all have our weird cultural quirks don't we?" she remarked, hoping that a taxi would come by soon she could flag down. Fortunately the ComStar facility was situated in the planetary capital of Thraxa, which with a population almost as large as the whole of Niops VII was actually a fair-sized and bustling city, despite its being surrounded by a frozen wasteland.
"Have you noticed we're getting a lot more looks from people in the street, and in passing cars, now Ma'am?" Kent asked.
"Word must have spread about the Mule that set down at the spaceport in SLDF olive livery and with Red Cameron Stars painted on the side of it" Cervoni reasoned. "The people at port probably got straight on the phone to the press, or maybe just their friends, after letting the government know we'd landed."
"Are we really that interesting?"
"The Star League remnant with warships and its own HPG network? We probably are, particularly in a backwater like this" Cervoni surmised. "Assuming they aren't idiots they probably figured out when we jumped in that we only came here to use their HPG because of the Interdiction cutting us off, and they would have to be serious idiots not to have put two-and-two together after we came straight here to the ComStar building after landing."
Corporal Kent nodded. "I'll bet that the Duchess is thinking that if ComStar and Charkes Marik don't settle their differences anytime soon then this won't be the only time they see us, she might be after a trade deal maybe?"
"We've probably got more to offer them than the reverse, but hauling our asses back and forth to Comstock just to deliver the mail would be a hell of a waste of a jumpship so if we can arrange something with the locals that would be good" Cervoni replied. "I do like the look of some of those fur hats I've seen people wear, those would definitely sell back home."
"I was hoping to try out the local hooch and could have offered an opinion of whether or not that was worth importing too but I guess I'm playing bodyguard again tonight, Ma'am" Kent said glumly.
"We'll still be here for a couple more days at least, so I'll make sure that you're off duty and on shore leave tomorrow night" Cervoni told him. "Just the hooch you want to try out? I'd bet a lot of the crew want to check out the brothels. All fully legal here in the Magistracy, catering to all tastes" she noted. As long as everyone involved was of legal age, consented, and there was no exploitation going on, then in Canopus space the motto was anything goes.
Corporal Kent grimaced. "My girlfriend would hack my balls off with a blunt entrenching tool" he said, expression indicating that it wasn't just hyperbole on his part.
Cervoni nodded. "Best just stick to alcohol then" she advised.
"Yes Ma'am" Kent concurred, wondering how much trouble he would be in if he just went to a strip club instead of a brothel. The rumours of girls dressed up as cats pole dancing, with body modifications including functional tails and mobile ears, was just something he needed to see for himself.
The stories about fake mermaids dancing half-naked in glass tanks too only made him wonder how much a chick from Frobisher could make in a month in the Magistracy, though not having hair or a tail like a fish probably damaged their earning potential, he considered idly.
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Part XXXIII- Section 2 of 2
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After an afternoon spent travelling back to the starport, collecting a briefcase full of cash, plus a bag of gold coins just in case, finding a bank where she could exchange Niops currency for C-Bills, returning to the ComStar HPG station to send the messages she was on Thraxa to dispatch and then making her dress uniform look half-way presentable Cervoni only hoped that her unexpected dinner with the Duchess Of Thraxa was going to go smoothly.
At least she was in a position to make small-talk about the similarities, and differences, between Niops and Thraxa over dinner, Cervoni considered, as she also brushed up on her Magistracy-related history and political knowledge. The local star was an M1V Red Dwarf, hotter and larger than the M5V Niops, but not so much hotter and larger that most people hailing from more typical inhabited worlds would necessarily notice the difference. Thraxa was also a far less crowded system than Niops, which packed seven planets around it, with most people living on the seventh while the inhabited world here was only the second out from the star.
Given that it was also orbiting a hotter and larger star, you might expect that Thraxa II would be considerably warmer than Niops VII but it actually orbited slightly further out from its sun resulting in them both having very similar surface temperatures. Always planned to be as self-sufficient as possible going forward, the people who first settled Thraxa had reserved what land there was near the equator for farming, clearing areas of the forests there both for crops and livestock grazing while building most of their suitably well-insulated cities out on the otherwise useless tundra.
Thraxa having a surface that was 80% ocean, frozen or otherwise, and much of the land covered by glaciers, mountains and permafrost, it was easy to understand why what soil there was which was available for the plough or sheep farming was not wasted by covering in in concrete. If not for all the geothermal activity underground Niops would likely look much the same, but volcanoes and hot springs are a useful antidote to permafrost.
Despite both being cold worlds under a red sun the indigenous fauna and flora of Niops VII and Thraxa II were also rather different. While the cold seas of both worlds harboured plenty of life, although Niops had nothing to match the terrifying sea-serpent known as the 'Thraxa Devourer', the fauna on Niops had never emerged onto the land while on Thraxa it had, including large megafauna like the aforementioned Snow Bear and the caribou-like Tazqan.
It was also believed that Thraxa II had been rather warmer in the past, with much of what was now merely frozen tundra once covered by far more extensive forests than those which could now only be found at the equator. This theory was backed fairly conclusively by the discovery of large coal deposits deep underground all over the place, which the locals exploited both to keep warm and to power their small industrial base.
Niops of course had no coal, or large fossil fuel deposits of any kind for that matter, but being more geologically active and technologically advanced it found that geothermal power and nuclear fusion reactors did the job of stopping the population from freezing to death pretty effectively without them.
Considering the wider political scene Cervoni knew that the Magistracy was actually about as good a star-nation as any to have on your border, being neither militarily expansionist and aggressive nor tyrannical and authoritarian. They were certainly a bit weird, and not just because of their female dominated society and their strangely meritocratic non-hereditary aristocracy, but their libertarian and frankly libertine ways too. At least you could always safely assume that if the Magistracy Armed Forces were shooting at someone that their enemy probably started it and likely deserved being shot at.
That was not to say that the Magistracy was quick to forgive, or wont to let past transgressions go, however. Despite strong trade links they still refused to permit the Free Worlds League to open an embassy on Canopus, holding onto a grievance that dated back to the Reunification War when the Marik's had invaded them on behalf of the Star League, and they were certainly no fan of the Terran Hegemony either for much the same reason.
Several systems which had once belonged to the Magistracy had been annexed by the Free Worlds League at the end of the Reunification War, the spoils of siding with House Cameron, and the Magistracy still regarded them as under foreign occupation nearly two-and-a-half centuries later. That did not mean however that Canopus planned to try reconquer them, that wasn't really their way, instead they were counting on the Free Worlds League to collapse one day so they could just walk back in.
Sitting back and waiting for the Free Worlds League to implode was not quite as optimistic a plan as some might assume it was, the League might be the oldest of the Great Powers but despite that it was legendarily chaotic, fractious and unstable. Each Magestrix in turn was playing the long game, betting that the Magistracy would win in the end by just outlasting the Marik bastards, and the smart money agreed that they just might, especially now that the ComStar interdiction was wreaking havoc on the fortunes of Atreus.
While technically the Magistracy had sat out the Amaris War, having in fact joined the Periphery Uprising against Star League rule at first, when Kerensky and Amaris went head-to-head the ruling Magestrix at the time, Janina Centrella, had supplied what intelligence she had on Amaris's plans to the SLDF. Additionally, she hadn't blocked Majesty Metals and Manufacturing from supplying Kerensky's forces with arms they needed to fight the Rim Worlds Republic as, while she was no friend to the Camerons and their supporters, the Star League with Stefan Amaris on the throne was objectively worse.
Naturally the other major Periphery power, the Taurian Concordat, had just sat back through the whole thing, gleefully munching on popcorn as the Star League tore itself apart.
Fortunately for Thérèse Cervoni once properly arranged the dinner was scheduled for fairly late, giving her plenty of time to get ready, although the whole time she hoped that her lack of a grasp of high-class social etiquette as it existed in the Magistracy of Canopus was not going to bite her on the ass. The government back home was keen to maintain good relations with the Magistracy since they were both more populous and economically developed than the Illyrian Palatinate, and hadn't rendered several Terran Hegemony worlds lifeless with WMD like the Free Worlds League, so a diplomatic faux pas could really hurt her career. With so many of the senior officers in the navy getting on in years Cervoni, herself born on Strana Mechty in the early years of the clans, had her sights set on captaining a warship before she turned fifty and with so many of the things in mothballs that was by no means an easy goal to achieve.
The taxi that transported Captain Cervoni and her marine bodyguard to the large estate belonging to the Duchess of Thraxa was allowed to enter the gates, ferrying them down a long colonnaded driveway to the large mansion belonging to the Trussel family where they got out and paid the driver in local script, tipping generously of course.
Whilst in theory the title of Duke of Thraxa was not hereditary every Duke and Duchess in the planet's history had come from the Trussel family, largely because of tradition and the fact they had the money to make sure that the tradition was continued. In that they were much like the Centrella family that ruled the Magistracy as a whole, technically you didn't have to be a daughter of the Centralla dynasty to be appointed the Magestrix but it wasn't a coincidence that they all had been.
The latest scion of House Trussel, Duchess Sarah Trussel, personally greeted Captain Cervoni at the door to the mansion and ushered her inside while a servant smoothly led Corporal Kent away, the duchess assuring Cervoni the marine would be properly fed and kept entertained while they dined.
Over a less formal and ornate dinner than Cervoni had feared, one which included plenty of local dishes, it became quickly apparent that the duchess was indeed hoping to establish a friendly trading relationship with Niops, grasping the ComStar interdiction as an opportunity to get her foot in the door. Until now jumpships from the Association had been mostly trading with more populous and industrialised worlds in the Magistracy like Ballad, a regional capital a few jumps from Frobisher, or even Canopus itself, but the closest place to Niops with an HPG that still connected to the ComStar network was Thraxa and the duchess was well aware of that fact.
Would it not be more convenient to everyone if all the trade between the Niops Association and the Magistracy of Canopus was carried out via Thraxa, the duchess suggested? Niops could order equipment from Majesty Metals and Manufacturing on Dunianshire, for example, have them delivered to Thraxa by local shipping and then collected by the next jumpship coming from Niops to access the HPH network. With Thraxa as a trade hub for goods going in both directions it would be convenient for all concerned, and although Thraxa would naturally expect to profit from this, handling charges, storage fees, 'limited' tariffs etc. surely such a system would be beneficial for everyone?
Cervoni was in no position to actually make any such agreement of course, but she did promise to pass the suggestion on to her superiors and said if nothing else Thraxa would surely find a market for her fur exports and Tazqan meat in Niops. The smoky flavour of the meat from the caribou-like native herbivore was extremely palatable, quite unlike anything Cervoni had eaten before, and although far more expensive than beef or venison from Francas it would still find many fans she decided.
All in all it was a good evening, and Captain Cervoni was pretty sure that if any such trade agreement was made it would look good on her record.
It wasn't all good news to report when she returned to Hegemony space however. When the replies to the HPG's she sent out arrived back at Thraxa it turned out that the money transfer to Federated-Boeing Interstellar for the license to build the CargoKing and CargoMaster had not gone through before the Interdiction was put in place.
Federated-Boeing wouldn't hand over the license without the money, and ComStar insisted that the money sat with their Hednesford station where it could not be accessed by anyone.
Several months later with the Interdiction still in place, and ComStar still refusing to budge, Captain Cervoni jumped into the Thraxa system with a billion C-Bills worth of germanium bars. Driving from the starport to the ComStar facility in a wheeled SLDF APC acting as a security van, thanks to the kind permission of the duchess, Cervoni swore to herself that if the local Precentor refused to take the germanium because it wasn't on his list of approved currency then she was going to make him ****** eat it.
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Note from the Author:
Thraxa II (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Thraxa) in the Magistracy of Canopus (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Magistracy_of_Canopus) is a cold world orbiting a Red Dwarf star like Niops VII, but the systems are actually quite different (Niops is crowded, Thraxa is not). Ruled by a duchess from the Trussel (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Duke_of_Thraxa) family the world was always intended to be as self suffiicient as possible despite its climate and the locals are known for being stubborn and independently minded. Thraxa has coal deposits, sheep farming and exports furs and Tazqan meat.
A matriarchial society under House Centrella (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/House_Centrella) family the Magistracy was brought into the Star League by force during the Reunification War (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Reunification_War) of 2577-2597 and is no fan of the Terran Hegemony. However they don't like the Free Words League either, and are happy to trade with them, so Niops regarding itself as Star League/Terran Hegemony is no bar to making a business deal.
Back in the Star League days the Ministry of Communication had SLCOMNET build HPG Stations all over the place but during the Amaris War (and the Succession Wars) many of these fell into disrepair, especially in the Periphery. In canon Thraxa had no HPG by 3025 but with a population barely into the double digit millions and a small economy ComStar wasn't going to put much effort into keeping the old SLCOMNET station running so that's hardly a surprise.
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So... nobody's made it to Atreus yet?
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Part XXXIV- Section 1 of 2
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"It wasn't so much the start of a beautiful friendship but the ComStar War did at least cement relations between Niops and the Free Worlds League into a mutually beneficial, and usually civil, acquaintance."
Stephen J. Tran, Red Star Rising: A History of Niops 2800-2900 - Niops Press, 2915
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Zenith Jump- Point – Niops System – 2838
Lieutenant-Colonel Mary Heath had never expected to rise above the rank of Major during her service with the Niops Association Militia, there were just too many junior officers chasing too few senior positions, but the expansion of the NAM in terms of personnel and responsibilities over the last decade had changed her career trajectory considerably.
Oddly enough her career had however come full circle in a way. When the SLDF jumped in back in 2827 she had been the officer with responsibility for making sure the system was being constantly monitored for inbound jumpships and then ten years later she found herself doing the same thing again.
Back then of course her office had been in Militia Headquarters on Niops VII and now it was on a shiny new million-ton Olympus Recharge Station at the Zenith jump-point. She didn't used to have several squadrons of aerospace fighters at her direct command, many of them packing nuclear ordnance either, but fundamentally it was the same job. Keep an eye on things and if anyone jumped in with evil intent ensure they were warned that Niops was not the typical periphery world and things would end badly for the interloper if they didn't reconsider their plans and get lost.
Heath had been appointed commander of the station after Captain Petroni was reassigned to the salvage mission to McEvedy's Folly. Transferring the Olympus from SLDF to NAM control had always been the long-term plan, but with Petroni needed to make sure the Potemkin assigned to the mission kept working, the transfer went ahead earlier than it would have been otherwise.
Brigadier-General Nellis offered the job to Heath, and since it came with a promotion and more money, as well as being a choice posting in itself, she jumped at the opportunity.
Not that it was an exactly action-packed assignment. While there were inordinately more ships jumping in and out of Niops these days the vast majority of them were SLDF and tended to keep to a tight schedule. There were a few periphery merchants and traders who had started making semi-regular visits, and the occasional cargo jumpship from the Free Worlds League delivering an order of industrial machinery or the like, but the latter were far fewer than they had been before the ComStar Interdiction for obvious reasons.
The engineers had finally gotten the second gravity ring finished and spinning, so the Olympus station was better off for living space than it had been, but the repair bays and the rest of the recharge batteries were still waiting on the work-crews needed to finish them being available. At the current rate that the government keep finding new high-priority jobs for the zero-gee construction teams any dreams of building a second Olympus station for Niops at the Nadir point were idle to the point of near fantasy, but then again just having one would have been thought of as miraculous not all that long ago.
There was at least a decent chance that the Voidseeker hanger salvaged from Camelot Command might be retrofitted to the station sometime before Heath was due to retire. Fully automated the hanger could not only launch and recover the drone fighters it could also refuel, rearm and if necessary also repair them which would free up a lot of maintenance crews as well as pilots assigned to the station.
Voidseekers were bad news, at least if they were gunning for you. Based upon the Stingray aerospace fighter they mounted a more powerful XL fusion engine, superior sensors and plenty of firepower, which in conjunction with the fact that the computer controlling the fighter was utterly fearless and could take a lot more gees while manoeuvring than a human pilot could had left a lot of SLDF fighter jocks from the Amaris War either dead or suffering from SDS related PTSD.
Until the robots took over however the fighters assigned to the station were a mix of older types belonging to the NAM, mostly Eagle and Ahab heavies for dropship and jump-ship busting and some of the faster Lightning for anti-fighter work. They had all been upgraded in recent years with improved weaponry, plus more heatsinks and armour, so the Olympus was by no means poorly defended but Heath would have preferred some of those souped-up Royals the SLDF were using every time an unscheduled and unknown vessel jumped in.
Naturally there was always a destroyer nearby just in case, either the Essex II Cape Bon or the Lola III Protecteur, with the other usually to be found at the Nadir point, but they could be called away in theory leaving the Olympus to defend itself.
Not that an absent destroyer was an issue when the sensors on the Olympus detected an emergence wave forming several thousand kilometres away and an alert was automatically sent to Heath's noteputer. A second update, a manual one this time sent by the duty officer, then reported that Protecteur was already starting to swing around ready to accelerate towards where the inbound vessel would arrive if needed. Thank God for paranoid SLDF types always on the lookout for invading clanners or a Marik taskforce, Heath thought to herself, leaving her office and heading down the corridor to the control centre while the computers tied into the sensors would be attempting to establish the likely mass of the inbound and how far away it might have been jumping from.
One thing that differentiated this particular Olympus station from the standard design was the recent addition of a very large optical telescope installed in a turret-like mounting atop the station, and by the time Heath arrived at the control centre it too was pointing at where the emergence wave was forming.
Supposedly the mirror for the big reflecting telescope had been deemed 'imperfect' when it was manufactured, which was why it had been rejected by the university, but just because it wasn't considered good enough to take high-resolution photographs of stars on the other side of the universe that didn't mean it wasn't good enough for other things.
The operator just had to remember to zoom out the image when taking a look at a ship which had appeared on this side of the Zenith point if they wanted to identify the type of vessel, not count the rivets in the hull.
"What have we got?" Heath asked the control room staff.
"Best guess is an Invader, jumping in from Romita" the duty officer reported. "IR signature detected, yes it's an Invader" they confirmed as the electromagnetic interference from the jump cleared up and the computer collated the data coming in from the suite of sensors directed at where the unknown had just appeared.
"IFF?" Heath queried.
"Invader transponder is squawking that it's the Free Worlds Navy jump-ship Dark Regret."
"Hell of a thing to name a ship, although I'd bet the Free Worlds League has regretted a lot of the things it has done in the past" Heath replied. "Transmit the standard greeting from Niops Traffic Control and inform them of the local rules regarding our restricted airspace. If they look like they're planning to try and send a dropship down to Niops in violation of our regulations ask Protecteur to paint them with her targeting radar, that should make them behave."
Nothing happened for the next few minutes as the Invader was greeted and informed of the rules visiting ships had to obey in this system and they signalled back their intention to comply. This wasn't the First Free Worlds ship to visit Niops since HPG contact with Hednesford was made, although they were certainly a rarity and it was the first since Heath took over. "We're being hailed by the Marik jumpship" the communications officer announced. "They want to talk to the station commander."
"Okay, let's hear what they have to say" Heath replied, putting on a headset microphone. "This is Lieutenant-Colonel Mary Heath of the Niops Association Militia, commander of the Zenith Recharge Station" she announced herself. "How can I be of assistance today?" she added politely.
"This is Garth Marik, son of Charles Marik Captain-General of the Free Worlds League, I am here on a diplomatic mission on behalf of my father and request an audience with a senior representative of your government. Ideally your High Associator."
"Holy shit!" one of the control room staff exclaimed as Heath herself looked a little stunned for a moment before she collected her wits.
"Taking you at your word that this is a diplomatic mission, the Niops Association is pleased to welcome you to our home system. In accordance with our custom for such visitors the Dark Regret may approach the station whereupon we will begin beaming power to your jumpsail with no payment for the service required" Heath signalled back. "It takes a while to recharge your drives normally here. Our M5V class star is a little on the dim side, particularly compared to an F4V like Atreus" she continued. "I will forward on your request for an audience, however my government may wish you to present some credentials to verify your identity before agreeing to do so."
"Asking me to confirm my identity seems entirely reasonable under the circumstances. I'll await the response from your government with the appropriate level of patience and understanding" the man claiming to be Garth Marik replied. "Incidentally we weren't aware you possessed a Lola III class destroyer as well as the Essex II a previous Free Worlds vessel reported encountering here. I'm now wondering how substantial your fleet of warships actually is?"
"Well if you'd jumped in last week you'd have met our vast fleet of Luxor class heavy cruisers" Heath responded wryly.
"And there I was under the impression that every single one of those had been lost fighting Amaris."
"Drat, you've seen through my clever ruse" Heath replied, chuckling. "Would you believe a squadron of battleships?" she asked.
"Those left with Kerensky."
"That's what the secret Cameron heir really running Niops wanted you to think" Heath told him. "But keep that to yourself."
"Pah, everyone knows that ComStar is hiding the secret Cameron heir on Mars, along with the cryogenically frozen body of Jerome Blake while they try and figure out how to cure him of the genetic disorder that killed him."
"You've got me, apparently I need to prepare a more convincing bluff" Heath replied, a couple of the station command crew visibly trying not to crack up laughing. Whoever came up with the notion that a refuge in audacity approach to keeping the Great Houses ignorant of Niops possessing several full-sized battlewagons was a genius in Heath's mind. Any intelligence operative of the Great Houses who came to believe that Niops had a lot more naval strength than they were letting on was bound to have to deal with a sceptical superior retorting that the analyst or operative in question was suffering from a sense of humour failure because Niops was always making jokes about their secret battleships, and of course their cabal of Camerons survivors plotting a second Reunification War.
"Does ComStar know about your second destroyer may I ask?"
"Probably, it's not really a secret and we've always assumed they had access to a lot of the old SLDF records. The two of them were assigned to the 295th as divisional escort ships which is how they ended up here" Heath explained, truthfully though with a hell of a lot of backstory being left out.
"They never passed on the information."
"Yeah, I guess they only hand over military intelligence like that to the Lyrans and Capellans" Heath responded laughing, unable to resist yanking his chain. "Too soon?" she added after a few seconds of radio silence from the other end.
While the supposed Garth Marik had evidently not liked the last dig at the Free Worlds League and its current ComStar-related predicament, the fact remained that he had been very friendly and congenial indicating he really wanted to be on good terms with Niops, even to the point of bantering with a military officer from a pissant periphery state.
It didn't take a genius to work out why he was here of course, thanks to the Interdiction Charles Marik and the Free Worlds League was getting their ass kicked by Steiner and Liao and they were clearly having little luck in restoring the HPG net. Seizing control of the abandoned HPG stations wasn't the problem, it wasn't like ComStar kept military garrisons there to defend them, rather it was a combination of both sabotage and the League's own lack of technical knowledge regarding how an Hyperpulse Generator operated in practice, as opposed to theory. There were still plenty of physicists on Atreus who understood the equations set down by Kearny and Fuchida, knowing exactly how the math applied to the practical engineering was another matter entirely.
Of course, if the Inner Sphere continued to blast itself into a pre-industrial society, one also severely lacking in Higher Education facilities thanks to a surfeit of funding and a surplus of radioactive craters, before too long they wouldn't have the physicists either. They hadn't quite regressed to that level as yet, but the Second Succession War was still less than a decade old and if the First was any indication it might have another quarter-century left in it before everyone ran out ammunition, manpower, money or just the will to keep banging their heads against a brick wall.
That was a problem for the future however. What Charles Marik needed right now was people that didn't belong to ComStar but were apparently well informed enough about the operation, maintenance and indeed manufacture of Hyperpulse Generators to have their own HPG network.
If it had taken SAFE this long to realise that people like that could be found only a single jump from Free Worlds territory it seemed that their reputation as being the worse intelligence agency in the Inner Sphere was well-founded. Unless it had just taken Charles Marik this long to swallow his pride and approach some podunk periphery nation for help of course, that couldn't be discounted.
Lieutenant-Colonel Heath had of course been advised that the Free Worlds League might well come knocking on Niops door looking for some HPG related assistance as the Interdiction wore on, that Charles Marik would send one of his own children to do so did come as something of a surprise though and could be seen as either desperation or astuteness on his part.
Given that he had blasted the Oriente ComStar station with warships, most observers on Niops tended to discount the suggestion that he was a particularly astute or pragmatic man which meant he was getting desperate.
Hopefully not desperate enough to make threats if Niops didn't concede to his requests, or possibly outright demands, although with the Free Worlds League Military currently getting hammered into the ground by their rivals what reserves they had were barely in a fit state to invade the Illyrian Palatinate, let alone the Niops Association.
With the Olympus station relaying the conversation back to Niops VII it wasn't long until instructions to Heath on how to proceed from that point on arrived from Brigadier-General Nellis. For a start play nice and express some noncommittal platitudes about how sad it was that the Free Worlds League was suffering because of underhanded ComStar shenanigans. As regards the current military situation, with the League being invaded from two directions, feel free to disparage the Capellans Nellis advised, people on Niops didn't care for their caste-like servitor system and predilection for biological warfare and didn't mind one bit if the Capellan government knew it, but don't bad-mouth the Lyrans. After all the Steiners weren't complete ******, they represented a big potential market in the future and they might already be holding a grudge about the outing of Raymond's Redcoats, so diplomatically it was best to play nice with them as well.
Niops didn't really care for any of the Successor States but there were clearly lesser evils among them and the government and military were pragmatic enough to differentiate. The Free Worlds League itself was objectively a better neighbour than the Capellan Confederation or the Draconis Combine would be, the inability of the realm of House Marik to ever get its shit together politically being an absolute blessing. Having a united, well-run and frankly less fractious and disorganised state than the Free Worlds League on the border would be of far greater concern than what they had now, so long may the status quo continue.
A joke being told at SLDF headquarters was that in the past Niops could have carved off a small chunk off the Free Worlds League and Atreus wouldn't have realised for five years. With the HPG network down it would be so long before they noticed they might not be absolutely sure if worlds like Revel and Stettin ever actually belonged to them, or there was something wrong with the old maps.
When the Dark Regret got close enough to the station to begin receiving beamed power to its jumpsails, at this point so close that it noticed the telescope array on top of the Olympus and had to be reassured that it wasn't a gigantic naval laser pointed right at them, Heath sent over a shuttle to confirm the identity of the man purporting to be Garth Marik.
Joking that he could have just shown himself at a viewing port and held up his identity documents so the big telescope could have read them instead Garth Marik willingly presented his credentials to the inspection team sent over to the ship and was told that despite them being accepted, and his being granted diplomatic status, he would still not be allowed to travel onto Niops VII.
However, given the unusual circumstances, and the fact it would only take a couple of days to make the journey, High Associator Giles Olson was willing to meet him personally aboard the recharge station and a dropship was being prepared to ferry him there with all haste.
Since, even with power being beamed from the station, it would take much longer than that before the Dark Regret would be ready to head home anyway Garth Marik seemed perfectly fine with the proposal and expressed his thanks that Olson was willing to make the trip. Live face-to-face contact was preferable to electronic communication, even if Niops still had the fancy holographic projectors that were quickly falling out of use across much of the Inner Sphere.
Fortunately for Olson the journey from Niops VII up to the Zenith point also gave him plenty of time to analyse the situation, run through various possible scenarios on how this might go and consider a number of proposals on how to proceed.
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Part XXXIV Section 2 of 2
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Arriving at the zenith station aboard a Confederate class military dropship, the only one the NAM owned and operated, escorted by an SLDF Titan, Giles Olson was pleased that preparations for hosting the meeting aboard the station were well in hand, with Lieutenant-Colonel Heath having prepared a conference room as well as temporary quarters for the Free Worlders if they needed them.
With a diameter of just over twelve-hundred metres, and also unusually wide, the main rotating grav-deck of an Olympus made living and working aboard such a station quite pleasant compared to most space stations. Eventually the grav-deck would even house stores and other businesses to cater for visiting jumpship and dropship crews, but as yet most of the floorspace was unused other than as temporary extra storage space for goods being imported and exported from Niops.
As Garth Marik, his bodyguard and an advisor were escorted through the station, they had arrived via one of their own shuttles which was now docked in a vacant small-craft bay, Marik made note of the fact that everything seemed to be brand new and freshly painted. This confirmed the report prepared for him by SAFE that Niops had only recently constructed the station and seemed to back up their theory that it was as yet the only recharge station these people had.
There certainly wasn't another such station at their colony Alphard, a Free Worlds jumpship having visited there to see what was going on in the system given that Niops had purchased the rights to the defunct branch of the Alphard Trading Corporation that once operated there, so their resources were not unlimited Marik surmised. Still, just to have built one of these things, said a great deal about their industrial depth and along with their operating their own HPG net indicated that there was more to these Niops people than just a few inherited warships.
Ushered into a somewhat utilitarian conference room, a large rectangular steel table in the middle with some rather uncomfortable duralumin chairs lining each side, Marik and his advisor took a seat while the bodyguard stood off to one side back against a wall.
They had let the bodyguard keep his sidearm, though given the number of armed NAM and SLDF military personnel infesting the station that was likely because they didn't think he represented much of a threat, and while they waited Marik made a mental note to ask why the Niops Association Militia had not been fully integrated into the SLDF structure when General Romanov and her people arrived.
Olson did not keep them waiting long and he entered wearing am expensive looking and well-cut business suit accompanied by a man wearing SLDF dress uniform, the star of a brigadier-general on his collar. "Sorry to keep you waiting" Olson began, smiling. "Giles Olson, High Associator of the Niops Association" he introduced himself. "May I present Brigadier-General Hal Franklin of the SLDF, General Romanov's second-in-command" he continued, indicating his companion.
"Garth Marik, here representing my father Charles Marik, Captain-General of the Free Worlds League" Marik introduced himself in turn, shaking hands with Olson who couldn't help but note how young he was, barely into his early thirties if that. "My companion Elise Stewart, Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs."
"A pleasure" Olson responded, smiling at the woman. "Your cousin is the Earl of Stewart I believe?" he checked.
"Second cousin many, many times removed" the woman replied, smiling back.
"Still, having all this aristocracy around makes a humble scientist turned politician like myself feel positively plebian" Olson joked. "What about you General Franklin?" he asked the military officer by his side.
"The Niops Association knows no lord but the First Lord of the Star League whose name is Cameron" Brigadier-General Hal Franklin, AKA Lieutenant-General Franklin Hallis, growled.
Olson sighed. "You'll have to forgive the SLDF people their ways" he said apologetically. "It's been said that diplomacy is the art of saying 'Good Doggie' while looking for a big stick, while the military only emphasises wielding the big stick" he observed. "Our military intelligence people have gotten it into their heads that you might intend to threaten us into handing over Hyperpulse Generators so you can better prosecute your war against the other Great Houses and I confess it has our forces rather on edge."
"The Free Worlds League has no such plans" Garth Marik denied.
"Wonderful news" Olson responded with a broad smile, "Naturally we would sabotage all our equipment to prevent it being seized in such a manner and I would so hate to have to counter with a threat to turn every Marik controlled world within sixty light-years into radioactive rubble" he said brightly.
The youngest Marik son raised his eyebrows. "That would seem… an overreaction." He opined.
"After what you people did to New Dallas and Brownsville? Like ****** it is" Hallis retorted. "We've spent over forty years stockpiling enough megatonnage to make sure that if the same thing happens to us you'll ****** regret it" he stated venomously.
"That's enough General!" Olson told him curtly.
"My apologies, Sir" Hallis replied, hoping that he was playing his role nearly as well as Olson was his.
"I'm afraid that given our lack of what the military tells me is called 'strategic depth' our defence policy leans heavily towards unleashing armageddon if it looks like what happened to the rest of the Terran Hegemony might happen to us" Olson explained. "Our star may be dim but that does not mean that our final rage against the dying of the light would not be very bright indeed."
"You consider yourselves the dying ember of the Terran Hegemony and the Star League then I assume?" Elise Stewart asked.
"Dying? No, not hardly" Olson replied. "More like the spark that relit what will one day become a raging inferno lighting the way to the future" he said before chuckling. "You know, if I was allowed to stand for re-election that line would have definitely been recycled into a speech, but as it is I'll just have to save it for my memoirs" he continued. "Oh, in case you don't know I'm serving out my last term in office, our constitution only permits the High Associator to be re-elected twice so come the next election in 2840 I'm back to being a private citizen. It's actually quite liberating in a way, I don't have to schmooze with people I don't like or pretend to agree with random nutjobs I run into out on the street anymore."
"Term limits? Not very Terran of you" Stewart observed.
"The positions of First Lord and the Director-General of the Hegemony may have been lifetime appointments, and the elected members of the High Council certainly had no term limits, but there's always room for innovation and improvement in government" Olson replied. "Our system certainly makes it trickier for one man or woman to so entrench themselves in authority that they become some kind of tyrannical dictator."
"I'll choose to assume that by 'tyrannical dictator' you are referencing those sat on the throne of the Draconis Combine or the Capellan Confederation, rather than my father" Garth Marik remarked.
"No offence but honestly I can't see the Free Worlds League as being centralised or organised enough for any Captain-General to meet the usual criteria" Olson replied. "That's really not meant as an insult by the way, your parliament and regional power-blocks act as somewhat of a check on your leadership that is sorely lacking in other places. If you want to see true totalitarianism in action look at what happened on Kentares."
"We don't like you for what you did, not who you are" Franklin Hallis interjected. "It's an important distinction."
"We don't like the Capellan Confederation for who, and what, they are which is the reason why we're prepared to be accommodating, if not necessarily in the manner you're hoping for" Olson told Garth Marik. "I'll cut to the chase, no we won't give you HPG's or technical assistance on how to get ones you've seized from ComStar running again, not because we like ComStar, in fact at the moment we're extremely ill-disposed towards them, but because we signed an agreement with them that gave us access to their network as long as we didn't provide Hyperpulse technology to any other state."
Marik frowned. "But aren't you currently unable to access the ComStar Network because your only HPG link operates through the Free Worlds League that they've put under interdiction?" he queried. "Doesn't that mean they broke the agreement between you?"
"We can still access it in a roundabout manner through the Magistracy, though there are related financial matters which we are extremely aggrieved about" Olson replied. "Frankly it's a pain-in-the-ass, but we have business dealings with parties beyond the local area and losing ComStar network access would have a negative effect on our economy."
"We could certainly make it worth your while" Marik persisted. "Even a handful of HPG's or a few manuals would help swing the war back the other way" he said. "It's going badly for us as I'm sure you realise" he admitted.
"Worth our while in the short term perhaps, but not in the long term I suspect" Olson replied.
"ComStar is not to be trusted" Marik declared. "Do you doubt that they passed on our military secrets to our enemies thus violating their supposed neurtality?" he asked, feigned indignance ignoring the fact that in secret they had previously informed the Free Worlds League of what the other Successor states were up to first.
"Oh, we believe you about that, the only thing we're not sure of is why you thought they wouldn't" Olson replied, chuckling. "Look, if you feel obliged to make threats at this point to try and get what you want then please go ahead, but it won't get you what you want while it will mean I don't tell you my proposal on how we might be of assistance otherwise."
Elise Stewart and Garth Marik looked at each other before turning back towards Olson. "What proposal?" Marik asked curiously.
"Okay, assuming threats are off the table then allow me to present a scenario" Olson began. "Let's say that hypothetically the Niops Association was interested in purchasing Stingray aerospace fighters, from Andurien Aerotech, I'm told they have a manufacturing facility for them on Westover four jumps from here" he continued, looking to Hallis for confirmation the military officer nodding. "Now, what with the war going on, and your ability to transport raw materials around restricted by the need to use jumpships to carry messages not just haul cargo, Andurien is currently in no position to oblige, woe is Niops."
Garth Marik looked puzzled. "I'm not sure where you're going with this" he admitted.
"Now you see while Niops does not have a production line for the Stingray, or any aerospace fighter type for that matter, we do have a certain amount of indigenous arms production, which includes the ability to manufacture Particle Projector Cannon" Olson continued. "A weapon that I believe the Stingray mounts but is in somewhat short supply in the Free Worlds League at the best of times."
"Too many of them going into the Awesome I guess" Hallis wryly observed.
"I don't know where you got the mistaken idea that the Free Worlds league was lacking in PPC production" Marik replied flatly.
"Well one indication was the way you've been noted as replacing the PPC on your examples of the Black Knight with a Large Laser, which you wouldn't be doing if you had PPC's to spare" Hallis responded. "Now to be fair it's not that you don't make a lot of PPC's, it's more likely that your problem is that so many of the machines you rely on mount them. You've got two factories making the Awesome, two making Marauders, other factories making the Thug, Warhammer, Battlemaster and Griffin… well I've made my point, but when added to all that the fact that your primary medium aerospace fighter also mounts a PPC it's not surprising that production doesn't meet demand."
"Indeed. So what if Niops was to try and speed up Stingray production in particular by shipping PPC's to Westover, purely for our own benefit of course, helping to clear the production backlog so we get ours sooner" Olson suggested. "Of course, there is also the matter of how we would pay for these aerospace fighters once they were complete, I mean with the HPG net down we can't simply transfer C-Bills now can we?" he asked rhetorically. "We might even have to resort to barter."
"Bartering what?"
"More PPC's obviously" Olson replied, smiling. "And I mean, we're not actually in any rush to receive our new fighters right now, so if we had to wait a couple of years for the first batch that would be fine even though we would make full payment in advance."
"Full payment in the form of PPC's" Garth Marik replied, playing along.
"Indeed" Olson confirmed. "Naturally we would deliver the PPC's to Westover ourselves, perhaps in a jumpship that was honestly too large for the assigned task and might be forced to pick up and transport other cargo along the way to make the trip worthwhile."
"We were thinking about a Monolith following a very roundabout route from here to Westover and then back again. Got any cargo that needs moving between any of the systems between here and there?" Hallis asked. "I mean, what with so many of your jumpships busy elsewhere you must."
"Nothing military of course, we're strictly neutral and trust that any encrypted communications we might carry along with us for you would not violate that status either" Olson added for himself.
"You don't see the PPC's you're moving in this hypothetical scenario as being military cargo?" Elise Stewart asked knowingly.
"Nah, just trade goods because we can't pay in C-Bills" Olson replied. "Wholly the property of the Niops Association until they get to Westover, at which time what happens to them is none of our business" he said. "Just to be clear this proposal should not be taken as a sign that we like you, it's more that we don't like ComStar, particularly not at the moment."
"Do you mind me asking how it is you seem to have this PPC production capability that must be beyond your own needs?" Garth Marik asked.
"Not at all, we made some weapon production lines to replace worn out hardware, you've got to remember all our machines date from the Amaris War or just afterwards, and planned to sell any excess production, perhaps to the Magistracy or even to yourselves eventually" Olson replied. "I'm sure you know we also purchased a license to produce the Thug, and we were going to need PPC's for those as well of course."
Elise Stewart frowned. "You realise that getting our hands on more PPC's, and a little more transport capability, isn't going to help enough for us to beat back the Lyrans and Capellans?" she asked.
"Yes, but other than offer our thoughts and prayers there isn't much more we can do without breaking our agreement with ComStar as I said" Olson replied apologetically. "Even if we could scrape up a handful of HPG's for you, and maybe offer technical assistance, it's extremely doubtful we could swing the war back in your favour anyway, not at this point. When you eventually throw in the towel we don't want to be the next ones Interdicted."
"Honestly I'm not sure that my father will think this is a good enough response from Niops" Marik suggested. "If he thinks you're bluffing about your purported nuclear arsenal he might order more direct methods to force you to comply with his demands."
"Then he'll find out that we're not bluffing and the Free Worlds League is in no fit state right now to deal with what we'll do to every one of your worlds within reach of our military" Olson replied flatly. "If he's trying to save his domain then getting a fair chunk of it orbitally bombarded because his warships are tied up elsewhere is not the way."
"Perhaps we should throw them another bone, the one we discussed earlier" Hallis said to Olson.
Olson nodded. "As well as the PPC's we have limited ERPPC production and can provide some of them, along with double-heat-sinks, that Brigadier Franklin advises you could secretly mount to some of your new-build Marauder mechs after they've left the factory."
"A MAD-3R with those would basically be a downgraded Royal Marauder, just without the ferro-fibrous armour" Hallis explained. "It's not a war-winning weapon, but if you suddenly deployed say a company of the things onto the battlefield one day, maybe even painted up in SLDF colours, it might make your opposition think you'd found a big Star League cache and cause them to halt their advance. It's not like they've got ComStar feeding them intelligence on all your dispositions right now."
"By 'limited' we mean we're hand-building them" Olson lied, "so don't go thinking we can ramp up production and help you turn the tide with hundreds of pseudo-royals." he said. "My advice would be to sue for peace while you've still got a star-nation that's mostly intact."
"Presumably you're hand-building ERPPC's for some of your hand-built Thug assaults" Marik surmised. "That makes sense under the circumstances" he reasoned.
"What exactly would you want for these ERPPC's and heatsinks?" Stewart queried.
"Ongoing courteous relations with the Free Worlds League and for you not to tell anyone where you got them" Olson replied. "You can tell ComStar about the normal PPC's though, in fact we'd actually like you to once you're back on speaking terms, we're trying to make a point there that there are consequences to messing with us."
Garth Marik looked thoughtful. "I've got to admit this is not what I thought I would be discussing with you when I arrived at Niops" he told them honestly.
"To be frank we certainly never expected an actual member of the Marik family to come to us looking for help so these are untested waters for all of us" Giles Olson replied with a shrug. "There is one thing though, I was wary of asking this earlier because I feared it might sound crass, but under the circumstances for the life of me I don't know whether I should offer my condolences for the death of your aunt Jeanette or not" he added awkwardly.
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Note from the Author:
Despite his relative youth Garth Marik (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Garth_Marik), youngest son of Charles Marik (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Charles_Marik_(29th_c.)) seems to have been the one responsible for the Free Worlds League getting off as likely as they did after losing the ComStar War (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/ComStar_War). Instead of his father sending him off to negotiate with the Primus Raymond Karpov (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Raymond_Karpov) and the First Circuit (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/First_Circuit) as in canon he is dispatched to Niops first to try and get some HPG's (and/or technical assistance).
Niops does not want to break their agreement with ComStar but they are angry enough with them to offer the Free Worlds League some help of a different kind. The FWL suffered an onging shortage of PPC's through the SuccessIon Wars which only got worse over time, needing to replace the PPC on some of their Black Knight (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Black_Knight) mechs with a large laser as early as 2809 in the First Succession War was just one example. By 2873 they also ended up having to produce a model of the Marauder (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Marauder) without PPC's and in 2915 a type of Banshee (http://'https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Banshee_(BattleMech)') without them.
It wasn't that they didn't make a lot of PPC's, it was that so many of their most numerically important machines used them (including the Awesome (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Awesome) which mounted three) that they rarely had enough, thus often having to substitute in lasers and LRM's instead . If their PPC supply was such a logistical bottleneck at the best of times it must have been surely even worst during the ComStar War/Interdiction so an additional supply of Particle Projector Cannon could have an outsized (if still far from war-winning) effect. It also amuses Niops that if asked why they're giving the FWL PPC's they can blame ComStar; "We're not giving them PPC's, we used them as currency. We wanted to pay for new fighters in C-Bills instead but we couldn't because of the Interdiction."
The Stingray (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Stingray) is a decent aerospace fighter with a lot of punch, but if you don't have enough PPC's for all your mechs having your primary medium fighter mount one as well isn't great logistically. One of the factories that makes the Stingray is on Westover (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Westover), only four jumps from Niops, so it's pretty close. A Monolith taking a less-than-direct route there and back could haul a lot of cargo between different inhabited systems which might be handy if the ships usually flying between them are unavailable.
Niops could easily provide a lot more ERPPC's than they are too, but not letting the FWL know that is rather important.
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Yohooo, Niops going for the Swiss route here. Nice job! :evil:
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Still wondering how the intro to the part a few back will come to pass... this is a MOST interesting route! :D
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Part XXXV- Section 1 of 2
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"If you want to keep people from trying to steal the diamonds you've just dug out of your mine, then I cannot endorse too highly the method of having a Battlemaster stood outside the building they're stored in."
Major Marcelo Gao - 2840CE
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Ennis City Spaceport – Westover System – 2838
"When they said this planet made Alphard look temperate, I thought they were joking" Captain Anne Blüd complained, looking across the great flat expanse of concrete which constituted the Ennis spaceport. The sun was beating down like an orbital strike and she wondered if she shouldn't have tried to borrow a sombrero from one of the crew of the Saratoga before coming here.
"Yeah Ma'am, but it's a dry heat" her long-time aide responded, trying to strike a more optimistic note. "Remember when we visited Frobisher the first time? That felt worse than this, what with the humidity on the island where we landed" he recalled.
"True enough" Blüd conceded. Humidity was not something you had to contend with on Westover IV. It was a good ten degrees warmer at the equator than Alphard was, and the oceans covered even less of the surface resulting in a planet that was absolutely parched.
Even stood at the bottom of one of the cargo ramps, sheltering in the shadow of the Mule they had arrived in the air temperature was scorching, and it felt like the breeze was trying to strip your skin of any moisture it had. Cargo handlers with a forklift and a loader had already collected the crates of PPC's they had transported here from Niops earlier in the day, and the dropship had been fully refuelled and resupplied immediately afterwards, but until the FWL authorities got their act together they couldn't leave as yet.
"If I ever had to perform manual labour here I think I'd need to borrow a cooling suit and a portable battery pack to power it" Blüd remarked, watching some poor unfortunates manually loading another dropship situated a few hundred metres away. This was definitely a place where one of those fancy new CargoKing dropships that Niops was supposed to start producing soon which did all that for you would come in handy.
"Wouldn't it be easier to just get the marine detachment to do it?"
"Oh, they'd all be dead of heat exhaustion before I resorted to humping crates around myself" Blüd replied grinning. "Privilege of rank."
"Yes Ma'am" her aide replied. "If they don't start emptying this place of dropships soon there won't be anywhere for anyone else to land" he observed. Despite covering a vast area the Ennis spaceport was near full to capacity with grounded dropships, all waiting for a jumpship to turn up and collect them which hadn't come. There were literally dozens of the things stretching out for kilometres in all directions, all baking in the sun with people visibly milling around them or heading for the terminal facility where there was at least air conditioning.
With the Free Worlds League diverting jumpships to carry urgent messages, and requisitioning others to move fresh military units and the necessary logistics for them up to the ever-deteriorating front lines, interstellar traffic in Marik space was a total mess. Naturally it was civilian cargo that took the lowest priority, but as shipments of food and raw materials stopped arrived that had eventually started to effect armaments production too.
Naturally Andurien Aerotech was given the highest priority for any jumpships that were available, with most any Invader or Merchant class vessel that arrived in the Westover system being requisitioned to carry disassembled Stingray and Riever aerospace fighters, or just spare parts for them, up to where they were needed.
Quite a few of the PPC's that Blüd had delivered would likely just be shipped straight back out too, many ending up being used to replace damaged ones on battlemechs fighting the Lyrans or Capellans, but what House Marik did with them after Niops delivered the things was none of her business.
The fact that even in times like these the Marik bureaucracy was still almost as bad as ever did not speak well of the Free Worlds League. Blüd had a Monolith jumpship with empty docking ports available and had filed a flight plan back to Niops which included a stop-off at Lesnovo, the regional capital with a population in the billions, and they had yet to sort out which dropships they wanted her to take there, leaving both Blüd and her jumpship stood idle while they made up their minds.
Having filed her flight-plan well over a week ago now, while still on-route from the jump-point to the planet, Captain Blüd was frankly less than impressed by their efficiency. It was probably all down to having people in authority that were too used to passing on orders from above, rather than use their personal initiative. Without constant instructions coming from Atreus via HPG much of the system ground to a halt and too many of those who were supposed to be in leadership positions were incapable of leading.
It made Blüd wonder how a completely top-down, centrally-planned society like the Capellan's would cope with a ComStar Interdiction? She could easily imagine it seizing up completely without orders flowing constantly from Sian, mostly because everyone was too afraid of being shot if they did something the Chancellor didn't like, and he, or she, wasn't telling them what that actually was.
The Federated Suns would likely cope the best, their governmental structure was more decentralised and their military expected their commanders to use some personal initiative. The Dracs were top-down, but cut off from orders their military would just throw themselves at the nearest enemy planet relentlessly anyway, as always.
Meanwhile if they were cut off from the generals giving orders the armies of the Lyran Commonwealth would probably enjoy their greatest military successes of the war.
The local bars near the port were probably busy catering to all the dropship crews left stranded there waiting patiently for a ride. Those waiting impatiently instead wouldn't get out of there any quicker, so why not just go get a drink?
At least Ennis, the capital city of Westover, could easily accommodate a few extra sailors with nothing to do. Ennis had been built on the continent of Dorset because it was closer to the North pole than the planet's other continent, Bournemouth, although being cool by the standards of Westover IV meant very little to most visitors because it was still a damn furnace.
With something like one in nine of the planet's inhabitants living there Ennis was a full-fledged Metropolis of a city and even though the spaceport was well outside of town you couldn't possibly miss the skyscrapers off in the distance. Taking advantage of the abundant sunshine solar panels seemed to carpet every city roof when seen from the air and it had made for quite a sight when coming into land.
The gigantic factory complex belonging to Andurien Aerospace also lay outside of town, although away from the spaceport, and a maglev line linked the port, the city and the factories. Fortunately for Westover it was seven jumps from the nearest Steiner controlled system, and the nearest Capellans were more like ten jumps away, so it had managed to get through the Succession Wars as yet unbombarded and with its infrastructure intact. The local militia garrison wasn't too large or well equipped in terms of battlemechs, but then it didn't really need to be, not just because it was so far from the front lines but because no pirate in their right mind would risk running into all the aerospace fighters Andurien could put in the air if they had to. They didn't just make them here they tested them here, and the test pilots employed by the firm would be only too happy to shoot up a few uninvited guests.
If it wasn't so damn arid Westover would actually be one of the nicest places in the Free Worlds League to live. As it was the locals did always enjoy mocking visitors who complained about the heat when it wasn't even midday yet.
In some ways it was a good thing that it took nearly two weeks to make the journey by dropship from the jump-point to the planet, because at least it had given the crew of Blüd's own dropship a chance to acclimatise somewhat. Blüd had gradually raised the temperature aboard the Mule by a little every day so the hot air rushing in when they opened the airlock on arrival didn't hit them all like a hammer, but for anyone that lived on a world like Niops VII this one was still hellish.
Orbiting a F6V type star, larger, hotter and overall nearly three times as luminous as Terra, let alone a dinky little Red Dwarf like Niops, Westover IV had been settled originally because it was mineral rich and over the years had become something of an industrial powerhouse. Considering it had been colonised for over three hundred years and was economically developed, you might expect it to have a larger population than it did, though at a hundred and sixty million it certainly wasn't tiny, but there just wasn't the available farmland or water resources to support many more inhabitants than that.
If it wasn't for imports of TriFil water-purifiers from the Curtiss Hydroponics company based in the Paradise system five jumps away Westover wouldn't even be able to support that many people. Although inferior to the Jamerson-Ulikov system developed by the Star League a few years later the TriFil purifiers did have a couple of advantages over the J-U as far as Westover was concerned, firstly they were made on a planet belonging to the Free Worlds League, and secondly the Free Worlds League had destroyed the factories on Brownsville that made the Jamerson-Ulikov's with nuclear weapons to stop the Capellans getting them so it was Trifil or nothing.
"Is that an Ice Cream truck?!" Blüd exclaimed, spotting what appeared to be just that driving across the port towards one of the larger dropships, a hulking Mammoth.
"That guy is going to make a fortune selling out here" her aide replied. "I guess he drove out from the city when he realised how many potential customers there were at the port."
Blüd pursed her lips. "Do you think the locals would regard it as an act of war if I sent over a few marines to requisition the thing?" she asked.
"Probably."
"I guess Admiral Bremman would be kinda ticked off if I did that?" Blüd reasoned.
"He wouldn't be best pleased, Ma'am."
"Career ending move probably" Blüd thought aloud, pretending to be still considering it.
"Life ending. He'd have you shot" the aide stated sincerely.
Captain Blüd nodded. "Probably not worth it" she decided after weighing it all up in her mind. "Next time we come here we should bring an industrial ice-cream maker and a walk-in refrigerator full of cold beer" she decided.
"I'll make a note Ma'am" her aide replied, grinning. "If you're thinking about selling some of the ice-cream and beer to people on other dropships we'll also need some Marik Eagles to bribe someone in local government for a business license. It's the cost of doing business in the Free Worlds League where nothing is free and there's always a noble or civil servant with a palm that needs greasing."
"Yeah. If they ever find a way to tax the Black Economy here they'd be able to outspend the Steiner and Liao combined in terms of military budget" Blüd responded only half in jest. "Best not start a war over ice-cream" she decided. "I'm still in with a chance of getting to command a warship before I retire" she added.
Being transferred from command of a Star Lord jumpship to a much larger Monolith two years ago had already been effectively a promotion for Captain Blüd, although she had certainly done a great deal more travelling in her previous vessel. There weren't too many jobs which required a jumpship that big and expensive to run, so her command, the Uluru, had been practically in mothballs when the order came down that they wanted a Monolith to make cargo runs into, and partially around, the Free Worlds League.
The return of the large salvage operation sent down to McEvedy's Folly had freed up some personnel, so at least Uluru had a full complement of crew for her and the two Niops-owned-and-operated dropships she was hauling, but most of her docking collars would be assigned to FWL dropships as she jumped around Marik space doing a 'favour' for the League. On the way here Blüd had picked up four dropships full of parts and raw materials at Hednesford and transported them onto Kendall where a company called Brooks Incorporated had a factory that made combat vehicles, then she hauled mining equipment from Kendall to Jubka via New Galicia and then refined metals from Jubka onto Westover via Turov.
It was certainly an extremely indirect route to take, but Andurien Aerotech apparently needed the metals from Jubka for Stingray production as much as they needed the cargo of PPC's from Niops and the High Associator was more than willing to put plenty of time, money and resources into getting back at ComStar.
It had been another Niops-operated Monolith, the Kalamos, which had delivered the first batch of PPC's to Westover a few months back, taking the direct route to get them there as quickly as possible, though the ship's journey home was somewhat circuitous as it hauled cargo for the Free Worlds League. This PPC shipment had been publicly announced, Niops issuing a statement Inner-Sphere wide via the Thraxa HPG that it was forced to pay for a purchase of Stingray aerospace fighters by bartering weapons because it was unable to do so with C-Bills thanks to the Interdiction, and stating that this did not mean Niops was politically aligned with the Free Worlds League. If ComStar interdicted any other Successor State in the future Niops would happily pay them in weapons as well if requested when purchasing goods or services.
The other secret cargo of ERPPC's and double-heat-sinks Kalamos had also been hauling to Westover was quietly passed over to some spooky SAFE-looking individuals. Unmarked trucks had arrived in the dead of night while spaceport security were told to look the other way, or else, and the crew of the dropship from Kalamos loaded them as fast as possible before anyone tested the 'or else'.
Blüd turned as one of the dropship crew came running down the loading ramp behind her, the sound of boots hitting the metal decking hard to ignore. "Excuse me Captain, I thought you should hear this" the crewman announced himself, reaching her. "It just said on local radio that a jumpship that just arrived in-system brought news that Charles Marik is dead" he announced. "Had a stroke, or a brain aneurysm or something apparently" he told her.
"A brain aneurysm?" Blüd repeated quizzically.
"Yes Captain" the crewman confirmed.
Captain Anne Blüd rolled her eyes. "Did they say what calibre it was?" she asked sardonically.
"No Captain" the crewman replied, trying not to laugh.
"You think someone offed him?" Blüd's aide asked.
"Marik's gonna Marik" Blüd responded wryly, shaking her head. "My guess is that he was too stubborn to negotiate with ComStar and one of his kids decided he had to go while there was still a Free Worlds League actually worth inheriting" she suggested. "Poor bastard couldn't have been too much older than I am."
"If it wasn't natural causes it could have been someone from their parliament that did it instead, or maybe SAFE" the aide suggested.
"SAFE would have missed" Blüd joked. It was perhaps exaggerated how bad the intelligence service of the Free Worlds League actually were at their jobs but it was difficult to argue that their record was spotty at best. Supposedly it all dated back to 2735 when Bertram Marik had the Intelligence Act of 2735 passed in the wake of a bloody Marik Civil War. The Act had borked SAFE by cutting their budget severely, increasing parliamentary oversight, and restricted their internal security role. Although the act hadn't been strictly enforced since the days of Kenyon Marik and his infamous 'Resolution 288', the document which effectively granted him dictatorial powers, the consequences to SAFE being severely hamstrung a century ago were still being felt as it had given their rivals in other nations a huge advantage over them for decades.
"According to the radio his oldest son Gerold is being recalled to Atreus from the front-lines, they'll probably officially declare him the next Captain-General as soon as he gets home" the crewman told them. "His sister Phillipa is supposedly holding the reins on Atreus for now."
"With the HPG net down, and with Steiner and Liao on the rampage, nobody is going to want to cause any more disruption so their parliament will probably let things slide procedurally until the Free Worlds League's not quite so deep in the shit" Blüd reasoned. "It'll be interesting to see how long they leave it before they open a dialogue with ComStar" she pondered aloud. "They won't want to do it straight away because it'll look too much like someone got rid of Charles for just that reason, but the quicker they come to terms with Karpov the better it'll be for the League overall" she said before turning to the crewman who had brought the news. "Get back to the radio and if you hear anything else important let me know" she ordered.
"Yes Captain" the crewman replied, turning on his heels and running back up the ramp.
"Might be interesting to see how the locals take the news" Blüd remarked. "Even loyalists must have been thinking that Chuck Marik screwed the pooch by starting a fight with ComStar without much of a plan on how to win it other than cross his fingers and hope for the best."
"He probably thought SAFE and his technical people would do better at getting the Hyperpulse Generators up and working again" her aide replied.
"Betting the fate of your entire nation on wishful thinking, without a good back-up plan if destiny isn't in your corner is pretty foolhardy if you ask me" Blüd opined. "Of course, expecting rationality and pragmatism from someone that orders a ComStar station to be blasted to fragments in a fit of pique, rather than retaliate for being screwed over in a more restrained and less overt manner is probably asking too much of the late Captain-General. Someone should have drummed into him at an early age that revenge is a dish best served cold. Like a banana split."
"Banana split?"
"I'm having trouble making myself stop thinking about ice-cream" Blüd admitted.
"So I assumed Ma'am" her aide replied, grinning. "As for Charles Marik, when he was basically raised by his grandfather, that being Kenyon Marik it might be too much to hope that he would have been taught nuance and subtlety, let alone self-control" he suggested wryly. With Charles's father Thaddeus usually away serving in the FWL navy during the First Succession War, and his uncle Carl having been killed in action fighting the Lyrans, most of the influence on Charles's early life on Atreus had come from Kenyon, and while Kenyon was a decent enough military strategist his diplomatic skills were somewhat lacking to say the least.
"Yeah, I guess" Blüd conceded. "They say Kenyon could walk into a room with half-a-dozen strangers in it and walk out again five minutes later after somehow having made seven new enemies."
"House Marik has definitely produced some interesting rulers over the centuries" the aide observed, shaking his head sadly. "How they survived this long when it only took one cretin in charge to bring down the Terran Hegemony is a mystery."
"Cretin? That's no way to refer to First Lord Richard Cameron" Blüd chided. "He was always more of a bozo."
"I stand corrected Ma'am."
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Part XXXV- Section 2 of 2
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Captain Anne Blüd looked around again. With the sun shifting in the sky as the day wore on they wouldn't be in the shadow of the dropship much longer, and there was no way she was wanted to deal with direct sunlight. Westover was a place where everyone wore sunglasses during the day, not just visitors from place like Niops where you could actually look directly at the sun safely enough. "Is that hovercraft heading our way?" she asked, noticing an approaching vehicle that was kicking up a lot of dust as it went. It looked like a type the SLDF used, a 'Gabriel' if she remembered correctly, but despite being armed, with a turret mounting a laser visibly atop the thing, it wasn't painted up in Star League olive drab, or FWL colours either.
"Looks like it" her aide replied as the Gabriel slowed to a halt and stopped next to the ramp. Fusion powered, with powerful electric motors driving the fans keeping it in the air, it normally ran pretty silently compared to an I.C.E. powered machine, although if Blüd recalled that if you angled the fans in the correct, or rather incorrect way the machine would howl its way along like an archangel blowing a trumpet heralding the end of days.
The hovercraft set down and the door opened. A one-person vehicle, the turret was fully automated and controlled by its own targeting computer so only a driver was necessary, the single occupant climbed out revealing it to be a man in early middle-age wearing lightweight military fatigues.
Squinting against the sun until he could move into the shadow of the dropship the stranger looked up at the large Red Cameron Star insignia painted on the side of the Mule before approaching Blüd and her aide. "You're from Niops right?" he asked, expression indicating he was really hoping they were.
"Yes" Blüd confirmed, frowning.
"Oh, thank God!" the man exclaimed, now looking visibly relieved. "We had no idea how the hell we were going to make the last few jumps."
"I'm sorry, who are you exactly?" Blüd wanted to know, narrowing her eyes suspiciously.
"Major Sam Tyson, Commanding Officer of Tyson's Troublemakers" the man replied. "Your government hired us for a planetary garrison contract just before ComStar pulled the plug on the HPG network in Free Worlds territory and we've been trying to get to you ever since" he explained. "You have no idea what a pain-in-the-ass it's been" he added, groaning. "I was told by port authorities that your commanding officer is a Captain Blood, can I speak to him please?" he requested.
"It's Captain Blüd, not 'Blood' and you're speaking to her right now" Anne Blüd replied, tapping the nametag on her uniform.
"Sorry. I was kinda expecting a guy with an eyepatch" the man claiming to be Major Samuel Tyson replied awkwardly. "We don't have our own jumpship so we usually get around by catching a ride on a civilian jumpship heading our way, takes a while but not usually this long. All the usual shipping routes are disrupted all to hell, and we couldn't reach you via HPG to let you know what was happening" he said. "We started out in Federated Suns territory, crossed the border into Marik space easily enough on a cargo hauler, they don't shoot at each other very much so there's always some cross-border trade, but then it all became a nightmare of a journey. We ended up backtracking at least twice to try and get a connecting jumpship that would get us closer to the periphery. Got stuck on Regulus for over a month, thought we'd be stranded on Gibson forever until we managed to wrangle a couple of free docking ports on an Invader heading from there to here to deliver a dropship full of medium lasers and urgently pick up some PPC's or something."
"Sounds like quite the trip" Blüd responded, still not sure of the man.
"If I ever write an autobiography it'll fill a whole chapter" Tyson told her. "We had to sell our Padilla on Gibson to cover our expenses, not that we had many Arrow IV's left for it anyway. Your government transferred enough C-Bills as an advance to cover our expected travel costs, and fortunately we exchanged them for Marik Eagles before we set out, but our journey took a lot longer and was a lot less direct than it should have been" he said, groaning again. "If you're heading back to Niops, and have a couple of free slots on your jumpship, can we get a ride?" he asked hopefully. "If not can you tell your government where we are and why we never turned up on time?"
Blüd nodded. "I'll need to see some credentials, and inspect your dropships, but if you're who you say you are we can get you back to Niops where another jumpship will take you onto where the government want you to be" she replied.
"We were told it was a planet called Galileo but I checked and I couldn't find it on a map" Tyson told her.
"You wouldn't, it's one of our newer colonies three jumps spinward of Niops" Blüd explained. "I'll warn you that we don't know how long we'll be stuck on Westover yet though, we're still waiting on the locals to tell us what dropships they want us to haul to Lesnovo on the way back home" she said. "With our dropship, and your two, we've still got the docking ports for another six on my jumpship so I'm hoping they don't want us to move more than that."
Tyson raised his eyebrows. "You've got a Monolith?" he asked in surprise. Those were rare, although thinking about it if the 295th ended up on Niops they must have brought a lot of jumpships with them just to haul the whole division along.
"Sure do. Traded up from commanding a Star Lord a few years ago" Blüd replied. "They gave my old boat to my former First Officer. I think they've got him hauling cargo from Niops to Copernicus these days."
"Never heard of that system either" Tyson admitted. When his contract with Niops was agreed he had tried to learn as much as he could about the place, and the region around it, but there wasn't much available.
"We took that one over a while back, it's not as far out as Galileo, and the population is larger, so we garrison it ourselves" Blüd told him. "You can always tell the systems we named ourselves, Niops was founded by astronomers and such so the government names everything after famous historical ones" she explained. "So what dropships are you operating?" she asked out of professional interest as well as curiosity.
"We've got a Dictator and an Intruder" Tyson replied. "The Troublemakers used to have two more Dictators, an Overlord and a Triumph as well, but that was back in my mother's day when we were a full regiment with a Star Lord of our own. Davion kept throwing us at the Dracs until we were all that's left, less than four lances of mechs, a few tanks and a couple of aerospace fighters. Most of the people we've got on the Intruder are our dependants so don't go thinking it's full of infantry, we're down to not much more than a platoon of them" he told her. "Nearly half of our mechs are assaults though, and there's a lance of heavies on top of that, so we're a lot punchier than most merc companies our size. The Troublemakers started out as a Heavy Assault Regiment with the SLDF so if your people hired us to fight off pirates we'll scare the ever-loving shit out of most bands" he declared with some justification. "We're just not in a fit state to face a Combine Sword of Light Regiment anymore and we're looking for a less dangerous job" he admitted. "Too many widows and orphans to take care of already, if you know what I mean."
"What happened to your jumpship?" Blüd asked.
"It got nuked" Tyson replied flatly. "Juicer target for the Dracs than the FedCom Invaders it was with at the time I guess. Our Overlord and one of our Dictators were still attached at the time so they went up too. Not exactly the Troublemaker's best day" he added sadly.
"Guess not" Blüd sympathised. "Did you hear about Charles Marik?" she asked, realising he might not have done.
"No. What about him?" Tyson replied.
"He died, just came over the radio. Brain aneurysm or something supposedly" Blüd told him.
Tyson looked momentarily surprised then frowned before rolling his eyes. "At least they didn't say that he fell down an elevator shaft onto some bullets" he quipped. "I wonder if he was killed because he was, or wasn't, going to make peace with ComStar?" he asked rhetorically.
"Probably the latter. Looks like his son Gerald is taking over, assuming their parliament doesn't try and interfere" Blüd told him.
"They'd better not for the sake of the League, the last thing these people need is more chaos and disorder. We saw enough of that travelling from one side of Marik space to the other, if they end up with internal civil strife because different factions are fighting for the crown as well the Lyrans and the Cappies will carve up their territory like a roast turkey" Tyson stated with certainty. "Our dropships are way over on the other side of the port, we weren't dropping off cargo so we got assigned the pads furthest from the buildings. If you've got transport I can lead you over there in my Gabe if you want to check us out, I wouldn't suggest walking there, not in this heat."
"We've got an all-terrain jeep up in the bay, I'll get it unloaded, just keep your speed down, it's not exactly fast" Blüd replied, nodded to her aide to go get that done. "It's got a folding roof that can keep the sun off at least."
Tyson grinned. "We put an old chunk of armour plate outside yesterday so the kids could fry eggs on it. Made a change from a barbeque party" he said, laughing. "Had to make sure they stayed in the shade as much as possible though. One of my people decided to try and get a tan when we first got here after getting really pale from being couped up in the ship. She was in the medbay on the Intruder recovering from sunburn and heatstroke after not much more than an hour outside midday."
"They've got quite some sun here" Blüd agreed.
"Yours is a Red Dwarf right? This must really hit you guys hard" Tyson surmised.
Blüd nodded. "It's not exactly what we're used to" she confirmed. "Some of our marine detachment spent some time on one of our colonies, Alphard, which is almost as hot and dry as this, but Westover is definitely something special all right" she agreed. "Oh, we might be getting out of here quicker than I feared, I guess this is the news I was waiting for on what dropships I'm hauling away" she said spotting another ground vehicle heading towards them. This one a small four-wheeled ATV painted up in FWLM colours and carrying two men wearing militia uniforms.
The ATV pulled up and the two men dismounted. "Captain Blood?" one of the two queried. He was wearing the insignia of a Lieutenant-Colonel which put him at equivalent rank to a naval captain, the other seemed to be a corporal who had been driving.
"It's spelled and pronounced Blüd" the woman in question corrected him, indicating her name patch. "How can I help you?" she asked.
"Lieutenant-Colonel Moretti, Free Worlds League Militia" he introduced himself. "We need you to transport eight dropships to Escobas urgently" he told her.
"No can do, that's in completely the wrong direction" Blüd replied. "We're heading back to Niops, with a diversion out to Lesnovo a little out of our way to help you guys out before we do. I filed my flight-plan with the authorities, check with them."
Moretti narrowed his eyes. "Those plans have changed" he told her. "We have a large shipment of military equipment that is needed there with all haste."
"Military equipment? Well that makes it a double no-can-do because Niops is neutral and we won't haul that kind of cargo for the Free Worlds league, or anyone else" Blüd responded.
"This isn't a request it's an order" Moretti told her with an edge to his tone of voice. "You work for us" he added curtly.
Blüd laughed. "I'm not part of your military, and I'm not even one of your citizens, so you can't give me orders" she replied, amused rather than intimidated by his attitude. "And as to where you got the idea that we work for you I've got no idea" she continued. "Our agreement with your government does not include provisions for what you're requesting so it's not happening. Still happy to transport a few dropships to Lesnovo, or even Ghazibad because it's between here and there, but I'm sure as shit not carrying military hardware halfway to the Capellan Confederation because you ask me to."
"Don't make me seize your vessel" Moretti growled. "I can have a company of infantry here in thirty minutes" he threatened.
"Try it and my Monolith will jump away and your government won't get another shipment of PPC's until they apologise in writing and you're busted to buck private and sent to fight a Lyran battlemech regiment on your own armed with nothing but a sharp stick" Blüd replied, completely unintimidated by his tone and posture.
"More to the point I can have a company of battlemechs here in less than ten minutes" Tyson interjected, looking Moretti in the eye.
"Who the ****** are you?" Moretti wanted to know.
"Major Samuel Tyson, commanding-officer Tyson's Troublemakers. Under contract to the Niops Association which makes her fight my fight" he stated with conviction.
"Never heard of you" Moretti retorted.
"That's because until now we were contracted by the Federated Suns where we've been taking on Drac Sword of Light Regiments and Capellan regulars so if you think we sweat some planetary militia that's never been within a two-month journey of the front then you're sadly mistaken" Tyson told him flatly. "If you don't believe me talk to the guys in the building that inspected our dropships on arrival. Make sure to ask about my assault mechs."
"While you're at it check the paperwork regarding the terms of the agreement we made with Garth Marik" Blüd advised, slightly surprised but grateful for Tyson's intervention. Technically his mercenaries were only obliged to defend Niops interests on Galileo.
"Garth Marik was only acting on behalf of his father and the Captain-General had died, or hadn't you heard?" Moretti persisted.
"We had, which I think puts Gerald Marik in charge and I can't see him breaking an agreement made by his little brother, especially when you need our PPC's to hold back the armies currently pushing you back to Atreus" Blüd replied. "Find a ship registered in the Free Worlds League and get them to take your dropships to Escobas or wherever."
"None of them are big enough to carry them all" Moretti replied, sounding a little less sure of himself now.
"Then requisition more than one" Blüd told him. "Is there anything else?" she asked sardonically.
"You haven't heard the last of this" Moretti spat, turning on his heels and heading back to his ATV, his driver following.
"We'll see" Blüd called after him. "What a schmuck" she opined more quietly to Tyson.
"You know if he calls in air-support we're screwed" Tyson noted. "For that matter I'm not being paid enough to take on the entire garrison."
"He's not going to want to take the risk of this all blowing up in his face" Blüd said confidently. "I'll tell my people what's going on and after that if the jeep's ready I'll follow you over to your dropships."
"While I'm waiting I think I'll intercept that ice-cream truck and steer them towards our Intruder. The kids'll love it" Tyson decided, looking over to where the thing was parked next to the Mammoth yonder. "Shouldn't take long."
"Good plan. Pick me up a cone, any flavour but mint" Blüd requested, heading up the ramp.
"Will do" Tyson replied, laughing at just how earnest she sounded about it.
Blüd stopped and turned around. "Oh yeah, just one more thing Major" she said.
"Yeah?"
"Welcome back to the Eleventh Army" Blüd told him.
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Note from the Author:
Westover (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Westover) is a very hot and dry planet and one of the places where Andurien Aerotech (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Free_Worlds_Defense_Industries#Andurien_AeroTech) manufactures the Stingray (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Stingray) and Riever (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Riever) aerospace fighters. The capital city Ennis is where you can find the factories as well as the militia garrison. Given that the planet is an industrial exporter with a fair-sized population it seems logical that the Ennis spaceport is pretty big.
Accross much of the Inner Sphere worlds as arid as Westover were abandoned once the Jamerson-Ulikov (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Jamerson-Ulikov_Water_Purifier) water purifiers once made on Brownsville (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Brownsville) became unavailable but the Free Worlds league had indigenous production of the slightly older TriFil (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/TriFil) purifiers thanks to Curtiss Hydroponics (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Curtiss_Hydroponics) on Paradise (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Paradise) so they didn't suffer as badly as their rivals.
In normal times it would not have taken Tyson's Troublemakers (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Tyson%27s_Troublemakers) anywhere near this long to make such a journey. They're a shadow of their former SLDF selves by this point, no jumpship, only two dropships and they're not even carrying as many mechs and combat vehicles as their Dictator (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Dictator) and Intruder (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Intruder_(DropShip_class)) could. All the spare infantry bays on the Intruder are useful accomodation for their dependents though.
Captain Blüd is right about what Charles Marik (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Charles_Marik_(29th_c.)) not dying of natural causes...
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Good view of the mess in the FWL.
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Woah, didn't expect Charles Marik get bumped off this soon. He was suppose to talk to his sister in Comstar as the Captain-General to try get the League out interdiction. Butterflies keep flapping their wings around here.
I love the ice cream truck thing, it was hilarious. My old rpg mercenary group I ran with, bough canon coolant truck and converted into a Volka Truck.
Love the writing, Hotpoint!
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One of my people decided to try and get a tan when we first got here after getting really pale from being couped up in the ship. She was in the medbay on the Intruder recovering from sunburn
That reminds me of my time in the army, come summer we all had soldier's tan and one sunny day the company command decide it's time for a sports day, which the NCOs interpreted as toss the rabble some balls after the breakfast and leave them alone until lunch. So a few guys decided to play football and the rest of us find any shadow that we can. One guy fell asleep with his shirt as his pillow and well, the shadow moves with the sun and none of us had the heart to wake him up, so by the lunch time he was well fried and had to wait until the next day to see the doctor. Who messed up an gave him a wrong lotion, which in circumstances acted as a skin irritant.
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FWL just earned themselves having any future Monoliths escorted by a destroyer. They are now on the “…and find out” side of the equation.
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Given that, the League must become more aware of the Niops has hardware now. SLDF grade hardware, given Charles Marik must updated dear old Captain-General. Wether his brother or sister act one in some fashion to grab Niops if they get too desperate.
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Woah, didn't expect Charles Marik get bumped off this soon. He was suppose to talk to his sister in Comstar as the Captain-General to try get the League out interdiction. Butterflies keep flapping their wings around here.
That would have been an interesting conversation since she died on the Oriente HPG station (which was a space station) when Charles had it blown apart.
Canonically it was Garth Marik who was sent to Terra to pay a massive indemnity to end the Interdiction.
Captain Blüd is right about what [/I]Charles Marik (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Charles_Marik_(29th_c.)) not dying of natural causes...
Sounds like natural causes to me... I mean, for a Successor Lord. Very few of them died of old age.
Canonically, IIRC, he died a decade or so later fighting on Irian, at a time when the FWLM was still trying to recover from the impact of the interdiction. That battle was more or less the high water mark of the 2nd Succession War for the Lyrans, led by poor Marcus Steiner: still tragically under-rated to the point he didn't get a write up in the 2nd Succession War sourcebook, despite almost breaking the FWL.
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*snip*
"Welcome back to the Eleventh Army" Blüd told him.
*snip*
Well played, good sir! :D
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if troublemakers have a few hulks that need hard to find parts (only SLDF made) they might get a few more machines back into the line. they might even have funds needed to buy some of the stored mechs. just think how happy they would be if they "were mistakenly" shipped a dozen DHS.
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Part XXXV- Section 1 of 2
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Meanwhile if they were cut off from the generals giving orders the armies of the Lyran Commonwealth would probably enjoy their greatest military successes of the war.
:grin: Brilliant analysis!
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Just taking the opportunity to say "Thank you!" for keeping this going. I'm enjoying it! Keep up the good work.
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Tyson's Troublemakers, originally the SLDF 23rd Heavy Assault Regiment, part of XXVII (27th) Corps, 11th Army, Lyran Commonwealth Military Region.
In the canon timeline, they passed into history during the fires of the 1st Succession War on the FedSuns/Combine border.
Now, they get a chance to survive and go home.
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Tyson's Troublemakers, originally the SLDF 23rd Heavy Assault Regiment, part of XXVII (27th) Corps, 11th Army, Lyran Commonwealth Military Region.
In the canon timeline, they passed into history during the fires of the 1st Succession War on the FedSuns/Combine border.
Now, they get a chance to survive and go home.
If Tyson keeps stepping up like he did here, I can see that by the next contract negotiation, they get a choice. Either a rolling contract, or reinstatement into the SLDF. If they choose for the latter, by the time of the 3rd SW, they'll be back to their original Regimental strength.
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I think those guys have already earned reinstatement, and "Welcome back to the Eleventh Army" pretty much confirmed it... :)
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I think those guys have already earned reinstatement, and "Welcome back to the Eleventh Army" pretty much confirmed it... :)
It's a good first step, but they are still contracted as mercenaries. Nobody knows if they're really there to seek a less dangerous option, specifically for their dependents, or if they are also there to investigate for, for instance, the Federated Suns by using their connection to the SLDF. Or if they'll get 'ideas' when they see what they're actually guarding and decide it might be a good idea to help themselves and get out to retire.
It's the reason why General Romanova has signed off on hiring them, to see what they're actually like.
Tyson's stepping up to defend the SLDF dropship seems to indicate that, somewhere, inside his psyche, he still considers himself a member of the SLDF. Not really a mercenary. Captain Blüd's report will be favourable, now let's see if they can keep it up for the duration of the contract.
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I missed it before... That should be a Mammoth parked at the spaceport. Behemoths can only go planetside once.
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23rd Assault's survival is kinda sad. They lost much of their robustness. I'm sort surprised had Dictator as part their heavy lift capacities, I would have thought they'd would have Overlord (not counting the one they lost).
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I wonder if their Dictator is a Command Variant...
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We've never had breakdown what makes a HQ variant of any dropship special. Aside from change up on what units it carries, it doesn't show capabilities of a HQ equipment or anything else. Like 10 tons of communication equipment doesn't seem effect a dropship (as far I know anyways. That's Strategic Ops (and beyooond) sort thing.)
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DropShips come with 3 tons equivalent of Communications Equipment as part of their controls for no additional tonnage, which is good for +1 Initiative. One more ton gets you satellite links, and four more tons would get it up to +2 Initiative. Totally worth it in my book.
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DropShips come with 3 tons equivalent of Communications Equipment as part of their controls for no additional tonnage, which is good for +1 Initiative. One more ton gets you satellite links, and four more tons would get it up to +2 Initiative. Totally worth it in my book.
How does that work with dropships though? Do you need to add the additional communication gear?
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Tech Manual, page 212:
Communications equipment that a unit automatically comes with stacks with a set of additional equipment to produce a total communications equipment tonnage rating. For example, a Small Craft (which receives 3 tons free) that adds a set of 3 tons of communications equipment has a total communications equipment rating of 6 tons.
Also, each additional ton adds a crewman. Still worth it, though!
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I really wish they'd fix that ton per crew thing. I keep thinking small craft should be big enough move six automobiles with that tonnage of com gear..
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A K-1 should be able to! :)
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Part XXXVI- Section 1 of 2
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"So there I was, reading through the flowery prose that litters Farnstroms's notes on his idea for a new type of fusion engine when I came to the part that said: 'Until, from the midst of this darkness, a sudden light broke in upon me, a light so brilliant and wonderous, and yet so simple. Change the poles from plus to minus and from minus to plus. I alone succeeded in discovery the secret of containing superheated plasma with an energy field. Nay, even more so, I myself became capable of generating limitless energy in a lighter and more compact design' and then I closed the notebook as I suddenly realised... It could work!"
Doctor Nathan Jones MEng PhD (co-inventor of the Energy-Damped-Light-Fusion-Engine) - 2855AC
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Association Council Building – Niops Association (Niops VII) – 2838
"The Uluru jumped out an hour ago with the next shipment of PPC's to Westover Sir" Admiral Jacob Bremman reported. "Captain Blüd seemed enthusiastic to see what the reaction will be when she sets down there in a Fortress rather than a Mule, or for that matter if they'll deign to ask why she's also hauling along a Titan to protect her jumpship."
"Hopefully the reaction will be not to try and strong-arm the periphery riff-raff again" High Associator Giles Olson replied, leaning back in his chair and folding his arms in front of him. "If they don't take the hint next time send a destroyer escort."
"Unlikely to be necessary" Bremman responded confidently. "Even having to use most of the vehicle bays as cargo space for crates of PPC's, a company of mixed heavy and assault mechs and three platoons of infantry should dissuade another attempt to shanghai one of our vessels, especially given just how much firepower the dropship itself brings to the party."
Olson nodded. "Blüd knows that I expect everyone to adhere to the strict rules of engagement I set down?" he checked. "They have to use force first and our response needs to be proportionate."
"Yes Sir" Bremman confirmed. "We're assuming that the authorities in the Free Worlds League don't actually want to stir up more trouble, and that it was simply some clueless muppet trying to make a name for himself who tried to requisition our jumpship."
"Given that they're still begging for any more ERPPC's and double-heat-sinks we can send, offering to rubber-stamp any more purchases of military hardware we make after the Interdiction is lifted if we can, I'd have to agree" Olson replied.
"Reports from the front are sketchy of course, but it does seem that the ploy to try and trick Sian into thinking Atreus had discovered a cache of Royal Marauders that Kerensky left behind worked, or at least it worked well enough to get them to pause their offensive temporarily" Bremman replied. "The Tremolino came back from Thraxa where it was being talked about in the news media, even the ComStar News Bureau was covering the story so it's safe to say it's getting Inner Sphere wide coverage. General Hallis is probably feeling pleased with himself for coming up with the ruse."
"He doesn't think it'll work for very long" Olson replied. "It was just the shock effect of a company of the things suddenly appearing on the field and shooting up a bunch of Capellan troops that caused Sian to overreact he believes."
"The 3rd Liao Guards we think" Bremman recalled reading the briefing himself, grateful that he had done so despite it being more of interest to senior army officers, rather than the naval ones, who liked to keep an eye on Inner Sphere military developments. It wasn't actually his turn as one of the Joint Chiefs to brief the High Associator, General Romanov should have been there that day instead, but she was still on a dropship heading back from the recharge station and had asked him to go in her stead. "The TO&E of Capellan units usually leans lighter than the norm as regards numbers of heavies and assaults, so a few supposed Royal Marauders with ERPPC's and the heatsinks to use them would have hit them hard, as long as the man or woman at the controls made sure not to close the range down and throw away their advantage anyway. Wouldn't have worked nearly as well against a Lyran unit, those people bring enough metal to the field to soak up the punishment."
"I know that ERPPC's were always rarer in the House militaries than in the SLDF, but are they really scarce enough to represent that much of an advantage?" Olson queried.
Bremman shrugged. "Most of the factories that made them didn't survive Amaris and the First Succession War, so they're not seen that often on the battlefield anymore we believe, if still available if you've got money to burn" he replied. "A bunch of mechs mounting them all turning up at once hasn't been a thing for a while. Give it a couple more decades of the Great Houses bludgeoning each other, and we might be the only people still making any of them at all" he theorised. "Probably true of the gauss rifle too, which is the real long-range heavy-hitter, but the sheer size of those things restricted how many machines ever mounted one even before the nukes started flying. Battlefield ranges are going to shrink down over the next few years mark my words, that'll only increase our qualitative tactical advantage, which is fortunate because it'll take decades before we'll be able to appreciatively move forward in quantitative terms."
"You're probably already aware, but General Romanov is starting to think that in the interim it might be an idea to hire more mercenaries for garrison duty, at least on the worlds where we can't establish a worthwhile planetary militia" Olson told him. "There's bound to be a few more decent quality PMC's out there who are battered enough from being repeatedly thrown at one Successor State or another to be seeking safer employment for a while, even if we're not paying the same rates as the Great Houses."
"It's probably necessary if we're going to keep expanding our territory at the current rate, I'm not sure we can count on being lucky enough to find decent ones going as cheap as the Troublemakers though" Bremman replied doubtfully. "Romanov seemed impressed enough by the Tyson and his people after she headed up to the recharge station to meet them personally. They set out on a jumpship heading to Galileo just before Blüd headed off in the other direction, once they're established most of our own garrison will be relocated leaving only a liaison officer and a token SLDF presence" he said before frowning. "We had our medical staff on the Olympus station check out the Troublemakers and their dependents, physically they're well enough, fortunately their Intruder dropship has decent medical facilities and a surgical unit that could deal with a lot of issues, but a fair few of their troops show definite signs of PTSD which could have been part of Tyson's motivation to get them as far away from the front lines as possible."
Olson thought about that. "The PTSD is understandable given that some of them might have been fighting non-stop for decades I suppose" he reasoned. "We should have our liaison keep an eye on them to see if it's effecting their work badly enough for us to want to intervene, even if that intervention is just us finding them a shrink" he decided. "As for Romanov going to see them personally that seems appropriate, well it does just as long as it wasn't just an excuse to avoid this meeting" Olson replied, smiling. "I'd hate to think she thought of them as merely a necessary evil. The annoying baggage of civilian oversight and control of the military."
"Perhaps more of an inconvenience than an evil" Bremman suggested, all of the Joint Chiefs usually bemoaned time being taken from their day to meet politicians so often, though briefing the High Associator wasn't nearly as bad as some of the conferences with the Minister of Trade and Industry, the diplomatic corps or even worse the council's Military Oversight Committee were. "They use up more of our time than you might think, we all try to make sure we're as up-to-date as possible on reading our own intel briefings so we don't look incompetent when you ask a defence-related question we can't answer."
Olson laughed. "You know I don't actually expect you to be omniscient" he replied.
"You don't? I'll let military R&D know that they can reduce funding to Project Crystal Ball, it's really been eating into our budget" Bremman joked. "On a more serious matter, I don't know if you've already heard through other channels but it's now looking like the Blackjack factory on Alphard will be finished before you leave office. I know you wanted an excuse to visit Alphard while you were still High Associator, so if you fancied a ribbon-cutting ceremony to open the place officially you could go with that."
Olson raised his eyebrows. "I thought there was some holdups on that?" he asked, surprised.
"Turns out that making an Improved AC/5 autocannon look like a standard AC/2 while not being excessively expensive to make wasn't as difficult as they thought it was going to be, and they should have them into production a few months ahead of schedule" Bremman explained. "It might be a little touch-and-go getting the new plant on Alphard for producing Ferro-Fibrous armour finished on time, but if needs be we can make it in our existing facility on Niops V as a stopgap."
"Won't that mean scaling back Hussar production?" Olson queried. "Is General Romanov okay with that?"
Bremman shook his head. "If we run the Niops V armour forges to capacity we can churn out something like four times the tonnage of plate we need for Hussar production" he replied. "The overcapacity allows for production of spare armour plates for various machines to be stockpiled in case of battle damage, as well as an ongoing series of upgrades to our existing mechs. "Quite a few of the SLDF and NAM machines in service still use standard armour that we can upgrade to Ferro-Fibrous, so we'll be gradually doing that over the next few years. It won't increase their survivability as much as the new weaponry did their firepower but it'll still bolster our qualitative edge over the Great Houses."
"Very well. I suppose since the endo-steel skeletons for the Blackjack will have to made in Niops until we build an orbital factory in Alphard anyway, importing the armour for them as well isn't such a big deal" Olson reasoned. "Although we could delay building the shipyard again to get that factory built earlier" he suggested, keeping a straight face as long as he could while watching for Bremman's reaction.
"High Associator I must object!" Bremman responded in horror, jumping to his feet.
"Your face!" Olson said, bursting out in laughter.
Bremman sat back down. "That wasn't funny Sir" he complained, realising that Olson was just yanking his chain.
"Oh, it really was Admiral, it really was" Olson disagreed, grinning.
"We'll have to agree to differ" Bremman stated flatly.
"Since we're already talking about the Blackjack factory on Alphard, I received an interesting piece of unsolicited advice from a certain individual that works in the fast-food industry a few days ago while picking up a bucket of fried chicken on the way home from work" Olson told him.
"Gloria presumably" Bremman surmised while being mildly amused by the notion of any of the rulers of the Successor States, or even just the duke or baron of a more populous world, doing something like that themselves. In some ways being the High Associator of Niops was more akin to being the mayor of a city than it was the head of state of an interstellar power, albeit city mayors didn't usually have capital warships and a large stockpile of nuclear weapons at their command.
"Right. My wife went to see a movie with her sister and I'm far too inept in the kitchen to risk trying to make my own dinner" he explained his visit to the diner in question. It wasn't like he hadn't ever tried to cook, it just always seemed to go wrong, something he attributed to it being more of an art than a science. "She suggested that only people with both parents and at least three of four grandparents born on one of the Hegemony worlds should be allowed to work in, or have access to, any of our factories working in the defence industry. Senior positions to require both parents and all four grandparents to be Hegemony born, with a similar setup in the various planetary militias."
"I can see that being a pain-in-the-ass for both ROM and SAFE who are probably the most likely to be spying on us. No getting to nose around our defence plants and military bases by just applying for a job or a spot in the militia" Bremman considered the idea.
"She also thinks we should take fingerprints, a photograph and a DNA sample from everyone that visits one of our worlds because it'll give spooky types on clandestine assignments palpitations and wouldn't take very long to do" Olson told him. "Retinal scans as well if the hardware can be made available."
Bremman sighed. "Presumably everyone gets an ID card with their photo on it and their fingerprints, genetic markers and retinal scan encoded on the thing too in Gloria's utopian vision of making life awkward for malevolent interlopers" he asked rhetorically.
"Good guess. I think she was about to suggest everyone getting a barcode tattooed on their forehead but my chicken order was ready so I managed to beat a hasty retreat" Olson replied. "It's still far, far from my weirdest encounter with a member of the public this week though. During my lunchbreak on Tuesday I went out to buy myself a new set of shoes, the new imports from Comstock are just so well made and so cheap I couldn't resist, and I ran into that lunatic Farnstrom" he recalled with a grimace. "He managed to corner me before I could beat a hasty retreat and he started to rant about how nobody was taking his new idea of how to make a completely new type of fusion engine seriously."
"You know he is a genius" Bremman noted. "I mean he's clearly crazier as a sack of Arcturan Razorcats, but our people working on the next-generation of directed-energy weapons have told me that if you ignore the fact he's got more issues than Stellar Geographic he's actually been very helpful at solving problems they send him to look over."
"He said he could turn the Steiner Stadium on Solaris VII into a fusion engine, or at least that's what I managed to make out from what he was saying while I was desperately trying to make my escape" Olson told him drily, wishing not for the first time that his security detail wasn't just one guy under orders to be restrained with the public.
Bremman blinked. "Okay that does sound pretty unhinged" he conceded.
"I gave him my usual response, put a proposal in writing and I'll have someone take a look at it" Olson said, sighing.
"You better actually have someone do that just to be rid of him for a while you know" Bremman advised. "It's been a decade now and he's still hassling me for a naval laser to play with."
"He's persistent all right, even his staunchest critics have never accused the man of being a quitter" Olson concurred. "Oh, I missed out the part where he said he'd need a couple of hundred million dollars and a bunch of lab assistants for some proof-of-concept experiments for the engine" he added, rolling his eyes. "I mean we've got the money in the reserves, the germanium mine on Alphard is the gift that keeps on giving and our asteroid mining turns up plenty of precious metals, but I'm pretty sure it would be akin to just piling up several tons worth of Newtons, pouring biodiesel all over them and striking a match."
"There's a lot of places that regard a lot of the experiments done purely out of scientific curiosity in much the same way you know" Bremman pointed out.
"Luddites and scientific philistines all" Olson responded haughtily. "Science for science's sake forever and always!" he declared, holding one hand aloft, index finger raised.
Bremman fought back a smirk. "Isn't that what Alpheus McEvedy was all about?" he asked, getting in a little revenge for Olson's earlier chain-yanking.
High Associator Giles Olson narrowed his eyes. "That's different. He was certifiably insane" he retorted. "Have you read the passages from his diaries we allowed the press to publish?"
"Yes Sir, although according to General Hallis the part about creating a modified Terror Bird as a riding animal isn't quite as nuts as it sounds" Bremman replied. "Apparently there's a planet in the Outworlds Alliance where they ride an animal not too dissimilar in size and shape to a Terror Bird called the Tariq. The local militias use them for mounted infantry units, they're supposedly very effective in the light scouting role because they can handle terrain a lot of other things can't."
"Seriously?" Olson asked dubiously.
"The Free Worlds League uses Branth-mounted infantry on Lopez, is a man riding a big carnivorous bird really that much weirder than one riding what's effectively a dragon?" Bremman asked rhetorically. "Talking of big birds, and press articles, is he council really considering importing a few breeding pairs of Giant Moas from McEvedy's Folly?"
"It's been discussed. They'll be okay with our climate and a meat animal we can raise locally will mean we won't be so reliant on imports. they're supposed to taste pretty good according to the people that went there" Olson confirmed. "As the forests we've started to plant expand we could release the Moas into them for some additional biodiversity" he added, planting the tree species from Buffalo Meadows had worked out better than expected, with them adjusting quite well to their new environment, and the biology department at the university was now pushing to import additional species from Thraxa that might do even better, Thraxa being more similar to Niops VII than Buffalo Meadows was in terms of temperature and the sunlight it received.
"Just as long as people don't get a hankering for roast Thunderbird, because I'd rather not have any of those running free here" Bremman opined. The second mission to 'The Folly' as some were starting to call it now had returned with hundreds of hours of footage of the things going about their business, including them preying upon the poor recreated Mammoths and Aurochs they liked to eat by preference.
"No Thunderbirds, but someone in NAM that read about the Hook Wolf wonders if they could be domesticated" Olson replied. "A Dire Wolf sized pseudo-canid with huge talons would make for one hell of a guard dog they think so they wrote it up as a suggestion. They're supposed to be pretty smart, smarter than you'd think."
"The Hook Wolves or NAM people" Bremman asked humorous. "Sorry, knee-jerk inter-service rivalry" he apologised for the attempted joke.
Olson ignored him. "Apparently Alpheus McEvedy used Terran corvids like the raven as a model for their intelligence, they might actually be considerably more intelligent than actual dogs. The people we rescued from there certainly believe so, they didn't fall for traps like other predators like the Toucan-Tiger did, they were smarter and more perceptive."
Bremman thought about that for a while and wasn't sure he liked it one bit. "Just as long as nobody sees fit to splice in some extra DNA to give them opposable thumbs too" he replied, thinking that this all sounded far too much like the basis of a schlocky monster movie for comfort. Then he wondered how well 'Night of the Hook Wolves' would do at the Box Office and whether or not he should find a scriptwriter. "If they're that smart are we sure that the Hook Wolves weren't one of McEvedy's experiments that used human DNA because I'm pretty sure that would violate an awful lot of old Terran Hegemony laws?" he asked.
"Oh, we'd make sure the things are fully sequenced to make sure they weren't before even considering the idea of domesticating them or breeding more" Olson reassured him. "When it comes to genetic engineering I always lean towards measured caution, it's gotten me labelled a luddite myself more than once by the more fundamentalist crowd at the university."
"Only seconds ago you were saying 'Science for science's sake forever and always' Sir" Bremman reminded him.
"Yeah, but I've always detected a hint of witchcraft about genetic-engineering not science" Olson replied and, not entirely in jest. "I mean, as a nuclear chemist by training I'm alright with alchemy, I've turned base metal into gold myself with a particle accelerator, but splicing together different DNA strands to create some kind of chimera strikes me as different."
"Perhaps we should verify that the 'Bubble, bubble toil and trouble, fire burn and caldron bubble' which resulted in the Frobisher people didn't involve eye of newt" Bremman joked.
"Their eyes are way too big for that" Olson replied, laughing. "Also, it's actually 'Double, double toil and trouble' in MacBeth" he corrected him.
"Really?" Bremman responded, pretty sure it wasn't.
Olson nodded. "Yes really. Bet you ten bucks I'm right" he said confidently.
"You're on."
"Great, you'll be paying for my next bucket of fried chicken" Olson said happily, his utter confidence causing Bremman to start to doubt his memory.
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Part XXXVI- Section 2 of 2
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"Returning to the subject of our shipping particle-projector-cannon to the Marik's, if that's going to continue once the Interdiction is listed we're really going to want to open another production line" Bremman advised. "It didn't take too much effort to get our existing production line for Improved PPC's to churn out standard ones instead, most of the difference between them is simply using more advanced materials and a few higher-grade components in the Improved version, but a factory on Alphard for standard PPC's would free up our high-tech PPC manufacturing facility for actual high-tech production work, not monkey-models for export."
Olson looked thoughtful. "To be honest I'm wary of supplying PPC's to the Free Worlds League in the long term" he said. "If we did that it might damage our relations with the other Great Houses, make us look less even handed and more like a supporter, or even a puppet, of the Mariks" he suggested. "The profit margin might not be nearly as good but the Department of Trade and Industry is pushing for us to only export non-military technology to the Successor States, advanced medical equipment like the Eligus Diagnoser is increasingly a rarity out there, and even things like good quality Scanalyzers aren't as ubiquitous as they used to be."
"If we wanted to make money from sales of non-military technology we should just charge for the Jamerson-Ulikov's we'll have in mass production soon" Bremman opined. "Yes, I know it's a hearts-and-minds thing to sell them at cost, and offer the blueprints to anyone that wants them, but there's dying desert planets across the Inner Sphere that would offer up their first born for the things."
"The goodwill and higher profile is worth more than the money, we have the latter it's the former we're still short on, Admiral" Olson noted. "The Terran Hegemony chose to make the J-U a restricted black-box technology, something that annoyed a lot of people, offering the design freely could be a priceless PR victory. One that we could also use to show up ComStar because they could have chosen to do the same and didn't, letting whole planets dry up into dust" he said before smiling. "Seeing as how we were already planning to put the things into mass production for our own use making more for export just lowers unit costs. Alphard sure as hell would benefit from a greater availability of fresh water."
"Kepler too if we ever get around to planting a flag there" Bremman replied. "Deserts that make the Sahara on Terra look like the sand bunker on a golf course."
"Until I get definite confirmation from the geological survey teams that there's the large deposits of oil and reservoirs of natural gas they think might be there Kepler is way down the list of systems we want to claim" Olson told him. "To be frank even if it is confirmed, how the hell we'd find the spare capacity to build and staff the drilling rigs, refineries and chemical plants that we'd need to exploit them within the next decade years I've got no idea. The only reason we've been able to find people to volunteer to work the mines on Galileo is because we've put them on a bonus scheme."
"I'm guessing it's not that they get to keep every third diamond they dig up?" Bremman asked with a chuckle.
"Nah, they get shares in the mining company and a plot of land to build their own home there" Olson explained. "Lots of interest from people already working the mines on Alphard to relocate to Galileo, so much that we might have to turn most of them down unless we can get the workers from the Illyrian Palatinate we're hoping for."
Bremman nodded. "How are negotiations going with that anyway?"
"Some of the merchant families are still worried that if they facilitate some of their mining workforce emigrating to Alphard to work for us, that they won't want to come back so we're not sure how many guest workers we're going to be able to get" Olson told him. "Offering them a financial loan at well below market rates so they can purchase military equipment from the Magistracy is helping to sway some opinions though."
"Whoever came up with that idea deserves a promotion if you ask me" Bremman opined.
"That would be you" Olson pointed out.
"Fleet Admiral Jacob Bremman has a nice ring to it don't you think?"
"Wouldn't that make you senior to General Romanov?"
"I just really want to make sure that my shipyard doesn't get delayed again just because the army comes up with a fancy new widget they want to get into production ASAP" Bremman told him.
"Like what? Farnstrom's new type of fusion engine?" Olson asked wryly.
"I'm more worried about this 'Project Hittile' proposal that just crossed my desk at the moment" Bremman replied seriously. "The Star League R&D people already did a lot of the preliminary work on that and it does seem like something that can be gotten to work, assuming they can figure out the electronics used in the Starfire 2500 missiles anyway" he said. "How in the hell they made electronics that good so compact is a mystery that's been baffling our people since we found all those headhunters in the first place."
"It was the Star League, they threw money at it" Olson replied. "A lot more than we've got, germanium mines or no."
"True but copying it shouldn't be nearly as difficult as inventing it was surely?" Bremman asked rhetorically. "Our new lighter model of Streak missile launcher is basically just a copy of the one the Star Adder's came up with not long before the Secession, reverse-engineering isn't usually nearly such a pain-in-the-ass as it's been with the Starfires, and even once we've managed that we still need to get it to work with the follow-the-leader system."
From what Olson knew of such things that was true so he nodded his agreement. "Did you get hold of the new Streak tech in one of those trials you people did?" he asked out of curiosity.
"Nah, during the withdrawal from Strana Mechty we were exchanging fire with just about everyone, and our people had the presence of mind to steal anything interesting they ran across" Bremman explained. "Thanks to General Hallis and the orbital fire support he was laying down our people's fighting retreat to the dropships was orderly enough that they could bring along some souvenirs as well as themselves."
"You've got to hand it to the man, whether it's bamboozling Capellans with fake Royal Marauders, or hijacking a battleship being used as an orbital tomb and turning its guns on the planet below, he definitely thinks outside the box" Olson observed.
"Sarah made a good choice when she picked him to replace poor Dwight as saKhan" Bremman agreed. "Of course, she was the one that set up the clan in such a way that the open-minded, not the mentally rigid, rose up the ranks to begin with which is why Franklin was next in line in the first place" he continued. "I doubt I'd have made it all the way to Star-Admiral rank in most other clans myself. She expected me to argue with her on naval matters and usually deferred to my expertise, rather than just do what I was told like a good little drone."
"I've got to ask, as someone that knew Sarah McEvedy is the Jennifer girl as much like her in personality as she looks?" Olson queried. He had seen images of the former Khan of the Wolverines and had met her sort-of clone many times and now in her early twenties they looked practically identical.
"I'd say yes, but as I never knew Sarah as a kid, you'd probably be better off asking Roger Callahan for his perspective as they grew up together" Bremman replied. "Before I forget to ask, General Hallis wanted me to check if you're still interested in observing a live-fire exercise, because he's planning on running a big one next month?"
"On Reykjanes Island presumably, not Niops V?" Olson asked. Because of the very different environmental conditions there the SLDF had recently established another training ground on the warmest of the three habitable worlds in the system. Reykjanes was a spectacular backdrop, what with the volcanoes, but the troops needed to be familiar with other environments according to the senior staff. In the longer term Romanov wanted more training facilities in the dry box canyons of Alphard and the forests of Stafford as well, but that was something Olson's successor as High Associator would have to agree because not only were there always financial costs involved any large tracts of land given to the military were obviously unavailable for other purposes.
"Yes, on Reykjanes" Bremman confirmed. "No need for a dropship trip to get there, just a VTOL ride."
"Sounds good to me" Olson replied. "I'd like to observe the gunslinger training program in action while I'm there too if that's possible. It sounds entertaining."
"I don't think it's as fun for those going through it, they're under a lot of pressure to perform and improve their skills, but I'm sure Franklin would be happy to oblige your request to watch the mech-jocks being scored for speed and accuracy as they run around blasting holographic projections" Bremman responded before smiling. "Back in the clan homeworlds that sort of thing was done with real mechs not holograms, having to fix all the unnecessary damage probably made the technician caste hate the warrior caste's guts."
"I doubt the accountants were happy about it either" Olson assumed.
"If we'd had a book-keeping caste they'd have stayed quiet for fear of getting shot, much the same way as anyone with an understanding of economics kept their mouth shut when Nicky K laid out his vision of clan society" Bremman told him. "Do you want to go through the latest budget requests now? I promise there's nothing in there about blowing up perfectly good machines just because some bozo thinks it makes for more realistic training."
"Not the part of these meetings I enjoy, but does it?" Olson queried. "Make for more realistic training I mean?"
"Perhaps a little, the holograms don't come apart like a real mech hit by an AC/20 would for example, but to be honest the goal was ritual not realism" Bremman replied. "Clanner society is a lot like ComStar is increasingly becoming, it's a secular religion with its own holt writ and arcane practices."
Olson frowned. "Not that secular, ComStar I mean, they've actually anointed the late Conrad Toyama as a saint and from what we're hearing I'm pretty sure their new Primus thinks he's the damn pope" he replied, rolling his eyes. "I mean, Toyama had his people chanting instruction manuals but I'm not sure if he believed in it all himself or if it was just an act. Karpov we're not too sure of, at least judging by some of what he's been saying, couching their disagreement with the Free Worlds League in some very flowery religious prose. I'm waiting for him to say that not accepting the Communications Protocol of 2787 is blasphemy against the words of the Blessed Blake."
"I'll start to worry when he launches a crusade against the heretics with their own HPG's and we hear ComStar mechwarriors bellowing 'Blakus Vult' as they go into battle" Bremman joked.
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Note from the Author:
Cargo is not typically transported in a Fortress (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Fortress) class military dropship but if you want to make sure nobody is going to try and steal your ship on arrival sending one that is very heavily armed is a way to do it.
Major Tyson made a positive enough impression to sway a few opinions regarding the hiring of more mercenaries while the demographics of Niops catches up with their offworld commitments (although being a former SLDF unit helps perceptions). Galileo (Pompey (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Pompey)) being rich in diamonds and fire opals, and Kepler (Horatius (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Horatius)) having large deposits of oil and natural gas comes from Handbook: Major Periphery States (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Handbook:_Major_Periphery_States). The Hegemony (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Marian_Hegemony) worlds were extremely blessed in mineral weath.
Certain corvids like the crow (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crow) and raven (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raven) are very intelligent and might be the smartest animals apart from primates. A direwolf-like flightless avian like the 'Hook Wolf' having corvid-like intelligence seems like something Alpheus McEvedy might come up with (it's frankly less nuts than the human-animal hybrids he was canonically experimenting with).
If Farnstrom was less of a mad angry scientist people might listen to him more. He's come up with the idea for the Light Fusion Engine (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Light_fusion_engine) (here to be called the Energy-Damped-Light-Fusion-Engine) a couple of hundred years before it appeared in canon. The LFE came about because Wolf's Dragoons (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Wolf%27s_Dragoons) couldn't get hold of the special materials needed for Clan Extra Light Fusion Engines any more and needed a substitute. The LFE isn't as good as a Clan XLFE (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Extralight_fusion_engine) but it's capable of taking hits without exploding that a Star League XLFE cannot making it a good compromise design. The Light Fusion Engine utilises technology that was actually developed to stop spectators watching the Solaris Games (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Solaris_Games) at the Steiner stadium (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Steiner_Stadium) from getting hit by stray PPC fire so Farnstrom's description of how his idea works isn't actually as crazy as it sounds.
Fans of the movie Young Frankenstein (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Frankenstein) may recognise part of the quote at the start of the chapter!
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Is this the wrong way round?:
"Reykjanes was a spectacular backdrop, what with the volcanoes"
Shouldn't it be Niops V with the volcanoes?
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I missed it before... That should be a Mammoth parked at the spaceport. Behemoths can only go planetside once.
Thanks, fixed.
Is this the wrong way round?:
"Reykjanes was a spectacular backdrop, what with the volcanoes"
Shouldn't it be Niops V with the volcanoes?
Nope. Reykjanes Island is volcanic and on Niops VII.
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Thanks for making the fix! And love the banter! :D
Outstanding job so far, but I'm still waiting for the HPG offer to the Mariks to come to pass... ;D
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i wonder about adding electronics used in the Starfire 2500 missiles on capital grade weapons. just let that sink in. :evil: :evil: :evil:
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Maybe that's what Barracudas have? ???
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Part XXXVII - Section 1 of 2
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"Niops was in an arms race against an opponent that they knew was already one lap ahead of them. That the opponent in question was situated thousands of light years away did not enter into their calculations when determining how much effort they wanted to devote into weapon research and development. Already a generation or two more advanced in military technology than the Successor States of the late 2820's to start with, by the end of the Second Succession War forty years later the Great Houses had fallen back a generation whereas Niops had continued to move ahead. The end result of this growing disparity was of course that when Niops finally came to blows with one of the Great Houses the war was exactly as one-sided as most people in the Inner Sphere expected it to be, just in completely the other direction."
Stephen J. Tran, Red Star Rising: A History of Niops 2800-2900 - Niops Press, 2915
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Military Research & Development Facility – Niops Association (Niops V) – 2839
Most of the people that worked there now called the place the 'Skunk Works', though it was likely that many of them knew the centuries old origin of the nickname, General Jenna Romanov considered as she prepared for her first visit. Now past her hundredth birthday and starting to feel old, though like most of those born on Terra she looked great for her age, she was starting to feel the need to make sure everything was running as it should be so that when she eventually retired and handed over command to Franklin Hallis the transition should be smooth.
Romanov had also come around to the idea that she might want to leave a more personal legacy behind in the form of children, with the Iron Wombs taking care of that. One thing she did not want to deal with at this age was actually raising them, which meant surreptitiously looking around for a family that might take on that responsibility for her and once she got back to Niops VII she planned to talk to a few people about that.
Not that she was in any hurry to rush back there. If nothing else the lower gravity on Niops V put a spring in her step that made her feel eighty again and she resolved to go for a run later, one that wouldn't leave her knees begging for mercy. Decades spent as a reluctant farmer on Buffalo Meadows had messed up her joints more than PT during her military career ever did. It was pretty obvious from her perspective now why the usual career move was to run away from the family farm to go join the army, not the other way around.
That was exactly what Brigadier Nellis had done himself of course, his brother inheriting the farm as a result, their respective time as farmers resulting in an occasional conversation between Romanov and Nellis about soil pH or crop yields in a Red Dwarf system that tended to bore General Hallis and Admiral Bremman completely out of their minds.
As for Hallis himself, if she wasn't suspicious that as soon as she was out of the picture he and his ilk would create a Romanov bloodname, as some of them had already suggested thinking that she would love the idea for some reason, Jenna Romanov might have been more inclined to go the sibko route for her potential Ironborn offspring. As it was however she had strong reservations about the whole thing and was hoping to find a young family that was looking to expand, and hopefully not just to get that tax break Olson had brought in for people with a lot of kids.
Still all of that could wait until she got back home, for now all her focus should be directed towards her informal inspection of the Niops V Skunk Works. Relocated from its original and temporary home on Niops VII to larger and more secure premises the R&D facility Romanov was visiting that day was still being expanded as funding became available, although being mostly below the surface you wouldn't be able to tell that from the air, or from orbit.
For the first ten years or so after the SLDF had arrived, Research and Development of more advanced weaponry had been restricted due to the need to direct what money and resources that were available into projects that gave the best bang for the buck. Upgrading the battlemechs and aerospace fighters of the 295th and NAM up to the standards of the Wolverine machines would increase the combat potential of the SLDF quicker and more cheaply than anything else, for one thing Hallis's people had arrived with the factories needed to do so already, and for this reason further development of most of the next-generation clan equipment that had been in prototype stage at the start of the 2820's had been given a low priority.
The second-generation of Extended Range Large Laser had been in prototype before Operation Klondike, a period when the clans still cooperated on research as Nicholas Kerensky was prioritising retaking the Pentagon Worlds over competition between the clans, so despite it being a Clan Nova Cat project the Wolverines had known enough above it to get them into production in time to equip the Hussar HSR-250-Dn. Other equipment not so far down the development path at the time of the Secession, such as the new model of Gauss Rifle Clan Burrock were supposed to be working on for example, were more of an unknown quantity. In that particular case, as with others, it wasn't deemed worth the amount of effort that would have been required to try and catch up with the Burrocks anytime soon, especially given that the Improved Gauss Rifle the Wolverines already had was itself an advance on Star League equipment anyway.
Of course, as the point neared that all of the SLDF machines had been brought up to the latest clan-spec circa 2823, Kerensky's people having surely advanced on from there themselves in the interim, the priority was now to make sure Niops didn't fall too behind the clans and that meant creating the 'Skunk Works', taking another look at the tech which had been in various stages of design in the period between Operation Klondike and Operation Switchback. After sixteen years of effectively treading water in weapons development, the men and women who had once put Clan Wolverine at the forefront of military technology were now being put back to work in order to catch up with the frontrunners again and they all knew how important a task it was.
Thanks to experienced civil engineers and construction workers, some of whom had once been involved in building the secure Brian Caches in the Pentagon Worlds, and greatly assisted by imported heavy machinery Niops had purchased from the Magistracy, the Skunk Works facility was dug in deep and when completed could likely withstand anything short of a nuclear warhead in the hundreds of kilotons range set to surface-burst. It was certainly no Castle Brian, the legendarily tough fortifications of the Star League, but it was intended to be a tough nut to crack nonetheless and was about as good as it could be, given the allocated budget and the number of personnel who could be spared for its construction anyway.
Situated over a hundred kilometres from Chapterhouse, the industrial town where the large majority of the factories belonging to the Niops Association had been sited until the SLDF turned up twelve years before, there was no road leading to the facility so getting there required a VTOL or a dropship and that day Jenna Romanov had arrived in one of the former, catching a ride there in a Vector after visiting the Hussar manufacturing plant earlier on. Amazingly, despite the mech factory having been up-and-running for a few years now they had only just finished backfilling the old open-cast mine it had been built at the bottom of, although to be fair part of that was down to the difficulty of periodically melting large amounts of rock into lava and pouring it in like cement to help hold the bulk of the material together.
The Vector had set down next to a drab, non-descript building on the surface that housed the main elevators and from there Romanov was ushered down to the main complex and then through several grey concrete-lined tunnels to where the new battlemech prototype she had been asked to check out before moving over to the directed-energy-weapons research bureau she was mainly there to see was waiting. Apparently the mech would have to be dismantled to get it out of there as the two-hundred-ton capacity cargo elevator to that level wasn't expected to be installed and running for another six months, but the huge cavern-like space where it had been put together for initial testing was more than large enough to put the thing through its paces.
As she entered the room following the technician who had been sent to guide her from the entrance, Romanov found herself looking at the prototype of the next model of Hussar and had to agree that they were right that you couldn't possibly mistake it for the one currently in production. All the additional aerials and that protruded from the rear torso, and the others sticking out of the turret on top, made the thing very distinctive even from a distance. Once you got closer a trained eye could also pick out changes made to several of the sensors that seemed to have been taken from a different machine entirely, this being obvious from the fact they were painted a different colour than SLDF olive drab.
"General Romanov" a man in a khaki jumpsuit unadorned by anything but a name badge came up to greet her. "Doctor Richard Frasier, Project Lead" he introduced himself.
"Nice to meet you in person at last" Romanov replied. "So, this is the new toy?" she asked.
"Yes Ma'am, it took us a while to integrate all the new electronic systems but we've finally got something superior enough to the HSR-250-Dn to warrant replacing it in production" he said happily.
"The 250 has only been in production a couple of years" Romanov pointed out. "Hard to believe it's already outdated enough to warrant replacement" she said doubtfully.
"Oh, but it is" Frasier replied confidently. "Fortunately we'll be able to retrofit the new electronics package from this model into the current one, so those already built aren't going to be obsolete and fit for the junkyard before they've barely seen service" he told her. "I should probably send a note of thanks to Samantha Hollister for agreeing to fund the project before she retired from the Department of Trade and Industry, without her backing and belief in what we were trying to accomplish we couldn't have made it this far so fast."
Romanov dearly hoped he was right about being able to refit the Hussar 250 to the new proposed spec because the bean-counters at the treasury would go nuts about all the money wasted on them if he wasn't. "Okay, run me through it. What's so special about this thing anyway?" she wanted to know.
Frasier smiled, clearly proud of his creation. "In simple terms it's the way we've integrated the mech's own sensors and communications systems with the Beagle Active Probe and the Guardian ECM so that it's more than the sum of its parts" he began to explain. "As you likely know already the Hussar was originally designed with an improved communications system to assist with its scouting role, and also make it somewhat more resistant to ECM jamming. What you may not know, because it wasn't an SLDF design but a Clan Wolverine one, is that the Stag had both an Improved Communication system and an Improved Sensor suite which together made it one of the most sophisticated battlemechs ever made, at least as regards its electronics."
"I did know that" Romanov told him, although the SLDF had mothballed such machines for fear of the clans noticing them somehow she had studied them intently. The Stag was particularly interesting to her because somehow the scientists and technicians of Clan Wolverine had taken a poorly regarded mech like the Vulcan and somehow used it as the basis for a far, far superior machine. "The additional aerials required for the comms and sensors are the reason you called it the Stag in the first place" she recalled. "They're supposed to look a little like antlers."
"Right" Frasier confirmed, smile widening. "I actually designed those systems for the Stag myself, though it wasn't me that came up with the name."
Romanov looked up at the prototype. "To cut a long story short I'm assuming you're going to tell me you've stuffed the sensor and communication systems from the Stag into a Hussar" she assumed.
"Well yes, but actually no" Frasier replied, shaking his head. "The Hussar carries a Beagle Active Probe and a Guardian ECM system, and the electronic suites on the Stag weren't optimised for integration with those so it would have been sub-optimal to do so."
"I'm confused" Romanov admitted.
"Okay, so basically we worked our way around the problem Ma'am" Frasier told her. "Like the Hussar the Mercury II mounts both a Beagle and a Guardian, with its electronics designed to work with them from the ground up. And since I also helped design the sensors and comms for the Mercury II, and I was far too lazy to start again completely from scratch in doing so, at their core they're near identical to those of the Stag" he explained.
"Ah, so you kludged together the electronics from the Stag and the Mercury II and then stuffed them into the Hussar after ripping out the original electronics?" Romanov now concluded.
"I wouldn't use the word 'kludge' myself, but essentially yes" Frasier replied, somewhat defensively. "We had to beef up the power distribution system to the electronics a little because they pull a lot more watts now than normal, and as you can see we needed extra antennae as on the Stag, but what we've been calling the Hussar 260 now has not only the best comms on the battlefield, it basically sneers at most ECM jamming and has superlative ECCM of its own, it also has sensors with an additional fifty-percent effective range over the original Royal Hussar, the HSR-200-Db, or our own HSR-250-Dn" he declared proudly. "It's now the ultimate in scout mechs" he claimed with some justification.
One of the technicians stood nearby coughed and once Frasier looked her way she mouthed a couple of words at him.
Frasier glared at the woman concerned who was giving him a disparaging look in return. "On the recommendation of our mechwarrior test-pilot some of the team have been calling it the 'Winged Hussar' because they think the extra antennae look a little like, well like wings, and apparently that's got some kind of significance in military history" Frasier told Romanov reluctantly. He didn't actually like the name himself, but had promised his staff to do so and they would be annoyed with him if he didn't.
"It does" Romanov told him. "Who's the mechwarrior?" she asked out of interest.
"Jackie Mroczkiewicz, she's not around today, I don't know if you know her?" Frasier replied.
"Not personally but her surname may explain why she'd be pushing to call it the 'Winged Hussar' because it's a Polish thing" Romanov told him. "Some of her ancestors may have charged down some of mine on horseback during the 17th Century. That is when they weren't charging down Swedes, Ottomans or whoever else was in front of them anyway" she said wryly. "The so-called 'Winged Hussars' were the elite of the Polish heavy cavalry, probably the best in the whole of Europe at the time, which is saying something because Europe in that era very much resembled the Age of War with everyone fighting everyone else, all the time, so the military art was highly developed."
"The military art, not the military science?" Fraiser queried.
"My field became a little more scientific and rigorous in approach a little later in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries" Romanov replied. "Better firearms and artillery, not to mention better trained and drilled infantry, made a glorious seventh-century heavy cavalry charge that would have still resembled something from the Middle Ages considerably less viable as a tactic" she continued before chuckling. "Sorry if I'm rambling a little, I'm getting old but I can still remember all those lectures I had to sit through at Sandhurst Military Academy a lifetime ago. It's surprising how relevant they can be to modern warfare."
"Modern warfare also being a science not an art no doubt" Frasier supposed.
"It is for us, I'm not entirely sure about much of the Inner Sphere, or the clans for that matter, they seem to be lurching back towards feudalism and knightly chivalric orders at a rate of knots" Romanov told him. "There were militaries a thousand years ago with a greater understanding of combined-arms-warfare than you'd see in some battles these days. I mean honourable single-combat mostly went out the window before the Winged Hussars were a thing but somehow they've made a comeback, it's ridiculous. Amateurish even."
Fraiser nodded. "Well, I can only hope that the force-multiplier that the Hussar 260 represents as a superior scout mech only bolsters our own scientific and professional military strength" he said. "I can send you a full report on the machine of course, full technical specifications and our estimates as to how soon we can replace the 250-Dn in production" he said. "Fortunately, because we already have the production lines for the electronic systems of the Stag and Mercury II in storage we'll not be starting from scratch and won't need to wait for a Project Workshop to be available."
"That's very much a good thing, they're already at capacity and booked up for years" Romanov replied. "Am I right that you were also involved in developing the Pulverizer?" she asked him.
"Only tangentially, I helped out a little integrating its Guardian ECM into its comms and sensors" Frasier replied. "Why?"
"I was wondering why the Enhanced ERPPC on the Pulverizer is more accurate than the one on the Stag II, idle curiosity really" Romanov told him.
"Jones should know, he helped design the ERPPC and was more heavily involved with the Pulverizer than I was" Frasier replied.
"Jones?"
"Nathan Jones, he's part of the team working on the next generation ERPPC that I think you're scheduled to take a look at later so you should be able to have a word with him" Frasier replied. "For now though I'll give you a quick look in the cockpit of the 260-Dn and answer any questions you may have about it."
"Different cockpit layout from the current 250-Dn I guess?" Romanov surmised.
"Slightly, we've tried to keep them very similar for the sake of the mechwarriors transitioning from one to the other" Frasier replied. "The sensor screen is laid out a little differently, and there are a few more buttons on the comms system, but Mroczkiewicz herself doesn't think it's too cluttered or confusing for that to represent a problem."
"I'll jump in the chair, take a proper look" Romanov told him, always happy to get the opportunity to sit inside a battlemech and not behind a desk. "So, what's next for you and your team after this?" she asked out of interest as she headed towards the ladder set up to facilitate reaching the cockpit.
"We're going to take another look at both the Guardian ECM and the Beagle Active Probe, preliminary work indicates it might be possible to shave half-a-ton in weight off both and if we can do that then it'll make the proposed Hussar HSR-265-Dn less risky."
Romanov stopped in her tracks at the bottom of the ladder. "What the hell is the HSR-265-Dn?" she wanted to know.
"It's essentially the HSR-260-Dn only with Target Acquisition Gear mounted coaxially to the ER Large Laser" Frasier explained. "We could do that now, but we'd have to remove some of the other weaponry, or shave off a ton of armour, and that would make the machine either less useful for anti-infantry work or more fragile. If we can save the weight on the Guardian and Beagle instead we get the TAG without making sacrifices elsewhere so there's no downside" he continued. "Unfortunately, we've got no idea how and when exactly we're going to achieve that goal as yet. It could potentially take another decade or more of R&D, which is why we don't recommend waiting for that new tech to be available as well before switching production from the current machine. As the saying goes, perfect is the enemy of good enough, and the 260 with its superior sensors and comms is more than good enough. After all we already have other scout vehicles equipped with Tag such as the Zephyr hovercraft that can plug the capability gap in the interim."
Romanov thought about all that. With a TAG fitted the ability of the Hussar to not only scout but also paint targets for guided artillery munitions like the Arrow IV could represent a huge potential tactical advantage in the long term, especially if used in conjunction with the longer-ranged sensors. A scenario where one of these things detected enemy machines waiting in ambush before it could be sprung, and then marked them itself for long-range bombardment to turn the tables was just perfect.
Although there was still a definite flaw to what Frasier had been saying before, General Romanov realised.
"If the HSR-265-Dn is going to be superior to this 260-Dn then the 260 isn't the 'ultimate' in scout mechs, it's the penultimate in scout mechs" Romanov corrected his earlier statement, giving him a look that she hoped conveyed the wisdom of old age and not that she was a pedantic jerk.
Frasier thought about that. "Yes Ma'am" he conceded the point. "You are technically correct, the best kind of correct" he praised her.
"Details matter" Romanov replied, starting to climb the ladder. "Also, on my authority as Head of the Joint Chiefs and Acting Commanding Officer of the Eleventh Army we're going with calling this thing the Winged Hussar" she told him, tone indicating that this was her final word on the matter.
Frasier sighed. "Lieutenant Mroczkiewicz will be thrilled to hear that when she arrives back here" he replied flatly, clearly less than enthused himself as he followed her up the ladder so he could guide her around the new cockpit layout.
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Part XXXVII - Section 2 of 2
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After half-an-hour looking over the HSR-260-Dn Winged Hussar, concluding that it was indeed well worth switching production to it from the current model, Romanov was guided to another part of the complex where they were working on the new model of Streak SRM. Finding herself looking with amusement at the sign hung outside which said 'Calm down, it's not Rocket Science. No, wait, it is Rocket Science! YOU SHOULD BE NERVOUS!' she was grinning as the door was opened for her.
Originally a project of Clan Star Adder, which had produced a prototype a couple of years before Operation Klondike and had the thing in production for their own battlemechs before the Wolverines declared independence, the new model of Streak SRM launcher was not only lighter than its Star League era progenitor it also utilised the longer-ranged missile originally developed for the Improved SRM so it could reach out further.
The launcher that they demonstrated to Romanov was a Streak SRM-6 that weighed thirty percent less than the system it was intended to replace and carried missiles that had thirty percent more effective range. It was in fact so superior that the only reason it had no been brought into service years before was that it would require a whole-new production line and Niops was in no position until now to free up some time in a Project Workshop for that.
It was of course another example of 'Perfect is the enemy of good enough' in that the Wolverines had arrived with a production line for the Improved SRM and getting those churned out in sufficient number to upgrade SLDF machines could be done right away without delaying other vital work.
With Project Workshop III-C coming on line next year there was finally a little headroom, which meant they could put the new Streak Launchers and missiles into production, thus the Skunk Works was making sure they were fully ready for that, with a production model available that had all the kinks sorted out.
As she was shown around and talked to the scientists and engineers of the rocket development team Romanov was also told that their next project after the Streak was to perfect the Improved LRM launcher, which had only ever been intended to be an interim design. As far as Romanov could tell the only major difference was that the perfected launcher would do away with the problem LRM's usually had of having a minimum range below which they couldn't hit a target, the missiles arcing up over them. It wasn't remotely as much of a leap in armaments technology as the Improved LRM launcher had been over the standard type, the former being only half the weight of the latter, but Romanov was assured that they could still use the existing iLRM production line to make the new launchers when they out of prototype so the switch wasn't going to draw excessive resources away from elsewhere for little return and shouldn't take too long to put into service.
Another longer-term project the 'Rocketeers', as they apparently liked to call themselves, were hoping to get to eventually was an improved Arrow IV launcher and missile. They were confident they could knock at least couple of tons of weight off the launcher by utilising the new lightweight alloys available, and if the superior rocket engine design of the Improved SRM could be scaled up they could increase the effective range as well.
Given that the proposed TAG-equipped HSR-265-Dn would synergise nicely with a better Arrow IV system Romanov suggested that they might want to touch base with Doctor Frasier and put in a joint request for funding when they got to that stage.
Querying as to their input into 'Project Hittile' the rocket scientists had laughed and assured her that they could have a compatible SRM and LRM ready years, if not decades before the people still trying to figure out the electronics on the Starfire seeker had achieved their goal. For that matter the small team who had studied the advanced Tandem-Charge Warhead used by the Headhunter had already completed their work and had a reversed-engineered copy ready for testing.
The next stop on her tour brought General Romanov to where the team working on laser weaponry were eagerly waiting to show off their new Extended Range Medium Laser. A prototype of the weapon had arrived on Niops along with the Wolverines, but while replacing all the standard medium lasers in the arsenal with longer-ranged ones would have been the ideal, it simply wasn't developed enough to do that back in 2827.
While the prototype had been the same size as the weapon it was supposed to replace, it massed another half-ton making one-for-one switching out of the old for the new problematic even if they had arrived with a production line for them, which they did not.
The chances were considered likely that the other clans had a perfected ER Medium Laser with that extra half-ton shaved off before the SLDF even reached Niops, with the Jade Falcons openly known to be leading in the race to get there first, so while it was welcome to finally catch up not doing so until a decade and a half later was hardly ideal.
Still, the new weapon was now finally ready for production, the same size and weight as the venerable medium laser, forty percent more powerful and with thirty percent more effective range. As a downside it also produced a lot more waste heat, but double-heatsinks could cope with that, especially the next generation boron-arsenide ones, so Romanov was more than happy with the design.
On a less positive note, development of better pulse lasers was not nearly so far along. They thought they could have something better than the Improved Large Pulse Laser in a year or two, but anything smaller than that was going to take a lot more R&D.
Well, you go to war with the lasers you have, not the lasers you wished you had, and the lasers they had were still going to be damn good as long as they played to their strengths, Romanov knew. Fortunately the new Extended Range Large Laser and Enhanced ERPPC had already pushed SLDF tactics heavily towards fighting at a distance and avoiding close-up brawling so shorter ranged weaponry like pulse lasers were only nice to have, not a necessity.
The the team working on ballistic weaponry were apologetic that they hadn't yet made any progress into developing successors to the various types of Improved Autocannon that the clans came up with over thirty years ago. This was partially down to the fact that they had spent a couple of years coming up with a prototype, then a production model of a class 5 autocannon that looked like a class 2 for the new Blackjack but they also freely admitted that because Clan Wolverine had concentrated most of its efforts towards directed-energy weapons they were behind the curve as regards the development of new LB-X and Ultra types.
They did have examples of prototype LB-X and Ultra type autocannons the clans had fielded for Klondike, so they weren't entirely starting from scratch now they were in a position to start working to perfect them, however the engineer that Romanov had a frank discussion with about it admitted that if they had a greatly superior weapon ready for production within the next ten years she would be very much surprised. In large part that was due to the need to develop new alloys and ceramics in order to shave off a useful amount of weight from gun-barrels, and unfortunately all the good materials-science people were already assigned to developing a better endo-steel and new types of armour plate.
Asked by Romanov if she thought the clans themselves would already have better autocannon by now the engineer had replied with a flat 'Yes', with the only doubt being whether Clans Coyote or Mongoose would have gotten theirs into production first. The engineer hoped it was Mongoose because it had become widely known in Wolverine circles since the secession that their Khan, Mitchell Loris, had privately agreed with Khan McEvedy that Nicholas Kerensky was a tyrannical nutjob, which raised Loris and his clan quite a lot in people's estimations.
It was a little annoying that the Skunk Works ballistics engineers couldn't say when they might be able to come up with a successor to the Improved Gauss Rifle either, because that was a long-range weapon that would fit in very well with current SLDF tactical doctrine, but at least the team working on the new Particle Projector Cannon were able to claim with some justification that they now had something just as hard-hitting and with longer range.
If the astronomers and astrophysicists were still considered the pinnacle of Niops society, being seen as an elite set higher on the social ladder than other academics, let alone the bulk of the population, within the military R&D community it was the Particle Projector Cannon people who were the rockstars and when Romanov reached their department it showed in just how well funded they seemed to be.
When Clan Wolverine unveiled their Enhanced ERPPC (eERPPC) in late 2822 the other clans had been shocked, but if they had known that it was only ever intended to be an interim production weapon while McEvedy's people worked on its replacement they would have been appalled.
If not for the malevolence of Jason Karrige of the Widowmakers, and the political machinations of ilKhan Kerensky, the more powerful Improved Enhanced ERPPC (ieERPPC) would have likely been in production by early 2824 and that weapon would itself have been potentially been succeeded by a more compact version in preliminary development some time the year after.
Unfortunately in reality the need to pack up and get the hell out of Dodge in a hurry as Sarah McEvedy initiated Operation Switchback had abruptly halted the research and since a production line for the eERPPC was what they had when they got to Niops the eERPPC was what they ran with when upgrading all the mechs, aerospace fighters and dropships they had.
They had actually had a working production ready Improved Enhanced ERPPC over a year ago, Romanov had seen one tested, but resources being diverted to produce Star League era ERPPC's for export, and a decision being taken to run up a good stockpile of spare Enhanced ERPPC's before switching over to its replacement, meant that they had only recently ended production of those with the factory currently in the process of being re-tooled for its successor.
Jenna Romanov wasn't on Niops V to see that particular weapon though, she was there to see what they eventually intended to replace that with.
Or rather the two different weapons they intended to replace it with.
Firstly the Compact Extended Range Particle Projector Cannon, or cERPPC had the firepower of the ieERPPC but in a lighter, and yes more compact package, and the Skunk Works already had a working prototype that Romanov would get to see in action. According to the design team, ideally they would have skipped the ieERPPC entirely and gone straight from the eERPPC to the cERPPC, but the lightweight alloys and ceramics and an entirely new type of capacitor needed to make the latter meant it would need a whole new production line, whereas you could make the ieERPPC on the one they already had with only minimal re-tooling.
Since the cERPPC wasn't actually more powerful than the ieERPPC, and you could have the latter in service a lot faster and with far less capital outlay for new plant and machinery, the compact version was going to be shelved for now. Maybe by 2850 with even more Project Workshops available it might make sense to put them into production but for now there were just better things to do with the available resources.
One of those things was to take another look at the ieERPPC and consider, what if instead of making it smaller and lighter you kept it the same size and looked at what you could achieve in terms of making it hit harder or reach out further?
This was when Romanov got to meet Nathan Jones, once the wunderkind of Particle Projector Cannon research who had helped invent the Improved PPC in his early twenties, the Enhanced ERPPC in his mid-twenties, and after over a decade of not being able to develop the particle projector cannon still further, much to his chagrin, was finally back doing what he was best at.
At least thanks to the university he had managed to get his MEng degree and then his doctorate in the interim, so the time hadn't been totally wasted, though Jones would have enjoyed it more if not for that lunatic who lectured in high-energy-physics.
What kind of maniac marks you down for poor penmanship, Jones had complained at being handed a grade of A- on a test where all the answers were correct just because the handwriting wasn't neat enough?
Jones suspected it was because physicists like Farnstrom don't like to think that mere engineers such as himself could be just as smart as they were.
'Nathan Jones?" Romanov queried, spotting his name badge.
"Hey Lady, you call him Doctor Jones!" a young man with a Capellan accent interrupted indignantly. The fact that second and even some third generation Capellans still didn't have the 'native' accent of Star League English spoke to the fact Niops society had yet to fully integrate.
"It's alright kid" Jones told him. "Can you go make sure that the firing range is ready for the next test of the cERPPC?" he requested.
"Yes Sir" the young man replied, dashing off.
"Yes, I'm Nathan Jones" the man confirmed. "Sorry about that General Romanov, that was my lab assistant Wan" he explained. "He's very loyal."
"Nice to meet you, Doctor Jones" Romanov replied, smiling. "Doctor Frasier, I guess you know him, told me earlier that you worked on integrating the Enhanced ERPPC with the Pulverizer and the Stag II?"
"I did, but that feels like a lifetime ago now" Jones confirmed.
"It was less than twenty years ago, and to an old fart like me forty years ago feels like the week before last" Romanov joked. "It's just idle curiosity but I was wondering why the same weapon on the Pulverizer was noticeably more accurate than on the Stag?" she asked. "Was it just because the one on the Pulverizer was torso mounted?"
"Sort of" Jones replied, thinking back to when he worked on it. "We basically built the Pulverizer around the gun using a special harness, rather than installing it as on most machines. The Stag II was basically just a re-built Stag with a bigger engine and the eERPPC arm mounted."
"Thought it must be something like that" Romanov replied.
"When we were retrofitting our hand-built Devastator assaults to carry the eERPPC, I was involved in that too, we tried to do the same thing with them as on the Pulverizer" he told her. "It's PPC bays also being torso mounted we hoped it might be possible, but we found we couldn't without re-building the whole mech which wasn't an option" Jones recalled. "If we decide to start making the Devastator again we could probably make the brand new ones using the torso weapon bay design from the Pulverizer though, except for it having two of them not one of course."
"Interesting" Romanov replied thoughtfully.
"I'd love to think that by the time we've got something like the Devastator coming off the production line the new toy we're working on will be ready, but don't get your hopes up" Jones told her. "The LRPPC will require as much of a technological leap over the cERPPC as it did over the original PPC though, so if it's available before I'm thinking about retirement, I'll be feeling pretty pleased with myself."
Romanov nodded. "But you're sure the proposed Long Range PPC is actually viable?" she asked.
"Oh, quite sure, as long as we don't set our sights too high on what's actually achievable" Jones replied confidently. "The current design goals of perhaps ten percent more range and firepower than the ieERPPC in a weapon of the same mass and volume isn't the really tricky part, it'll be achieving it while not producing truly excessive amounts of waste heat that'll be more difficult" he said. "The new model of double-heat-sink we'll have soon can only help so much. We want something that's efficient enough that the mechwarrior at the controls of the machine carrying one doesn't have to fear pressing the fire-button repeatedly for fear of being roasted alive in his cockpit. If we didn't have to worry about that we'd just slap on a big capacitor and a longer barrel and be done with it, but we want a good weapon, not a kludge."
"Admiral Bremman mentioned something about the technology being developed for the LRPPC possibly being applicable to naval use?" Bremman recalled. "Do you know anything about that?"
"Yes, it was probably my initial thoughts about that put to paper which he read" Jones confirmed. "It's very early days of course, but our initial work indicates that several of the various new designs for parts that'll come together to form the LRPPC will likely scale up better than what we use now. If so, it'll make the proposed Enhanced Naval PPC considerably more viable as something to look into in the future" he said. "It definitely won't be something we can just retrofit into current Naval PPC's though, they'll have to be built entirely from scratch. Push another twenty-percent more wattage into the big guns on the Zughoffer Weir and they'd explode… which is kinda sub-optimal" he added wryly.
"Oh well, I'm sure the admiral would find something to do with all the old Naval PPC's after they've been taken out and replaced with better ones" Romanov reasoned.
"Best if he did" Jones responded. "Even only counting Heavy NPPC's there's forty-eight on the Zug and sixteen each on Bismark, Rawhide and Ulithi so it would be a hell of a shame to just scrap them all" he opined. "They're each worth more than a Thug assault" he continued. "Talking about the Thug, since we're going to be essentially hand-building them in a Project Workshop, rather than mass produce them on a production line, as an experiment it's been suggested we fit their arms with the hot-swap modular weapon bays they developed for the Stuka from the ones on the old Mercury and the Dragoon. If so, we're really going to want to make sure that the power-couplings are beefed up because if not they won't be able to mount an LRPPC later on. They'll pull a lot more wattage than anything we use now and why not future-proof them I say?"
"Certainly sounds like the thing to do, if you send the suggestion through channels I'll give my endorsement" Romanov replied.
"Great" Jones replied smiling. "The cERPPC should be ready by now if you want to watch it burn clean through some heavy armour plate" he suggested. "Does as much effective damage to armour plate as a gauss rifle but it's far smaller and only masses a third as much."
"Could have used one of those fighting Amaris" Romanov replied with a sigh. Though on the bright side there were still plenty of other people worth shooting at she considered.
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Note from the Author:
In the game of battletech some machines have Design Quirks (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Design_Quirks) these being positive or negative and reflecting something different about that particular mech or aerospace fighter. In the case of the Stag (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Stag) developed by Clan Wolverine it has the Improved Communications (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Design_Quirks#Improved_Communications) and Improved Sensors (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Improved_Sensors) design quirks reflecting it posessing to superior electronics suites to most mechs. The Hussar (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Hussar) also has Improved Communications (useful for a scout mech) but switching it out for the even better electronics used by the Stag seemed like something they might want to do. I can't imagine that the Wolverine scientists and technicians that designed the electronics for the Stag weren't also the people that did so for the Beagle (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Beagle_Active_Probe) and Guardian (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Guardian_ECM_Suite) equipped Mercury II (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Mercury_II), so if anyone could kludge them together it should be the people that made the things in the first place.
Adding Target Aquisition Gear (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Target_Acquisition_Gear) (TAG) to the new HSR-260-Dn "Winged Hussar (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_hussars)" to create the HSR-265-Dn would be a useful next step (Clan Wolverine always favoured the use of artillery) but in order to find the weight needed to mount it they need both a lighter Beagle and Guardian unless they want to downgrade the machine in other areas (in canon the clans managed to lighten both the ECM and Probe to one ton by 2832, Niops is playing catch-up here).
Niops is also behind the clans in several other fields of military research at this point (for example they've just gotten a new Streak SRM (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Streak_SRM-6) that the clans had over a decade earlier). The weapons where prototypes existed before they left in 2823 they're not quite so far behind in (eg. there were prototype clan Extended-Range Medium Lasers (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Extended-Range_Medium_Laser) during Operation Klondike (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Operation_KLONDIKE)) but in others such as Gauss Rifles (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Gauss_rifle) (the modern Clan version dating to 2828) or Medium Pulse Lasers (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Medium_Pulse_Laser) (in clan service 2827) it'll be a while before they catch up.
Despite inventing the Enhanced ERPPC (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Enhanced_Extended-Range_Particle_Projector_Cannon) (eERPPC) in the first place they're even behind on those at this point, with Clan Snow Raven coming up with the more powerful, lighter and smaller Clan ERPPC (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Extended-Range_Particle_Projector_Cannon) (CERPPC) in 2826 (presumably using captured Wolverine R&D). If you want the in-game stats the Improved Enhanced ERPPC (ieERPPC) is a 15 damage eERPPC while the Compact ERPPC (cERPPC) is... well it's a CERPPC basically.
Known by the nickname Indiana 'Minnesota Jones' at university while getting his PhD what Doctor Nathan Jones doesn't know about Particle Projector Cannon isn't worth knowing (there had to be a reason why Clan Wolverine was ahead in PPC tech, he's got a lot to do with it).
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So we are at point where Niops science starts sneering at things.
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I might suggest the Micro Pulse Laser and clanner Machine Gun mount as small successes that keep the Pulse Laser and Autocannon shops in business... ;)
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Great Chapter, funny little comments :laugh:
(https://bg.battletech.com/forums/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=80036.0;attach=75252)
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they might want to see about making some of them look like Frankenmechs. it would mess with someone.
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"If you want the in-game stats the Improved Enhanced ERPPC (ieERPPC) is a 15 damage eERPPC while the Compact ERPPC (cERPPC) is... well it's a CERPPC basically."
So basically, the cERPPC is just the Clan ER PPC we are familiar with, while the ieERPPC has the same weight and crit profile as a regular Inner Sphere ER PPC (seven tons, three crits) but has the 15 damage/15 heat profile of the Clan version?
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So basically, the cERPPC is just the Clan ER PPC we are familiar with, while the ieERPPC has the same weight and crit profile as a regular Inner Sphere ER PPC (seven tons, three crits) but has the 15 damage/15 heat profile of the Clan version?
Yep.
The idea is that the Snow Ravens got hold of the initial Wolverine research into what became the Clan ERPPC and they skipped the ieERPPC development stage entirely just putting the CERPPC straight into production. Niops could have done the same thing, but it would have meant building a whole new production line first, while running with the ieERPPC for a while meant they could have a 15 damage ERPPC in service much faster using the factory they already had (it's similar enough to the eERPPC for that to be possible).
The thing is, in-universe by skipping the ieERPPC stage the Snow Ravens ended up in a dead-end development path. In order to eventually get more range and firepower (the LRPPC) you need more volume and weight to work with.
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I love the "id est" ERPPC! ;D
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Part XXXVIII - Section 1 of 2
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"To quote a distant relation of mine, 'Only those are fit to live who are not afraid to die'."
General Leigh MacArthur - 2764CE
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Illyria III – Illyrian Palatinate – 2839
Dave Robertson leaned back against the stack of ammunition crates which had just been unloaded from the Mule cargo dropship that had accompanied the SLDF Overlord beside it here and idly wondered if the cute blonde local girl who had been driving the forklift was single. The contingent of the Niops military dispatched to Illyria was there to help train the Ilyrian militia in the use of the Manticore tank in preparation for a number of those being delivered from the Magistracy, but until they were needed for that that the kits of what was once sibko Gamma were stood idle and were currently very bored. The tread-heads had more to do of course, they had unloaded their tanks as soon as they arrived while the mechs were left aboard the ship until they were needed.
At least it was warm, and sunny enough that most of the Niops people were wearing sunglasses to deal with the glare from the system's G4V star, but that only raised a few questions in Robertson's mind that he wondered if his two companions could answer.
"You know what I don't understand" Dave began to speak.
"Pretty much everything as far as I can determine" Frederick Hallis interjected before Robertson could continue. Hallis himself had opened one of the crates and was inspecting the contents. According to the markings on the crate they were training SRM's that lacked warheads, but it was always a good idea to check if that was really what was in them. He wasn't entirely sure if the local militia people could tell the difference between training munitions and live rounds and if they might be shot at him later he wanted some reassurance.
"What I don't understand" Robertson continued, ignoring the snark, "is how a planet with a breathable atmosphere, a pretty decent climate, and which was colonised nearly five hundred years ago can still have less than a quarter of a million people living on it" Robertson asked rhetorically. "When they said we'd be setting down at a militia training ground few klicks north of the planetary capital I was expecting a city not a town. It's not even a big town" he complained, having seen it from the air as the two Niops dropships came into land earlier that morning.
"Ah, yeah I see what the problem is" Henry Callaghan spoke up. "They hide that kind of information in books" he told his friend while looking over towards the collection of wooden huts and a number of hangers yonder that constituted the military base, such as it was. The Illyrian militia wasn't exactly well-funded, leading them to also being poorly trained and equipped, and one thing that brought that fact neatly into focus were the Merkava VIII tanks they still used that dated from the early days of the Age of War and hadn't been updated since, one of which could be seen parked next to an Apostle SPG which was even older.
"You're right" Frederick concurred with Henry. "Now you see Dave, a 'book' is like a comic, only with less pictures and more words" he explained in as serious a tone as he could muster.
"****** you both very much" Robertson responded, glaring at them. "Seriously, I mean it's not exactly Terra, or Stafford, but this place is way nicer than any planet in Niops, hell a lot more people live on ****** Alphard than here and that's mostly desert. Are most of the people here sterile or something?"
Henry sighed. "No, they have kids, they just tend to leave when they're old enough because their prospects are shit" he explained. "You know how the Palatinate is an oligarchy founded by a bunch of merchant families back in the 24th Century? Well, those same families still run the place, and if you're not born into one of them there's not much chance of getting very far in life. Unless you're happy working as a miner for crappy wages until the day you die you hitch a ride on the next jumpship going somewhere else and never look back."
"It's not an actual dictatorship or anything so they don't try to force people to stay, and the ruling families aren't tyrannical and oppressive enough for the majority to rise up and overthrow them, so they just ended up stuck in the current social stasis" Frederick added. "If the Free Worlds League hadn't thrown in the towel at the end of last year that might have all changed because most people that emigrated from Illyria usually went there, and the League was starting to look a lot less attractive a place to move to as their economy collapsed but I guess now the status quo is going to return" he surmised.
"Not necessarily, I can see people from here migrating to one of our colonies in future" Henry disagreed. "We've already got guest workers from Palatinate worlds taking five-year contracts on Alphard, some of them might decide to stay."
"Certainly possible" Frederick had to admit. "The only working stiffs who earn a decent wage here are the ones that work in the dropship yard down on the southern continent, the Star League built it for them when it was still trying to win hearts and minds in the periphery, not just keep them in line with threats of sending in the fleet if they misbehaved. If I'm remembering right they only make the Danais class here though, the Terran Hegemony didn't want them having too much useful infrastructure all the way out here" he added with a wry smile. The Danais class dropship wasn't a bad design per se, it was just a little basic technologically and a lot smaller that something like a Mule, the mainstay of cargo transportation in the Inner Sphere.
"Okay, since you two seem to know everything there is to know about this place what is there to do in terms of having some fun?" Dave asked the most important question as far as he was concerned.
"Not much for us, given that we're not allowed to drink, unlike the tank crews who I know are planning on going into town this evening to try out the bars, but if we're stuck here for months which is on the cards, and ComStar get around to restoring the HPG net all the way out to Illyria soon, they'll likely re-start the Annual Mechwarior Games they usually host here that got shelved during the Interdiction because they couldn't advertise or send out invites" Henry replied. "It's like the poor man's Solaris Games, decent prizes for the victors and the locals make bank from spectators who come here to watch and gamble" he explained. "It's a damn shame we can't roll up in the Bull Shark prototype and stomp everyone.
"Why not? It's not like the clanners every saw the thing in action" Dave asked, reasonably he thought.
"Anyone looking at a Bull Shark next to a picture of a Pulverizer or even a Mercury II is going to notice immediately how Clan Wolverine the styling is and the winner of the assault class division is going to get their picture splashed all over the Inner Sphere" Henry replied, as ever the voice of reason. "If we weren't worried about that shit we'd stick Billy the Kid in the thing, send him off to Solaris and bet ten billion on the funny looking mech driven by the guy with the big mouth."
"Yeah, it would be our biggest earner since we found the germanium stockpile on Alphard" Frederick agreed. "Talking of gambling and the Interdiction being lifted, bet you both fifty bucks that Illyria gets back on the network before we do" he wagered. "The longer they leave it until they get the Hednesford HPG station running the more pressure the phone company thinks we're under" he said. Although it had been a few months now since Captain-General Gerald Marik sent his little brother Garth to Terra to negotiate an end to the ComStar War much of the Free Worlds League was yet to have a working HPG station again. Much of that was likely due to how seriously some of them had been sabotaged to stop the FWL using them, but SLDF Intelligence suspected that Primus Raymond Karpov was slow-walking repairs to punish the Marik's for not bending the knee low enough during peace negotiations. From what Niops could tell young Garth Marik had done a great job on his people's behalf, getting ComStar to restore the Hyperpulse Generator network without having to kowtow in a humiliating fashion and not having to agree to pay excessive financial damages into the bargain. In this he was likely helped somewhat by the slight rally in the military fortunes of the League due to all the extra PPC's arriving from Niops, Niops itself hoping that the Marik's would remember that.
"No bet, ComStar are dicks and they think they can get what they want from us by being dicks" Dave replied flatly, Henry nodding his agreement. "Hey, the girls are back" he noticed, pointing to where Jennifer and Katrina were heading back their way after going to meet with Major MacArthur who was in charge of the training mission, with the captain commanding the tanks as his second in command. Although the SLDF Overlord had transported two companies of mechs and only a single company of tanks to Illyria each Manticore having four crew meant that the tankers made up the bulk of SLDF army personnel. "Why did you ask Kat to go with Jennifer instead of you anyway Fred?" he asked curiously, you usually jump at the chance to play wingman.
Frederick sighed. "I don't think the Major likes me" he explained.
"What makes you think so?" Henry asked.
"Because Alice told me he doesn't like me" Frederick replied matter-of-factly.
"Ah, I guess he's still not come around to the idea that his precious granddaughter is dating some soulless, gene-spliced freak of science" Henry surmised.
"Why would that bother him?" Dave asked, feigning mystification. "She's a redhead so it's not like she's got a soul either" he pointed out, confident he was far enough away from Fred to avoid a punch if one was thrown his way in response.
Realising that Dave was out of arm's reach Frederick let that one slide. "It's not the genetic engineering, it's being a Hallis" he explained. "Supposedly way back when Leigh MacArthur, Alice's great-grandmother, commanded the 295th my grandfather, who still commanded the 331st back then, made some joke at a party about the 295th losing their royal status and asked if they'd checked the back of the sofa."
"You're kidding?" Henry asked incredulously.
"Nope, I guess they'd had all had a few drinks, so it sounded funnier at the time and a whole bunch of generals laughed their asses off, which really pissed off Leigh MacArthur because she was pushing hard for the 295th to get their royal title back and thought it was a personal attack or something, not just a stupid joke" Frederick told him. "She was the reason the 295th started a policy of only recruiting from Terran Hegemony worlds, something General Romanov continued" he added. In order to even be considered for 'Royal' status as an SLDF unit it was a requirement that the unit's personnel were from the Hegemony itself, not just a Star League member state. House Cameron only wanted the best gear going to the troops they considered most loyal to themselves.
In many ways the Royal SLDF units like the 331st were just the pre Star-League Terran Hegemony Armed Forces wearing different badges on their uniforms.
"So, she told her son that Frederick Hallis was an ****** and then decades later his granddaughter gets involved with another Frederick Hallis, the grandson of the original" Dave concluded. "That's hilarious!" he declared, laughing.
"It really is a small galaxy" Henry observed. "What are the chances?"
"I'd prefer not to know" Frederick replied honestly. "It's got to be improbable enough to make me believe in fate, or that there's some deity messing with me personally."
"It wasn't a deity that put you and Alice together, it was Jennifer" Henry noted just as the girl herself arrived at the scene.
"Are you denying my divinity again Henry, didn't I warn you about that before?" Jennifer McEvedy asked deadpan. "Do I have to send a lightning bolt your way? Or PPC fire which is pretty much the same thing" she joked. "What are we talking about?"
"Major MacArthur doesn't like Fred" Dave explained.
"Because he's ****** his granddaughter?" Katrina assumed. "Don't look at me like that Fred. You are" she responded to the look he sent her way. "When we got back from the Folly the second time I think you two must have spent your entire three weeks leave in the sack."
"I'm not saying it's not true, I just didn't like the phrasing" Frederick told her. "It's not like Henry wasn't doing the same when he got back from there too."
Henry shook his head. "Nope. I mean I would have but Philomena couldn't get the time off college" he responded sadly. "On the plus side I never have to worry about her family not liking me because I'm genetically engineered, not with her dad being a genetic engineer."
"Maybe he thinks you're not spliced-up enough though" Jennifer suggested wryly. "So was Kat right about that being the reason the Major doesn't like you?" she asked Frederick.
"That's probably got a lot to do with it, but the whole story is funnier if you ask me" Henry replied instead. "So, what plans does the Major have for us?" he asked her.
"Lights and mediums are playing OpFor tomorrow as expected, I get to sit that out" Jennifer replied. "Once the tread-heads have finished teaching the locals how to operate a Manticore well enough to turn the turret, aim the gun and not drive off a cliff the Major wants you lot to play pirate. Run around a little exchanging directed-energy weapon fire with the tanks to show them what it's like."
"Dialled down guns I hope" Frederick checked, tongue-in-cheek.
"Maybe not the ones being shot at you, what with Major MacArthur being in charge" Dave suggested, grinning.
Frederick thought about that. "Anyone wanna swap mechs?" he asked hopefully.
"No, he knows you're the one assigned the Phoenix Hawk so I sure as hell don't want to be in it" Henry replied.
"Normally I'd swap a Locust for just about anything but not today, sorry Fred" Dave added for himself.
Katrina shook her head. "You'll take my Griffin from my cold dead hands. The PPC is love, the PPC is life" she declared reverently.
"Spoken like a true Wolverine" Jennifer observed appreciatively. "As for the Orion they assigned me for this operation, if you think I'm giving up the first heavy they ever put in my hands then you're crazy Fred. Even though I honestly doubt the Major wants you dead" she told him. "Slightly maimed maybe but not dead, too much paperwork" she added after a little more thought.
"Did you get to talk to any of the locals?" Henry asked Katrina.
"Nah, not really. They're mostly too busy trying to learn as much as they can from our tankers to socialise much" Katrina replied. "Major MacArthur is hoping that we can get the militia up-to-speed quickly so we can all pack up and go home. When their own tanks finally arrive from the Magistracy they'll be looking for a training cadre of instructors and mechanics to stay here for a year or so as longer-term advisors but that's not our problem. I'm just glad we're only here for the crash course, Manticore tank operations 101 and basic anti-mech tactics if you've got a tank with a good gun and decent armour to put up against them."
"The Illyrian tank crews have got to be pretty stoked about switching up from a Merkava with an AC/5 to a Manticore with a PPC right?" Dave asked. "I sure as hell would be."
"They are" Jennifer confirmed before suddenly laughing. "One of the locals asked why we don't just hand over a few of our own tanks to the Palatinate right now, replacing them with ones from Majesty Metals and Manufacturing when they're available."
"I'm guessing that the Major didn't tell them it's because our ones might look normal, and have the same controls as a regular Manticore, but they're actually upgraded" Henry responded, grinning.
"Yeah, we definitely don't want to get involved in a conversation that includes the question 'Improved PPC? What's an Improved PPC' do we?" Katrina asked rhetorically, grimacing at the thought. "I'm just glad someone had the sense to put the original SRM launchers back in temporarily, so we don't have anyone asking why our missiles are making hits so much further away than any of theirs ever have."
"It's just lucky that someone had the sense not to sell off all the old surplus just in case" Henry added. "Although since we've been mostly offloading it to the Palatinate anyway it's still ended up at the same destination."
"Yeah, I saw a local carrying a shoulder-launched SRM tube just now that still had 'Niops Association Militia' stamped on the side of it" Katrina told them. "I asked him about the thing and he said they traded a dropship-load of copper ingots for a bunch of them a couple of years back. I'll bet the NAM grunt that used to hump it around was only too happy to swap it for an Improved SRM" she rightly supposed. Infantry always wanted to stay as far away from the mech or tank they were shooting at as they could. Less chance of being seen before they can pull the trigger and duck back into their foxhole.
Infantry could take on battlemechs and win, but typically they always took heavy losses doing so unless supported by their own mechs, or some decent tanks which is where the Manticore would come into play.
Given that the vast majority of threats the Illyrian Militia would ever likely have to face in their new tanks when they arrived would be pirate raiders in aging machines, the mechs sent along to act as an opposing force, or OpFor, to the tankers that Katrina and the other were driving consisted almost entirely of designs which were both common and at least a couple of centuries old. A Manticore with its fairly heavy armour, PPC main gun and pair of missile launchers was enough of a handful that your average pirate band with merely a few mediocre light and medium mechs wouldn't want to tangle with one. You wouldn't want to take out a Manticore tank against a trained Successor State regular in a Marauder heavy, but your average pirate mechwarrior in an old Locust or Wasp would hightail it straight out of there as soon as one turned up.
The locals needed to know how to deal with something nastier as well just in case, hence Jennifer being assigned an Orion, and Major MacArthur himself had brought along his personal Highlander assault, but the vast majority of the two companies of mechs loaded aboard the Overlord were vintage mediums and lights.
Which of course turned out to less than ideal in hindsight when fate intervened. They were supposed to be there to train some militia though of course, not fight an actual battle, so you couldn't fairly pin the blame for that on the people who decided which machines to break out of storage for this mission.
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Part XXXVIII - Section 2 of 2
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"When's chow time?" Dave asked. "It's like Scandinavian food here like in the Rasalhague worlds?" he asked. "Smorgasbord and whatever?"
"I think so" Henry replied uncertainly. "Hey, do you remember those supplies we looted from that dropship at Svelvik? We ended up flushing all those tins of fermented herring out the airlock because every time we opened one every compartment on Saratoga ended up smelling like rotting fish."
"It's called 'Surströmming' and we didn't loot it, we requisitioned it" Jennifer corrected him. Star Captain Francis had been very insistent on that point when Yukon and the so-called 'Canada Tribe' had been raiding the Draconis Combine for supplies back before they made contact with the Switchback Fleet.
"I might not have remembered the name but I remember it really put me off the sushi we got off that Drac transport we ran into a few weeks later" Henry recalled. "Although it was funny when Fred ate that wasabi ball by accident."
"Accident my ass, Kat told me she'd already eaten one and it was really tasty" Fred complained.
"No, I said I'd eaten some of it, some, with something else, not the whole damn thing on its own" Katrina defended herself. "But I agree with Henry, it was funny watching you gag, you had exactly the same expression as when they exposed us to that tear-gas to see how we'd stand up to it."
"Less crying from the tear gas though" Dave added, grinning.
Frederick Hallis was about to call his trothkin a bunch of ****** when an SLDF corporal came sprinting towards them from the Overlord after practically bounding down the loading ramp. "Major MacArthur was just on the radio" the corporal yelled at them. "He says you all need to stand to and get ready for action."
"I was just with him and he said he didn't need us until tomorrow" Jennifer replied, frowning.
"It's not for training" the corporal responded, expression grave. "The locals just detected a pair of jumpships arriving at the closest Lagrange point" the corporal explained. "The Palatinate is assuming they're pirates and so is Major MacArthur. As per standing orders all SLDF forces are to prepare for combat immediately."
"Pirates? Holy shit!" Frederick Hallis exclaimed. "I thought they didn't hit Illyria itself too often, less militia to deal with on the other Palatinate colonies?"
"I've got no idea, just passing on the orders. I need to get back to the ship, help make sure the aerospace fighters are going to be ready for launch if needed" the corporal replied before turning on his heels and heading back towards the Overlord as fast as he could.
"Crap. Our mechs are all pre-loaded with training rounds" Jennifer realised. "We need to help the maintenance guys swap them out for live ammo" she said, chasing on after the corporal with the others immediately following on behind.
"How much live ammunition have we got aboard anyway?" Katrina asked Henry as they ran, knowing that he kept track of things like that. It had been joked before that someone must have accidentally added some DNA from a logistics officer into the mix when they made him, most mechwarriors didn't care much about such things until they were promoted to a rank where it was their job to care.
"Enough SRM's and LRM's for one or two battles, maybe the same for autocannon rounds" Henry replied. "After that it'll be lasers and PPC's only unless the locals have enough compatible ammo in the right calibres to spare" he continued. "We weren't here to fight a war after all" he remarked as they arrived at the dropship and headed up the ramp towards the mech bays which were already a hive of activity as the technicians and mechanics prepared the two companies of battlemechs aboard for combat operations not training.
All Frederick could think about was what the chances were of pirates deciding to raid Illyria just then, and wondered if it could really just be a coincidence?
It wasn't actually a coincidence as such, but the chain-of-events that had led to the raiders arriving that day wasn't actually due to the SLDF being there at the same time, but rather to the reason the SLDF was there, that being the shipment of tanks from the Magistracy expected to arrive later that year, not that Frederick or any of the others knew that at the time.
If you wanted to obtain good plunder you needed good intel, a good habit of effective pirates being to maintain a network of informers, and as rumours of the Palatinate being expected to receive a large shipment of arms spread it seemed like a good idea to hit them before that happened. The timing also being influenced by the prospect of seizing an unusually rewarding quantity and quality of loot if they made their move now, before the Free Worlds League was back on its feet.
As for where exactly in the system they jumped in, although it was always safer to utilise the standard jump-points, these being positions above or below the star at a distance far enough out that the gravity was weak enough not to mess with the hyperspace bubble generated by a K-F drive, there were downsides to that if your intentions were less than honourable.
Since accidentally jumping into a gravity well would likely kill you, most people much preferred a days-long dropship ride from the zenith or nadir points to the planet they were heading to, rather than risk life and limb at a so-called 'pirate point'. Pirates themselves of course found it safer overall to take that risk however, because it gave the locals far less time to prepare their defences. Uninvited guests with hostile intentions tended to believe they were more likely to get killed by fully-mobilised and entrenched militia than they were by some navigation officer screwing up his jump calculations.
Illyria III had a decent sized moon, Gentius, which meant it also had a decent sized L4 Lagrange point you could choose to jump into instead of the standard jump-points, at least if you had faith in both your math and your map of the system anyway.
It would still be hours before the dropships they launched made planet-fall, but if they had chosen to use the standard jump-points instead it would have taken nearly eight days, and nobody in their right mind wanted to give an opponent that much prep-time. Even part-time militia with obsolete weaponry could put up a decent fight if they were dug in like a Kiamban Tick, and nobody in their right mind wanted a hard fight if they could have an easy one instead.
As the SLDF personnel went about the business of re-arming their machines for war, not training, many of them were thinking that it was a shame Illyria lacked the plethora of optical telescopes to be found back home in Niops because it would have been nice to know exactly what they might be facing, and perhaps who these interlopers actually were.
Any orbital telescope would have quickly ascertained that the two jumpships consisted of a pair of Invader class vessels, and a decent one with good resolution would have revealed that despite having six docking collars between them they were only hauling four dropships that day, a Union, a pair of the smaller Leopard class plus an old Jumbo cargo hauler.
Something that the telescope could not have told them was who these people actually were as neither of the jumpships and none of the dropships they arrived with carried any external markings, not even the ones you would typically find on pirate vessels, stylised jolly-rogers and the like.
They were in fact pirates, although conversely on a different day they might have been part of a mercenary regiment that was officially registered with ComStar's Mercenary Review Board while on yet another they might even be even the armed forces of the Circinus Federation, a proper nation-state with an elected government and everything.
They were the 'Black Warriors', mechwarriors who wore a lot of different hats, both metaphorically and literally because as well as being Pirates/Mercenaries/Soldiers they eschewed any kind of consistent uniform policy, each of them dressing how they wished although within reason as their officers still expected them to look at least vaguely military and not a complete clown-show.
Unlike most other periphery nations the Circinus Federation, situated not far from the Illyrian Palatinate, had found an effective way to pay for the upkeep of a military that was surprisingly well-trained and equipped relative to the size of their population. Send it off to steal from other people so that it was entirely self-financing and as a bonus gained plenty of combat experience.
The armed forces of Circinus, the aforementioned Black Warriors, did very well out of the arrangement. They had a safe and secure homeworld to operate from, and where they could raise a family, they could always count on bonus payments from successful raids to top up their otherwise meagre pay and the frequent combat operations kept them sharp and combat-effective.
The President of Circinus also did very well out of it. Money and resources flowed in from elsewhere to keep the economy ticking over nicely, making their world wealthier than the average agrarian planet and thus ensuring they remained popular with the voters, while they also didn't have to worry about other pirates preying upon their citizens either as none of them would ****** dare. The Black Warriors were savvy enough not to shit where they eat and they didn't let anyone else do so either.
The taxpayers and ordinary citizens of Circinus did very well out of it too. Well enough that they didn't ask their political and military leaders any awkward questions as to where all the money came from to pay for things like new roads and irrigation canals being built, and why, unlike other periphery worlds, their planet never seemed to get raided by ****** cosplaying 17th Century Buccaneers.
Everybody else unfortunate enough to live within a few jumps of Circinus did very badly out of it of course, but it wasn't like they got a vote or a claim of a share of the ill-gotten gains, so their opinion on the matter didn't carry much weight with the Commanding Officer of the Black Warriors, the President or Circinus or the wilfully ignorant citizenry of Circinus.
By tradition the Black Warriors were always led by a member of the Cirion family, although that day it was the daughter of the current commander rather than Colonel Cirion himself who was in charge. Major Angelica Cirion needed to demonstrate she was worthy of taking over once her father was either killed in action or retired and if everything went according to plan this operation would go a long way towards firmly cementing her place in the line of succession.
For most of the last two years the Black Warriors had been raiding the Free Worlds League, both taking advantage of the chaos in their ranks caused by the ComStar Interdiction and also taking revenge for the way the Marik's had treated the founder of the Black Warriors, Angelica's grandfather Zachariah Cirion.
The grudge the Black Warriors held against the Free Worlds League verged on an outright vendetta or blood feud. According to their version of events Zachariah Cirion and his mercenary regiment had been badly mistreated, insulted and abused while they were in the service of the League not long before the Amaris Coup, leading to the Black Warriors breaking their contract and heading out to the periphery to look for a new home.
That was not to say that the Black Warriors didn't attack other people as well. If a Lyran controlled world was a particularly juicy target they would happily raid House Steiner as well, despite Steiner and Marik being enemies, but that was just paying the bills whereas raiding a Marik planet always brought a smile to the faces of the Cirion family and their followers.
If the intel was right the pay-day from hitting Illyria was well worth giving up the opportunity to raid one more Marik system before it had its HPG restored, and Angelica Cirion had faith in her sources.
In normal times each of the Danais class dropships which were produced at a low rate on Illyria were exported almost as soon as they were completed, typically sold onto customers in the Free Worlds League or occasionally a periphery-based merchant trader. With the Interdiction however, and the economy of the FWL having effectively ground to a halt, there were currently two brand-new Danais class ships sat on a pad waiting for a buyer and a third currently being assembled.
Those two completed dropships were worth over seventy million C-Bills each, and stripping the third for parts and stuffing them into the Jumbo she had brought along for the purpose would only increase the profitability of the operation.
The plant where the Danais was produced on Illyria and the town around it was defended of course, the factory workers having formed their own militia for the purpose, but most of the military strength of the Palatinate in the system was to be found at the capital on a completely different continent. More importantly, all that brand new military hardware that the Illyrians were buying from the Magistracy of Canopus hadn't arrived yet so the timing just couldn't be better.
Angelica Cirion didn't want a fight if she could avoid it, with luck a simple show of strength would cause the locals to lay down their arms, or perhaps just step aside and let her take the dropships if she promised not to attack the civilians in the town, and that was why she had brought along more firepower than should have been strictly necessary.
Her Union class dropship, the Bunga Bunga, carried a full company of mechs, and each of the Leopards another lance apiece. Between the three military dropships she had six aerospace fighters, plus the Leopards themselves as air-power and she also had an infantry platoon loaded aboard the Jumbo plus crews for the dropships she expected to seize.
As the dropships reached atmosphere they detected fighters coming up to meet them and Cirion scrambled her own to deal with them. As expected the Illyrian's couldn't even boast proper aerospace fighters to defend themselves with, according to sensors the conventional aircraft trying to take on her pilots were merely Angel light-strike-fighters, along with a couple of the larger Defender, both machines that were utterly outclassed by the ones her people had.
You had to give the Illyrian pilots points for even trying, they definitely had some guts, but after her Ironsides and Sparrowhawk aerospace fighters knocked down three of them for no losses the rest had the sense to hightail it out of there.
The factory complex where the Danais was built was situated on the southern continent, and with their aerospace fighters providing overhead cover the unmarked dropships belonging to the Black Warriors set down far enough away that they could unload their machines before the locals could try to assault them. Less professional troops sometimes made the mistake of landing right next to the opposition and getting hammered before they could deploy, putting too much trust in the ability of the weapons mounted on the dropship to secure a hostile LZ, but Angelica Cirion was no amateur.
Once all her mechs were unloaded and formed up she would lead them in an advance on the town and the factory it was built beside. Only then, once her fighting strength was on display, would she get on the radio and tell the locals to surrender in order to prevent bloodshed.
A few militia with shoulder-launched SRM's, some APC's and a few aging Merkeva and LT-4 tanks weren't a match for her five lances of battlemechs and unless they were idiots they knew it.
The Black Warriors in the mechs were already starting to think about how each of them would spend their share of the prize money once the dropships were seized and later sold when their comrades in the aerospace fighters above them started yelling that a freaking Overlord had just popped up over the horizon, one escorted by a squadron of aerospace fighters, and it was heading their way ploughing through the atmosphere in a ballistic arc like a gigantic projectile.
"What the hell?" a suitably surprised Major Angelica Cirion asked the universe at large before her comms system notified her that someone was broadcasting a lot of wattage on one of the standard military radio frequencies.
Cirion switched over to the frequency concerned, becoming only more vexed and confused as a result as singing blasted from the speakers in her cockpit.
"Oh we'll rally round the flag, boys, we'll rally once again,
Shouting the battle cry of freedom
And we'll rally from the sphere, we'll gather from the rim,
Shouting the battle cry of freedom
The Star League forever, hurrah! boys, hurrah!
Down with Amaris, up with the star
While we rally round the flag, boys, we rally once again,
Shouting the battle cry of freedom"
"What in the actual ******?" Cirion exclaimed, rephrasing her earlier statement to one more suitable for the current circumstances.
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Note from the Author:
There must be a reason why a perfectly habitable world like Illyria III (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Illyria), capital world of the Illyrian Palatinate (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Illyrian_Palatinate), which which was first colonised way back in the 24th Century, has such a small population. People just choosing to leave because the prospects for anyone not born into one of the wealthy ruling families are bad is just my fanon explanation.
Although most of their income seems to come from exporting refined metals and metal ores Illyria does make money off its annual Mechwarriors games (which I'm assuming were postponed during the Interdiction) and the soucebooks do mention shipbuilding happening on the southern continent.
The Star League liked to restrict economic development in the periphery, but did allow worlds there to produce the Danais (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Danais_(DropShip_class)) class dropship which is why I'm having that the type of vessel made on Illyria. It's not a huge high-tech operation but the Danais isn't a huge high-tech ship either.
Major MacArthur of the 295th is the son of General Leigh MacArthur (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Leigh_MacArthur) (who commanded the division before Jenna Romanov) and the grandfather of Alice MacArthur. A veteran of the Amaris War, being Terran born he looks good for his age. Leigh MacArthiur would have commanded the 295th around about the time General Frederick Hallis (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Frederick_Hallis) father of Franklin Hallis (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Franklin_Hallis)) commanded the 331st.
The Black Warriors (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Black_Warriors) of the Circinus Federation (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Circinus_Federation) are sometimes pirates, sometimes mercenaries and sometimes the armed forces of Circinus. Regardless of what hat they might be wearing at the time they are very well trained and equipped (by periphery standards), they don't like the Free Worlds League and there's usually someone from House Cirion (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/House_Cirion) in charge. In canon Angelica Cirion (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Angelica_Cirion) was a colonel in 2853 but this is a few years earlier than that so she's still just a major.
As a periphery militia the Illyrian armed forces are not so well equipped. They still use old Merkava (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Merkava) tanks and Apostle (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Apostle) SPG artillery and their pilots fly Angel (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Angel) and Defender (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Defender_(Conventional_Fighter)) conventional fighters bought from the Free Worlds League.
Oh, and the Black Warriors having a Union (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Union_(DropShip_class)) class dropship called 'Bunga Bunga' comes from the novella Dying Dignity (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Dying_Dignity), I didn't make that up!
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Don't Black Warriors also have a beef with Eridiani Light Horse?
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Don't Black Warriors also have a beef with Eridiani Light Horse?
Per Sarna:
https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Black_Warriors
The Eridani Light Horse moved to Circinus in 2853 to launch raids against the Lyran Commonwealth. Both groups, as old Star League units, worked together, launching raids against their common foe. However, when the Light Horse uncovered that the Warriors were really pirates, at the end of the war they parted ways. The Warriors saw this as a betrayal, and since then keep a deep hate toward the ELH. The Light Horse landed at the behest of Charles Marik who saw an opportunity to both destroy the Warriors and attack the Commonwealth. The Black Warriors were eventually destroyed by the Light Horse. The ELH then moved on to attack the Lyran Commonwealth, leaving the world to be garrisoned by the Free Worlds League Military. Actions taken by these garrison troops fanned the flames of hatred for the League. Though destroyed in 2864, the Black Warriors would rebuild.
So this timeline has the Black Warriors running into Niops and the SLDF before the ELH had a chance to meet them.
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Per Sarna:
https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Black_Warriors
The Eridani Light Horse moved to Circinus in 2853 to launch raids against the Lyran Commonwealth. Both groups, as old Star League units, worked together, launching raids against their common foe. However, when the Light Horse uncovered that the Warriors were really pirates, at the end of the war they parted ways. The Warriors saw this as a betrayal, and since then keep a deep hate toward the ELH. The Light Horse landed at the behest of Charles Marik who saw an opportunity to both destroy the Warriors and attack the Commonwealth. The Black Warriors were eventually destroyed by the Light Horse. The ELH then moved on to attack the Lyran Commonwealth, leaving the world to be garrisoned by the Free Worlds League Military. Actions taken by these garrison troops fanned the flames of hatred for the League. Though destroyed in 2864, the Black Warriors would rebuild.
So this timeline has the Black Warriors running into Niops and the SLDF before the ELH had a chance to meet them.
It also sets the stage for the eventual meeting between the Light Horse and Niops, though, which, I'll be honest, I've been waiting for since the beginning of this story.
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It also sets the stage for the eventual meeting between the Light Horse and Niops, though, which, I'll be honest, I've been waiting for since the beginning of this story.
Yay, that's something I'm interested in seeing.
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I'm still wondering how the quote at the beginning of one of the earlier sections (where Niops replaced Comstar in the FWL) is going to come to pass...
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SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT
After being nominated earlier this month in its category Best Timeline Based on a Work of Fiction (https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/2024-turtledoves-best-timeline-based-on-a-work-of-fiction-poll.551048/) in the 2024 Turtledove Awards over on Alternate History Forums (https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/) (where I also post this story) I'm happy to announce that Guided by the Light of a (Red) Cameron Star has won in its category. azn
I honestly didn't think that a story set in the universe of a relatively niche franchise like Battletech would get more votes than the ones set in more mainstream ones like Star Trek/Star Wars/Harry Potter etc. but here we are!
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Congratulations on your victory.
I remember back in the day when I was still a member, even more mainstream universes had no chance against ASOIF fics because AH was as obsessed with it as SB was with Worm.
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Congrats, that's fantastic news! :)
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Yay, Congratulations!!!
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Congratulations! :cool:
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Congratulations, my good sir! Well deserved, in my opinion.
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Congratulations!
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I remember back in the day when I was still a member, even more mainstream universes had no chance against ASOIF fics because AH was as obsessed with it as SB was with Worm.
Yeah, they had to split the ASOIAF into its own separate category because of that issue.
Coincidentally enough a Game of Thrones/Rome crossover I've been writing a while won the AltHist 2016 Turtledove in its category before they made the split (it's certainly possible that a few of my readers there from that followed me over to Battletech fic which helped get my votes up this time).
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Well done.
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Congrats Hotpoint!
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Yeah, congratulations for the award. Well deserved I think. :smilie_happy_thumbup:
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I do hope we see some action soon, the Wolverines are going get rusty!
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Bravo
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Part XXXIX - Section 1 of 2
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"The Ironborn from the clan breeding program that Nicky K put into high gear in 2819 are going to form the backbone of the SLDF for the next thirty years, and they're arriving just in time because most of the 295th like yourselves are starting to move like they need to see a chiropractor. Accept that a lot of your people need to retire and just put our kits in a cockpit to replace them."
saKhan Trish Ebon speaks an uncomfortable truth to the senior officers of the 295th Battlemech Division - 2837CE
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Illyria III – Illyrian Palatinate – 2839
Typically the flight path of an Overlord dropship through the atmosphere was strictly an up/down affair from surface to orbit or vice versa. If you wanted to travel in a rather more horizontal direction than normal a more streamlined aerodyne type vessel such as a Leopard or a Triumph tended to be a much better choice, mostly because they didn't have to follow a flight-path like a gigantic mortar bomb in order to make rapid transit from Point A to Point B. A spheroid dropship was more aerodynamic than a brick if ploughing sideways through the air, but not by nearly as much as you'd want if you planned to do it for very long.
It was all very well saying that with enough thrust you didn't need to worry about what shape your craft was to make it fly, if you wanted it to fly well it was still a good idea to take account of drag because all the atmosphere between you and your destination had to be pushed out of the way and at supersonic velocities air compressibility was best not ignored.
Anyone that needed convincing on this point should be directed towards any aerospace fighter pilot that had flown both a Stingray and a Hellcat through the air at supersonic speed and low altitude and ask them their opinion on which ride was the least pleasant.
The SLDF Overlord had blasted off from where it had originally set down at the militia base near the capital Dalmatia and had entered a ballistic trajectory which would carry it over the ocean to its destination on the southern continent. This was an even less pleasant ride than an outside observer might assume because, thanks to being in a gravity well, there was a 'down' which was not the same direction as the axis of thrust, and the angle of that down changed throughout the arc.
Naturally the worst part was when the Overlord had to flip stem to stern so it could use its main engine to deaccelerate and then set down as gently as possible. This all being left to the last possible safe moment in order to make the trip with the necessary haste that combat operations required.
Describing the journey as uncomfortable, hair-raising and tooth-rattling would be to drastically understate the reality, fortunately the SLDF trained its personnel to deal with such situations and had provided the necessary equipment.
Thanks to all the harnesses designed to hold everyone and everything in place multiple serious injuries were avoided, while mouthguards prevented several tongues being bitten off during the rollercoaster ride of a trip.
It was still disconcerting as all hell of course, especially for the mechwarriors who made it strapped into the cockpits of their machines for rapid deployment on arrival.
Looking out from the cockpit of his Highlander secured within one of the mech bays within the Overlord, Major Robert D. MacArthur noted with satisfaction that the six huge external doors of the dropship were already starting to open even before the ship set down, and soon after that the landing was surprisingly smooth given the circumstances.
Spitting out his mouthguard MacArthur took a deep breath as magnetic clamps holding his Highlander and the other machines disengaged. "GO GO GO!" he bellowed into the microphone fitted to his neuro-helmet as soon as the doors had opened, the first four mechs already heading out through the doors before he had even finished the order.
The last time MacArthur had done an actual combat drop like this was on Terra while fighting against Amaris decades before, but General Romanov had sure-as-hell made sure her people practiced regularly for these kind of deployments into a potentially hostile LZ, and the lights and then medium mechs under his command tore off the dropship to secure the area like they did this every day.
The Overlord should have touched down far enough away from where the pirates had landed that they couldn't possibly hit his forces before they fully deployed, but Major MacArthur wasn't prepared to take any risks. While his two companies of battlemechs could be all off the ship and ready for action in minutes that was not true for his armoured unit and he wanted that company of Manticore tanks crewed, down the ramps and formed up before he ordered his forces to advance.
According to the locals the presumed pirates had a Union, two standard model Leopard mech carriers and an old Jumbo. The latter dropship was unlikely to be carrying battlemechs or vehicles, it was probably just mostly along to transport loot, but there might be infantry aboard it and between them the two military dropships could be carrying some twenty mechs.
MacArthur himself had some twenty-four mechs plus twelve tanks to support them, plus whatever the local militia had of course, which would have made him a great deal happier if he didn't know that his command was light on heavies and heavy on lights, to coin the old mechwarrior joke.
As his Highlander followed the smaller battlemechs off the ship, tank crews visibly already running to their own machines behind him in the vehicle bay, MacArthur wished he had come to Illyria to fight a war not to train militia. "Suck it up Robert" he said quietly to himself, 'If wishes were mechs we'd all be riding an Atlas II" he observed wryly as he cleared the dropship and the only other assault battlemech under his command, a Stalker, appeared at his side.
The Overlord had set down on a small hill on what was otherwise mostly a wide open plain, with some farmland nearby and the town where the dropship plant was located visible on the horizon. Not too far to the north, just out of line-of-sight from here should be where the pirate dropships were and once his tanks were ready MacArthur intended to go for the throat pin them down with his tanks and larger, slower mechs in the centre with his lighter machines screening his flanks.
It was a fair assumption that if these ****** had known there was a full battalion of mechs and tanks from Niops on the planet they wouldn't have landed at all, and while they would have seen the Overlord heading their way the sight of three company's worth of heavy metal heading right at them was still unlikely to do their morale any favours.
Things were more equal in terms of aerospace fighters. An Overlord carried a full squadron of six, while their Union and pair of Leopard dropships would have brought two apiece to the fight, so numerically they were matched.
Where they weren't matched was in terms of equipment. According to his fighter-pilots currently jockeying for position in the sky above, the other side was using standard model Sparrowhawk light and Ironsides medium fighters which weren't actually bad machines but they were no match for the souped-up Tomahawk and Rapier fighters that the SLDF had brought to the fight. Even if his pilots had 'only' been flying royals it would have been a mismatch, but as it was the SLDF had upgraded their machines still further with improved clan technology and more armour.
It would have been nice if some of his mechs, not just his Tomahawk fighters, were packing Enhanced ERPPC's but his mechwarriors had been there to act as a OpFor and the pirates they were training the Illyrians to fight wouldn't have that kind of firepower, nobody this side of Strana Mechty apart from Niops actually did. As such what he had for the ground fight was strictly 'B Team' equipment, Star League era gear or weaponry such as the Improved Large Laser that hit just like an ordinary Large Laser, it was just lighter and more compact.
From what he knew of the clans those clowns would have bid away a couple of lances to make it an even fairer fight but that just went to show how stupid and/or insane they were in MacArthur's opinion. Back during the war a good day was the one where you arrived with a whole division and found the enemy waiting for you in battalion strength or less. If they were smart enough to surrender then great, if not you ordered a whole company to engage a single mech and after the hilariously lop-sided fight you praised their bravery while simultaneously mocking their utter stupidity for not waving the white flag or running away.
Given that their jumpships would take nearly a whole week to recharge their drives it wasn't like the pirates could just climb back in their dropships and flee themselves, well they could but they wouldn't get any further than the Lagrange point. Given that Niops was widely known by now to possess armed jumpships, as well as actual warships, MacArthur assumed that the opposition would prefer to make a fight of it on the ground rather than in space, even if they hadn't yet detected the Tramp at the zenith point which had transported his people here from Niops.
A Tramp class jumpship was no warship, but compared to a couple of Invaders it was still pretty formidable and it could jump from the zenith point to where they were any time it liked, having already fully recharged its own K-F drive while MacArthur's Overlord made its way from the jump-point to Illyria III.
If the Tramp had more armour MacArthur would have considered having it make the jump, shoot the pirate jumpships up for a while then use its Lithium-Fusion Battery to jump back to the zenith point but that would have been risking damage to the Tramp. The Invaders weren't totally unarmed, they usually carried a couple of Large lasers or PPC's, and they might also be carrying some fighters in their small craft bays as the Tramp itself happened to be.
It was unlikely any of their fighters were packing nuclear ordnance as the two Ahab aerospace fighters docked aboard the SLDF Tramp were, but MacArthur knew that while just jumping in and nuking the pirate jumpships would be an easy win General Romanov would have his balls on a plate for doing it. Trying not to look as WMD happy as the Successor States was part of the image Niops wanted to project to its neighbours, the Association freely admitted possessing a large nuclear stockpile but publicly stated this was only maintained as a strategic deterrent.
Most of his mechwarriors that day were from the 331st, the Amaris War veterans of the 295th tending to be found driving heavies and assaults these days where fast reaction times weren't nearly as important as experience and discipline, but many of his tank crews however were comprised of soldiers his own age hailing from his own division. Romanov had felt that instructions being given to the Illyrian militia on how to operate a Manticore would be better received coming from older more experienced tread-heads than snot-nosed kids and so she had selected tank crews primarily on that basis.
It all showed in just how much more excited and enthusiastic the radio chatter was between the mechwarriors compared to that between the tankers as MacArthur listened in. The Manticore crews were mostly long past the stage where they yearned for glory, or promotion, they just wanted to blast the enemy with PPC's and LRM's from range and then grind under their tracks, quickly and with minimal fuss and ideally minimal losses.
That wasn't to say that the tankers were blasé or unmotivated. They clearly wanted to get at the enemy and teach them a couple of lessons, these being that the SLDF was still the finest military that had ever taken the field, and that old warhorses could still kick ass, they just much preferred not to get killed doing it. In their youth losing their lives to help rid the galaxy of Stefan Amaris had seemed a sacrifice worth making, doing so this close to retirement just to dispose of some pirate rabble not so much.
They were in the right vehicles if they wanted to stay alive while dishing out the punishment at least, MacArthur considered with satisfaction. A regular Manticore was pretty tough to start with, but if you swapped out the original PPC and LRM launcher for the lighter improved versions of both, and then devoted that spare tonnage for even more armour, well if nothing else it certainly did wonders for tanker morale.
It still looked and handled much like the regular version, and the controls were the same so they were just fine for training the locals how to operate the Manticore, it was just even better at taking a hit now and that suited MacArthur just fine because so many of his mechs weren't exactly designed to soak up a lot of incoming fire.
With a screen of light mechs scouting a little ahead of the main force Major MacArthur ordered the advance, making sure that his recon units knew that if they made contact they shouldn't try to be heroes, they should wait for the tougher machines to catch up. Like his mother liked to say, nobody ever won a war by dying for her planet, you make the other poor, dumb bitch die for hers.
It was good advice, but she might have been invited to more social events in refined company if her language had been a little less salty when mixing with polite society he knew.
As for the fight to come, some artillery would have nice to soften the foe up before the fight of course, as would having a Stuka squadron as air support, but MacArthur guessed that those under his command of the Wolverine persuasion in particular weren't phased too much by the idea of going in without them. During their days with him as their cult leader Kerensky Junior had apparently frowned upon proper combined-arms warfare, so they thought of arty and airstrikes as something that was nice to have, not an outright necessity on the battlefield.
Many of them were still a bit weird in his opinion, even after a decade of living on Niops with normal, albeit more than a little nerdy, people, but you certainly couldn't fault them on their ability to pilot a battlemech. The genetically-engineered ones were still an unknown quantity as far as he was concerned however, and he didn't think his reservations were entirely due to being aggrieved that his granddaughter was involved with one, a ****** Hallis no less. By messing with their fight-or-flight reflex their creators had made them react to stressful situations in a way that the vast majority of sane humans did not, which made them potentially unpredictable and undoubtedly difficult to relate to or always understand.
This would be the first time any of them had seen combat, and MacArthur was certain how they acted and behaved would be studied in depth for quite some time afterwards but he didn't think this would really answer any of the big questions about them.
MacArthur expected to win this fight decisively, perhaps not bloodlessly but decisively nonetheless. The great unknown that would be faced at some point in the future was how the Gamma and Zeta 'sibkits', or whatever the hell it was they called themselves, would handle defeat, or even just being ordered to retreat.
They handled their machines wonderfully though, he had to give them that. Ethical considerations aside, if you started teaching your people how to fight at kindergarten age by the time they were in their late teens or early twenties they really knew their trade. MacArthur himself had been younger than any of the kits currently were when he fought his first battle, having been a mere nineteen years old when as a second lieutenant he first followed General Romanov across a battlefield on Apollo, and with only a fraction as much time spent in a mech cockpit when he got to do it for real the first time as they had, he certainly expected them to perform better than he had at least. The neurohelmet you wore used your own sense of balance and reactions to stimuli to keep your battlemech upright when something was trying to knock it down, and to stop you falling over when moving across broken terrain at speed, and it took years of practice to be really good at it.
Watching the Locust, Wasp, Commando and Stinger lights leading the advance, each with some gene-spliced weirdo barely out of their teens at the controls effortlessly dealing with any obstacles the encountered as they kept formation and maintained spacing MacArthur hoped they could shoot as well as they drove, rightly assuming that they probably could.
They knew their jobs well enough that they didn't think scouting just meant looking out for the enemy at least. As the light mechs advanced they reported on the terrain and the state of the ground so that the units following behind took the appropriate route. This was particularly important when you had a mix of different platforms working together such as mechs and tanks. Ground that was tricky for a mech could be easy for a tracked vehicle and vice versa, wide tracks and low ground pressure per square metre meant that a sixty ton tank like a Manticore could traverse soft ground that the foot of a twenty ton mech would just sink into, while conversely a mech could step over or jump obstacles that would utterly stymie a tank.
That was just another reason why combined-arms formations were just objectively better in the majority of situations, they just weren't so stuck in the way they had to operate, stuck being the operative word in this particular example.
Was the raw skill of the kits and a careful study of their trade in the academic classroom sense a match for actual combat experience though, Major MacArthur wondered, knowing that he would be finding that out sooner rather than later?
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Part XXXIX - Section 2 of 2
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A few kilometres away Major Angelica Cirion was counting on experience. Judging from the Overlord dropship's IFF It looked like she was about to be facing some kind of expeditionary force from the Niops Association, maybe there to train the Illyrians she wondered, but how good could they really be?
She had heard the stories of course, even if you weren't connected to the HPG network like Circinus both rumours and actual news tended to spread fast from the Inner Sphere to the near Periphery, and Niops was close enough to Circinus for her people to have paid attention. A self-styled Star League and Terran Hegemony remnant, Niops had apparently been a high-tech scientific research station that was technologically sophisticated enough to not only make its own HPG's but even keep a small number of warships and an unknown number of battlemechs operational.
It was supposedly Niops that had loaned the Palatinate the money they were using to buy the shipment of military equipment from the Magistracy that was expected to start to arrive later in the year, so the Association wanting to make sure the money wasn't being squandered made a certain amount of sense if they were conscientious, but the timing was pretty unfortunate from her perspective.
Raiding Illyria before they had the new gear and couldn't put up meaningful resistance was the whole reason why the Black Warriors had chosen to strike now, only idiots wanted a fair fight after all, but assuming that damn Overlord was fully loaded she could be facing thirty-six mechs, or perhaps a mix of mechs and combat vehicles, to her twenty.
It was best to assume the worst and plan for it, Cirion knew. The 295th Battlemech Division which had somehow ended up on Niops wasn't a royal formation, so they wouldn't have the best gear the old SLDF had boasted, but they wouldn't have worn-out junk either like most forces you encountered in the periphery.
It was a good news/bad news situation, the two actually going hand-in-hand. The good news was that it was a reasonable assumption that the opposition hadn't really fought anybody since Aleksandry Kerensky put a bullet into Stefan Amaris, so they wouldn't have anybody much under ninety with combat experience. The bad news being that because they hadn't fought anybody since then they could well be bringing factory-fresh machines to the party, ones with all the fancy bells and whistles still working. Guardian ECM systems, Beagle Active Probes and command mechs where all the electronics still worked just weren't a thing these days, particularly not way out here, and the other side having potential force multipliers like that wasn't exactly great.
At least she had a fair idea of how they were likely to fight, or at least she assumed so given that the people that would have trained the opposition were almost certainly old SLDF regulars who had served in the 295th against Amaris. Most of the actual veterans would be retired by now of course, maybe excepting the senior officers and a few grizzled non-coms, but they would have taught their kids and grandkids the way they were taught and given that SLDF doctrine had triumphed over the Rim Worlds Republic it seemed unlikely they would have tried to re-invent the wheel in the intervening years.
That could be their undoing. The Black Warriors knew Star League Defence Force battlefield doctrine as well as anyone, in fact during the Amaris War they had actually been involved in training new recruits to Kerensky's cause in how the SLDF did things, thanks to Zachariah Cirion and his mercenary regiment siding with the anti-Amaris cause and doing what they could for the Star League.
The people that trained Angelica and her generation of the Black Warriors had trained a lot of the people that went on to retake the Terran Hegemony, the SLDF units at the sharp edge needing a constant stream of replacements as they took battlefield casualties. It was in fact one of the reasons why the Black Warriors weren't your typical pirate rabble, they were professional soldiers with proper training and the instilled discipline you would expect from that. They just happened to want a better pay check and a laxer uniform code than a regiment with less flexible morals would get, and you couldn't even accuse them of being only out for number one. If somebody invaded Circinus the Black Warriors would fight for their home just as hard as any soldier anywhere in the Inner Sphere would, excepting perhaps the Dracs but those lunatics seemed to go out of their way to martyr themselves for the dragon.
It was annoying that her aerospace fighters were too busy dancing around the sky looking for a positional advantage in the dogfight to come to do some better aerial observation but as the Niops people advanced it was obvious from altitude by the tank tracks many of them left behind that it wasn't a mech-only formation.
How Cirion handled this would depend on what tanks they were. The SLDF had relied heavily on the Manticore and the Von Luckner as their main tank strength and they needed to be dealt with in a very different way.
The Von Luckner was the heavier of the two machines, and the harder hitting thanks to its massive AC/20 that could utterly wreck a mech in one blow, but the AC/20 lacked range so as long as you weren't stupid enough to get close those things could be dealt with. The Manticore was more of a problem at longer range, it didn't have the same knock-out punch but it's PPC used in conjunction with its LRM launcher could tear the hide off you if you gave it the time to do so.
As the enemy approached her scouts made note of their composition before withdrawing back to her lines.
Just the Manticore then, and the vast majority of their mechs were lights and mediums, Angelica Cirion considered as her scouts relayed on their findings.
They had more hardware, but the average tonnage of her mechs was considerably higher, with armour plate to spare. If she tried to fight at range then it would play into the hands of that company of PPC and LRM toting enemy tanks, but if she went right at them, concentrating fire on anything that could be knocked out fast to even the odds, and was clinical in her target selection after that, this could work.
Assault wise they did have a Highlander and a Stalker, the gauss rifle on the former being another particular reason not to want to shoot it out with them at long range. A lucky hit from that thing could blow the head of her Battlemaster clean off, and her ride being a command mech it would surely be gunning for her. Cirion wanted to be up close where she could put all her medium lasers and her SRM launcher to work against it, burn the thing down with weight of fire in a brawl where the Highlander didn't have the advantage.
That Stalker would have to be dealt with differently, it had a weapons load-out that meant it would hit you progressively harder the closer you got to it, but the Black Warriors could tackle that thing after thinning out the herd.
This was going to be bloody but it was winnable, Cirion decided. Bigger mechs and undoubtedly more experienced mechwarriors should be enough to get the job done, especially if she could shake their morale by taking down a few enemy machines in the first few minutes.
There was an area of more uneven and broken terrain nearby, and Angelica Cirion immediately ordered her mechs to move into it. If they had been fighting against Von Luckner tanks instead that would have been a bad idea but in terrain like that where you could only get line-of-sight relatively close the PPC on the Manticore wouldn't get a chance to shine, at least metaphorically. Being a blindingly bright charged particle beam with lightning flashing around it a PPC always shined literally.
Issuing her instructions over the encrypted command channel Angelica Cirion told her troops what she expected of them, how she expected the fight to go, and what they needed to do in order to win. This wasn't turning out to be the battle they had expected against poorly equipped militia, but it wasn't like they had a battalion of heavies and assaults heading their way, those Niops machines might look shiny and pristine but that was because they hadn't fought a battle since her grandfather commanded the Black Warriors.
As the opposition approached and the scout's observations were confirmed that there was indeed an awful lot of diminutive 'bug' mechs among them, Wasp, Locust and Stinger twenty-tonners, as well as a couple of the slightly heavier Commando, the Black Warriors started to feel more confident and a ripple of laughter over the comms followed Major Cirion's joke that she should have brought along a can of insecticide.
It would be folly to completely discount even the smallest of mechs of course. They might not be able to take much punishment, and they didn't mount the firepower to dish it out either, but they had a speed and manoeuvrability advantage over heavier machines and if they could flank around and shoot you in the rear where the armour on your own ride was thinner they could be a literal pain-in-the-ass. For that reason Cirion told her own lights not to fully commit to the action until theirs were, they might be needed to counter a sudden piece of tactical chicanery.
Ideally she would have moved her forces into the town for the fight, tanks with specialised long-ranged armament sucked at urban warfare, but the need to defend her dropships, and also the risk of local militia armed with shoulder-launched SRM launchers equipped with Inferno warheads, ruled that one out.
As she formulated last-minute plans and issued final orders her comms gear flagged up an incoming radio transmission from the other side over an open channel.
"This is Major Robert MacArthur of the Star League Defence Force issuing the first and final warning you will receive from me" the transmission began. "Given your failure to identify yourselves it is assumed you are unlawful combatants entitled to no protections under the Ares Conventions or any of the other rules and customs of war. As such we will treat you as pirates, showing no mercy unless you immediately lay down your arms and surrender, thus preventing unnecessary bloodshed on both sides."
Cirion grinned. "There's no such thing as the Star League Defence Force anymore" she signalled back. "No Star League either for that matter, so I guess you're operating under a false identity. As such it is assumed that you are unlawful combatants entitled to no protections under the Ares Conventions" she retorted sarcastically, laughing.
"The SLDF as constituted serves the government of the Niops Association as the lawful continuation of both the Star League and the Terran Hegemony. Regardless of that we're not here to bandy words with criminals. You can surrender your arms and face a fair trial, or you can face us in battle, choose the latter and any of you that survive will then face a hangman's rope."
"I have a counter-offer" Cirion responded. "You all turn around, get back on your dropship and just leave because if you don't then after I've beaten you and taken your mechs as salvage I'll leave your corpses rotting in the sun to feed the carrion eaters" she said. "In case it's not clear, that's me saying that I won't be meekly waving the white flag."
"Thank God. I was worried for a moment you might not want to make a fight of it. MacArthur out."
Well, he was certainly out of his league anyway, Angelica Cirion thought to herself confidently as the enemy formation continued to bear down on her position.
As with most ground battles in the twenty-ninth century the festivities began with a massive storm of LRM's from both sides, missiles raining down like hail in a mostly indirect-fire engagement that made up for in fire and fury what it lacked in accuracy.
It was all so spectacular that it took Anjelica Cirion a couple of minutes to register what her aerospace fighter pilots suddenly started screaming about.
Two planes down already? How the hell did that happen, Cirion wanted to know before the fighting on the ground took up all her available attention.
It still itched in the back of her mind however, where it was soon joined by another thought as her mechwarriors started yelling about the first enemy machines taking direct fire not reacting to solid hits like they should, and their return fire being unusually unflustered and precise, as if the man or woman at the controls was on a firing range not in a battle.
As the world became missile salvoes, streams of autocannon tracer, PPC bolts and laser beams lit up by clouds of smoke and dust Angelica Cirion wondered if there was more to these Niops people and their machines than met the eye.
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Note from the Author:
The force dispatched to Illyria to train the locals in operating the Manticore is not properly balanced and it's not ideally equipped to take on the Black Warriors (http://'https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Black_Warriors') (it would obliterate the average pirate battalion though). Despite numerical superiority they have smaller mechs on average and the Manticore (http://'https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Manticore') tank specialises in long-range engagements that Cirion isn't stupid enough to given them. If the SLDF's tank company had been a mix of the Manticore and Von Luckner (http://'https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Von_Luckner') then the Black Warriors would have been less happy at a close-in fight but as it is they prefer to brawl rather than get shot up by PPC's.
Thanks to the first 'full production run' Ironborn coming of age the SLDF is now leaning younger. particularly in terms of those sat in the cockpits of light mechs. Although the first use of the Iron Womb by the clans dates to 2816 it wasn't until 2819 that numbers were significantly ramped up as Kerensky embraced the technology fully as part of his breeding program.
MacArthur would have much preferred to fight with some good artillery support, the kind that the SLDF used so effectively before against the Blood Rain on Algenib, but they don't have any Vali or Thor batteries so they're fighting with what they do have.
The biggest edge they do have is in terms of aerospace fighters, and its technological. The ASF's belonging to the Black Warriors are so outclassed by upgunned Royal Tomahawk (http://'https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Tomahawk_(Aerospace_Fighter_class)') and Rapier (http://'https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Rapier') fighters it's not funny.
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Just waiting for the hammer to fall here... Cirion has NO idea! ;D
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This is what I've been hoping to read! Good stuff!
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MacArthur would have much preferred to fight with some good artillery support, the kind that the SLDF used so effectively before against the Blood Rain on Algenib, but they don't have any Vali or Thor batteries so they're fighting with what they do have.
I daresay MacArthur is going to be asking for a Fortress the next time he has to do one of these missions... ;D
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I daresay MacArthur is going to be asking for a Fortress the next time he has to do one of these missions... ;D
I'm thinking a Colossus, with a Titan as a aerospace backup along with a pair of Achilles to act as bodyguards...
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But only the Fortress has installed artillery... ;)
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But only the Fortress has installed artillery... ;)
Colossus has two Arrow IV launchers to the single Long Tom the Fortress has. And with 72 (!!!) Heavy Vehicle bays, you can bring a full mech battalion, a full armored battalion, and then two companies of Long Toms with another dozen spotter VTOLs and light hovercraft too. :D
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Wait, what? I totally missed the Arrow launchers on the OG Colossus...
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I'm thinking a Colossus, with a Titan as a aerospace backup along with a pair of Achilles to act as bodyguards...
Someone is thinking along the right lines……
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Part XL - Section 1 of 2
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"Circinus? I like to think of it as Niops dark twin, or perhaps the evil alternate universe version of Niops. Niops with a goatee if you will."
Giles Olson, Former High Associator - 2844 CE
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Illyria III – Illyrian Palatinate – 2839
Cackling like a lunatic after his initial whoop of triumph Nils Rayson brought the nose of his Tomahawk aerospace fighter around towards the next target on his scope as the wreckage of the pirate Sparrowhawk he had just shot down fell to earth, or rather the surface of Illyria III where the largest remaining chunk of the plummeting thirty-ton airframe would make an impressive crater.
While you could often salvage a defeated enemy battlemech, that didn't tend to be an option when it came to downed aerospace fighters. Generally they hit the ground very, very hard after being knocked out of the sky, and while some of the armour plate might still be intact enough to re-use the valuable weaponry and electronics tended to end up a broken, tangled mess.
If they hadn't been able to eject what was left of the pilot was inevitably also a broken tangled mess mixed in with what was left of their ride, but in this case the Sparrowhawk pilot had successfully managed to punch out when their engine failed. Slowly drifting down by parachute Rayson correctly assumed that they would be bemoaning all the way down to the ground the fact that they had been suckered but good.
This wasn't Rayson's first aerial victory, but it was the first one in many years. Coming up nearly two decades ago now as a rookie pilot he had shot down a couple of Trident ASF's belonging to one of the rebel groups over Circe, and a couple of years after that over Strana Mechty he had splashed a Zero being flown by a pilot from Clan Wolf, the Kerenskysite bastard spiralling into the ground just outside Bearcat while still in his cockpit, but it had been a long dry spell ever since.
Now in his forties Rayson had been starting to think that maybe he should consider swapping his beloved light fighter for something more suitable for middle-age, a Rapier or even a Stuka maybe, as his reaction times definitely weren't what they used to be. On the other hand however, despite that enemy Sparrowhawk having clearly been flown by some twitchy, hyperactive kid who must have downed several large cups of espresso judging by how they had been throwing it around the sky, it wasn't Nils Rayson dangling from a 'chute right now was it?
There was indeed a lot to be said for youth, but guile and being a sneaky underhanded SOB with a plan and an ace hidden up the sleeve also had its merits.
The Sparrowhawk was lighter and nimbler than a Tomahawk, with a superior thrust-to-weight ratio that meant trying to outturn or outclimb it would be an exercise in futility unless the Sparrowhawk pilot was either a klutz or a complete idiot. The Sparrowhawk wasn't well armed or well armoured, its advantage lay in its speed, and as they had started to tangle it had become obvious to Rayson that his opponent was the type that liked to play with their food.
Using the superior performance of their machine the Sparrowhawk pilot had danced around the sky, making sure to stay out of the effective range of the large lasers that the standard model TKH-63 Tomahawk mounted as its primary armament. The enemy pilot effectively taunting Rayson by occasionally getting just barely close enough to hit, Rayson obliging by firing his lasers that missed by a mile each time.
That the Tomahawk might be deliberately shooting wide apparently didn't occur to them.
One of the ironies of 29th Century aerial combat was that in many ways it resembled that of the World Wars of the early-to-mid 20th Century more than it did some slightly later wars, such as the Second Soviet Civil War of the early 21st, when fire-and-forget guided missiles launched at well beyond visual range had rendered old-school dogfighting an anachronism. The swing-back to gun-fighting in the skies had largely been as a result of the development of the aerospace fighter, these being powered by a nuclear fusion reactor that could generate an obscene amount of electrical power as well as the ability to take off from a runaway and reach orbit.
The sheer wattage you could push into your electronic countermeasures, particularly brute-force jamming, could so overmatch the capabilities of the seeker head in an incoming radar-guided missile that they just stopped being effective. Ironically the very same reactors that had allowed for excessively powerful ECM had also made laser weaponry practical, quickly bringing back the age of the aerial gun-fighter and they had reigned ever since. Self-guided fire-and-forget BVR missiles small enough to hang under an aerospace fighter had been in effect just a short-lived historical oddity, a flash-in-the-pan that lasted only a few decades.
Gradually as the Sparrowhawk pilot reached the conclusion that the incompetent schmuck in the Tomahawk couldn't hit the side of a barn if they were inside it they let themselves get closer and closer, taunting their opponent though still making sure that they were far enough away that only both the best-aimed and luckiest of shots could hit them.
The Sparrowhawk was already within effective range, if barely, when the pirate in the cockpit reduced speed slightly more to let the Tomahawk on their tail catch up slightly more as if mocking their skills. If any incoming laser fire did get too close they would simply gun their engine again and leave the slower fighter behind to eat their dust.
Eventually they would have likely gotten bored with their sport, but they never actually got the chance. If Rayson's Tomahawk had been a regular THK-63 model the Sparrowhawk pilot would have gotten away with it but it wasn't, not anymore.
Two years before the fusion engine in Rayson's fighter had been pulled out and replaced with a XL powerplant, one originally designed for the Stag battlemech that had been put back into manufacture for the Hussar. With the same power-output as the original engine it didn't make the Tomahawk any faster, but it was considerably lighter, freeing up some weight for more weaponry and heat sinks.
The upgraded machine was effectively now a THK-63b, a 'Royal' Tomahawk, the type that the SLDF had mounted an ERPPC on.
Except that it didn't mount an ERPPC, it mounted an Enhanced ERPPC. Not only that, by swapping the Large Lasers for Improved Large Lasers an additional two tons of weight was available that was used to install an extra pair of double heat sinks so it could actually use all that firepower more often without overheating so quickly, a problem the THK-63b had been known for.
The Sparrowhawk might have been far enough away from the Tomahawk that a Large Laser fired at its maximum effective range would have to be lucky to hit it, but as far as the eERPPC was concerned this wasn't even long-range shooting.
Taking careful aim for the first time Rayson line up his shot on the rear of the Sparrowhawk and fired all three of his guns the instant it levelled off for a split second between manoeuvres, the Improved Large Laser in each wing and the eERPPC in the nose of his Tomahawk discharging all their stored energy immediately. One of the lasers missed, Rayson was good but for even one of them to make a hit at that range was pretty lucky.
The lone Enhanced ERPPC did not miss.
Since light travels somewhat faster than a particle beam, the beam from the Improved Large Laser actually struck the Sparrowhawk a tiny fraction of a second before the eERPPC did, but as far as the pirate in the cockpit was concerned it happened simultaneously.
A Sparrowhawk is not a well-armoured machine, and like most aerospace fighters it had less armour in the rear aspect than the front anyway, as such having both large laser and an eERPPC bolt suddenly, and extremely unexpectedly shot up its ass came as a very unpleasant surprise as an impressive chunk of armour plate was instantly vapourised and every warning light in the cockpit of the thirty-ton fighter lit up.
"Got you now you slippery jackrabbit son-of-a-bitch" Rayson said gleefully, hitting his overthrust to close the gap still further before the other pilot could get his act together and recover from the shock.
To give them some credit the pilot of the Sparrowhawk didn't take all that long to hit their own overthrust, making them faster than the Tomahawk again, but Rayson managed to get in a couple more good hits with all his guns before the Sparrowhawk managed to use its superior performance to get out of the effective range of Rayson's lasers, and even after that the pirate was still in eERPPC range.
It wouldn't have worked nearly so well if the Sparrowhawk pilot had known they were up against a 'Royal' of course, but assuming that they were up against a regular Tomahawk where the third gun in the nose was a titchy, short-ranged and weak small laser, not a massive long-ranged particle beam cannon, had likely seemed a certainty at the time. The SLDF that ended up on Niops weren't a Royal Division with that kind of fancy gear were they? No, they were not.
Playing games with the relatively sluggish Tomahawk had seemed like it would be fun and so instead of being a consummate professional the young Sparrowhawk pilot had ****** around, and then they had subsequently found out, the universe being no great fan of hubris.
As mentioned before Rayson had whooped in triumph as his eERPPC hit something that must have been vitally important for the Sparrowhawk to stay in the air, the pilot inside punching out fractionally before a large internal explosion sent a hefty part of its fusion powerplant flying out of the engine's exhaust, but he had still kept his head in the game. Radio chatter on comms informed him that another pirate Sparrowhawk had been swatted but also that the SLDF Rapier pilots were having fun with the enemy Ironsides.
The Ironsides had punchier guns, it's twin PPC's hit harder and had more range than the Improved Large Pulse Lasers of the upgraded Rapier in Niops SLDF service, but when they had tried to use that advantage they had found themselves being absolutely pummelled by seemingly endless salvoes of LRM's that were hitting far too often for comfort thanks to Artemis IV guidance.
By replacing the original armament with 'Improved' types enough tonnage had been freed up for the Rapier to carry considerably more armour, two additional double-heat-sinks and also a lot more LRM ammunition, the latter being of particular interest to the Ironsides getting constantly pelted with the things.
With the Rapier tanking what PPC fire managed to strike home at long range better than the enemy pilots thought it should, which was disturbing in itself, the Ironsides closed so they could get more hits and eventually bring their multiple SRM launchers to bear, wanting to be the one giving not receiving the gift of missiles for once, but as they did so they started to take fire from Large Pulse Lasers which were nasty in a dogfight because they spread the good news around, increasing the chance of a hit against a manoeuvring target.
It was all still far too much of an even fight for Rayson's liking so he slotted in behind the nearest Ironsides that was shooting it out with a friendly Rapier and started blasting.
Nicholas Kerensky might have wanted to bring back honourable single-combat, but just because modern aerospace fighters might dogfight like it was the First World War the 'knights-of-the-sky' crap went out with Manfred von Richthofen, this wasn't a game and unlike the Sparrowhawk pilot he had already shot down Nils Rayson wasn't playing around.
As his Tomahawk and the Rapier ganged up on the unfortunate pirate Ironsides, Rayson idly wondered if the army guys and gals on the ground were having as good a day as he was so far? He knew they didn't have the benefit of all the equipment upgrades and improved weaponry he did, but if the pirate mechwarriors were as overconfident as their aerospace pilots had been then they were likely in for one hell of a shock he decided as the enemy fighter desperately tried to shake him.
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Part XL - Section 2 of 2
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Even more so than most light aerospace fighters, light battlemechs like the twenty-ton Locust, Wasp and Stinger tearing around on the ground far below the aerial dogfight relied upon their speed for protection, not their armour. As such if forced into a pitched battle they would keeping moving as fast as they could, almost as if the life of the mechwarrior in the cockpit depended upon it, which of course it did.
In the chair of a slightly upgraded LCT-1V Locust, the original armour plate had been replaced by ferro-fibrous and switching out the machine-guns for lighter clan-tech ones freed up half a ton that was then devoted to a concealed flamer, mechwarrior Dave Robertson was moving at nearly 130kph as he looked for a potential enemy target he might actually be able to handle, or at least annoy enough to draw its attention from someone else that wasn't so hard to hit.
The problem with that approach was, of course, that while going at maximum speed meant you were much more difficult to hit, it was also much more difficult to hit back. This intrinsic problem was amplified by the fact that the weapons mounted on a light mech tended to be incapable of the sort of one-punch knockout that was possible for something like a heavy mech carrying a gauss-rifle or massive AC/20 autocannon. Light mechs had to nibble the enemy to death, one tiny bite of armour plate at a time until something mechanically critical underneath was exposed, and if you weren't even hitting a high percentage of your shots anyway because you were running around like a lunatic, then chewing up anything that wasn't another thinly-skinned light mech like yourself was like trying to consume a cauldron of soup with a teaspoon.
I need to remember not to skip dinner before a battle, Dave Robertson thought to himself as he dodged autocannon fire from a pirate Centurion, a machine he had never seen before in real life, the metaphors in my internal monologue are all about eating today, he realised firing back with his single medium laser before veering away to avoid getting lit up by a JagerMech that had taken a sudden interest in him.
These guys sure do have an interesting mix of machines, Robertson considered. It wasn't even that they were a motley collection of various salvaged battlefield scrap, you wouldn't really expect any kind of uniformity from a band of periphery pirates even one this size, the curious thing was that their eclectic collection of battlemechs all seemed to be in pretty good condition.
If he had known at the time that he was facing the Black Warriors, formerly a mercenary regiment who had been given the job of training replacement personnel for the SLDF during the Amaris War it would have made a lot more sense. Aleksandr Kerensky had needed new recruits who could operate most, if not all, of the machines in SLDF service and this had resulted in the Black Warriors being assigned a wide selection of machines for that purpose, including some of the less common or more modern types. Add in what they had later captured from raiding worlds in the Free Worlds League, an occasionally the Lyran Commonwealth, and their extremely varied TO&E made a lot of sense.
As Robertson turned and put some fire into the flank of a pirate Rifleman that had been near the Jaegermech, presumably they were part of an air-defence lance, it was all too obvious that what the other side lacked in numbers they made up for in the average weight of their machines. The company of Manticore tanks on his side that were just now arriving and throwing their firepower into the fray helped a lot but they would have been much more of a decisive factor in a long-range engagement rather than a messy, close-in brawl, their PPC and particularly their LRM launcher being sub-optimal for this kind of battle.
Although lighter and more compact than a standard LRM launcher the Improved LRM system shared its big flaw of having an effective minimum range. It was an indirect fire weapon that launched salvoes off in a ballistic arc and that meant at certain ranges it just wouldn't depress enough to hit something right in front of it. A volley of LRM's passing harmlessly right over an enemy target might look spectacular, it would and leave them wreathed in smoke from all those vapour trails, but it wasn't all that useful.
The Particle Projector Cannon also had a minimum range, though that was pretty much point-blank by comparison being half that of the LRM, which being due to the need to protect the machines own electrical systems from the PPC hitting something closer than ninety metres away. The lightning that seemed to crackle around a PPC beam wasn't just an amusing light-show, it was absolute hell on electronics if you didn't try and mitigate the problem.
That was another reason why the SLDF had always liked to use mixed companies of Manticore and Von Luckner tanks by preference, the former combat vehicle wasn't good at brawling up close, the latter absolutely rocked at it.
Major MacArthur had told his mechwarriors that a priority task was to stop the enemy closing on the Manticore tanks, this being due not only to the need to make sure they were far enough back from the action to use their weaponry effectively but also because one thing that battlemechs so-equipped loved to do against tanks was use their jumpjets to leap upwards and land on top of the poor bastards.
Tanks were built tough, but their turrets, and the crews inside them, did not appreciate having fifty-plus tons of weight come suddenly crashing down on top. This was actually a move which MacArthur would have always thought about a lot as he drove a Highlander which specialised in the tactic, though massing ninety tons and despite that mounting jumpjets which could send it high into the air the Highlander would do it to everything, including mechs, and at every possible opportunity.
They called it the 'Highlander Burial' because if the ninety-ton assault jumped on a light mech, for example, it could literally drive it into the ground like a tent-peg.
It was risky for the mech too of course, unless the landing was performed perfectly it could result in serious damage to the jumper as well as the jumpee with the latter potentially toppling over and crashing into the ground hard, but it remained one of the quickest ways to end a fight and something tank crews rightly feared.
Rolling into what had already become a confused mess of brawling mechs before they arrived the tank company rolled in guns and missiles blazing, Robertson happy to see that the experienced tank crews knew their trade with a whole lance of them throwing everything they had at a pirate Awesome. The assault mech in question mounted three PPC's, almost as many as the whole lance of tanks between them, but like the Manticore it was a long-range specialist and unlike them it didn't have a SRM launcher to help it cope a little better with these less-than-ideal combat conditions.
As Robertson kept his Locust moving, speed was life, he noted other pirate mechs including the Rifleman he had just shot at quickly coming to the aid of their beleaguered comrade in the Awesome, indicating that they knew their trade as well.
What they didn't know was that while a standard Manticore carried eleven tons of regular armour plate, these ones had not only been refitted on Niops with superior ferro-fibrous armour, a type that nobody else in the Inner Sphere had been able to manufacture in nearly thirty years, they carried three more tons of it as well.
The tanks weren't the only ones soaking up considerably more incoming fire than they should have been able to take. Most of the SLDF battlemechs had been retrofitted in much the same way, with thicker plates of tougher material which was slowing their descent towards a fateful combat-loss-grouping scenario.
The outnumbered pirates had needed to even the odds, and their best way of doing that was to use their bigger, heavier mechs to knock a few of the smaller, lighter SLDF machines out of the fight quickly. Even if they weren't actually destroyed, a tank or mech stripped of most of its armour would usually seek to pull back from the middle of the action before it was, unless it was one of those 'glorious death' seeking maniacs from the Draconis Combine in the cockpit anyway. Objectively it was a perfectly sound tactic, and their commander's choice of ground synergised very nicely with it as these ranges worked in her favour as well.
The problem for the Black Warriors as the battle continued was that these Niops people just weren't starting to fall in droves like they should have been by now. Even the primarily autocannon and missile armed SLDF machines that should have been more heedful of losing armour because of the risk of taking a hit to their ammunition magazines, and subsequently going up like Krakatoa from the resultant internal explosion, seemed far too content to take the hits and keep on firing back.
Unlike the machines belonging to the Black Warriors their firing rate wasn't noticeably dropping off after the first few minutes of frantic action either. Normally, as internal heat levels rose due to waste heat from firing your guns more attention had to be paid to keeping mechs from overheating and potentially shutting down, something that tended to result in battles starting as a crescendo of fire which gradually petered off as cockpits started to get uncomfortably warm and warning lights started to blink.
Watching a Warhammer that was painted up in regulation SLDF olive drab, one of the small handful of Niops mechs larger than a medium in the fight, deliberately move to take on a larger Zeus assault, one that the Black Warriors had captured a few years earlier during a raid into the Lyran Commonwealth, something else became quickly apparent to Angelica Cirion. That son-of-a-bitch must be using double-heat-sinks because otherwise it simply wouldn't be able to keep firing at that rate without overheating and shutting down, she realised.
Cirion quickly assessed the other Niops machines as best she could, paying particular attention to those like the Warhammer that were usually thought of as 'under-sinked', unable to dump anywhere near as much waste heat as fast as their weapons generated it, and quickly concluded that the Warhammer was not an isolated case.
Double Heat Sinks had been getting rarer over time, there were very few factories in the Inner Sphere left that could still make them after so much of the former Terran Hegemony had been blasted to rubble, and the Great Houses carefully husbanded their available supplies. They weren't actually lostech yet, but they were certainly scarce enough that you wouldn't expect to run into an entire battalion of machines that all seemed to have them.
Bringing the guns of her Battlemaster assault mech to bear on an Orion that was hosing its AC/5 autocannon, SRM launcher and lasers at one target, while volleying LRM's at a more distant one , Angelica Cirion opened up with her PPC and massed battery of medium lasers, aiming for the armour above where the internal ammunition stores were situated on the opposition heavy.
Sitting in the cockpit of the Orion Jennifer McEvedy winced as a big chunk of her armour plate was scorched off and instantly manoeuvred so that the Battlemaster wouldn't be able to hit the same place again with their next volley. Her Orion was no faster than the pirate assault mech so she wouldn't be able to just outpace the thing and get away, but she could at least make the thing work for it.
Thanks to the retrofitting of CASE protection around the ammunition magazines McEvedy didn't have to fear a catastrophic internal explosion that might have scattered both her machine and herself in small chunks over a wide area but that Battlemaster was still a lot more mech than you would want to duke it out with in an Orion and she was about to request assistance when a PPC lanced out and caught the Battlemaster in the flank.
Katrina in her Griffin medium, too close to the Battlemaster to use her LRM launcher as well but just her PPC made for a nice distraction.
"Annoying little shit" Cirion growled as the particle-projector-cannon seared armour off her left torso. It wasn't that the Griffin was really a realistic threat to a Battlemaster from where it currently was, it was that she couldn't give her full attention to the Orion if she had to worry about the medium potentially working its way around and put shots into her rear where that PPC would hurt a great deal.
Another enemy medium, this one a Shadow Hawk, arrived on the scene and opened up on Cirion's Battlemaster before a volley of SRM's caught it in the chest, these being fired by one of Cirion's lance-mates in a Crusader who followed it up with their lasers.
The Shadow Hawk switched targets and fired back at the Crusader as more mechs arrived on the scene from both sides and the area immediately surrounding Cirion turned into a maelstrom of fire, the enemy mediums and occasional heavy seeming only too willing to go head-to-head with larger machines bearing the skull and crossbones insignia of the Black Warriors.
Anjelica Cirion wasn't inexperienced or inept and she had always been able to keep a clear head under pressure, analysing the situation dispassionately despite being in the middle of a firefight. Logically she wasn't up against actual SLDF royal mechs, for one thing that Phoenix Hawk over yonder with the red Cameron Star on it that was shooting at one of her pair of Ostsol heavies would have a visually very distinct ERPPC instead of a large laser on its right arm if it was an PXH-1b instead of a regular PXH-1. Nevertheless, it very much looked like these Star League stragglers had spent the decades since Kerensky picked up his toys and left upgrading their machines to a sort-of pseudo-royal with DHS replacing the original sinks and, judging by the damage they were soaking up, presumably Ferro-Fibrous armour plate as well.
Cirion wondered if the reason she was finding that so hard to believe was her innate bias against anything so financially extravagant. The Black Warriors were mercenaries and privateers, pirates if you were going to be blunt about it, and they fought battles intending to make a handsome profit from them. Ferro-Fibrous armour was inarguably superior to regular armour, something like twelve-percent better at absorbing incoming fire per ton if she was remembering correctly, but it cost twice as much per ton so if your priority was the bottom line on the accounting ledger you just wouldn't use the stuff.
Thanks to the need to protect against directed-energy weapons, lasers and PPC's, armour had to be ablative, burning off to dissipate incoming fire. Even autocannon shells and missiles tended to carry HEAP (High Explosive Armour Piercing) warheads rather than other types because they whittled down such armour faster than pure kinetic impact or shaped-charges did. This meant that armour was effectively a consumable item, one that was used up in battle, and Ferro-Fibrous was expensive.
Even the Star League with its immense military budget had never up-armoured all its war machines with the superior, but pricier, armour type Cirion knew. But then they had armed forces so large that they could sacrifice a little quality for quantity.
If you didn't have vast armies, but did have good technical know-how, weren't planning on feeding your military continually into the grinder like the Successor States and had the money to do it then you could go all Ferro-Fibrous like Niops apparently had. On the other hand, holy crap you must really want to punch above your weight class to take that approach!
Ferro-fibrous replacing standard plate alone couldn't explain just how many hits they were taking without being brought down, so they must be enjoying a lot of luck as well and that would inevitably run out at some point, but this was not how she had wanted or needed the battle to go in the early stages.
It clearly wasn't just luck that was keeping their light mechs in the fray though, Cirion had to concede. This wasn't good ground for fast-moving machines that being why she chose it, the terrain was uneven and rocky in places as well as being littered with features like ravines and depressions that restricted line-of-sight. Despite that the olive-drab twenty and twenty-five tonners were somehow rushing around like maniacs, dodging incoming fire as they went without tripping or stumbling, all while making an unlikely percentage of their own shots as they went. It wasn't freakishly skilful piloting, Cirion had known a number of light-mech specialists in her own Black Warriors regiment who could have done it too, it was just odd that they could all apparently drive their machines so hard and so fast on unsuitable ground.
In any military command there was always a gradient of abilities, a few aces at the top, a few people at the bottom who just barely scraped in, and the majority somewhere in-between. If that rule was also true of Niops then either they had left all their mediocre mech-jocks at home or their average performance was bizarrely higher than could be expected. Again, the latter wasn't entirely unprecedented for an SLDF unit, the veterans that trained Cirion would occasionally mention with a degree of awe regiments such as the Black Watch who had put their entire roster through the old Gunslinger Program to hone their skills, not just their elite mechwarriors as was the norm, this resulting in a frankly epic level of battlefield effectiveness, but the 295th Battlemech Division was not the Black Watch.
They weren't unbeatable either, far from it. Cirion watched as one of her Victor assaults blew the head right off a Niops Wolverine with its AC/20, all the fancy ferro-fibrous in the world unable to stop that happening, and she herself pulverized that annoying Griffin, the mechwarior inside ejecting after the battery of lasers on Cirion's Battlemaster scorched off enough armour for its PPC to breach the engine compartment of the medium mech, but her losses were mounting faster than hers and they had more machines to start with.
The crunch-point came when a pair of Rapier heavy fighters came in on an apparent strafing run, her air-defence lance doing their best to try and ward them off by opening up with their autocannons firing flak shells, only to start taking what seemed to be ERPPC fire from elsewhere in the sky.
The Rapier heavy fighters had seemingly drawn fire so that other fighters above could get a bead on the Rifleman and Jaegermech air-defence mechs and pin them down from beyond the range of their own guns. Accuracy wasn't great at that range, particularly not from a fast-mover in the sky, but it didn't exactly do wonders for the aim of the mechs being plinked at with particle-beam-cannon fire either.
Coming around for a second pass, a real one this time, the Rapier duo strafed anything in front of their guns that wasn't painted olive-drab and then pulled up, climbing into the sky.
At the same time the SLDF Highlander avenged the Wolverine that had gone down earlier to the Victor by blowing the latter's own head off with its gauss rifle.
By this point broken and fallen mechs littered the landscape, most belonging to the Black Warriors and the situation was continuing to degenerate for Cirion's people. They could take a lot more of the Niops mechwarriors and tankers with them, but they weren't going to get out of here alive if they did.
Fighting valiantly to the last man in a glorious defeat surrounded by the corpses of the foe may sound romantic but that wasn't really what the Black Warriors were ever about. Fortunately the Cirion family had always planned for what to do if an operation went spectacularly sideways like this one had, a contingency plan that relied upon the fact that they weren't your typical pirate band.
"This is Major Anjelica Cirion offering my surrender and that of my unit to the commanding officer of the Niops forces on Illyria" she signalled on multiple frequencies. "In order to save lives on both sides I request a cessation of hostilities."
"You had your chance to surrender before the battle, pirate" came the immediate response.
"We are not pirates" Cirion replied. "We are the armed forces of the Circinus Federation conducting a pre-emptive strike against the Illyrian Palatinate on the orders of my government" she announced. "If we lay down our arms we insist we are taken as prisoners of war with the customary protections afforded by the Ares Convention and the other rules and customs of war. I have official documentation with me to prove my claim and you can verify our identity with the government on Circinus who will confirm sending us on this mission."
A long pause at the other end of the line indicated her opposite number was thinking about it. "Bullshit" they said eventually.
"If I'm lying you can still hang me as a pirate" Cirion pointed out. "I also insist that you not turn me over to the Illyrian militia, we're your prisoners not theirs."
"This had better not be some kind of ****** trick because if it is you'll wish you died in battle, trust me. With the proviso that if this is a ruse I'll put the rope around your neck personally I accept your surrender."
"Of course I trust you, you're the SLDF" Cirion replied smirking. Dad back home was going to be really pissed off about this monumental ******, but he'd get over it, and the current president was well aware of the deal her grandfather had done with his predecessor whereby the government of Circinus would go along with the cover story for a raid gone all to crap.
Actually their 'just-in-case' pre-planned cover story for this particular mission was better than most, being at least vaguely plausible. It wasn't what you'd call convincing, but hopefully it was at least good enough to spare her the hangman's noose.
When he heard it later as Cirion formally handed over her sidearm Major Robert MacArthur described the cover-story as 'bullshit', that quickly becoming his word of the day, but it wasn't quite bullshit enough for him to not decide that this was a problem for someone higher up the chain of command than him to deal with.
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Note from the Author:
The Royal and/or 'Early-Clan' versions of the Tomahawk (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Tomahawk_(Aerospace_Fighter_class)) and Rapier (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Rapier) are considerably better than the standard models. If the Sparrowhawk (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Sparrowhawk) pilot had any idea there was a fighter with an ERPPC on his tail they wouldn't have played with them like they did.
Ferro-Fibrous (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Ferro-fibrous_armor) armour became lostech (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Lostech) in the Inner Sphere in around 2810. It was superior to standard armour (about 12% more effective per ton at absorbing damage) but cost twice as much meaning that it doesn't make good sense financially if you're trying to maintain a very large military (or are trying to turn a profit by raiding). Niops uses a lot of Ferro-Fibrous (quality over quantity) in their machines and since a lot of their Improved Weaponry is lighter and more compact than normal they can also carry a greater weight of it.
Double-Heat-Sinks (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Double_Heat_Sink) (DHS) mean that a mech can keep firing for longer without overheating. They're not actually lostech by 2839 but they're increasingly rare and you certainly wouldn't expect to see them retofitted universally to machines that didn't have them originally. A rolling program of upgrades since they arrived at Niops in 2827 (weapons first, then armour and heatsinks as manufacturing was spun up) means that an awful lot of SLDF machines can dish it out and take it to a excessive degree.
Cirion actually chose her ground very well and there was no way she could have known that her opposition were a bunch of genetically-engineered freaks piloting mechs that were pseudo-royals armed with weaponry that she didn't know existed. For example, autocannon and LRM armed machines such as the Orion (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Orion) and Shadow Hawk (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Shadow_Hawk) save so much weight on weaponry (thanks to the lightweight 'Improved' gear) that they carry far more armour than anyone would expect. Meanwhile a Warhammer (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Warhammer) with DHS to deal with all the heat generated by its PPC's is a very different beast than a regular Warhammer (plus the Improved PPC is a ton lighter so you can up-armour it too).
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Love the updates! Cirion is actually showing some brains and making the best of a shit situation. If she had been Clan, this would have been prime hegira time. As it is, because the Black Warriors ARE an actual House unit for Circinus, they'll likely be treated as proper POWs instead of pirates.
Also I know that the 295th and Niops do NOT practice taking bondsmen, but if I were the aerojock commander on the Niops side, I'd bring that Sparrowhawk pilot in for a nice conversation about whether he or she would like to immigrate. The accounts indicate a decent-to-good amount of skill and situational awareness for a lightfighter jock, and it is not their fault that they did not know the Tomahawk was a cheat code Early Clan version.
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That was very good chapter!! I was so hoping read some good juice combat action, we got it! Thank you, Hotpoint!
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Awesome storytelling, but...
The Orion (in particular) certainly doesn't have an AC/5, and if its armor has been replaced with Ferro and Heat Sinks doubled, I REALLY want to know what else it's carrying... Everything Niops has should turn the Orion into a TRULY frightening machine! ;)
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Part XLI - Section 1 of 2
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"Even at its worst the Star League, or rather the Terran Hegemony, was never nakedly imperialistic. It always preferred to operate under a veneer of paternalism, telling people that we're doing this for your own good and you'll see that one day as it dispatched its military might off out into the galaxy, and raised the Cameron Star wherever SLDF boots hit the ground. With that inspiration and background it is not perhaps surprising that as Niops expanded its own influence it had a tendancy to come accross as well-meaning but also more a little condescending at times. People involved in quarrels with each other do not usually like being told, 'play nice children or we'll come over there and take your toys away', although this tended to be more the product of Niops being terrible at many aspects of regular diplomacy, while being very good at the gunboat kind rather than deliberate antagonism."
Stephen J. Tran, Red Star Rising: A History of Niops 2800-2900 - Niops Press, 2915
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Zenith Jump-Point – Niops System – 2839
"In all honesty sir, I can't believe we're taking this crap seriously" Lieutenant-Colonel Mary Heath, the station commander stated candidly as she escorted General Hallis from the airlock where his dropship had docked towards the brig where the prisoners waited. "Anyone can say that they're soldiers, but if you ask me these ****** are the most piratety pirates that ever pirated."
"I can't say I disagree Colonel, but actually proving that to a sufficient degree that we can hang them, or else just ship them to Alphard to dig up germanium for the rest of their lives, is another matter unfortunately" Franklin Hallis replied glumly. "You know I can never get used to just how smooth the grav deck on this thing feels" he added randomly, "nowhere near as much sense that there's something a bit wrong with 'down' as I remember from being stuck on the Zug all that time and that was a better grav-deck than most."
"It's over twelve-hundred metres across, makes all the difference" Heath replied. "I try and run the loop whenever I can, it's not a bad way to stay in shape and the deck circumference is long enough that you don't feel like you're in a hamster wheel" she said. "As for our guests, well I mean they literally have the Jolly Roger painted on their mechs, and their supposed 'uniforms' would have to be a lot more uniform to be considered, well, actual uniforms, so it all seems ridiculous to credit their claims with any merit."
Hallis stopped walking and sighed, taking a small pocket noteputer from out of a pocket on his jacket, pressing a few buttons and then turning it around to show Heath what was on the screen. "It only took me a few minutes searching through the military database to find multiple units that have used a skull, or skull and crossbones design as their unit insignia over the years" he said, scrolling through a few of them to show her. "All of these examples come from legitimate military commands, hell, according to their pirate queen her grandfather got the idea from a book about Frederick the Great he once read as a military cadet. They called it the Totenkopf in German."
Heath smiled at the use of the phrase 'pirate queen' since it did indicate Hallis wasn't buying into what they were selling. "Her grandfather?" she queried.
"Zachariah Cirion, he started out as an SLDF regular. That's the other problem, the Black Warriors had already adopted their skull-and-crossbones insignia when they were still affiliated with the SLDF, at least tangentially as a mercenary regiment under contract, and nobody made a fuss about it when they were training new recruits for Kerensky" Hallis told her, putting the noteputer back in his pocket and starting to walk again.
Heath frowned. "That's true? They actually did that? I mean I heard that's what they claimed but…"
"All true, we checked the records. Not just Zachariah himself but most of regiment were originally SLDF who left to become mercenaries after putting in their time, honourable discharges not deserters" Hallis confirmed. "They fell out with their employers in the Free Worlds League apparently, which is how they ended up out in the periphery in the first place, but when the Amaris coup happened they declared for Kerensky and returned to the colours. It's not like we're dealing with another Blood Rain scenario, these sons-of-bitches were on our side during the war. They were mercs but they were still loyal to the Star League."
"Which makes a difference I suppose" Heath responded with a shrug.
"General Romanov thinks that it earns them a fair hearing at least" Hallis replied. "I assume Major MacArthur had similar thoughts on the matter which is why he chose to have them all carted back here rather than just let the Illyrian's have them."
Heath nodded, she also suspected that MacArthur was smart enough to make them somebody else's problem. "I stuck most of them in an empty barracks I could secure, placing the officers in the brig as ordered" Heath told him. "No real problems with them causing trouble, they're disciplined enough I'll admit, but they've been complaining about the fonio porridge I've been feeding them."
"Took me a while to get used to it when the first shipments arrived from Alphard a few years back. If you ask me they should turn all of that grain into beer and stick to oats for porridge" Hallis opined. "After I've talked to Ms. Cirion I'll let General Romanov know my assessment and then she'll discuss the matter with the High Associator."
"I sort-of expected you to arrive with an interrogation team" Heath admitted. "One of Gloria's proteges or maybe even the scary old lady herself."
"The truth-drugs and thumbscrews are on hold, at least for now" Hallis replied with a wry smile. "It's not just the foreign policy aspect of the political dimension involved, although Circinus is a sovereign nation-state so it's a factor, the truth is Olson wasn't all that happy when he signed off on enhanced interrogation techniques for Stefani Marcus and her merry band of slavers and unapologetic war criminals. We've no indication that the Black Warriors are that level of irredeemably evil scum, they might just be amoral opportunists, so they get the kid gloves treatment unless our civilian masters decide otherwise."
"Just a suggestion, but putting them all on trial would cost the taxpayer a lot more than putting them out the airlock" Heath observed, only partly in jest. "Here we are Sir" she told him as they arrived at the door to the security offices with the brig attached to them. "Do you want me to sit in with you during your conversation with the ranking prisoner?" she asked.
"That won't be necessary Colonel, you've got a station to run" Hallis replied as she opened the door for him and led him inside. "And a well-run station it seems to be. I'll let Brigadier-General Nellis know that he put the right person in charge when the SLDF transferred command over to the Militia."
"Nice of you to say so Sir, but I'd hope he knew that already" Heath replied, smiling. "I'll have a security team escort the prisoner to the interrogation room. Everyone knows that you are to be referred to by your alias at all times for security reasons."
"I hope their memories are better than mine, I nearly forgot to only put one star on my collar when I got dressed on the dropship this morning. It only occurred to me when I switched the 'Hallis, F' nametag on my uniform for the 'Franklin, H' one."
Heath chuckled. "I you don't mind me saying so, but your secret identity as 'Brigadier-General Hal Franklin' isn't the most difficult pseudonym to see through" she commented.
"You wouldn't be the first to say" Hallis told her. "In my defence it's refuge in audacity because if the clanners ever caught wind of a General Hal Franklin on Niops they're going to assume I couldn't possibly be so stupid as to adopt that as a fake identity" he said, grinning. "Also, it's easy for me to remember" he added.
"Pity your real surname wasn't something a little more common, like say 'Smith', you could have kept using it" Heath observed.
"Yeah, but the thing that really chaps my ass is that the kits with the McEvedy bloodname could still get to use it because it's been suggested they pretend to be the descendants of that lunatic Alpheus McEvedy not Sarah" Hallis complained. That was another refuge in audacity move, if the clans ever found out there was a planet in the Niops Association called 'McEvedy's Folly' it would ring a lot of alarm bells, but if they investigated further and found it had already been nicknamed that before the Exodus, and for an entirely different member of the wider McEvedy family, that could throw them off the scent nicely.
Still, the most amusing alias had to be the one that Kirsten Mroczkiewicz had suggested for those that bore her bloodname after a lifetime of being asked 'how the hell do you spell that?'. On off-world deployments their name-patches and dog-tags now said 'Brzęczyszczykiewicz' instead.
Assuming that they hadn't hauled her all the way from Illyria just to throw her out an airlock Anjelica Cirion was relaxed enough as she sat patiently waiting in the the interrogation room. Her chair beside the grey metal table in the middle of the room wasn't exactly the most comfortable but they hadn't roughed her up or mistreated her in any way, other than feed her that weird gruel with the suspicious taste and texture, and so far it seemed like they took this 'We're the SLDF' thing seriously enough to still follow the regulations regarding the correct treatment of Prisoners of War.
Of course, if they concluded that she was a pirate, not a POW, that would all change. The Star League didn't believe in torture of brutality, but it did believe that pirates were legally hostis humani generis, the enemy of all mankind, and did not treat them leniently.
The door to the room opened and a surprisingly familiar looking man wearing an SLDF duty uniform bearing the rank insignia of a Brigadier-General entered, closing the door again behind him. "Anjelica Cirion?" he checked.
"That would be Major Anjelica Cirion, Sir" she replied. "I would stand up and salute but, you know…" she continued, rattling the handcuffs that were securing her to the table.
"Just be grateful they're not leg irons like we normally put on pirates" Franklin Hallis replied evenly. "Brigadier-General Henry Franklin" he introduced himself, taking a seat across from her. "If they're not calling me 'Sir' most people call me 'Hal', both friends and enemies, don't consider yourself the former."
"I think I've met your son, Sir" Cirion replied. "He's the spitting image of you."
"Yes, he was attached to our training unit's deployment to Illyria" Hallis confirmed. "Scored his first kill according to the after-action report."
"He manhandled me aboard a dropship, none too gently either" Cirion told the senior officer.
"Probably a little sore that you and your people kill or maim a few of the kids he once helped train" Hallis replied placidly. "Of course, not nearly as many as our people killed and maimed of yours" he added. The losses weren't as bad for either side as they could have been of course, if MacArthur had rejected Cirion's offer of surrender under the terms she wanted they would have been considerably worse for the SLDF even if victory was assured by that point in the battle. Forcing your opponent to fight to the death might be the most decisive form of victory but it was rarely a good idea if you had any regard for the lives of your own people.
More armour and the use of CASE to prevent internal ammunition explosions had minimised the number of SLDF personnel that returned to Niops in a box, and the medical technology available to the SLDF could fix practically anything short of outright death, being able to replace lost limbs with cybernetics or even clone replacement organs if necessary, but in Hallis's mind they were still just the little kids he remembered them being. The Ironborn might have been literally bred for war but they weren't ultimately disposable military hardware like the machines they piloted, they were human beings and they needed to be regarded as such.
"Considering you had numerical superiority and better equipment we didn't do too badly Sir" Cirion defended the battlefield performance of the Black Warriors under her command.
"I'll concede the point" Hallis replied with a shrug. "For what it's worth Major MacArthur actually praised your handling of the tactical situation in his report, he noted your intelligent choice of terrain on which to fight the action and the piloting and gunnery skills of your people."
"We're professionals" Cirion responded, looking him in the eyes. "Professional soldiers, definitely not the pirate rabble you're accusing us of being."
"That remains to be decided" Hallis told her without commitment. "Major MacArthur also included your claims as regards your supposedly 'legitimate military reason for launching a pre-emptive strike on the Illyrian Palatinate' in his report. Would you care to elaborate on the steaming pile of Eiglotherium shit you're trying to feed us?" he asked sardonically. "Are you really trying to say that you believed that the Illyrian Palatinate was preparing to invade Circinus?"
"No" Cirion replied.
"No?" Hallis repeated, confused.
"No" Cirion confirmed. "I didn't think that the Palatinate was going to invade Circinus, my government got it into their heads that it was, based upon some pretty spurious thinking if you ask me" she told him. "It's not like they just pulled the idea completely out of their ass though."
"Whose ass did they pull it out of then?" Hallis asked wryly.
"Look, we've been living next to the Illyrian Palatinate for decades and we never considered them any kind of threat whatsoever until like the last five years or so" Cirion told him, spinning a carefully crafted yarn designed to keep her and her people away from prison, or worse a gallows. "To describe their military equipment as being Reunification War or even Age of War vintage, would have been generous, they were still using archaic rifled cannon on towed mounts as anti-mech weaponry for God's sake, but then a few years back we got word that they had started to substantially overhaul their military after basically neglecting it for centuries."
Hallis frowned. "In what sense?" he asked.
"One day a load of Star League weaponry started to appear in their inventories, for a start those old towed guns were being replaced by vehicle-mounted autocannons, decent ones in good working order. Not only that they also had a load of good quality laser cannon they were hanging off everything that could move, as well as a whole bunch of SRM and LRM launchers" Cirion explained. "At first we thought they must have dug up one of those Star League caches that are supposed to be hidden somewhere on Illyria, but then we found out that they had been bartering refined metals from their foundries and ore from their mines for the things."
"You seem very well informed" Hallis replied guardedly, and more than a little suspiciously.
"Circinus keeps its ear to the ground and its eye on its neighbours, it's a dangerous galaxy out there" Cirion replied, not wanted to make it seem like a big deal. "Don't be too impressed by our intelligence gathering though, the Palatinate isn't exactly a closed society" she continued. "We eventually found out that they were getting the weapons from you, because someone that was part of the crew of a transport ship that hauls iron ore from Illyria to the Marik's was talking about it in a bar" she said with a gentle chuckle. "I guess you needed steel from the Palatinate so you could build things like this seriously impressive station" she suggested, looking around, "but you had more military surplus than you did ready cash to pay for it right?"
"More of the case that we've had trouble getting people to accept the Niops Dollar in the past" Hallis replied. "Weaponry is even more of a universally accepted currency than C-Bills are."
"Yeah, and you don't have to worry about ComStar giving you a shitty rate of exchange or skimming off the top" Cirion observed. "Anyhow, the Palatinate were re-arming, but still not nearly enough to add them to the list of people we had to worry about yet, but then last year we found out that they had done a deal with the Magistracy of Canopus to buy a huge amount of military hardware; mechs, tanks and aerospace fighters, which is when our government became more concerned."
Hallis tried not to look surprised. "Why would that concern you?" he asked, she was wrong about the mechs specifically but otherwise mostly correct. He wouldn't have necessarily described the arms deal between Illyria and Canopus as 'huge' though.
"Are you kidding? They're our closest neighbour and compared to us the Palatinate is massive" Cirion contended. "They've got several times our population and control four star-systems to our one. There's no sliddiffs to keep people in line anymore, big powers swallow small powers whenever they feel like it. Look at what the Lyran's did to the Finmark Free Republic. It's not like Finmark was a realistic threat but the Steiner's still snuffed them out."
"Not a persuasive argument, the Lyran Commonwealth was also expansionistic, when was the last time the Illyrian Palatinate ever attacked anyone?" Hallis asked rhetorically. "Also, what's a 'sliddiff', I'm not familiar with that phrase?"
"You know, sliddiffs" Cirion said again. "As in the Star League Defence Force, S.L.D.F, sliddiffs" she explained. "You don't use that one then I guess?"
"No, we most certainly do not" Hallis told her flatly.
"Might just be a Black Warrior thing I guess" Cirion surmised. "Grandad's generation always referred to themselves as former SLDF that way and it stuck I guess" she reasoned.
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Part XLI - Section 2 of 2
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"You were talking about your government being concerned about the Palatinate rearming" Hallis brought the conversation back on track.
"Right, so not only are they upgrading the equipment they already have, now they're in a full-scale military buildup buying up brand-new equipment which rang a lot of alarm bells because the ruling families in the Palatinate don't like paying taxes, they're tighter than an airlock seal when it comes to money, so why are they suddenly ploughing cash into the military?" Cirion asked rhetorically. "It's not like they're expecting the Free Worlds League to suddenly invade, the Marik's have more than enough problems to deal with already and it's cheaper for them to buy the metal from the Illyrian's than occupy the Palatinate anyway."
Hallis rolled his eyes. "So, you're trying to convince me that you thought the Illyrian's were building up their military because they had a nefarious scheme to invade Circinus? What for? To steal your grain, because that's the only thing you export as far as we can tell."
"Like I said before I didn't believe it, so don't go accusing me of pretending to" Cirion replied. "Although for the record Circinus is actually pretty mineral rich, unusually so in radioactives, we just didn't have the mining equipment to exploit it or the industrial base to make it. Like you just said yourself we're an agricultural society, but do you know who does have a load of mining equipment and people trained to use it?"
"The Illyrian Palatinate" Hallis finished for her.
"Right" Cirion confirmed.
Hallis leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms. "Still not buying it" he said.
"Still not selling it" Cirion retorted. "We thought, and by 'we' I mean the Circinus military, that the Palatinate was just worried about pirates. There's been more and more pirate activity in our region of space over the years, the Succession Wars stripped a lot of planets of their militias and the majority of the former Rim Worlds Republic not annexed by the Lyrans is lawless making it easy for pirates to operate out of there."
"Well, you've got a point there at least" Hallis conceded. "Circinus was originally part of the Rim Worlds Republic and pirates do seem to be operating out of there" he continued, smirking.
"Very droll Sir" Cirion replied, tone indicating she didn't think so. "The fact is, we're one of the few systems in the area that doesn't have a pirate problem because we actually have a military worth the name not just a handful of militia. The Black Warriors might not have all your fancy upgraded mechs, but we're well equipped and well trained enough that buccaneers look for an easier target."
"An alternative explanation being that they don't want to stray onto another pirate band's turf" Hallis countered. "The flag of the Circinus Federation literally has a skull on it, I mean hell your currency is called the Skull. It's not like you're even being subtle about it."
"This again?" Cirion responded, rolling her eyes. "Like I told your Major MacArthur the Black Warriors have used the Skull and Crossbones insignia forever, we were already living on Circinus when the refugees from the Lyran Commonwealth arrived and the new civilian government just adopted the symbol of their adopted homeland, tweaking it a little to differentiate the armed forces from the state itself because we're not a military dictatorship" she said. "It's no different than Niops using a modified Cameron Star."
"The connotations are a little different" Hallis drily observed.
Cirion looked at him askance. "Depends on your point of view, just ask the Taurian Concordat" she replied, making a pretty decent point though Hallis wouldn't admit it. "As for us calling our currency the skull, if you think you have trouble getting other people to accept the Niops Dollar then believe me we have it worse. I wasn't just guessing that ComStar probably try to screw you on the exchange rate to C-Bills, they look at our money like it's carrying some kind of communicable disease."
"Ah, well they're not always in the wrong I guess" Hallis replied, uncrossing his arms again and leaning back forward. "I'm still far, far from convinced that your attack on Illyria was just some kind of pre-emptive strike because your government thought the Palatinate was about to invade. They don't even have the armed dropships they'd need to pull something like that off, you're the one with military space-lift capacity, although I guess you're down a Union and two Leopard dropships at the moment, not to mention some starlift thanks to the jumpships we impounded as well."
Cirion sighed. "Our mission to Illyria was expressly aimed at kneecapping their power-projection capability" she replied. "Word reached Circinus that the Illyrian Palatinate was building up a fleet of Danais class dropships with the intent of converting them to armed Trojan class vessels" she lied, although there was just a tiny grain of truth in there. After they captured the things and took them home to Circinus the Black Warriors plan was to perform that very conversion themselves.
"Oh, come on!" Hallis responded dubiously.
"Our intelligence people didn't give the rumour much credit either until they looked into it and found out that the Illyrian's really had stopped selling the Danais class dropships they've been manufacturing for export since the Star League days but they were still making the things" Cirion told him. "A Trojan might be a poor man's Union but they're nearly the same size and with the right refit can carry a whole company of mechs or combat vehicles" she noted. "We're not industrialised like the Palatinate, we can't make any new ships ourselves, the fear was that eventually they'd have enough quantity to beat our quality if we didn't chop them off at the knees before they could."
"If you weren't trying to paint the Illyrian Palatinate of all things as some kind of bogeyman regarding Circinus with envious eyes and drawing their plans against you, you'd be a little more believable" Hallis suggested.
"Double standards don't you think?" Cirion replied chidingly.
Hallis was confused. "In what way?"
"Your argument is that we're automatically pirates just because we use a skull as our national insignia and paint them on our mechs, but the notion that a bunch of Scandinavian descendants who literally use a Norse longship with shields arrayed along the side as their flag might have a hankering for some good old fashioned Viking action never so much as enters your mind" Cirion replied, looking somewhat pleased with herself.
Hallis narrowed his eyes. "Very clever" he said eventually.
"I thought so" Cirion replied. "Once again, I personally didn't think that the Palatinate was going to invade us to dig up our mineral wealth, my government did based upon their reading of the intelligence data" she continued. "The President was persuaded that we needed to act before it was too late, seize or destroy the ships they had already built and wreck the factory that was building them while that was still an option. For a pre-emptive strike to work we had to make our move before the arms shipments from the Magistracy started arriving because we can't absorb heavy losses to personnel or equipment, we don't have the population or military depth."
"As the old saying goes, one man's pre-emptive strike is another man's cowardly sneak attack" Hallis responded. "If you'd actually identified yourself as being the armed forces of Circinus rather than behave like a bunch of pirates conducting a raid you might have a little more creditability here."
Cirion laughed. "You can tell that you guys basically sat out the Succession Wars and hid away from the rest of the galaxy in isolation, because you seem to have missed the memo being sent out that the old rules of war have been relegated to just guidelines these days" she replied. "How is what we did different than what the Great Houses do all the time?" she asked rhetorically. "Just look at the Dracs and their Chain Gang missions intended to keep the Davions and Steiners from recovering too fast from the First Succession War."
"You've got me there" Hallis conceded. "I can certainly see the similarities given that the Chain Gang missions were also conducted by a bunch of criminals."
Cirion chose to ignore that jibe. "The Free Worlds League and the Lyran Commonwealth had an actual peace treaty in place, but that didn't stop Charles Marik attacking them in 2830 claiming it was because he'd learned they were planning to attack him."
"I don't recall the forces Marik sent to attack the Steiners at Dieudonné and New Hope failing to identify themselves like yours did at Illyria" Hallis countered.
"Okay, so I'm rude and we didn't fill out all the correct paperwork, that doesn't make us pirates" Cirion replied.
"Pretty sure I can find plenty of precedent for that getting people treated as pirates and hanged" Hallis replied.
"We would have identified ourselves to the Illyrian militia on the ground when demanding their surrender" Cirion lied. "We never got to that point because we were attacked by an unknown mercenary force that was presumably working for the Palatinate before we could" she added.
Hallis narrowed his eyes. "Unknown mercenary group? Seriously?"
"Anyone can paint a few mechs olive drab, slap on a Red Cameron Star insignia and say they're the Niops military, it's not like the machines I was looking at backed up the claim. None of MacArthur's machines were late Star League designs that might have given the assertion some credence" Cirion argued. "Hell, it's not like people pretending to be the 295th Battlemech Division isn't a thing, the first thing we heard about Niops is when your General Romanov was sending out rants bitching about Raymond's Redcoats lying about their origins and besmirching the good name of her command. If we'd arrived at Illyria and found a warship there I'd have believed MacArthur's claim, but a bunch of mechs and tanks dating back to the Reunification War or earlier isn't as convincing."
To describe Hallis as less than convinced would be an understatement. "If you didn't believe MacArthur's unit was SLDF then why surrender like you did assuming you would be treated according to the regs?" he asked reasonably.
"I thought I was going to die and get the rest of my people killed into the bargain. A Hail Mary play seemed like a good idea at the time" Cirion replied, truthfully although she hadn't ever really doubted that MacArthur's unit was from Niops, just sowing the seeds of doubt. "You're not seriously trying to dismiss the idea that sailing under a false flag isn't something that happens are you? I mean, we've heard stories about groups raiding planets who are clearly pretending to be us. Our assumption has always been if it's Lyran worlds getting hit it's the Marik's and vice versa, but it's not like we can prove anything, it could just be a genuine pirate band cashing in on the fact we do paint something that looks like the Jolly Roger on our mechs."
Cirion inwardly smirked. Maintaining a semblance of plausible deniability over the decades had been a cornerstone of the Black Warriors approach to not getting crushed by an angry Successor State. If not for that then the Free Worlds League in particular would have most certainly come calling after the First Succession War petered out freeing up some of its military for such operations.
Hallis was about to respond when he was interrupted by a knock on the door. "Enter" he said loudly, wondering what this was about.
The door swung open to reveal Lieutenant-Colonel Heath wearing a bemused expression. "Can I have a word with you outside General Franklin?" she requested. "It is rather urgent" she added.
"I'll be back in a minute. Make yourself comfortable" Hallis told Cirion.
Cirion rattled the chain securing her to the desk. "How?" she asked reasonably, Hallis ignoring her question as he got up and followed Heath outside into the corridor, closing the door behind him.
"What is it Colonel?" Hallis asked the NAM officer.
"We've received a government communication, along with a note General Romanov tagged on" Heath replied. "The HPG net is live again between here and Illyria, ComStar must have gotten the station on Hednesford running again, we're not sure of the specifics but the Palatinate government made contact with Circinus and after being told we had captured their raiding force their government confirmed sending Cirion and her people to Illyria."
"Nice of Circinus to not just disown them I guess" Hallis replied. "Of course, seeing as how it's her own father that commands their military then daddy might have leaned on their government not to hang her out to dry by denying all knowledge."
"Yeah" Heath agreed. "Here's the awkward part, Circinus has said themselves they launched the raid to pre-empt the Palatinate invading them, and given that it failed they are seeking negotiations and a diplomatic settlement."
"I suppose its too much to hope for that the Illyrian Palatinate just told them to go ****** themselves?" Hallis replied.
"Not really their style, their government sees the galaxy in terms of trade and war is bad for business after all" Heath replied. "They'd prefer just to return to the status quo."
"After they lost people? After we did too?" Hallis replied nonplussed.
"Oh, they're seeking financial redress for their losses, and they expect us to do likewise, they just don't want to deal with an actual full-scale war I guess" Heath replied. "We could beat Circinus into submission pretty quickly ourselves of course, but our government sure as hell doesn't want to occupy the place or end up having to defend it from other people because we robbed them of their defence capability."
Hallis frowned. "It would be more like robbing them of their offence capability" he responded.
"No arguments here Sir" Heath concurred. "Unfortunately it's being taken out of our hands because the politicians and diplomats are taking over" she told him. "The Palatinate have requested our government to act as a mediator and guarantor in their negotiations with Circinus, and according to her note General Romanov thinks the High Associator will agree."
"Something else to add to his legacy when he steps down next year" Hallis replied, sighing.
"Given the circumstances I think it's safe to say we won't be doing anything with the prisoners until the diplomats sort things out" Heath replied. "Orders from up high say treat them as if they were POW's not pirates, but make sure they're told we don't officially recognise them as POW. It's an academic distinction but they'll probably be happy to hear they're not going to be flushed out an airlock anytime soon at least."
Hallis sighed again. "Anytime soon is right, diplomatic negotiations can take years even if both sides actually want to strike a deal."
"These ones might go a little faster" Heath replied. "Negotiations are supposed to take place on Circinus, we'll be transporting the delegation from Illyria there ourselves, and I don't think it'll be in a civilian jumpship if you catch my drift."
"What makes you think so?" Hallis asked.
"The fact that we've been picking up a bunch of transmissions from Naval Headquarters to Rickenbacker, sorry I mean the James Sever."
"Ah, so gunboat diplomacy" Hallis concluded, smiling.
"You can usually depend on getting better results with a kind word and a Congress Class Frigate than you can with just a kind word" Heath rightly observed.
Hallis nodded. "Nothing like the possibility of facing orbital bombardment if you ****** around to concentrate the mind" he agreed.
"I still think it was all just a pirate raid gone wrong though" Heath opined.
"Yeah, but I'll have to give them credit, they spin a good yarn" Hallis conceded. "Just plausible enough to make you wonder, even if you're still pretty certain it's just bullshit obfuscation."
"Muddying the waters has probably paid off for them a lot in the past" Heath commented. "I've got to give them credit for being pirates pretending to not be pirates while literally using pirate iconography. If the name wasn't already taken they should have gone all-in and renamed their planet Tortuga to really rub people's noses in it."
"Hard to believe they're an old SLDF unit."
"Don't you mean sliddiff?"
"Is it wrong that I find that term more offensive than the damn skull and crossbones flag they use?" Hallis asked rhetorically. "Sets my teeth on edge."
"It gets worse, I've heard them call us 'Nee-oppies' Heath told him.
Hallis grimaced. "That in itself should be enough to hang them" he stated firmly.
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Note from the Author:
Although the Jolly Roger (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jolly_Roger) definitely screams 'pirate' the fact is that a Skull and Crossbones (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skull_and_crossbones_(military)) or Totenkopf (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totenkopf) motif has been used by an awful lot of military units over the years (including some within the Battletech universe) so the Black Warriors (http://'https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Black_Warriors') choice of unit insignia can't actually be taken as a slam-dunk proof of them operating as pirates. The Circinus Federation (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Circinus_Federation) itself uses a related symbol, and even named its currency the Skull (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Skull), which isn't exactly subtle, but they've never been stupid enough to outright declare they were a pirate kingdom like the Tortuga Dominions (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Tortuga_Dominions) did.
In canon the Black Warriors had been playing pirate for decades but they managed to keep that under wraps, successfully enough in fact that when they found out in 2853 the Eridani Light Horse (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Eridani_Light_Horse) (ELH) who ended up working with them were surprised. To me that indicates the Black Warriors were pretty skilled at covering their tracks and had a decent intelligence operation going. Having contingency plans in case everything went wrong on a raid feeds into that.
Use of the term 'sliddiffs' for former SLDF units by Anjelica Cirion and her people comes from Dying Dignity (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Dying_Dignity) (the ELH didn't seem to like it either).
Circinus IV (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Circinus) is fairly rich in certain minerals, including valuable gemstones and radioactives, but unlike the Illyrian Palatinate (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Illyrian_Palatinate) their economy isn't centred around mining. Stealing off other people must have better profit margins.
At this point in history the Circinus Federation only owns one system which itself only has a small population and by comparison the Palantinate is in fact much larger and with far more people, however despite their Viking Longship sigil the Illyrian's aren't agressive towards their neighbours (which is not to say they're pacifists, when the then nine-system strong Circinus Federation invaded the Palatinate in 3034 the Illyrians won).
Cirion does have a point about the rules of warfare being mere guidelines by this point in Battletech History though (and converting Danais (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Danais_(DropShip_class)) class dropships to Trojan (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Trojan) class military vessels is very much a thing, if not something the Palatinate planned).
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Well, I reckon that this is an outstanding job of doublespeaking and obfuscation.
Nicely done.
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Indeed! Well written, even if Cirion should have been facing an actual interrogator instead of Hallis... ;)
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man that was some skillful writing
I just hope that none of the mechs and tanks are given back to the OC after they comp pay both groups. replacing mechs would be harder for the OC than any other group and it would show that the SLDF military was not totally buying what they were shoveling.
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Part XLII - Section 1 of 2
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"There are two types of people in the galaxy, people with warships and people that have to be obsequious. We have warships."
Admiral Jacob Bremman - 2845CE
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Circinus IV – Circinus System – 2839
Still wondering if jumping into the Circinus system at the L1 Lagrange point like a pirate had been a little too much, even if her orders had been to 'make waves they can't ignore, literally and figuratively', brevet Rear Admiral Sarah Mbeki was nevertheless confident that having the James Sever floating in space only hours away from Circinus IV not days should concentrate the minds of the authorities on Circinus very nicely, both military and civilian.
The Illyrian's had been more a little surprised themselves when the Congress Class Frigate had previously jumped into their own capital system, broadcasting a message that their ride was here. Even though they had been expecting a warship, Niops had told them in advance it intended to send a message to Circinus via a show of force, they had assumed it would be one of the two destroyers Niops was known to possess and that it would send down a shuttle to collect them. The appearance of the vessel identifying itself as the NAS James Sever, a larger more heavily armed craft than any destroyer, which was hauling both a Titan aerospace carrier and a Lee class battalion transport along with it had caused something of a stir.
Sending the Lee down to the surface of Illyria III to collect their passengers Mbeki had explained to them first via radio that if you're going to fly the flag then you send the flagship hence Niops dusting off its only frigate. Hopefully this should lead, or rather mislead, the powers of the Inner Sphere and Periphery into thinking that although they had clearly underestimated the size of the Niops fleet, if the James Sever was their flagship it wasn't like they had a bunch of battleships squirrelled away.
A three-century old design, multiple Congress class frigates had once served in the navies of the Great Houses as well as that of the Star League, though how many of them were still operational after the great culling of warships during the First Succession War was unknown. It wasn't as if Niops had suddenly pulled an overpowered, modern, high-tech SLDF capital ship out of their ass, thus colossally freaking out the entire Inner Sphere, but it should at least scare the ever-loving crap out of the right people. The 'right people' in this instance being Circinus.
Of course, since the Congress class was known to be poor at dealing with attacks by massed aerospace fighters, it was specialised for taking on other warships and comparatively lacking in anti-fighter weaponry and point-defence, bringing along a Titan with its three squadrons rounded out the package nicely.
Sending a heavily armed and armoured Lee as well, instead of a 'mere' Overlord, was just plain showing off, as was loading it up with a reinforced battlemech battalion that leaned very heavy in tonnage.
Arriving at Circinus IV via a non-standard jumppoint, in this case the L1 Lagrange point, Mbeki made sure to broadcast that this wasn't an invasion, merely a diplomatic mission, although as they watched the frigate head straight towards them the locals were likely somewhat less than reassured.
Mbeki's further claim in a later transmission that the warship itself, two heavily-armed dropships, a combined force of thirty aerospace fighters plus the forty battlemechs emblazoned with the Red Cameron Star that had journeyed to Circinus should not in any way be misconstrued as a threat had reached the planet just before the frigate itself did.
The government and military leadership of Circinus likely gave that claim about as much credence as it deserved, but if they expected Niops to pretend to buy into their bullshit story then a little reciprocation was judged to be in order.
The James Sever positioned itself in a geosynchronous orbit directly above the planetary capital, conveniently placed for orbital bombardment and with the Titan and its three squadrons of aerospace fighters acting as a fighter screen for the frigate, the Lee and its various passengers headed down to the surface.
Circinus had a hot dry climate, indeed much of the northern continent was covered by the vast Ezo desert that made the Sahara on Terra look lush and verdant and even in the few areas suitable for agriculture, these being dry savannahs, temperate it was not. As the Lee headed for the designated landing ground outside the city that the locals assigned to them Mbeki made sure to remind her people that sunglasses were the order of the day, along with sunscreen for anyone paler in complexion than she was. Despite most people periodically using sunbeds back home to ward off rickets, not to mention depression, living under a Red Dwarf star wasn't exactly beneficial to maintaining a healthy tan.
The local star was a type G5IV, not quite as hot as the G2V Sol in the Terra system but nonetheless rather large, so despite the habitable planet being the fourth one out from the star, rather than third, it still absorbed more sunlight than Terra did hence the high surface temperatures.
At least it wasn't quite as hot and arid here as it was on Westover. According to anyone from Niops that had been there while delivering PPC's to the Free Worlds League that place was absolutely hellish. Circinus meanwhile was merely far, far too hot for comfort.
The seventeen-thousand ton vessel kicking up a vast cloud of dust as it came into land, Mbeki let it all settle before she ordered the hanger doors opened and the loading ramps lowered. It wouldn't be diplomatic for the battlemechs to start to disembark so they remained clamped in their bays, along with the single squadron of aerospace fighters the dropship carried, although the Lee itself was hardly defenceless.
The multiple gauss rifles, ERPPC's, ER Large Lasers, AC/20 autocannon, LRM launchers and lighter weaponry that littered the hull of the Lee was had made it a formidable in the extreme even as originally built, but almost of its armament had been upgraded over the last few years and the tonnage and volume saved by using lighter, more compact hardware had been devoted towards adding Arrow IV launchers with concealed launch-tubes as well.
If the locals had thought the Lee was too far away from the city to hit it with anything from where they had instructed it to land they were badly mistaken. Although finding themselves under the shadow of the James Sever floating high above their heads it was not as if they were any happier in their ignorance.
Eventually the plan was to adopt a revised Lee, tentatively being referred to as the Grant, as the primary battalion transport of the SLDF. However, given the current surplus of Overlord class dropships already in the inventory, plus the need to prioritise producing cargo movers, the Grant was very much a longer-term project on hold. Maybe in twenty years after plenty of CargoKing and CargoMaster bulk haulers were in service the Grant might look worth spending some money on, but for now it was just a paper-project, one being revised every time a new piece of equipment became available.
Ten minutes after arrival a number of expensive-looking civilian passenger vehicles appeared and pulled up next to the dropship, their drivers no doubt acutely aware of just how much firepower was pointed at them. A woman in a well-made business suit popped out of one of the vehicles and with a smile plastered on her face that put Mbeki in mind of a real estate agent, or perhaps a used car salesman, she approached the ramp where Mbeki was waiting. Introducing herself as a government representative the woman said she was there to escort the delegation from the Illyrian Palatinate, and of course the observers from the Niops Association, to where the President of Circinus and his staff were waiting for them.
Unable to resist the snark Mbeki observed that from the air the planets small capital city looked unusually well-planned and ornate for that of a small agricultural colony situated way out in the boonies, and that the farms on Circinus must be exceptionally productive for such a small amount of cultivated land under the plough generating so much food for export that they could have paid for all that expensive construction.
To her credit the woman's smile didn't shift one iota as she said that she wasn't really familiar with the prices of crops or anything like that but that she'd heard that there was a good market for grain from Circinus out in the Deep Periphery and it was taxing the income from that trade which paid for everything.
She couldn't actually name any of the planets in the Deep Periphery Circinus exported to however, saying that Mbeki would have to talk to someone from the Department of Agriculture about that, or maybe the Department of Trade. Day-to-day she mostly just ran errands for the President, kept his diary up to date, and handled his mail.
Later on that day, while watching them interact at the conference, Mbeki wondered if she handled something else for the President of Circinus as well, something his wife wouldn't be too happy about, but mentally she filed that under idle gossip not worth repeating.
Mbeki, along with Major Kirsten Mroczkiewicz from the army acting as her aide were technically subordinate to the professional diplomats the High Associator had assigned to this mission to represent Niops, although by the standards of the Inner Sphere both of them would have been regarded as extremely amateur rather than professionals in the strictest sense. The lead diplomat, a Gareth Jeffries, had basically stumbled into the career because he had minored in political science while taking a degree in a 'proper' science, that being physics, and found his minor more interesting ending up studying international politics at the postgraduate level as a result.
It wasn't as if Niops was exactly awash with people that had any relevant qualifications in the field, so when the Association started looking beyond its borders Jeffries had found himself in a senior role in the new diplomatic corps, despite being barely out of his twenties at this point.
Herself having a grandson who was older than Jeffries, Sarah Mbeki thought it was hilarious, and she fervently hoped that he wasn't going to present the 'deer caught in the headlights' expression to Circinus that he had when first meeting the delegates from Illyria, the youngest of whom was nearly twice his age.
Given their oligarchic political structure it wasn't surprising that all the Illyrian representatives hailed from one of the merchant families in the Palatinate, their chief negotiator was a first cousin of the current Administrator, as they called their head-of-state, but despite the nepotism they did at least seem to know their business and during the journey had discussed their objectives and game-plan with Jeffries. The Palatinate had no interest in going to war with Circinus, but they were equally clear that they wanted to leave no doubt in the minds of the opposition that if they thought Illyria could be pushed around without a fight they were sorely mistaken.
Much to the relief of everyone in the Niops delegation the Palatinate government didn't really believe the claims by Circinus that their failed raid was a pre-emptive strike resulting from a fear that the Illyrians were planning to invade them. It was just plausible enough that it might be true, providing everyone with a diplomatic 'out' from actually going to war if that was what everyone wanted, but as the aggressor both Niops and Illyria expected Circinus to be the one to formally apologise, make reparations and agree to terms set out by the Palatinate and the Association.
Since it was their planet that was raided, and their sovereignty violated, the directions given to Jeffries by the High Associator was to follow the lead of the Palatinate. If they were too amiable and lenient towards their hosts then Jeffries was supposed to let Rear Admiral Mbeki growl a little and make some vague threats but the Association didn't really want to potentially get tied down militarily this far from the Niops system, they just wanted Circinus to behave itself… or else.
After warning the Illyrian representatives that once on Circinus it was likely that they would be under electronic surveillance at all times Mbeki had provided them with both a White Noise Generator and a Bug Scanner for if they ever wanted to discuss something, and using a scanner of her own once she, Jeffries and Mroczkiewicz climbed into the vehicle that would transport them into the city she was happy to see her caution was justified as the device immediately detected an electronic listening device hidden in the car.
Not that they would have said anything in the car anyway, the driver could have overheard after all, but it did amuse Mbeki to loudly suggest the locals fumigate the vehicle because it was infested with bugs, the kind you needed EMP to exterminate them with not DDT.
After passing several grainfields and a large livestock ranch the vehicles reached the city and it looked as prosperous on the ground as it did from the air. As they pulled up outside the government building in the centre of town Mroczkiewicz observed while the car door was opened for her that the old saying was clearly wrong, crime actually did pay after all.
After a low-key greeting at the entrance the delegations from Illyria and Niops were led through into a rather grand hallway and then off into a side room where a man sat behind a desk was recording everyone's name, title and any other pertinent information into a noteputer and then printing out name-badges for everyone.
Apparently there was a buffet laid on in the next room where the local dignitaries were waiting. Under the circumstances it all seemed weirdly amicable, their hosts cordial and polite, courteous even, and Mbeki idly wondered if they had planned for eventually getting caught red-handed having contingency plans to smooth things over.
It all certainly seemed very organised at least, and letting the Illyrian's go first Jeffries patiently waited his turn to be registered, receiving his badge and then joining the Ilyrians again while Mbeki got hers next.
Kirsten Mroczkiewicz went last which was where the fun began.
"Another from the Niops Association I assume" the clerk behind the desk said in a bored tone, still looking down at his noteputer. "Name and title" he requested.
"Major Christine Brzęczyszczykiewicz" she replied.
The clerk froze for a moment and then looked up. "I'm sorry?" he responded, looking perplexed.
"Major Christine Brzęczyszczykiewicz" the SLDF officer repeated, completely deadpan.
The clerk blinked. "Can you spell that for me?" he requested.
"C.H.R.I.S.T.I.N.E." Mroczkiewicz obliged.
"No, I meant your second name" the clerk responded, increasingly sure she was yanking his chain.
Mroczkiewicz did so, the clerk's expression becoming ever funnier as she did so.
"That is not a real name" the clerk confidently declared, the damn Nee-oppies probably thought that having a couple of warships meant they could play games with anyone they liked, he thought to himself.
Kirsten Mroczkiewicz reached under her collar and removed her dogtags, throwing them down on the desk in front of the clerk. "Take a look and then apologise" she told him curtly.
The clerk picked up the dogtags and examined them carefully. In order to fit the excessively long name on the tags the letters stamped into the metal were absolutely tiny, the clerk assuming that the alternative would have been tags the size of a dinner-plate. "I'm sorry" he eventually said sheepishly, recording the name on his noteputer before handing back the tags.
"I hope you made sure to add the ogonek to the first letter e in my surname."
"The what?"
"The ogonek, the little tail underneath. It's a diacritic that effects how the letter is pronounced" Mroczkiewicz explained. "It might have been hard to see on the tags" she conceded. "If you left it off nobody would know how to say my name properly if they saw it written down."
The clerk stared at her. "Lady, if one person in a thousand can look at this name and have so much as a clue how it's supposed to be said out loud I'd be amazed" he told her.
Kirsten Mroczkiewicz, AKA 'Christine Brzęczyszczykiewicz', glared at him. "Is this some kind of anti-Polish racism or something?" she growled. "I heard that most of the people here are descended from families who came from the Lyran Commonwealth, and I can hear a trace of a German accent in your voice too. Is it just Poles you've got a problem with or any Slavs?" she asked accusingly. "****** Krauts" she muttered under her breath.
"Let it go Major" Mbeki interjected, mostly because the army officer seemed to be having far too much fun with her fake name.
"If you insist Ma'am" Mroczkiewicz deferred to her superior, she had already had her fun anyway though she did scowl at the clerk when he passed her the name badge he had printed out for her, in very small print.
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Part XLII - Section 2 of 2
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"You know, an awful lot of people changed the spellings of their names by removing the diacritics to make it easier for the Anglos in particular to cope, my own family included" a young man wearing something that approximated a military uniform broke into the conversation. "Originally our name wasn't Cirion, it was Cirión" he said, pronouncing the name the second time in a Spanish accent.
"Some of us aren't quitters" Mroczkiewicz replied sarcastically.
"Captain Zane Cirion at your service" the man introduced himself. "You may have met my sister?" he suggested, smiling.
Mroczkiewicz smirked. "So I assumed, I guess she was just following in the family tradition of giving up when she surrendered to our people on Illyria" she added.
"Not without putting up quite the fight first from what I've heard" Zane Cirion replied, still smiling.
"Enough to put my cousin Jacquline in hospital minus a few internal organs" Mroczkiewicz told him truthfully. Jackie Mroczkiewicz had been piloting a Wasp that got itself almost completely wrecked by a heavy mech belonging to the Black Warriors.
In retrospect asking for a transfer from the Skunk Works on Niops V where she had been the test-pilot for the prototype of the new model Hussar had not perhaps been Jackie's best ever decision, although it wasn't like anyone had expected the training mission to Illyria to end up facing actual combat. If they had Jackie would have likely volunteered anyway but would have insisted on bringing along the 'Winged Hussar' for proper live-fire testing.
With more armour, all that fancy electronics and a ER Large Laser to play with instead of the Medium Laser on the Wasp she might not have ended up in the infirmary wondering if she was lucky to survive or unlucky to need almost as much repair work as her mech did.
"Terribly sorry to hear that but C'est La Guerre" Cirion responded. "I hope her chances of pulling through aren't too bad."
"She'll be fine, she's just annoyed that it'll be a couple of months before they can clone her a new liver so she can drink again" Mroczkiewicz replied. "Where are my manners?" she asked rhetorically. "Captain Cirion, may I present Rear Admiral Sarah Mbeki of the Niops Association Navy."
"Charmed I'm sure" Cirion responded, formally bowing to Mbeki. "If it wasn't for the unexpected appearance of that frigate hanging above our heads I would have wondered if Niops actually had enough ships to warrant having a naval officer of that rank, but under the circumstances I guess you do."
"Given that I'm not even the highest ranked naval officer in the fleet you might want to revise your estimates of our ability to project power a little higher still" Mbeki replied evenly. "Should I assume that your father, Colonel Cirion, is also here?" she asked, looking around.
"He'll be along later, once negotiations for an end to hostilities are formally underway. I was dispatched for the meet and greet in his stead" Cirion replied. "On that note I should probably go and say hello to the delegation from the Palatinate. It's been a pleasure meeting you both, and I hope that you've been treating my sister and those under her command with equal civility and the proprieties they deserve."
"We're fairly sure she deserves facing the gallows so no" Mbeki replied, smiling sweetly.
If she had been expecting an angry reaction she didn't get one. "Sounds like you've met her for sure" Cirion" replied, smiling back. "For a girl named for the angels she tortured me rather more like a demon would have when we were growing up together" he joked. "I'm sure we'll get the chance to talk again later. Admiral Mbeki, Major Brzęczyszczykiewicz" he bowed to each in turn before heading off towards where the buffet was.
Kirsten Mroczkiewicz blinked. "I can't believe he got that right" she said quietly to Mbeki.
"Smooth little bastard" Mbeki whispered back as Jeffries rejoined them looking perplexed. "Something wrong Sir?" she asked the diplomat.
"ComStar are here" Jeffries told here. "I just ran into a Precentor and a couple of her stooges."
Mbeki raised her eyebrows. "Why the hell would ComStar be here? They don't have an HPG station on Circinus."
"They say they're here as diplomatic observers" Jeffries told her. "They're also talking about adding Circinus to the network as a matter of priority."
"Why? Hardly anybody lives here?" Mroczkiewicz queried. There were periphery systems just as close to the Inner Sphere that were both considerably more populous, and far more important to interstellar trade than Circinus that ComStar had never bothered with.
"Something about the 'misunderstanding' between Circinus and Illyria demonstrating how vitally important good interstellar communication is" Jeffries replied dubiously. "I can only assume that their Precentor on Illyria clued them in on what was going on."
"Yeah. And wasn't the timing of the HPG stations in the Free Worlds League that Illyria and Niops are linked up to suddenly working again just then one hell of a coincidence" Mbeki observed sardonically, it being generally accepted that ComStar was still trying to get Niops to hand over control of NHCOMNET to them, being deliberately awkward as a result. "Other than Oriente we must have been practically the last systems reconnected, and Oriente has the excuse that its station had been blown up."
"ComStar does have a record of inserting itself into diplomatic negotiations between the Great Houses, and between smaller polities too on occasion" Jeffries noted, cautioning against an assumption that they were always self-serving and Machiavellian. "They like to portray themselves as being fair-minded neutral brokers and that plays into that image."
"I suspect the new Captain-General would laugh his ass off if anyone referred to ComStar as 'neutral' after they provided intel on the Free Worlds League to their enemies" Mbeki replied wryly. "Or he would if he wasn't still sore about his father's untimely demise."
Jeffries nodded. Although officially Charles Marik's death had been from natural causes there was a very strong suspicion that someone in the upper echelons of power within the Free Worlds's League had gotten him out of the way because he was refusing to make peace with ComStar. It might have even been his successor Gerald Marik who now ruled that was responsible, House Marik didn't have the best record as regards familial loyalty. The smart money however was on the League's Parliament removing Charles from the equation after failing to get him to back down to ComStar despite the FWL heading rapidly towards military and economic collapse.
That wasn't to say that the Free Worlds League had just rolled over during their negotiations with ComStar to end the interdiction, Garth Marik, Gerald's little brother, had taken a fairly hard line with Raymond Karpov and the First Circuit, refusing to accept any greater financial penalty than the one Karpov's predecessor Conrad Toyama had originally demanded before his own death. Analysts on Niops considered it possible that the League's refusal to kowtow, rather than merely bend the knee slightly to Comstar was partially down to the shipments of PPC's from the Association strengthening their military position a little, but that was just supposition.
"Careful, we're probably being spied on by ROM agents right this moment" Jeffries cautioned.
"You could be right, in that case let me just state for the record that Jerome Blake was a jumped-up telephone repairman, Conrad Toyama made up all the stuff he said Blake told him on his deathbed, and anyone that thinks it isn't at all suspicious that Toyama died from a stroke so soon after he named Karpov his successor is a freaking idiot" Mbeki responded, grinning.
"And with that some poor ROM agent somewhere is having a heart attack because it's his job to repeat all that to his superiors" Mroczkiewicz said, laughing as they made their way towards the buffet, confident that the locals were unlikely to try to poison them.
Unbeknownst to Mroczkiewicz it was actually two ROM agents that were listening in via a directional microphone, one of them turning to the other saying, 'Not it' with a pained expression on his face.
Since by jumping into a non-standard jump-point the Illyrian and Niops delegations had arrived about a week ahead of schedule, no seven-and-a-half day journey on a dropship from the Zenith or Nadir points for them, it had been assumed that the locals would be caught on the hop, unprepared to get underway with negotiations immediately. Putting Circinus on the back-foot still further by them not being fully ready to respond when Illyria and Niops made their case should have worked to counter the home team advantage somewhat it was hoped. Annoyingly however they seemed fully prepared and organised already, and were only too happy to begin the formal proceedings when the Palatinate representatives requested they move forward with the business at hand immediately.
A large conference room had been fitted out for the occasion, opulently decorated and furnished. While at the buffet Mbeki had managed to find a government official from the local Department of Trade and had queried just how a small agricultural colony managed to pay for all this finery, without missing a beat the official claimed that Circinus had been selling on resources and technology stripped from Camp Amber, the old SLDF facilities on the planet situated under the Ezo desert. These dated from well before the Amaris War, when the Rim Worlds Republic was just another loyal Star League member state and had later been fought over during Kerensky's campaign against the usurper.
Camp Amber had been a major fortress, one that it had taken the SLDF some time to wrest back from the RWR Army that had taken up residence after much of the Star League military was recalled back to the Terran Hegemony by First Lord Richard Cameron, this being at the behest of his 'friend and loyal advisor' Stefan Amaris. It was certainly plausible that enough valuable equipment still remained behind after the fighting for Circinus to turn a tidy profit from salvaging technology from there, but Mbeki thought it more likely that the wealth on display was ill-gotten gains from illicit piracy and that what remained of SLDF resources and facilities on Circinus was devoted towards keeping the Black Warriors fighting fit.
For all Mbeki knew the vast underground facilities of Camp Amber were piled high with stolen loot. Piracy was rife out here, the opportunities for successful raiding had been extensive since the fall of the Star League, with planetary militias near the periphery stripped of men and equipment as they were deemed better needed on the front lines as the Great Houses bludgeoned each other into a stupor.
According to their prisoners back at Niops the only reason the Black Warriors had not joined Kerensky's Exodus was because the notification reached them too late, lacking an HPG and with regular interstellar travel still disrupted the message had only arrived at Circinus by courier months later so they were accidentally left behind.
Ironically something similar had happened with Mbeki and the 295th her naval squadron was attached to, though in their case they weren't so delayed that they still thought they might be able to catch up with the main group and had tried to do so. If not for accidents of fate both her people and the Black Warriors might have ended up in the Pentagon Worlds as the 331st had done, though the history of the latter indicated that wouldn't likely have worked out for the best either.
Fate was a fickle thing, Mbeki idly considered as their hosts announced that the armistice and treaty negotiations would begin shortly.
"They look confident" Jeffries whispered to Mbeki when the President of Circinus arrived, accompanied by Colonel Cirion, effectively head of the armed forces.
"It's just bluster but you look nervous" Mbeiki whispered back. "There's no need, we're not the ones in the weak position. In the worst case scenario we just decide, 'to hell with this diplomacy shit' and just crush them like a bug" she told him, grinning.
Jeffries smiled. "I'm not sure the High Associator would approve" he replied.
"This time next year he'll be retired and boring people with stories about how he used to be in charge, so don't sweat it" Mbeki advised. "Who cares if Circinus doesn't like our brand of gunboat diplomacy as long as they keep out of our way?" she asked rhetorically.
Jeffries nodded and then straightened up, adopting a calm demeanour. "Oderint dum metuant" he quoted. "Let them hate as long as they fear."
"Who said that?"
"Caligula, not the nicest or sanest Roman Emperor to be honest" Jeffries told her. "Machiavelli meanwhile said it was better to be feared than loved if you couldn't be both."
Mbeki chuckled. "It wouldn't take a particularly perceptive person to realise you're an academic" she told him. "Just try not to make your speeches and arguments sound like a doctoral thesis being presented" she advised. "Let the Illyrian's do the heavy lifting unless they're not up to it."
"Good Afternoon everyone" the ComStar Precentor said loudly loudly as everyone filed into the conference room and took their seats. "At the request of the Circinus Federation, and as a neutral party in this dispute, I will be presiding over the negotiations" she announced. "Assuming there are no objections?" she added, looking around.
"Can I just clarify something first?" Jeffries replied.
"What exactly do you need clarification on?" the Precentor queried.
"Are we supposed to be voicing possible objections as to your presiding, or to the laughable notion of the absolute neutrality of ComStar?" Jeffries asked sarcastically. "It wasn't too long ago that you were caught out feeding intelligence data on the troop dispositions of the Free Worlds League to its enemies" he stated flatly. "To be honest, this all makes me wonder in fact how Circinus seemed so well-informed as to arms purchases being made by our friends in the Illyrian Palatinate from our friends in the Magistracy of Canopus" he added.
Attaboy, Mbeki thought to herself as the Precentor glared daggers at him.
"Such accusations are completely unfounded and I demand they are withdrawn!" the ComStar official replied angrily.
"Merely supposition, not accusation on my part" Jeffries replied in an off-handed manner as if it didn't really matter. "Without proof of any malfeasance by ComStar in this matter an assumption of innocence follows as a matter of course. As such the Niops Association voices no objections to the Precentor taking the role she has been requested to undertake in these proceedings" he said. "Though we will of course monitor for signs of possible bias in favour of one party or another and may revise our opinion accordingly later" he added, now looking thoughtful and deliberative.
"The Illyrian Palatinate has no objection to ComStar's representative presiding" their chief negotiator added for his delegation.
"Fine. Then shall we begin?" the Precentor asked, still glaring at Jeffries. Were these people always so lacking in decorum or was it only when they had a warship above your head making them think they could be as obnoxious and imperious as they wanted and get away with it.
Who did they think they were anyway? The Terran Hegemony?
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Note from the Author:
Circinus IV (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Circinus#Circinus_IV) is another hot, dry planet like many of those in the periphery that have a breathable atmosphere but a low population. If the Star League hadn't fallen it might have been eventually terraformed into a nicer world but without that it's not exactly a paradise. The old SLDF facilities of Camp Amber under the Ezo desert were fought over during the Amaris War and would have been very useful to the Black Warriors later on.
The Lee Class (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Lee_(DropShip_class)) dropship was pretty much the final word in SLDF battalion transports when the Amaris War broke out. It was better regarded than the slightly larger Colossus (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Colossus_(DropShip_class)) and very heavily armed. Replacing much of the armament with the lighter 'Improved' early-clantech versions frees up some weight to add more heat-sinks and Arrow IV missile launchers.
Given that the communication from Kerensky inviting the Black Warriors never got to them until it was far too late my assumption is that Circinus lacked an HPG at the time (it may have been destroyed during the fighting). It had one later on in canon but by then it was the capital world of a multi-system polity not a single-planet agricultural colony that only officially exported food (the exports of raiding missions and imports of pirate booty were somewhat less public).
Niops lacking an experienced diplomatic corps led to people like OC Gareth Jeffries here being drafted into the role. He's actually pretty sharp but nonetheless rather inexperienced, this leading to him being a little undiplomatic... and ironically blunt.
Cirion is not a real name, it actually comes from a character invented by Tolkien, however Cirión is a real name so I'm assuming someone from the family changed it at some point.
Feel free to speculate what ComStar is up to...
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"Major Christine Brzęczyszczykiewicz" she replied.
The fact that you didn't include the link to video that is origin of this meme, is a crime against the humanity.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfKZclMWS1U (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfKZclMWS1U)
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I'd love see how much ComStar is sweat being pressured by unmeasured power.
Do you they really NOT know whom the Niops Association has become? Its like they forgot.
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in a universe with warcrimes o'clock from a communist hermit kingdom and everything bad about feudalism let alone Japanese Feudalism yet even amongst these evils the PHONE COMPANY makes them look like bad toddlers!!!! Get Teddy and Taft we have a trust to BUST!!!
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Not it! :evil: :grin: :laugh:
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Hilarious all the way around, and thank you to PsihoKekec for the origin of the meme! :D
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Do you they really NOT know whom the Niops Association has become? Its like they forgot.
They know. To them, they are Terra, and everyone should be bowing down to them. Terran Supremacy is one of the keystones of politics in the Inner Sphere from the Terran Alliance to the ilClan. Niops is a part of the Terran Hegemony, and should obey Terra and its custodians.
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Part XLIII - Section 1 of 2
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"Niops delenda est."
Raymond Karpov, Primus of Comstar - 2842CE
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Association Council Building – Niops Association (Niops VII) – 2840
"You really came up with this on the spur of the moment?" Giles Olson asked the young man sat across from him.
Gareth Jeffries nodded. "Yes Sir, the delegates from the Palatinate seemed far too forgiving for my liking, to be honest I think ComStar might have been whispering in their ears, and although the final decision was their call given that it was their sovereignty which had been violated, both Admiral Mbeki and myself believed that Circinus was getting off far too lightly if we didn't tweak the final settlement against them some more."
The High Associator nodded. Requesting that Jeffries attend his office to brief him as soon as he returned from the negotiations on Circinus had proven well worth some of his increasingly limited time left in office, it was filling in a lot of details that the summary report that arrived by HPG a few weeks earlier had left out for reasons of brevity. "You believed they needed to be brought down a peg or two" Olson surmised.
"Yes Sir, frankly some of them looked a little too smug for my liking when the return of their jumpships was agreed" Jeffries replied. "Looking at the matter from a purely financial perspective, money and trade being very much the prism through which the Illyrians view the world, the cash value of those jumpships far exceeds the losses that would have been incurred even if the raid had been completely successful. As such the Palatinate judged keeping them a disproportionate penalty that would only guarantee future enmity with their neighbour, even if Circinus was generally seen as the initial aggressor and therefore the guilty party" he continued. "It's not an entirely meritless argument, overly harsh terms written into peace treaties have historically led to subsequent wars on occasion. For example, the Versailles Treaty of 1919 may have formally brought the First World War to an close but it arguably set the conditions for the Second World War breaking out two decades later."
Olson nodded again, he might have been less lenient himself in the same position but it was a decent point nonetheless and it wasn't for Niops to dictate to another government how they behaved anyway, at least not a friendly government. Staying on good terms with both the Illyrian Palatinate and the Magistracy of Canopus was a critical foreign-policy goal, it was nice to only have to worry about the border with the Marik's. "They weren't concerned that Circinus might use the jumpships to attempt a repeat performance later?" he queried.
"Between the arms being imported from the Magistracy, and their share of the battlefield prizes, Illyria believes they'll be too hard a nut to crack in future" Jeffries replied. "About the only thing the prisoners said that we ever believed completely was that they made their play when they did because they didn't think they could once the Palatinate's military build-up was complete. It's even worse for them now that it would have been going forward because the Black Warriors are down a bunch of battlemechs, several of which will shortly be taking up a new life in Palatinate colours making it worse, and they're also pretty sure we've also got the Illyrian's backs."
"Niops being the eight-hundred-pound gorilla out here in this neck of the woods" Olson said, chuckling. "We've come a long way since I won my first election" he said, mind always aware that the end of his final term was drawing close. The general election was only weeks away now and since the constitution restricted how long you could stay in office he was unable to stand himself.
Jeffries smiled. "I wasn't actually old enough to vote in that one" he told the High Associator.
Olson looked at him askance. "Please don't say things like that, it makes me feel ancient" he requested glumly. "While I try and forget you just told me that, what was their reaction when you insisted on the extra terms being added to the armistice agreement" he asked curiously.
"Initially they all just stared at me in disbelief until eventually their President stood up and bellowed: 'You want us to foot the bill for the repairs of the battlemechs you took from our people as salvage? Are you ****** serious?' and then he looked to the ComStar Precentor as if expecting her to back him up."
"And she didn't" Olson responded, grinning.
"Nope. I guess she picked up on the vibes Admiral Mbeki was signalling, the ones that were screaming 'Screw this. Let's just crush them like a bug and go home' to anyone paying attention" Jeffries replied, grinning. "They'd already accepted that we were going to keep their dropships, the Palatinate was pretty happy with getting themselves a Union in good condition as well as some mechs, and even if we just stick the two Leopard's we're keeping in mothballs for now Mbeki's sure they'll be useful eventually. They thought that making them stump up the cash to fix the machines we broke was rubbing their faces in it though."
"Which it was" Olson said flatly.
"Yes, that was the entire idea. I wanted them to know exactly how much further down the food chain they were than us, and they must have known deep down already because after some bluster, and a clearly fake threat to withdraw from negotiations entirely, they eventually agreed to our terms as you know" Jeffries explained. "In the spirit of trying to sound reasonable and conciliatory, and after letting them seethe for a while, I told them that we wouldn't expect the money to pay for the repairs right away just as long as the financial restitution for the casualties they caused wasn't too long in coming" he continued. "They bitched about how much we wanted them to pay the families of the deceased, and they really bitched about covering the medical bills of our injured, but they shut up when we said if they didn't agree to pay we'd only return one of the jumpships, sell the other to the Free Worlds League or the Magistracy at well below market price, and send them what was left of the money after deducting the reparations from there."
Jeffries leaned forward in his chair. "Thinking strategically. Since I played bad cop at the negotiations it might be worthwhile for someone else from Niops to offer Circinus a diplomatic olive branch in the near future, something to diffuse the situation somewhat so when they think of Niops they don't automatically just think 'obnoxious, overbearing ****** throwing their weight around' just 'not people we want to mess with' instead perhaps" he suggested. "One of Admiral Mbeki's officers gave me an idea when he was complaining about the climate on Circinus, we might want to consider supplying them with an industrial-sized Jamerson-Ulikov water-purification system or two once we've got production of those ramped up."
"Ah, yes. The very best type of development aid, the kind that looks generous but also means they're dependent on us for replacement filters if they want the thing to keep running" Olson surmised.
"Right" Jeffries confirmed his reasoning. "If we offer to supply them at cost, as we're planning to do for the Magistracy and the Palatinate, we can portray it as being just an extension of an existing policy rather than a means to put a leash on the bastards" he said. "If we really wanted to make it look convincing maybe you could suggest to the incoming High Associator that they be the one that makes the offer. The change in administration being the reason for a more easy-going, less strident diplomatic policy than we had under your harsh regime."
"I was wondering about that when I read the HPG you sent summarising how the negotiations went" Olson told him. "The cryptic part about the election coming up and your concern that the next High Associator might undo all your hard work to constrain future aggression by Circinus."
"Seemed like a way to throw ComStar off the scent" Jeffries replied, smiling. "As regards the rest of the HPG, sorry it was so brief, High Associator" he apologised, "If we didn't have to utilise the ComStar Network I wouldn't have left out so much information that wasn't misdirection, but they clearly read and copy everything that's placed in their care before delivering it, and besides which have you seen what they charge per page of text?" he asked rhetorically, shaking his head in disbelief. "I'll never complain about how much NHCOMNET charge to send a letter to my sister working on Comstock again."
"Monopoly pricing and no regulation because that precious Communication's Protocol of theirs let's them get away with fleecing their customers" Olson replied with distaste. "It's not like SLCOMNET didn't turn a profit back in the Star League days, they weren't altruists, they just didn't abuse their position to completely screw over everyone wanting to send an HPG."
Jeffries smiled. "The big difference was because the primary goal of the Department of Communications was to help tie the Inner Sphere together, not to make themselves rich" he replied.
"You really think ComStar's primary goal is to make themselves rich?" Olson asked, raising his eyebrows as if chiding the young diplomat.
"No. Their primary objective is the pursuit of power and influence. Information is one currency of that, money is another, that's why they seek to obtain and hoard both" Jeffries replied. "The real question is how much military strength they have, that being another important currency of power."
"General Romanov for one doesn't buy the notion that they demobilised all those SLDF divisions Kerensky placed in Blake's hands after they took over Terra and handed it to ComStar on a plate" Olson noted.
"It would have been a little foolish of them to do so when the Great Houses were annexing Hegemony systems left, right and centre, so I'd have to agree with her assessment" Jeffries replied. "If I recall correctly most of those divisions weren't Hegemony born Royal formations so most of their veterans are going to be long retired or dead by now, but they'll still have the hardware and presumably they had the foresight to recruit and train up replacements" he theorised.
Olson laughed. "A few more years of the Successor States battering themselves back towards the pre-industrial age and ComStar might start thinking they can retake the Hegemony" he suggested.
"Yeah, just in time for the Clans to show up intending to do the same" Jeffries responded, laughing. "I guess we'll just sit back and take on the winner."
"It's a plan, I'll write it up on a note and leave it in my desk for my successor along with the Water-Purifier idea I'll make sure to take personal credit for" Olson joked. "Talking of plans, you're not entirely convinced by the Palatinate's one that they think will prevent future unpleasantness between them and Circinus I believe?"
Jeffries sighed. "In my opinion it's just another example of how their cultural bias towards commerce and trade effects their critical thinking" he replied. "Circinus claims that they thought Illyria was going to invade them in order to take control of the valuable mineral wealth on Circinus IV, a claim that is most likely just bullshit but who can know for absolute certain. The Palatinate chose to take it at face value, perhaps just as a diplomatic courtesy perhaps not, which is why they suggested a joint business venture with Circinus to start to exploit that wealth."
The High Associator pursed his lips. "The Illyrians do have the mining expertise" he observed.
"Yes, but they also believe that if they forge mutually beneficial trade relations with Circinus then they won't have any more problems with them" Jeffries responded. "It seems a reasonable position, persuasive even at first glance, but historically nations go to war with their most important trading partners all the time. I'll give you a historical example, again using the First World War as an exemplar although now it's from the beginning of the conflict not the end. In 1913 the two countries Germany traded with most were Britain and Russia, a year later they were fighting against them in the most destructive war in history to that date, something that surprised a number of theorists who thought that couldn't happen because their economies were too intertwined."
"It's not all about economics" Olson observed.
"No Sir" Jeffries agreed. "Wars mostly ceased being profitable with mass industrialisation, it's rare to gain back more resources even in victory than you had to spend on the spend on the military to do so, but just because invading someone would likely lead you worse off in the long term didn't seem to reduce the number of people starting wars."
"I assume you explained all this to the representatives from the Palatinate?" Olson asked.
The young diplomat sighed. "Of course, but they want to believe that everything revolves around trade so they do" he replied. "At least they're not naïve enough to think we should give back both jumpships before Circinus hands over the reparation money trusting them to pay later when we have less of a hold over them. We'll give one back as a gesture of good faith, I'm thinking whichever is in the worse condition myself, but if they want the other one as well, then obviously we'll want to see the C-Bills they owe us first."
"Have they even got the money?"
Jeffries shrugged. "Honestly, we were kinda hoping they would say they had it on hand, then I could have asked why they were so flush with ready cash and make a flippant comment about how that disproved the old adage that 'crime does not pay' because they seemed to be making a good living from it, but no such luck. They asked if they could pay by instalments instead of one lump sum."
"Just so long as they don't expect to get the damn ship back before the final payment that's fine as far as I'm concerned" Olson replied. "It's just a shame that both jump-ships weren't carrying dropships or we could have ransomed a few of them too."
"The assumption is that they were expecting to capture those Danais cargo haulers so they had to have the free docking collars to haul them away," Jeffries replied, "which brings me neatly to something else" he continued. "They were quite cute in sticking to their cover story consistently, as part of that they refused to agree to anything without a concession from the Palatinate that Circinus could send people to inspect those dropships in order to verify whether Illyria was in fact militarising them, as their supposed intelligence source told them it was."
Olson laughed. "I assume the Palatinate agreed?"
"Well yeah, because they weren't militarising them" Jeffries replied. "It was actually pretty funny, Circinus was lying, we knew they were lying, and they knew we knew they were lying, but for the sake of diplomat niceties we all just pretended otherwise" he continued, shaking his head in amusement. "It's very different seeing it all play out like that in real life not in books let me tell you, although the funniest part was Illyria offering to sell them to Circinus at market price if that reassurance wasn't enough."
The High Associator was very much reminded of the negotiations between ComStar and the Free Worlds league which had led to the HPG interdiction being lifted. As part of the agreement Garth Marik, representing his older brother the new Captain-General, had to formally state for the record that their father had been in error when he declared that ComStar had been passing on military intelligence they had on the League to its enemies. The fact that Charles Marik had been right, that everyone in authority in the League knew he was right, that Comstar knew he was right and that the other Successor States knew he was right as well mattered little. The important thing was that a inconvenient truth be put aside for the sake of expediency and ComStar's preferred public image.
"How was the Illyrian offer received?" Olson asked, intrigued.
"In a way that let me know Colonel Cirion also has a sense of humour" Jeffries told him. "He asked what they would charge the Black Warrior's for one, seeing as how he was now down a Union, and then he asked how much extra he would have to pay to get it converted to a Trojan, assuming that hadn't been done already."
Olson chuckled. "I do wonder how events might have panned out if one of the prisoners we took wasn't his daughter" he remarked. "It would have made it a little awkward if his government had decided to simply disavow any knowledge."
"On the surface the Black Warriors do seem loyal to the civilian government, but it must have dawned on them, even if it was never actually said aloud, that he might have some issues with letting his little girl get hanged or thrown out of an airlock" Jeffries suggested. "It's more than possible that Cirion's troops are more loyal to him, or rather his family, than they are the President. Notions of obligation to an individual or a dynasty rather than a state isn't just for the Great Houses after all, one of the best latter-day critiques of Marx is the failure of his model to predict that feudalism was effectively going to make a big comeback. It's not the wealthy industrialists calling all the shots."
"If it was then I wouldn't be running Niops, Guan Yuanchun would be" Olson remarked. The richest man on the planet had seen his wealth only increase over the last decade as he invested capital into various off-world enterprises that were paying off handsomely. The money he was ploughing into Alphard and Comstock in particular, the future industrial heartlands of the Hegemony, would likely see him become an actual billionaire presently.
Other than Olson himself the man the press were most asking the question: 'Which candidate do you endorse?' was Guan Yuanchun, but the man apparently had the sense to stay out of politics, apart that is for funding advocacy groups for those of Capellan refugee descent like himself.
Privately Olson knew who he wanted to win of course, based on knowing all the candidates personally apart that is from the weirdo who wanted to introduce the clan caste system to Niops and was running on that as a platform, but he wasn't saying.
Regarding the aforementioned weirdo inexplicably he was not even of Wolverine descent, he was actually Niops born, which only made it all the stranger. Olson wondered if he was even grounded enough in reality to realise that if he did win Franklin Hallis would promptly blow his head off and rather doubted it.
Apparently said candidate also believed in phrenology, the phlogiston theory and trickle-down economics which probably explained a few things. It was a pity he didn't also profess belief in astrology as well to be honest, because if he had he could have been committed to a mental health facility for his own good and that of society at large.
"As per your prior instructions on the matter I agreed that we would release the prisoners into the custody of the Palatinate ASAP and that they would return them to Circinus" Jeffries told the High Associator. "The agreed schedule for the return of the first jumpship to Circinus only specified it occurring this year, and at our convenience."
"So, we give it back on December 31st you think?" Olson replied, grinning.
Jeffries grinned back. "If we can jump in at exactly at 23:59 on that date that would be ideal" he agreed. "We wouldn't want to break any agreements but there's no need to go above and beyond the minimum required."
"The heady joys of malicious compliance are not to be underestimated" Olson remarked. "****** ComStar do it to us all the time. Did you hear yet that they're still dithering over releasing our access to the funds we deposited with them at Hednesford?" he asked.
"Still? I thought that would have been sorted out by now" Jeffries replied, surprised.
"They keep changing their story, the latest one is that they need to make sure that the data in their Hednesford accounts from before the Interdiction perfectly match the back-up records on Terra just in case SAFE meddled with them somehow" Olson explained. "As if we didn't know ROM spent the entire ComStar War running rings around Free Worlds intelligence."
To be fair it wasn't like SAFE had completely failed in its efforts to deal with ComStar's intelligence operations within their territory. They had captured quite a number of ComStar personnel, including members of ROM, passing on some of what they learned to Niops because they were trying to keep the Association on-side and not risk their source of PPC's being cut-off, but overall SAFE had lived up to its Rep of being a distinctly second-rate intelligence organisation.
If the League had been a little less desperate at the time it was unlikely that they would have been so willing, perhaps even eager, to share intelligence information with some minor periphery nation like Niops, but at the time they had needed all the help they could get. Needless to say, once HPG access had been restored, and the military situation stabilised, SAFE had almost immediately stopped feeding potentially valuable information they had learned about ComStar and its intelligence agency to Niops, it simply went against the grain to do so except in the direst of circumstances, but for a while keeping their PPC supplier on-side had outweighed other considerations.
It was considered likely that ComStar was aware that the Niops Association was better informed about them thanks to SAFE than they would wish them to be. After all SAFE's own reputation was that it leaked like a sieve at the best of times, while the messy, near-chaotic political structure of the Free Worlds League likely made infiltration of the various structures within its government a less onerous task than doing so would be in the Capellan Confederation or the Draconis Combine for example. How the phone company would treat with them in future as a result was uncertain as yet but they were certainly being a pain-in-the-ass at the moment.
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Part XLIII - Section 2 of 2
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Olson adopted a serious expression. "It's possible that you might be required to undertake a diplomatic mission to Terra on our behalf in order to try and normalise our relations with ComStar" he told the young man.
"Normalise?"
"Not in the sense that everyone else kisses their ass so they won't switch off their HPG access, or pass on their secrets to someone else, not that 'normal' Gareth" Olson explained. "I mean our normal in the sense that they pass on our messages and we pay for the privilege, nothing more than that."
"What makes you think our relationship with ComStar is becoming rocky enough to warrant a little amiable chat to clear the air? Not just their interceding in the Circinus issue surely?"
Olson shook his head. "No, that's just one of the indications we have that ComStar is starting to think we need to be put in our place" he said. "As you know, during their interdiction on the Free Worlds League we were routing communications via the Magistracy, Thraxa having the closest available HPG that still worked."
Jeffries nodded. "I really like those cuts of Tazqan meat we've been importing from there too" he replied. "Amazing depth of taste."
"I know right?" Olson enthusiastically agreed. "I've asked the Department of Trade to see if we can import a few Tazqan and raise them here, they'll probably do better in our climate than most herd animals, but that's a digression" he said. "Apparently the HPG on Thraxa is expected to fail at any moment and ComStar have no plans to repair or replace the thing."
"But that's ridiculous" Jeffries replied, visibly surprised. "I know they don't prioritise systems where there's not much trade, or data traffic, but I thought that we agreed with the Duchess of Thraxa that we'd route all our trade with the Magistracy through there from now on?"
"We did, and we are, it's the closest system in the Magistracy to us anyway and she's proven a reliable person to do business with" Olson replied. "We're assuming that ComStar are doing it to try and lean on us, their options for doing so are limited and while letting Thraxa fall off the grid doesn't impact us directly it's an annoyance at the very least. The director of NHCOMNET has been pushing me to establish an outpost in the Al-Farghani system, no habitable planets but there's a moon that could be terraformed eventually and a decent enough asteroid belt. More importantly it's within HPG transmission range of both ComStock and Thraxa so we wouldn't be so dependent upon the Hednesford station to get a message out."
"But it wouldn't be any use doing that if Thraxa isn't going to have a working HPG anyway" Jeffries noted.
"Nope" Olson confirmed. "NHCOMNET wanted to send a curt demand to the Primus himself saying that if ComStar didn't keep the Thraxa station online then we'd install an HPG of our own there" he said. "I told them it was a bad idea."
"Is it?" Jeffries asked rhetorically.
"Isn't it? Karpov would likely go ballistic" Olson stated with certainty. "According to Garth Marik the man practically had steam coming out of his ears when the Free Worlds League refused to completely supplicate themselves."
"I'm sure he would, that's why NHCOMNET would send the message to him with you countersigning, and then once the 'malevolent' Giles Olson is out of the picture the new High Associator can apologise for their behaviour and request a reset on diplomatic relations between Niops and ComStar" he suggested, smiling evilly. "Naturally as an act of goodwill it would be nice if they kept the Thraxa station running, but we'd be willing to pay some of the costs if ComStar is short of cash at the moment. The Interdiction itself, and the costs of restoring the network in Marik territory, must have drained their coffers severely, unless that is they've been overcharging everyone drastically all this time."
Olson burst out laughing. "They won't know how to respond to that at all" he said eventually. "They don't want to have to justify letting Thraxa fall off the grid, especially if we're offering to foot some of the bill."
"Better than that, if they claim its some exorbitant sum we can say that we could do it all ourselves for less than that and suggest they're being screwed by whoever is making the HPG's for them" Jeffries replied, grinning himself.
"They've clearly been trying the carrot and stick approach with us but ever since the Interdiction it's been a lot less carrot and a lot more stick" Jeffries argued. "If they get to thinking that the stumbling block was the man that's been running Niops for fifteen years, and that the new guy or girl might be less intransigent than you've been in telling them to get lost when they asked to take over control of NHCOMNET, we might get a couple more years of carrot."
Olson frowned. "At some point they're going to realise we're screwing with them."
"Yeah, and we'll know that they'll know but diplomacy is like that" Jeffries responded.
"It'll be out of my hands soon of course, but as it happens I've personally come to believe that our best approach to relations with ComStar is aloof bordering on antagonistic so that approach would lean into that" Olson responded thoughtfully. "It's something that'll give us a distinct identity as not just being another periphery microstate. We don't have to suck up to the phone company because we still know how everything the Terran Hegemony invented works and can reproduce it, and we don't have to bow and scrape to any of the Great Houses because we've got the firepower to inflict crippling losses on any aggressor" he said. "My military attaché Colonel Ebon came to me last week with a motto the armed forces wants to adopt, something that they feel as being appropriate to our circumstances: 'Irrita me invenies quid valeam'."
"Provoke me and find out what I am capable of?" Jeffries translated from Latin.
Olson nodded. "A true scholar I see" he observed appreciatively. "Although that's not quite how she translated it."
"Yes?" Jeffries queried.
"****** around and find out" Olson told him, trying not to laugh.
Jeffries laughed himself. "Not very literal but it might be a more accurate translation as regards the message it want to convey nonertheless" he had to admit. "Perhaps we need an informal motto for our foreign policy position too? Something like: 'Niops sumus. Scimus omnia et numquam pares' perhaps?" he suggested.
"We're Niops. We know everything and we're never outmatched" the High Associator translated himself. "Sounds a little boastful, but when you can back it up why not indulge in some swagger?" he asked rhetorically.
"Only boastful, sir? I was going for downright obnoxious" Jeffries replied.
"The Latin makes it sound a little too classy for that" Olson opined. "Perhaps just say it in English and then you can also substitute 'outgunned' for 'outmatched'."
Jeffries thought about that and nodded. "You've got a point" he conceded. "English and unmistakably obnoxious it is."
"Keep the Latin version in your back pocket in case you feel the need to be condescending as well" Olson advised. "I suspect that maintaining an air of intellectual superiority while talking down to ComStar in particular would render the most stoic of them completely incensed and totally throw them off their game."
"Well, they really don't like it when you correct them in public, I've seen that for myself" Jeffries told him. "The Precentor attending the Circinus negotiations quoted Metternich and said it was a something Jerome Blake came up with."
"Metternich?" Olson queried.
"He was an early nineteenth century statesman and diplomat, served the Austrian-Hungarian Empire" Jeffries explained, unsurprised that Olson was unfamiliar with the man. "I corrected her in front of everyone and she was not happy about it."
"They claim to be preserving knowledge but they're more like a religious cult every day I swear" Olson remarked. "They actually refer to their former leaders Blake and Toyama as saints did you know that? They'll be claiming they grant miracles next, the Catholic Churches should sue."
"I think they're still too busy arguing with each other to pay attention."
The High Associator blinked as something occurred to him. "Forget ComStar itself for a moment, I think I might have something else for you to do" he said suddenly. "What would happen if we contacted the Church in Rome and offered to hand over Bernard Critchly?"
"I suspect they would be very pleased" Jeffries assumed.
"Not the kind of news ComStar could suppress even if they tried. The Pope would likely spread the word far and wide don't you think?" Olson asked.
"Billions of very happy Catholics right across the Inner Sphere I would imagine."
Olson smirked. "Public relations gold just when ComStar might be looking to bad-mouth us because we won't dance to their tune."
"And we get to spread the story about how the 295th division of the SLDF fought and won the last battle of the Amaris War by defeating the Amaris Dragoons" Jeffries considered. "They'll wonder why we're only going public with this now though."
"We'll make something up about keeping it quiet while we pumped the prisoners for information about other possible Amaris holdouts and didn't want to possibly tip anybody off" Olson decided. "It's not even a complete lie, we did find out who Raymond's Redcoats were from them."
Jeffries looked thoughtful. "If we delivered Critchly to the Vatican on Terra personally we could make it a full-blown diplomat mission" he said. "The Vatican is still technically an independent state so we could present our credentials to the Pope, formalise diplomatic relations with them and then ask if we can address the First Circuit of ComStar since we're on Terra anyway."
Olson nodded. "Lots to think about here, but well worth discussing with the council" he said. "At the very least it'll be another example of Niops being the small pebble making ripples in the big pond and we're getting to the stage where that works in our favour."
"I wonder if the history books will agree" Jeffries remarked.
"If the Second Age of War doesn't come to a close soon we'll be the only ones left who are literate enough to write the history books of the future, so we should be fine" Olson replied wryly.
"What about ComStar?"
"Their history books will say that Jerome Blake rose from the dead and captured Critchly before returning to the grave" Olson joked.
"So is undead Jerome Blake a vampire or a zombie?"
"Disagreements over that will be the schism that they'll fight a civil war over, heretics being burned at the stake because they refuse to recant their belief that he cast a reflection in the mirror."
"Blasphemy!"
"May the light of Sweet Zombie Blake shine upon you my child" Olson solemnly intoned, wishing that he had a few more years left in office so he could be in charge when things got really interesting.
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Note from the Author:
ComStar had gradually become less secular and more akin to a religious order under Conrad Toyama (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Conrad_Toyama) but during Raymond Karpov's (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Raymond_Karpov) reign it really began to embrace the idea with robes, chanting and an increasingly use of clerical language. I suspect the Roman Catholic Church on Terra (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Roman_Catholic_Church) didn't know whether or not to be flattered by the imitation or not. ComStar's habit of crediting Jerome Blake with saying things other's came up with to make him look good is canon.
With ROM (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/ROM)and SAFE (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/SAFE) literally fighting it out with each other during the ComStar War (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/ComStar_War) the former was no longer quite the mystery organisation it might have been before. For the Free Worlds League, in wanting to keep Niops on-side and paint ComStar as the bad guy, to pass on information they learned about ComStar (and ROM) to the Association seems likely (they were in truly dire straits at the time).
Giles Olson won't be High Associator much longer but he's still trying to make a mark.
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Olson is succeeding in my book! Seriously, ComStar delenda est! >:D
And I'm still waiting for Niops to provide HPG service to the FWL... ;)
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"May the light of Sweet Zombie Blake shine upon you my child"
gold.... pure gold.....
wife thought i might need medical help after i reacted to reading that line.
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"We will pay for repairs to the Thraxa HPG... out of the funds you've sequestered."
"We expect those billions of C-bills returned or delivered plus 5% annual interest, assessed monthly. I assume you don't need our help calculating that?"
"We have an interesting economic analysis of how much it would cost us to run a sphere-wide HPG network and what our prices would need to be to yield a modest profit. I'm not quite sure we translated it into C-bills correctly, could you check our calculations before we publish?"
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The apoplexy any of those would cause on the ComStar side would be pure hilarity! :D
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Part XLIV - Section 1 of 2
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"The ace in the hole of the BJ-1n Blackjack was its AC/5's disguised to look like the AC/2's of the original model BJ-1. The mechwarriors that operated the BJ-1n called it the 'Five Card Trick', and in conjunction with the machine being far more mechanically reliable in reality than in was in legend they revelled in the tactical advantage that being badly underestimated provided them.
When the secret got out, as it had to eventually, they just swapped out the autocannons on the Blackjack for ER Large Lasers and the heat-sinks needed to keep them firing and the various militias of the Niops Hegemony continued to happily match their machines against all comers."
Weekend Warriors: Militia against Professionals during the Lostech War - Niops Press, 2920
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Hydrae Battlemech Manufactory (HBM) – Alphard – 2840
Shielded from the blazing sun by a large awning, Giles Olson looked out at the crowd who had assembled outside the newly completed factory complex to hear his speech before he officially declared the manufacturing facility open. They all looked a great deal less uncomfortable in the sunshine than he would have, most of them being either Alphard born or having been living and working here now long enough to have acclimatised by now.
Stood behind a podium on a raised dais, one set up in front of some truly gigantic hanger doors, the High Associator looked out at his audience and smiled. Leaning in closer to the microphone connected to a loudspeaker so everyone could hear. "I'll try not to use up too much of your time" he began. "I'm sure you've all got better things to do than listen to a politician a couple of weeks away from retirement ramble on" he continued, looking around. "Could be worse I suppose. At least it's not raining" he deadpanned.
The ripple of laughter that passed through the crowd confirmed to Olson that he had hit the right note. Situated by a natural harbour on the west coast of the Hydrae continent the annual rainfall in this area measured less than ten centimetres per year, although the river that flowed into the harbour not far from the factory meant that the area was still generally greener that most of Hydrae was.
In order to house the factory workforce, and to cater to their needs, a town had been built beside the river, one that was expected to double in size within five years and then double again in population within five more as more industry sprang up nearby and more people arrived looking for work. The Corps of Engineers had already laid out a grid system for future roads, making certain it wouldn't develop into some kind of haphazard shanty town, and was now breaking ground for a future commercial district. Plans for a large public park were also being considered, though the amount of irrigation needed to keep grass and trees properly watered in this climate was a stumbling block to the more grandiose schemes.
Alphard was one of those places where it was well worth using solar panels even if you had fusion power generation. There was even a scheme to build a production facility to produce umpteen square kilometres of the things, cover a huge area of otherwise useless arid land in them and use the shade underneath for farming. The electricity the panels generated would power pumps bringing seawater inland and then convert it to fresh water using industrial J-U purifiers.
It wouldn't really be a sensible, economically viable proposal until all the land suitable for farming elsewhere on the planet was under the plough, but in the long term it would allow Alphard's population to grow somewhat beyond normal limits if someone in the future hankered for the days when the Star League Department of Mega-Engineering saw the obstacles Mother Nature threw in the way of humanity as a challenge not a block.
The dropship which had transported Olson here had set down at the partially completed spaceport situated a few kilometres away, after which a hover-car ferried him onto the factory for the official opening ceremony. The day before he had visited what was effectively the planetary capital city, a large and growing town surrounded by farmland on the Typhon continent, one of the two large landmasses that lay near Alphard's north pole, and to say he had been somewhat surprised by the warmth of the welcome he had received from the locals was a massive understatement.
Back home on Niops the people still treated the High Associator in much the same way that people on most planets in the Inner Sphere would treat the mayor of a big city, he was someone you might run into at the supermarket or at a coffee shop during lunchbreak, not some high-and-mighty figure of authority that needed to be bowed and scraped towards, or regarded with something remotely akin to deference and awe.
Finding himself at a huge parade being held in his honour and treated as if he was the Director-General of the Terran Hegemony, or even First Lord of the Star League, by cheering locals rather than some bureaucrat was the sort of thing that might well have gone to his head if not for the fact that he knew he would be merely a private citizen again soon.
His wife who was accompanying him on this trip must have caught on to his mood because she had leaned in close and whispered 'Remember thou art mortal' in his ear while some local dignitary waxed lyrical about his supposedly great achievements while in office, giggling at the expression that appeared on Olson's face when she did so.
She was actually the one that had nudged him into politics in the first place, though of course that was back when being elected as High Associator might get you a nice table at a restaurant on Niops VII not something akin to a Roman Triumph in another star system entirely like Alphard, and she liked to take some credit for how things had turned out for him as a result. There was an old saying she was fond of that claimed: 'behind every great man there was a great woman propelling him forward' and, although Olson didn't really consider himself 'great' as such, he didn't generally disagree with the sentiment.
ComStar might not accept the premise, but if they did agree they would probably attribute the quote to a putative 'Mrs Blake'.
Fortunately for the crowd who had come out to see him on Typhon Giles Olson was actually pretty good at giving a rousing address when the occasion called for one, and recycling some material from a few of those he had given in the past whilst electioneering he had delivered an impromptu but stonking speech to the masses, one that featured references to cooperation and a shared vision of a brighter future for all as the Hegemony both expanded and deepened the ties between its member worlds. If each planet, and each person living upon those planets, contributed what they could for the common good then they could build something far, far greater than the sum of its parts. While the Great Houses continued to bathe each other in blood and nuclear fire, razing civilisation itself to the ground as they did so, out here Niops, Alphard and the other member worlds were building each other up, creating a vibrant, dynamic new nation that they could all be proud to bequeath to their children and grandchildren.
Fortunately it didn't seem like he had laid it on too thick yesterday and the locals reacted enthusiastically enough to his words that Olson not only didn't feel he had overreached with the 'manifest destiny' schtick but he was also pretty sure that if his successor, whoever it was going to be, visited Alphard and gave a speech of their own it would probably seem lacklustre by comparison. As a rule politicians on Niops tended to be somewhat boring, not particularly inspiring, technocrats that weren't exactly all that thrilling to listen to, Olson being unusual on that score because he could carry a crowd. The underlying scientific meritocracy did at least weed out those unable to actually do the job however, which was more than could be said of people running things in a lot of places, and until the last few years an inability to stir up the mob hadn't really been a deal-breaker for a Council Member or even the High Associator themselves.
That was yesterday though. Given the rather different audience present at the new battlemech factory being opened Olson had opted not to go with stirring oratory in favour of relaxed, earthy good humour and after running a few jokes past his wife earlier just to make sure they were actually funny he delivered an entertaining enough speech that seemed to deliver the goods, at least judging by the laughter and occasional applause.
Olson laughed along with crowd for a while before becoming a little more serious. "Before I forget, can I offer my heartfelt thanks for all the hard work you men and women have put into this project over the last few years" he addressed the crowd. "If it wasn't for the sterling efforts of people that hail from Comstock, Francas, Niops plus of course Alphard itself, all coming together for a common goal we wouldn't have been able to get this factory completed both ahead of time and, even more amazingly for a government project, actually on-budget!"
The High Associator sighed. "You have no idea of how much trouble it caused when the Project Manager tried sending the unspent money back to the treasury, dozens of bean-counters staring blankly into space trying to figure out what they were supposed to do because nobody had ever done that before" he said, trying to sound sincere but not so sincere that they wouldn't know he was joking.
Olson paused, sighed again and then shook his head sadly. "Given that the paperwork is too hard to figure out I guess we'll just have to pay everyone a bonus instead" he said. "Just make sure to spend it before the new guy or gal takes over from me or they might want it back" he very obviously joked now as some very enthusiastic cheering broke out.
It wasn't actual largesse on his part of course. The assembled engineers, technicians and construction workers who had just completed building the factory complex would be moving onto other work, indeed some already had being released from working on the new Water-Purifier plant for this occasion, and if word got out that there was an actual benefit to going above and beyond then more people would do so.
There was certainly no shortage of work that still needed to be done, but there was a severe shortage the skilled labour needed to do it which meant getting the most out of everyone was paramount. As an increasing number of workers who had signed up for five-year contracts arrived from the Illyrian Palatinate it looked like they would be able to get the new mines running to capacity at least but hopes to drastically increase the amount of land under the plough on the northern continents of Alphard were still stymied by a serious lack of manpower.
In some ways the system was a victim of its own success, the new factories being opened paid better than signing up as a farmhand did, and with manufacturing starting up again on Comstock as well now people there were starting to reconsider plans to take jobs on other planets, even ones that might pay a little more than the ones back home.
It certainly didn't help that Comstock had a more pleasant, temperate climate than Alphard. Toiling in the fields on Typhon or Echidna was bad enough, but working construction on Hydrae was hellish. There was a good reason why the native population didn't live near the equator despite the vast mineral wealth to be found both on Hydrae and the island continent Crux.
At least food imported from the Stafford system could help feed the expanding urban population on Alphard for now, although it was considered risky to see that as a long-term solution. Planets being capable of feeding themselves was safer, just look at what happened to Comstock when interstellar trade collapsed, so while it wasn't like anyone was actually going to go hungry on Alphard the Department of Trade and Industry was starting to push for large scale recruitment from poorer worlds in the Free Worlds League nonetheless. There were several worlds under Marik rule within a few jumps of Niops that had been rendered poor and destitute by the wars, it was hoped their inhabitants might well jump at the chance to obtain a new home and steady well-paid work, especially in a place that wasn't in the line-of-fire.
That would have to be handled very carefully though, for both diplomatic and security reasons. The government on Atreus might be too preoccupied at present to make a fuss about some small periphery power poaching its people, in fact they might even be quietly happy about it because they were having trouble supporting the populations of some of their smaller colonies, but eventually they might make a fuss about it and that required prior forethought and planning to deal with.
Waiting for the latest round of applause to settle Giles Olson looked around. Not far away in the distance another large manufacturing facility for mechs was already beginning construction, this one however not intended to eventually produce war machines but rather agromechs and loggermechs that would hopefully increase productivity, and therefore output, while demographics caught up with soaring demand. Back home in Niops another Project Workshop had just been brought on line, PW III-C on Niops V, which should ease production bottlenecks in high-tech manufacturing equipment a little, and eventually they would be in a position to build a factory making robotics advanced enough to need a lot less human supervision, but for now they still had to prioritise on what really needed to have been done yesterday and allocate labour accordingly.
Doing everything in a rush certainly showed in the design of the buildings here, Olson thought to himself. Plain, boring concrete boxes put together in a hurry that actually looked much like the majority of new construction back home, only cheaper because weather-proofing and insulation to keep out the cold wasn't really much of a design requirement here. The buildings were blindingly bright here though, painting everything white helped keep them cool inside, and they dazzled you almost as much as the G3IV type star high above. On Niops VII the boxy concrete blocks many people lived and worked in were made darker to try and catch as much sunlight as possible.
The other thing that caught the eye that differentiated the buildings here from buildings back home was all the air-conditioning vents and Olson was now very much looking forward to getting inside before his suit jacket was completely drenched in sweat. Supposedly down in the deep germanium mines on Crux some of the workers wore modified versions of the cooling suits worn by mechwarriors and it was easy to understand why. A few hours of having to swing a pickaxe down there where it wasn't just hot, it was also humid, sounded horrific.
The 'workers' on Crux were actually convict labour of course, so a little suffering was par for the course, but if they collapsed from the heat then they couldn't work and so making sure conditions for them weren't too terrible paid dividends.
If they met production quotas they even got aircon in their cells and ice-cream as dessert which reputedly did more to keep them complaint than armed guards ever did. Olson had considered visiting the penal colony while he was here but had eventually decided against in favour of getting back to Niops a little sooner. Ensuring that the handover of power after the election was a smooth as possible was important, he had been running things for fifteen years now, the only High Associator to ever make it the full three terms of office permitted by the constitution, and leaving on a high note with no hitches was important to his legacy.
More importantly he needed to make sure that the big wooden desk that he had paid for himself was moved out of the High Associator's office well before his successor took over and claimed it. Olson loved that desk, it had been made from an unusual hardwood imported from Buffalo Meadows, and the study in his private home was just big enough for it to fit inside.
The carpenter who made it had originally been an 'Astech' in the 295th, as the military called Assistant Technicians who worked on mechs and aerospace fighters, who had found a talent at woodworking during their years marooned on Buffalo Meadows. They operated very successful business now back on Niops VII making bespoke furniture, though the timber was mostly imported from Stafford these days that being rather closer. The forests that had been planted on Niops VII using imported species of trees grew very slowly given the temperature and limited sunlight so while they would eventually produce useful lumber, for now they weren't much use for anything but a habitat for recreated Aurochs and Giant Moas, both transplanted from McEvedy's Folly.
Once he was out of office and back to being an ordinary citizen Olson planned to invest some of his savings in that fast food chain that was starting to get off the ground, he had tried a Moa burger and he was pretty sure it was going to be a hit throughout the Hegemony. The same however could not be said of Kentucky Fried Dodo unfortunately, those things going extinct had clearly been no great loss to gastronomy assuming Alpheus McEvedy's recreated Dodo tasted as much like the original species as it looked.
Nobody would ever be raising herds of Moa here on Alphard though, regardless of how tasty they were. The recreated Moa had been engineered to live in considerably cooler climes than could be found on this arid rock, Olson thought to himself. Fortunately there were regions of Francas that were expected to be extremely suitable for rearing the Moa in commercially viable quantity, and the people there were certainly well experienced in livestock farming and ranching, albeit with imported Terran species.
They already farmed ostriches on Francas, the Giant Moa shouldn't be too different.
Some people on Stafford meanwhile had expressed an interest in perhaps importing both the Crested Mammoth and the Aurochs, not as meat animals but as beasts of burden. The aurochs would probably be easier to domesticate, but on the other hand an eight-ton mammoth could pull one hell of a plough and unlike a tractor used plants as fuel and was also a good source of manure.
The diversity of worlds within the Hegemony made Olson regret not visiting any of them before now, although he certainly couldn't have found time for the the long trek all the way down to Frobisher and McEvedy's Folly. He would have probably gotten a decent reception on Frobisher though, they seemed very pleased with the Iron Wombs that would mean Homo Sapiens Amphibia not going the way of the Dodo (sans the epic comeback) and all the advanced genetic engineering equipment salvaged from the Folly added to their own meant that Frobisher had a very bright future ahead of itself as the likely bioscience hub of the Hegemony.
The fact that there were children who had been born on Niops while Olson was in office that might potentially still be alive at the dawn of the next millennium was mostly down to the genetic engineers on Frobisher. As soon as the first clinic providing anti-agathic gene-therapy treatments had opened back home it had been running full-tilt to try and meet demand and although priority was being given to the genetically-enhanced infants coming out of the Iron Wombs, given the financial investment in creating the new sibling companies the military wanted to get as many years of service out of them as they possibly could, the treatments were available to all.
True, if you were wealthy you could jump to the front of the queue, but the income from that was being used to fund additional clinics with an expansion of the service to the rest of the Hegemony worlds planned soon. Given the far greater populations of the other member planets however production of the treatments would have to be ramped up drastically in order to cope with potential demand, and with increased immigration another factor it might be a generation before every child born in the Hegemony could be guaranteed such an extended lifespan.
It was expected however that when the Magistracy of Canopus in particular caught word of the treatments, they would be throwing money at Niops to try and get access themselves and if they were willing to pay as much as some analysts thought they would that might actually bring in enough income to subsidise the whole thing. Certainly the year before when news that Niops could not only likely repair their ever-dwindling number of precious Terran-Hegemony-tech Stasis Tubes, but even potentially make new ones reached Canopus this had resulted in a handwritten letter sent by the Magistratix herself arriving on Olson's beloved desk via the Duchess of Thraxa, the note asking how much it would cost to get this expedited.
It wasn't quite a heap of blank cheques being thrust into the hands of the Niops Association, but the Department of Trade and Industry were pretty happy about it and started pushing for another delay in working on the new shipyard while a Project Workshop was assigned to reverse-engineering and then manufacturing the Stasis Tube technology.
Fortunately for both Admiral Bremman's blood pressure and his mental health the High Associator had immediately nixed the suggestion. The Magistracy would just have to wait until at least 2845 by which time another workshop, PW-II-B should be completed on Niops VI.
After cracking a few more jokes and waxing lyrical on the sterling job being done by everyone in the Hegemony to build a brighter future, Giles Olson told the crowd that he had wasted more than enough of their time already and that they should all head inside where cold drinks, sandwiches and ice-cream waited for all in the factory canteen. While they got to enjoy themselves he would be shown around the plant and would ceremonially push a large button to start the whole production line running for the first time.
It would be a pleasure to get inside for him too, with or without ice-cream, and while his wife played court in the canteen, herself having no interest in looking at machinery, Olson looked around outside one more time before entering the building with the factory foreman acting as guide and a couple of men from his protection detail hanging back.
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Part XLIV - Section 2 of 2
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Virtually every machine in the factory had already been tested of course, indeed several pre-production Blackjack battlemechs had already been produced there, they had just never run the entire factory all at the same time from raw materials to finished product in one smooth run rather than in fits and starts.
As Olson was escorted inside by the factory foreman, Niops born of Capellan Refugee stock, he passed by one of the Blackjack mechs the factory would soon be turning out by the lance-load and noted it was painted up in unusual livery. "What's with the bright yellow Cameron Star?" he queried, pointing up at the insignia.
"The Alphard Militia adopted it as their insignia, they're getting the first dozen machines" the foreman explained. "If the idea catches on then I guess the ones we'll make for the Frobisher militia eventually will have an orange Cameron Star on them instead" he said, grinning.
Olson smiled. "Alphard will probably want to add their name to that insignia because otherwise people will confuse them with all the other systems in the Hegemony with G type stars" he suggested. "For that matter McEvedy's Folly is also an orange dwarf like Frobisher."
"Good point, though I hadn't heard that the genetic abominations on the Folly were forming a planetary guard" the foreman joked.
"They are, but they won't need mechs, just a flak jacket big enough for a Thunderbird to wear" Olsonreplied, playing along. "The factory workforce are all considered reliable I assume? No security risks?"
The foreman nodded. "Nobody whose parents and grandparents weren't born on Niops, Alphard, Comstock or Francas has been allowed to get a job here" he replied. "We're going to expand that to people from Stafford and the other Hegemony systems that joined more recently but we're keeping the rule regarding ancestry. Makes foreign infiltration a little tricky."
"Same rule for militia membership I suppose?" Olson checked.
"Yes Sir, only people whose families have lived in the Niops Hegemony worlds for generations, the one that don't really identify with anywhere else as a homeland" the foreman confirmed. "There's certainly plenty of other work for non-Hegemony immigrant labour here on Alphard anyway; mining, farming up on Typhon or Echidna, or a job at one of the other factories cropping up making civilian goods. I nearly lost a good machinist last week to a firm that's about to start turning out ATV's for local use and export, quad-cycles you know, lots of demand for those as we start developing planets out here in the wilds."
"I guess they imported the plant and machinery for that from the Magistracy?" Olson supposed.
"Yeah, but the same firm is looking to start making tractors and construction machinery next using a line imported from the Free Worlds League I've heard, fire-sale prices there at the moment" the foreman told him.
"A lot of that is really just the exchange rate between the Niops Dollar and the League Eagle at the moment" Olson told him. "The Eagle has fallen a lot against the C-Bill at the same time ComStar bucks have slipped in value compared to ours. It won't last though, the League's economy is mostly back on its feet and once people realise that confidence in their money will go back up."
The factory foreman smiled. "Sounds like you know what you're talking about" he replied.
Olson laughed. "Nah, just fifteen years of practicing pretending that I do" he confided, tongue-in-cheek. "I assume the local militia are happy with the Blackjack now they'll be getting the things?"
"Yes Sir. In concert with SLDF instructors we've started training a few locals up on the pre-production machines already. Fortunately the Blackjack doesn't handle much differently than most mechs in its weight class, other than being a little more sluggish than some, so the prior experience they've been getting before now on other machines in preparation for the BJ-1n being available is proving valuable I'm told" he said. "Just to be clear she's sluggish when walking or running, if you use her jumpjets as well she's manoeuvrable enough to be effectively on a battlefield."
Olson smiled. "Yes, I do read the briefing papers that cross my desk" he responded. "If the Blackjack was really the third-rate war-machine most people think it is in the Inner Sphere we wouldn't have chosen to put it into production" he said. "The autocannon upgrade helps but, to quote my military liaison, 'If the Blackjack wasn't a fundamentally sound design, then swapping out the AC/2 for an Improved AC/5 would have just been putting lipstick on a pig'."
The foreman laughed. "Great analogy" he opined.
"I liked it, most of my staff aren't as entertaining in their phrasing as Colonel Ebon" Olson told him. "The Alphard Militia is getting the first twenty-four machines off the production line if I recall correctly?" he asked.
"Yes Sir" the foreman confirmed, nodding. "After that we'll start shipping them out to Comstock, Francas, Stafford and the other member worlds to equip their planetary defence forces, but for obvious reasons it'll still be a while before we'll be able to meaningfully scale back the SLDF garrisons already there. As you can see by just looking around this isn't some slick, fully automated Star League factory that can churn out hundreds of mechs a year with half a bored dozen staff sitting around without much to do, I mean we're not low-tech by any means but if we can eventually ramp up to thirty-six mechs a year we'll be doing well, though we'll need considerably more inflow of raw materials than we have at present to achieve that goal, as well as another production line for fusion engines."
"I'm told that there are more mining operations being planned for up-river that will provide the raw materials at least" Olson remarked, looking with interest at a large piece of machinery he thought was some kind of press. Everything was at a huge scale of course, even a medium battlemech like a Blackjack was a hefty beast of a machine by human scale.
The rivers on Hydrae were very important, not just because they provided fresh water, Jamerson-Ulikov Water Purifiers could go a long way to meeting that need, but because they were also a trade highway to the various mining towns further inland. The number of barges full of ore making their way downriver to factories situated on the coast would increase exponentially over the next few years, the plan being that they would be eventually supplemented by roads and mag-lev lines that would allow more ready access to mineral wealth located further afield, but they already delivered enough to keep the factories running, if not to capacity.
"Yes, but we'll need to expand the river-port to handle it first" the foreman replied. "You can't just magic infrastructure out of thin air unfortunately."
Olson laughed. "Honestly it seems like we already have sometimes" he joked. "Ten years ago there was nothing here but rocks baking in the sun, now look at this place" he said, sweeping his hand around.
"You can get a lot done with some project workshops, money to import plant and machinery and a motivated workforce that's for sure" the foreman agreed. "As the town grows around the factories we're building here and we've got more indigenous manufacture going it'll make things easier certainly" he said confidently. "We can already produce our own ferro-fibrous armour and older-type double-heat sinks right here in the factory, I'll show you the armour forge and the DHS line later, but we're still having to import endo-steel frames from Niops and that won't change until we get some more orbital infrastructure right here in Alphard."
"It's on the to-do list believe me, it's just a very long list" Olson replied. "Not much point telling me about it anyway, I'll be looking for a new job soon" he said, before smiling. "Talking of which, are you hiring and what's the pay like?" he asked, jokingly.
"Salary would probably be a little lower than you're used to, Sir" the foreman replied.
"Yeah, I'm just kicking myself now that I wasn't corrupt. Could have built up a nice retirement fund" Olson replied, feigning regret.
"That's unfortunate, I was going to suggest you get a job in the marketing department but if you're honest then it's really not the career for you" the foreman replied, shaking his head sadly.
"There's a marketing department?"
"Well not yet, but eventually every budding militia mechwarrior in the Niops Hegemony is going to have a Blackjack and then we'll have to either sell them to other people or shutter the factory" the foreman replied.
"Shutter the factory? We're the Star League, we'll just dig a big hole, fill it up with mechs, bury them and call it a 'cache' just like our forefathers did" Olson said wryly. "Seriously, the Great Houses keep turning them up all the time, even ones most of the SLDF didn't seem to know about are scattered around everywhere."
"Yeah, makes you wonder when they're all going to run out?" the foreman asked rhetorically. "Judging from the news reports they're already wrecking their ability to make new battlemechs so eventually they'll only have the caches left to feed into the grinder."
"Maybe by the Fourth Succession War" Olson suggested. "Nah, more like the Fifth" he reassessed his answer. "That won't mean peace though, they'll fight the Sixth with sticks and stones if they had to" he said. "More seriously they're bound to see sense eventually and they'll stop flinging nuclear weapons at each other while there's still something worth actually fighting over."
"Just as long as they don't all decide we're worth fighting over" the foreman observed. "It might not exactly be the Valkyrie factory on New Avalon" he said, referring to the most productive battlemech manufacturing facility still operating in the Inner Sphere, "but this place is going to get more and more valuable as more and more factories elsewhere get destroyed."
"True, but whoever tries to take it away from us is in for a much harder fight than they're expecting, and not just because our Blackjack is punchier than it looks" Olson replied, reaching out to touch a piece of heavy machinery, the feel of the cold metal making it more real somehow. "We're building the future here."
"Well said, High Associator" the foreman replied, glad he had voted for the man three times and wishing he could have done it again.
"Yeah, if I say it again later in front of other people when we're in the canteen pretend it's the first time you've heard it okay?" Olson requested, grinning cheekily. "That goes for you guys too" he added loudly to his security detail who had maintained a polite distance while he talked to his guide.
"Will do" the foreman agreed before they moved onto the part of the production line where the ferro-fibrous armour was mounted to the endo-steel frame of the mech, pointing out where some design changes had been made to the original specs so that they could more readily switch out the autocannons on the Blackjack for Extended Range Large Lasers if required later.
It was best to future-proof when building the future after all.
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Note from the Author:
Just as a reminder Hydrae, Typhon, Echidna and Crux are the names used here for the continents on Alphard (http://https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Alphard_(MH)) that were known as Italia, Alba, Gaul and Ostia in canon (where the Roman-themed Marian Hegemony exists not the Niops Hegemony). Hydrae isn't nearly as suitable for farming as Typhon and Echidna are nearer the poles but it has some rivers that can be usefully exploited for water and transportation.
The BL-1n version of the Blackjack (http://https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Blackjack_(BattleMech)) medium battlemech being put into production in the new factory on Hydrae will equip the various planetary militias of the Hegemony. As noted above it's not exactly the largest, most automated battlemech production facility n the Inner Sphere but it's by no means the most primitive either. As a comparison the Valkyrie plant on New Avalon was turning out well over a hundred mechs a year right throughout the Succession Wars (which made it the most productive known factory) but that was basically lostech automation.
How people in Niops view their High Associator is likely to be rather different than how outsiders would, I was trying to give a little window on that here as Giles Olson nears retirement and visits Alphard for the first time while in office.
It's been theorised that the reason why certain ancient megafauna, perhaps including the Giant Moa (http://https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moa), went extinct after encountering mankind was that they were cursed with being tasty (there would be other reasons too of course, such as being easy to hunt). The Moa burger is going to be a big hit as the ranchers on Francas and their financial backers take the interstellar Fast Food business by storm!
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Love it! I too will miss Giles Olson as High Associator, but term limits exist for a REASON... ;)
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Part XLV - Section 1 of 2
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"Producing and maintaining the necessary infrastructure to allow a doubling of the population of the Niops system every twenty-five years is well within our capabilities, it should even be possible to raise the overall standard of living as we do so because increased automation of industry will increase average productivity at the same time. If we aim for noticeably faster population growth than that however then simply building enough schools, hospitals et cetera while staffing them properly will require a reallocation of resources that will result in necessary cutbacks elsewhere, consumer goods in particular given the obvious reluctance to cut defence spending."
Summary Report into the proposal to encourage population growth in the Niops System via Tax Incentives - 2838CE
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Capital City – Niops Association (Niops VII) – 2840
Judith was still standing there obstinately in the middle of the family living room, hands-on-hips looking up at Frederick as if trying to stare him down, an attempt doomed to failure because it was inordinately cuter than it was intimidating. "I don't need a babysitter" she insisted. "I'm not a baby."
"You're my baby sister and you'll always be my baby sister" Frederick countered. This wasn't exactly how he had originally been planning to spend his Saturday either but Barbara had asked a favour earlier in the week when her appointment was rescheduled. "Your Mom's got a doctor's appointment and then after that she's going to see your grandma, and because Dad's at work you get me" he told her.
"When you were my age you didn't need a babysitter" Judith persisted.
"When I was your age they were teaching me how to live off the land and where I should stab people in order to bleed them out" Frederick replied wryly. "As far as I know that's not something they teach at elementary school here" he added, trying not to laugh. In retrospect telling her stories about what he used to get up to when he was little might have been a mistake because it had clearly left her with a rather distorted impression of the sort of things that were generally considered acceptable for pre-teen children in normal society.
The society that Frederick had lived in when he was his little sister's age was, of course, decidedly abnormal and he was fully aware of that, as was the girl of course although it didn't suit her to say so.
He had been less than a year older than she was now when he picked up a rock on Liny, a moon in the Arcadia system, to get ready to fight a detachment of Ghost Bears that were hunting for any stranded Wolverine survivors in the wake of Operation Switchback. Fortunately their commander wasn't someone that considered slaughtering children either just or honourable, orders be damned, so he had let Star Captain Francis and his charges Sibling Company Gamma go free.
There was a standing order because of that event that if the Wolverines somehow ever returned to the Clan Homeworlds for revenge the Ghost Bears were to be shown mercy, they had earned it.
Frederick sometimes wished he had kept the rock he had picked up to throw at the Ghost Bears as a souvenir but at the time it had just been a rock and they had been on Liny collecting something far more important, supplies for the journey back to the inner Sphere.
"They should. School's boring" Judith complained. Based on his stories Frederick's old 'school' on Circe sounded like much more fun to go to than hers ever did, they taught him how to navigate and read a map and to call in artillery strikes and everything. Daddy always said that artillery was the 'king of battle' so knowing how to do that must be more useful than knowing how to write in cursive she was sure. "And I got into trouble because I keep calling Alice, 'Alice' instead of Miss MacArthur" Judith continued her complaining. "I've always called her Alice, it's not my fault she's a teacher at my school now. Why couldn't she get a job at a different school?" the little girl wanted to know. "It's like I'm being spied on" she added suspiciously. Judith knew what spies were, her daddy used to catch spies for Jennifer McEvedy's mommy, that was before Khan McEvedy died and he became Khan instead.
Being a Khan was special. When she started school the children there whose parents were also Wolverines like her best friend Samantha Callahan used to treat her like she was sorta special too just because of who her daddy was. The kids whose parents were born on Niops didn't really understand why though, and when a couple of them had asked Judith about it the best answer she could come up with was 'I'm kinda like a princess, kinda but not really because I don't get to wear a tiara and I won't get to be Khan one day just because my daddy is'.
Although both her daddy and Sarah McEvedy did kinda end up in charge of the Wolverines because their daddies had once been in charge of the 331st Royal Battlemech Division, which later became the Wolverines, so maybe it was possible she might be Khan one day? Unless her big brother did, or Jennifer McEvedy did, or maybe even David Robertson who was also kinda Wolverine nobility too because his daddy had been saKhan before her daddy was.
And no she didn't dress all 'fancy' sometimes because she was 'kinda like a princess', that was just because sometimes her Mom dressed her up like a doll because she was really into clothes and worked for a company that made them.
Princess or not she was definitely part of House Hallis though, that was a real actual thing for sure she had told the non-Wolverine children. It had originally been what they called a 'Martial House' one based in North America in the Terran Hegemony, a family that owed allegiance to House Cameron and produced soldiers to fight for them like her grandfather, the Franklin Hallis her big brother was named after.
She had cousins on Royal in the Federated Suns because her daddy's older brother had ended up there after the Terran Hegemony fell and he had reestablished House Hallis there. Not that she had ever met them, or even sent them an HPG to say hello, she only knew they existed because her daddy had sneakily checked up on what happened to his family when he returned to the Inner Sphere. Most people who had followed Aleksandr Kerensky on his Exodus had tried to do that by reading newspapers and books and stuff even though they knew they couldn't actually get in contact.
Judith supposed that the House Hallis on Royal owed allegiance to House Davion now, which wasn't as good as serving House Cameron but at least the Davion's weren't completely horrible like House Kurita or House Liao were. Her mommy was actually named after Barbara Liao, who wasn't too bad by Liao standards but still wasn't a very nice person.
"It's not some conspiracy against you, munchkin. Your school was hiring when she graduated teacher-training college. You can ask her that yourself if you don't believe me, she's coming over later" Frederick told his little sister. "We're going to watch a movie on the holovision. Yours is better than the one in her apartment and if I want to watch a movie in barracks I have to fight a trial of possession for the remote control first" he told her, not being entirely truthful about the remote control.
"No, you won't, you'll just make out with each other on the couch. I don't want to watch my brother make out with one of the teachers at my school in front of me, it's weird" Judith protested, it was bad enough when her parents did it.
Of course, Judith planned to deal with that particular issue tactically. She would just plant herself between them on the couch which would also give her better access to the popcorn.
Fred would probably be proud of her if she was stupid enough to explain her plan to him, which she wasn't.
"It'll be worse when you get married. My teacher will be my sister-in-law" she complained.
Frederick laughed. "Who says we're getting married?" he asked.
"Henry Callahan is getting married, and Mom says you'll have to get married and start having kids too soon because you're going to get old faster than Dad did" Judith replied. "I won't have to have children until I'm dad's age though because I've been getting the anti-agg…" the girl stumbled upon the word, "agrath…" she tried again.
"Anti-agathic treatments" Frederick helped her out. He also knew that the reason Henry was getting hitched at a fairly young age was because he had made a vow to himself during the worst of the battle on Illyria against the Black Warriors that if he got out of this alive he was going to ask his girlfriend to marry him.
"Right, those" Judith agreed. "You didn't get them when you were my age and neither did Alice, I mean Miss MacArthur" she corrected herself. "I mean Alice dammit" she swore, correcting herself again because now she wasn't at school.
"Language" Frederick chided.
"I bet you swore way worse than that when you were my age" Judith defended herself.
"No, I didn't" Frederick told her truthfully. "When I was your age any time I swore in front of an adult I had to do twenty-five push-ups" Frederick told her.
"Did that work?" Barbara asked, entering the room after coming down the stairs while trying to fasten her overcoat over her belly and failing. After Frederick arrived for babysitting duty, exactly on time as she had assumed he would be, she had gone to her room to get changed.
When she had phoned him earlier in the week to ask if he would be okay with babysitting on Saturday, since she knew he wasn't on duty that weekend, Frederick had prevaricated at first but Barbara had wheedled him into it saying that his little sister wanted to spend time with him.
That was apparently an outright lie, Judith would have much preferred to have been left alone in the house, but there was no way that was happening.
"Eventually it did" Frederick told her. "At first I just got really good at push-ups" he continued. "Maybe you should try wearing a poncho instead?" he suggested to his now very pregnant stepmother as she continued to struggle with her overcoat. "I mean you'd look like a tent but…" he trailed off, grinning.
Barbara looked at him askance. "Father make exact same joke" she told him. "You definitely clone, not just two-thirds copy of original."
Judith frowned. "How come when grandma calls Fred a clone you tell her off but you get to do it?" she asked rhetorically, not expecting an answer because Mommy didn't answer questions like that. "And for the last time I don't need a babysitter" she said, stamping her feet. "I'm not a baby, I'm going to be a big sister soon" she pointed out.
"That's true, can't be too much longer until Tax-Break in there arrives and your clothes fit again" Frederick observed.
"Stop calling your new brother or sister 'Tax-break', it might stick" Barbara ordered her stepson while touching her pregnancy bump. It wasn't as if the new tax code that looked to encourage people having larger families was the only reason she and her husband had decided to have another child, even if it did admittedly have something to do with the timing.
One thing was for sure though. If they decided to have yet another child in a year or two she wasn't going to argue with her husband about using an Iron Womb next time like he had actually suggested for this one. Her back was killing her, her feet hurt, and her ankles were so swollen she couldn't wear her favourite boots, the gorgeous knee-high leather ones from Comstock.
Barbara always liked to dress very stylishly, fortunately by working for her uncle in a company that made clothing she could justify the excessive size of her wardrobe by saying it was expected of her in her business to look good.
By contrast if he didn't need multiple uniforms in different camouflage patterns for different terrains and weather conditions you could have fitted her husband's entire wardrobe in a suitcase. Just getting him to get fitted for a civilian suit rather than wear his dress uniform for any formal or semi-formal occasion had taken years.
"Dad does it, and looking at the size of you are you absolutely sure it's not a new brother and a new sister in there?" Frederick checked, not entirely in jest.
"Definitely not twins, told the doctor doing the scan not to tell me what sex they are but did want a count because I wasn't this big with Judith" Barbara responded.
"I remember" Frederick replied, recalling her first pregnancy back when he was still a high school kid not a serving soldier. "But look at the size of her now" he added, nodding towards his little sis.
"Yes, I'm big now, thanks for agreeing with me. And what do big girls not need? A babysitter" Judith declared triumphantly.
"You're seven. Seven-year-olds need a babysitter. It's the law" Frederick told her forcefully. "If I wasn't here someone else would be."
"Thank you, Frederick" Barbara responded as her daughter pouted.
"You're welcome. I called for a taxi like you asked, they should be here soon" Frederick told his stepmother. "A few more weeks and I guess you'll be able to fit properly behind the wheel of your car again."
"Can fit now, just uncomfortable as… heck" Barbara replied, correcting herself just before she swore.
Frederick scratched his nose. "Any chance that I could borrow your wheels tomorrow to take Alice out for a drive since you're not using it at the moment?" he asked. "The forest they planted out near Arecibo is starting to actually look like an actual park, not just a bunch of shrubs, and I thought it might be nice to go out for a walk with her there."
Barbara nodded, there was a paved road heading out there now so it wasn't like he was asking to taking her precious automobile off-roading, style didn't just mean clothes it meant driving a sleek expensive car too. "Alice still homesick for Buffalo Meadows sometimes is she?" she asked.
"A little I guess. With trees it probably looks a lot more like it did where she grew up here than it does without them" Frederick replied. "She used to climb them and swing on them when she was Judith's age" he added. Your memories of where you lived when you were little always stuck with you, for Frederick he still pined a little for Great Hope and Bearcat sometimes, even though his fond memories of the cities were interspersed with having to flee them before Old Nick had his sibko put up against a wall and shot.
Frederick also wondered if her childhood on Buffalo Meadows was the reason that Alice had decided to become a teacher, she had a thing for kids and that might be because there had been so few of them around when she was little herself. Although the 295th stranded on Buffalo Meadows had managed to make a home for themselves there they had not managed to produce enough offspring to make the colony viable in the long term. Once all the long-lived Terran Hegemony born first-generation had eventually died off it would have been likely only a matter of time before the colony did if the Switchback Fleet hadn't run into them instead.
The Iron Wombs were saving their bloodlines now though. Even General Romanov herself had a child on the way, although she had found someone else to raise them. Even with the anti-agathics you wouldn't want to have to deal with a newborn when you were over a hundred years old as she was now.
"Buffalo Meadows is a Red Dwarf system like Niops, but it was warmer than here because it's an M1V class star not an M5V" Judith piped up.
"Right" the girl's mother confirmed. "And if the star was a little bigger it would be…?" she asked, waiting for the answer.
"A K9V Orange Dwarf" Judith answered. "It's not easy to tell the difference just by looking at them though" she continued. "When Miss MacArthur started at the school she introduced herself to everyone in the assembly hall" she said, calling her 'Miss MacArthur' rather than 'Alice' because it was at school. "She told us where she was from, I mean I knew already of course, and said that the big tree they planted in front of the school a few years ago was from where she was born."
"There's no big trees on Niops" Frederick corrected her. "Not yet anyway, some of them won't be fully grown until you've got adult grandchildren" he said. "I remember full-grown Circian Oaks that were as tall as dropships."
"Circe is a weird planet" Judith opined. "Sometimes it's colder than Niops VII and covered in glaciers, sometimes it's as hot and dry as Alphard. Most of the time it's kinda between the two though, like when Frederick and Dad lived there."
"Do you know why?" Barbara asked, testing her.
"Mr Armitage at school taught us it has an eccentric orbit" Judith replied, remembering being shown a hologram of the Circe planetary system that was sped up to show what happened. "It's only inside the habitable zone when the planet's not too close to the star and not too far away either" she said then giggled. "They call it the Goldilocks zone because it's not too hot and not too cold… like the porridge in the story" she added. They taught you a lot about stars and planets and stuff at school here, more than they did in other places Judith knew, but she didn't really understand why not. Stars and planets were super-important after all, the whole universe was full of them.
"That's right" Frederick confirmed. "On Circe we had what they called a 'Great Year' as well as a normal year, every seven hundred years the planet goes from really cold to really hot and then back again. It's the reason why the plant-life there was so hardy."
"Not hardy enough to grow here very well" Judith countered.
"Not enough sunlight, Circe is a lot brighter and a whole lot bigger than Niops" Frederick replied. "I think your taxi is just pulling up outside" he told his step-mother, spotting it out of the window.
"Thank you Frederick" Barbara replied. "Be a good girl for your brother, Judith" she instructed her daughter, carefully and slowly bending down to kiss her on the top of the head before heading for the front door.
"I'm always a good girl" Judith replied.
"Right, and you always tell the truth too" Frederick replied wryly.
"I do" Judith insisted. "Bye, bye Mommy" she bade her mother farewell.
"Bye, bye Judith" Barbara called back, opening the front door and stepping outside. "I'll be back well before your bedtime. Frederick will make you dinner" she added, making a hasty retreat.
"That wasn't in the agreement" Frederick called out as the door slammed shut.
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Part XLV - Section 2 of 2
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"So… pizza?" Judith asked hopefully.
"We'll see" Frederick replied with a sigh.
"Ham and pineapple pizza?" Judith persisted.
Frederick looked at her utterly appalled. "Pineapple?" he repeated with dismay.
"But pineapple's not really expensive now like it used to be, they import them from Stafford" Judith told him.
"They could offer to pay me to eat pineapple on pizza and I wouldn't" Frederick told his baby sister. "If we're getting pizza it'll be with anchovies on it."
"Anchovies?!" Judith exclaimed. "Yuck! Nobody likes anchovies."
"I like anchovies, Philomena loves anchovies" Frederick disagreed.
"Philomena's part fish, she doesn't count" Judith argued back.
Frederick frowned. "I hope you're not saying that just because she's genetically engineered she's not a real person?"
"No, I'm saying that she's a real person that's part fish, so what she thinks about fish is going to be different than what other people think about fish" Judith replied, clearly finding her own logic unassailable. "Sam said that Philomena ate all the shrimp at the Callahan family barbeque too" she added, reinforcing her case.
"According to Henry Philomena also steals the bacon off his plate when they have breakfast so maybe she just really likes food that's salty, not just food that swims" Frederick offered a counter-argument.
"Maybe" Judith conceded. "Sam says she's going to be a flower-girl when Henry marries Philomena next year" she told him. "Can I be a flower-girl too?"
"Not up to me, munchkin it's not my wedding" Frederick replied.
"But you're going to be the Best Man, aren't you?"
Frederick laughed. "I could be the groom and it still wouldn't be up to me" he replied. "You could ask Alice to ask Philomena, or better yet ask Philomena yourself."
"Yeah, I guess" Judith replied.
"Oh, and don't think I've forgotten that you lied earlier about never telling lies" Frederick told her.
"I don't" Judith insisted.
Frederick gave her a disparaging look. "Yes, you do" he stated flatly. "When you got me to come to your school that day to talk about what it's like on McEvedy's Folly you promised that the kids wouldn't just want to ask about about me and the Thunderbird."
"That wasn't my fault, I told them not to" Judith defended herself.
"When I asked if anyone had any questions after I gave my talk the very first one I was asked was 'Were you really nearly eaten by a giant chicken?' and it got worse from there" Frederick pointed out. Somehow he'd thought they'd want to hear more about the feathery pink Mammoths and how floofy they were, or even the goofy-looking Sabre-Tooth Toucans, but no.
"It is kinda a funny story though" Judith opined. "I mean, lots of people have stories about fighting pirates, or clanners, or Rimjobs but you fought a really big bird… and lost."
"You shouldn't say 'Rimjob' Judith" Frederick told her quickly.
"Why not?" the little girl wanted to know.
"It's rude" Frederick responded.
"It's supposed to be rude, they're the bad guys, you're supposed to say mean things about them, right?" Judith queried.
Frederick grimaced. "It's the way that it's rude" he explained as best he could.
"How?" Judith asked, confused what all the fuss was about.
"Well… it's like when people say 'clannerbastards' when talking about Nicholas Kerensky and his people" Frederick replied, improvising fast because he really didn't want to explain to his baby sister what a 'Rimjob' was, other than being an insulting name for people from the Rim Worlds Republic who fought for Stefan Amaris.
"Oh right" Judith responded. She wasn't allowed to say 'bastard' because it was a swearword, although in her defence she didn't know 'clannerbastards' was actually two words said really fast together. "Wait, since when is 'Rim' or 'Job' a swear?" she wanted to know.
Frederick considered his situation. "This is one of those things you need to talk to Dad about not me" he said eventually. He could have suggested she ask Barbara instead but that wouldn't have been as funny. "So is Alice a good teacher?" he asked, less than smoothly changing the subject.
"She's okay, you wouldn't need to know her to tell she hasn't been doing it very long though" Judith replied.
"Too young?"
"Tries too hard to try and make the kids like her by trying to be fun" Judith explained. "The real teachers don't do that."
Frederick laughed. "She is a real teacher Judith" he told her.
"Nuh uh" Judith disagreed. "Can I have a candy bar?" she asked. "Mom put them all in the top cupboard in the kitchen and I can't reach them" she explained the problem. Her brother was good for things like reaching high shelves, he was even taller than Dad and Dad was pretty tall to start with.
"If she put them there to stop you having one then I shouldn't get one for you" Frederick replied, shaking his head no.
"She put them there to hide them from Dad" Judith replied honestly. "They were supposed to be for me, but he kept eating them instead."
Now that sounded plausible enough and given that he wouldn't have minded having a candy bar himself, Frederick attributing that to an inherited sweet tooth, he went into the kitchen with Judith following. "Not that cupboard, that's where Dad puts his beer" she told him when he initially reached for the wrong one. "You're not allowed any" she told her big brother forcefully. "You go crazy when you drink beer."
"I go crazy when I drink enough beer to get drunk, not just from one two beers" Frederick corrected her, "but I wasn't planning to have one anyway" he added. "This cupboard?" he checked.
"Yes, the candy is behind the jars of pickled tomatoes" Judith confirmed.
"Never liked the pickled tomatoes" Frederick muttered to himself as he moved them out of the way. Barbara's Chinese cooking was pretty good but her dabbles into traditional Russian cuisine left something to be desired. "How's your Chinese these days?" he asked.
"Lăolao says my Mandarin is getting pretty good but my Cantonese still needs a lot of work" Judith replied as Frederick handed her a candy bar. "That means maternal grandmother" she explained.
"I'm not totally monolingual, mèi mei" Frederick replied, using the Mandarin word for little sister as he closed the cupboard again after taking a candy bar for himself. "Barbara tried to teach me some Mandarin when I was younger but then you came along and she found herself with a much better student."
"I still think the only reason she doesn't always speak English as well as she can speak English is to annoy Dad because it's the only language he can speak" Judith shared her theory.
Frederick laughed. "I remember a time around about when you were just learning to walk that he once told her that the whole point of the Terran Hegemony was to make everyone learn English so that people like him that grew up with it wouldn't have to ever bother learning anything else" he told his little sister. "The Reunification War was just a smokescreen."
"Really?" Judith asked doubtfully.
"Nah, not really" Frederick replied. "Well, he really said it, but he was only joking."
"What did Mom say?"
"That there was no doubt that he was definitely English" Frederick replied. Supposedly the Hallis family directly traced its roots, albeit via North America, all the way back to England before the Norman Invasion of 1066 so they really were about as Anglo-Saxon as it was possible to be.
Of course, it was well known that the Terran Hegemony was actually a Scottish conspiracy not an English one. The first Director-Generals had all been McKenna's then the Cameron's took over. Even if you looked closer to home the 331st Division had been commanded by a McEvedy, the 295th by a MacArthur and the Niops Association Militia was currently commanded by a Nellis, the Nellis family also being of Scottish descent.
Moreover, with Giles Olson gone the new High Associator was now former councilman James Murray. Franklin Hallis had joked that anyone would think the Jocks had won the Battle of Culloden.
"You didn't have candy-bars when you were little did you?" Judith asked, taking a bite out of hers.
"No, but I really liked the oaty cereal bars that they gave us when we went hiking, they were flavoured with synthetic honey" Frederick replied. "Whoever it was making the stuff was better at his job than the person that made the artificial Maple Syrup, not that I knew that until I got to try real Maple Syrup for the first time on Camelot Command."
"What was it like living there?"
"Much better than living on Yukon, less cramped and we got to eat lots of fruit" Frederick told her. "But you've heard all my stories before, so why are you asking?"
"So I can tell them to our new little brother or sister and make sure I get them right" Judith explained. "You never know when you're going to be sent off on a mission so you might not be there to tell them yourself" she said. "It's important that they know the stories so they know our history. Wolverine history, so it's not forgotten when you're gone."
"You know, just because I'm not going to live to a hundred and fifty like you are that I'm not going to die of old age anytime soon right, munchkin?" Frederick asked wryly.
"I'm not stupid" Judith replied, rolling her eyes in a very familiar fashion that reminded Frederick of when he did it himself, or when Dad did it, which was basically the same thing.
It was likely a very good thing that other people couldn't read Franklin Hallis's body language nearly as well as Frederick Hallis could, especially considering he was having his first meeting with the new High Associator next week and he didn't really rate the man all that highly.
"Okay, so do you want to hear the story about Liny again just to make sure you've got it right?" Frederick asked his little sister.
"Nah, you've told that one loads of times, and you always say that you wished you'd kept that rock you picked up to throw at the Spook Teddy" Judith replied. She did like that nickname for the Ghost Bears though, it was almost as good as calling the Jade Falcon's the 'Green Turkeys' or the Smoke Jaguar's the 'Mist Kittens'.
Clan Widowmaker was only ever called Clan Widowmaker though, no cutesy nicknames for those jerks.
"Tell me again about visiting Bearcat and Katyusha City" Judith requested instead.
"Okay, but only if you agree to having anchovy pizza later" Frederick bargained.
"Fine" Judith agreed unenthusiastically.
"And you admit that putting pineapple on a pizza is dezgra."
"Neg!" Judith replied, glaring at him. She couldn't just speak English, Mandarin and some Cantonese, her Clanner was better than you'd expect from someone that had never been within two thousand light-years of Strana Mechty too.
Challenging Frederick to a Trial of Possession for the holovid remote control later while sitting between him and Alice on the couch proved to be a mistake though. He still won even after bidding himself down to the index finger and thumb on one hand.
Stupid genetically-engineered strong grip and freakishly fast reaction times. He always beat her when they played Grande Circuit Challenge III on the games console too.
At least he'd be old and slow one day and she wouldn't be. Then she'd whup his ass but good at everything!
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Note from the Author:
The last time we saw Judith Hallis, daughter of Franklin and Barbara Hallis, she was a baby but that was back in Part XXV in 2833 and time marches on. She's now seven and doesn't think she needs a babysitter because when her big brother was her age he was already a future member of the Warrior Caste in training (the laws regarding the treatment of young children on Niops are a little different than they were in the Clan worlds though). Judith has a new sibling on the way which her parents insist is not just because of the taxbreak.
Given the expected big hike in population growth expected due to the tax-breaks for having more children (and more Iron Wombs each year) Alice MacArthur choosing to go into teaching is probably a savvy career move. One thing they did not have many of on Buffalo Meadows (http://'https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Buffalo_Meadows') was children.
Roger Callahan is older than Franklin Hallis and has a few grandchildren now at this point, one of his grandaughters going to school with Judith (he still looks younger than you'd expect because he was Terran Hegemony born and got the anti-aging treatments as a child that Niops has brought back).
We get to meet the new High Associator in the next part.
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Pineapple on pizza is delicious, IF properly done. None of that canned surat bulljive, fresh pineapple, laced with some balsamic, torched and brulee'd along with shaved jamon iberico and a touch of salsa verde atop a buttery thin crust and bubbling pecorino romano.
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Pineapple on pizza is delicious, IF properly done. None of that canned surat bulljive, fresh pineapple, laced with some balsamic, torched and brulee'd along with shaved jamon iberico and a touch of salsa verde atop a buttery thin crust and bubbling pecorino romano.
well I like Pepperoni and Pineapple.
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As a parent, both of those posts are absolutely DELIGHTFUL! :D
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And speaking of picking up that rock, I recommend watching through to at least 1:11 of this excellent (if unfinished) video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=luIKMpl1lfk
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Part XLVI- Section 1 of 2
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"Terraforming isn't a magic trick but a lot of it does involve smoke and mirrors."
Building Better Worlds: The Unofficial History of SLDoME - Niops Free Press, 2890
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Capital City – Niops Association (Niops VII) – 2840
If it had been raining, or snowing, or if he had been running late for his meeting Franklin Hallis would have requisitioned a vehicle to ferry him from SLDF Headquarters to the Association Council Building, seat of government in Niops, but as it was he needed to stretch his legs anyway so he decided to walk.
Although the capital continued to grow in population and geographic size it still wasn't exactly a teeming, sprawling metropolis by any means. Frankly describing it as much of a city at all would still be a bit of an exaggeration, and most of the government buildings were to be found near the centre of town anyway so it wasn't much of a hike in any case, just enough to get the circulation going and take in some fresh air.
There was certainly more traffic on the roads than there used to be, Hallis noted idly as he trudged along the pavement, glad that his new boots were more comfortable than the old ones. If he had known how well-made the new SLDF issue footwear coming out of Comstock was these days he might have dumped his old pair months ago but after you've polished the same pair so many times it was a little hard to let go.
The new uniform was better too. After much deliberation, and more than a little procrastination, General Romanov had finally admitted that the original SLDF pattern uniforms weren't the flawless design classic they were supposed to be and authorised a few changes to be made going forward.
To the untrained eye the new issue jackets weren't actually that much different than the old ones, certainly not different enough to warrant a mass changeover to the new pattern all at once, but the cut more closely resembled that of Terran Hegemony uniforms from before the foundation of the Star League, the rank insignia on them had been made slightly more prominent and the Red Cameron Star of Niops was on full display.
It wasn't quite as stiff and binding to wear with extra layers underneath either, something that was very important when you were outside on Niops VII and you didn't want to have to drag a heavy overcoat with you all the time.
Hallis still actually preferred his old Clan Wolverine issue dress uniform, the one with the even spiffier Prussian Collar and the Sam Brown belt that not only looked good but was practical for hanging your personal weapon, or weapons from, but even if Romanov had liked the look too, which she didn't, it was way too clan-looking to risk wearing it outside the Niops system.
With more people than decade ago, and higher wages thanks to the ongoing economic boom, it wasn't a surprise that there was so much more traffic on the streets, Hallis considered as he waited at a pedestrian crossing near the Planetarium for the lights to change so he could continue his journey.
People he encountered on the way generally fell into three groups based on how they reacted to coming across him, and there were quite a few of them out that day because it was a Saturday and not particularly cold out by Niops VII standards.
The majority were Niops-born civilians that either ignored him completely or at most vaguely registered his military uniform, whereas the smallest group were uniformed military themselves that saluted as they passed him going the other way along the sidewalk, Hallis crisply returning each salute.
The third group were those civilians, presumably of Wolverine origin, that greeted him with 'Khan Hallis' and a nod of recognition, some of those nods verging on a bow even though that certainly wasn't something he ever encouraged.
If people had expected clan culture to die out completely, a puddle less than a hundred-thousand strong immersed in a Terran Hegemony sea, albeit it with some Capellan admixture, they had been proved wrong though not for the reason they might expect.
It wasn't so much a top-down dictate from the Khan or saKhan that Wolverine identity needed to remain, nor even the influence of what had been the Warrior Caste, it was broader than that.
Nicholas Kerensky had ordered the annihilation of Clan Wolverine, the summary execution of any of its warriors that were captured and the sterilisation of its civilians.
If Clan Wolverine ceased to exist then that would be letting Old Nick win, if not in the way he had necessarily desired, and letting that tyrannical, murderous bastard win was simply unacceptable.
In reality of course any Wolverine cultural traits weren't going to end up much as more than a thin veneer plastered over the overwhelming late Star-League era Terran Hegemony culture of Niops eventually and Hallis knew it. After a while it would likely exist as merely a few odd quirks such as referring to military schools as 'Sibling Companies', being more tolerant of settling disputes with your fists than 'civilised' society would usually deem acceptable and of course still having a Khan, even if the role was now essentially honorary.
It was important to still have a Khan just in case they ever returned to Strana Mechty. Somebody had to formally declare that the Trial of Annihilation had failed, and that Clan Wolverine had won in the end before they raised the Wolverine banner over Bearcat once more and then reclaimed their holdings on Circe.
Also, someone had to piss on Nicholas Kerensky's grave. Ideally that person would be named McEvedy but a Robertson or a Hallis would do.
Arriving at the Association Council Offices Hallis returned salutes from the guards outside, the soldiers from the Niops Association Militia assigned to protect the building looking less bored than he might have considering the lack of an actual threat to its inhabitants, and then he entered being greeted by the receptionist.
"Good Afternoon General Hallis, the High Associator hasn't finished his meeting scheduled for before yours but I'll let you know when you can go up" the receptionist told him brightly.
"Thank you, Deborah" Hallis replied. "Working this weekend I see."
"Getting next Wednesday off in lieu" the receptionist replied, smiling. Most Civil Service employees worked a standard Monday to Saturday week but things tended to get busier and less rigid when a new High Associator took over. So much to do in order to get them up to speed.
The receptionist herself would have still likely been in Junior High the last time that had happened, Olson had won his first election in 2825 a couple of years before the SLDF showed up at his doorstep, but older members of staff had the institutional memory to deal with all the temporary chaos and hubbub that accompanied such a change in leadership.
Naturally it still went very much easier on Niops than it tended to do in the Draconis Combine or the Free Worlds League for example. For one thing you didn't have to clean up the remains of the former boss after their assassination, suicide or 'suicide'.
Despite having access to the best medical technology outside of Terra The average life expectancy of rulers of the Successor States was actually rather lower than it was for their subjects, Hallis knew. Hell, people on less developed planets in the periphery probably had a better chance of getting to a hundred than your typical Coordinator, Captain-General or whatever.
A political system that led to a smoother, less violent transfer of power, in this case democracy, didn't necessarily lead to the best person for the job getting it however. Franklin Hallis was of the opinion, one kept to himself naturally, that the new High Associator wasn't up to the job and that if it wasn't for an unlikely happenstance they might not have won the election at all.
An astronomer by background James Murray PhD had failed to gain a majority of the vote in the first round nor anything like it. He had obtained a narrow plurality, getting more votes than anyone else managed in an election where there were several candidates, but not by enough to avoid a second round of voting with only the two candidates who had obtained the most votes in the first round eligible to stand.
Depending on your point of view it was either a system that guaranteed that whoever won in the second round runoff election had the support of more than half the population, and was therefore democratically legitimate, or it was a system that made sure that the most unpopular of the two candidates couldn't become High Associator, but either way it produced a result that the majority were willing to accept as the better outcome.
In both the 2830 and 2835 elections, if not the one in 2825, Giles Olson had actually managed to obtain more than half the vote in the first round of voting which had ended the process there and then with no second round required. That was unusual though, most politicians in the Niops Association just didn't have his level of voter engagement, or frankly his charisma.
Fifty-two percent of those who voted in the second round of voting in the 2840 election had either liked James Murray, or else actively disliked their opponent more, so now he was in charge.
The winning margin was small enough to make Hallis wonder if not for the other James Murray whether the outcome would have been the same.
Given that the majority of candidates were dull technocrats promising to both continue the policies of Giles Olson and maintain the status quo if elected, they had all looked for something to make them stand out a little from the crowd. In the case of former astronomer Councilman James Murray PhD that issue was orbital solar mirrors.
The expeditions to McEvedy's Folly had brought the topic of using such mirrors to warm a planet into the public consciousness on Niops VII. Back in the day the Star League Department of Mega Engineering (SLDoME) had constructed an array of them around the world then known as 'Project Sagittarius Umbrella' to reverse the severe Ice Age that was gradually turning it into a snowball. It would in fact have ended up frozen solid from one pole to the other in only a few more centuries if not for the engineers of SLDoME and their habit of only using dictionaries that had the entry for the word 'Impossible' crossed out.
Some accused the terraforming crews of SLDoME of hubris, or of even playing God. Their usual response to that was, 'God made the universe, but the Department of Mega Engineering made Venus habitable' before getting back to work.
By comparison to reversing an apocalyptic Ice Age on McEvedy's Folly, warming up Niops VII a few degrees would be a piece of cake surely? Not only could they make the planet a more pleasant place to live reflected sunlight beaming down on arable farms and forests could increase grain yields and rates of tree growth. It was an argument that had caught some political traction given that Niops had spacelift capacity to spare, increasingly large-scale asteroid mining to provide the raw materials and the undeniable truth that no matter how high the standard of living got on Niops VII it was no substitute for having a pleasant climate.
Councillor James Murray PhD didn't give a crap about crop yields, or being able to enjoy a barbeque in your back garden without freezing your balls off, he cared about astronomy and hated the notion of honking great orbital mirrors blocking out the view.
Niops being a colony founded expressly for the purpose of astronomical research, and having a population weirdly obsessed with star gazing as a hobby, not just as a profession to boot, Murray's strident opposition to 'Orbital Light Pollution' caught some traction with the electorate, not much but some at least.
Then he was invited to speak about the issue by the news channel who thought that broadcasting a segment that combined politics and astronomy as part of their pre-election coverage might be good for ratings.
The producer knowing little about orbital mirrors had sought out an expert, and when he found one realised he had struck gold, quickly inviting them onto the show as well.
Thus it was that when Councillor James Murray PhD appeared on the news channel to talk about orbital mirrors and his objection to constructing any around Niops VII, he was confronted with a man who, in his youth, had once actually helped construct some of the things elsewhere. Captain James Murray MEng, Star League Navy (Retired) formerly of the Star League Department of Mega Engineering was only too happy to go on television to advocate the use of a well-established and proven terraforming technology that would improve the lives of everyone on the planet.
James Murray, the engineer not the astronomer, had officially retired from active service on his one-hundred-and-fifteenth birthday, although he still worked part time as a consultant because he knew more about the SLDoME tech recovered from McEvedy's Folly than anyone else and he was just old not useless. Famously irascible and short-tempered within certain circles the last time he gave a crap about civility or politesse in his dealings with others Kerensky was still in charge, Aleksandr Kerensky, and given free rein to express his views he proceeded to lecture James Murray, the astronomer not the engineer, about how gosh-darned awesome orbital mirrors were.
James Murray, the engineer not the astronomer, did not of course use the phrase 'gosh-darned'. The phrase he did use had to be bleeped out by the news channel. He was also bleeped out later when he called James Murray, the astronomer not the engineer, a narrow-minded, parochial, luddite mother-funster.
He didn't actually say 'funster' either needless to say.
Eventually James Murray, the astronomer not the engineer, snapped and started yelling at the other James Murray, bawling him out for lacking a soul, saying that every child on Niops should have the right to look up at the stars on a cloudless night and wonder in awe at the majesty of the universe without 'unnecessary orbital junk' getting in the way before launching into a diatribe about how Niops had fallen too deeply under the sway of engineers, bean-counters and military types and how people were losing sight of what the Niops Association was founded to do.
Changing demographics would erode the power and authority of what was effectively the ancien régime over time, but until then they were still living in a society where interfering with people star-gazing was a hot-button political issue, Jenna Romanov had observed to Hallis after the broadcast as polls subsequently indicated a surge of support for the James Murray running for office (they also indicated that quite a few people wished that the other James Murray was running instead, these being mostly SLDF types). In her opinion they were witnessing the last hurrah of the Old Guard as James Murray, the astronomer not the engineer, was suddenly thrust into the limelight as the reactionary champion of the ancient regime.
He wasn't actually that in reality of course. Councillor James Murray PhD was in fact broadly-speaking actually very much in favour of Niops stepping up and restoring civilisation in a galaxy that had gone all to hell since the Terran Hegemony collapsed. His televised rant however struck enough of a chord with enough people that it put him just ahead in the polls as the standard bearer of what some called the 'Great Purpose'.
While it had all made for great ratings, in retrospect putting a fairly strong-willed scientist up against a strong-willed engineer regarding what was a contentious issue had inevitably led to conflict. Scientists and engineers were natural enemies, like Englishmen and Scots, or Scots Highlanders and Scots Lowlanders, or Murrays and other Murrays.
Damn Murrays, they ruined Moray.
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Part XLVI- Section 2 of 2
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"The High Associator will see you now, General Hallis" the receptionist spoke up, breaking Hallis away from his thoughts. "Um… don't mention the desk" she advised awkwardly.
Wondering what exactly she meant by that Hallis made his way up to the High Associator's office, something he had done dozens of times before when it was his turn to brief them on behalf of the Joint Chiefs, and after told to just knock and enter by his secretary sat outside he did so.
At which point the 'desk' thing made perfect sense because newly-elected High Associator James Murray wasn't in fact sat at a desk, he was sat behind a folding-table situated where Giles Olson's very nice desk used to be.
"Good Afternoon, Sir" Hallis announced himself, stopping to salute while waiting for an invitation to sit down. In front of the folding table.
"You're probably wondering about the desk" Murray said, sounding rather aggrieved about the furniture situation judging by his tone of voice.
"I wasn't going to say" Hallis replied honestly, he certainly would have done if not for the warning though.
"Olson took his desk with him" Murray said bitterly. "Private property apparently."
"I see" Hallis replied comprehendingly, it was a very nice piece of furniture after all.
"They're trying to find the old desk that used to be here before he replaced it, the government owned one" Murray told him. "If they can't I'll have to get a new one made" he added with a sigh.
"Oh, I think that went to Admiral Bremman. It's in his office at Navy HQ by the spaceport" Hallis replied, instantly regretting saying it.
"Ah ha!" Murray exclaimed, sitting bolt upright in his chair. "Please tell him I want it brought back" he requested, tone indicating that it was not actually a 'request' so much as a command from on high.
"Will do, Sir" Hallis replied. Jacob was going to be really annoyed about this Hallis knew. The admiral had only gotten the desk because he had always gotten on very well with Giles Olson, they even socialised outside of work Bremman claiming that Olson was a surprisingly good rapper when he had a few drinks in him.
Hallis had never really gotten the 'rap' thing even though it was big on Niops. Listening to a nerd on the radio rhyming about thermodynamics wasn't his idea of a good time. Given him good old fashioned classical dubstep any time.
"Take a seat General, at least Olson left those behind" Murray said, sounding a little happier now he thought he might have a proper desk to sit behind soon. "I thought it might be General Romanov that gave me my first briefing?" he queried.
"General Romanov was injured yesterday morning; she's supposed to stay off her feet for a few days" Hallis explained her absence. That was the reason he was here now instead of at home looking after Judith even though he was supposed to be off duty this weekend. Fortunately Frederick was available to babysit his little sister, the boy had his uses even if he was still almost as such of a sarcastic pain-in-the-ass now as he had been in his teens. "The General offers her sincere apologies for not being able to attend."
"Injured how? Nothing too serious I hope?" Murray asked, sounding genuinely concerned.
"Running an assault course" Hallis explained, trying not to laugh. "The General doesn't seem to have mentally adjusted to the fact that she is over a hundred years old now and her ability to leap over obstacles isn't what it was when she was only eighty."
"Good grief. I'll have a word with her about that" Murray replied, rolling his eyes. "I know you Terra-born people are long-lived but you're not immortal."
"You're a third-generation Niops citizen yourself I believe?" Hallis noted.
"Third generation astronomer too, although I was the first in the family to go into politics" Murray replied. "But enough about me, I believe you have some updates regarding military deployments and developments?" he asked, looking down at his notes.
Hallis nodded. "The expanded training mission to Illyria progresses according to schedule" he began. "A number of the candidates for mechwarrior training picked out from the ranks of the Palatinate militia show sufficient promise that they should be able to field a combat-effective battlemech lance alongside their tank formations by the end of the year."
"They're using battlemechs captured from the Black Warriors correct?"
"Correct Sir" Hallis confirmed. "We repaired the battle damage they took ahead of receiving the reparation payments from Circinus in order to speed up the process of getting them operationally ready and available to take the field in needed."
"At which point we can withdraw our ongoing commitment there presumably?"
"Yes. It hasn't been too taxing logistically supplying a small expeditionary force in the Palatinate, we already had jumpships operating between Niops and Illyria hauling cargo and people seeking work on Alphard, but we never intended the commitment there to last quite this long. Mostly because we never expected somebody to attack Illyria while we were there, particularly not anyone that was a lot more formidable than your regular band of pirates."
"Very well" Murray replied. "Battlemech production on Alphard progresses as expected?"
"A few teething troubles with some of the plant and machinery, but nothing you wouldn't expect from a new factory that's still ramping up production" Hallis told him. "We're ahead of the game in terms of training mechwarriors on Alphard so while we will want to maintain a garrison of our own there to protect what will increasingly become the industrial heartland of the Hegemony, we can restrict that to no more than regimental size rather than up it to a full brigade as would have been necessary otherwise."
"I was under the impression that most of the Alphard Militia is still infantry and that will remain the case even once they start receiving battlemechs?" Murray responded quizzically.
"If fighting a defensive battle and properly dug in infantry shouldn't be underestimated Sir, but in any case our long-term plans for the various planetary militias don't just revolve around handing them a few mechs" Hallis replied. "We're already looking into putting the old Ballista self-propelled-gun into large-scale production to give the planetary guard units some useful artillery support and the Magistracy would be only too happy to sell us more Manticore tanks if there's room in the budget to push some more in the direction of the militias."
The High Associator frowned. "I thought we were already in the process of developing indigenous tank production?" he queried. "Why import them rather than simply make more for the militias?"
Hallis raised his eyebrows. "I'm sorry Sir, I thought you knew about the decision to manufacture the Von Luckner instead of the Manticore. It was featured prominently in the briefing documentation you were sent when you won the election."
"I'm afraid I'm still working my way through a mountain of paperwork" Murray replied, truthfully although he had opted to read it in a different order than the one suggested by his staff.
"Oh, well we were going to put the Manticore into production to save importing them from the Magistracy, but the opportunity to obtain a license to manufacture the Von Luckner instead for absolute peanuts came up so we jumped at it" Hallis told him. "The company that makes them, or should I say made them, HartfordCo Industries, just had their factory on Bryant levelled, and given their financial situation, not to mention the extreme weather conditions prevalent on the planet, they're in no position to rebuild."
"Bryant?" Murray repeated. "Isn't that the planet where Amaris destroyed the Storm Inhibitors?"
"Yes Sir" Hallis confirmed. "Without SLDoME around to fix them the planet's been gradually falling to wrack and ruin ever since" he said. "After we heard about their factory being totalled we sent HartfordCo an offer to buy a license to produce the Von Luckner and after accusing us of being vultures they agreed. Bryant is under occupation by the Capellan Confederation at present, but as we don't currently have beef with them they didn't try and block the deal."
Murray nodded his understanding. Bryant was a former world of the Terran Hegemony and hence deemed to be 'under occupation' according to Niops even if the Capellan's might not see it that way.
It was strange how the subject of orbital mirrors kept coming up in his life though, the Storm Inhibitors on, or rather over Bryant being exactly that. When extreme weather events just as hurricanes formed they would be disrupted by carefully aimed beams of reflected sunlight to dissipate them, it being just another SLDoME trick to tame planets that would otherwise be unsuitable for colonisation.
"Our armoured units operate a mix of the Von Luckner and Manticore tanks, the former is most effective at short-range engagements, the latter at long ranges so they complement each other very well" Hallis explained. "If our tank units on Illyria had fielded such a mix, instead of just the Manticore alone, it would have likely led to a quicker victory with reduced losses. If we were forced to only field one design it would be the Manticore incidentally, it's a better all-rounder, but since we can buy those from the Magistracy, while now making the Von Luckner ourselves, we don't have to compromise."
"I assume High Associator Olson signed off on all of this?"
"Yes Sir, not long before he left office. It was all done in a rush though so it's not surprising you hadn't heard given how busy you were with the election" Hallis replied. "It was definitely one of those situations where we had to jump in and grasp the opportunity quickly before someone else might have. As I said before, we really did get the license from HartfordCo for absolute peanuts, it was even more of a steal than when we got the license to produce the Thug after Maltex Corporation had their own factory blitzed."
Murray leaned forward in his chair. "Forgive me General Hallis, but if I recall correctly one of the selling points in the militaries proposal to build a factory producing the Manticore was that it presented an opportunity to repurpose surplus fusion power-plants stripped out from Stingray aerospace fighters imported from the Free Worlds League. Will that also be the case for the Von Luckner?"
"No" Hallis admitted. "The Von Luckner utilises a class 225 Standard Fusion Engine rather than the 240SFE powerplant of the Stingray and Manticore, however by the time the factory is complete we plan to have started importing Sabre light aerospace fighters from the Magistracy which do use a class 225 SFE so we'll modify those to power the Von Luckner instead."
"It's that easy?"
"Well, the VOX 225 engine in a Von Lucker isn't exactly the same shape and size as the Nissan 225 in a Sabre, but since we're making our own Von Luckner tanks we'll just change the design of the engine compartment to suit" Hallis responded. "We were going to do the same with our version of the Manticore, modify the design slightly to carry a VOX240a instead of the regular Pitban 240."
"I suppose when you get right down to it they're all just fusion reactors, it's just what the machine they're installed inside does with the power they generate that changes whether they're an aerospace fighter, a tank or a battlemech" Murray reasoned.
"Very true. We actually use a few old Wasp powerplants as emergency generators in our bunker complex on Reykjanes Island" Hallis replied. "For what it's worth, in the longer term I do still have a plan for the surplus engines from the Stingray, they won't go to waste. I'm hoping we'll eventually get a license to produce the Schrek PPC carrier made by Aldis Industries, they also use a 240SFE powerplant, although since Aldis is safely headquartered on Terra we're unlikely to get the license at the bargain price we did other machines."
Importing the Stingray and eventually the Sabre with a standard-fusion-engine already installed by the manufacturer, and then immediately switching those engines out for superior Extra-Light Fusion Engines to turn them into 'Royal' equivalent aerospace fighter, would have been a terrible waste of money if those surplus engines weren't going to be re-purposed. As it was if those engines were still going to be gainfully employed then the bean-counters and bureaucrats were generally willing to accept the argument made by the military as to why it was a good idea to go about it this way.
It wasn't a secret that Niops was importing the Stingray from the Free Worlds League, and it wouldn't be a secret when they started importing the Sabre from the Magistracy of Canopus either, what was going to be a secret was that those aerospace fighters in Niops service were going to be much better than the regular models of each type in service elsewhere.
The advanced Extralight Fusion Engines the upgraded fighters would require would have been a problem to put into production if not for the fact that Niops already had a couple of production lines for such engines crated up in storage. Retooling the machinery that used to produce the XL engines for the Mercury II and Stag II was a lot easier than having to create whole new manufacturing capability completely from scratch, and it was inordinately quicker than having to wait for Project Workshop time to be freed up.
The line that used to make the engine for the Pulverizer was already in the process of being re-tooled to make the powerplant for the Thug instead. Those machines were going to be hand made in Project Workshops as and when they were available, rather than put into mass production, although the definition of 'hand made' when it came to high-tech artisanal production in a Project Workshop was a slight misnomer.
Especially with the engine being made in a separate facility a Project Workshop could 'hand build' an assault mech around an endo-steel frame, itself also made elsewhere, somewhat faster than a bunch of guys in a garage could have managed.
Eventually when he had a Project Workshop of his very own working for the army full-time Hallis was aiming towards round-the clock production of 'hand-built' assault mechs, not just the Thug but also the King Crab if they could get the license. The Devastator and the Rifleman II wouldn't need a license, nobody was making them anyway and as far as Hallis was concerned the designs were SLDF/Hegemony property in any case.
"I believe that construction of the dropship maintenance facility has begun?" Murray checked.
"Yes Sir, once completed the Alliance Station now being assembled in orbit will not only be able to service our existing dropship fleet but we'll be able to put the CargoKing into production" Hallis confirmed. "It's coming at a useful moment, we're starting to suffer from a shortage of available cargo transportation as our interstellar trade increases and they're automated enough not to put as much of a strain on our labour resources as older types such as the Mule would. The military model, the CargoMaster, will also help us out a lot logistically as the Hegemony expands."
"Admiral Bremman is pleased I'm sure" Murray surmised.
"He is, Sir" Hallis replied. "Though I don't think he'll be happy until we get the first orbital shipyard built over Niops VIII, or maybe not even until the second over Niops IX."
Murray's eye twitched. "By 'Niops VIII' and 'Niops IX' I assume you mean the astronomical objects known as Elizabeth as Helena which are situated in the Niops asteroid belt?" he asked coldly.
"Yes" Hallis replied, slightly vexed by the man's reaction and manner.
"Those are Dwarf Planets, merely large asteroids" the High Associator stated firmly. "As such they are not to be designated as Niops VIII and IX."
Hallis raised his eyebrows. "But they're actually round and both well over fifteen-hundred klicks in diameter, Helena is closer to two-thousand..."
"Nevertheless, they are Dwarf Planets according to the official criteria established for such by the Niops Astronomical Union" Murray told him sternly, cutting him off mid-sentence. "I suppose you're one of those people that thinks Pluto in the Sol system is a planet too?" he asked sarcastically.
"Well, it is isn't it?" Hallis replied, confused.
The High Associator stared at him. "GET OUT AND DON'T COME BACK!" he bellowed, jumping to his feet and pointing at the door.
Since it was a direct order General Frankin Hallis immediately shot out of his chair to comply even if the entire situation was insane as far as he was concerned.
"No, wait" the High Associator said more quietly, sitting back down. "Get out and come back with my ****** desk" he corrected himself.
Later, while Franklin Hallis explained how his day went to his wife back at home Barbara had stared at him. "You called Pluto a planet?" she asked in horror, staring at her husband aghast and making him wonder if he was the mad one or if everyone born in this system was completely nuts.
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Note from the Author:
Our first look at High Associator James Murray PhD, although we've met Captain James Murray MEng before in Part XIX (in universe the two men having the same name is a coincidence). James Murray was originally an astronomer who ran for political office becoming a member of the Association Council and now the High Associator, meanwhile James Murray worked for the Star League Department of Mega Engineering (SLDoME) and then the SLDF. They have very different opinions on the subject of Orbital Mirrors.
Niops uses a Two Round Voting system to elect the High Associator (France uses it to elect their President too). In an election with multiple candidates it stops someone getting elected that a clear majority don't like on a fraction of the vote (which can easily happen in First Past the Post elections with three or more candidates).
The Storm Inhibitors (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Storm_Inhibitor) used on Bryant (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Bryant) (and other worlds) kept the severe weather in check there until Amaris and the Rim Worlds Republic blew them up. With their planet a mess HartfordCo Industries (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/HartfordCo_Industries) manufacturer of the Von Luckner (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Von_Luckner) tank was unable to rebuild their factory after it was destroyed in 2840.
In the universe of Battletech Pluto (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluto) retained its status as a planet (a political decision no doubt, regarding it as a Dwarf Planet (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwarf_planet) is more logical given the other rocks floating out there in the outer Solar System). On Niops however during their isolation the astronomers had their way. Like Ceres (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceres_(dwarf_planet)) in our own asteroid belt Elizabeth and Helena in the Niops asteroid belt are also dwarf planets.
High Associator James Murray has a berserk button or two, Hallis hit one of them square on!
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Dwarf planets are still planets. I will ride or die on that hill.
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Justice for Pluto!
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HILARIOUS! Says the Astronomy Minor from over 30 years ago (and current Information Warfare officer)... ;D
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Funny and worrisome, the guy....is not all there.
Wasn't there suppose to be some diplomatic mission to Terra or was just talk? Murray doesn't seem to be stable isotope to me.
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I expect he'll be a one-term wonder... I wouldn't bet against the Engineer in a future election... ;D
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Depends if he does damage to the SLDF while he in office, that's more pressing issue.
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I wouldn't expect the Engineer to do ANY damage to the SLDF... you don't bend your own crowbar... ;D
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I wouldn't expect the Engineer to do ANY damage to the SLDF... you don't bend your own crowbar... ;D
Yeah, but this is the Scientist.
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Ah, wasn't sure which "he" Wrangler was referring to...
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Ah, wasn't sure which "he" Wrangler was referring to...
Awww......I was talking about the guy in charge of the Niops , the new High Associator James Murray. Fruit cake who overreacts to planets status. Yelling at his highest commander over something like that is very....bad. Means he either he could be unstable or might be influenced by others, including ComStar.
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Funny and worrisome, the guy....is not all there.
Wasn't there suppose to be some diplomatic mission to Terra or was just talk? Murray doesn't seem to be stable isotope to me.
Obviously he won't be going to Terra until they correct the status of Pluto 😋
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Dwarf planets are still planets. I will ride or die on that hill.
Sure, they're planets, it's in the dang name. The problem is that absolutely no astronomer would ever count them when they number the major planets, because otherwise the Sol system would have anywhere between 12 and 15+ planets with Ceres, Eris, and a couple other large asteroid belt and Kuiper belt objects. From an astronomer's viewpoint, that way lies madness. If nothing else, the usual mnemonic to name the planets would probably have to be updated every few years as another dwarf planet the same size or larger than Pluto was discovered hiding out among the comets. School children and their teachers would justifiably riot. (Cats and dogs, living together; Mass hysteria!)
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Just looking at the comments here I'm not surprised a professional astronomer becomes irate about what counts as a planet. 🌌
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Heck, I'm sure some professional Astronomers NOW get irate about that... ;D
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We do not talk about the secret facilities that are clearly not located on the object that is clearly not the ninth planet in the Niops system. Ever.
We especially do not talk about the planetary scale thrusters that are not located on that object’s dark side.
:evil:
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Justice for Pluto!
Seconded, all for this say yup!
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Sure, they're planets, it's in the dang name. The problem is that absolutely no astronomer would ever count them when they number the major planets, because otherwise the Sol system would have anywhere between 12 and 15+ planets with Ceres, Eris, and a couple other large asteroid belt and Kuiper belt objects. From an astronomer's viewpoint, that way lies madness. If nothing else, the usual mnemonic to name the planets would probably have to be updated every few years as another dwarf planet the same size or larger than Pluto was discovered hiding out among the comets. School children and their teachers would justifiably riot. (Cats and dogs, living together; Mass hysteria!)
I disagree I think it would be cool to have 15 planets in the solar system. Or more! I think it would be fun, and we could even get kids involved by having them learn about astronomy by pouring over data and if they find a new planet they can get invited to NASA or something. I'd love to spend tax dollars on that.
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Part XLVII - Section 1 of 2
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"We are not as brothers, the Widowmakers and the Ghost Bears, we are brothers."
Joint Declaration of saKhan Hans Jorgensson of Clan Ghost Bear and saKhan Cal Jorgensson of Clan Widowmaker - 2842CE
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Hall of Khans – Strana Mechty – 2840
"While our reconnaissance team should be commended for carrying out their mission in an exemplary manner" Khan Kesar Jerricho of Clan Coyote spoke up, "about the only good thing I can say regarding the intelligence they have brought back is that at least the deployment of nuclear ordnance by the Traitor Lords seems to have been scaled back somewhat" he observed.
"If I was more certain that was because they were starting to regain their sanity, rather than simply running out of targets actually worth expending thermonuclear weapons on, I would view that knowledge in a more positive light" Sandra Tseng of the Ghost Bears responded wryly.
"I would have to concur with Khan Tseng" ilKhan Nicholas Kerensky added for himself. "This so-called 'Second Succession War' that has now raged in the Inner Sphere for a decade, and which shows no sign of ending anytime soon, is no less horrifying to me than the mindless slaughter of the First Succession War was when we learned of it five years ago" he said. "That fewer continents are routinely scorched by thermonuclear fire, fewer worlds are poisoned with chemical and biological weapons and fewer cities are devastated by orbital bombardment than before is likely due as much, if not more, from a lack of capability as it is a sudden recognition of basic morality" he opined, the assembled khans nodding their agreement.
"As regards orbital bombardment capability in particular," James McKenna of the Snow Ravens interjected, "judging by the intelligence data our operatives collected it is logical, indeed undeniable, that the navies of the Great Houses are incapable of fielding anything close to the number of warships they used to" he suggested. "During the First Succession War fleet actions were seemingly commonplace, certainly in the early decades of that conflict at least, now however for even a single warship to be deployed into combat seems to be a noteworthy event much spoken of."
Rafe Kardaan of the Cloud Cobras nodded. "They threw too many of them away attaining pyrrhic victories that proffered only short-term advantage and now cannot replace their losses because their shipyards are evidently just debris in decaying orbit for the most part" he concurred. After the Snow Ravens the Cloud Cobras were the clan that most concentrated their focus on the arena of aerospace warfare rather than ground combat and viewed the universe through a similar prism. Holding the high ground was the best way to achieve dominance.
"Their merchant fleets have suffered less but are still demonstrably only a shadow of what they were" the khan of Clan Sea Fox, Karen Nagasawa, chipped in. "Based on admittedly limited data my analysts conclude that their economies have most likely been as devastated by the precipitous drop in interstellar trade resulting from losses to jumpships as they were destruction of industrial facilities. Planets that were once economically vibrant and productive wither on the vine for the lack of shipping needed to transport raw materials and finished products."
"Given that this economic strife has not resulted in a noticeable slackening of their constant warfare against each other, my assumption is that they heavily prioritise their remaining resources towards their military at the expense of the standard of living of their civilians" Kerensky said then paused for a moment looking thoughtful. "It could be said that we do the same, I am sure many a malcontent would contend so, but our people are not starving to death by the millions amidst cratered radioactive hellscapes, nor are they dying of thirst in droves for the lack of basic water-purification technology" he stated, looking suitably appalled by the reality of life across much of the Inner Sphere these days. "The society we created is one of warriors, based upon martial competition, but with the goal of creating a military able protect civilisation from any threat, not to war mindlessly with itself while civilisation collapses around us" he continued, now looking to khan of the Coyotes. "Your clans innovation zellbrigen, Khan Jerricho, which I embraced after Klondike and the needless death of my brother, seeks to limit losses of lives and resources so that we do not spiral into the kind of apocalyptic madness and mindless slaughter that has befallen the Inner Sphere, and we need only look to the current state of what was once the glory that was the Star League to see what happens if war is practiced without restraint" he said, casting his eyes towards the holographic projection of the colonised star-systems within a thousand light-years of Terra that currently dominated the hall.
As well as the stars themselves the projection showed the route that the reconnaissance mission had taken. Two Tramp jumpships belonging to the clans, both armed and equipped with lithium-fusion batteries though disguised as mere periphery traders, had followed the Exodus Road back towards the Inner Sphere together, only separating as they neared the Draconis Combine.
One of the two vessels had started at Knutstad and then skirted the Inner Sphere in an anti-clockwise as far as Icar and Steelton, systems that once been part of the fallen Rim Worlds Republic but now belonged to the Lyran Commonwealth. Meanwhile the other jumpship began at Farstar and travelled clockwise, eventually passing through the territory of the Outworlds Alliance as far as Haynesville in the Federated Suns.
The intelligence they had brought back was considerable, far more than the previous mission had obtained five years before. Although they had deliberately not penetrated more than a jump or two into any of the Successor States at any point, mostly for fear of encountering naval forces and being potentially unmasked, they had gathered data relating to the current situation in the Inner Sphere as far away as the Magistracy of Canopus which seemed to be coping better than most.
As for the rest of the near periphery most of the former Rim Worlds Republic had fallen to brigandage and piracy, with only those systems annexed by the Lyran Commonwealth retaining some semblance of order. The Outworlds Alliance was falling apart, with Wynn's Roost seceding and most the Trader's Domain region following them and the Taurian Concordat was apparently stuck in an inward-looking decline and still somehow convinced that Davion was going to invade them any second despite the Federated Suns being far too busy already fighting the Draconis Combine and the Capellan Confederation.
Meanwhile the so-called Pirate Kingdoms such as the Tortuga Dominions were enjoying a Golden Age, raiding with near impunity as the exploited the military weakness of the Great Houses in their periphery regions. According to the pirates the clan scouts had captured, interrogated and subsequently executed near Star's End, the only exception to that situation was apparently in the region between the Magistracy and the Illyrian Palatinate. That area was reputedly the Bermuda Triangle of space if you were of a buccaneer persuasion, pirate bands that went in had a nasty habit of never being seen again and as word of that had spread few still chanced it.
As regards intelligence on the Great Houses themselves simply the opportunity to collect newspapers in Steiner and Davion controlled space had proved extremely fruitful, certainly more so than it had before on worlds belonging to House Kurita where public access to information was much more tightly controlled. Stories concerning the HPG Interdiction that ComStar, the former SLCOMNET had placed on the Free Worlds League recently and its effects were of particular interest to the clans since it demonstrated that ComStar was no mere observer but an active participant in the affairs of the Inner Sphere.
Nicholas Kerensky looked away from the starmap. "Based on what we have learned my opinion remains unchanged that the clans have a moral obligation to return to the Inner Sphere on day, end this destructive Second Age of War, impose order and restore the Star League" he declared before sighing. "Unfortunately however, it is my belief that the combined militaries of the so-called Successor States still outweigh our own forces by too much to believe that we are in any position to attempt such an undertaking with any realistic chance of success" he added. "Quantity has a quality all its own, and what they lack in weapons technology and skill they more than make up for in sheer numbers" he said, feigning regret. "Are there any among you that disagree, quineg?"
The assembled khans chorused 'neg' is response, all of a like mind, although many of them were looking at Ellie Kinnison of the Steel Vipers as they did so, thinking that if anyone there was crazy enough to think that they could actually conquer the Inner Sphere it would be her.
"On a more positive note, the precipitous reduction in their naval strength and their apparent inability to replace their losses does provide some hope" Nicholas Kerensky told the Grand Council. "Not only does it mean our naval strength is unmatched, the fact that they threw away their warships in foolhardy frontal attacks, heedless of the loss of capability that resulted from doing so, leads me to believe that they may do the same for other increasingly irreplaceable assets."
"From what we have learned they certainly do not shy away from squandering their battlemech regiments in unfavourable terrain" Elizabeth Hazen of the Jade Falcons observed, checking her notes. "At some point you might expect the Combine to realise that the mountains and dense jungles of Hesperus heavily favour defence, but they just keep flinging themselves against the Lyran Commonwealth there over and over" she said, rolling her eyes. "The Steiner forces can literally replace their own losses straight out of the factory and their casualties are always lower in every engagement because Kurita has to come to them."
"Their supposed sense of honour and an unwillingness to ever retreat even when it is foolish not to blinds them" the khan of Clan Blood Spirit, Colleen Schmitt, noted. "As you all know I am not exactly one to downplay the importance of honour and duty" she continued to polite laughter, "but our tradition of hegira, allowing retreat without dishonour, exists for a reason. There are times when everyone sane must recognise that enough is enough and accept that the sunk cost fallacy is an actual thing."
"Do the Traitor Lords strike you as sane, Khan Schmitt, quineg?" Ellie Kinnison asked sarcastically.
"Aff" Schmitt replied, choosing to disagree with the woman on principle. "Self-serving, immoral verging on malevolent and seemingly incapable of seeing the big picture, but not necessarily insane, not most of them anyway. If they were truly mad I would not harbour such hatred towards them because I would assume them incapable of understanding the gravity of their crimes" she said. "On that note may I suggest that the ilKhan has much of what we have now learned declassified and distributed to all of our people, regardless of clan or caste, so that all are aware of why we are calling upon them to continue to sacrifice for the greater good of humanity."
"I agree" Sandra Tseng concurred. "Given how many of our people, or at least their parents and grandparents, hail from one of the worlds that the Traitor Lords have burned to ashes in their constant struggle to try and come out on top it would likely drive them to greater effort for their clan, and the clans as a whole, if they were as cognisant of the facts as we are."
ilKhan Kerensky frowned. "While I believe that our people should obey lawful orders without question or hesitation, should already strive to do all they can as best they could in undertaking whatever task they are assigned, I concede your proposal has merits" he seemed to concede reluctantly while inwardly smiling. Kerensky believed that the clans needed a goal to unify around, the people themselves an enemy to direct their hatred towards so that hatred might not be directed towards him one day instead, and if the absent Wolverines were proving to be an elusive bogyman then the Successor States would do very nicely instead.
The fact was that a disproportionate percentage of the SLDF that had followed his father on the Exodus were from the Terran Hegemony worlds, few of the units that had decided to remain behind being from the Star League Navy or the Royal Divisions of the army. As such they, and their descendants, looked upon what had befallen their former homeworlds with a mixture of horror and rage and for Nicholas Kerensky in particular the whole situation was a blessing because even the most heinous things he had ever ordered done himself paled in comparison to what had been going on back in the Inner Sphere at the same time.
Over the last few years Nicholas Kerensky himself had even on occasion openly, if mildly, criticised some of his own orders given while seeking to pacify the Pentagon Worlds after Operation Klondike, referring to them as necessary evils that he regretted before comparing them with the truly unforgivable and unjustified actions of others such as the Kentares Massacre. A limited application of brutality to restore order and compel obedience in dire, chaotic circumstances was one thing, but to order millions of unarmed civilians to be literally put to the sword because you were angry about the death of a close relative was quite another. As he put it himself in an address that was broadcast by HPG to every world under clan rule, he had been personally devastated by the death of his younger brother during Operation Klondike but having everyone on Eden put to death because of it, even the ones living on the other side of the planet from where it happened, did not cross his mind for an instant because unlike those that held sway in the Inner Sphere these days he was neither evil nor mad. The clans had of course slain those directly responsible for the death of Andery Kerensky, but only those directly responsible because to do more than that was insane and unjust.
All things considered Nicholas Kerensky had weathered the storm of the Wolverine Secession and their successful escape better than he had hoped for at the time, albeit more by luck than judgement because the news from the Inner Sphere had been so appalling it eclipsed everything else in people's minds.
If there was one thing about the current situation however that did annoy Nicholas Kerensky somewhat it was that if anything clan society seemed to be operating considerably more smoothly and efficiently now that the other castes were happier to go along with things by choice, than it had when they were coerced into compliance. To give one example productivity in munitions factories was up by a statistically significant amount in nearly every clan as the labourer and technician castes were no longer grudgingly doing the minimum they could get away with but saw themselves as contributing to a higher purpose that they actually agreed with.
You can force someone to work at bayonet point but getting them to do they best they can is another matter entirely. Part of the reason why production was up was that some of the workers themselves had made suggestions on how to improve it, something that happened rarely before because so many of them were unhappy about their lot.
The change was actually so stark that even Jerome Wilson, the khan of the clan Kerensky had chosen to join himself, had been heard to remark that they were probably seeing why the damnable Chalcas Clan had been able to outperform the others economically and scientifically. Their labourer, technician and scientist castes had not just doing the minimum required to stop them getting put up against a wall and shot.
The truth was that even now only a small minority of the population had actually been born and raised within clan society, most of the workforce being from the Pentagon Worlds, and many of them had bristled against the shackles, usually metaphorical but occasionally literal, being placed upon them under clan rule. The seething criminal underbelly of clan society, the so-called 'Dark Caste' of rebels and malcontents, had been ever expanding until news started to arrive as to the state of the Inner Sphere but these days dissent was noticeably more muted.
Sarah McEvedy had loosened those shackles and it had paid off because her workforce had looked at how their opposite numbers faired in other clans and it made her look good, much as the bloody Succession Wars were now making Nicholas Kerensky look good, or at least not nearly as bad.
Nearly everyone that had followed Aleksandr Kerensky on the Exodus had expected the Inner Sphere to collapse into war once the SLDF was no longer present to act as a constraint on military adventurism, but few had predicted just how bad it was going to get. Most had assumed that the scale of destruction and death toll would be similar to that of the Age of War before the formation of the Star League, the more pessimistic arguing it would be like the Amaris War, or even the Age of War was itself before the signing of the Ares Accords put some constraint on how the factions behaved.
In reality the Succession Wars had proven orders of magnitude worse than almost anyone had predicted. So bad in fact that it forced clan society, all castes of clan society, to reassess their place in the universe and consider what they were going to do about it.
Majority opinion was that the SLDF should have stayed and fought and would have if it had known what was going to happen. Given that they couldn't wind the clock back and do it all again they should at the very least go back, save the Inner Sphere from continued strife and give the murderous scum ruling over the Great Houses a much-deserved shellacking.
As Nicholas Kerensky had declared in a fiery speech, billions, tens of billions of dead cried out for vengeance, and it was their duty as the Star League in Exile to answer that call.
With any luck however, Kerensky had thought to himself, he would be dead long before they were remotely in a position to do so. If not then the Successor States would surely come to their senses, scaling back on the war-crimes and lessening the clamour for the clans to intervene, but for now having the khans grumbling less about his rule and the lower castes mollified somewhat was a undeserved win he happily embraced.
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Part XLVII - Section 2 of 2
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"I do not know if any of the rest of you have noticed" John Fletcher of the Hell's Horses spoke up. "But it appears that the various armies of the Great Houses seem to have forgotten how to properly conduct combined-arms warfare" he observed professionally. "It is certainly possible that I am extrapolating too far based upon limited data, but the only time we see mention of tank and infantry formations being used is when there are not enough battlemech regiments available to undertake a particular task."
"Much of what we know comes from open-source intelligence, newspapers, rumour and the like" Raymond Sainze of the Fire Mandrills noted. "Battlemechs are 'sexy' in media terms, mention of them is likely to attract more interest so they are likely to be disproportionately featured in accounts of battles."
Fletcher shrugged. "You may be right" he conceded, "however I took note of a mention of the mercenary brigade known as the Crater Cobras, an appellation they seemingly earned because they were deemed mere 'crater makers' by a critic due to their heavy employment of artillery during combat operations" he continued. "The fact that their heavy use of artillery was itself seemingly so noteworthy makes me wonder how rarely it must be encountered."
"Mercenaries are cowards, hungry for profit and loathe to risk their lives" Ellie Kinnison said dismissively. "To criticise them for bombarding their foe from tens of kilometres away rather than facing them honourably makes perfect sense to me" she said. Her Steel Vipers actually paid more attention to the effective employment of ground forces other than battlemechs than any clan other than the Hell's Horses themselves, the Viper infantry arm in particular being unusually large and chock full of those that had failed to make the grade in a clan where the standards for qualification as a mechwarrior was unusually high, but even they regarded artillery with distaste.
John Fletcher looked at Kinnison askance. Whether artillery gave you the warm fuzzies or not, failing to give the great killer of the battlefield its due respect was foolhardy. The clans might 'play fair' in trials but the Great Houses most certainly would not. "The Crater Cobras are our lost brethren, formed from several former SLDF units that chose to stay behind rather than join the Exodus" he pointed out. "Their original commanding officer was Lieutenant-General Alexander Baldwin who, unlike certain people, earned his spurs fighting Amaris in an actual full-scale war where combined-arms-operations were the norm" he replied, the dig at Kinnison having been too young to fight Amaris like he had obvious to all. "It is more than possible that the reason why they earned their nickname is because Baldwin still followed SLDF doctrine while commanding his brigade, employing his artillery to support his infantry, tank and battlemech units as he was trained to do" Fletcher continued. "The point I am making, which should be obvious, is that the armed forces of the Inner Sphere have forgotten the lesson."
"Which is a good thing" Elizabeth Hazen realised. Like Fletcher she was old-school SLDF by background, both of them were fast approaching their hundredth birthday and were starting to look it despite the anti-agathic treatments of their youth, living hard lives had aged them.
"Which is a good thing" Fletcher confirmed. "Battles where artillery is used less frequently greatly favour the clan way of war, it plays to our strengths. The skill of our warriors and the greater effective ranges of our new autocannon and direct-energy-weapons" he noted. "Incoming high explosive fired from beyond the horizon cares little for your skill or courage, it only cares if you are present in the grid square it was aimed at when it arrives" he said, expression very much one of a man who had been stuck in a trench while a battery of howitzers showed great interest in shuffling him away from both the location itself and his mortal coil.
"Coincidentally, while reading the reports I too made note of that particular mercenary command, admittedly at first because I could not help but approve of their choice of name, crater-making notwithstanding" Rafe Kardaan of the Cloud Cobras spoke up smiling, his choice of words triggering some polite laughter from the other khans. "It is worth consideration that these 'Crater Cobras' as well as being former SLDF include the Cameron Star on their unit insignia which indicates to me that despite choosing not to join the Exodus they still bear some admirable allegiance to the Star League" he said. "Although they chose to become mercenaries I have to wonder if that was only because they did not believe that any of the Great Houses were deserving of their fealty?" he added.
"The Eridani Light Horse continue to fly the Cameron Star also, I believe" Colleen Schmidt said, pursing her lips as she considered what the khan of the Cloud Cobras had said.
"Indeed" Kardaan responded, nodding. "I realise that my clan is slightly unusual in paying as much attention to base political considerations as we do, but given that there does still seem to be a degree of loyalty to the Star League remaining in the Inner Sphere, a number of those loyalists being under arms, might we not consider reaching out to them when the time comes to launch our crusade, quiaff?"
"Aff" Schmidt concurred. "I would not wish to slay those that still fight under the banner of the Cameron Star unless I had to."
"Me neither, but I was actually thinking more in terms of swaying them to our cause" Kardaan explained his thinking on the matter.
James McKenna scratched his chin looking thoughtful. "Although it ended badly, and I confess I am not sure how much of the blame for that rests with me, my Snow Ravens would not have so easily dealt with the Empire of Hidalgo as we did on Circe during Operation Klondike if the forces of the Kerensky Dominion, who still professed loyalty to their former commander, had not fought by our side" he said. "Even if we were only able to get the likes of the Crater Cobras and the Eridani Light Horse to stand aside it would be of help in our campaign, even more so if they joined our cause to reestablish the Star League" he suggested.
"Given our gross numerical advantage I can only agree" ilKhan Kerensky interjected. "We should find time to discuss this further and I would also suggest that when we send our next intelligence-gathering mission to the Inner Sphere we instruct our operatives to gather as much information of former SLDF units that did not formally sign up with one of the House armies as possible without them risking being captured and identified. If there is one thing that we do not need it is the Traitor Lords being given the opportunity to prepare for our crusade. Even with the element of surprise the scale of the undertaking is daunting to contemplate" he said, frowning for a moment before suddenly smiling. "On a somewhat related matter, learning the fate of the 295th Division came as something of a pleasant surprise, and I would personally hope that we could avoid crossing swords with them also. They were one of the units that fought in the Battle of Moscow in 2777, an event that I think you can all understand is dear to my heart" he said honestly. He vaguely recalled his mother mentioning once that she had been introduced to a 'General Romanova' by his father after the battle, the officer's family name being something that had caught her attention for obvious reasons. Apparently the officer was unable to speak Russian, something which had disappointed Katyusha Kerensky somewhat, but still for a direct descendant of the Tsar's themselves to command a division involved in the liberation of Moscow was portentous she thought.
"The 295th fought their way from Apollo all the way to Terra, it was a shame they were left behind during the Exodus, though in their particular case it seems to have been largely by accident not choice" Colleen Schmitt commented. "I was also pleased to hear that, finding themselves stranded in the Inner Sphere, instead of abandoning their duty they decided to establish themselves on a Star League colony to protect it from the predations of others" she said. "Incidentally, do we know much more of this 'Niops Association' than is mentioned in the report, quiaff?" she asked hopefully.
"Aff' Nicholas Kerensky confirmed. "As well as being a self-sufficient colony of the Terran Hegemony established for astronomical research, a study of old files in the SLDF databases indicated some connection between the Niops Association and the XXXIV Corps which had been stationed in the periphery bordering region of the Free Worlds League before the Amaris War" he said. "Niops provided logistical support to the XXXIV Corps, supplying technologically advanced spare parts that would have otherwise had to come all the way from the Hegemony itself" the ilKhan continued. "It seems that a manufacturing base sophisticated enough to maintain cutting-edge Hegemony astronomical sensors and the like was also up to the task of producing short production runs of late Star League military equipment including that only in the possession of Royal formations at the time."
"Which explains nicely how they were able to keep the war machines of the 295th operational in the years since" Elizabeth Hazen remarked. "I was wondering about that. In fact it even vaguely crossed my mind that the Chalcas Clan might somehow be involved, what with the rumours of Niops still operating equipment regarded as 'lostech' elsewhere in the Inner Sphere" she added.
"It seems more the case that Niops never lost the ability to manufacture Star League equipment, rather than having it reintroduced thanks to someone like the cursed Calchas arrive at their doorstep a few decades after the 295th did" Kerensky replied. "Being able to manufacture and maintain your own HPG network might seem like some kind of dark sorcery to those living in the technologically regressed Successor States, but before the Traitor Lords burned much of the rest of the Hegemony in nuclear fire knowing how an ERPPC works would not incur accusations of witchcraft' he said sardonically. "I also doubt that the Chalcas Clan would like the Niops Association flag, to my eye their Red Cameron Star resembles the Clan Daggerstar a little too much for them to embrace it" he joked.
Stephen McKenna chuckled for a moment before becoming more serious and professional again "The 295th did have warships assigned to them, which included the destroyers mentioned in the report as being operated by Niops, although I have seen no mention of the Potemkin class cruiser that we know General Romanov had at her command at the time of the Exodus" he said. "I wonder if Niops has been keeping her existence a secret, something to surprise the Free Worlds League with if House Marik casts envious eyes in their direction?" he suggested.
"It would be sensible to keep an ace up their sleeve given what the loathsome Mariks did to Brownsville and New Dallas" Kerensky agreed with the theory. "The mention of Niops boasting of the size of their nuclear deterrent indicates they are aware of the threat they are under."
"We should not be surprised perhaps that a planet full of astrophysicists and SLDF military personnel who served against Amaris is somewhat knowledgeable regarding both the theory of nuclear fusion and its practical application to warfare" Raymond Sainze wryly observed. "Given that we know the 295th are on Niops and still apparently a cohesive unit I wonder if the SLDF divisions that aligned with Jerome Blake and took control of Terra are still mobilised and battle-ready as well?"
"Our intelligence regarding the current situation on Terra and Comstar generally is sparse unfortunately" the ilKhan replied regretfully. "Airing on the side of caution we must assume that the eight divisions that my father left under the command of General Lauren Hayes, those that joined the cause of Jerome Blake, are still capable of taking the field, even if by now they lack a strong core of veterans to stiffen their ranks" he said. "Given what was happening to the other worlds of the Terran Hegemony I have to assume that ComStar is not stupid enough to have demobilised."
"It is possible they have warships too" Stephen McKenna warned. "The Titan Shipyards survived the Amaris War after all, and if it suits this Niops Association to keep a secret capital ship in reserve just in case then the same would be true for ComStar" he said. "They might conceivably have even begun to rebuild the SDS system" he added with an involuntary grimace. As a naval officer who had commanded warships during the liberation of the Terran Hegemony during the Amaris War his nightmares were haunted by M-5 Caspar warships and M-3 Pentagon drones.
Since talking up the potential difficulty of the task of 'liberating' the Inner Sphere very much suited Nicholas Kerensky he was only too happy to entertain such a notion and he steered the conversation over the next few minutes along those lines. Even without warships and murderous artificial intelligences opposing the clans, he then warned, their achieving uncontested dominance of the high ground of space was still in doubt because of the sheer number of aerospace fighters and armed dropships that could be thrown at them, many loaded down with nuclear-tipped ordnance.
With broad agreement from the Grand Council that the time was not yet right to contemplate launching their crusade to save the Inner Sphere from itself and restore the Star League the ilKhan proposed two votes. The first vote was whether or not they should send another reconnaissance mission to the Inner Sphere in five years or leave it for a full decade, with Kerensky advocating the latter arguing that the clan's ongoing military buildup would not bear fruit for at least a decade anyway, the so-called Second Succession War was highly unlikely to end anytime soon, and that every time they sent people back they unnecessarily risked exposure.
Nicholas Kerensky won the first vote by a comfortable margin, with only the lunatic fringe, which included his lover unfortunately, dissenting.
The second vote was on whether the Grand Council should in future once again have the saKhan of each clan attend as well as the khan, as had been the norm before the Wolverine Secession. After Franklin Hallis had blown the original Great Hall to rubble via orbital bombardment a concern that the man might well come back one day and do it again had led to a decision that having all the Khans and saKhans in one place was a bad idea in terms of ensuring continuity of government after a decapitation strike.
The second vote was tighter, but seeing as how they had heard nothing of the Chalcas Clan in a decade and a half and Strana Mechty was much better protected now anyway the majority voted to go back to the old way of doing things.
Kerensky took note of the fact that Jason Karrige of the Widowmakers, who had spoken little throughout the rest of the proceedings, had become quite animated when the name of Franklin Hallis was said aloud in the context of the vote. Nicholas Kerensky could not help but conclude from the man's demeanour that he still lay awake at night fretting that Hallis was going to sneak into his room just before dawn, cut his balls off and then gut him like a fish.
That was certainly how Kerensky himself daydreamed about getting rid of the man at least. If not for Karrige's scheming the whole business with Sarah McEvedy might have turned out very much differently. The death toll would have certainly been much lower, the ilKhan wanted to break the Wolverines, make an example of them to encourage the others, not nuke their capital city in a massively excessive false-flag operation.
As the years went by Nicholas Kerensky occasionally wished he could turn back the clock and pick Clan Widowmaker to be the one he made an example of, citing their underhanded back-stabbing and plotting as being even more in opposition to the basic principles of clan society than McEvedy and her loosening of the caste system.
Karrige was definitely up to something, Kerensky knew, using his saKhan's ties to his own brother who served as the saKhan of the Ghost Bears to weave together an alliance to rival the one Clan Wolf had with the Coyotes.
The prospect was almost as disconcerting as the way Clan Mongoose and the Snow Ravens were seemingly falling into each other's arms, with the Cloud Cobras and Burrocks also starting to align themselves into that new power-block.
If the Great Houses of the Inner Sphere were not such monsters providing a unifying foe to rally against the clans might have even been facing a major schism, and his position as ilKhan itself beemn under threat. As it was Nicholas Kerensky could only breathe a sigh of relief and offer thanks for the likes of Jinjiro Kurita for making him look so damn good by comparison.
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Note from the Author:
Clan (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Clans) society is not developing as it did in canon. Power-blocks are forming and becoming deeper (the Mongoose/Snow Raven axis being the one which is most suspicious of Nicholas Kerensky with the politically adept Clan Cloud Cobra moving their way) and if not for the horrible news still reaching them from the Inner Sphere the clans would not be near as unified as they still are. Kerensky does not have the untrammeled power and authority he had before the successful Wolverine Secession but had gained some figurehead status as someone to rally behind when contemplating a crusade to 'restore civilisation' in the Inner Sphere.
In cannon the supposedly annihilated Clan Wolverine were referred to by the clans as the 'Not-Named' with saying their actual name out loud a strong taboo which would cause great offence. Here saying 'Wolverine' will not get you physically assaulted, but a clanner in the vicinity might spit on the ground when they hear the name and it is considered more polite, or politically correct, to call them the 'Chalcas Clan', with 'chalcas', or challenging the caste system, being greatly frowned upon in clan culture.
The clans are far weaker militarily here than the were in the 31st Century when they launched their campaign against the Inner Sphere in canon, simultaneously the Successor States are stronger in 2840 than they were in 3040 and there are still plenty of veterans around that fought in the Amaris War that they understand logistics and strategic depth. Most of them would like to go back and paste the 'Traitor Lords', being rather angry about all the billions of deaths back home, and its not just those of the Warrior Caste who support military action, but they know fulll-well that they'd lose if they did.
Clan Cloud Cobra (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Clan_Cloud_Cobra) having a particular soft spot for the Crater Cobras (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Crater_Cobras) mercenary brigade seems appropriate (the clans do like their totem animals), the fact that the Crater Cobras are made up of former SLDF units and still feature the Cameron Star on their insignia makes that easier to justify. On the subject of insignia the Clan's Daggerstar (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/File:Clan_Logo.jpg) really isn't that far removed from the Red Cameron star being used by Niops.
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On a somewhat related matter, learning the fate of the 295th Division came as something of a pleasant surprise
[Whistles innocently]
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We again see the effects of time on the Clans - the Khans assembled here still remember vividly what it was like to fight with combined arms rather than get Kowlooned over and over again.
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Over time, they'll forget or die... that memory will not last.
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I would thought be interesting this point history the Clans realized that there was a second division in Niopis, perhaps jump starting the invasion at very different time in history.
Then again, they pointed out they were not ready (Kerensky not motivated...) to retake the land of his father.
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With their (very) imperfect intel, they ascribed it all to the 295th.
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Niops should quickly jump on the opportunity to secure a license for the Grasshopper since it's only manufacturer, Lantren Corporation is also based on Bryant. First and foremost, set up a realitivly visible production site to churn out the simple and reliable 5J model, the bulk of which will available for export at a "reasonable" mark up to all parties who have cordial relationships with them.
Of course its only natural that Niops should stipulate a set percentage of production be reserved for the SLDF and the planetary militias to supplement their "poor, pitiful Blackjacks", after they've had some "minor upgrades" to proper SLDF specs of course. Such as Clan grade DHS, some combination of a CT mounted ER PPC, ER LL, or LPL and quad ER MLs or MPLs with maximum Standard Armor for the militias and SLDF Line Regiments and a variant utilizing the most advanced ECM and Stealth systems for the Elite BlackOps and Gunslinger graduates. The LRM5 will remain unchanged aside from using the lighter Clan version, primarily as a harassment weapon, but most often as a means to deploy Thunder munitions as a deterrent or wreak havoc behind enemy lines, and to make the Mechs visually indistinguishable from the 5J model. This will allow the Grasshopper to fulfill roles once held by the Exterminator and Guillotine, both former workhorses of the Regular Army and Special Forces Commands, neither of which if I recall, the Wolverines or 295th had in any useful quantity.
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Part XLVIII - Section 1 of 2
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"The Cameron Star was raised over us a hundred years ago and, unlike the rest of the Terran Hegemony, on Niops it has never been lowered and never will be!"
Giles Olson, Master of Ceremonies - 2841CE
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Capital City – Niops Association (Niops VII) – 2841
On any other day, or rather night, lighting up the sky over the capital with a massive fireworks display would have been strictly verboten, even during celebrations of the coming of the New Year, where sending tiny pyrotechnics skywards was the norm on almost any other planet, such a thing would normally be regarded as unnecessary light pollution on Niops VII.
Plenty of land and decent town planning meant that the capital city of the Niops Association was blessed with a number of large parks breaking up the urban sprawl and although the climate meant they were usually a little underutilised they did provide a nice place for people to congregate in on special occasions such as Star League Day on July 9th or, as noted before, just greeting the New Year along with thousands of other people.
It wasn't however New Year that saw the uncharacteristic explosion of several tonnes worth of low explosives and assorted metal powders over the capital that particular evening of course, it was a celebration of a rather more unique event.
One hundred years ago, back in 2741, a small fleet of dropships had set down on Niops VII, bringing with them the first fifty-thousand official colonists and the Niops Association was formally founded as a self-governing colony of the Terran Hegemony.
There were actually a few individuals living on Niops whose parents had actually been resident before then of course, hence the fifty thousand only being the first official colonists. The people already living there when the dropships set down in 2741 had been part of the various Star League engineering teams which had spent years constructing all the buildings and other infrastructure needed for a self-sufficient scientific research colony situated way out in the periphery, and a few of them had decided to stay on afterwards.
Naturally the Niops Association being the Niops Association it was considered that anything that happened here before the astronomers and astrophysicists got there was just prologue. It was a colony founded for a specific purpose, not a colony founded as just somewhere new to live out on the frontier, so the arrival of what became first permanent residents wasn't marked on the calendar as an anniversary to be celebrated, whereas the arrival of the first stargazers was.
The last surviving member of the engineers who had actually built the colony and then opted not to return to Terra afterwards had passed on of old age just a few years before the SLDF arrived, their passing at least being officially commemorated at the time so it wasn't like the pre-2741 colonists had been totally written out of history, but the school textbooks still tended not to put much emphasis on their story.
A recent campaign to actually add the date the Star League engineering crews actually arrived in Niops to the calendar as another public holiday on Niops had fallen afoul of an objection that if they did that then other people might start clamouring for the anniversary of the arrival of Capellan Refugees to be celebrated too.
Judith Hallis, sat on her father's shoulders in the big park near the planetarium while looking up at the fireworks, couldn't really see the problem with that. Not so much because she was the granddaughter of Capellan refugees on her mother's side but because it would have gotten her a couple more days off school every year. If it was up to Judith they would also get a public holidays on the anniversary of the day the Star League Expeditionary Brigade jumped in to survey the system for the first time, the day the Star League Astronomical Office decided that Niops would be a good place to build the astronomical research colony they wanted and the day James McKenna founded the Terran Hegemony, June 2nd.
Judith insisted that thinking June 2nd should be a public holiday had nothing to do with the fact that it was coincidently her birthday.
"Don't go thinking that just because you're getting to stay up late on a school night we'll let you do that again" Franklin Hallis warned his daughter, grateful that General Romanov had agreed to take on his duty shift that evening, not that she didn't owe him a favour or two for repeatedly making him deputise for her when it was her turn to attend some kind of social function or another as Commanding Officer of the SLDF.
Hallis didn't much like attending dinner parties and galas any more than Romanov did, but she outranked him and Barbara always loved having the opportunity to dress up and play 'wifeKhan' as she jokingly called it.
Thank God she worked for a company that made clothes, because the new dress she insisted upon for nearly each one would have hammered their family finances worse than the wretched mortgage did.
"They should give us tomorrow off too" Judith opined, watching as a volley of rockets crackled into the sky and exploded in a shower of red and blue sparks. The park was big enough that each family or group of friends could be far enough away from each other to enjoy some personal space, although it certainly didn't look half deserted by any means what with so many out watching the display.
"You should be happy enough to have gotten today off school so you could attend the parade" her father replied. The organisers had roped in former High Associator Giles Olson to act as Master of Ceremonies, the man himself joking that it was mainly because being unemployed that got him cheap, and he seemed to enjoy himself a lot in the party atmosphere treating the whole thing with some irreverence.
His successor, James Murray, gave a speech which fell more than a little flat because he just wasn't the public speaker Olson was. It wasn't actually a bad speech as such, it hit all the right notes, it just failed a little in delivery compared to Olson's own relaxed joviality intermixed with gravitas when that was required.
Despite being a centenary celebration any telling of the history of the Niops Association had to include the fall of the Star League and the Terran Hegemony and the long period of isolation for Niops from the rest of the galaxy that resulted from it.
Olson's triumphant following line that the Dark Age that followed the collapse of civilisation was now being pushed back again by the light of the Red Cameron Star had been greeted by cheering as the brief sombre interlude of the story of Niops was replaced by an era of hope.
Judith had herself been largely unmoved by the rhetoric, she had other interests. "The parade was okay I guess" she conceded, "But I liked the big barbeque afterwards more" she told her father. At the taxpayer's expense the government had imported the equivalent of several herds of animals from Francas for a 'free' public feast that was accompanied by what must have been an Aqueduct cargo carrier's worth of beer for the adults and soft drinks for the kids… and certain genetically-engineered people of a Wolverine persuasion that were legally barred from consuming alcohol. "It would have been more than okay, but half of it was just a bunch of people following a marching band" she critiqued the event earlier in the day.
Franklin Hallis smiled. "It really wasn't" he responded, most of it was actually made up of a series of floats with big models of stars and planets on them, plus a few inflatables. "And one of those people marching behind the band was your brother."
"Yeah, but I get to see him all the time and he wasn't even in his battlemech" Judith replied, dismissively. "They didn't have any assault mechs" she complained, a single lance of Hussar lights being the only battlemechs that joined the parade.
Hallis sighed. "They didn't want any mech over thirty tons, too hard on the road otherwise" he told her. The aerospace guys had gotten to put on a much better display, dozens of fighters in formation hurtling over the city at barely subsonic speed and even the navy got into the act with a fly-by of aerodyne dropships, a Titan and a Triumph.
"The Militia rolled a whole bunch of big tanks down the street in their part of the parade, those must weigh more than thirty tons" Judith said confidently, still looking up as yet more fireworks wooshed into the sky and exploded. There had been so many so far that you could easily see all the smoke they left behind drift in the air and distinctly smell the gunpowder residue.
"Their tracks spread the weight, the ground pressure under the feet of a mech is really hard on asphalt" her father explained. "It's why we don't just use mechs for recon, light tanks can sometimes go places where a mech the same weight would sink up to its knees" he said. "Ground pressure is also the reason why your Mom's high heels are hell on the floorboards at home" he added, seeing her approach weaving through the crowd and taking the opportunity to raise the issue again without necessarily sounding like he was nagging.
"Are you still complaining about that?" Barbara Hallis replied. "They didn't have the soda you asked for at the refreshment stand, I got you cherryade instead" she told her daughter, passing her up a can. Even while wearing high heels she was still quite a lot shorter than her husband, without them, because they were in a park wrapped up warm for the evening, he towered over her though not as much as Frederick did.
"Sugar and caffeine, she'll be awake all night" Franklin Hallis groaned, "and yes I'm still complaining about the floorboards. Importing that wood from Stafford costs a fortune. Can't you just take your fancy shoes off as soon as you get home. You always tell me to take off my boots."
"Your boots usually filthy, and my shoes look good" Barbara retorted.
Hallis was agnostic as to whether any of her multiple pairs of shoes imported from Comstock she owned looked good, although he did appreciate what they did for her legs and backside in the right dress so he wasn't going to quibble on details. Pregnancy had restricted her footwear options somewhat but with her ankles and feet giving her less trouble again, not to mention loosing a lot of weight all at once, a process accompanied by some truly first-rate painkilling drugs, Barbara was back to ruining the floorboards again.
"Remind me to thank your mother again for watching Tax Break tonight" Franklin asked.
"Zach, our son's name is Zach" Barbara replied, wagging her finger at him chidingly although she was well aware he was only doing it to yank her chain.
"Technically it's 'Zachariah', but I'll concede you're closer than I was" Franklin conceded, amused. "Probably best he always calls himself Zach though since I'll bet the half the kids born on this planet this year could call themselves 'Tax Break' if everyone was being honest about it and that could get confusing at roll call."
"Roll call? What makes you think he join the military when he grow up?"
"Of course he'll join the military" Franklin responded. "No son of mine is joining the chairforce instead" he joked, dearly wishing there was a fighter-jock in earshot that could have taken offence. Even after a thousand years the tradition of the army and navy mocking the johnny-come-later third branch persisted.
Barbara rolled her eyes. "He might want to become astronomer or something instead."
"And if that day comes I'll be getting a paternity test" her husband replied deadpan.
"It good job I know you think you funny" Barbara replied, shaking her head sadly. She blamed Trish for much of that, she encouraged him by laughing sometimes.
"The holograms are starting!" Judith exclaimed excitedly as the fireworks ceased and now lasers started playing across the smoke drifting above. After a moment they became massive three-dimensional images in the sky starting with a Red Cameron Star the size of a Behemoth Class dropship that started rotating in the air.
Supposedly the engineers from the laser research team at the Skunk Works had built the oversized holo-projectors in their spare time, and their recently announced delay in turning out a prototype of the new pulse laser was just a coincidence, but Franklin Hallis wasn't sure. The former members of Clan Wolverine's science and technician castes working there were focused enough but he occasionally worried some of the Niops-born civilians also on the project were more prone to goofing off or just getting distracted by pet projects.
That wasn't to say that all their pet projects weren't worthwhile, some were downright intriguing like the notion of taking an Anti-Missile-System and replacing its machine-gun with one of the prototypes of the next-generation Small Pulse Laser. If they could get that to work it would not only greatly improve the survivability of battlemechs and aerospace fighters to deal with barrages of SRM's and LRM's, Admiral Bremman was already cackling to himself at the thought of being able to mount dozens of the things to his warships and then safely wade into whole wings of enemy fighters flinging nuclear-tipped missiles at him.
As the Red Cameron Star being projected above morphed into an image of the Niops system itself, the seven planets and two dwarf planets sped up in their orbits so you could see them move, Franklin Hallis inwardly winced when he remembered it was his turn to brief the High Associator again next week. It wasn't as if the man had actually yelled at him again in any of their meetings since the unfortunate 'Niops VIII and Niops IX' incident but just knowing the man had a 'berserk button' as Trish called it, one you could inadvertently push, made things a little tense.
It wasn't like High Associator Murray was Stefan Amaris, Nicholas Kerensky or Jinjiro Kurita level nuts, but Franklin Hallis liked his political leadership a touch less volatile by preference. On the other hand, in Hallis's opinion Murray's election had served one useful purpose in that it demonstrated that democracies weren't immune to putting whackadoodles in charge either.
Still at least in a democracy you could vote the whackadoodle out at the next election. According to rumour even after he had clearly gone clinically insane it had still taken a fair while for the Draconis Combine to push Jinjiro off the throne in favour of his half-brother Zabu.
It wasn't really a good look for the Combine that soon thereafter they had then quickly ousted the sane and competent Zabu in favour of his son Yoguchi, the current coordinator, because facing economic strife Zabu had wanted to cut the military budget.
It was apparently more acceptable for a Coordinator of the Draconis Combine to be paranoid and deranged than it was for them to be fiscally prudent. Honestly they were just lucky that the generals of the Lyran Commonwealth were too inept for the government in Tharkad to properly bring the size of its own far less imbalanced economy to bear on Luthien in an effective manner.
"Look at Elizabeth and Helena daddy" Judith said, pointing up at the hologram with her free left hand while holding her can of drink in her right. "They're not real planets like the others" she added, making sure he knew that.
Franklin Hallis narrowed his eyes as he turned towards his wife. "Did you put her up to saying that?" he asked suspiciously.
"Maybe" Barbara replied, smirking.
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Part XLVIII - Section 2 of 2
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"Hey, it's Danny from my school" Judith exclaimed, waving to a boy stood near his parents also watching the display. "Hi Danny!" she called out to him. "He's in the year above mine, he's Ironborn like Fred, only without the genetic engineering" she told her parents as the boy waved back.
Looking over Franklin Hallis recognised the boy's parents and frowned. He had no idea that their son went to the same school as his daughter and felt relieved it hadn't been him that personally handed over the assignment that the boy was likely to be a little sore over. They were both with the 295th so General Romanov had taken it upon herself to deliver the news thinking it might be badly received under the circumstances what with the boy being so young.
As it happens Danny Donovan had taken the news much better than his parents had thought he might, something that his mother was both pleased about and mildly upset because she had expected him to be considerably more distressed to find out that he wasn't going to see her for nearly a year than he actually was.
Claire Donovan noticed her son waving to someone and saw it was a girl sat on General Hallis's shoulders, like her and her husband he was in civilian clothes and presumably also off-duty having taken his own family to the park to watch the firework and hologram display.
"Friend of yours?" Danny's father queried, also noticing the waving.
"Kinda, she's in the year below me at school" Danny replied, "My friend Alan always says hello to her because her Dad's the Khan" he explained.
"Not our Khan" Claire Donovan reminded her son.
"Nah, but he's still a General" Danny replied. "Did you ever want to be a General?" he asked his mother.
"I didn't even want to be a Major, but they stuck me with the promotion when they handed me the new assignment" Claire Donovan replied. At least it wasn't just a brevet rank which meant it did come with a pay-rise not just a fancier title.
"I never wanted to be a general either," her husband told their son, "but I always thought being a Lieutenant-Colonel would be nice" he said. "I certainly never thought I'd be stuck as a Lieutenant for half a century, finally make Captain and then have my wife promoted over me" he muttered. "Not that I'm bitter or anything Ma'am" he added wryly.
"I always outranked you at home anyway Douglas, so don't pretend the natural order has been upended" Claire told him, smiling.
"When you visit Terra you're going to bring me back a present right?" Danny checked, watching a holographic image of that very same world appear in the sky. As he watched the image seemed to zoon out to show Luna orbiting it and then further out to show the entire solar system the homeworld of humanity was in.
At school they talked about the Terra system almost as much as they did Niops and the other systems that belonged to them now. It was important to teach kids where they came from after all.
"I'm not there on vacation or to sight-see Danny" Claire reminded her son. "But I'll try to bring back a souvenir" she promised.
"I wish I could go" Danny said.
"Because you'll miss me?" Claire asked.
"Well yeah" Danny replied, "but I've never been to Terra" he added.
"I'm a little jealous too" Douglas Donovan remarked. "Your mother and I haven't been there in sixty years, and I might never get the chance to go back."
"That is so long" Danny responded, unable to imagine being as old as his parents. Most of the kids at school had grandparents younger than his parents even if his parents didn't look as old as they really were. "Do you remember when Niops was founded Dad?" he asked deadpan, knowing that he wasn't that old.
"No, I don't, I wasn't born yet" Douglas Donavan replied, slightly annoyed at the accusation he was well over a hundred years old. He was only ninety-seven, which was admittedly pretty old to have a son Danny's age, even by Terran Hegemony standards, but he wasn't quite into the three-figures yet. His older sister Deborah had been born in 2741 though, so if Amaris's troops hadn't killed her on Caph back in 2767 she would actually be celebrating reaching her own century this year, just like the Niops Association.
Getting to fight the bastards again on Algenib a few years ago had been inordinately satisfying, as well as having made him feel younger than he had in years.
Running around after Danny all the time however was making him feel old. Fortunately Claire felt much the same, their son from the Iron Wombs was a blessing, as well as being a miracle of science, but tax advantages or not they really didn't want another one.
Like the vast majority of those who found themselves stranded on Buffalo Meadows the Donovan's had not ended up having kids there. A lack of the required equipment needed to found a colony from scratch, along with the environmental conditions on the somewhat marginal planet, meant it had taken decades to actually build a colony suitable to raise children by which time it was too late.
The Wolverines turning up at Buffalo Meadows one day, bringing their Iron Womb tech with them, had changed all that of course and Douglas and Claire Donovan were far from the only nonagenarian veterans of the 295th on Niops with an elementary school aged child these days.
Actual centenarian Jenna Romanov had outsourced the problem to someone younger, having found a volunteer family to raise her own biological/technological offspring for her, but that solution did not appeal to many of her somewhat aged division.
Danny had a thought. "When you meet the Pope can you get me his autograph?" he requested.
Claire burst out laughing. "I don't think I'm going to get to meet the Pope" she replied eventually. "And even if I did, I don't think that's something you're supposed to ask him."
"Why not? He's famous" Danny persisted.
"Yes, but he's not famous like a holovid celebrity" Claire explained, but judging from her son's expression he couldn't really grasp the distinction. "Would you ask the First Lord of the Star League for his autograph?" she asked.
Danny thought about that. "Yes, but I don't think ghosts can hold a pen" he replied eventually. "Maybe if he was a poltergeist?" he reasoned.
"There are no such things as ghosts Danny" his father told him.
"You can't know that for sure Dad" Danny replied. "It's not completely ridiculous like believing in astrology" he argued, confirming to his parents that their son was very much Niopsian. "What I don't get is why you have to deliver Critchly to the Vatican?" he asked his mother. "Just because you were the one that shot his mech out from under him that doesn't mean you have to be the one that has to escort him all the way to Terra."
"The government think it's a good public relations opportunity" his mother explained. "They want to maximise the press coverage on Terra and the rest of the Inner Sphere. They think having me there to personally hand him over in front of the cameras will be good for Niops, and if the people at the top order me to do something I do it because I'm a soldier."
"Yeah, I guess" Danny replied without enthusiasm. He had always thought it was pretty cool that his mom was the mechwarrior that took down a famous, or rather infamous, war criminal, a guy that was literally mentioned in all the history books about the Amaris War, but that had never affected him negatively before. Usually it just meant showing off the chunk of Critchly's Rampage assault mech that his his mom had hanging on the wall at home to other kids when they came around his house the first time, the thick metal massively dented from the gauss rifle slug that had impacted it and torn it right off the machine.
Mom's ride was a Pillager assault mech, an old design but one that mounted twin improved gauss rifles that, in Mom's words, hit like a meteorite strike. Dad's mech meanwhile was a Thug which had recently had its Enhanced ERPPC's swapped out for the newer Improved Enhanced ERPPC's that could cause as much damage as a gauss rifle, but were smaller and lighter.
During one of their occasional arguments over dinner Mom had eventually conceded that the IEERPPC had its charms, but still insisted that 'There ain't no kill like a kinetic kill' while noting that while a particle projector cannon might burn the armour right off an enemy mech it wouldn't pollaxe one like a gauss slug could.
The most annoying thing about the whole thing as far as Danny was concerned was that Mom would complain if he ever said 'ain't' himself, was bad grammar only okay for adults?
Both his parents had been military brats when they were his age, back when Simon Cameron was still First Lord of the Star League and Danny was pretty sure dinosaurs still walked on Terra. As such they had raised their son in the way they had been raised, as far as they could on Niops anyway, and they didn't really see being deployed away from their own child for a year as being nearly as weird as the parents of most kids at school would have.
The Wolverine kids, or 'kits' as they liked to call themselves, got it, but they were a whole other kind of weird even if they didn't think Danny being Ironborn was all that strange like some other people did.
Being asked at school by regular kids if he would go completely crazy if he drank a beer or if he had 'superpowers or something' got old fast. He wasn't that kind of Ironborn, until they started giving him the anti-agathic gene-therapy treatments the DNA of his cells was barely tinkered-with at all.
The holograms in the sky were replaced by the beginning of another volley of fireworks which increased in volume over a few minutes before reaching a crescendo of light and sound heralding the end of the display and also the end of the centenary celebrations.
Danny's parents wouldn't be there for the bicentenary of Niops in 2941 which made him feel a little sad, although he would be thanks to all the jabs. He might even still be around for the two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Association in 2991 which should be pretty cool, although by then he guessed they might just be calling themselves the 'Terran Hegemony' because Mom and Dad said that once the jerks ruling the Successor States had beaten each other into a pulp, the Clans were dealt with and ComStar was put back in its place they were going to take it all back and restore the Star League under the Cameron Star.
First things first though. Niops had to raise its profile in the Inner Sphere, project an image into the galaxy a little like the holograms earlier had been projected into the sky over the city, something to be wondered at, perhaps even be a little awed over eventually.
Sending a ship all the way to Terra to publicly hand Bernard Critchly over to the Vatican was part of that, Danny's parents had explained. It was something that even ComStar would find difficult to downplay because the Catholic Church, both of them, would spread the word far and wide, and Niops and the 295th would forever be remembered as the ones that finally brought the evil bastard to justice.
Danny wasn't usually allowed to swear, but it was okay to call Bernard Critchly an evil bastard because he was one, just like he wasn't supposed to spit on the ground unless he was outside and he had just said the name 'Stefan Amaris' then it was alright.
The Wolverine kids at school did that too, although they also spat on the ground if they ever said 'Nicholas Kerensky' as well. Danny assumed that children in the Federated Suns did that when they said Jinjiro Kurita, him being another evil bastard because he ordered the Kentares Massacre.
For some reason Danny couldn't quite understand killing billions of people with nuclear weapons didn't seem quite as bad as killing millions of unarmed civilians with swords as Jinjiro had done, or even hundreds of protesting Catholic Monks by stomping them with your mech as Critchly had. It was probably because when you dropped a bomb on someone you couldn't actually see them making it feel less real, like playing a computer game he reasoned.
Danny had occasionally wondered if the ghosts of all those dead monks haunted the piece of the Rampage that stomped them, the one hanging on the wall at home, but he figured they wouldn't want to bother the people that caught the guy that murdered them so it didn't bother him too much.
Despite her promotion Danny's Mom wasn't going to be in charge of the mission, Colonel MacArthur would be. He would have some 'name recognition' on Terra according to Dad because his Mom, General Leigh MacArthur, had commanded the 295th before General Romanov which meant there would be files and documents about her on Terra. Colonel MacArthur's granddaughter was a teacher at Danny's school and his parents had told him when she started that he must always behave for her because of the family she came from, not that he was allowed to misbehave for any of the other teachers, it was just that the MacArthur's were important.
Leigh MacArthur had still been the commander of the 295th when Danny's parents joined, both being Terran Hegemony born they were the type of recruits the general had been looking for in her quest to get the division's original 'Royal' title reinstated, as well as turn them into an elite formation. If not for her and her recruitment policies Danny's parents would have probably never even met, and Danny himself wouldn't even exist, so he kinda understood why they thought that way about 'House MacArthur'.
When the fireworks display ended everybody started heading home, filing out of the park with some of the adults swaying a little because they had enjoyed a little too much to drink. One of those a little worse for wear after enjoying one too many beers was Gareth Jeffries of the Diplomatic Corps who had not only been celebrating the Centenary but also his recent success in getting ComStar to repair the Thraxa HPG with a little, rather undiplomatic, political chicanery.
As Niops main trade link to the Magistracy, having Thraxa fall off the HPG grid because of a technical failure in admittedly aging machinery had been a potential problem, one that the Association felt ComStar was seeking to use to pressure them into signing up to the terms of the Communications Protocol of 2787. It had been less-than-subtly hinted by ComStar that if Niops played ball then the Phone Company would find it in their hearts to install a new HPG at Thraxa with all haste, all it would take if for NHCOMNET to be handed over to them.
Instead the Director of NHCOMNET, with both the High Associator and the Diplomatic Corps urging him on, had sent an HPG directly to Primus Raymond Karpov telling him that either ComStar could fix the Thraxa HPG or NHCOMNET would install one of their own.
Jeffries himself had suggested a few additions to the HPG message which vaguely referred to the possibility of NHCOMNET perhaps going on to install new HPG's on other Magistracy worlds in the future if they weren't properly maintained. That had probably caused Karpov to blow a gasket, but it was amazing how fast Thraxa's HPG was up and running again afterwards.
Before the ComStar Interdiction on the Free Worlds League the Magistracy of Canopus would have been a little annoyed to get dragged into this diplomatically in any way, even as a mere bystander, but the Magestrix seemed far more amused than annoyed about it all. ComStar losing some faith in their absolute monopoly on providing HPG communication was good for everyone, except for ComStar that is.
In a few weeks Gareth Jeffries would be on a jump-ship heading to Terra, representing the civilian government of Niops and being temporarily accorded the status of Ambassador to the Holy See. This was the kind of opportunity that would make or break his career, that thought being another thing which had led to him getting drunk, and at a stroke make him the most senior diplomat ever to be born on Niops.
Fortunately High Associator Murray was only too happy to follow the advice left behind for him by Giles Olson as regards foreign relations, and since Jeffries had worked closely with Olson in his final few weeks of office last year in formulating those plans the diplomat was more than familiar with them.
One thing was for certain regardless of how smoothly the mission to Terra went, if ComStar had been pissed off about losing their HPG monopoly and then having NHCOMNET mouth off at them then they were going to be apoplectic with rage when the Niops Association publicly announced it was going to start providing the plans for civilian lostech to the entire Inner Sphere, starting with the Jamerson-Ulikov Water Purifier, for free as part of an interstellar aid program.
Not knowing how ComStar would choose to react, attempted sabotage by ROM or even actual military action by their own troops or hired mercenaries could not be ruled out, Jeffries had also put together a series of proposals to retaliate to any such moves.
By far the funniest in his own opinion was building a new university on Alphard which would offer scholarships to people from throughout the Inner Sphere.
First course to be featured on the curriculum of the physics department: Hyperpulse Theory, while meanwhile the engineering department would be teaching HPG Maintenance and Repair 101.
Just thinking about it caused the still inebriated Jeffries to suddenly start howling with laughter as he stumbled his way home.
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Note from the Author:
According to Field Manual: Periphery (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Field_Manual:_Periphery) the Niops Association was founded in 2741, although that was when the first fifty thousand actual colonists arrived, not when the engineering crews who actually built the colony did. Niops being Niops only counting when the astronomers turned up as being their founder's day seems apt. There are people on the planet whose parents or grandparents were there before 2741, although not many.
The Donovan family, Claire and Douglas, has appeared before a couple of times in the story although we've never seen their son Danny before. Danny is Ironborn in the sense that his parents utilised the Iron Womb technology to be able to have him but not in the sense of him being a genetically-engineered Wolverine type. Both being well into their nineties the Donovan's are old to have a pre-teen child even by Terran Hegemony standards (having kids in your seventies was pretty normal just not twenty years older than that) but to look at them you'd think they were only in their sixties at this point. Being the mechwarrior that brought down Bernard Critchly of the infamous Greenhaven Gestapo (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Greenhaven_Gestapo), Claire has been assigned to the mission that is taking him back to Terra to hand over to the Vatican.
Battletech has a rather feudal outlook as regards allegiances to certain families. The MacArthurs as the descendants of General Leigh MacArthur are looked upon by the 295th as special (especially for the Donovans who were recruited into the division by her). The 331st have House McEvedy and House Hallis, the 295th House Romanov and House MacArthur in effect (these would be considered 'Martial' rather than actual 'Noble' Houses although the Romanov's can always point to the Tsars if they want to pull rank).
As well as being the centenary of the founding of the Niops Association, 2841 is also the year that Jinjiro Kurita (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Jinjiro_Kurita) finally died (although having gone nuts he hadn't ruled as Coordinator of the Draconis Combine for some time by then). They're celebrating on Kentares IV too but for a very different reason than on Niops VII.
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That's hilarious how Niops is poking at the most diabolical fantastic Primus in ComStar history.
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Loving it! :D
I can only hope Danny's mom makes it home...
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Part XLIX - Section 1 of 2
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"Contrary to what you may have heard, the last Battle of the Amaris War was fought on Algenib in 2829, not on Terra in 2779, but the history books are right that the SLDF won it."
Colonel Robert MacArthur - 2841CE
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Guadraro Military Spaceport – Italy (Terra) – 2841
When the Star League Defence Force had retaken Italy as part of Operation Liberation in 2777, the SLDF had been forced to fight its way into Rome, their advance following the route of the old medieval road known as the Via Tuscolana and establishing a temporary headquarters at the Guadraro Military Spaceport before going on to smash what was left of the forces loyal to Amaris in the city.
Getting to Guadraro was a lot easier for the SLDF sixty-four years later as Italian air traffic control simply gave them permission to enter their airspace after the inbound spacecraft dropped from orbit and directed it to set down on the assigned landing pad.
Following instructions the Intruder class dropship made a slow, smooth descent and gently lowered itself onto the pad whereupon it such down its engines and waited for a mass of ground vehicles to approach, many of them bearing police or paramilitary markings, before lowering its ramp.
They weren't the first spacecraft bearing Niops insignia to land at Guadaro, that being the shuttle which had arrived an hour earlier and which could be seen resting on a nearby pad. While still in orbit the Intruder had deployed a shuttle to land ahead of the dropship, the ST-46 carrying diplomat Gareth Jeffries so he could be whisked to the Vatican by VTOL and formally present his credentials.
The Holy See tended to be very formal and correct when it came to paperwork. The Niops Association couldn't hand over Bernard Critchly to the Vatican City State if the two sovereign entities didn't officially recognise each other, so that needed to be sorted out first with Jeffries officially accredited as ambassador from the Niops Association to the Holy See and an extradition treaty signed.
With the bureaucracy satisfied the Intruder had eventually followed its shuttlecraft down from orbit, the airspace around it cleared from all other traffic for security reasons and it wasn't until it set down that even VTOL craft had been allowed to take the air again within a hundred and fifty kilometres of Rome.
Colonel Robert MacArthur wearing his full dress uniform, regulation pistol and short-sword at his hip, strode purposely down the ramp where he was met by a man wearing an even more ornate uniform with a thick red strip down the trousers and feathers on his cap. "Colonel Robert MacArthur, 295th Battlemech Division" the SLDF officer formally introduced himself, saluting because he had been told he was going to be met by a general.
"Vicecomandante generale dell'Arma dei Carabinieri Antonio Mannerini" the other man replied, returning the salute. "I am to escort you and your prisoner to the Vatican City" he added, his English good but heavily accented. "If the Pope was not so adamant that the bastardo belongs to him we would want him for his crimes against the people of Italy" he stated flatly.
"Perhaps after the Catholic Church has taken their pound of flesh the Vatican will hand him over?" MacArthur suggested.
The Italian Carabinieri officer laughed. "If you think that the Inquisition will let him off lightly enough for what's left to stand trial in an Italian court you underestimate just how long and how deeply the church can hold a grudge" he said wryly. "It took them four hundred years to publicly admit Galileo was right after all, and all he did was say the Earth went around the sun."
MacArthur chuckled. "We named a star system after him, Galileo I mean, not Bernard Critchly" he replied. "The only star-system we know of actually named after one of Stefan Amaris's posse of war-criminals is Von Strang's World, although the fact that there are still people out there who think Amaris wasn't the villain is the reason we're being quite so cautious with transporting our prisoner" he explained.
Using a Congress Class Frigate carrying two armed dropships as a prisoner transport was probably a little excessive to be honest, but the Niops Association was deliberately trying to make waves in this mission. The James Sever had jumped into the Terran system at the Nadir point where it and its Titan class dropship escort currently waited for the Intruder to return. Just the arrival of a commissioned Star League Navy warship would itself have been major news on Terra but given who it was transporting, and to where, had guaranteed press and public interest that ComStar did not even bother trying to downplay.
In any other circumstances getting permission from the Free Worlds League to fly an armed warship from one end of their territory to the other and back would have been quite the ask, but when Niops explained that they had caught Bernard Critchly and were hauling his sorry ass to Terra to hand him over to the Pope the usual objections had vanished almost overnight.
Mannerini nodded. "As per our agreement you will be permitted to drive your convoy under-arms through Rome to the Vatican, with both my Carabinieri and the city police acting as escorts" he said. "I suspect Critchly is more at risk of being assassinated by those that justifiably hate him than he is being set free by deranged radicals though."
"You've cleared the route I take it?" MacArthur checked.
"We have and lined it with more armed men and women than have been seen in Rome since the SLDF drove out Antilos Legos and his so-called Greenhaven Gestapo" Mannerini replied, his obvious expression of distaste from even saying the man's name aloud hard to miss. Legos had looted his way up and down Italy having been given free rein to do so by Amaris himself, and he had turned much of the country into a charnel house doing so.
During their headlong retreat northwards from Rome the self-styled Greenhaven Gestapo had even resorted to deploying nerve gas against the advancing SLDF, a move which ended up killing even more civilians than it did the soldiers of the Star League. Between that and the years of wanton brutality they suffered under the occupation the people of Italy were not likely to forget the names of Legos and his murderous lieutenants anytime soon.
"Very well Sir" MacArthur said. "I'll unload my three wheeled APC's and a Chevalier tank that will lead my column" he said.
The Carabinieri officer nodded. "Which of the three APC's is Critchly in?" Mannerini asked.
"I'm not prepared to tell you that, Sir" MacArthur replied flatly before saluting again.
Mannerini smiled. "Good, it's nice to know I'm dealing with a professional that actually understands security" he replied, returning the salute.
Ten minutes later a long column of police, paramilitary and military vehicles rolled out of the spaceport onto the Via Tuscolana and headed off towards the centre of Rome. As they rolled down the highway tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of people lining the route watched them pass from behind barriers guarded by armed and armoured police officers.
The Eternal City had a long memory and Bernard Critchly was nothing if not memorable. The man was almost cartoonishly evil, infamous not only for personally slaughtering some six hundred unarmed monks from the seat of his assault mech, but also for his nickname of 'The Ogre', his notoriously bad temper and predilection for random violence and for actually having his own portrait painted over part of Michaelangelo's fresco in the Sistine Chapel.
There was an old legend in Rome that while visiting the city if you threw a coin into the Trevi fountain backwards over your left shoulder with your right hand that you would return there one day.
Sat handcuffed to a wheelchair in the back of an APC, a handgun practically stuck in his face by someone that very much looked like they were fervently praying for an excuse to pull the trigger, Critchly could only wish that he hadn't thrown that damn coin over his shoulder seventy years ago because this was seriously the last place he had ever wanted to come back to.
It had been a long time since the Inquisition had stretched someone on the rack, but if he arrived at the Vatican and found then dusting off one brough up from the museum achives in preparation for his arrival Bernard Critchly would have been less than surprised.
They hadn't of course, but to say the Holy See had been rather shocked to receive an HPG one day from a tiny interstellar power in the periphery, the message informing them that this obscure 'Niops Association' had captured one of the most wanted war criminals in human history, one that they had been after for decades, and would they like him, was a teeny bit of an understatement.
Once they had established it wasn't just an elaborate practical joke the Roman Catholic Church had responded very much in the affirmative. Niops had told them to expect a naval warship, a frigate no less, to deliver the prisoner into their hands and could they please clear that with ComStar and maybe smooth things over with Atreus if House Marik complained about the warship crossing their territory.
Word had spread like wildfire and the Niops Association was inundated by HPG's from governments and media outlets from one side of the Inner Sphere to the other seeking confirmation and asking a lot of questions.
Niops replied that its representatives would be happy to hold a press conference at the Vatican City on Terra to answer any and all questions once Critchly was handed over, assuming of course that the Pope was agreeable to that.
Robert MacArthur himself suspected that the Holy See would have happily offered to gift Niops a piece of the True Cross and appoint High Associator James Murray a Cardinal in order to get their hands on Bernard Critchly and was entirely unsurprised when the Vatican immediately acquiesced to the request to host the press conference.
About the only diplomatic hiccup, albeit a minor one, was when the New Avalon Catholic Church announced that they should have been offered Critchly too since their Pope was just as legitimate a successor to Pope Clement XXVII, who had been murdered by the Greenhaven Gestapo, as the Pope of the Roman Catholic Church was.
Having anticipated such a reaction the Niops Association had replied that they were handing over Critchly to the Vatican State for entirely secular reasons, the particular crime in question being the slaughter of hundreds of unarmed civilians on their territory. That those civilians were catholic monks who had been protesting on Pope John-Paul II Square was irrelevant as far as Niops was concerned, the Vatican had legal jurisdiction because they were the sovereign state where the crime took place.
Of course the fact that the New Avalon Catholic Church only really had a following in the Federated Suns, while the Roman Catholic Church had influence everywhere, certainly entered into the calculation. The Pope might not have had any divisions, at least not since the Papal States were dissolved anyway, but the Papacy still wielded a massive amount of soft power, so much in fact that they had swept aside ComStar's reluctance to allow outsiders to jump an actual warship into the Terran system.
Despite being technically only an observer to the still extant Terran Congress it was surprising just how many votes there the Holy See apparently had in its pocket and ComStar still had to play lip-service to the notion that the Congress was the legitimate government of Terra.
The Vatican was of course likely aware that the Niops Association was looking to leach off a little of its soft power through means such as requesting to host the press conference there, even if only to help it raise its profile, but they were willing to go a long way to get their hands on the Ogre.
Raising the interstellar profile of Niops was most certainly a central part of the objective for this mission, something that was made obvious by the fact that not only were the armoured vehicles the SLDF had deployed to ferry Critchly from the starport to the Vatican emblazoned with the Blue Star insignia of the 295th Division, the Mailed Fist and Sword logo of the Eleventh Army and of course the Red Cameron Star, they were also all flying the Niops Hegemony flag.
Watching the flag flying from the APC ahead of his in the convoy via an armoured porthole, MacArthur could not help but sigh as he recalled just how much time had been spent back home deciding just how large the flags should be, one of the perils of government by committee. They wanted them large and eye-catching, but not so large that they looked like they were deliberately trying to be eye catching.
Calling themselves the Hegemony, if not the Terran Hegemony, so publicly on Terra itself was certain to rouse comment, or at least Jeffries hoped it would because he would hate not to reap all the potential diplomatic and political rewards given that it had taken nineteen jumps to get here and would take another nineteen to get home again afterwards.
It was a pity the porthole didn't offer a better view as the column of vehicles rolled through Rome at a decent pace, this was certainly a city that was worth seeing MacArthur knew, one dotted with ancient architecture and with a breathtaking history.
Fortunately for the city, the Sixth Army of the SLDF which had liberated it from Amaris had baulked at the idea of using artillery or air strikes to soften up those occupying it because of the incalculable collateral damage that could have caused to irreplaceable buildings, and had instead used infiltration tactics whenever possible rather than just blast their way in. They had paid a price for this decision in blood, the Sixth taking heavier casualties than they would have otherwise, but who would want to be the men and women that flattened Rome?
General Romanov had dispatched a wreath on behalf of the 295th to be laid at the monument to the so-called 'Tomb of Kerensky's Unknowns' to be found in the Pantheon itself. The Sixth Army had done its duty and failing to pay due respect to the dead would be unforgivable so before they headed back to Niops MacArthur would make sure to lay the wreath there.
In an attempt to hold off the advance of the SLDF six decades earlier Antilos Legos had ordered the bridges across the Tiber that bisected the city to be blown, thus when the convoy of vehicles heading to the Vatican that day reached the river it crossed it via a modern bridge that had little trouble supporting the weight of all the armoured vehicles as they neared the home stretch of the journey.
Rolling right into Saint Peter's Square and unloading Critchly there would have been showier perhaps but not wise in terms of security considerations, so with the Police and Carabinieri vehicles peeling off beforehand and with what Macarthur assumed was the Pontifical Swiss Guard, judging by their distinctive uniforms, directing traffic once the Chevalier and the APC's reached the dotted line on the road that indicated the border, the column left Italy and arrived in the Vatican City State.
Flagged to come to a halt in a piazza next to St. Peter's Basilica the wheeled tank and the armoured personnel carriers it was leading pulled up and they were immediately surrounded by several dozen more Swiss Guards, MacArthur noting that most of them were carrying modern rifles not their usual ceremonial halberds. Seeing the Mauser 960 laser rifles, the same model as used by the SLDF, in the hands of men wearing bright renaissance-era dress was at least somewhat jarring as far as visual images went, but it helped demonstrate that despite the late medieval garb they weren't justsoldiers.
The three APC's lowered their ramps and half a dozen SLDF infantry in full combat gear disembarked from each followed by Colonel MacArthur and the two officers accompanying him as his temporary staff.
One of the Swiss Guard that seemed to be an officer himself, at least judging from the fact his uniform was even more ornate than that of the others and that he was wearing a very fancy rapier at his hip, spotted MacArthur and approached him. "Colonel MacArthur?" he checked, the man's accent sounding Lyran to the SLDF officer's ears though presumably he was from the German speaking part of Switzerland.
"Yes" MacArthur confirmed.
"Oberst Johann Helbing" the officer introduced himself standing to attention, saluting and snapping his heels together making him seem even more Lyran.
MacArthur returned the salute. "May I present Major Claire Donovan, also of my 295th Division, and Captain Jason Carmichael of the Niops Association Militia" he introduced his companions who also exchanged salutes with the commander of the Swiss Guard. "Thank you for allowing my troops to remain under arms after crossing the border" he added after the formalities.
Oberst Helbing smiled wryly. "We don't want to risk the son-of-a-bitch getting assassinated, or worse getting away, any more than you do Colonel. Probably even less" he replied. "We have laid on refreshments for your men in our barracks and one of my junior officers will give them a quick tour of the Vatican unless you plan on ordering them to stay with their vehicles. Those vehicles will, of course, be perfectly secure here with a detachment of my Halberdiers guarding them until you depart, I assure you."
Given the reputation of the Pontifical Swiss Guard MacArthur believed him. They were very much the epitome of 'I'll die before I give up my post and as God is my witness I'll take ten of you with me' soldiering. Religious faith and martial skill in equal measure. "I'll take you up on that offer, Oberst Helbing" he replied, his other ranks would no doubt enjoy the chance to see more of the Vatican and his orders from General Romanov being to play nice with his hosts as much as possible anyway. "Be warned that none of them have ever set foot on Terra before, let alone visited Rome or the Vatican, so they might bombard your guides with questions."
Helbing laughed. "On a normal day we deal with tens of thousands of wide-eyed tourists, I think my people can cope" he replied. "We've prepared a holding cell for the prisoner if you want to hand him over now."
MacArthur nodded. "Bring him out" he ordered, a wheelchair emerging from the back of one of the APC's and rolling down the ramp, the chair being pushed by an SLDF sergeant.
"He got old" Helbing noted, directing a look of utter disdain at the man sat in the wheelchair, his face being partially obscured by an oxygen mask connected to a tank affixed to the back of the chair.
"Frail too" MacArthur replied. "We had to clone him a new liver and stick an artificial heart in him at one point to keep him alive. His lungs are a wreck too, we think he caught a whiff of poison gas at some point, possibly something they used themselves which drifted back on them when the wind changed direction, and it caught up with him eventually with age" he said, Amaris's forces had deployed chemical and biological weapons a lot more during the war than the SLDF ever had. "We could have just let him die, but we figured you'd want him alive and besides which he deserved as many years in solitary confinement as medical science could allow" he added. Imprisonment had aged Critchly fast and he hadn't been a young man to start with.
Helbing sighed. "Alive yes, to stand trial. Time was the church would have simply burned him at the stake" he observed wistfully, thinking back to an age of purer justice. "An artificial heart you say?" he queried.
MacArthur nodded. "Powered by a fission battery, should be good for another ten years at least but if you do decide to bring back the old methods watch out for it exploding when you set him alight" he warned drily.
"Oh, if only bringing back the auto-da-fé was an option" another voice interjected from nearby, their accent French. "Please remove the mask so we can properly verify his identity" the man continued, walking towards Critchly. As they approached it could be seen they were not wearing the uniform of the Swiss Guard but rather priestly robes instead, rather ornate and colourful ones topped by a bright red cap, and that they were carrying what looked like a facial scanner.
"May I present His Eminence Cardinal François Cointerel, Prefect of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith" Oberst Helbing introduced the newcomer.
Until now Bernard Critchly had been sat docile in his wheelchair, seemingly resigned to his fate, but he now visibly flinched and sat up straight.
"Ah, I see what has likely haunted your nightmares for over sixty years" Cardinal Cointerel addressed Critchly with some satisfaction. "How gratifying to know you were expecting this encounter to happen one day" the head of what had once been known as the Roman Inquisition added, smiling coldly.
MacArthur had read up enough on how the Church hierarchy worked to know that a cardinal was considered one step down from the Pope himself, a 'Prince of the Church' in the formal parlance, and if this man was also Head of the Inquisition that he was very senior indeed. "Sergeant, remove the prisoner's oxygen mask please" MacArthur ordered. The SLDF non-com reaching down to do so as Cointerel held the scanner up to his face.
"It's him, bone structure and retinal scan confirms it" Cointerel confirmed, looking at the display intently. "Replace the mask please, I wouldn't want him to expire before his time" he said, the sergeant doing so after MacArthur nodded his affirmation. "You know the last time the SLDF handed over one of these creatures to me it all went rather differently" he remarked, transferring the scanner to his left hand while making the sign of the cross with his right.
"The last time?" MacArthur queried, raising his eyebrows.
"Yes, October '77, I still remember it like it was yesterday" the Cardinal recalled. "Hans Mikkelsen," he said, bending down and looking Critchly right in the eye, watching as the war criminal own eyes widened. "Did you hear what happened to Mikkelson, Colonel MacArthur?" Cointerel asked, still looking into Critchly's eyes.
"I heard a rumour that when the Sixth Army caught him they handed him over to the Swiss Guard who put him up against a wall" MacArthur recalled hearing that story not long after Amaris died.
"Not quite" Cointerel replied evenly. "They handed him over to me and after I excommunicated him on the authority of the Curia and the Pope, thus damning his soul for all eternity, I personally shot him in the head" he announced, watching Critchly's dismayed expression with a sense of satisfaction that made the Cardinal feel ever so slightly ashamed of himself as he straightened back up. "The Holy Father himself personally heard my confession afterwards. He didn't want my soul following Mikkelsen's to hell for breaking the Fifth Commandment since I was only acting under his orders."
MacArthur blinked. "You're not going to do the same to Critchly are you?" he asked nervously. "Because we put a great deal of time and effort into getting him here and we could have just shot him back home" he pointed out, not being particularly shocked at being told that the man had personally executed another famous, or rather infamous war criminal. Summary justice had been all the rage back then in the aftermath of the Amaris Civil War, just ask anybody named Amaris in the unlikely event you could still find one. Aleksandr Kerensky had ordered his entire family shot with only maternal relatives with a different surname spared.
"Oh no, tempers are far less wrought than they were back in my youth when emotions were still running high over the then recent murder of poor Pope Clement" Cointerel replied, shaking his head. "The current Pope and the Curia agree that a public trial is called for, and we have even obtained the most competent and professional legal counsel available to conduct the Ogre's defence" he told MacArthur. "My days as God's Own Hit Man are long past me" he said, smiling. "Although I suspect it did do wonders for my career" he admitted, doubting he would have ended up as not only Prefect of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith but also a Prince of the Church otherwise. After what had befallen Pope Clement XXVII and the Vatican itself, the Roman Catholic Church under Clement's immediate successor, John Paul V, had become rather hard-line and being the man that 'dealt with' Hans Mikkelsen, another notorious war-criminal lieutenant of Antilos Legos, had looked good on a résumé.
Pope John Paul V had died a few years ago, his own successor, the current Pope, being more moderate and liberal in outlook, which was not to say that the Roman Catholic Church was not still monumentally pissed off at Bernard Critchly. Christ may have preached forgiveness, but some people made following in the footsteps of the fisherman very, very hard.
The average life expectancy on Terra being so long meant that there were still plenty of people around that had personally witnessed the atrocities perpetrated by the Greenhaven Gestapo and some memories don't tend to fade much over time.
For that matter there wee still quite a few people around that remembered just how bad Critchly used to smell, largely thanks to poor personal hygiene habits. During his time in custody on Niops he had been cured of this however, mostly by the expedient of his guards telling him, 'It uses the shower or it gets the hose again' if he didn't keep himself clean.
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Part XLIX - Section 2 of 2
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"Oberst, if you could take that down to the holding cell" Cardinal Cointerel requested, indicating Critchly, "I will personally escort Colonel MacArthur and his officers to where Ambassador Jeffries is waiting for them to join him" he said. "I believe that the Holy Father intends on having the prisoner taken to the Sistine Chapel later to witness that his desecration of the fresco has been stripped away, and Michaelangelo's vision fully restored to the Glory of God, so you may wish to make security preparations for that" he advised.
Helbing nodded.
"While I doubt the prisoner is in a fit state to make a run for it, if he does may I suggest you instruct your men that while the word of Our Lord as passed down to us in the Bible frowns upon killing, and that they should therefore refrain from shooting him in the back if possible, the book is somewhat fuzzier when it comes to the subject of kneecaps" the cardinal advised sagely.
"I'll let them know, Your Eminence" Helbing replied, trying not to laugh because it would bad in front of the men.
"Excellent" Cardinal Cointerel responded brightly, clapping his hands together. "Shall we be off Colonel?" he asked MacArthur rhetorically, gently tossing the facial scanner to one of the Swiss Guard who caught it before marching away, a distinct spring in the man's step.
MacArthur leaned over towards Helbing. "You really wanted this ****** didn't you?" he asked.
"It would be difficult to express in words just how much" Helbing replied earnestly, nodding as MacArthur quickly made to catch up with the Cardinal, Major Donovan and Captain Carmichael in pursuit.
Oberst Johann Helbing, Commander of the Swiss Guard, looked down at the man sat in the wheelchair. "Consider this as confirmation of the truth that God will not be mocked and don't go thinking that repentance will save you from hell because God's mercy may be limitless but that doesn't hold true for his Representative on Earth" he warned, having heard that the Pope intended on excommunicating the man personally.
Critchly took a deep breath. "****** you, candystriper" he replied. "And ****** your Pope" he just about managed to gasp out afterwards.
"Candystriper?" Helbing repeated, looking down at his uniform. "Good one, and four whole syllables too, you're not as dumb as I thought" he said. "Let's get you down to the cell. Feldweibel Schallberger should be ready with the Iron Maiden by now, he spent half the night sharpening all the spikes inside."
Bernard Critchly blanched and Helbing was gratified that all of his men had remained stony faced when he mentioned the Iron Maiden, that particular device of medieval torture supposedly favoured by the Inquisition being very much a later fabrication.
They did have some old thumbscrews in an archive somewhere apparently, but while John-Paul V might have sanctioned their use his successor was less 'Wrath of God' and more 'Love of God' as the Church got over the trauma of the Amaris era.
"Hauptman Wettstein, please escort our SLDF guests to the barracks, Make sure they feel welcome" Helbing instructed one of his officers, sticking to English rather than Italian or German so the soldiers of the SLDF could understand as well. "Leutnant Ochs, you and your men will remain here to guard the vehicles. Do so with the same zeal you would the Papal apartments" he ordered, both officers recognising their instructions with a nod. "We are indebted to the Niops Association and the 295th Battlemech Division for bringing us the Ogre" he reminded them.
None of the SLDF infantry or the tank crew were actually from the 295th, despite what the insignia on their uniforms said. They were all from the 331st and had been born on Circe or Strana Mechty being assigned to this mission because they knew to keep their mouths shut about that. If asked they were the children and grandchildren of the original soldiers of the 295th which had officially arrived at Niops not long after failing to catch up with Kerensky's Exodus.
Most of the soldiers were also young enough to have been raised on Niops, and thought of it as their home by now, so when asked about where they came from by curious member of the Swiss Guard they truthfully spoke of what it was like to live on Niops VII way out in the periphery.
After lunch one the SLDF infantrymen even performed the old rap about Galileo and his own encounter with the Vatican, which was about as convincingly Niopsian as you could get, even if the cultural anchor point was entirely lost on the rather perplexed soldiers of the Pontifical Swiss Guard.
Apparently you could move faster in those robes than Robert MacArthur would have expected because Cardinal Cointerel had set a brisk pace as he led the Colonel and his two officers through the rooms and passageways of the Vatican towards where Gareth Jeffries was waiting. On a normal day there would have been a lot more people around, not just clergy but also other guests and visitors, but for security reasons the number of people allowed inside the walls had been severely restricted.
As they proceeded Cointeral had bombarded Macarthur, Donovan and Carmichael with questions, which they all supposed was part of his job description, and they were glad they had all rehearsed a consistent script that was mostly true but left out or obscured details that Niops did not want anybody from outside the Association knowing. Fortunately he was more interested in talking about the capture of Critchly than he was about Niops which made things easier but the man was definitely fishing for information nonetheless.
As they eventually reached a large set of doors, a pair of Swiss Guards stood outside them, Cointeral knocked and entered, leading MacArthur and his companions inside.
Gareth Jeffries was waiting inside as expected, what MacArthur had not expected was that he would be sat at a table drinking coffee and eating pastries with the Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church and the Vicar of Christ himself.
You could have warned me, MacArthur thought to himself directing a brief glare at Cardinal Cointerel who noticed the Colonel's expression and seemed amused. "Your Holiness, may I present Colonel Robert MacArthur and Major Claire Donovan of the 295th Battlemech Division of the Star League Defence Force and Captain Jason Carmichael of the Niops Association Militia" he announced them grandly.
The Pope put down his coffee cup and stood up off his chair, Jeffries instantly following suit as befits protocol.
"Your Holiness" MacArthur spoke up, saluting then offering a shallow bow. He wasn't Catholic himself but the Pope was a Head of State holding a position deemed equivalent in the ranks of nobility to an emperor. Even the First Lords of the Star League had bowed to the Pope when they met, it would be uncouth not to and besides which potentially disrespecting the untold billions of Roman Catholics in the galaxy was such poor politics that only Richard Cameron would have been stupid enough to do it.
The Pope smiled and approached MacArthur. "No need to kiss the Papal Ring Colonel, a handshake will do" he said reaching out his hand which MacArthur took. He then subsequently shook hands with Donovan and Carmichael before fixing his attention back to MacArthur. "I consider it a pity that General Romanov could not be here herself, I would have liked to present her personally with the Papal Commendation I plan to issue to the men and women of the 295th Division, but I trust you will convey it back to her Colonel" he said. "Your valour in finally bringing the war-criminals of the accursed Amaris to justice, after so many years of them avoiding their righteous punishment and continuing their vile ways, cannot be praised too highly" he continued. "The 141st Amaris Dragoons were barely less irredeemable than the mercenary scum that followed Antilos Legos, murderous butchers all, and to see them brought low while they were commanded by an actual cousin of Stefan Amaris himself is almost poetical."
"Isn't it unusual for the Catholic Church to do something like that?" MacArthur queried.
"We do not, as a rule, involve ourselves in international politics or temporal matters it's true, at least not since the Papal States were dissolved anyway" the Pope replied, smiling. "When it comes to opposing evil however we like to think our ourselves as very much in the fight" he said. "If Stefan Amaris, Antilos Legos and Bernard Critchly were not tools of Satan himself I'll eat my hat and if you've ever seen it you'd know that the Papal Tiara is rather indigestible" he joked.
"I remarked to His Holiness that your son asked you to get his autograph Major Donovan" Jeffries spoke up, the woman having mentioned this during their long journey to Terra.
Donovan looked appalled at having this mentioned but the Pope smiled again. "I think I can manage that although I believe I'll send you back to Niops with something more consequential as well" he said. "Ambassador Jeffries informed me that you were the mechwarrior who defeated Bernard Critchly in battle?" he asked her.
"I was Sir, almost to be honest I had no idea at the time who was sat in the cockpit of the Rampage I was shooting at" Claire Donovan replied, trying not to sound too nervous given who it actually was she was talking to.
"Nonetheless Major you faced a mortal foe of the Roman Catholic Church in battle and defeated him, something that merits reward" the Pope told her. "As such I am naming you to the Order of the Golden Militia, what some call the Order of the Golden Spur, an honour that has been bestowed upon those who have contributed to the glory of the Church by feat of arms since the Fourteenth Century. A Papal Knighthood."
Donovan stared at him. "I'm not Catholic" she managed to reply.
"Strangely enough it's not actually a requirement that you are" the Pope replied. "It has even been awarded to non-Christians in the past, although I assume you are one?" he asked.
"Episcopalian" Donovan replied.
"Ah, one of our Anglican brethren" the Pope responded. "I will make sure to mention you to the Archbishop of Canterbury the next time we meet, lovely woman, and we agree on so many matters of religion as long as the subject of King Henry VIII of England and his daughter Elizabeth aren't raised" he added with a chuckle. "Forgive me for not saying so earlier, Captain Carmichael, but naturally the Niops Association Militia with also be receiving a Papal Commendation for their part in the Battle of Algenib, I'm told you fought there?"
"I did" Carmichael confirmed. A company of the militia had helped the SLDF against the Blood Rain, earning Carmichael himself the Combat Mechwarrior's Badge, something that not very in the NAM could boast of.
"I look forward to seeing the presentation on the battle Colonel MacArthur intends to give to the press later, it sounds like the Amaris Dragoons put up quite the fight, although nobody ever accused them of being cowardly I suppose, just malevolent beyond measure" he said before turning to Cardinal Cointerel. "Ambassador Jeffries has informed me that the Niops Association intends to provide the entire Inner Sphere with the blueprints to both the Jamerson-Ulikov Water Purifier and the Eligus Medical Diagnoser, once restricted Terran Hegemony technologies, and to do so for free as an act of Christian charity" he told him. "I will converse with the Curia about the Church assisting in the distribution of these technologies if we can, they could save many lives and alleviate much suffering."
Cointerel raised his eyebrows. "It is very generous of them to do so without recompense, not something we see very often in these dark days" he replied. "I suppose that the rumours are true that Niops has maintained the ability to produce many devices that are lostech elsewhere and not just Hyperpulse Generators?"
"Ironically the new Dark Age that has befallen the galaxy elsewhere never reached the worlds orbiting an unusually dim star far from the light of Terra" Jeffries said poetically.
The Pope nodded. "Yes, the new Dark Age, the one in which ComStar sees itself as being akin to taking the role our church did in late antiquity, keeping the wisdom of the ancients safe after the Roman Empire fell" he observed.
"The current Primus most certainly seems to believe in that creed" Cointerel agreed. His spies within ComStar indicated that Raymond Karpov intended to push his organisation even closer towards cosplaying the medieval Roman Catholic Church what with the chanting, and the robes and the pseudo-monastic orders. Still, they did say that imitation was the sincerest form of flattery.
"Makes one wonder if he realises that in this scenario that the Niops Association and its growing Hegemony are the part of the Roman Empire that did not fall, which also retained the knowledge of the ancient Romans and Greeks and still boasted the legions to defend it" the Pope asked rhetorically. "I must say I never thought I'd meet the Byzantine Empire reborn but here we are" he said, waving his hand towards Jeffries.
"Byzantine?" Carmichael repeated the word quizzically.
"The Eastern Roman Empire, the part that didn't collapse when Rome did in the west and kept going for another thousand years" Jeffries explained. "They actually still called themselves Roman, or rather Rhōmaîoi in Greek the language they mostly used, rather than the Byzantines because as far as they were concerned they still were."
"Which would make us the 'Anti-spinwards Terran Hegemony' I guess" MacArthur said.
Jeffries smiled. "I guess all we need now is to elect ourselves our own Justinian as High Associator and find ourselves a Belisarius" he said grinning, wondering how many reporters at the press conference later would get the references if he made them in jest.
Watching that press conference live from his quarters at Hilton Head on the other side of the Atlantic Raymond Karpov, Primus of ComStar, was already incensed enough when the diplomat from Niops gave the announcement about releasing the blueprints for lostech to the galaxy, but he practically had a stroke when Jeffries mentioned the Byzantines… and Belisarius!
Having the successes of Operation Holy Shroud possibly gutted by these upstarts had been bad enough, but now he faced a far greater problem.
The Eastern Roman Empire hadn't just survived the fall of Rome itself, at one point they had very nearly managed to reconquer the western part too, and had retaken large parts of it including Italy. General Belisarius, the greatest military commander of his age, in the service of the Emperor Justinian, had once again raised the standards of the Roman Army over Rome itself, earning himself the later sobriquet as 'The Last of the Romans'.
The worst part of it all from Karpov's personal perspective being that one of the first things Belarius had done after taking Rome was throwing the then Supreme Pontiff, Pope Silverius, out on his ass because the Eastern Roman Empire considered him a stooge of the barbarian tribes who had earlier destroyed the Western Empire, and they were still pretty sore about the whole thing.
Still watching as this 'Colonel MacArthur', apparently the son of the commanding officer of the 295th before the current one, told the press about the Battle of Algenib where the SLDF had taken on and defeated the Amaris Dragoons, thus winning the last battle of the Amaris War in his words, something else suddenly dawned on Karpov.
"Romanov, their general is called Romanov" he exclaimed. "Of course they're the damn Byzantines" he realised, dropping his face into his hands as he envisioned the 'Anti-Spinwards Terran Hegemony', as Jeffries had called it, thundering out of the Periphery one day to once again raise their standards over Terra.
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Note from the Author:
Okay, so the preceeding quarter-million words or so may have left the readership with the impression that because Johann Sebastian O'Reilly (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Johann_O%27Reilly) was not the man that discovered the tens of billions of C-Bills worth of Germanium on Alphard, that this story was not about the Roman Empire being recreated in space. I apologise for the confusion, this story is about the Roman Empire being recreated in space, it's just not the Roman Empire you were expecting.
If ComStar is the Roman Catholic Church of the Dark Ages then the Niops Hegemony is the Eastern Roman Empire (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_Empire), the part that kept going long after Rome itself fell to the barbarians.
Military sci-fi just isn't the same without a reference to Belisarius (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belisarius) is it?
Hans Mikkelsen of the Greenhaven Gestapo (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Greenhaven_Gestapo) being caught by the SLDF and then handed over to a representative of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith (the Roman Inquisition) who promptly excommunicated him on the order of the Pope and then shot him in the head comes from the sourcebook Historical: Liberation of Terra (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Historical:_Liberation_of_Terra_Volume_2). Turns out if you murder the Pope and the Curia, slaughter hundreds of unarmed monks, loot the Vatican and paint over the fresco on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel you will make the Catholic Church very, very mad at you, who would have thought?
The Pontifical Swiss Guard (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Pontifical_Swiss_Guard_(Vatican_City)) may look like toy soldiers in their late medieval style dress uniforms and carrying halberds, but both in the Battletech Universe and in real life (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_Guard) they are not.
Finally the Order of the Golden Militia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_the_Golden_Spur), AKA the Order of the Golden Spur, as awarded here to Major Claire Donovan is a real thing.
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How nice of them to stoke Karpov's paranoia to new heights.
I guess the Inquisition lost some of it's flashiness since the fabulous days of Torquemada (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnF1OtP2Svk)
BTW, Iron Maiden is a band (greatest ever in my not so humble opinion), torture instrument is iron maiden.
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I'm surprised he not freaking out that division of the SLDF is active outsider of Terra.
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But you made the Cardinal French... How could you miss the opportunity to make him SPANISH! ;D
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"But you made the Cardinal French... How could you miss the opportunity to make him SPANISH! ;D"
No one EXPECTS the SPANISH Cardinal! I mean Inquisition
I doubt it will be in the manner of History of the World part 1 (Mel Brooks! you can't Torquemada out of anything!)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PR7hp0613QY
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For what it's worth, the Vatican Observatory is a real thing, and would be quite interested in the original mission of the Niops Colony.
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I'm sure there's at LEAST one actual Astronomer on this mission... ;D
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"But you made the Cardinal French... How could you miss the opportunity to make him SPANISH! ;D"
Unfortunately it says in Historical: Liberation of Terra that the guy from the Inquisition who shoots Hans Mikkelson in the head, after the SLDF catch him and hands him over, has a French accent.
Mikkelson hears the accent and thinks they must be a Swiss Guard from the French speaking part of Switzerland. When the man corrects him explaining he's actually from the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, Mikkelson becomes considerably more nervous.
For what it's worth, the Vatican Observatory is a real thing, and would be quite interested in the original mission of the Niops Colony.
I'm sure there's at LEAST one actual Astronomer on this mission... ;D
The Vatican is savvy enough diplomatically to use this as a opportunity for outreach (they're considerably less 'bull in a china shop' than Niops, they've been playing the game a lot longer.).
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Makes perfect sense... too bad he didn't have a Spanish assistant at least... ;D
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The Vatican is savvy enough diplomatically to use this as a opportunity for outreach (they're considerably less 'bull in a china shop' than Niops, they've been playing the game a lot longer.).
Not to mention they have what is frequently acknowledged to be the world's oldest continuously active intelligence service. Lacking a traditional military since the fall of the Papal States in the 19th century, they've become absolute masters in the use of soft power in all respects. Say what you will about the failings of the Catholic hierarchy over the centuries, they are very good at diplomacy and intelligence gathering.
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"While I doubt the prisoner is in a fit state to make a run for it, if he does may I suggest you instruct your men that while the word of Our Lord as passed down to us in the Bible frowns upon killing, and that they should therefore refrain from shooting him in the back if possible, the book is somewhat fuzzier when it comes to the subject of kneecaps"
I just WHEEZED. Oh dear god what a line.
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What a line indeed! :D
Seriously... who knew the Inquisition even HAD a sense of humor!? ;D
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Well, face it, you can't Torquemada anything!
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"While I doubt the prisoner is in a fit state to make a run for it, if he does may I suggest you instruct your men that while the word of Our Lord as passed down to us in the Bible frowns upon killing, and that they should therefore refrain from shooting him in the back if possible, the book is somewhat fuzzier when it comes to the subject of kneecaps"
I just WHEEZED. Oh dear god what a line.
What a line indeed! :D
Seriously... who knew the Inquisition even HAD a sense of humor!? ;D
Well, face it, you can't Torquemada anything!
The "fuzzier on the subject of kneecaps" line was pretty blatantly stolen, borrowed by me from Shepherd Book in Firefly (still my favourite TV show ever).
As for the Prefect of the Inquisition Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith having a sense of humour, well we've caught him on a good day in an upbeat mood.
Interestingly enough Joseph Ratzinger (the later Pope Benedict) headed the Inquisition for over twenty years and was supposed to have a much better sense of humour in private than people expected...
... though expectations might have been low because he wasn't just head of the Inquisition for two decades, he was also German. :wink:
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The "fuzzier on the subject of kneecaps" line was pretty blatantly stolen, borrowed by me from Shepherd Book in Firefly (still my favourite TV show ever).
As for the Prefect of the Inquisition Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith having a sense of humour, well we've caught him on a good day in an upbeat mood.
Interestingly enough Joseph Ratzinger (the later Pope Benedict) headed the Inquisition for over twenty years and was supposed to have a much better sense of humour in private than people expected...
... though expectations might have been low because he wasn't just head of the Inquisition for two decades, he was also German. :wink:
There was a classical observation that only intelligent people CAN have a sense of humour. It's the ability to recognize the absurd, and adapt to it, that is the root of humour, and why nothing demonstrably false, can be funny.
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Well, face it, you can't Torquemada anything!
Not with THAT attitude.
Give me 12 McKennas and a Watch that looks the other way, and I'll be happy to demonstrate.
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Part L - Section 1 of 2
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"If you wanted to know when the Niops Association reached the public consciousness, well you could certainly guess worse than when the newspaper cartoon, 'Saint George and the Dragoon', depicting a crusader knight with a Red Cameron Star on his shield fighting a dragon, the dragon sporting a long mustache to resemble Stefan Amaris, was printed in newspapers from one side of the Inner Sphere to the other."
Stephen J. Tran, Red Star Rising: A History of Niops 2800-2900 - Niops Press, 2915
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Pisa – Galileo System – 2841
Major Samuel Tyson wondered if Pisa might be the smallest city in the Inner Sphere to have its own HPG station as he settled down in his quarters after a long day to relax and watch the holovid. The NHCOMNET building in the centre of town didn't just send and receive hyperpulse transmissions, it also transmitted a UHF signal for the colonies bare-bones television station, one that broadcast local and interstellar news along with a few kids shows, some old Terran soap operas and a lot of documentaries.
Tyson would have preferred more action movies and police procedurals on TV, although the documentary about the Byzantine Empire yesterday had helpfully filled in a few blanks in his historical knowledge, but you had to admit that living in the boonies in Niops territory was definitely a cut above what it was like in most of the periphery. Hell, the medical clinic in town was better funded and equipped than it would have been in much of the Inner Sphere, while the school actually had noteputers for all the kids, holoprojectors and a science lab.
That schoolteacher from Francas who taught his niece was pretty hot too in Tyson's opinion, hence his habit of offering to walk his sister's kid to school when he wasn't on duty.
Most of the buildings in Pisa were mostly just drab concrete put up in a hurry, including the school, but they kept the rain out, the heat in, had mains water and power not to mention a connection to a proper sewerage system. If you were averse to catching cholera properly constructed sewers were an underappreciated must, not that everyone in the periphery seemed to have gotten the memo on that one unfortunately.
Despite the amenities describing the largest settlement on Galileo as a city was still a hell of a stretch though, even if the place had grown dramatically in size in the couple of years since Tyson's Troublemakers had taken up their contract with the Niops. On arrival the mercenaries had been granted their own district on what was then the edge of town, one large enough for hangers to hold their mechs plus a barracks and a few other prefabricated buildings around a parade ground, but if the town kept expanding in size and population at the current rate the Troublemakers would soon find themselves completely surrounded on all sides by urban sprawl.
It was already getting to the stage where simply shipping in enough food, mostly from Stafford although good quality meat made it all the way from Francas, was starting to become a problem and more and more farms were starting to spring up. There were miners with money to invest and a dream of owning some land, land on Galileo was still pretty cheap anyway, and although the local soil wasn't ideal for arable farming, there were various genetically-engineered crops which could cope with it well enough.
The Troublemakers owned and operated a pair of dropships which were usually were parked up at the spaceport several klicks outside of town but were occasionally hired out to move people and cargo. Their employer had even managed to scrounge up some spare parts for the Troublemakers old Dictator which was getting on in years, and handed them over for a song. Of course, Niops had considerably more modern military dropships than the Dictator practically coming out of their ears, thanks to having a full division's worth of starlift capacity, so it wasn't like they were being super generous. The parts were probably just taking up space in a warehouse gathering dust.
According to the news Niops was even about to start producing a super-fancy new military cargo dropship soon, the CargoMaster, alongside its civilian version the CargoKing, and Tyson was hoping he might get the chance to bid on a soon-to-be-surplus SLDF-owned Mule when they did. Effective mercenary regiments didn't ignore logistics and adding a cargo carrier to the Troublemaker's TO&E would make them look a little less ragged. Also a Mule would potentially bring in a lot more money when offered out for short-term hire, it could easily carry four times as much cargo as the Troublemaker's Intruder and Dictator could combined, and there was usually someone trying to get something heavy and/or bulky from A to B in boom times like now.
Getting used to the idea of living in a place where the economy was surging ahead, and people weren't loathe to invest in building new factories and other infrastructure for fear of some ****** turning up and nuking them, had taken Tyson a while. The weird sense of optimism that everything wasn't spiralling towards total collapse, and that your children and grandchildren would be better off than you are, was just so far removed from the reality of life for most people since the Star League collapsed that it took some serious mental adjustment.
Astonishingly the tiny Niops Association had managed to found more new colonies in the last few years than all the Successor States combined, and the only thing that seemed to be restricting their territorial growth was a lack of people to actually come live on them.
The mines on Galileo itself were being successful enough in attracting labour though, doing better at that than the new colony on Baccalieu was certainly, hence Pisa's sharply rising population. The mining company paid high wages and offered good employee benefits, including the option to buy shares in the business, and the taxes they paid funded infrastructure projects and covered the wages of sufficient law enforcement officers to stop Pisa degenerating into your typical frontier mining town.
Unlike on Alphard the men and women working in the mines on Galileo weren't digging for germanium, or coltan and the rare earth metals usually found with it like niobium and tantalum, they were digging for diamonds and fire opals.
The large majority of the diamonds being pulled out of the ground were industrial, the hardest-known naturally occurring substance had plenty of uses including in mining equipment, though there were plenty of gemstone quality examples being found as well. The fire opals meanwhile were mostly heading for the hedonistic Magistracy of Canopus where both men and women were very fond of their bling and the demand for the stones seemed insatiable. They were pretty, Tyson had to admit, he had been given a cut and polished example of a fire-opal mounted on a tie pin by one of the mine-owners as a gift, and there was a fairly large one cut into the shape of a Cameron Star in a presentation cabinet in the Town Hall.
It might have been in danger of being stolen if not for the fact that everyone knew that if you tried to pull off that kind of heist on Galileo you would have to deal with the mercenaries hired to stop anyone stealing the gemstones that were the planets primary export. Tyson's Troublemakers weren't toy soldiers, or part-time militia, they were professionals who took their job very seriously.
At first most of the miners on Galileo had been men and women from Comstock and Francas, old Star League colonies that had signed up to join the new 'Niops Association Hegemony' being put together out here in the periphery, but increasing numbers of contract workers from the Illyrian Palatinate had been turning up recently and you were almost just as likely to hear Scandinavian accents around town as Hegemony English ones these days.
Niops wasn't running Galileo as a loss by any means, but they clearly didn't treat their colonies as a cash-cow and were ploughing a lot of the money they made from mining back into local infrastructure such as roads, and wages in the mines were high. In the long term they wanted the economy on the planet to diversify away from just resource extraction, as was already happening on Alphard, but for now pulling precious stones out the ground was bringing in more than enough C-Bills to keep the bean-counters content.
As long as Galileo was turning a profit Niops was happy to keep the Troublemakers on the payroll too, which was just great as far as Sam Tyson was concerned. He had buried enough of his friends and comrades already, all of them lost fighting in the seemingly endless Succession Wars with many of the battles they had fallen in being fought for objectively no good reason whatsoever. Sometimes it seemed like the Great Houses were just comparing dick sizes with each other, or even worse destroying something just to stop the other guy getting it, which only screwed everyone in the long term.
Sam Tyson's mother, the original commander of the Troublemakers, had chosen not to follow Kerensky into the void, the SLDF's Twenty-third Heavy Assault Regiment under her command signing as mercenaries for the Federated Suns instead. You couldn't really accuse House Davion of being particularly malevolent, compared to the Draconis Combine and the Capellan Confederation they were usually fighting the Federated Suns was objectively the lesser evil by a long, long way, but they still treated their mercenaries as being more expendable than their own troops which had led to the Troublemakers being effectively rendered hors de combat by the end of the First Succession War.
Now lacking their own jumpship, and a far cry from the Twenty-Third Heavy Assault of old which had stomped Amaris's lackeys into the dirt and could throw three full-strength battalions of heavy and assault mechs at the enemy, the remnants of the Troublemakers had been scrabbling desperately for work that wouldn't get what few of them remained killed when they heard about Niops. Sending General Romanov that HPG offering their services had been a Hail Mary play that worked out, there wasn't much demand for mercenaries that weren't happy to throw themselves headlong into the meatgrinder for a few bucks anymore.
If you didn't know about the wealth of precious stones to be found on Galileo you might wonder why anyone would want an admittedly understrength but still formidable mercenary unit to garrison it. The fact was all those shiny rocks would attract pirate raiders like horseshit attracts flies if word reached them about it, and the unusually heavy average tonnage of the Troublemakers battlemechs made for good bug repellent.
A couple of lances of Wasp, Locust or Stinger light mechs might make your average pirate band out in the periphery the ****** of the walk, able to raid most whoever they liked with impunity, but Major Sam Tyson had a stable of heavy and assault mechs some of which massed as much than a whole lance of lights on their own. Moreover, he had mechwarriors inside his machines that had cut their teeth against Sword of Light Regiments, not against poor dirt farmers with rifles that dates from the Reunification War, and who would love the chance to stomp pirate scum into the dirt.
On the subject of pirate scum Tyson noted that the holovid was repeating the news conference from the Vatican on Terra, the one he had first watched in the bar last week along with several other off-duty Troublemakers. How the Niops people had managed to keep the almighty whupping they had inflicted on the Blood Rain under their hats all these years he couldn't imagine, they were certainly on-point when it came to stopping intel leaking out, but damn wasn't it good to hear that the fist of justice in the form of the Star League Defence Force had smashed the last of the Amaris Dragoons but good, and even managed to finally capture that evil prick Critchly into the bargain.
It had turned out that Major Marcelo Gao, the current commander of the small contingent of infantry belonging to the 295th on Galileo, technically its official garrison even if the Troublemakers provided most of the actual firepower, had himself fought in the Battle of Algenib. This had resulted in him being bought so many drinks at the bar by not only Troublemakers, but also miners born on Comstick and Francas when he let that slip that he had to be carried back to his barracks.
Grabbing the remote-control Tyson turned up the volume on the Holovid and dropped into a chair to watch the press conference again just as Colonel MacArthur and the others were answering questions. The holovid projected a 3D image of an unusually well furnished and ornate press room situated in the Vatican on Terra, some five hundred light years away from where Tyson was sitting, but if not for a slight shimmer to the image he might have even been there in person. Colonel MacArthur's presentation on the Battle of Algenib and the capture of Bernard Critchly had already been shown, along with part of the press conference which followed, but some of the best parts were still to come and were well worth seeing again.
"Émilienne Guérin, Federated News Services" the female journalist given the chance to ask the next question introduced herself on the holovid, her French accent typical of many in the Federated Suns. "If you've had Critchly and the others in custody since 2829 why has it taken until now for you to hand him over to the Holy See?" she asked reasonably.
"Because we wanted to get as much useful intelligence as possible out of them first, and also because much of that intel might have been useless if it became public knowledge" MacArthur replied. "To give one example it was via interrogation of the commanding officer of the Blood Rain that we learned the true origins of the mercenary regiment known as 'Raymond's Redcoats', establishing them to be the 38th Amaris Fusiliers" he said. "I mean, we always knew they weren't really the 295th Battlemech division as they purported to be, because we were, but it was certainly nice to find out exactly who was going around pretending to be us."
"But you publicly revealed the true identity of the Redcoats years ago" the journalist persisted.
"We did" MacArthur confirmed, "though I note that the Lyran Commonwealth continues to employ them despite that" he said disapprovingly, "but they were not the only Rim Worlds remnants we learned of from the Blood Rain, and if we had gone public with the news of their defeat and capture a decade ago it might have wrecked our chances of dealing with some of the others before they panicked and went to ground."
"Are you saying that the Battle of Algenib was not the only occasion when the Niops Association has gone up against former units of the Rim Worlds Republic?" the journalist asked in surprise.
"While I am not at liberty to disclose everything we've been up to in the last few years, I have been authorised to announce that if anyone ever finds an old Rim Worlds Republic outpost or two a few jumps from the Magistracy of Canopus and the Taurian Concordat, outposts which somebody has smashed from orbit with naval autocannon, that they shouldn't be surprised to find a sign saying 'Niops was here' sticking out of one of the craters" MacArthur replied drily. "One of them was the base the 141st Amaris Dragoons initially fled to after they made their escape from Terra via Spica in the Capellan Confederation in 2778."
"Wouldn't that make those military operations the 'Last battle of the Amaris War' rather the one on Algenib?" the journalist, Guérin, queried.
"The outposts in question were no longer in operation. They were smashed to stop them ever being so again by other Amaris Empire remnants who also knew their location" MacArthur replied. "A battle is when there are two sides shooting at each other, those weren't battles, those were pest control."
"Just prior to this press conference the Niops Association has also revealed to the Lyran Commonwealth the existence of two more such facilities in the Deep Periphery anti-spinwards of their territory, these being Rim Worlds Republic Outposts 25 and 27, along with our best guess as to their location" Gareth Jeffries, sat next to MacArthur, added.
"For what it's worth, I still think before we did that we should have made them promise not to offer any pro Amaris holdouts they might find there a job first" MacArthur interjected sardonically, the various journalists laughing in response, except of course for the one from the Lyran-based Donegal Broadcasting Company, "but our civilian government back home isn't as personally aggrieved about the 38th Amaris Fusiliers, or Cameron's Curse, or Raymond's Redcoats, or whatever the hell it is they're calling themselves this week, as I am."
Tyson didn't know what was funnier, the SLDF officer's sarcasm or the look of mild dismay on the face of civilian diplomat beside him when he said it. Either way it was surprisingly entertaining television for a press conference. He was pretty sure that his dearly-departed Mom would have had a few issues with that bunch of former Amaris soldiers turned buccaneer too. Calling themselves 'Cameron's Curse' for a while certainly didn't make them sound all that repentant, with switching from piracy to mercenary work under a false identity probably just being a savvy career move rather than a complete change of heart.
There were quite a few other Rim Worlds Republic units turned mercenary about Tyson knew, even a few regiments that contained both former RWR and former SLDF troops, but those Rimjobs hadn't turned pirate first after losing the war. The rep of the 38th Amaris Fusiliers wasn't actually as bad as that of the 141st Amaris Dragoons had been, but in some ways that was just damning them with faint praise. The SLDF had still very much wanted a piece of them after winning the war for their actions on Castor which had included the use of tactical nuclear weapons in civilian areas, which was why of course they had fled to the periphery in a hurry to take up piracy.
There was a school of thought that it had been the reopening of the nuclear genie by Amaris that had led to their far more widespread and devastating use by all sides during the First Succession War. While the Star League had officially put aside the Ares Conventions when it had launched the Reunification War back in the 26th Century, use of WMD, particularly on civilians, was still very much frowned upon which was why the casualties of that war paled beside those incurred in later conflicts. Wars were rarely ever clean, but the Amaris Civil War had heralded an era where they had become dirty beyond imagination.
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Part L - Section 2 of 2
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"Stefanos Rallis, Irian Media Interstellar" another journalist introduced themselves before asking a question. "Your choice of transportation when conveying Bernard Critchly to Terra certainly raised a few eyebrows, warships, particularly ones that large, are scarce these days. According to the records I've seen the SLS James Sever was lost during the Amaris War. How did it end up very much intact and flying the Niops flag?"
"Looks like somebody did the research, well done" MacArthur replied. "The records you've seen may have indicated she was lost, but she wasn't actually destroyed, just disabled with internal and external damage severe enough that she wasn't able to be repaired by the Star League Navy at the time. We recovered her a while back from a system near Finmark where she had been floating as a derelict and after a lot of work eventually put her back into service."
"Does that mean you have a naval shipyard?" Rallis asked as a follow up, this question causing something of a stir with the other journalists.
"No, if we had we could have built a brand-new Congress from scratch in less than a third of the time it took us to get the James Sever running again" MacArthur told him. "Quite a lot of her systems were actually salvaged from another Congress Class frigate we located that had been hit even harder than she had. Effectively between the two wrecked ships we had just about enough parts for one working frigate that we spent years putting back together."
Wishing that he had grabbed a sandwich from the canteen before heading home Tyson momentarily considered going to get one but decided to watch the rest of the broadcast first. He wasn't that hungry but he was already pretty comfortable in the chair in his quarters, it had originally come from an old dropshuttle and was nicely padded to cope with high-gee acceleration.
"Jane Moore, The Times of London" another reporter interrupted. "Has the Niops Association salvaged any other warships?" she asked.
MacArthur and Jeffries looked at each other. "Well of course we have" Jeffries replied after a pause. "So far we've managed to get forty McKenna and Texas class battleships back running again, not to mention a half dozen Enterprise class supercarriers" he deadpanned. "The High Associator is only days away from signing an executive order that will send our whole fleet on a mission to reconquer the Terran Hegemony. Our plan is to appoint Duke Ian Cameron-Windsor as the new First Lord of the Star League… could you do us a favour and pop into Buckingham Palace when you get home to let him know."
This time everyone in the room laughed, except for Robert MacArthur who was looking at Jeffries disapprovingly. "They never got the Enterprise class ships to work" he said, shaking his head.
"Really? Damn, do you think they might have bought it otherwise" Jeffries asked, looking like he was trying to keep a straight face and almost, but not quite, succeeding.
"Probably not" MacArthur had replied. The exchange between them being so funny Tyson couldn't help but suspect it had been rehearsed. You could get away with a lot of obfuscation if you turned everything into a joke. The mercenary honestly wouldn't have been too surprised at this point if Niops had a few other smaller warships they had recovered squirrelled away, joking about having a fleet of battleships was a smooth way to avoid answering questions about corvettes or the like.
It would certainly help explain why the hell Niops and the 295th had been so quiet during the First Succession War, Tyson reasoned. As well as stockpiling nukes so the Mariks didn't do to them what they did to New Dallas, they were also surreptitiously salvaging every warship they could and emptying every Star League cache they knew of.
Reestablishing HPG contact with the Inner Sphere had waited until Niops was in a position where if the Great Houses tried to lean on them the response would be the flat, 'Come at me Bro', which had always worked for the Taurian Concordat.
You could conquer the Taurian Concordat, hell the Terran Hegemony wearing their Star League hat had actually done it during the Reunification War, but it just wasn't worth the cost in blood and treasure to do it.
"In all seriousness," Jeffries continued on the holovid, "while we wouldn't tell you if we had salvaged any other warships, any serious naval analyst can provide you with an estimate of just how large a fleet a polity our size could realistically crew and maintain" he sagely advised the journalist from the Times. "I will say that the vast majority of our salvage operations over the years was just us collecting spare parts from old hulks that we needed to keep the ships we have running. That said however, I am prepared to reveal that we successfully captured a Royalty Class armed Jumpship of Rim Worlds manufacture from the Blood Rain, effectively their flagship. Unfortunately in that engagement our own flagship, the James Sever, had to riddle her so full of holes before she lowered her colours that we're still in the process of trying to get it fully operational again."
"It's like trying to get hold of parts for an old car. The Terran Hegemony built over two hundred Congress Class frigates, and we know where most of them were lost, so finding spares for one isn't as difficult as it is for some limited-edition custom jalopy built and operated by someone else, like a Royalty for example" MacArthur added for himself.
The journalist from Irian Media Interstellar nodded. "Presumably it's also a little easier for you to keep your Lola III class destroyer running than your Essex II for the same reason?" he asked.
MacArthur nodded though Jeffries looked at the journalist amused. "Okay, you know far too much about this stuff" the diplomat observed. "Did you used to make little plastic models of warships as a kid by any chance?" Jeffries queried wryly.
Being someone that did that as a hobby himself as a boy, although in his case it was battlemechs not warships, Tyson felt somewhat personally aggrieved but judging by their expression the reporter took it in good humour.
"Rebecca McTavish, Donegal Broadcasting Company" a reporter from the Lyran Commonwealth now spoke up. "Can you tell us anything more about the Blood Rain and how Bernard Critchly came to join them?"
"Not much more to tell beyond what Colonel MacArthur already said in his presentation on the Battle of Algenib earlier" Jeffries replied. "The 141st Dragoons fled Terra before the noose closed around them and it appears Critchly bribed them to take him along. Given that they were also a bunch of wanted war criminals with a price on their head he probably thought it was safer to stick with them afterwards than risk associating with less disreputable folks that might turn him in. When the original commander of the Blood Rain retired from piracy Stefani Marcus took over. Her being an actual cousin of Stefan Amaris himself, and named for him no less, apparently gave her the edge in the election. She liked to call herself 'Colonel Marcus', or even the 'Pirate Queen of the Blood Rain', though we mostly just call her 'Inmate' these days as you'd expect."
"Election?" McTavish repeated quizzically.
"Yes, the Blood Rain held an election to choose their new commander, we're given to understand that Critchly also stood himself but recieved hardly any votes" Jeffries replied. "Even other scum think he's scum. Everyone has standards I guess."
"And she's really a cousin of Stefan Amaris?" the Lyran journalist asked.
"Yes, DNA test confirmed it" Jeffries replied, nodding. "She did tell us that despite her not liking Critchly personally that she freely admits he was her most effective company commander when raiding. Unsurprisingly being a murderous, bloodthirsty pirate suited him down to the ground."
"Find a job you love and you'll never work a day in your life" MacArthur said wryly.
"James Clark, Interstellar News Network, given the claim of the Niops Association to be a de facto, and de jure, continuation of the Terran Hegemony some might be wondering why you didn't come to the aid of the rest of the Hegemony during the dark days of the First Succession War" the reporter for ComStar's own news organisation asked.
"We didn't wade into the fray with our single battlemech division for presumably the same reason Jerome Blake didn't with the eight SLDF divisions at his disposal, that being because we're neither stupid nor insane" Jeffries replied coldly. "If you think that the Terran Hegemony citizens of Niops, Comstock, Francas and Frobisher are indifferent to what has befallen their brothers and sisters in the core worlds of the Hegemony then you are very much mistaken. We were simply in no position to intervene on their behalf."
"I see, and how do you respond to allegations that Niops proved itself merely a puppet of the Free Worlds League by its supply of weaponry to that star-nation that it then used against its other neighbours?" the reporter from INN queried.
"We only made payment in arms for purchases made by us from the Free Worlds League during the ComStar Interdiction because we were unable to do so with C-Bills, we certainly weren't engaging in barter by choice, it's a pain-in-the-ass" Jeffries replied evenly. "ComStar also effectively froze our bank account, one denominated in germanium bars, which was deposited with them at Hednesford, which didn't help matters either, but I guess that's all in the past now. The Niops Association no longer sells or barters weaponry to the Free Worlds League, and we certainly don't give them away either."
"Your germanium reserves do seem quite extensive, care to comment on that?"
"Captured war criminals and pirates swinging pickaxes in germanium mines can be surprisingly productive" MacArthur replied. "The secret is motivation. They know we're motivated to find an excuse to hang them so they don't give us one. Next question please."
Tyson laughed. Deal with Niops long enough and you soon learned they had a very technocratic, generally rational way of doing things. Imposing capital punishment on the worst of the worst might be cathartic, but being sentenced to twenty-five to life of economically productive hard labour instead of being executed still monumentally sucked for the person concerned and was better for the taxpayer.
"Philippe Lefort, Le Figaro. The 295th Division was not a Royal formation but despite that you seem to have a lot of Royal-grade military equipment in your inventory. Was this merely recovered from star League caches or are the rumours true that the Niops Association manufactures such extremely advanced weaponry itself?"
"Both" MacArthur replied. "By which I mean we reverse-engineered Royal equipment that we recovered and put it into low-level production to replace less capable equipment as it wore out."
"We don't have issues with so-called 'lostech' on Niops, though occasionally we do have to figure out something that the Terran Hegemony didn't deem to provide a mere astronomical research colony the blueprints for" Jeffries interjected. "I can give you a less warlike example of our scientists and engineers reverse engineering some tech we never had ourselves too. The Magistracy of Canopus has asked for our assistance in maintaining their Terran-supplied Stasis Tube technology and we have a team taking one apart right now to see how it ticks."
"Interesting. Will you be disseminating that technology for free as you are the J-U Water Purification system and the medical diagnostic equipment?" the reporter from the French newspaper asked curiously.
"That's really a question for the Magistracy, it's still their intellectual property after all, but I doubt my own government would be averse to doing so. It's a non-military medical technology that could potentially save a lot of lives" Jeffries replied.
"I'll try and reach the Magistracy for comment then. On a wider point, I'm sure that many people will be wondering why a self-described minor power in the periphery is simply giving away advanced technology it could readily demand and obtain payment for."
"Because there are people throughout the Inner Sphere who are starving because they can't irrigate their crops, and they're dying from diseases that our great-great-grandparents thought they had eradicated forever" Jeffries replied. "We're doing it for the same reason we smash pirates and hunt down war-criminals, because it's the right thing to do and somebody damn well should."
Jeffries shook his head and sighed. "The Star League used to do these things, it's gone and everyone else is too busy slaughtering each other over where a dotted line on a star-map is drawn to worry about the little guy, or even see the big picture. The reason why every hospital doesn't have a Eligus Medical Diagnoser anymore is because they were made on Saffel, and the Federated Suns and Draconis Combine wrecked the place fighting over it. The reason why all the colonies that depended on Jamerson-Ulikov Water Purifiers are falling off the map is because the Free Worlds League devastated the planet where they were made with nuclear weapons just to make sure the Capellan Confederation didn't end up controlling the supply. If you're going to claim you're the rightful heir to the Star League you might want to try acting like the Star League and remember that despite commanding the most powerful military in history it still built more often than it destroyed."
MacArthur nodded. "Somebody needs to step up and attempt to reverse the decline, not just sit back and wait for it to happen, so the Niops Association is stepping up. Maybe we'll fail miserably, let's face it we probably will, but at least we're out there trying."
"Okay so we're maybe a little naïve, utopian even, but we're also technologically advanced and heavily armed so hopefully we'll get away with it" Jeffries added, grinning. "Don't worry, we'll head back home soon returning all you cynics to your regularly scheduled entropic decline into a new dystopian dark age. We'll be roleplaying the Eastern Roman Empire out in the hinterland" he joked as a call-back to something he had said earlier about history not really repeating itself but rhyming on occasion.
Tyson didn't think that the analogy fitted perfectly by any means, but Terra being Rome, the Terran Hegemony being the Western Roman Empire, ComStar being the Catholic Church during the Dark Ages and the Niops Hegemony being the Eastern Roman Empire lined up just well enough to make the historical allusion work.
The Successor States might not be best pleased at being equated to the Goths, Vandals, Alans, Visigoths and whatever, but they had sacked, pillaged and burned enough worlds that Tyson himself thought that if the shoe fits wear it.
Resolving to go get that sandwich after all Sam Tyson turned off the holovid and was already starting to climb out of his chair when his thoughts of pastrami on rye were interrupted by a knock on the door.
"Enter" Tyson said loudly, standing up.
The company clerk opened the door and stepped inside holding a letter. "Sorry to disturb you Sir, but the mailman just dropped off an HPG that's come for you" he said, holding it out.
Tyson took the letter and dismissed the clerk who hurried back to their work closing the door behind them. Because only a small minority of people on Galileo as yet had a noteputer that could be connected to their data grid NHCOMNET operated a postal service in town to deliver printed-out HPG's by hand which was a little low-tech for Niops but this was the frontier after all.
The mercenary commander opened the letter assuming it must be from Niops but as he started to read he realised it had come from a lot further away from that, being routed into NHCOMNET from ComStar's own separate network.
Raising his eyebrows when he saw who it was from Tyson read it through twice before stuffing it into his pocket and going to fetch that sandwich while he thought about how he was going to reply.
It wasn't like Tyson's Troublemakers were exactly tight with Bolton's Rangers whose commander had sent the HPG. The two mercenary units had actually fought on different sides during the First Succession War, with the Rangers signing a contract with the Draconis Combine while the Troublemakers did so with the Federated Suns, although they hadn't ever actually come to blows in the field.
They were both former SLDF though, and the SLDF turned mercenary units liked to keep track of each other, partially because they rated each other as dangerous potential foes, generally superior to House regiments, and partially because it bothered them somewhat shooting at each other.
Ever choosing to work for the Dracs wasn't a good look for the Rangers in Tyson's opinion, although just as you'd expect from them the Combine had screwed Bolton's Rangers over with their 'Company Store' policy and a few other things, leading to the Rangers leaving their employ for that of the Duchy of Oriente a few years back.
Their timing to go work for one of the big three member states of the Free Worlds League just before the ComStar Interdiction hadn't been great though, especially given that the Duchy directly bordered the Capellan Confederation.
Just making their way across the Free Worlds League during the Interdiction in order to take up their contract with Niops had been a major pain in the ass for Tyson's Troublemakers, meanwhile Bolton's Rangers had to help deal with a full-scale invasion by angry Capellans looking to exploit the chaotic situation.
There was one thing that most every former SLDF unit knew about Bolton's Rangers, mostly because it was something they went out of their way to tell you. Back when they had been the 208th Hussar Regiment they had fought beside Aleksandr Kerensky right at the end of the Amaris War, literally right beside him.
Unlike most units saying the same they could actually prove it too. They had video footage taken by one of their mechs at the time which showed Kerensky's Orion kicking down the gates of the Presidential Palace on Terra where Amaris was holed up.
It was a good thing that Tyson did know the story because if he hadn't the part of the HPG letter than said 'Turned out we didn't fight in the last battle of the Amaris War after all. Kinda annoying but when we heard we raised a glass to the 295th anyway' would have made less sense.
The part of the letter where Colonel Bolton asked what it was like working for the Niops Association, did Tyson know if they were hiring, and, if so, could he put in a good word, was fairly self-explanatory.
Major Sam Tyson knew something else about Bolton's Rangers, something that almost made up for them working for the Dracs at one time, they still painted their mechs up in SLDF colours and they always wore the Cameron Star next to the insignia of whoever they were working for.
From a personal perspective, being effectively asked for a letter of recommendation by a unit that boasted one of commendation personally signed by Aleksandr Kerensky made Tyson feel pretty pleased with himself too, even though he knew it was basically just because he commanded the only mercenary unit Niops currently had under contract.
For most of the Inner Sphere the Niops Association was still an unknown quantity, if one that had just managed to drastically raise its interstellar profile in a very dramatic fashion. Just finding out that the 'Niops Association Hegemony' already controlled multiple star-systems and was continuing to expand territorially likely surprised a lot of people almost as much as learning that their navy was even more powerful than thought did.
Getting in on the ground floor before everyone else tried to sign up was probably a fortuitous decision, Sam Tyson thought to himself with satisfaction. The Troublemakers weren't nearly as large a mercenary command as Bolton's Rangers, for example, but when negotiating a future contract with Niops they could always point to the fact they had offered their services to the people still flying the Cameron Star first and cash in on that.
As to whether or not Niops might be interested in hiring on any more mercenaries or not at the moment Tyson wasn't sure. They certainly weren't at war with anyone right now, although for a while it had looked like they might be about to go and give the Circinus Federation a hammering, but conversely they were still planting their flag in new places and those places would potentially need a garrison to both keep pirates away and stop that flag being pulled back up by someone else.
Deciding to go and see Major Gao before replying to the HPG Sam Tyson made sure to remember to grab his wallet on the way out as well as get that sandwich. Gao's truly epic hangover from last week must have faded by now and he might accept being bought a drink again.
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Note from the Author:
In case you've forgotten Galileo is what the planet Pompey (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Pompey) is called in this story (instead of the Marian Hegemony naming everything after famous Romans we have Niops naming everything after famous astronomers). Pompey was known for exporting diamonds and fire opals and while the name is different the geology is the same. Galileo Galilei was born in Pisa in italy hence the capital of the planet being named that. Bit of trivia, the UHF transmission tower on top of the NHCOMNET station on Galileo has a noticeable lean, this is deliberate.
Like Tyson's Troublemakers (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Tyson%27s_Troublemakers), Bolton's Rangers (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/5th_Fusiliers_of_Oriente) was a former SLDF unit that stayed behind during Kerensky's Exodus (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Operation_EXODUS) and became a mercenary regiment (in the latter's case they were originally the 208th Hussar Regiment of the SLDF). The Rangers initially worked for the Draconis Combine but got screwed over (the Combine's rigorously implemented Company Store (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Company_Store) policy seems very much intended to do just that) and so they went to work for the Duchy of Oriente (https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Duchy_of_Oriente) instead (part of the free Worlds League). In canon Bolton's Rangers signed up with the Duchy permanently in 2845 becoming the 5th Fusiliers of Oriente regiment but that hasn't happened yet (and won't).
The Eridani Light Horse and the Crater Cobras might be the most famous former SLDF units turned merc that still express some loyalty to the Star League but they are by no means the only ones. Bolton's Rangers were extremely proud of having been with Aleksandr Kerensky when he put an end to Amaris and retained SLDF colour schemes on their mechs even when they signed up with the Duke of Oriente as House troops.
Incidentally we're now at chapter fifty and well over 280,000 words (roughly three novel's worth of text). Nice to see plenty of people still reading at this point!
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On arrival the mercenaries had been granted their own district on what was then the edge of town, one large enough for hangers to hold their mechs plus a barracks and a few other prefabricated buildings around a parade ground, but if the town kept expanding in size and population at the current rate the Troublemakers would soon find themselves completely surrounded on all sides by urban sprawl.
Common issue, especially in Europe. And then people complain because there is a military base right in the city, well base was there well before you decided to buy a plot next to it.
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Common issue, especially in Europe. And then people complain because there is a military base right in the city, well base was there well before you decided to buy a plot next to it.
Military base, airport/airfield, heck even fireworks factories.
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This has become one of the favorite fanfics out there from all the fanfics out there. The little details like the UHF tower leaning, on purpose, in Pisa is hilarious. The Niops leadership making jokes about all their battleships as a long term OPSEC move is beautiful. There will be a day when the Niops Admiral will hail his opponent and say something like "It's hilarious that we were not joking".
Looking forward to the shenanigans they get up to as Comstar tries to figure out how to respond and Niops is a few steps ahead with no F**ks to give.
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Nice to see other former SLDF units rallying to the Red Cameron Star! :)
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Nice to see other former SLDF units rallying to the Red Cameron Star! :)
Looking forward to seeing the Eridani Light Horse doing so.
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I suspect the Crater Cobras might come first... ;)
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I'm sure the Primus enjoyed the news to everyone else that he had 8 Divisions...
I don't think that was ever spelled out to the Houses in the original timeline.
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I'm sure the Primus enjoyed the news to everyone else that he had 8 Divisions...
I don't think that was ever spelled out to the Houses in the original timeline.
And Niops knew thru the Wolverines. Did the 295th know about it, or was it information only known to Aleks K and his closest advisors?
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I think the fact that some SLDF troops stayed with Blake should be common knowledge amongst the Exodus participants, while specifics would be known to Kerensky an his staff.