Date: January 2, 3006
Location: Galatea
Title: Contested Dreams
Author: Randall N. Bills
Type: Short Story (MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries)
Synopsis: Nikolai trudges through the frigid, snowy streets of Galatea City to the seedy Lazy Lighthorseman bar. He orders a Timbiqui Dark, flashes a 100 C-Bill note to pay, then becomes the center of attention by taking center stage at the karaoke platform, playing the part of a drunken fool, and, having thusly defined his character, removing any curiosity about him among the bar's patrons. He slumps into a chair next to his contact and makes idle chatter with people around him until the bar begins to empty. At last, he tells his contact he's interested in off-books mercenary contracts, while putting a token onto the table to verify his bona fides. He gets another drink from the bar, and when he returns his contact tells him there's a drive under the table with contracts not found in ComStar's databases. Nikolai pays the man by sticking a credit chip to the bottom of his beer glass, then leaves it on the table as he gets up to go.
A few blocks away from the bar, he realizes he played the part of a drunk and wealthy fool too well, and has been followed by some muggers. He expertly disables one attacker and convinces the other to back off.
Back at the apartment, Chloe, Dawson, Brooklynn, and Ryana join him - Chloe furious about his having been stabbed during the altercation with the muggers. Nikolai justifies the risk, noting that the unit isn't going to last much longer without a good contract, since their nest egg is getting smaller every day. He says they'll have to let their new hires go, postpone maintenance fee payments and training runs, and then they'll be branded as failures, and will never get a contract. He shouts that they have to either take one of these shady contracts, or admit they couldn't make a go of being independent mercenaries.
Dawson expresses reluctance to take murder-for-hire contracts, and Nikolai answers that the contracts are illegal, but not immoral, and can be concealed behind "state secrets" and other euphemisms. Ryana says they should take one of the contracts, noting that the unit cannot go on as it currently stands. Chloe finally agrees as well, and asks what makes the contract in question so secret that it can't be on the MRB database.
Nikolai outlines that it's an extraction operation, protecting a team from Interstellar Expeditions, with the POC being Mr. Sebastian Spears. Chloe and Ryana react with surprise, and Chloe begins laughing. They reveal that they know him, having concluded a contract with IE during the battle on Hesperus. They consider his contracts to be crazy, but lucrative. The reason they don't go through MRB is that they don't want ComStar to know what they're doing. With that out in the open, the team decides to take the contract.
Notes: Interesting how often in the BattleTech universe the seasons on various worlds, all with separate orbital periods, stellar distancing, and continental distribution tend to have weather patterns that precisely mirror those of Terra's northern hemisphere. Nothing saying Galatea City can't have snow in January, but this happens very frequently across the fiction, and I'd love to see a description of "Rasalgethi's deep August snows" or a saying "Like a cold January on Satalice" meaning something that comes around only once every ten year cycle. The early fiction (especially Bill Keith's worldbuilding efforts) did this a lot more, which I felt added more grounding and variety to the sense of being on exotic worlds. For this reason, I'm very much looking forward to Catalyst's "Alien Worlds" map set, which will feature more environments that couldn't ever appear on Terra.
With the mention of paying maintenance fees, it is clear that the unit doesn't have enough integral tech support to cover their needs and are paying for their tech services (at 10 times the cost of the salaries for Elite techs - since the math is so favorable towards having your own techs, the main shortfall must be in finding the techs in the first place - thus leading to the early lore showcasing techs as targets of objective raids, and being kept under lock and key in underground bunkers as two-legged LosTech). Thus, they literally are about one or two months away from bankruptcy, assuming my calculations of their nest egg are accurate.
The use of Nikolai's black market trader contracts to get the token giving him entre to IE's recruiter is interesting - but must leave IE with a very limited number of prospects for their operations. The Combine was far less secretive when they wanted mercs for secret missions - they just advertised a fake lead-in mission that had the correct parameters but fake details, and then gave the unit the real mission once it was on-site and away from the hiring halls. Sure, there'd be the risk of someone talking, but that risk doesn't go away with their current method. I presume IE can't/won't go to the remaining Mercenary Guilds, because of the (very real) worry that ROM has infiltrated them.
Murder-for-hire contracts do exist in this timeframe. Helmar Valasek splits his efforts between sending his 'Mechs out on water raids and sending hit-squads out on assassination missions. Further out, the Jarnfolk have full-on assassin guilds, though their contracts are usually internal to the Jarnfolk families, and it would be almost unheard of for them to operate in the Inner Sphere. (Though a Jarnfolk trading vessel was operating in the Oberon Confederation region in the late 2900s.) Vendettas in the Combine also regularly require the service of assassins. Do all those contracting for killers have to use such elaborate cutouts, though?
Nikolai states that some contracts are universally illegal, by any law. What laws apply in the Succession Wars? Granted, ComStar's Mercenary Review Board can set standards of conduct - no genocide, no civilian massacres, no nukes, etc., and they can prevent units in violation from getting contracts through their networks, and badmouth them to potential clients. However, looking at the advertising put out by the Black Knight Legion (from MechWarrior 4), they freely advertise industrial sabotage, tout the (non-canon) killing of Duke Ian Dresari (an assassination contract if I ever saw one), and proudly say that no job is too dirty.
But would the Combine care if a mercenary unit slaughtered the populace of a Davion world? Or would they give them a bonus? Granted, that unit might never be able to work in the Federated Suns or the Lyran Commonwealth again, but that would be a preference of those hiring agents, not a legal matter, since none of the Successor States have legal jurisdiction in each other's territory. (That again brings up the question of how, exactly, the Lyrans justified raiding a Free Worlds League planet to find "illegal nukes" when the Lyrans' own planetary garrisons on Skye were using nukes to blow up dams during a Kurita invasion.)
Another example is that of the Screaming Eagles, which executed prisoners of war on New Canton during the 4th Succession War and were "disgraced," but were tried and found "not guilty" of wrongdoing and continued in FedCom service in the War of 3039. House Davion's contracts specifically stated that killing POWs was against its rules. However, the Combine's Dictum Honorium specifically states that all POWs should be immediately executed, unless they can be leveraged for further use. So there's an example of each Great House having its own set of laws, and there being no one set of things that are "universally illegal" in the Inner Sphere.
I think Nikolai is more concerned about their reputation than about legal consequences. If they get the reputation as a mob of murderous thugs based on the types of contracts they're initially willing to take, then the only types of contracts they'll be subsequently offered are those suited to murderous thugs. (Hello, Combine company store!) The Eagles did ultimately end up taking a reputation hit and had to settle for Chaos March and Periphery contracts after the War of 3039, but they served the Sandovals well in the Jihad and were welcomed back by the Federated Suns to guard the border against the Raven Alliance.
