Beating The Odds

[Middcore]

Prologue: Joyride

Calseraigne
The Free Worlds League
3027

Mathieu adjusted his ill-fitting breather mask and glared daggers at his brother. Not that Sacha could see his look of disgust he knew, not through Mathieu’s mask and goggles, his own goggles, and the clouds of dust blowing into the battered hovercar’s open windows. And not that Sacha was paying any attention to him, anyway. It was just as well. When he got like this a quick glance was often followed by a quick fist. So Mathieu took some satisfaction in the opportunity to stare at his brother and think about the contempt he really felt for him. Still, it was poor compensation for being dragged along on another one of Sacha’s pointless, moping, joyrides. Nothing ever changed.

The ancient hovercar had already long since left behind the Rust, the graveyard of fishing boats left beached and then abandoned by the retreat of the Sablier Sea. The sea had once provided the livelihoods of families like theirs, and many generations before them. Now Mathieu and Sacha’s grandfather could tell stories about working as a fisherman when he was a young man, only a few standard years older than they were now, but he was one of the oldest people in their village. When they were young boys Mathieu and Sacha had spent countless hours playing on and around the Rust, but even at an early age Mathieu had started to see how different he and his older brother were. For Sacha, the hulks were never anything more than an opportunity to physically challenge himself, miniature mountains to be scaled and creaking obstacle courses to be negotiated. As Mathieu explored the wrecks his eyes started little by little to see the purpose of things, the purpose they had once served for the people who had lived on the shores of the Sablier before him, had started to puzzle out the mysteries of mechanical function in engine rooms and maneuvering hydro-jets and cranes for manipulating fishing nets. By the time he was ten, he had progressed from fascination with broken things to taking apart working ones. At first when he tried to put them back together they hadn’t worked anymore, and the beatings he’s received from his father then had dampened his enthusiasm, but only temporarily. Now when he took something apart and put it back together, it not only worked, it worked better than before. Radios, old noteputers, flatscreens, food heaters.

That, Mathieu told himself, was why he had a future, and why his brother, like most of the others in their village, did not.

Mathieu’s stomach lurched into his throat as the hovercar cleared the lip of a dune. “Sacha,” he shouted over the howl of the fans, “How far out are we going?” Once again his brother showed no sign of even being aware of his presence, even though it was Sacha who had insisted Mathieu come along..

Mathieu couldn’t remember being this far out into the salt for years. What reason was there to come out this far? He wasn’t entirely sure there hadn’t still been some water here when he had been a child. Many kilometers away, in the deepest depressions of what had once been the sea floor, brackish remnants where nothing lived still lingered. Soon even that might be gone, if the Marquis and his friends from off-world had their way. When the old Marquis had died, people in Mathieu’s village had taken little notice. When word had reached them that the new Marquis, the nephew of the old one, had arrived on Calseraigne, they had taken even less. Generations of Marquesses had come and gone and life in the villages along the receding shores of the Sablier had changed little.

But this new Marquis was different. He had ideas, ideas like building a dam where the Gagnon River joined the Sablier, husbanding the Gagnon’s dwindling flow to save the northern lobe of the sea. As for the southern part, where Mathieu’s family had lived for centuries? A necessary sacrifice, too far gone to save. Supposedly, a corporation from off-world  wanted to “explore” the salt flats that had been the southern half of the Sablier for natural resources. Some of the people in Mathieu’s village welcomed the news, thinking it would finally bring jobs to replace fishing. Others were less optimistic. Mathieu didn’t care either way because he didn’t plan on staying around long enough to see what would happen. He was going to find a way out.

That is, if Sacha didn’t get them both killed first. Reckless driving aside, they were a good half a local hour out from the village now, it was getting late in the day, and it looked to Mathieu like a dust storm was brewing. Nobody could predict with certainty when one would whip up, and nobody could predict with certainty when one would subside. They had goggles and breathers, they could ride it out if they had to… probably. The real threat of the dust storms was the lung diseases that were a fact of life for many of the population on what had once been the Sablier’s shores. Getting killed by actually being out in the storm…well, it was possible, but it wasn’t easy. Unless you were stupid. Which was another way of saying “Unless you were Sacha.”

“Sacha…” Mathieu’s shout turned into a cry of surprise as the hovercar abruptly decelerated, and he barely had time to throw out his hands to prevent a rib-cracking impact against the dashboard.

He glared at his brother once again, waiting. Here it comes, he thought.

Sacha continued to give every sign of ignoring him, staring straight ahead through the scratched and dirty windshield, until at last he removed his filter mask and started to speak. “She told me it’s over, Mathieu.”

Mathieu gritted his teeth and waited, but there was only the sound of the winds whipping across the dunes. Finally he removed his own mask. “Who told you, Sacha?” He knew the answer, but apparently getting this over with before nightfall was going to require him to do some prompting.

“Vivien,” his brother replied, still staring straight ahead. “She said she didn’t want to see me anymore.” Sacha’s body convulsed in a bitter laugh, his mouth twisted into a sneer. “What a ****** stupid thing to say. There aren’t more than a couple hundred people in the village. She’ll still see me every day!”

Mathieu looked away and slumped back against his seat. This was what passed for witty insight from his older brother. She won’t see you every day if she gets out, you fool! Mathieu didn’t share his brother’s attraction to Vivien. She was too delicate, not his type. But she was one of the few of the younger generation who had grown up with Mathieu and Sacha that he respected. She wanted to be a doctor. Like him, she had ambitions beyond the confines of their dusty, decaying village. Which meant that her being with someone like Sacha had never made any sense; the end of their relationship had been, from Mathieu’s point of view, inevitable, but he had still dreaded it because he knew that it meant he would be dragged along on an expedition like this one.

Mathieu loved his brother. He swore to himself that he did. But every time he was forced to bear witness to one of Sacha’s bouts of self-pity, he loved him less. What made Mathieu furious wasn’t that Sacha was sad over the loss of the girl, but that he would never understand why he had lost her, would never find motivation in it to become a better man, to set his sights on something beyond the dunes and salt flats of the dying sea.

There was a gurgling sound. Mathieu glanced over and found that his brother had produced a bottle of liquor from somewhere. He groaned to himself. We’re going to be out here all night.

He slumped in the hovercar’s lumpy, torn seat and closed his eyes. The only sound was the wind and the gurgling from Sacha’s bottle. And Mathieu’s own racing, looping thoughts.

Things had to change. Things would change. He just had to find a way out.

[Lazarus Sinn]

Tagged

[Daryk]

Perhaps he should ask Vivien what her plan for escape is? ???

[snakespinner]

tagged

[Middcore]

Part I

“All politics are local.”
-Variously attributed

Chapter 1: Easy Money

Calseraigne
The Free Worlds League
3027

Kit Söderlund raised one hand to shield her eyes as she walked out of the cavernous maintenance bay and emerged into the light. Decades ago the outpost which the Black Kats had taken over as their base for the duration on their contract on Calseraigne had actually been situated on the shores of the Sablier Sea, and the bay which now housed the mercenary unit’s war machines had been used to conduct maintenance on boats out of the weather - a faint water line was still visible on its interior walls. Before her, through a gap in the base’s ferrocrete fortifications that had allowed the militia craft to float directly in, a dry gray-gold expanse blurred out to the horizon. The Sablier was long gone from here and possibly on its way to being gone completely, and the militia saw no purpose in patrolling the waste left behind, leaving the outpost to be battered by the dust storms that occasionally blew in from the salt flats until the Kats had arrived a few weeks before.

Dust storms and climate change weren’t problems you could solve with BattleMechs. So what are we doing here, anyway? Kit wondered to herself.

Just outside dusty, cracked ferrocrete walls, four of the unit’s six BattleMechs stood in line. Two more, plus the unit’s pair of light armored vehicles, remained inside the hangar behind her. She glanced up at the weathered guard tower on the wall, where one of the unit’s squad of infantry threw her a wave - the Kats weren’t much for salutes - before going back to staring boredly at the horizon. Kit searched her memory for the young man’s name, ashamed of herself for already losing track of who was who when the unit boasted no more than a couple dozen people on its whole roster. Rask. Curtis Rask. That was it.

Kit halted at the feet of her Vindicator. Like the other machines, the Mech bore the Kats’ insignia of an arch-backed hissing feline, but it had been newly painted in the blue, purple, and silver colors of the Everett family, hereditary Marquises of Calseraigne since an Everett had led the Free Worlds League’s effort to wrest the planet away from House Liao more than a century ago - the last time, to Kit’s knowledge, the world had seen any armed conflict. The current Marquis, Guillaume Everett, was the Kats’ employer, although neither Kit or anybody else in the unit had ever met the man. Their contract had been negotiated by an intermediary, and in the weeks since their arrival they had still never laid eyes on him in person. When the Marquis wasn’t in the capital city doing important things with the planetary government, hereditary noble things that Kit couldn’t imagine and didn’t care to imagine, he rarely left the grounds of his estate on the banks of the Gagnon river that fed what was left of the northern sea.

But yesterday, a member of the Marquis’s household guard had arrived at the Kats’ outpost and informed Kit that the nobleman was requesting she assemble a lance to escort him on a vaguely-explained “expedition” the following day.

This was an occasion that demanded the Kats look their best. Fortunately, the unit’s support team had already been hard at work on that front, if only for lack of anything else to do.

The Vindicator weighed in at forty-five tons, putting it towards the lower end of the medium class of BattleMechs. It had spindly limbs, the right arm ending in the barrel of a particle-projection cannon, a blocky chest, and a head which slightly resembled an infantryman's helmet and gas mask on a gigantic scale. Stenciled beneath cockpit viewports that formed the visor of the “helmet,” Kit read: CPT. K. Söderlund - “JINX”

“How’s it look, boss?” Sid Norris’s voice was full of his usual puppy-like enthusiasm. The young tech’s endless supply of energy made Kit feel older than her twenty-seven years, but not as old as the inscription below her ‘Mech’s cockpit. The callsign she had more or less embraced; she had heard plenty less flattering. Seeing the rank of captain attached to her name still made her uneasy, even if in theory it made sense for her as the commander of what was now a company-strength unit, at least on paper. If you didn’t look at the paper too closely.

Kit glanced back at Norris as he reached the top of the ramp, then back up at her ‘Mech. “Looks good, Sid. Really good.”

“Thanks, boss.” The young tech beamed, but then his face clouded with concern. “The thing is, the facilities here… they’re not fit for doing much more than painting, I’m afraid. If you ever got into a real scrap, I don’t know how we’d do proper repairs.”

Kit sighed. “I know, Sid, I know. But the only real facilities on the planet belong to the militia, and they seem to act like they’re doing us a favor squat in this moldy old place. Anyway,” she said, smiling at the tech to try to cheer them both up, “I don’t think there’s much chance of us getting in any real scraps today.” She eyed the Vindicator again. “You really did do a nice job. Make sure I tell the rest of the support team I said so. The colors are a little flashy, maybe, but we should probably get around to picking some of our own someday. Better for business.”

“And what does business look like today?” said Norris. “If you don’t mind my asking, er, Captain.”

Kit’s forehead creased in a frown, and not just because of Norris’s attempt at military formality, but she forced her face back into the cheerful mask. “Parade colors for parade duty, more or less,” she answered. “Or maybe honor guard would be a better way to describe it?”

Or maybe the best way to describe it is that we’re going to use our pretty paint jobs to intimidate some desperate, impoverished civilians.

She kept that part to herself. She was a captain now, officially, the Black Kats were a real unit, almost, and expressing those types of doubts and complaints to the enlisted ranks wouldn’t do.

But what the hell are we doing here, anyway?

***

“Anyone want to explain to me why people would be so determined to keep living here?” Ellie Jarvis was constitutionally incapable of staying quiet for more than five minutes at a stretch. As CO, Kit supposed she was supposed to tell her lancemate to clear comms, but there didn’t seem to be much need for being so hard-assed considering how unlikely it was they would encounter any actual danger on this “mission.” That left Kit with the problem of coming up with an answer to Jarvis’s question.

Kit had left the planet of her birth before she was a teenager, had left Galatea for the first time as a tech in a mercenary unit before she hit twenty, and though she had always returned to Galatea between contracts she didn’t consider the Mercenary’s Star home. She couldn’t really imagine what “home” meant to people who had lived not just in the same world but in the same village for their entire lives. “You’re asking the wrong people, Siren,” she said. “Why ask a bunch of mercs? Doesn’t the song say ‘Home is the regiment,’ or something like that?”

“Not my style of music,” Jarvis scoffed.

“Captain,” Landry Tucker broke in, “I just want to make sure I understand… there’s no chance we pull a trigger today? I mean, we’re just showing the flag, right?” That was Tucker to a tee: earnest, to the point, conscientious. Far too conscientious and by the book, it seemed to Kit, for it to make any sense for him to end up in a small-time mercenary outfit, but he wasn’t the only member of the unit whose past Kit had seen no need to explore.

Kit flicked her gaze over the BattleMaster 'Mech marching in the center of their formation, just ahead and to the right of her Vindicator. She was listening to her lance’s chatter on one comms channel while monitoring a separate frequency shared only between her and the BattleMaster’s pilot, the Marquis Guillaume Everett. The Marquis had greeted her when her lance had met up with his machine, sounding utterly relaxed, but had said nothing since.

“Can’t see a chance, Tuck,” she answered, trying to sound just as unconcerned. “Not unless the civvies were a threat to our employer… and I can’t see any way they could be.” In truth, she wasn’t quite as confident as she was trying to sound. Using fully armed BattleMechs to “show the flag” to discontented civilians had the potential to result in the type of incident that could ruin a fledgling mercenary outfit’s reputation… or haunt a MechWarrior.

The five BattleMechs - Kit’s lance, plus the Marquis’s BattleMaster - were plodding across what had once been the southern sea floor. Several standard months before the Kats’ arrival on the planet, a kilometers-wide dam had been completed at the hourglass neck where the Gagnon River met the Sablier. The sea as a whole, it had been decided, was beyond saving, but by diverting what remained of the Gangnon’s flow into the northern lobe, it could be preserved at the expense of the southern. And in return for picking up the tab for the construction of the dam, Leyda Resource Ventures Interstellar, a corporation from the nearby Duchy of Andurien, would gain exclusive rights to explore thousands of square kilometers of what had once been the bed of the southern sea. The whole project, or so Kit was told, had been masterminded by the Marquis himself, set into motion shortly after he had returned to Calseraigne following the death of his father. The result, in theory, would be the environmental and economic salvation of a part of the planet that had been sliding into oblivion for decades. Truly an ambitious and noble undertaking. Or maybe the new Marquis simply wanted to restore the seafront views from his estate, situated on what had once been the shores of the northern Sablier and was now several kilometers removed. Who knew how nobles thought?

Whatever the Marquis’s motivations, not everyone saw him as a savior. Many of the remaining residents of the decaying villages on the banks of the southern Sablier objected fiercely to bring part of the part sacrificed for the sake of the whole. Some, mostly younger people and families, had been placated by the promise of temporary accommodation at the refugee camps near the Marquis’s estate, followed by new homes with better conditions and better work in the revitalized communities on the northern shores, all paid for by LRVI and a substantial donation from the Marquis's personal fortune. Others, mostly older, refused. They were apparently determined to end their lives in the same place where they had begun, where their parents and grandparents and great-grandparents had lived and died before them, even if staying meant that end would probably come much sooner than it needed to. Home meant something to some people it would never mean to Kit.

And so that was how the Kats found themselves accompanying their employer on an expedition to a village on the edge of the waste to apparently serve an eviction notice, more or less. To the best of Kit’s limited understanding, the Marquis was within his lawful rights under the neo-feudal system that prevailed to a greater extent in all five of the Inner Sphere’s five Successor States, partially as a way to handle the challenges of governing stellar empires stretched across hundreds of worlds light-years apart and partially as a consequence of centuries of warfare.

That didn’t make being a part of it feel any better to Kit, but when you were at the Kats’ level of the mercenary trade, you couldn’t afford to have qualms. The Eridani Light Horse could uphold the traditions and ideals of the Star League Defense Force. The Kats’ goals were less ambitious: string together contracts and survive, slowly grow and build a reputation if possible. The fact they had managed to do it for two years meant that they were defying the odds: Kit knew the statistics said more than half of all new mercenary commands were destroyed or disbanded within one standard year of founding. So when the Kats’ had completed their contract serving as a training cadre to the local militia on the world of Lurgatan further coreward along the League’s Liao border and word had reached them the Marquis of Calseraigne was looking for a small mercenary unit to “enhance security,” Kit had signed on without too much thought. It was a contract, and nearby, and not obviously suicidal.

So off they went: Kit in her Vindicator, Tucker’s Blackjack, Jarvis’s Wasp, Ehud “Lefty” Maier in an Enforcer, and in the center of the loose wedge formation the Marquis himself in the BattleMaster. The nobleman could pilot a ‘Mech. That was one thing Kit could add to the short list of things she knew about her employer. She eyed the Marquis’s machine once again. It was painted in the same colors as her lance, but with the Everett family crest and the eagle emblem of the Free Worlds League added. Up close it looked factory-fresh, pristine in a way that the Kats’ battle-weary machines never would, even with their fresh coat of paint. She couldn’t help but think there was something awkward in the assault-class ‘Mech’s movements, though. Skilled, experienced MechWarriors who were well attuned to their ‘Mechs through the neurohelmet interface had a way of imparting a grace to their machines. Kit knew she was a long way from being at that level herself, but she had seen enough true expert ‘Mech jocks to know from the way the BattleMaster plodded that its pilot was inexperienced. Not that it was likely to matter. Follow the little lordling around, look pretty, maybe scare some civilians, Kit thought to herself. There’s much worse things we could be asked to do. Easy money.

They had almost reached the village now. Kit could see a dozen or so dilapidated, dusty buildings a few hundred meters ahead, although from what she had seen of the region’s architecture she knew that half or more of the town might be embedded in the ground out of view, dating back to when tropical storms were a regular occurance. She could see human figures standing on some of the tilting rooftops, staring at the quintet of BattleMechs as they approached. The BattleMaster shuffled to a halt. “Thank you, Captain,” said the Marquis’s voice in her ear. “This will do.”

The mercenary lance came to a stop in a ragged line abreast on either side of the Marquis’s ‘Mech. Kit activated her microphone. “Um, my lord… why exactly are we here?”

“I am here to talk to these people. My people.” The nobleman sounded amused. “You are here because the commander of my guard insisted I not go anywhere near this place without a BattleMech escort. He neglected to extract a promise from me to stay inside a ‘Mech myself.”

Kit blinked. “I’m sorry, sir… er, my lord,” she ventured, “But if our mission on this trip was supposed to be to ensure your safety…”

“That will do, Captain,” the Marquis replied. “If you and your lance would wait here, please…” As Kit watched, the BattleMaster’s cockpit canopy opened and a figure in coveralls began to climb down. Hell, Kit observed, He didn’t even bother to put on a cooling vest.

Static crackled in Kit’s other ear. “Boss,” came Siren’s voice on the Kats’ frequency, “What exactly is going on here?”

“Not exactly sure myself,” Kit said, as she watched the Marquis reach the surface of the dry seabed and begin walking off in the direction of the village. “Looks like our employer wants to go have a chat.”

Tucker’s anxious voice in counterpoint to Jarvis’s chirp. “Is that really such a good idea?”

Kit shrugged slightly to herself, as much as the bulky neurohelmet on her shoulders would allow. “He seems pretty confident about it.”

Finally, “Lefty” Maier, as usual silent until the moment he felt the need to make a cryptic interjection others rarely understood: “Let not him that girdeth on his armor boast himself as he that putteth it off,” the Enforcer pilot intoned.

“Lefty,” said Jarvis, with audible exasperation, “What does that mean?”

Kit sighed. “Not our job to second-guess our employers, or nobles.” She slumped in the Vindicator’s cockpit and watched as the figure of the Marquis strode towards the village.

[Middcore]

That's right, I'm back with the same shit but different! A few notes:

-This is a continuation of the story of the main protagonist from most of my previous fanfics (links in signature if you haven't read them), though it's not necessary to be familiar with what happened in those to follow this story.

-I wanted to stretch myself a bit by trying some things in terms of multiple POV and somewhat more intricate plotting compared to my previous fanfics. You can be the judge in the end how successful the experiment was.

-This project is mostly complete, with a few final chapters yet to be written but I have a clear vision of the conclusion (finally). I decided to start posting it as motivation to force myself to actually get it done.

-My goal is to post at least one and hopefully two installments per week.

-The total length here will be over 40,000 words, which pushes it over the upper limit of novella and into actual novel territory according to some classifications, not that it matters what it's called. Just so you know what you're in for.

I hope people enjoy it, and if do are please drop a comment to let me know, it really does mean a lot.
 

[Sir Chaos]

-This is a continuation of the story of the main protagonist from most of my previous fanfics (links in signature if you haven't read them), though it's not necessary to be familiar with what happened in those to follow this story.

Oooh... now I realize why Kit felt familiar. I look forward to seeing how things go for her.

[Daryk]

So far so good!  :thumbsup:

[Lazarus Sinn]

i have not read your other works, but I do like this one so far.

[Intermittent_Coherence]

That's right, I'm back with the same shit but different! A few notes:

-This is a continuation of the story of the main protagonist from most of my previous fanfics (links in signature if you haven't read them), though it's not necessary to be familiar with what happened in those to follow this story.

-I wanted to stretch myself a bit by trying some things in terms of multiple POV and somewhat more intricate plotting compared to my previous fanfics. You can be the judge in the end how successful the experiment was.

-This project is mostly complete, with a few final chapters yet to be written but I have a clear vision of the conclusion (finally). I decided to start posting it as motivation to force myself to actually get it done.

-My goal is to post at least one and hopefully two installments per week.

-The total length here will be over 40,000 words, which pushes it over the upper limit of novella and into actual novel territory according to some classifications, not that it matters what it's called. Just so you know what you're in for.

I hope people enjoy it, and if do are please drop a comment to let me know, it really does mean a lot.

The unit has grown. It used to be just a lance + a Harrasser, now it's more a short company. Did they hire a couple owner-operators? I assume they picked up some decent light armor somewhere(APCs?), maybe even Atzenbrugg where we last saw them. Harrasser isn't exactly what I'd consider armored.

[Dave Talley]

Tag!

[mikecj]

TAG'd.

[Middcore]

Chapter 2: Shindig

“You’re enjoying that, aren’t you?” Kit shot a sideways glare at her XO.

Cedric Smythe grinned back at her but gave no response at first, instead seeming to pause and listen to the sound of his spurs on the polished floor of the hallway that had a ceiling twice Kit’s height. Since the Kats had no dress uniform, Smythe had outfitted himself for the occasion in his old AFFS dress greens, with the elaborate Davion sunburst layer that usually covered almost half the wearer’s torso removed but the Deneb Light Cavalry insignia still in place… and with the decorative spurs favored by Federated Suns MechWarriors still on the boots. Kit was sure he was going out of his way to exaggerate the scraping and clanking on the marble and exotic wood paneling of the Marquis’s mansion, and it was doing nothing to improve her mood.

“Hey kid,” Smythe responded. Kit was relieved that Smythe hadn’t felt the need to start calling her “Captain” all the time, at least in private. “I’m just…”

Kit rolled her eyes. “Just a hick from the outback, right.” If she had a C-bill for every time she had heard Smythe describe himself this way, she was sure she would have enough to buy a new BattleMech.

Smythe grinned wider and nodded. “Right. So you’re prob’ly thinkin’ I should be… overawed by all these swank surroundings, right? Ooh’in’ and ahh’in’? No, don’t deny it. But the fact is my upbringin’ is the reason I’m not impressed. Every Baron or Count in the Outback builds himself a place like this, and the more dirt-poor the landhold, the shinier the shack.” Smythe cracked his knuckles behind his shaved head. “So no point gettin’ a rod up your ass about it, chances are there’ll be enough folks here with that affliction.”

Kit scowled. “Laugh it up, Smitty. You don’t have to be the face of the unit.”

Smythe shrugged. “Better your face than mine, anyway.”

There was a gilded-frame mirror the size of a small hovercar on the wall, and Kit stopped to examine her reflection. Unlike Smythe, she had never served in a Great House military, and so she didn’t even have an old uniform to fall back on. When she had received the invitation to attend this reception celebrating the completion of the dam across the Sablier, she had experienced a moment of panic. She and Ellie Jarvis had made a shopping trip in the capital to find her clothes for the occasion. They had settled on what Jarvis called a “military-inspired” look consisting of a smoke-gray buttoned blouse and trousers, midnight blue bolero-style jacket with faux-epaulet tabs at the shoulders, and, to Kit’s dismay, knee-high boots with a two-inch heel that Ellie had talked her into on the basis that adding height to her slight frame would “give her more confidence.” Kit didn’t think tripping and doing a face-plant in front of the assembled dignitaries would be good for her confidence. The subdued hues of the ensemble meant that the only color which stood out was from the red in her hair. It was not an outfit designed to attract attention, and Kit was fine with that. Although we should probably at least get some unit patches made, she thought to herself as she smoothed the outfit for the hundredth time.

“You look good, kid,” said Smythe, with a quiet earnestness she heard from him only rarely.

Kit sighed. “Ellie picked basically everything.”

“What’s wrong with that? Siren’s about as fashionable as they come, for a ‘Mech jock.” In fact, being a mercenary MechWarrior sometimes seemed like it was only a stepping stone for Ellie Jarvis in her plans for a more glamorous career as a tri-vid star or something.

“Yeah, but Ellie’s hair has been three different colors since we got here, and none of them occur in nature.” Smythe laughed and Kit turned back to him with a grimace. “I guess I can’t delay it any longer, can I?”

They continued their walk down the hallway and a new, terrifying thought made her curse out loud. Smythe shot her a questioning look. “Jesus, Smitty,” she said, “You don’t think they’re going to… announce us, do you?”

***

To Kit’s relief, there was not, in reality, a butler announcing each illustrious guest who entered the mansion’s grand ballroom. In fact, hardly anyone seemed to pay any attention to her at all.

She managed one conversation with an executive from one of the planet’s leading import/export guilds which lasted all of two minutes before succumbing to the total boredom of both parties. When that two minutes was up she turned to discover that she had lost track of Smythe, damn him. She eyed the gathering from the edge of the room. The men mainly wore suits, some with tails and waistcoats. The women were mostly wearing gowns in a riot of shimmering colors which to Kit, no judge of fashion, all seemed to somehow blend together even though they would fail as camouflage among the flora of any world Kit had ever visited. She couldn’t see Smythe anywhere, although she occasionally thought she could hear the clank of his spurs on the marble, over the din of stuffy conversations and fake laughter and the music played by a string quartet that would finish one tune and then play another which seemed to her to sound exactly the same.

She found herself wondering, just like she had the last time she answered a summons from the Marquis, why exactly she was even there. On the positive side, there truly didn’t seem to be any possible way she would end up shooting anyone this time. On the other hand, she figured that there was a much greater chance she would end up wishing someone would shoot her instead.

She finished a glass of too-sweet champagne and had just plucked a second off a tray carried by a passing waiter when a voice from just outside her peripheral vision startled her.

“You must be Captain Söderlund.”

Kit whirled, feeling exposed and vulnerable at her lost anonymity as if a surprise attack had stripped off a couple tons of armor plate. The woman who had spoken to her had mahogany skin and richly textured hair. She looked about Kit’s age, and was approximately Kit’s height but with a frame that was all honed, lean muscle. She wore immaculately pressed white and purple that Kit recognized as the Free Worlds League Military dress uniform, although without any visible unit insignia. The Calseraigne Garde Planétaire wore dark blue uniform jackets with white trousers.

“How did you know?” Kit managed.

The other woman smiled wryly. “Apart from me, you’re the only woman here not wearing a gown or jewelry.” She extended her hand. “Lieutenant Naila Benichou.”

“I didn’t know there were any regular FWLM personnel on the planet,” Kit said, shaking Benichou’s hand tentatively.

“I apologize that we haven’t had a chance to meet sooner,” Benichou responded. “I’ve been posted to Calseraigne as a special military advisor to the planetary government. The Marquis has been pushing the Deputies to strengthen the planet’s defenses, as I’m sure you know.” Kit nodded even though she didn’t know any such thing. “To be quite honest with you though, I spend more of my time in a sim pod trying to stay sharp than anything else.”

Kit suddenly felt as engaged as she had all evening. “Sim pods?”

Benichou nodded. “I think that’s half the reason I ended up here, actually. The government ordered two, with the idea they would screen potential MechWarrior candidates from the Gee Pee… sorry, the Garde Planétaire… to explore whether it would be advisable to actually try to procure some ‘Mechs. A symbolic political move more than anything. They’re not academy-grade pods, but good enough you don’t feel like you’re in an arcade.”

Kit thought about the state of the simulators at the only academy she had ever been to, about the arcades on Galatea she had frequented as a teenager, and took a drink of her champagne in an effort to conceal her flush of embarrassment. “I guess I should visit sometime,” she said.

“You should!” Benichou replied brightly. “What do you pilot? To be quite honest with you, when I heard your unit had arrived on-planet I tried to get a dossier on you - thought it was part of my job, if you understand - but…” Benichou paused awkwardly. “...the information the Liaison Bureau had from the MRB was pretty sparse.”

For a moment Kit wondered if Benichou was trying to insult her by rubbing her face in what a two-bit, no-rep outfit the Kats were, but dismissed that as her own insecurity talking. No surprise the Mercenary Review Board’s dossier on the Kats was slim. If Benichou had searched for info on Kit herself, however, she probably would have found old press reports from Galatea, during the brief period when she was one of the most popular curiosities of the Mercenary’s Star. Kit hoped she hadn’t.

“I pilot a Vindicator,” Kit said in answer to Benichou’s question, trying not to wince. She knew that her ‘Mech, workhorse of House Liao, was not highly regarded by many MechWarriors outside Capellan space, especially by those from Liao’s traditional enemies in the League or Federated Suns.

“Tough old hunks of junk!” Benichou said, but with genuine enthusiasm rather than sarcasm. “Not to be underestimated.”

“You’ve fought one a time or two then?” Kit asked.

Now it was Benichou’s turn to wince. “Not personally. Only what I was told, by my aunt. Her words, that hunk of junk thing, I hope you weren’t offended.”

Kit shook her head. “Wasn’t like I exactly picked it, anyway,” she said. Fell ass-backwards into the cockpit would be closer to the truth. “A ‘Mech is a ‘Mech.”

Benichou nodded once more, glanced around the room, and smoothed her uniform. “To tell the truth, I haven’t fought any Vindicators or anything else, either, “ she said with barely-suppressed bitterness. Kit didn’t know what she was supposed to do with this information, but Benichou saved her from having to think of a response. “What about you? Seen any action?”

When Kit met the Lieutenant’s gaze again there was an anxiousness in her eyes that hadn’t been there before. In her mind’s eye Kit saw a tank crewman putting a gun to his own head as he burned; a Marauder heavy ‘Mech stalking down a city street like a prehistoric reptilian apex predator; other memories she avoided conjuring up except when her nightmares gave her no choice. She blinked and took another sip of her champagne. “A little,” she managed. “Nothing to brag about.” A truthful answer, but she had no idea if it was the type of answer Benichou was looking for. She needed to change the subject. “And what’s your ride?” Kit felt quite comfortable talking about BattleMechs, if not about actually fighting in them.

“My family machine is a Wolverine,” Benichou said with a smile of pride that quickly faded. “However, I… wasn’t able to bring it with me when I was assigned here.” Kit tried not to wince; all MechWarriors dreaded finding themselves “Dispossessed” - left without a BattleMech pilot and therefore stripped of purpose and status. She mentally berated herself for managing to find a way to hit a sore point with the only person who had been friendly with her all evening.

Benichou fixed Kit with her intense gaze again. “Captain, let me ask you your professional opinion. The Marquis and the Deputies have been at odds over strengthening the GP. The Marquis hired your unit personally to enhance the planetary defenses.” Is that what he hired us for? Kit wondered to herself. “But aside from the political tensions, the biggest threat to peace here seems to be the holdouts in the southern sea zone, which isn’t saying much,” Benichou went on. “What do you think the chances are of any actual fighting happening here?”

Blake’s blood, Kit thought, It’s like she actually looks up to me! A House military officer, looking up to her. Kit was suddenly struck by what a strange line of work she had chosen where having killed people not only elicited respect from those who had not, but counted for more than anything else.

“For whatever my professional opinion is worth, I’d say the odds are pretty damn low,” she said. “Especially after the Marquis’s stunt at that village now that everyone thinks he walks on water… or could if there was any water still out there to walk on…” But Benichou was looking over Kit’s shoulder, no longer listening to her.

Kit spun on her heels again and froze. The new arrival was slender, not tall, and looked to be about thirty standard years old, give or take. His suit was the more showy tailcoat style she had seen some of the other male guests at the reception wearing, shining steel blue under the lights of the ballroom, with a pale purple waistcoat underneath. Unlike most of the other guests he wore no necktie or cravat. Kit had never seen the face before in person, but it was familiar enough from the news tri-vids. Marquis Guillaume Everett was undeniably handsome, with skin a shade lighter than Lieutenant Benichou’s, and an immaculately groomed mustache and beard that just outlined his jaw. Kit had a moment of panic as she wondered how much he had heard, although the sunny smile on his face showed no hint of offense.

“My lord,” said Lieutenant Benichou, with a slight but prolonged tilt of her head. Kit mimicked the Marik officer’s movement.

“Do you know,” the Marquis began, his voice a clear, lighthearted tenor, “That you two are the only ladies here tonight who have not yet imposed upon my time for social pleasantries?”

“My lord,” Benichou said, “Allow me to present Captain Söderlund of the Black Kats mercenary company.”

“Of course,” the Marquis said. He turned his dazzling smile on her and offered a handshake which Kit once again accepted tentatively.

“The Captain and I were just ‘talking shop,’ as the saying goes,” Benichou explained. Kit took the opportunity to study Benichou as the Marquis turned his attention back to the Lieutenant. Unlike herself, Benichou didn’t seem the slightest bit uncomfortable in the presence of the planet’s noble ruler, but there was something about her that was different from the almost startlingly forthright young woman Kit had been talking to a few moments before. Her demeanor was more reserved, or deferential. 

“Ah,” the Marquis said, spreading his arms and nodding knowingly. “Now I understand what was more interesting than me.” The cheer suddenly vanished from his face and he looked at Benichou sternly. “But if you’ll forgive me for interrupting, Lieutenant, I am afraid I must take you to task for deceiving me.”

Benichou’s brow furrowed in confusion. “Deceiving you, my lord?”

The Marquis looked at Kit again and the bright smile reappeared. “Lieutenant Benichou accepted my invitation to do a little fencing, as there’s scarcely anyone else on the planet who knows how. She neglected to mention to me that she was the bronze medallist in saber at the academy-wide tournament at Princefield her final year.” Princefield, Kit recalled, was one of the Free Worlds League’s most prestigious military academies, attended by the scions of many noble and wealthy families. Kit began to see where Naila Benichou had developed her easy rapport with the upper crust. Perhaps she was even some sort of minor nobility herself.

Benichou laughed. “Well, I wouldn’t have told you I was bronze medallist, my lord, because there were no medals. I had to settle for the title of ‘second runner-up,’ which of course itself is just a nicer way of saying ‘second loser.’”

The Marquis rolled his eyes at Benichou’s modesty. “Well, second runner-up at Princefield was more than enough to leave me feeling quite embarrassed,” he said to Kit as if relating an amusing secret. Kit couldn’t imagine the Marquis, born to privilege, blessed with good looks, and apparently full of serene self-confidence, ever feeling embarrassed by anything.

Benichou grimaced sympathetically. “I certainly enjoyed the chance to get back on the piste in any case.” She glanced across the ballroom. “If you will please excuse me, my lord, Captain, I believe duty compels me to go observe social pleasantries with Deputy Gamelin.”

“You should get a medal,” the Marquis said with a laugh. “Man’s a terrible blowhard, you know,” he observed to Kit with the same conspiratorial tone as before. With another brief bow for the Marquis and a nod for Kit, Benichou walked away.

Which left Kit all alone with the chatty nobleman. And his brilliant smile. How much had he heard of what she was saying to Benichou when he walked up?

Maybe it was better to just bite the bullet. “My lord,” she began, “I think I may owe you an apology. I-...”

“No, Captain, it’s I who owe you one! Your unit has been here in my employ for weeks now and it’s unconscionable I’ve never taken the time to meet you in person. And I wanted to say thank you for accompanying me on my trip to Besoble few days ago.”

Kit figured out quickly enough that Besoble must have been the name of the Rust village. She took a sip of her champagne as she tried to think of something to say. “We were just doing… what we were hired for, I suppose.”

The Marquis laughed. “Well then in that case, I apologize once again for subjecting you to a boring afternoon.”

“In our line of work, boring can be good,” Kit said. There was suddenly what felt like profound silence, as if every other conversation in the room had reached a lull point at the exact same moment. In her head, Kit screamed.

“Is your BattleMaster a family machine?” Idiot. He thinks you’re an idiot, she mentally berated herself, wondering at the same time why she cared if he did. Were BattleMechs really the only subject she could come up with to talk about?

The Marquis nodded, surely amused by her small-mindedness but too polite to show it. “It’s been in my family since this world’s liberation from House Liao.”

“You wouldn’t get most MechWarriors out the cockpit of a machine like that so easily.”

Everett chuckled. “Well, I make no claim to be a MechWarrior. Some would say dilettante is a more accurate description of my profession, but I would say I aspire to someday be worthy of being thought of as a statesman.” 

“Still,” Kit said, “What you did… well, it took guts.”

The Marquis shrugged modestly. “Have you run into Lombard?” He nodded across the room at a grizzled looking older man in a rumpled suit who stood near the entrance talking to nobody. “He’s the head of my family’s guard, can’t stand events like this, would rather be creeping around the estate looking for Liao spies… he was furious at me about the whole thing. He served with my father, and sometimes I think he still sees me as a child.”

Kit was seized by a sudden curiosity. “But what exactly happened when you walked into that village?” Since the Marquis had climbed out of his ‘Mech and walked into Besoble, the ugly situation in the village appeared to have been completely defused. The protesters had started to trickle out into other villages or the refugee camps they had come from, and most of the elderly holdout residents had agreed to be relocated.

Everett shrugged modestly. “I talked to them,” he said, as though that explained everything.

“You talked to them,” Kit said flatly.

“Yes. I told them, more or less, that I was sorry. That I couldn’t take full responsibility for the situation they were in, but that I was sorry that my predecessors and the planetary government had ignored them while their plight got worse and that what’s happening now is from a sincere effort to make things better.” He paused thoughtfully. “In the end, though, I think perhaps what I said was less important than the fact that I came to them alone, unarmed, unprotected, and spoke to them as people.”

“But did you, really?” The words were out of Kit’s mouth before she realized she was saying them. Was it the champagne or the man’s undeniably disarming presence that made her suddenly feel bold? “You may have gotten out of your ‘Mech to talk to them, but everyone there could see you walk up in it, and my whole lance with you, and then our ‘Mechs standing there, in weapon range, waiting. Couldn’t that be seen as an implied threat? Even…” What am I saying? “Even as a show of contempt, in the mind of a person who was already angry? Showing you had the power over those people and chose not to use it? Er, my lord.”

The Marquis stared into her eyes for a long moment. She felt her cheeks flush hot. Then he smiled, and at first she thought he was going to laugh again, but he didn’t. Instead he nodded slowly. “Captain, you make a fair point. In the end I can only say I was forced to strike a balance between mollifying the people and mollifying Lombard.” And there was the laugh again after all, and she damned him for finding everything so amusing even as she found she was laughing along with him.

The Marquis glanced away and Kit thought she saw a flicker of irritation in his eyes, the irritation she had expected to see in response to her challenge a moment before, but in an instant it was gone and his serene good humor had returned. Kit turned to follow his gaze and saw the man he had spoken to. In contrast to the finery of most of the reception’s attendees, his drab suit gave the impression of a man who had picked his wardrobe only to stay within the bounds of propriety without actually caring how he looked, or perhaps had simply put on the only suit he owned. He was no more than thirty-five, small-ish, with hair so blonde it was almost white, or perhaps had simply turned white extremely early. Kit’s first impression of him was that he was perhaps some accountant coming to wring his hands about how much this reception was costing the Marquis. As he came closer, however, she saw the intensity in the man’s eyes and realized she was wrong. If she had been forced to guess at the newcomer’s profession, she might have said artist, although she had never met any artists.

The man trudged unhappily toward them and looked as if he was opening his mouth to speak when the Marquis cut him off. “Ah, Deputy Gamelin!” the Marquis called cheerfully.

“My lord,” the man said sourly, with a stiff bow.

“Captain,” the Marquis said in his conspiratorial tone, but loud enough for the man to hear, “This is Émile Gamelin, of Calseraigne’s governing Assembly of Deputies…  perhaps the only other person on the planet who is willing to speak to me as honestly as you did a moment ago! Monsieur Gamelin, allow me to introduce Captain Katryna Söderlund of the Black Kats.”

Kit extended her hand to the man, but he only looked at it with seeming distaste, so she awkwardly let her arm fall back to her side. “I know who she is, my lord,” Gamelin snapped. “I was able to deduce she could only be your hireling from the…” He looked Kit up and down. “...Unprofessional and inappropriate military chic pretensions of her attire.”

Another flash of irritation showed on the Marquis’s face, gone as quickly as it came. “Deputy, please,” he said, sounding almost as if he was talking to a child. “Our differences are no cause for being rude to the Captain. She is here, in every sense, at my invitation.”

The look Gamelin gave her was withering, but his voice was what chilled her. She had only heard such contempt directed at her from one man before, and that man had tried to take her life. “You will forgive me, Captain,” Gamelin seethed, “If I do not care to shake hands and exchange pleasantries with a herald of war recently arrived on my beloved homeworld.”

[Sir Chaos]

Gamelin seems... nice. "Nice", as in "would be nice if something embarassing happened to him".

[Daryk]

He's totally in it to win... the current lord has "stooped" to hire mercs...  ::)

[Lazarus Sinn]

tagged

[DOC_Agren]

1 ping only
interesting so far

[Middcore]

Chapter 3: Something to Prove

Kit couldn’t have said exactly why she wanted to beat Naila Benichou so much. She just knew that she did.

It wasn’t that she disliked the young Marik officer. Kit’s brief conversation with her during the reception had probably been the most enjoyable part of the entire event, although that was setting the bar low. The woman’s friendliness seemed genuine, and she was remarkably free from the stuffiness that Kit might have expected from a graduate of one of the Inner Sphere’s most exclusive military academies. Something about the way her demeanor had changed with the Marquis annoyed Kit, but maybe that was just the way you were supposed to treat nobility; if Benichou had spent years around the scions of titled families at Princefield, she would certainly know how to conduct herself.

When Benichou had invited Kit to visit the planetary militia base to get in some time in the Planetary Guard’s simulator pods, she had been happy to accept. When Benichou had suggested a “friendly” one-on-one simulated battle, Kit had casually agreed. It wasn’t until Kit had climbed into the pod and the exercise had begun that she realized how much she wanted to win. Enough to cheat, at least a little.

Kit had picked a simulated urban environment as their virtual battlefield. Much of her limited real-life combat experience had come in urban terrain, and she hoped it would negate the maneuvering advantage Benichou would probably have in an open field. Of course, the Ares Conventions, instituted over six centuries before in an effort to minimize civilian casualties in conflicts between the various powers of the Inner Sphere, expressly forbade combat in cities… unless a military target was located within one, in which case all possible efforts were supposed to be made to minimize “collateral damage.” Every BattleMech simulator Kit had ever used, however, included urban battlefields as an option, which perhaps showed just how much weight this provision of the Conventions now carried. Ironically, it had been the Star League, now seen by many as the peak of human civilization preceding centuries of the chaotic and destructive Succession Wars, that had first formally discarded the Ares Conventions when campaigning to regain control over independence-minded states in the Periphery. Now the Conventions were treated as guidelines at best. Perhaps so as not to disturb the consciences of MechWarrior trainees, the generic cityscape created by the simulator showed no signs of human habitation, although all of the buildings started the scenario in pristine condition, which created a somewhat eerie, ghost town-like atmosphere.

But it wasn’t just that Kit was familiar with combat in urban environments generally. She was intimately familiar with this particular one. Although it wasn’t based on a real city on a real world anywhere, at least as far as Kit knew, she knew the layout of its streets like it was her own hometown. The simulator pods were running the exact same software as ones she had rented time in whenever she could afford it on Galatea years before as a kid and then as an apprentice ‘Mech tech. She had recognized it immediately. Benichou might sniff at the pods for not being academy-grade, but they had been a big step up from the arcades, and now they were going to give her a home field advantage against the Marik MechWarrior.

It wasn’t that she felt she had to prove herself by beating Benichou, not exactly. Although the Marik officer didn’t look down her nose at Kit, most objective observers would have bet on Benichou in a fight between the two of them. A Princefield graduate against a former tech trained by a washed-out Kurita sho ko should have been no fight at all. Most people would say that if Kit managed to hold her own, it would be a moral victory.

No, what made it worse, Kit decided, was that Benichou didn’t seem to consider herself superior - if anything she looked at Kit with respect because of the difference in real combat experience between them. And that put Kit under more pressure, the pressure of feeling she had to put in a good enough performance to live up to the other MechWarrior’s expectations.

It had become clear immediately that, as Kit had expected, the two of them were taking fundamentally different tactical approaches to the fight.. She had caught only brief glimpses of Benichou, enough to tell that the FWLM officer had selected a Javelin - a highly mobile machine armed with batteries of short-range missiles, renowned as an effective hit-and-run fighter. Benichou was always in motion, trying to tear around the simulated cityscape too rapidly and unpredictably for Kit to effectively stalk her. The Panther Kit had selected for the mock battle was in many respects a similar machine to her Vindicator, although ten tons lighter at thirty-five tons. It had a very slow ground speed for a light ‘Mech, but was noted for its ability to move nimbly on its jump jets. Its main weapon was an Alshain Weapons “Lord’s Light” PPC, giving it much greater hitting power than most ‘Mechs of its weight. The Panther also had a reputation as a dangerous urban fighter, Davion MechWarriors nicknaming it the “alley cat” for its hard-hitting ambushes.

Exactly the type she had lured Benichou into.

Using her remembered knowledge of the simulated cityscape, Kit had used her seismic sensors to track Benichou’s frenetic movement and stay one step ahead of her despite her machine’s lower speed. Kit had snuggled her ‘Mech up close to a simulated office building at a three-way intersection, with a third story skywalk that connected it to what looked like a parking garage and a walled courtyard in between. She had dropped the Panther into a crouch so the courtyard wall concealed the ‘Mech up to its waist, and in the gap between the wall and skywalk she could see down the street, where Benichou’s Javelin was walking into her sights, just as Kit had known she would. 

Kit floated the targeting reticle on her HUD around and over the Javelin, intentionally preventing herself from getting a target lock so that Benichou wouldn’t get a warning tone in her cockpit. The Panther’s PPC was capable of destroying or crippling many light ‘Mechs with a single good shot, but it had a narrow optimum range band where a target was close enough for high accuracy but not so close that the feedback from the stream of charged particles could damage Kit’s own ‘Mech. Benichou still showed no sign of noticing the Panther waiting in ambush in the shadow of the office building; she probably had her head down watching her own seismic scanner on a secondary cockpit display. Only a couple more steps…

Now. Kit settled her crosshairs center-mass on the Javelin, waited two agonizing seconds before the reticle turned gold to indicate a solid targeting lock, and squeezed the trigger for the PPC on her right joystick.

Before she had even flexed her finger on the trigger, however, the Javelin had lurched to a halt and twisted violently at the waist, as though something had suddenly caught its attention in one of the high-rise towers lining the street. The result was that instead of striking home right in the middle of the Javelin’s boxy chest, Kit’s PPC shot hit just above the machine’s left elbow. The limb snapped off and embedded itself in the front of a simulated department store, but the Javelin’s torso was no more than scorched by the spent energies of the charged particles.

“Arienai…!” Kit breathed.

Benichou’s reaction time was unbelievable. You couldn’t teach something like that, even at Princefield, or at least Kit didn’t see how. The Javelin twisted its torso back into line and let loose with a flurry of SRM’s from the launchers built into its chest, although only a couple of them made it through the gap to pock-mark the Panther’s armor while the rest collapsed the skywalk in front of Kit’s ‘Mech and battered the office building. As Kit recovered from her surprise, an icon on her HUD indicated her PPC was ready for another shot, but the Javelin danced nimbly backwards around an intersection out of view before she could re-establish a lock.

There was no doubt Kit had gotten the better of the exchange in terms of raw damage dealt, but the Javelin, unlike many ‘Mechs which carried their main weapons in their arms, wouldn’t be significantly diminished in fighting ability by the loss of the limb. After being certain Benichou had made the fatal mistake she had been waiting for only a few moments earlier, Kit had accomplished precious little. At the very least, she had rattled Benichou, because the Leaguer MechWarrior had made a hasty retreat instead of trying to rush Kit’s position and bring her superior close-range firepower to bear. But chasing after the faster Javelin would be playing the game Benichou’s way, and it wasn’t going to work to just try to trap the Marik officer in a blind alley or something; Benichou would be more wary after the first ambush, and her uncanny reflexes could equalize any fight where Kit didn’t put her down with the first shot.

That was when Kit had realized defeating Benichou was going to take tactics that all her academy training would never teach her to expect. Because they weren’t, strictly speaking, possible. At least not in the real world.

Now Kit was once again patiently waiting for her opponent to appear, but this time from an elevated vantage point like the Panther’s namesake lurking in the treetops. It had taken precise use of the ‘Mech’s jump jets to reach this position crouched atop a high-rise apartment building, and Kit had twice almost overshot her landings and plunged back down to the street. Kit knew that her opponent couldn’t fail to hear the sound of the Panther’s superheated plasma exhaust echoing through the metal and glass canyons, and would be trying to locate the landing point of Kit’s leaps with her seismic sensors… and be baffled when she couldn’t.

The Javelin’s movements as it crept down the street below Kit’s perch seemed to convey its pilot’s confusion. Kit allowed herself a grin of satisfaction as she floated her crosshair around the Javelin. She held her fire until the Javelin had just passed her highrise ambush position and she had an angle on the back of Benichou’s ‘Mech before she settled her targeting reticle and pulled the trigger.

The Javelin’s thin rear armor may as well have been non-existent for all it did to stop the beam of stream of charged particles and the ‘Mech staggered. As the crackling electrical arcs from the PPC entry wound cleared Kit could see the telltale glow of an impending ammunition explosion. The Javelin was doomed, and any sensible MechWarrior in Benichou’s position would be pulling the eject handle.

Instead, Benichou steadied the stricken Javelin, spun it on one foot to face Kit’s highrise, and sent it leaping skyward. Kit’s jaw dropped. No malfing way.

The Javelin rocketed upwards until it was level with Kit’s Panther, and Kit stared into the missile tube ports on its chest as it hung there for a moment on pillars of burning plasma. Then the ammunition bins finally cooked off.

The rather crudely simulated shockwave from the Javelin’s detonation wasn’t strong enough to do more than rock the Panther back slightly on its heels. The simulated chunk of debris that smashed against the Panther’s head, though it stood no chance of penetrating the ferroglass viewports, still triggered a very real involuntary reflex reaction in the pilot.

Kit’s flinch, transmitted to the Panther’s gyros through the neurohelmet that was supposed to allow the pilot’s own sense of balance to keep the machine upright during delicate maneuvers, was just enough to send the ‘Mech toppling backwards off the edge of the apartment tower roof.

Stupid way to “die,” Kit thought. Then the simulator pod went dark.

***

Kit climbed out of the pod, set the training neurohelmet down on the command couch, and sat on the edge of the platform that housed the pods’ tilt and rotation motors, her face flushed as much from embarrassment as from the simulated reactor heat pumped through the pod’s climate control vents.

The place the militia had chosen to locate their pair of sim pods in their base on the outskirts of the capital city spoke volumes about how seriously they took the planetary government’s initiative to explore adding BattleMechs to their forces. It looked like an old storage room, with ceilings barely tall enough to accommodate the pods. There was no observation room with tri-vid or even flatscreen feeds of the action going on inside the pods, which meant the best an instructor could do to monitor an exercise was connect a noteputer to a jack on one of the pods themselves.

Benichou emerged from her pod and Kit was relieved to see her expression was a chagrined smile that showed no anger. Wiping sweat from her palms on her shorts, she offered Kit a handshake, which Kit accepted with more enthusiasm than at their first meeting.

“You always shake someone’s hand after you kill them?” Kit asked, taking a swig from a bottle of water.

“From where I was sitting, you killed yourself,” Benichou responded. “Habit I picked up from fencing, I suppose. Now I have to know: how the hell did you get up on top of that building?”

Kit smiled sheepishly. “Honestly? I cheated. The city map in these pods is the exact same as ones I used to use on Galatea. Most of the buildings in that map will collapse like they should if you’re dumb enough to jump on top of them. But there’s a few where the programmers got sloppy and forgot, or made them destructible from the ground level but didn’t think any ‘Mech could jump high enough to get on top, so they’re not coded to fall if you do manage it by hopping from rooftop to rooftop. I was bored enough a while ago to figure out which ones, and it was pure luck that you were hunkered down in a place where I could use the glitch to my advantage.” She sighed. “Sorry, guess it doesn’t really count as training the way you’d fight.”

Benichou sat down next to Kit and shook her head as she sipped from another water bottle. “Well, in real life I would have had to punch out instead of trying that last-ditch effort to take you with me. But I don’t mind saying I was frustrated at myself, especially after you almost got me with that first ambush.”

“When did you know I was there, that first time?”

“Not until after you fired, actually. When I got the target lock warning tone, I knew you couldn’t be on my flank because there were tall buildings on either side of me, but I actually thought you had snuck into my rear arc somehow. Thought I was going to lose my right arm instead of the left.”

Kit shook her head. Benichou talked about using her ‘Mech’s limb as a shield to block a killing shot so casually, but most MechWarriors Kit had seen didn’t have the reflexes to make such a tactic even worth considering. “My professional opinion is that the Free Worlds League is wasting you as an advisor on this…” Kit had to stop herself from using a word like backwater. “...in a place like this.”

The Lieutenant winced. “Thank you, truly. If only you could convince my parents.”

“What’s the story there?”

Benichou leaned forward and rested her elbows on her knees. “I was born on Mosiro,” she said. Kit vaguely recalled that Mosiro was the capital world of an “archipelago” of three systems near the League’s Andurien province, with one of the Inner Sphere’s largest populations of adherents of the Islamic faith. “My family is one of the most prominent on the planet,” Benichou continued. “Not nobility, but wealthy. They made their fortune in optics… My great-great-grandfather helped set up the astrophysics lab at the University, and then applied what he knew about telescopic lenses to go into business. Not the type of optics in a laser or anything as exciting as that, mind you. Consumer stuff, like what’s used in tri-vid projectors. Not that I got to watch many tri-vids growing up,” she said with a laugh. “My mother considered the content in most of the popular ones appalling.”

Abruptly, Benichou stood up and began to pace the room, fists on her hips. “Anyway, those who chose military service over business have always been the black sheep in my family. My parents hated it when I would beg my aunt to tell me war stories when she came back on leave. When they saw I wasn’t going to grow out of it, they bought my way into Princefield.” Benichou spun to face Kit, raising her hands defensively. “It’s not as bad as it sounds. Nobody gets in there without money or a title, no matter how good you are. It’s just… how things are.” Kit nodded. She wouldn’t think of judging the other woman for her family connections; however she had gotten into the prestigious academy, she clearly had the skill to back it up.

“Anyway,” Benichou went on, “I proved I deserved to be there, as much as anyone did. But when I graduated, I found out that my parents had pulled strings to keep me from getting posted to a line unit. They’ve made their peace with me having a brief military career because they’ve decided it will be a resume-enhancer, sort of like the way they use my aunt’s Wolverine as a gate guardian at one of their facility complexes for marketing. They just want me to live long enough to get bored, admit they were right, and go join the family business.” She shrugged, and her toned shoulders slumped. “As best as I can tell, I ended up here because when the Assembly of Deputies put out a request for a consultant from the FWLM, some desk brass thought he would be doing the Marquis a favor. Princefield’s way of looking out for its own.”

Kit blinked. “I don’t follow.”

“The Marquis’s father was a Princefield grad,” Benichou explained. “Georges Everett was… a bona fide hero, actually. He was inducted into the Order of the Saber.” The young officer said this as though she expected it was common knowledge, although it took Kit a moment to remember that the Order was a decoration the Free Worlds League awarded for valor and not some sort of elite fencers’ club. “He actually gave a lecture to my class once on the meaning of duty that… ” Benichou trailed off and flashed another rueful smile. “But you don’t want to hear about that.” Kit didn’t know whether she should feel insulted. “So, anyway, here I am,” Benichou finished. She sat back down next to Kit.

“So if you’re supposed to be an advisor to the planetary government, what kind of advice have you been giving them?” Kit asked.

Benichou sighed. “Nothing they want to hear, or, I suspect, that they don’t already know. Calseraigne has to be among the most weakly-defended planets along the whole Liao border. Their point of view is that since the Confederation hasn’t tried to take the system back in a hundred years, why should Max Liao suddenly take an interest? Especially since they’re supposed to be our friends now.” Benichou’s short, derisive laugh said all there was to say about her views on the Concord of Kapetyn, a shaky pact between the Successor Lords of Houses Marik, Liao, and Kurita to counterbalance the impending Steiner-Davion alliance that had completely thrown off the Inner Sphere’s balance of power.

“But the Marquis feels differently. Obviously.”

“The Marquis isn’t a soldier, but his father fought the Confederation, and I suspect instilled him with a healthy distrust of Capellan friendship. It’s barely been more than ten years since the Confederation backed Anton Marik’s revolt!” Benichou said with intensity. “And there’s an argument to be made that Calseraigne has only been peaceful for so long because there was nothing here worth fighting over.”

“But if the natural resources project out in the old southern seabed is successful, that could change.”

Benichou nodded. “Right. That’s part of why the Marquis had to fight so hard to get the Deputies approval for it.”

Kit quirked an eyebrow. “Why did he need their approval? I thought hereditary rulers could just… rule.”

The Lieutenant made a face. “The political situation on Calseraigne is… a bit more complicated than that.” Kit groaned inwardly and wondered if there was any place in Marik space where politics weren’t complicated. The Free Worlds League was notorious for its internal disputes. “The people of Calseraigne have always placed a high value on democratic ideals, and the Marquis’s predecessors have always been very hands-off,” Benichou explained. “It’s better for everyone if the Marquis and the Assembly are in accord. The Marquis has pushed the Assembly to allocate funds for strengthening the Garde. But some of the Deputies seem to think… that being prepared for a fight makes it a self-fulfilling prophecy, as if the Capellans will be drawn like moths to a flame.”

“That explains the charming member of the Assembly I met after I talked to you at the Marquis’s reception,” Kit said. “He called me… what was it? ‘A herald of war.’”

“Gamelin? He’s a firebrand. Leader of the faction in the Assembly most stridently opposed to the Marquis getting more involved in the planet’s affairs, more out of pure principle than anything else.” Benichou sighed again. “So, anyway, here I am,” she repeated. “There are four or five young militiamen who I run through exercises in the pods here, once a week or so when they can find time. Most of the Pee Gees aren’t even full-time, you know - they have other jobs. But it’s basically paid recreation to them. I don’t think any of them seriously believe the Garde will ever get any ‘Mechs for them to pilot. “ Her shoulders slumped. “That’s how useful I’ve managed to make myself.”

Kit found she had no idea what to say. Did Benichou expect her to pour out her life story as well, since they were getting so well acquainted? “Well, Lieutenant,” she said, “I appreciate the history and civics lesson, it should dramatically lower my chances of making a fool out of myself if anyone else actually talks to me at the next reception I have to suffer through.”

The Marik officer smiled. “Please, call me Naila. You may as well after I poured out my soul like that earlier,” she said with a chagrined smile.

“Well in that case, call me Kit. No need for ‘Katryna’ unless you’re presenting me to someone again.”

Naila tapped her water bottle against Kit’s in a toast. “Agreed,” she said with a grin. “But just because we’re on a first-name basis now, don’t think I’ll forget next time we do this that you’re a dirty cheat.” She glanced over at the gleaming simulator pods. “It’s not the same, is it?”

Kit found to her surprise that she knew instantly what the other woman was talking about.

“In a simulator, I can treat this like a game, like fencing,” Naila reflected. “But when it’s actually life and death… it’s not the same at all.”

Kit met her gaze, but it was a different fire than the ambition and drive burning in Benichou’s eyes that she saw. “No,” she said quietly, after a long silence.

Benichou nodded, seemingly lost in thought.

[Daryk]

Nicely done!  :thumbsup:

[Middcore]

Hi folks. I hope to have the next chapter of this up "soon" but I went on a brief trip and came back with kidney stones as a souvenir, so I can't promise specifics.

[Daryk]

OUCH!  Sorry to hear that... I wish you a speedy recovery!

[Middcore]

Chapter 4: Perspective

The simulator duel with Naila Benichou had done something to clarify for Kit just where she stood on the hierarchy of raw MechWarrior talent. Her conversation with the Marik officer afterwards had done little to clarify what might be expected of her mercenaries during their time on the planet. As far as the state of Calseraigne’s defenses went, both the Marquis’s position and the Assembly’s objections seemed reasonable on the surface. If the Marquis had any concrete, specific reason to believe something might happen that would scratch her unit’s new paint jobs, though, she owed it to her people to find out. She had made up her mind to ask for an audience with her employer when the nobleman stole a march on her.

Once again, a messenger in the livery of the Marquis’s household security forces had arrived at the Kats’ repurposed militia base, two days after Kit’s conversation with Naila, carrying a sealed invitation to come to the nobleman’s estate the next day. She had held the creamy textured paper in her hands delicately, like something that might explode, and probed the man for more detail on the reason for the request. It had been about as productive as talking to a very genteel armor plate.

The optimistic view on the Marquis’s invitation would have been that it pointed to them being of the same mind, that he wanted to make up for ignoring her during the Kats’ first several weeks on-planet by giving her a thorough explanation of his purpose for hiring the unit. To Kit, it felt more like her employer was somehow in her head. Answering the Marquis’s summons instead of suggesting a meeting herself made her feel she had somehow lost the tactical initiative, and she had to remind herself Guillaume Everett was her employer, not her enemy.

Before she could ask her employer any questions, he once again preempted her by asking a question of his own. One she certainly had not been expecting.

“Have you ever flown before, Captain?”

At first Kit had been puzzled. Of course she had flown on DropShips dozens of times, starting as a young child. The nobleman dismissed this, however - DropShips, he said, weren’t “really” flying. “Especially the spheroid types that so completely disregard aerodynamics and rely purely on brute thrust,” he declared. And of course she had flown a number of times on atmospheric passenger shuttles. The Marquis was unimpressed with this as well. “On a shuttle they do everything they can to make you so comfortable you’re practically anesthetized and forget you’re in the air at all.”

What the Marquis considered “real” flying turned out to be a tiny personal recreation aircraft which the Marquis said was called an OpenSky. It had a teardrop-shaped fuselage that looked like it was as much glass as steel, with a pair of diminutive turbine exhaust nozzles at the back on either side of a thin spar leading to a T-tail, and high-mounted straight wings. It could accommodate two people seated comfortably side by side. Kit climbed into the right-hand seat beside the Marquis, with some reluctance, and they took to the air from the small paved runway at the edge of the estate’s gardens.

Once they were airborne, Kit had to admit that it was a totally different experience from any of the “flying” she had done before. The view from the OpenSky’s bubble-like cockpit as the Marquis took her on a tour of the seacoast was spectacular. She only wished she was able to enjoy it more. There was definitely no danger of forgetting you were in the air in the tiny craft; it seemed to bump and bob with every swirling air current and gust of wind, and Kit often found herself holding on to the bottom of her seat and only half able to pay attention as Everett went over the finer points of the ambitious project to save the northern Sablier as the first stage in an economic revitalization of the whole planet. Apparently, that was his purpose in inviting her on this joyride: to explain his grand vision for his family’s fiefdom from a bird’s eye view. She only hoped at some point he might get to touching on the Kats’ place in all of it.

He had shown her where construction was underway to improve living conditions in the villages on the northern lakeshore where the waters were returning after the construction of the dam on the Gagnon. Turning south, they had passed by the estate again. From the air, its lawns and gardens, watered by pumps drawing from the recovering northern lake, were an island oasis of green in the arid expanse. Just to the west of the estate was the ad-hoc city of tents and prefab barracks structures housing people displaced from villages on the old southern lake shore, awaiting relocation to permanent homes in the north. If the estate was an emerald island in a golden ocean, then the white tents and gray structures gave the impression of boats clustered around a harbor. Now they were flying over what had once been the southern lobe of the Sablier, dotted along its edges with more-or-less abandoned villages and the rusting hulks of ancient beached fishing vessels.

“At one point, Captain,” Everett said, “Calseraigne was considered an important enough planet by the Capellan Confederation that they had a WarShip named after it… since that was back when WarShips existed, it tells you how long it’s been since Calseraigne was considered important.” The last WarShips, militarized versions of the JumpShips used for faster-than-light travel between star systems with massive armaments, had been destroyed during the Second Succession War almost two centuries before. Now, with the principles of manufacturing the Kearny-Fuchida FTL drive only barely still understood as a result of the Inner Sphere’s technological degradation, the fragile, weaponless JumpShips which remained were universally considered off-limits to military action, too precious to destroy. “There were several pitched battles fought over the system during the First Succession War, which resulted in the devastation of much of the planet’s larger, southern continent, which had much of Calseraigne’s arable land. The battle that my ancestor won to bring Calseraigne into the League wasn’t much of a fight in comparison, if I can be honest with you, Captain. One of the League military’s ‘Liberation Units’ he commanded exploited discontent among the populace to topple the Liao government towards the end of the Second Succession War, and by thenConfederation was in no shape to do anything about it.”

Evererr banked the aircraft into a turn and Kit had to force her hands to stay on the armrests of her seat. “To thank my ancestor for his service, the League in its wisdom appointed him noble ruler of Calseraigne.” He smiled at her. “You see the irony, of course. He had won over the planet’s populace talking about freedom and democracy, and then found himself presiding over the place as a feudal landhold.”

Kit didn’t have much interest in politics, but she knew enough to see that the irony of Calseraigne’s situation was more or less the irony of the entire Free Worlds League in a nutshell. The League touted itself as a bastion of freedom and democracy. It was true that the League’s Parliament probably had more actual power than any representative body in any of the other Successor States, and that individuals in League space had more personal liberty than people in the Confederation, or the Draconis Combine where she had been born. Yet the Captain-Generalcy of the League was basically a hereditary position exclusively held by members of House Marik, fundamentally no different from the way the other four Great Houses each held sway over their own vast interstellar realm.

“So what was my ancestor’s solution?” the Marquis asked. “Well, it was to run away, in essence. He who never ran away from a fight left the day-to-day business of governing the planet up to the elected Assembly and built his estate here as a retreat, and a rarely-used one at that, while he continued his military career.” He paused and looked at her quizzically. “Are you quite alright, Captain?”

He had finally noticed her white-knuckle grip on her seat. Embarrassed, she forced a smile. “Fine, my lord,” she insisted. “You were right, it really is totally different from the type of ‘flying’ most people are used to.”

“Perhaps you might like to take over for a bit,” he suggested.

She flushed with a mixture of embarrassment and irritation. She had piloted a BattleMech into combat; she was hardly going to be impressed by getting her hands on the stick of the Marquis’s little aerial sightseeing runabout, as unique a craft as it was. Does he think I’m a child? “Not necessary, my lord,” she answered. “Please, continue with what you were saying.”

The Marquis studied her. Then slowly, almost ceremoniously, took his hands off of the aircraft’s control stick and folded his lands in his lap, and gave her a serene smile.

She stared at him for a long moment. Then the aircraft suddenly lurched in an updraft. Her hand flew out and before she realized what she was doing, she had grasped the identical control stick on her side of the cockpit. She felt her cheeks flush again and breathed a curse.

Everett chuckled. “Please don’t think I’m trying to patronize you, Captain. It’s just that I think I understand where your discomfort comes from.” She glanced this way and that out of the bubble, anywhere but at him. “You’re a MechWarrior, and an officer,” he went on. “You’re used to being… in control. When you’re in an unfamiliar environment, and not the one calling the shots, you can’t just relax and enjoy the view. Circle us back north-northwest, please,” he asked. “Gently… yes, just like that. We’ll conclude our tour with a pass over the planetary capital.”

She still seethed as she listened to him, but as she found the correct amount of force on the stick for the minute corrections needed to keep the aircraft flying straight and level, she found that there was truth in what he said: her anxiety had started to drain away the instant she felt she was the one flying the aircraft, even though she barely understood the basics of doing so.

The Marquis stroked his well-groomed beard. “Where was I? Ah, yes. Most of the people who lived in this region made their living by fishing,” he said, gesturing expansively at the wasteland passing beneath them. “With so much southern land lost, the Confederation embarked upon a project to divert part of the Gagnon’s flow to create irrigation for new farmland to the north and west, near the new capital. Unfortunately this, combined with the changes to the planet’s climate already underway, had drastic consequences for the Sablier and the people who depended on it for their way of life.” The Marquis sighed. “I’m ashamed to say that my ancestors did nothing to stop the downward slide. Did nothing to address the increasing human misery, right in our own back yard, as it were. Whether out of apathy, or out of embarrassment at asserting themselves into the planet’s affairs, I don’t know. But they did nothing.” He turned to look at her, and she was startled by the passion in his eyes. Was this the real man, she wondered, concealed beneath a cultivated facade of a vain, almost foppish nobleman? “That is what I meant when I told those people I take responsibility. I will not rest on the laurels of what my ancestors did for this world over a century ago. I will make this farce of a title mean something by making life better for these people and building a future for this world.”

There was silence for a while then, aside from the whisper of the aircraft’s tiny turbine engines. Kit was surprised by the Marquis’s intensity, and Everett himself seemed almost embarrassed. In the distance, the planetary capital was clearly in view. Deloy looked tiny after the years Kit had spent in Galatea City, although she judged from her hazy childhood memories that it was roughly the same size as the capital on Outpost where she had grown up. Home meant something to some people it never would to her.

“My lord,” Kit began, “Thank you for inviting me on this flight with you. I understand that’s going on here much better with this new… literal and figurative… perspective. And I admire what you’re trying to do. Sincerely.” She hesitated, second-guessing her own words. People adding “honestly” or “sincerely” to their statements usually ended up making themselves sound less trustworthy and not more, in her view, but she also presumed the Marquis was accustomed to flattery. “But what I still don’t understand, and what I hoped to find out today, is what role we play in all of this? My unit, I mean? How is a demi-company of BattleMechs and light armored vehicles going to help you make better lives for these people and reverse centuries of neglect? Lieutenant Benichou tells me you’re been trying to convince the Assembly that Calseraigne needs stronger defenses.”

Everett opened his mouth to speak. There was a tremendous bang. The control stick jerked almost hard enough to rip itself out of her hand, and the little aircraft shuddered.

“Javlar!” she exclaimed. Everett seized the controls on his side. She scanned the instrument panel. She didn’t know the specific meaning of most of the lights now illuminated or blinking, as there was little direct analogue between the aircraft’s systems and those of a BattleMech, but she was willing to bet from the sheer number of them calling for attention that none of them meant anything good.

“What the hell was that?” Despite the mild profanity, the first Kit had ever heard him use, the Marquis’s tone seemed more confused than alarmed, as though he was reacting to a particularly puzzling faux pas committed by a guest at one of his receptions. “The engines are out,” he reported, now sounding slightly more concerned.

“Something hit us,” Kit said, her thoughts racing but still somehow sluggish to process the implications of what was happening. “Somebody’s shooting at us. A MANPAD?” Everett looked at her blankly. “A shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missile!” she explained. “We need to lose altitude fast in case they have more than one.”

“I’m not sure how much choice we have,” the Marquis said mildly. Kit suddenly noticed that the sound of the turbines had died away, leaving only the eerie howl of the wind rushing by outside the bubble. The Marquis seemed to have the glide under control, but the aircraft was going down. Slowly, but inexorably.

“Kuso!” she hissed.

“You are from Rasalhague, then?” he asked. She stared at him, bewildered by the irrelance of the question. “I thought you might be, with your Scandinavian surname,” he explained, as though there was nothing else more important to talk about. “Still, one never wants to be rude by assuming. But the trace of accent I thought I detected gets stronger when you are, ah, under stress… and then after hearing you use both Swedish and Japanese profanities, I felt it was a fairly safe guess.”

“My lord…” she began.

“Please, call me Will,” he interrupted. “My friends always have.”


The man was exasperating. “Are we friends now?” she said, clutching at the bottom of her seat in spite of herself as the powerless aircraft bobbed in the spiraling air currents. 

He smiled, a flash of his dazzling, vacant, playboy smile, the one she still couldn’t classify as a true reflection of the man or a mere facade. It occurred to her she might not get time to finally figure it out. “Well, Captain,” he said, “It seems there’s at least some chance we’re about to die, and I don’t know about you, but I would rather die among friends.”

Kit ignored that. “The runway at the spaceport… can we make it?”

“Somewhat doubtful, I think,” Everett said. “There’s also the matter of whether we still have intact landing gear…” He scanned the instrument panel and flicked switches whose function Kit didn’t know.

The aircraft lurched. Kit was thrown forward against her seat harness. The nose of the plane dropped and she found herself staring down through the bubble at the ground, coming rapidly closer.

[Brother Jim]

Oh dear, they appear to be in quite the pickle !?!?

[Daryk]

If it's truly a plaything for the rich, it will have a parachute...  ::)

[Sir Chaos]

If it's truly a plaything for the rich, it will have a parachute...  ::)

If it´s truly a plaything, it will have one parachute.

[Daryk]

Certain Cessnas have parachutes big enough for the whole plane...  ^-^

[Horsemen]

An interesting read so far.

[Elmoth]

Nicely done! Waiting for more :)

I still need to collect this unit after we convinced you to mangle proper spelling with the unit's name xD

[Middcore]

Chapter 5: Mission Briefing

The walls of the private office reserved for the Marquis in Deloy’s Hall of Government were paneled in dark wood and decorated with military mementos: unit patches, a fist-sized shard of what looked like BattleMech cockpit ferroglass, a tattered Capellan Confederation flag, a faded old-fashioned photograph of a quartet of smiling young men and women in cooling vests, one of whom, Kit realized as she paused to study the image, looked strikingly like the Marquis. They were, Kit realized, keepsakes from his father’s career. They might be of interest to Naila Benichou, with her obvious admiration for Georges Everett, the late League hero, but they told Kit nothing about the character of Guillaume Everett, her current employer. This was a soldier’s office and whatever the current Marquis de Calseraigne might be, he was not a soldier.

“Captain,” Everett was saying as he reclined in the plush leather chair behind the desk, “I hope this experience won’t put you off of flying. You were actually showing a real feel for the controls.”

The Marquis was in a strikingly good mood about the fact someone had tried to kill him less than a standard day before, especially for a civilian. Kit would have expected the man to be shaken, she would have understood him being angry. A continuation of the man’s customary almost-arrogant cheerfulness as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened was difficult for her to process.

She and the Marquis had gone on living thanks to an ingenious feature of the OpenSky that Kit would have appreciated knowing about before they had been forced to make use of it: an emergency parachute which deployed from the craft’s tail - by some stroke of fortune undamaged by the MANPAD hit - and allowed the no-longer-airworthy craft to float to the ground at a safe rate. Whether this was an option marketed specifically to aviation-enthusiast VIP’s as a hedge against assassination attempts, or was a standard feature meant for more mundane in-flight emergencies, Kit didn’t know. It was bad luck that the crippled aircraft had come down in the middle of the Gagnon outside the capital rather than actually on the ground, but a gendarmerie patrol boat had plucked her and the Marquis out of the OpenSky well before the aircraft sank.

Whatever accounted for the Marquis’s good mood, it wasn’t doing anything for Kit’s. An easy contract was now looking much less easy in view of the facts that someone was apparently trying to kill her employer, she had no clear idea who it was, and her employer himself didn’t even seem to be taking the whole thing very seriously.

“With all due respect, your grace,” said Cedric Smythe, “I’m failin’ to see the humor in all this. Somebody just tried to assassinate you, with my CO thrown into the bargain.”

The Marquis inclined his head towards the mercenary XO and spread his hands. “Forgive me, Lieutenant, if it seems like I’m being flippant about the situation. Perhaps it’s just the exhilaration of being alive. However,” he went on, “The truth is that I’ve been half-expecting something like this to happen. It’s almost a relief to see my enemies finally make their move.”

“Beggin’ your pardon, but when exactly were you plannin’ on tellin’ us about these enemies, your lordship?” Smythe’s determination to use every possible form of address for the pseudo-nobleman except the correct one was the type of thing that she ordinarily might have written off as part of the “Outback bumpkin” act he put on to amuse himself and put others off their guard, but in this case it almost seemed like a deliberate effort by Smythe to irk their employer.

“My apologies once again, Lieutenant,” the Marquis responded. “I wasn’t trying to deliberately conceal things from you, and I deeply regret that Captain Söderlund was put in danger when I was targeted.” Kit scowled. She was the type who got angry when someone tried to kill her, and being assured that she would only have been collateral damage didn’t improve her mood. “I admit I didn’t expect that they would act so boldly and so publicly. I mean, with all of the capital city for an audience.” A civilian news VTOL had arrived overhead as Kit and the Marquis were stepping on to the rescue boat, and the descent of the smoking OpenSky had been captured from a couple of different angles by cameras in the city.

“Who is ‘they’, my lord?” Kit asked. The circumstances didn’t seem appropriate for “Will” now.

“The seeds of the conflict which had its first shot fired yesterday were planted a century ago, Captain, when the League tried to make this world the personal fiefdom of my ancestor… and that advocating for change, however necessary the change may be, will always bring opposition.”

“Could you be a bit more… direct, my lord?”

Everett steepled his fingers. “As you know, Captain, I’ve taken a more active interest in Calseraigne’s affairs than most of my predecessors. This has provoked the indignation of those who are more concerned with upholding abstract principles than standards of living for this planet’s people, and who think they have achieved something by maintaining peace for a hundred years when the sad reality is that the planet is simply no longer worth fighting over.”

“Lieutenant Benichou gave me a crash course in Calseraigne’s history and politics,” Kit said.

The Marquis smiled. “Lieutenant Benichou is a credit to my father’s alma mater. A pity that her abilities are being wasted here.”

“I want to be sure that I’m entirely clear on what you’re saying here, my lord,” Kit said. “You believe that it’s the elected representatives of your own world, or someone aligned with some faction of them, that just tried to kill you?”

“If you have another theory to offer, Captain - based on your recent crash course in Calseraigne’s history and political dynamics - I’m willing to listen,” the Marquis said. “A jealous husband from my wasted youth before returning here to take up my father’s title, perhaps.”

Everett’s flippant attitude was truly incredible. “Obviously you’re in a much better position to say what’s going on than me, my lord,” she said. “I… simply find it hard to believe someone thinks they could simply assassinate the noble ruler of a world in one of the Successor States in peacetime as a solution to a political dispute and get away with it.”

“Is it peacetime, Captain?” the Marquis said, arching his eyebrows. “The general consensus seems to be that the Third Succession War did ‘end’ sometime in the past several years, but that’s only so the Great Houses could catch their breath. Nobody knows what the Davion-Steiner union will bring. The Free Worlds League and the Capellan Confederation continue to raid each other all along the border, despite the Concord of Kapetyn. There are also certainly precedents for noble families losing planetary fiefdoms without the system being conquered by a foreign power. To mention just one example: About thirty years ago on Hortense, in Davion space, the ruling Grandin family was overthrown by a popular uprising, and New Avalon recognized the new democratic government without a second thought, leaving the Grandin family to sulk in exile. I find much to admire about the Federated Suns,” the Marquis went on, nodding towards Smythe, “But they have never had democratic traditions as strong as the League’s. I am the last of my line. If something were to happen to me, I have no heir to plead for justice or claim my title. Atreus may have made my family lords of this world a century ago, but if I were out of the picture, it would be quite easy to simply look the other way and let things continue on this unimportant world more or less as they have for the last hundred years.”

Kit couldn’t deny that what Everett said made some sense. There was little to be gained for the Free Worlds League’s federal government by investing resources in investigating the assassination of a noble lord on a remote planet, and still less to be gained by appointing a new Marquis if the Everett line went extinct - especially when the Marquis’s opposition were theoretically acting in the name of the League’s democratic ideals. She still wasn’t entirely convinced, but mainly she just didn’t want to believe she had brought her unit into the middle of a messy civil conflict. “My lord,” she said, “I’m afraid I do have to return to my executive officer’s question: when were you planning on telling us about all of this?”

The Marquis considered her. “Are you wishing you had asked more questions before accepting this contract, Captain?”

With conscious effort, Kit froze her face in a neutral mask and hoped the flush in her cheeks was less visible than it felt. It was true that when the opportunity for the Black Kats to take the contract on Calseraigne had presented itself, she hadn’t been too inclined to research it beyond the sparse details available in the solicitation circulating through the HPG network, even if it had been possible to get more information about such a backwater world. The Kats had been able to string together one short-term contract after another moving spinward along the Free Worlds League’s Periphery rim, but when they had finished a stint of militia cadre duty on Lurgatan, they had found their options were to take the gig on Calseraigne or begin a long, costly journey back to Galatea. When you were at the Kats’ level of the mercenary business, you generally took work where you could find it.

She was relieved when the Marquis’s question turned out to be rhetorical. “I’m afraid this isn’t the type of dirty laundry that I can broadcast in a contract solicitation,” he went on. “It could be considered provocative, to say the least. And it’s not as if I knew something like this would happen. Of course you’ve heard the adage, ‘Hope for the best, prepare for the worst?’ I had both a best-case and a worst-case scenario in mind when I decided to seek out a mercenary unit.”

“Let’s talk about the best-case scenario, my lord,” Kit said, spreading her hands in a gesture that invited him to elaborate.

“Very well, Captain. My hope was that your unit would be able to serve the duration of your contract here as, in essence, a showpiece for domestic audiences.”

“By domestic audiences,” Kit said, “You don’t just mean things like our trip with you out to that village?”

The Marquis shook his head. “I haven’t made any headway in my efforts to convince the Deputies that we need to improve Calseraigne’s defenses. Hiring your unit is a show of good faith that I am willing to bear part of the burden myself, and of challenging them to take action, not to say shaming them into it.”

Kit took a deep breath. “And the worst case that hiring us was intended to help you prepare for?”

“I think you already more or less have an idea, Captain. I think you’ve been thinking about it this entire conversation.” Damn. It really was like the man was in her head. “Perhaps you’re imagining your BattleMech kicking down this building with the recalcitrant Deputies still inside? Well, let’s be direct.” He locked eyes with her. “If I ordered you to do such a thing, would you do it?”

“Maybe that’s a question you should have asked before hirin’ us, your honor,” Smythe said in a voice that was almost a growl.

The Marquis nodded at him. “Touché, Lieutenant. Ours is a marriage of convenience, on both sides.”

Smythe’s efforts to provoke their employer, if that was what they were, didn’t seem to be having any success, but her XO had at least given her time to consider her response to the Marquis’s question.

“My lord, all I can say is that I have to look beyond each and every order we might receive from an employer, and even beyond each contract. I have to think about the next contract, and the one after that. For a mercenary… especially at our level of the trade… building a reputation is everything. I won’t deal in hypotheticals, but I will say I will never comply with an order that would be suicidal for my unit… either literally, or reputationally.” In the corner of her eye, she saw Smythe glance at her. She couldn’t quite be sure, because she kept her gaze locked with the Marquis’s, but it seemed to her he looked pleased for the first time since the meeting had started.

The Marquis nodded thoughtfully. “A circumspect answer, Captain. Perhaps even a statesmanlike one.” He suddenly flashed his signature smile, and the abrupt change from his previous intensity was disconcerting. “You should be aware though, that however conscientious you may be, there are those on Calseraigne who assume the worst about your intentions, and about mine in bringing you here. Do you keep up with the local press, Captain?” Kit shook her head. “Just a day after you made planetfall, an anonymous editorial ran in Deloy’s leading daily all but openly insinuating that I had hired you as a personally loyal force of storm troopers to crush Calseraigne’s democratic traditions.” The Marquis chuckled as if the very scenario he had brought up moments before was absurd.

“I’ll tell my people to be on their best behavior when off-duty in the capital,” Kit said. For all the good it sounds like it will do.

“That would be prudent, Captain.” He rose from his seat, and so Kit and Smythe did the same. The interview was clearly over.“I truly believe my adversaries have done us a favor on several fronts,” Everett said. “They have made their intentions clear, and after acting so publicly and failing it’s unlikely they will take any other overt action in the immediate future. Yesterday’s events will probably make me more popular, actually. In the short to medium term, it will of course be necessary for me to take some additional security precautions, and you will be involved in those plans.” He smiled at her again. “This has been a most valuable discussion, wouldn’t you agree?”

Kit nodded and forced herself to smile back. “Indeed, my lord.” And I thought this contract was going to be easy money.

[Daryk]

Heh... there's no such thing as "easy" money...  :D

[Elmoth]

Civil conflict, the best kind.

[FWCartography]

Tagged.
Great characters, and I love stories that have a smaller scope.

[Middcore]

Chapter 6: Patriots

Naila Benichou was uncomfortable.

She stopped to inspect her reflection in the mirror by the door of the Thomas Paine Club and smoothed her uniform as she tried to account for the source of her anxiety. There was the vague feeling she had every time she entered a bar, tavern, or saloon of any type that somewhere her mother was making a face of fretful disapproval, yes. But that wasn’t it.

Maybe it was the atmosphere of the place. At Princefield, everyone knew which watering holes were “prole bars” and which ones were the exclusive domain of the blue-bloods, the cadets who had secured their entrance to the Academy through noble birth. The Thomas Paine, with its faux gaslamp lighting, had a distinctly stuffy vibe.

Naila gave her name to a maitre’d - something none of the prole bars would have ever had - and a moment later was led to a small private room with a single table. “Lieutenant,” said one of the three men already seated, rising to shake her hand, “Thank you for coming tonight.”

“Deputy Tremblay,” she said, accepting the handshake, and nodded to the two other members of Calseraigne’s elected government present. “Deputy Gamelin. Deputy Granger.”

It was Tremblay who had asked her to come to the Thomas Paine after finishing her limited duties at the Planetary Guard base this evening. He had not said who else would be there. Gamelin’s presence was not a surprise: from what little Naila had absorbed about Calseraigne’s politics during her time on the world, the two were firm allies in the Assembly, although Tremblay was inclined to more moderate rhetoric than Gamelin’s fiery oratory. Granger, though… that was interesting. A long-time fixture of the Assembly, Granger had twice narrowly lost out on the Speaker’s chair earlier in his career, and now was somewhat famous for appearing to sleep through most debates until suddenly stirring to deliver an incisive quip or put-down directed at whoever held the floor. He was reclined in his chair, arms folded over his bulky body, eyelids drooping, giving the impression of a man already deeply in his cups, although the table in front of the three Deputies was bare.

“You need not have worn your uniform,” said Gamelin.

“Thank you, Monsieur Gamelin,” she answered, although the Deputy’s tone had not suggested he was concerned about her comfort. “But I consider myself to be on duty.” Gamelin’s remark cut to the heart of her anxiety. If she was being honest - and she prided herself on being honest, at least with herself - coming to this meeting felt vaguely illicit, like becoming part of some sort of plot. She had worn her uniform both as a reminder to herself of her own obligations, and because she knew that a regular FWLM officer - the only one on Calseraigne - coming to the Thomas Paine could not fail to be noticed. She had nothing to hide. “I’m afraid I must ask why you asked me to meet with you in this… time and place, Monsieur Tremblay. You know I’m always available to advise the Assembly or any of its committees during their regular business.”

Tremblay smiled indulgently. “Your duty on Calseraigne is to lend your expertise to the planetary government, no? Whether in whole or in part, is it not all the same? Perhaps here with us, you may feel yourself able to speak more frankly.”

Naila scoffed inwardly at this. She had spent most of her life trying to learn not to speak as frankly as she wanted to. When she was a child and her father had invited friends and business partners to the family home, she had made precocious remarks that embarrassed her parents, although she would not understand why until years later. When she was ten her mother had first tried to explain to her, without success, the meaning of the turn of phrase “honest to a fault.”

It was Princefield - learning to navigate the social dynamics and student politics, the abuse from the blue-bloods directed at proles like her who wouldn’t shut up and learn their place - that had finally changed her. Simply saying exactly what she thought and assuming everyone else would be equally as direct and open was incompatible with survival at the prestigious military academy. She had withdrawn into herself, channeled all her frustration into her studies and training. As her efforts paid off and she started to stand out among her peers, her confidence grew, but on the few occasions she said what she really thought it usually seemed to lead to grudges, rivalries, and the occasional duel. A cockpit or a fencing strip were the only places she felt free to truly be herself. And all of her hard work had only brought her here, to a half-forgotten world, with nothing to do but think twice about every word she said to nobles and politicians who weren’t really interested in anything she had to say, anyhow. When she had arrived on Calseraigne, there had been an HPG message from her parents waiting for her, congratulating her on her prestigious assignment - advising a planetary government, so early in her career! - as if they had nothing to do with it, and saying they were proud of her. She had sent a reply saying the right things for a dutiful daughter, that she felt fortunate and honored, when if she had been honest she would have said she felt like shit.

“What is it you wish to speak about, Deputy?”

Gamelin almost spoke over her in his apparent impatience. “Who would you speculate is behind the recent attempt to assassinate Guillaume Everett?”

The outspoken Deputy, at least, was someone who could usually be counted on to get to the point. And yet she knew she still had to consider her response carefully. This seemed well out of the remit of what she had supposedly been sent to Calseraigne to advise the Assembly about.

“The Marquis obviously has forged ties with off-world industrial concerns as part of his Lake Sablier project,” she ventured. “Making powerful friends also creates a chance of making powerful enemies. I recall reading that the terms of the current agreement with LRI will automatically come up for renegotiation in the event of the Marquis’s death or abdication. Perhaps rivals of the Marquis’s business partners sought to eliminate him.”

Tremblay glanced at his companions. “Ah, perhaps. A plausible scenario…”

Gamelin waved his hand like he was swatting away an irritating insect. “But is it the most plausible?”

“I don’t think I understand you, Deputy Gamelin.”

Tremblay laid a hand on Gamelin’s shoulder. “What I think my colleague is trying to say is this: speaking frankly, what do you suppose the average person on the streets of Deloy who just watched the Marquis’s aircraft plummet into the river thinks about why it happened? Or consider all that you have learned about Calseraigne in your own short time here, and then apply Occam’s Razor to this mystery.”

Naila hesitated.

Granger’s rumbling voice actually startled her. She had half forgotten he was there. “You did not come dressed for a social outing, Lieutenant,” he said. “We are not your friends. You do not need to spare our feelings.”

Naila took a deep breath and looked at each of the three in turn, and finally held Gamelin’s piercing gaze. “Given the recent… tensions… it’s reasonable to guess that some percentage of the population believe that the attempt on the Marquis’s life was the work of domestic political opponents.” In the dim light, she thought she saw the ghost of a smile play over Gamelin’s features; she could not remember ever seeing him smile before.

Tremblay nodded and sighed. “We have come to the same conclusion, Lieutenant. In any murder mystery… or attempted murder, as the case may be… one begins with motive. Who had reason to wish the victim dead? Cui bono? As believers in democracy, we must also believe in the wisdom of the common people, and the common person is more than wise enough to ask themselves, ‘Who stands to gain from this?’ even if they lack the education to phrase the incisive question in Latin… or know maxims like Occam’s Razor, for that matter. It is inescapably true that the Marquis’s demise would seem like an answer to a damnable prayer for my colleagues and I: we are known to oppose the Marquis involving himself more and more in the governing of Calseraigne; we would prefer there was no such thing as a Marquis de Calseraigne at all, in fact. With so many already predisposed to think the worst of those of us who have made the people’s business our business, is it inevitable that some will ask: Why wouldn’t they try to knock off the young Marquis?”

“Whatever obligatory expressions of shock and horror we have made or will make about the assassination attempt will convince no one,” Gamelin broke in. “There is no theory of this event that we can suggest which the public is likely to find compelling, or which will not actually serve Everett’s goals. A different brand of paranoid who refuses to think the worst of my colleagues and I will no doubt suspect House Liao, but this will only give credence to Everett’s drumbeat for stronger military defenses. Blaming it on rivals of his business partners is plausible, but there is no evidence for it, and it will only bring further attention to his ambitious humanitarian undertakings,” he fumed.

“You don’t seem to believe the Marquis is sincere in wanting to help the people left behind by the retreat of the Sablier,” Naila observed drily.

“His sincerity or insincerity is immaterial!” the Deputy snapped. “No doubt the Capellan Confederation is very sincere in desiring the well-being of the billions it holds in its grasp. Our ancestors did not overthrow the Confederation to trade one supposedly benevolent overlord for another. Everett’s ancestors understood this, and had the decency to busy themselves elsewhere most of the time, and to stay out of the way at their maison on the seashore during their rare visits here.”

Tremblay raised a pleading hand to his fellow Deputy. “Please, Émile,” he said, “We did not ask the Lieutenant to come here to hear your ideological fulminations.” He turned back to Naila. “The point is, from a political standpoint, it is only Everett himself who benefits from his apparent brush with death.”

Naila was growing impatient. “Deputies, these are political concerns. I was stationed here to advise you on military matters.”

“Surely they could not resist teaching you that ancient bon mot about the continuation of politics at Princefield,” Granger intoned.

Tremblay spread his hands. “Let me be plain, Lieutenant Benichou: we brought you here tonight to ask you to help us prevent a war.”

Naila stared at him, astonished. “What kind of war?”

“The worst kind, and the kind that our beloved League has historically specialized in,” sneered Gamelin.

“The assassination attempt will inflame passions,” Tremblay said. “It has the effect of a provocation. Calseraigne is much closer to an open civil conflict.”

Naila sat in silence, trying and failing to derive any other meaning from what the three Deputies were saying than the one it seemed increasingly, painfully plain they were trying to suggest. “You almost sound as if you think the Marquis shot down his own plane.”

They stared back at her. Even Granger, despite his somnolent facade, was actually watching her closely through half-shut eyes.

“Deputies, you have encouraged me to speak frankly,” she said, “So I will: This is insane.”

“We are not asking you to believe us, Lieutenant.”

“Then what are you asking?” she said, exasperated. “How am I supposed to help you prevent a war?”

“You have a relationship with the Marquis.”

Naila suppressed her irritation at Gamelin’s tone, which made it clear he was not asking a question and came close to sounding like he was making an accusation. “The Marquis and I share a sporting interest,” she said. “Apart from that, my interactions with the Marquis have been limited to pleasantries at social functions, and giving him the same opinions on Calseraigne’s military preparedness that I have given you and your colleagues in the Assembly.”

“And yet that still potentially gives you greater access than we enjoy,” Tremblay said.

“I was not sent to this world to be your spy, Deputy,” Naila said in disgust. She started to rise from the table.

“I know how it sounds,” Tremblay said, with the same imploring gesture he had earlier used in an attempt to calm Gamelin. “We know your duty is to the League, and we would never ask you to compromise that. But would you agree it is not in the League’s interest to have a messy little civil war on a poorly-defended border planet?”

“I would,” she conceded, reluctantly.

“Then if you were to become privy to any information which would seem to indicate one is likely, simply pass it along,” Tremblay said.

“You have also developed a rapport with the commander of Everett’s mercenaries,” Gamelin said flatly.

Naila glared at him. “I met Captain Söderlund at the Marquis’s reception, and it’s fair to say that I hit it off better with her than you did, Deputy. I suppose you want me to pass along any information I get from her as well?”

“The mercenaries are the only BattleMech force on the planet,” Tremblay said calmly, and Naila felt a pang of shame and frustration, wishing with all her heart she was in a cockpit somewhere instead of in this room having this conversation. “They were hired personally by the Marquis. They must be a major factor in any calculation about a conflict on Calseraigne.”

“Just because they were hired by the Marquis doesn’t mean they would obey his orders blindly,” Naila argued. “Smart mercenaries think of their survival and reputation. I’m sure that at some point you’ve heard the statistics on the attrition rate of new mercenary units, Monsieur Tremblay. The Kats have already beaten the odds by lasting this long. In my interactions with Captain Söderlund, she seems conscientious. Besides, a mere six BattleMechs would not last long against the entire militia.”

“You are assuming a scenario,” Gamelin said with that hint of a smile once more, “Where the entire Garde Planétaire could be counted on to defend the cause of liberty and democracy. We assume no such thing. Some may side with the Marquis. Others would simply never respond to a call-up, and wait to see which side wins.”

“The truth, Lieutenant,” Tremblay said, “Is that because you are from off-world, because you have no biases in this little political drama of ours, because your loyalty is only to the League… you may be the only person we can trust to do the right thing.” He looked at her gravely. “We place great faith in your integrity.”

Naila looked down at her hands and found they were gripping the table tightly. With an effort she forced herself to let go, and folded her hands in her lap. “I will do all that I can, compatible with my duty and my honor as an officer, Deputies,” she said.

A few minutes later, Naila left the Thomas Paine through a back door. She had said her goodbyes to the three Deputies, and told them she felt honored by their confidence in her.

But if she had been honest, if only with herself, she felt like shit.

[Daryk]

Honestly, MY money is on one of those three being behind the shootdown without the knowledge of the other two.  ::)

[Sir Chaos]

Honestly, MY money is on one of those three being behind the shootdown without the knowledge of the other two.  ::)

My money is on one of them being behind it, and at least one of the two knowing it but keeping the knowledge to themselves in case they need to blackmail the guy.

Well, either that, or none of them did it, but each of them suspects at least one of the other two.

[DOC_Agren]

Honestly, MY money is on one of those three being behind the shootdown without the knowledge of the other two.  ::)

I was think the same..   I'm guess it is Granger..  but I'm betting he set it up in Gamelin name.

[Lazarus Sinn]

Shooting himself down would certianly muddy the waters a bit and allow the Marquis to play up being the victim for all it was worth.

[Elmoth]

I was think the same..   I'm guess it is Granger..  but I'm betting he set it up in Gamelin name.

Gamelin is the firebrand. This is easy to pin on him. So I assume he is not the instigator. This is either the case descried as one of them being responsible, or it is the plot twist written in neon letters, and it is actually the Marquis who did it.

Cheers,
Xavier

[Daryk]

I think it's way too easy for a "deliberate" shoot down to go wrong, but that's just my opinion...  ^-^

[wolfgar]

I think it's way too easy for a "deliberate" shoot down to go wrong, but that's just my opinion...  ^-^

I have to agree, just like it is too easy for these three to be a part of a conspiracy to kill him
am i the only one smelling a Liao in the mix?

[Daryk]

That would make sense too... get a civil war going, then send "peacekeepers"...  ^-^

[Elmoth]

Valueless planet, remember. As far as we know, at least. Until the investment is ongoing the Cappies do not seem very interested in it. They are about to be hit by the FedCom at this point (3027), so I find it quite unlikely that they send peacekeepers to Calseraigne.

[cklammer]

Ja, that is a purely local issue ... but may have been engineered to be a near miss by that MANPAD.

[Elmoth]

That, I can buy. But putting yourself voluntarily near the blast zone of a MANPAD shows more strength of character than what I have. If this is the case, of course.
We might be overthinking it, really xD

[cklammer]

Those MANPADs have proximity fuses usually, don't they?

Adjust the proximity fuse to "looking scary but being harmless" should not be rocket science ... oh ... of course it is  ;D

[Daryk]

Any planet with a breathable atmosphere is NOT valueless.

[Middcore]

Hello good people. Obviously I've totally failed to deliver on my pseudo-promise to post 1-2 chapters per week and I feel I owe you all some kind of update.

This is far from dead. The last chapter posted is the end of Part 1, and the story is actually written well into Part 3, although still not complete, and I've been doing a final editing pass on each chapter as I post them. When I started posting, I thought that I was close enough to the end that I would have the conclusion written by the time I "needed it" and that posting chapters here regularly would give me a kick in the butt to make sure I worked diligently on actually finishing the story. So why hasn't it worked out that way?

Without going into too much personal stuff you have no reason to care about: I have been out of full-time work since abruptly getting laid off last fall, and I've only been able to supplement the income from my wife's full-time retail job with semi-consistent freelance work. In silver linings theory this should leave me lots of time to work on personal projects like this. But the overcast reality is me getting laid off is just one line in a litany of misery that we've been through over the past three years or so, and depression is a bitch. Things like a brief vacation that turned into a week of intermittent agony from kidney stones and an unexpected trip to help clean out my mother-in-law's house certainly haven't helped me devote the attention to this that I sincerely want to, either.

It isn't all bad. I'm optimistic that the first (pittance) paid writing I've ever done on gaming (though not BattleTech and not fiction) is going to be published soon. Maybe that will give me some motivation to get back to this. I am determined to finish it, however long it takes. I actually started working on it over two years ago now, and what you've been reading is the third draft after two abortive previous attempts. I purposefully set out with this story to try to stretch myself (compared to the previous ones with this character) by using multiple POV characters and doing a story with some classic BattleTech political intrigue, even if it is on a very small stage. It hasn't been easy and only some of the core concepts survive from the original plot I sketched out. And to tell the truth I haven't always enjoyed working on it. But I am set on finishing it if only to prove to myself that I can, and because I have more plans in mind for Kit after it's over.

That's all for now. I know it's not a great explanation but it's what I've got. Sorry for the self-pity, it annoys me too.

[Elmoth]

All our support and patience, of course. real life takes precedence over writing stuff for the enjoyment of internet readers any time. Take care and get better in all your situations :)

[Daryk]

If you need any help with editing, just shoot me a PM.  If you require references, just ask Cannonshop, Monbvol, Giovanni Blasini, 2ndACR, or Failure16.  My plate's a little full, but I can certainly help.  Editing your own stuff can be hard.

[Lazarus Sinn]

Take your time. I am willing to wait.

[snakespinner]

Glad to hear your first paid writing is about to get published. Hope you make millions.
Don't worry if it takes a long time to finish the story, we are patient and understand how bad real life can be.
Good luck.

[Horsemen]

Do what you need to do to take care of you. I'll pick it back up when you do so.

[Middcore]

Yes, forum, I know it's been more than 90 days. Yes, I'm sure I want to reply.

I'm not dead. And I've been working on this again. It's pretty close to being finished, actually, for real this time.

Going to be leaving town for a few days to see my nieces (which will be nice) and go through some more old family junk (which won't be). But expect new chapters to be posted starting in November, if anybody still cares to read.

[Daryk]

Huzzah!  Glad to hear you're back at it! :)

[Elmoth]

Awaiting developments. I have this idea of BUILDING the Kats as a tabletop unit once I finish dragging myself through my plastics, you know.

Cheers
Xavi

[Lazarus Sinn]

Patiently awaiting the next installment.

[Cannonshop]

Hello good people. Obviously I've totally failed to deliver on my pseudo-promise to post 1-2 chapters per week and I feel I owe you all some kind of update.

This is far from dead. The last chapter posted is the end of Part 1, and the story is actually written well into Part 3, although still not complete, and I've been doing a final editing pass on each chapter as I post them. When I started posting, I thought that I was close enough to the end that I would have the conclusion written by the time I "needed it" and that posting chapters here regularly would give me a kick in the butt to make sure I worked diligently on actually finishing the story. So why hasn't it worked out that way?

Without going into too much personal stuff you have no reason to care about: I have been out of full-time work since abruptly getting laid off last fall, and I've only been able to supplement the income from my wife's full-time retail job with semi-consistent freelance work. In silver linings theory this should leave me lots of time to work on personal projects like this. But the overcast reality is me getting laid off is just one line in a litany of misery that we've been through over the past three years or so, and depression is a bitch. Things like a brief vacation that turned into a week of intermittent agony from kidney stones and an unexpected trip to help clean out my mother-in-law's house certainly haven't helped me devote the attention to this that I sincerely want to, either.

It isn't all bad. I'm optimistic that the first (pittance) paid writing I've ever done on gaming (though not BattleTech and not fiction) is going to be published soon. Maybe that will give me some motivation to get back to this. I am determined to finish it, however long it takes. I actually started working on it over two years ago now, and what you've been reading is the third draft after two abortive previous attempts. I purposefully set out with this story to try to stretch myself (compared to the previous ones with this character) by using multiple POV characters and doing a story with some classic BattleTech political intrigue, even if it is on a very small stage. It hasn't been easy and only some of the core concepts survive from the original plot I sketched out. And to tell the truth I haven't always enjoyed working on it. But I am set on finishing it if only to prove to myself that I can, and because I have more plans in mind for Kit after it's over.

That's all for now. I know it's not a great explanation but it's what I've got. Sorry for the self-pity, it annoys me too.

KEEP YOUR OWN PACE.  We'll wait.  Life (real life) is always more important than hobbies.

[Daryk]

Pace is indeed everything... take your time, good sir! :)

[Horsemen]

Looking forward to it but take the time you need when you need it. Now or in the future.

[Brother Jim]

As others have said, take your time, as you need it.



But we are holding an empty bowl while making sad, puppy dog eyes and asking
"Please Sir May We Have Some More????  Pleeeeeeaaaaasssssee???"

"Thank You"

[Middcore]

Part II

“Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take
an interest in you.”
-Pericles

Chapter 7: Earning Your Keep

Kit kept the Vindicator’s throttle dialed back to a brisk 40-kilometers-per-hour walk. There was no point charging into an engagement before you fully understood the situation, her grandfather had taught her that. No matter how eager you were for a fight.

And Kit was eager, eager enough to surprise herself.

The last time she had led her own unit out in the wastes of the seabed, she had wondered what they were even doing on the planet, seemingly nothing more than a showpiece meant to intimidate desperate villagers. Everything that had happened since then had made things more complicated, and she still wasn’t sure she had a firm handle on the situation she had gotten herself into by signing the contract on Calseraigne. But here, today, was something she was certain she did understand: a fight, in her ‘Mech, and against a real enemy.

The last time they had gone out into the wastes, she had had to reassure Tucker they wouldn’t be killing anyone. Today the odds were better than even that they would, and she felt ten times better. For a moment she wondered what that said about her, but there was no more than a moment for wondering.

“They’re still on a direct vector for the city, Captain,” came Miles Morency’s voice in her ear. In the background she could hear the roar of the Harasser hovertank’s fans as Miles’s brother Martin guided it over the desert, shadowing the enemy lance. “Best guess is three lights and maybe one medium… they’re clustered too close together to separate out seismic and magres.”

“Copy, Klicks,” Kit answered. “We’re moving out to block them. Just keep them on sensors for now. You’ll know your moment to get in the mix.”

The unidentified DropShip had landed in the salt flats of the former southern lakebed about an hour before. Whether it was the start of Calseraigne’s first pirate raid in years, the first Liao raid in even longer, or something else entirely, right now it didn’t matter much. Whoever they were, their intentions, though unannounced, were clear enough. The dry lakebed was the closest place to land a DropShip for an assault on the capital, except for the spaceport itself on the north side of the city, and even Calseraigne’s militia couldn’t have failed to notice an invasion force literally landing on their doorstep. Probably.

The first word of the mystery force’s arrival had been from one of the Rusters who had pulled up to the gates of the Kats’ outpost south of the city in a buggy. Kit had scrambled all her ‘Mechs and vehicles.. The latest report she had gotten from Corporal Palmberg, heading up the Kats’ infantry contingent and left to maintain communication with the Gee Pee, was pessimistic about the militia managing to organize any sort of response before the whole thing was over.

On either side of Kit’s Vindicator marched “Lefty” Maier in the Enforcer and Landry Tucker in the Blackjack. A couple hundred meters ahead, rising in and out of view as they traversed the rolling undulations of the waste, her Bravo Lance of Smythe’s Commando, “Siren” Jarvis’s Wasp, and “Fuzzy” Farrish’s Spider formed another loose three-’Mech wedge. “Alright, boys and girls,” she radioed, “Whoever this is didn’t come for a social call. The twins say we’re looking at a lightweight lance of ‘Mechs, and their pilots might even know how to use them, so… stay sharp.”

There was always a moment when she said these kinds of things to her unit, things commanders were supposed to say, that she felt a twinge embarrassment, as she wondered whether she said them for her unit’s benefit or for her own. Some of her people had more combat experience than she did, and in House military units. Purely as an individual, as a ‘Mech jock, she was confident enough in her skill. She knew she was far from the best, but she had been trained well and gotten out of some tight spots. In a cockpit, she felt at home - although out of one, in her nightmares, doubts mocked her. But there was no place for a lone MechWarrior except perhaps in arena gladiator fights, and her own brief gladiator career had been a farce. In real fights, MechWarriors were either leaders or followers, and every moment of every day she was aware that she had become a leader only because of very, very improbable circumstances without ever even getting the chance to be a follower first. Some moments, like this one, she was more aware of it than others.

Fortunately, she didn’t have to figure it out entirely on her own. “Smitty,” she radioed, “Switch to command frequency.”

There was a couple of seconds of silence and then Smythe’s drawl in her ear. “Tell me what you’re thinkin’... boss.”

Kit smiled slightly, knowing that her XO had just stopped himself from calling her “kid,” even though nobody else could hear their conversation. “Whoever this is,” she said, “They’re probably working off old intel. That means they won’t know about us. They’ll think the south end of the capital is undefended.”

“Yeah, safe enough bet.”

“So I’m thinking you take Bravo in head-on to surprise them, stop them short… then we’ll come in behind you to clean up.”

There was another pause as Smythe considered. “We have numbers on them. Could have Alpha hold the line while Bravo circles behind. Better chance of a clean sweep.”

“Whatever they’re here to do, it looks for damn sure like they want to do it in the city,” Kit pointed out. “First priority is to deny their objective, not to inflict maximum losses. My lance is too slow, we can’t take the risk of them just blowing past us.”

“Fair enough,” Smythe agreed.

“I’m sorry, Sarge, you’ll have to fight them almost fair for a minute, even with the twins joining in.”

“I know you’ll be right behind us,” Smythe reassured her.

She and Smythe relayed the plan to their respective lances and the Kats’ entire ‘Mech force accelerated to a run. Smythe and his two lancemates in their faster machines quickly outdistanced the three medium-weight ‘Mechs in Kit’s lance, and Kit started to second-guess herself. The risk in her plan was that it would leave Smythe’s lance to take on the enemy lance in a more-or-less even fight, or even at a disadvantage considering only the number of ‘Mechs, for a brief period before her slower lance could catch up and bring their superior firepower to bear.

There was no sound except the thumping of the Vindicator’s feet as it loped across the lakebed in a spine-pounding run. Then Smythe’s voice crackled in her ear once more: “Contact.” His lance had met the enemy.

“Copy,” Kit responded, although she knew Smythe might have already switched back to his lance frequency. She marked Bravo lance’s position on a secondary cockpit display. Then silence again, except for the sound of ‘Mech feet and the growing internal chorus of Kit’s doubts.

Finally, her lance passed under one kilometer to the contact point. “Let’s get their attention,” she called to Tucker and Maier. “Pop up on three. One… two… three.”

Kit stomped down on her foot pedals and grunted as she was pushed down into her command couch. The Vindicator hurtled into the air on columns of flaming plasma, flanked on either side a moment later by the Enforcer and Blackjack as her lancemates fired their own jump jets.

As she cleared the dunes and her jump reached its apex, she had a clear view of the fight taking place between Smythe’s lance and the raiders. There was no time fully to pick out who was who in the melee, but she quickly counted off seven ‘Mechs  moving and shooting, which meant nobody on either side was down yet - although the Morency twins’ Harasser tank was nowhere to be seen.

One of the ‘Mechs in the furball abruptly came to a stop, looking in the direction of Kit’s rising lance with obvious and almost comically human surprise. Kit knew by its silhouette that it was a thirty-ton Javelin like the one Naila had piloted in their simulator duel even before the Vindicator’s warbook computer tagged it. She dropped her targeting reticle over the raider and launched a flight of long range missiles without a lock, aiming for more distraction rather than damage. The Vindicator’s descent prevented her from seeing the results.

The Vindicator touched down on the sea floor again with a teeth-rattling impact. Kit steadied the machine’s balance and brought it back up to full running speed. She was in range for her main weapons now but rolling dunes blocked line of sight to any target.

At last she reached the top of one particularly tall former undersea ridge and found the whole tableau of the battle spread out in front of her again. “Pull up!” she radioed to her lancemates. “Firing line here.”

Four hundred meters away she spotted the Javelin. Whether because of the distraction she had provided or some other reason, the raider MechWarrior was in big trouble. The Javelin twisted in a failed attempt to draw a bead on the Kats’ Harasser as the hovertank flitted by and delivered a double-handful of short range missiles that cratered the Javelin’s green paint. The ‘Mech’s’ left leg buckled underneath it and the pilot only barely caught their machine with its left arm. Giving up on the departing Harasser, the Javelin swiveled its torso back in the direction of Farrish’s nearby Spider and fired an SRM salvo of its own which missed completely.

“For ******’s sake…” Kit muttered at the enemy pilot’s stubbornness. Her targeting reticle glowed gold and she let loose with another flight of LRM’s, followed up by a blast from the Vindicator’s right arm PPC. Her shots crushed the right side of the Javelin’s torso, blowing off the arm it was using to prop itself up and leaving it lying flat on its face. A moment later the ‘Mech’s ammunition cooked off, gutting it completely. There was no chance for the pilot to eject.

“They’re running,” observed Tucker. Kit wrenched her gaze away from the burning Javelin. The fight in the raiders seemed to have died with their lancemate. A Stinger and a Firestarter were headed back in the direction the raiders had come from at maximum speed. The fourth enemy ‘Mech, a forty-five ton Phoenix Hawk, whirled back and forth, squirting bursts of machine gun and laser fire at the Kats’ light ‘Mechs in an effort to hold them at bay and perhaps cover its comrades’ retreat.

That has to be the lance commander, Kit thought to herself. Finally the Hawk pilot seemed to notice Kit’s firing line for the first time. Setting its feet, it raised the massive laser it gripped in its right hand like a pistol.

Kit’s targeting reticle was already over the Phoenix Hawk’s chest. Her finger was on the trigger. But she found her hand had suddenly gone slack. In her mind’s eye she saw another Phoenix Hawk on another world raise its weapon and take aim…

Her view of the outside world dimmed for an instant as her cockpit ferroglass polarized to keep her from being blinded by the laser beam that barely missed the Vindicator’s head. Her hand convulsed and her view returned just in time to see her reflex PPC shot crack wide of the target.

“You alright, Captain?” It was Tucker’s voice, with a thundering staccato background as he and Maier pummeled the Hawk with autocannon fire. Barely staying on its feet, the raider pilot back-pedaled over a dune out of sight in the same direction it’s lancemates had fled.

“Fine, fine,” she responded, knowing it was only good luck her lapse hadn’t gotten her killed and mentally cursing herself for it.  “Hold here. No pursuit, we couldn’t catch them and stay together anyway. Klicks,” she called to the Harasser crew, “Distant shadow again. Make sure they’re really leaving.”

“Uh, might have a problem here, Cap,” reported Morcency. “Got a new heavy metal reading. And I mean heavy.”

Kit’s mind raced. If the raiders were bringing reinforcements, it was a damn strange time to do it. “Same vector as the first lance?” she asked.

“Negative, Cap. Coming from the Northeast. One ‘Mech, taking a peek now… aw, what the hell?”

Kit’s heart pounded and she lurched the Vindicator into motion again. “Klicks. Talk to me.”

“Warbook tags the new arrival Bravo-Lima-Romeo,” Morency reported, his exasperation audible even through the radio. “I think there’s only one of those on-planet?”

Kit cursed and fired her jump jets again to clear the dune the Phoenix Hawk had used to break contact as Maier and Tucker fell into line behind her. She saw it off in the distance, its gait unsteady, apparently slowed by leg damage, but already at the edge of her weapons’ range. And she also saw, plodding forward in an apparent effort to block the raider’s escape, a BattleMaster, unmistakable in the Everett family’s blue, silver, and purple.

“What the ****** is he doing?” she shouted to herself. It had all been over - the fight had been won. The raiders were running away with their tails between their legs, and her force had suffered nothing worse than armor damage. And now her employer had come to play hero and put himself in danger of being killed by one lucky shot!

The Vindicator touched down hard, compressing her spine, but she ignored the pain and kept the ‘Mech moving at a dead run, trying to settle her targeting reticle on the Phoenix Hawk’s back, telling herself No, no, no, this was not going to happen all because she had hesitated, because she had gotten lost in a waking nightmare for just one moment…

The Phoenix Hawk swiveled its torso towards the BattleMaster, then slowly shuffled to a halt. Its arms dropped to its sides. On Kit’s sensors, the infrared signature of the Hawk started to go dark as the fusion reactor at its heart shut down. She slowed the Vindicator to a walk and started to breathe again.

The BattleMaster came to a halt, ponderously ruined to face the raider ‘Mech, and fired. Parallel streaks of artificial lightning and coherent light drove into the Phoenix Hawk and toppled it to the lakebed floor. Kit stared, uncomprehending, speechless.

“Jesus! What the hell? ******!”

Landry Tucker was not speechless; his scream in her helmet’s earpiece was loud enough to make her wince. “Settle down, Tuck,” she said through gritted teeth.

“Blake’s Blood, Cap, didn’t you see? That Hawk jock was powering down, he was surrendering! I mean, what the ******?”

“Tucker,” she said, willing her voice not to shake, “Can it.” She switched frequencies. “Palmberg, you read?”

“I read you, Captain,” said the infantry squad leader. “Good to hear your voice. What’s the situation?”

“We’re done out here. We need a medevac though… Gee Pee, civilian, whatever you can get.”

There was a slight pause before Palmberg responded. “Copy, Captain. Who-...”

“Not one of ours,” Kit said. Things could have gone worse, she told herself. Much worse. Focus on the good: mission accomplished, no losses… employer didn’t get his ass blown off. Not our job to second-guess nobles. We did our jobs.

For the first time since arriving on Calseraigne, in fact, she had done a job she felt like she understood. But as she stared at the fallen Phoenix Hawk, she realized that for all her earlier eagerness, that thought brought her surprisingly little pleasure.

[Daryk]

Nothing good is going on there, that's for sure!

[Horsemen]

I think I smell some politics coming.

[Sir Chaos]

I smell another great fanfic coming back to life!

[Elmoth]

New Kats entry!!!
You made my day sir :) Short and sharp combat.
Mr nice guy does not seem to be so nice after all.

[Middcore]

Chapter 8: Conference

Try as she might, Kit couldn’t stop her gaze from drifting to the conference room window. Outside, laid out on its back on the militia headquarters parade ground, was the raider Phoenix Hawk. Gathered around it and on it were a couple platoons’ worth of GP techs, infantry troopers, a few officers… pretty much everyone on the base who didn’t have anything better to do, it appeared. Some of the part-time militiamen had probably even come to the base while off-duty just to take in the sight.

The Kats’ contract on Calseraigne didn’t include salvage rights, a clause that had seemed insignificant when the agreement was drawn up given how unlikely it had seemed that any actual combat had occurred. That meant that the Hawk was now de facto the property of the GP, although they had only been able to haul the wrecked machine in from the lakebed after Kit had offered the services of the Kats’ MRV. What the militia intended to do with their unearned prize, she had no idea. She doubted they had the technical skill or resources to restore it to operational condition. The small horde of gawkers assembled around the fallen Hawk unpleasantly reminded Kit of insects swarming on a corpse, although they moved with much less organization or purpose.

There was precious little to distract her inside the conference room where she now found herself sitting. Seated next to her was Naila. In the two chairs on the opposite side of the table were General Bollier, the CO of the Garde, and an aide Kit thought might be a major, although her understanding of the GP’s uniform rank insignia was hazy. The two militia officers wore their dress blue and whites, the General’s straining over a frame that had once been powerful but had now run to fat, the aide’s creased as sharp as the gaze he had flicked over Kit when the pair had entered the room. Naila was wearing her FWLM field uniform. Kit was wearing technician’s coveralls that she thought were mostly clean. She had been about to start assessing the damage to Smythe’s lance’s ‘Mechs when she had received the request to attend this unexpected meeting and there was no time to change, not that she had anything much better to change into. Naila had greeted her warmly, offered her congratulations and said she was sorry she had missed out on the fun. The two militia officers sat in stony silence and seemed determined to pretend she wasn’t there.

On a flatscreen mounted to the wall, an aerial view showed the Marquis’s BattleMaster standing over the smoking form of the fallen raider Phoenix Hawk. A news VTOL had arrived over the scene of the battle just in time to capture the aftermath of what was now being treated as an act of heroism by the nobleman, although the coverage occasionally managed to mention the Kats’ contributions in turning back the apparent Liao raid as well. Kit looked away before what she knew would be coming next: a quote from the Marquis saying that he simply couldn’t sit by and wait for the outcome while others risked themselves fighting to protect his home. As if that wasn’t the reason you hired mercenaries. As if they hadn’t done their jobs, as if the fight wasn’t over by the time the Marquis had wandered in and more-or-less murdered the surrendering Phoenix Hawk pilot, whoever he was.

Kit felt the fine hairs on the back of her neck prick up. The door to the conference room opened and in walked the man of the hour. “As you were please, gentlemen and ladies,” the Marquis said as Kit and the others started to rise from their seats. He glanced up at the flatscreen and winced. “Can we turn that off?”

The screen went dark as the Marquis took his seat at the head of the table. Casually and yet immaculately dressed, Everett looked more like he had prepared for an interview session with a celebrity lifestyle magazine than for a military conference. Despite this, Kit could tell from a glance that something had disturbed the Marquis’s usual carefree attitude. In fact, he looked more troubled than he had during their plunge into the river.

“The purpose of this meeting,” the Marquis said, “Is to discuss steps to ensure Calseraigne’s security.”

General Bollier shifted his bulk in his chair. “You know I am always ready to discuss such matters at your pleasure, my lord, even if we have not seen eye to eye in the past, he said. “But if I may be frank…”

“I’ve never known you to be any other way, General,” the Marquis interjected with a smile that was too obviously strained to have its usual charm.

The General grunted. “I don’t see what’s to be gained by including… junior personnel in the discussion.” He gave Kit and Naila a smile that made the one the Marquis had given him look sincere by comparison. “Nothing personal, of course.”

“Lieutenant Benichou has been a great resource to me,” the Marquis replied, “And we would be foolish not to make use of her expertise. As for Captain Söderlund,” he went on, “I think we should all be able to agree that she has earned her seat at this table.” There it was again: the reality that she was in a business where having killed people gave you credibility more than anything else. It was strange how the Marquis saying she belonged made her feel even more self-conscious about her presence at the gathering.

The General grunted again and carelessly waved a hand at his subordinate. “I trust there is no need to recapitulate the basic facts of the raid…” the maybe-a-major began.

“I think we need to start at the beginning,” the Marquis interrupted. “Why were we caught so unprepared?”

General Bollier rumbled and shifted in his chair. “We simply never anticipated such an attack profile, my lord. The Capellans’ objective in attacking from the southern side of the capital is a mystery. There is simply nothing there.”

“Nothing except people,” Everett observed.

“Yes, yes, of course,” the General said with the same half-heartedly-swatting-at-an-insect gesture. “My point is that it makes no sense except as a pure terror raid.”

The Marquis steepled his fingers. “And would that be so surprising from the Confederation?”

“If I may, my lord,” Naila spoke up. “Even Liao isn’t in the habit of committing atrocities with nothing to be materially gained. But with respect to the General, just because we can’t determine a material motive for the attack doesn’t mean none existed. We have to be wary of ‘mirror-imaging’ and assuming the enemy thinks the same way we do.”

“Yes. Well.” The General sniffed. “The Lieutenant makes a valid point,” he said, the emphasis he put on Naila’s rank leaving no doubt about how little he actually appreciated her input. “Who can fathom the inscrutable Capellan mind?”

“It is possible that the purpose of the raid was to test our defenses.” This suggestion from the possible major earned him a sideways glare from his superior which he seemed not to notice.

“Well, in that case we can only hope that what they learned will buy us some time to improve our preparedness,” the Marquis said. “But Captain Söderlund and her people will not be here to fill in the gaps in our defenses forever.”

“On that note,” Kit interjected, “I need to raise an immediate, practical concern. Right now my unit is in no shape to respond to another attack. Half my ‘Mechs have significant damage, and getting them repaired at the facilities provided to us will be… challenging.”

Bollier waved his hand again. “You have what we could spare… Captain.”

“Perhaps I can suggest a solution?” The General fixed Naila with a stare which left no doubt how little he wanted a solution from her or probably anyone else. Naila didn’t notice, or pretended not to. “The Garde could benefit from getting that Phoenix Hawk out there up and running, at least enough to give some of the men I’ve been putting through the simulators hands-on experience. You have some good repair facilities, but no technicians with any experience in ‘Mech repair. Am I correct?” Bollier said nothing but his aide nodded. “The Black Kats need better facilities to repair their ‘Mechs, but they have experienced techs, including Captain Söderlund herself, isn’t that right, Captain?”

“I started wrenching on ‘Mechs when I was twelve.”

“And didn’t stop until just a few moments before coming to the meeting, by the looks of it,” General Bollier sneered, casting an eye over Kit’s coveralls.

Kit stared back across the table at him. “I’ve been getting my hands dirty so the Garde doesn’t have to. But don’t worry, General,” she said, showing her palms. “I washed them before I got here.”

“Is there any reason,” Naila went on, cutting off further verbal barbs, “That there couldn’t be some type of arrangement where the Kats trade their assistance repairing the captured Hawk for the usage of the Garde’s repair facilities?”

The Marquis smiled. “This sounds like an excellent idea to me,” he said. “General Bollier, is there any practical reason why it wouldn’t work?”

The militia commander was saved from having to think of one by the sound of a knock on the door. “Come,” he barked. A young non-com (Kit guessed) entered the room, gave a quick bow to the Marquis, then stooped in between the two militia officers to whisper something in the General’s ear, then departed.

“Well,” the General said, “It seems that at least we may soon be able to get some insight into the motivations behind this attack. It seems the captured Capellan ‘Mech pilot is conscious.”

The Marquis stared, open-mouthed. “He’s… he’s alive?” he stammered.

Bollier nodded. “As soon as he’s well enough to move, we’ll transfer him from the hospital in the capital for interrogation here at headquarters.”

Everett slumped back in his chair, clearly shaken. “Well. Whatever the man’s intent or cause was, I can honestly say I’m glad to hear he’s alive. To be honest, the idea I had taken a life has been… weighing on me.” The Marquis sighed. “I’m sorry, ladies and gentlemen. All of you may have had similar feelings after your first combat, but this is new to me.”

A silence descended on the room. Kit glanced around the table. Naila seemed to have withdrawn into herself. The two militia officers looked down at the table uncomfortably. Did either of them even have any combat experience? Was Kit the only one in the room who had actually been under fire? Would she ever get over how bizarre it was to be regarded by others with respect or even jealousy because she had spilled blood?

The Marquis cleared his throat, collecting himself with a visible effort. “But back to the main topic of this discussion. Although there are surely useful things we will be able to learn from analysis of the previous attack, what matters most is ensuring we are prepared for the next one, if and when it comes. To that end, I have two specific measures in mind which I want to discuss.”

“Do please go on, my lord,” Bollier said, sounding happy to have the subject changed.

“The first is a large-scale training exercise to be held on the southern Sablier. It will involve as much of the Garde Planétaire as you can call up for duty, General, with Captain Söderlund’s unit acting as… I believe the term is ‘OPFOR’? This will give the Garde experience in how to respond to another quick-strike raid by a BattleMech force.”

“I see.” A joyless smile spread across the militia General’s face. “And will you be participating as well, my lord?”

Everett’s brow furrowed in confusion. “I’m afraid I don’t follow you, General.”

“If the purpose of the exercise is to give me troops experience in defending against a BattleMech attack, then surely it would help to have more ‘Mechs available,” the General said patiently. “In fact, I believe yours is the most powerful ‘Mech on the planet, outclassing the ones used by Captain Söderlund’s unit by some margin. Unless after your recent, ah… experience you don’t feel ready to get back in the cockpit again, my lord? It would be entirely understandable.”

Bollier’s voice was all exaggerated deference and sympathy without a trace of genuine respect behind it. The Marquis looked at him with a flash of irritation and dislike Kit had seen only once before, when Deputy Gamelin had appeared at the reception a few weeks before. A flash, and then it was gone, replaced by the nobleman’s customary air of confident good humor. “I appreciate your concern, General, but there won’t be any problem. Your point about the practical advantages of having another ‘Mech available for the exercise is well taken.” He smiled brightly. “You and I have been debating about Calseraigne’s defenses ever since I became Marquis, General. It might be enjoyable, having the opportunity to make my point in a personal way.”

The tense silence as the nobleman and the militia commander held each other’s gaze was finally broken by Bollier’s indeterminately-ranked aide. “And the second measure you wanted to discuss, my lord?”

Everett nodded. He folded his hands on the table, and his expression became more serious. “There are short-term, practical steps we can and should take to strengthen Calseraigne’s defenses. But there are limits to what we can accomplish on our own. And by ‘we,’ I don’t just mean those of us in this room; I mean Calseraigne as a whole. We have always valued our independence, but there comes a time when independence becomes irrelevance… and when insisting on being left alone just means being left behind.”

As the Marquis spoke, General Bollier’s expression of affected indifference had rapidly given way to confusion and then concern. “My lord…?”

“Since I inherited my father’s title,” Everett went on, “I have been absorbed with considering how to reverse our world’s decline and put us on course for a better future. A better future not just in the sense of military and political security, but of economic prosperity and standards of living for Calseraigne’s people as well.” The Marquis’s worlds were clearly carefully chosen, and when he paused, clearly for dramatic effect, Kit realized that she was probably hearing a rehearsal of a speech he intended to deliver to a much larger audience in the near future.

“I intend to petition that Calseraigne be admitted into the Duchy of Andurien. Within the next several weeks, I will travel to Andurien to discuss the matter with Dame Catherine Humphreys and offer my personal assurances of fealty.”

Everett’s quietly-spoken declaration of intent hit the room like a thunderclap. Even Kit, an off-worlder who knew just enough about League politics to know she knew practically nothing, could see the momentous implications of what the Marquis had said. For an independent world like Calseraigne to align itself with one of the League’s provinces would be one thing; for the world’s hereditary noble ruler, whose very existence was resented by some, to bring the change about unilaterally was sure to cause protest. On top of that, the Duchy of Andurien, composed in large part of worlds which had once been part of the Capellan Confederation, was known for its fierce hatred of House Liao; and its ruler, Catherine Humpreys, was known as a bitter critic of Captain-General Janos Marik. 

Kit glanced across the table at Naila, but her friend didn’t seem to notice, too preoccupied with her own thoughts. General Bollier’s broad face had flushed brightly and sweat had broken out on his forehead. The militia commander’s obvious consternation was in contrast to his aide. The younger officer’s expression showed no reaction to the announcement at all, as if his face had been as crisply ironed and pressed as his uniform.

“My lord…” General Bollier choked out, “Has the Assembly of Deputies been informed of this?”

The Marquis shook his head. “Not as of yet. I intend to address the Assembly and publicly announce my intentions soon, possibly as part of the celebration of League Day. I chose to disclose this to all of you first because the sad reality is that the announcement could lead to some degree of unrest. Assuming that the Confederation will be deterred for the time being by the defeat of their raid, political tensions could be a greater threat to Calseraigne’s security in the short term than House Liao.”

“That was very circumspect, my lord,” Bollier choked out. “I assure you in such an event the Garde will fulfill its duties.”

Kit’s mind raced. Every new development seemed to make the situation her unit found itself in the middle of Calseraigne more complicated and more fraught with potential pitfalls. Marching out into the desert to meet the Capellan raid had been the one moment where this contract had seemed straightforward.

And then the raiders had turned out not to be Capellan at all.

[Daryk]

Even Junior Varsity FWL politics are ROUGH! ;D

[Elmoth]

*popcorn*

[Horsemen]

Nicely written. I expected the raiders were not Capellans. I have my suspicions so it will be interesting to see which it is.

[Middcore]

Chapter 9: Purpose

Not caring for once about dirtying or rumpling her uniform, Naila clambered up onto the gutted Phoenix Hawk’s chest.

Crouching, she peered into one of the rents in the Hawk’s torso. She reached out to touch the blackened metal and yanked her hand quickly away. The heat emanating off of the ‘Mech’s metal hide was intense, like a memory of the conflagration that had ripped out its heart under the guns of the Marquis’s BattleMaster, although Naila knew that it had more to do with the machine being laid out on the parade ground under Calseraigne’s blazing sun for the entire day.

The sun was going down now. The crowd of curious militiamen had long since dispersed, and with most of the Garde’s personnel living off-base, the parade ground was practically deserted. She was alone. There was nobody watching her. There was nobody to keep up appearances for, nobody to mediate between. She could be honest, if only with herself, about how she felt.

And she felt like shit.

Naila’s sense of duty had always been unflinchingly clear, even if it didn’t always align with her parents’ ideas about her obligations to the family. Now, for the first time she could remember, she was unsure about what duty demanded of her.

Was she obligated to inform the trio of Deputies about the Marquis’s plan? Strictly speaking, it didn’t clearly fall within the realm of advising the planetary government about security matters, which was her ostensible purpose for being on the planet. On the other hand, the Marquis’s entire rationale for the plan hinged on keeping Calseraigne secure.

She was aware of the fact that if the Assembly found out about the plan before Everett felt like informing them, he would know someone in the room had leaked. But she had to put that out of her mind. Now of all times, she couldn’t let her decision-making be corrupted by self-interest.

And yet she found her mind was too full of selfish feelings to even focus on her dilemma. Feelings of uselessness, jealousy, and a childlike indignation - a petty, absurd, and yet nonetheless real sense of unfairness, that she had been the victim of a cosmic injustice.

She gazed at the half-obliterated Capellan Confederation insignia on the Hawk’s chest. How she wished she had gotten the chance to be a part of that fight. In the end, she didn’t give a damn what the Capellans’ reason for showing up on Calseraigne had been. Fighting them would have, if just for one moment, allowed her to feel clarity of purpose, like her presence on Calseraigne could be justified, like she was doing something here that mattered. But she had missed her chance, because she had no ‘Mech. Instead, Everett, the arrogant ass, had taken a walk in a ‘Mech he could barely control and came out looking like a hero.

What had she achieved since coming to this planet? In terms of practical results, suggesting the agreement to let Kit’s unit use the militia’s repair facilities was probably her greatest accomplishment. Smoothing over a petty squabble between people who were supposed to be on the same side.

As she surveyed the wrecked Hawk, she realized this was the closest she had come to a BattleMech since graduating from Princefield.

Naila had always believed that combat was the closest thing in the universe to real meritocracy. As a “prole” at Princefield, she had learned to endure the taunts and snubs of the blue-bloods. Let them say what they liked; she knew her abilities were the equal of anyone, and someday, if she kept her will strong, she would get the chance to prove herself. But what if she never got that chance? What if this was the closest she ever came to a real fight? What if the trial by fire that would allow her to show her worth never came?

Naila reached out and touched the destroyed ‘Mech’s searing steel hide again and forced herself not to pull her hand away, grimacing as she tested the strength of her will against the pain.

[Daryk]

There's going to be a conversation with a somewhat cross medic in her future... :D

[Elmoth]

More please. I like the character development in this story.

[Middcore]

More please. I like the character development in this story.

Thanks. That's very encouraging. When I was a kid and I'd read BattleTech novels I would look for the 'Mech combat parts and kind of skim everything else, and to honest I think there's still a lot of BT fiction being published that have engaging plots without engaging characters, so having someone tell me I'm succeeding at character development really means a lot.

[Elmoth]

I reallyu like the Kats. I think their stories are up there with the top crop of any official BT fiction publication.

[Middcore]

Chapter 10: Bedside Manner

Kit hated hospitals.

Of course, she reflected as she sat in the stuffy waiting area, she had never met anyone who liked them. Maybe the people who worked in them did - the doctors and nurses and researchers who had chosen the business of saving lives. Kit had spent far more time in the company of people who were in the business of taking them. The same business she was in now.

The last time she had seen her grandfather was in a hospital bed, just before she had left Galatea as a junior tech with Pressler’s Privateers. He had not tried to convince her to stay. When she made it back to the Mercenary’s Star several months later she had returned to the hospital to find he was gone. It hadn’t come as a great surprise. She had sat in a waiting room much the same as the one she found herself in now and realized that she was well and truly alone in the universe.

She had gotten used to being on her own, to relying on herself. Most of the time she could be alone without being lonely. But hospitals were the loneliest places in existence.

“Captain… Söderlund?”

Kit could hear the doctor’s surprise and skepticism when the woman laid eyes on her, despite the effort she made to hide it. If her coveralls had been inappropriate for the meeting with the Marquis and the militia general, they were hardly more appropriate for this setting, but she hadn’t been planning on coming to the hospital in the heart of Calseraigne’s capital. Stupid, she thought to herself. They didn’t believe me. I came here for nothing.

“If you would please follow me, Captain?”

Kit tried to hide her own surprise as she stood up and fell into step beside the doctor. “I must say, Captain, this is highly irregular,” the woman said, the heels of her shoes clicking on the scrubbed floors. She flicked a side-eyed gaze over Kit once again. “I would have expected the Marquis to at least send you with… some sort of credential. To be quite honest, we wouldn’t have believed the Marquis had sent you if we hadn’t recognized you. From the news, I mean.”

Kit and her people had managed to avoid press attention after their clash with the raiders. All of it had gone to the Marquis. Kit realized to her chagrin that the doctor would only mean the coverage of her and the Marquis being fished out of the river. Well, it got me in the door.

“I apologize, doctor,” Kit said. “I would have come better prepared, but when the Marquis received the report the enemy MechWarrior was alive and conscious, it was imperative to find out what information could be gleaned about the attack from him as soon as possible.” True enough, except that the fact-finding mission was her own, and not the Marquis’s as she had implied.

“Hmm. Well, I don’t think you’ll get anything very useful from him at the moment. But I can give you ten minutes with him for the Marquis’s sake.”

At the end of the wing, an overweight hospital security guard stood by the only room with its door shut. “No offense, but is this security adequate?” Kit asked.

The doctor stopped in front of the door and crossed her arms. “Let me be clear with you, Captain. We had to amputate the man’s right leg above the knee, and his right arm just below the elbow. With the dose of painkillers he’s on, he would be no danger to anyone even if all of his limbs were intact.” She nodded at the security guard, who produced a key card to unlock the room. “Still… you can see for yourself. Ten minutes, Captain.” She spun on her heel and clicked away back up the corridor. Kit slowly entered the room and heard the door shut and lock behind her.

The curtains in the room were pulled shut, and the only illumination came from blinking lights on the various devices on either side of the bed monitoring the patient’s vitals. The room was silent, and for a moment Kit thought that perhaps the raider had lapsed back into unconsciousness, or at least fallen asleep. Then she felt the hair on the back of her neck stand on end and knew she was wrong - she was being watched. Kit’s hand found the switch on the wall and she flipped on the light. She heard a groan and what might have been a muttered obscenity.

The raider’s bed was positioned so that the man’s left side faced the door. From this perspective, the man’s injuries weren’t immediately apparent. Only as Kit took a step closer did she see the bandages wrapped around his right arm and leg, or what was left of them. The sight brought her up short in spite of the doctor’s description.

“The other nurse was cuter.” The man’s voice was somewhat high, cracking.

“I’m not a nurse,” she replied.

“Well, you’re sure as hell not the interrogation goon squad.”

The raider giggled idiotically at his own joke as Kit approached his bedside. His gaze was benign and somewhat unfocused, clearly showing the effects of the amount of drugs in his system. Up close, Kit decided that he wouldn’t have looked very intimidating even with whole limbs and a fully lucid mind. He was thin, and his features were an odd mixture of youthful and haggard, like they had been frozen in place by a hard life before having a chance to fill out to maturity. It was a face that gave a stronger impression of a kicked dog than a hungry wolf.

The raider stopped laughing and lay there blinking at her. Kit realized she had made no actual plan for how she was going to get any useful information out of the man if she managed to bluff her way this far.

“I know you’re not Capellan,” she said flatly.

There had been plenty of time to examine the downed Phoenix Hawk before hauling it from the desert to the Garde base on the Kats’ MRV, and Kit had spent enough time wrenching on BattleMechs to know this one was not what it appeared to be - what someone was trying to make it appear to be. The Capellan Confederation national insignias had only recently been applied, but insignia for any specific unit was totally absent. The machine was in an overall poor state of maintenance, worse than Kit would expect from a ‘Mech belonging to a Great House military. To be fair, Kit had never worked on a House ‘Mech - but the Hawk was in worse shape than any clapped-out merc ‘Mech she had ever had the misfortune of trying to patch back together.

The raiders weren’t Liao. She would bet her life on it, almost. But since everyone else - the Marquis, the militia, even Naila - seemed to be taking it for granted they were, and she didn’t have any idea who they might really be instead, it hadn’t seemed like a good idea to bring that up during the meeting. The more complicated the contract on Calseraigne became, the more it seemed like every move she made might actually mean betting her life.

“Well,” the raider said, dreamily, “So what do you want me to do? Argue?”

“So I want you to tell me who you really are, and why you came here,” Kit said. It can’t really be this easy? Can it? “If you’re a  pirate, there’s nothing in the city worth looting.”

The raider shook his head slightly. “Won’t argue with that either. Wouldn’t know, I guess.” His eyes grew cloudier and his forehead creased in a hint of a frown. “They weren’t supposed to be there.”

“Who wasn’t?”

He seemed to notice her again after having drifted away somewhere else. “Who wasn’t what?”

Nope. Not going to be easy. “You said someone wasn’t supposed to be somewhere,” she said as patiently as she could. “What did you mean?”

“Somewhere?” the raider repeated, sounding amused. “We’re in a hospital. I know why I’m here.” He raised the stump of his right arm feebly and then let it fall back to the bed. “You’re not a nurse… so why are you here?” He started to dissolve into giggles again.

It was a fair question. Kit walked back over to the locked door and slumped against it. Whether the maimed man was truly as drug-addled as he seemed or simply ****** with her (which she couldn’t totally rule out), she wasn’t getting anything very useful out of him, certainly nothing she could use to help her plot a course out of the murky situation she had gotten her outfit into on this world. She really didn’t know anything more than she had when she arrived at the hospital.

The raider had fallen silent again and was staring vacantly up at the light in the ceiling. When she approached his bedside once more his eyes showed dull surprise, as though he had already forgotten she was there.

“I killed your friend,” she said. “The one in the Javelin. I killed him.” She meant for the statement to sound matter-of-fact, like it was of no greater significance to her than saying it looked like it was going to rain. Listening to her own voice, she didn’t think she had been entirely convincing.

Still, her gambit had produced some effect on the crippled man in the bed. She could tell because while he laughed again, it was a very different laugh from the moronic, spaced-out tittering she had heard before. It was hoarse and bitter and unpleasant. “First,” the raider said, “Dimi wasn’t my friend. He was a lucky sumbitch, that’s all I’ll say for him. Until he wasn’t, I guess. Second,” he glanced at where his right hand should have been with a look of surprise, then held up two fingers on his left hand instead. “Second, you might have killed him… but you’re no killer.”

“How do you figure?” she asked, wondering whether this was just leading to more painkiller-produced dream logic.

The hoarse laugh again. “Because,” he said, “Whole time you’ve been in here, you won’t look at me.”

She scoffed. “I’m looking at you right now.”

“No.” He shook his head slowly on the pillow. “You’ve been… been looking at my damn face this whole time. Never been that malfing handsome. You just don’t want to look at me. At what I am now.” He raised the remnant of his right arm and feebly waved it back and forth at her like he was trying to brandish a weapon held in fingers that were no longer there.

Kit spun on her heel and paced the room, cursing herself once again for wasting time by coming to a place she hated to be taunted by a doped-up, crippled pirate. He was watching her as she stalked at the end of the bed. “You weren’t supposed to be there,” he said. “Militia here doesn’t have any ‘Mechs.”

“I’m not militia,” she sighed, and realized that the raider had probably learned more about her than she had about him.

“Oh.” He nodded slightly. “So did you come here to say you’re sorry?”

“I didn’t put you in that bed.”

“Not for this,” he replied. “For Dimi, since you thought he was my friend.”

She shook her head. “I was doing my job.”

“Oh,” he said again. “What is it then, killer? Why are we talking? You like hospitals so much? You just lonely?”

She was really starting to hate this man. “When I kill someone,” she snarled at him, “I like to have some idea why.”

He wasn’t watching her anymore. He was blinking up at the light again. “What for?” he asked placidly. “You’re just a finger on a trigger, same as me. Right, killer?”

For a moment Kit strongly considered physically harming the man, but she decided that assaulting cripples in hospital beds wasn’t something she was prepared to stoop to, even if she was in the business of killing people. Words would have to hurt him enough. “Speaking of fingers,” she spat, “You realize you’re never going to pilot a “Mech again, right?”

The not-Capellan, no-longer-a-MechWarrior regarded the bandaged stump of his forearm, and for a moment Kit thought he was going to dissolve into laughter again. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, that’s going to suck. Once I come down from all the shit they shot me up with and can really think about it.” He turned and looked at her, and though there was no hatred in his eyes, Kit found she didn’t want to meet his gaze. “Guess Dimi was the lucky one after all.” The raider’s head sank back into the pillow, and his eyes closed. Before Kit could think of anything else to say, he was asleep.

[Daryk]

That went almost as bad as her conversation with the Marquis is going to go... ;)

[Elmoth]

Well, this man will be as lucky as Dimi in a few hours, I guess. Overdose administered by a Marquis's goon is my bet. He is a loose thread form his public image and official discourse. And he can't have that.

I like how Kit is so far removed from the perfect protagonists of so much of battletech.

[Middcore]

Chapter 11: Pep Talk

“I’m a hundred percent sure now, Sarge,” Kit said. “Based on what I got out of that poor bastard…”

“What you got out of him while he was drugged out of his mind, you mean,” Smythe interjected.

Kit rolled her eyes. “Granted. But my bet is those guys we tangled with were mercs. They weren’t Capellan, and bandits don’t show up where there’s nothing to steal.”

Smythe nodded thoughtfully. “Alright. Mercs workin’ for who, though?”

Kit’s shoulders slumped and she kicked at a crack in the floor. “That I don’t know yet.”

“So a lance of mercs show up to get a bloody nose from us, but we don’t know who hired them or why.” He sipped his beer. “Yeah, makes perfect sense.”

“I can’t figure out why you don’t seem to care about this, Sarge,” she said, glaring at him. “We killed one of those people, Sarge. I killed one. Don’t you want to know who they were?” She turned away to look out over the darkening desert. The two of them were in a sort of control tower at the center of their temporary base, overlooking what had once been the docking area for patrol watercraft. With the southern Sablier long gone, it offered an unobstructed view of kilometers of desert on one side and of the Deloy skyline on the other.

“Might make things easier if we don’t,” Smythe said quietly. She remembered the maimed man’s words and suppressed a shiver. Just a finger on a trigger.

For three years she had leaned on Smythe as an outlet for anxiety and a source of trusted advice. Kit may have brought what a new merc outfit needed to get started - some minor notoriety on Galatea, some objectively foolhardy ambition, and most importantly a lance of ‘Mechs - but Smythe had brought the sober-headed experience that the unit to survive, if not exactly thrive. She didn’t kid herself about the fact that Smythe had, by any meaningful measure, been running the unit more than she had up to this point, although she hoped it wasn’t as obvious to everyone else as it was to her. He never challenged her decisions in front of the rest of the outfit or employers, but she would have been hard-pressed to think of a major decision she had made without consulting him.

Now, the murkier the situation on Calseraigne got and the more she felt she needed his advice, the more reticent to give it he seemed to become. “Don’t go looking for trouble” might be a decent maxim for the merc business much of the time, but Kit was increasingly convinced that the Kats were already in the middle of trouble, and in it deep. But Smythe couldn’t or wouldn’t see it, and not seeing eye to eye with him left Kit feeling confused and alone.

“So what did his honor have to say?” Smythe asked. “That above my pay grade?”

“Don’t act like you’re sorry you missed it,” she growled at him. “The Marquis wants us to train against the Gee Pees. Basically have us make his point that the militia’s not ready to protect this planet… as if we needed more proof of that. I can’t say I’ll mind embarrassing General Bollier, though.”

“Anything else?”

“Oh, nothing too important,” she said bitterly. “Just that he’s going to join the Duchy of Andurien because he says Calseraigne can’t keep going it alone anymore. He’s the Marquis, so he can just… do that, I guess? Go kiss old Catherine Humphreys’ ring or something and it’s a deal? Hell if I understand how it works.” She shrugged.

“Now that is above my pay grade,” Smythe said. “He ain’t payin’ us to give him political advice, though.”

“Political mistakes lead to wars, Sarge!” she replied, running her hands through her hair in frustration. “And he clearly thinks this decision could blow up in his face when the rest of Calseraigne finds out about it, or he wouldn’t have told me and the militia brass about it even before he told the civilian government.” She stared through the sand-blasted windows into the night. “Everything that happens makes me think it’s more likely we’re going to end up in the middle of a civil war.”

“Always a non-zero chance when you take a contract in the League,” Smythe drawled. “Occupational hazard, just like if you work in Steiner space you got to watch out for-...”

“Damn it, Sarge, will you get serious?” she exploded. “This isn’t a punchline! This is something that could kill our rep, if it doesn’t actually get us killed!”

“So what do you want me to do, kid?” Smythe asked, crossing his arms. “Argue with you?”

Kit’s thoughts ran back to the maimed raider in the hospital bed. Men contradicting, belittling, or dismissing what she had to say was something she had experienced often enough, but she had never imagined she could be so frustrated at having two men in one day refuse to argue with her. She turned her back on him and fought the urge to pace the cramped room.

“Alright,” Smythe said, breaking the silence. “Alright. You want serious? The fact is, if there’s going to be a civil war here, we probably can’t stop it. You’ve got to be realistic about what you can accomplish in this business we’re in. Hell, even the biggest names in the trade ain’t really changed the status quo. Few hundred years of fightin’ and dyin’ and it’s still the same five families runnin’ the show...” He shrugged. “Anyway, if everybody runnin’ the show on this rock is as determined to fall ass-backwards into a civil war as you think, there’s not much we can do about it. Historically, peacekeepers tend to get shot at by both sides…”

“Enough with the history lesson, Sarge,” she said with a tired smile. “I take your point. But if we can’t stop this, then we need to decide what we’re going to do when it comes.”

“Nothing new to tell you, kid,” he said. “Think about what the line you won’t cross is. Beyond that, whatever has the best chance of saving our asses and our rep… in that order of priority, I guess. Your call.”

Kit stared out into the night. My call. Smythe’s deference might have been intended to build up her confidence, but its effect was to make the weight of responsibility press down on her even more heavily. If there was anything to be said for her leadership of the unit for the past three years, she felt it was that she had managed to select contracts from the limited pool available to an outfit of the Kats’ insignificant stature where their duties were straightforward. But this… this contract was different, no mere bandit hunt or cadre stint. Kit tried to fight off the feeling that she had already made the wrong call in bringing them to Calseraigne in the first place.

“After all,” Smythe continued, clapping her on the shoulder as he ambled out of the room, “You ain’t gotten us killed or disgraced yet. From what I’ve heard, that means we’re beating the odds.”

[Daryk]

A cliffhanger invoking the name of the story?  That's next level, good sir! :)

[Elmoth]

Nice. I am sure the big guy is involved. But I am still debating with myself if he is in league with his supposed political opposition or not.
And that hospital guy is unlikely to survive the night.
In any case that PHX will be a good ride if Naila joins the unit.

[Horsemen]

Looking forward to the next installment. Thank you.

[Middcore]

Sorry for another delay. Holidays and then starting a new job. New chapters coming 'soon.'

[Daryk]

No worries!  Real life always takes precedence... :)

[Elmoth]

Congrats on the new job!!

We will wait, of course. Real life has right of passage.

[Horsemen]

Congratulations on the job! Hopefully you find it a decent place to be.

[Middcore]

Chapter 12: Fun and Games

Even standing at its foot, Kit’s trained eye couldn’t detect the telltale signs of repairs made over decades or centuries on the BattleMaster the way she could with most ‘Mechs. That was the kind of top-tier maintenance that being a hero of one of the Great House militaries got you, she supposed - and then when you pass the machine on to your descendant who doesn’t use it for anything besides looking impressive and attempting to murder people who were in the middle of surrendering…

She frowned and shook off the unpleasant though. Glancing at Sid Norris, she was surprised to see that he was making a sour face as well. “Not impressed?” she asked the young tech.

“Call me crazy,” Sid responded, “But I’ve just always thought the BattleMaster was a little… well, a little overrated. It has to get so close to really hit hard, and that big bubble head may as well be a shoot me here sign.”

Kit gazed up at the massive machine. In MechWarrior circles, Sid’s opinion would definitely have been in the minority; the BattleMaster design had built up an iconic reputation in its centuries of existence. None of the units Kit had worked for as a tech had been lucky enough to have one in their TO&E. This was as close as she had ever even come to one - and now she was going to get a chance to pilot it! She tried to focus on that thought to cheer herself up and chase away her worries.

“If it’s good enough for Hanse Davion and Takashi Kurita,” she observed, “It ought to be good enough for me.”

Sid scoffed. “And when was the last time the high and mighty Successor Lords did any real fighting?”

“Alright, how about James O’Gordon then? Grand champion of Solaris, 3009 to 3012.”

“Arena fighting isn’t real combat,” Sid declared.

That’s what I thought, Kit reflected, Right up until I almost got malfing killed. “Well, good thing today’s not real combat either then, Sid,” she pointed out. Just a friendly little war game, where if all goes as planned, I completely embarrass that fat ass General Bollier’s militia.

When the Marquis had revealed this underground hangar beneath the mansion of his estate, Kit realized it had somehow never occurred to her to wonder where he kept the BattleMaster he had piloted out into the Rust and maim that annoying bastard in the hospital bed. The hidden ‘Mech bay was big enough to accommodate and maintain a full lance, and had been built by the first Everett Marquis at a time when a Capellan effort to retake Calseraigne had seemed like a much more realistic possibility. The current Marquis related with apparent amusement that there were supposedly multiple hidden tunnels leading from the bunker out into Deloy or into the desert in case the Marquis ever needed to make a surreptitious escape from the estate, although he said that only his chief of security Lombard knew how many there were and where they led.

A short time later, Kit and Sid had completed their external “walk-around” inspection of the ‘Mech and all of Kit’s irritation was forgotten as she seated herself in the cockpit. As she and Sid began running startup diagnostics, she was struck by an uncanny feeling. She was used to ‘Mech cockpits that smelled like years of accumulated sweat, if not worse. The BattleMaster’s cockpit mostly just smelled stale, like the air in a room that had been shut up for a long time.

“It’s always pleasing to see people in their element. It helps you understand who they really are.”

Kit was so engrossed in checklists and monitor readouts that the familiar voice startled her. She turned to see the Marquis standing on the cherry-picker lift outside the cockpit, smiling at her. “The reception where we met was clearly - I trust you won’t be offended by my saying so - not an environment where you felt comfortable, “ he said. “Neither was the sky on our sightseeing flight the other day, although you were showing some natural aptitude. But here…” He nodded at her. “You have the look of someone who is where they feel at home. Where they are meant to be.”

It was strange how the Marquis saying she looked like she was right where she belonged had the effect of suddenly making her feel self-conscious and exposed. She had her maintenance coveralls unzipped down to her waist and tied around her hips, and the skin left bare by the tank top underneath suddenly chilled. “I’m not sure how to take that, my lord.”

“Take it as a compliment, Captain,” Everett said with a smile. “I could never get so comfortable in that seat in a hundred years. My father insisted I learn to at least march old Durandal around, but that’s about as far as I got.”

Kit banished the thought of the gutted Phoenix Hawk once more and looked at Everett quizzically. “Durandal?”

“The name my father gave this machine when he piloted it,” the Marquis explained. “Durandal was the sword of Roland in French legend. Most people who knew my father would have been surprised to discover he was so literary.” Kit wondered if every conversation with her employer was going to leave her feeling so uneducated. “He seemed a bit embarrassed himself when he told me,” Everett went on. “I was only a child then; perhaps he thought it would make me more interested. I've always been fascinated by the names people choose to give to war machines, though. BattleMaster is hardly one of the more imaginative. Remind me what type of 'Mech you normally pilot, Captain?"

"A Vindicator."

The nobleman nodded. "Ah. Sort of abstractly, philosophically belligerent. And have you given it a more personal name, if I may ask? That is if I’m not getting too personal, Captain.” Kit shook her head. The thought had never occurred to her - maybe, she reflected, because a part of her still didn’t think of the Vindicator as hers. “I heard once there is a type called a Guillotine, though, and I must say that is my favorite name for a 'Mech I've heard of,” Everett said. “It's very… honest.”

Kit blinked. "My lord?"

He smiled at her. "What is a BattleMech, if not a killing machine?" Before she could think of a response, he leaned forward and peered at the cockpit monitors. "Anyway, how is my ancestor's old steed holding up?"

It took a moment for Kit to remember what she had been doing. It was unlike her to lose focus on a technical task. "It's fully mobile. Reactor output is solid, no actuator squawks. I can't really be sure of the missile or machine gun ammo feeds unless we do a live fire test, but the PPC and lasers all show green, and it’s not like we’ll be using them at full power today anyhow.” She frowned as she continued to scroll through the results of the self-diagnostic check on one of the secondary cockpit displays. “It looks like there may be a problem with the life support…”

“That sounds rather bad.”

“It’s the sealing system. What keeps the cockpit airtight if you were operating underwater, or in an environment with a non-breathable atmosphere.”

“Ah,” the Marquis said with a chuckle. “So not a pressing concern for today’s pantomime, then.”

Kit smirked. "Won't get in the way of me showing up General Bollier's weekend warriors. The recordings are already loaded into the comm system. You’re confident the General will react the way we want?”

“I know the man all too well.” The day’s exercises would pit one force consisting of the bulk of the planetary militia’s armor and mobile infantry assets against another force consisting of the Kats and a much smaller militia detachment. In planning, Kit and the Marquis had bet that General Bollier, who had resisted all of the Marquis’s calls for reforming and strengthening the militia and whose troops had been caught flat-footed while the Marquis and his mercenaries had gotten the glory for fighting off the Capellan raid, would want to use the exercise to get a measure of revenge for that humiliation. This was the belief on which they had built their plan: that the Marquis’s BattleMaster would be both literally and figuratively the biggest target on the battlefield.

Except it wouldn’t be the Marquis in the BattleMaster. It would be Kit, broadcasting a few pre-recorded taunts from the nobleman on open frequencies to encourage the General to send his forces after her on a merry chase and neglect real objectives.

“Alright,” she said as she scrolled through the last diagnostic display. “Ready to bring the reactor up out of maintenance mode. The only thing, my lord,” she added, a little embarrassed to have to bring the subject up, “Is that I’ll need to know your spoken code phrase.”

“Hmmm?” Everett blinked at her. “Oh, that. There isn’t one.”

Kit’s jaw dropped. “It hardly seemed necessary,” Everett explained in response to her look of obvious shock. “If anyone could infiltrate my estate and reach this space, they could do worse things than steal this machine.”

Logically, what the nobleman said was true enough, but Kit still found it hard to comprehend. The code phrases MechWarriors used to unlock the full combat capabilities of their mounts were more than just practical security measures: they were, even if few ‘Mech jokes would actually say so, marks of ownership and the bond between human and machine. To own a BattleMech, one passed down through generations of family, and feel so little attachment to it…

Idiot, she chided herself. He has a whole planet to worry about. “Ah. Well then. In that case, it’s time to start the show.”

The Marquis flashed a dazzling smile at her. “Make me look good, Captain.”

He rode the lift down out of view as she dogged the cockpit canopy shut. Pulling the coveralls the rest of the way off, she put on her cooling vest and neurohelmet and jacked the helmet into the BattleMaster’s computer systems. There was the familiar, indescribable mental tingle that always accompanied the moment her own sense of balance began to be transmitted to the huge machine’s gyros - but instead of dissipating quickly like she was used to in her Vindicator, it lingered at the base of her skull. It was a telltale sign of the pilot and machine being slightly out of sync - inevitable unless she had the chance to continue piloting the BattleMaster for an extended period of time so the ‘Mech could imprint with her neural patterns, which was highly unlikely.

No matter. The slight discomfort wouldn’t be enough to stop a MechWarrior trained by a veteran of the Draconis Combine Mustered Soldiery’s elite Sword of Light regiments from running rings around some backwater militia. It wasn’t even discomfort, really - more like a nagging worry in the back of the mind, like when you feel you’ve forgotten to do something important. As the BattleMaster took its first step, that worry faded into the background like all of her others - worries about what her employer might be hiding from her, about who was really behind the “Capellan” raid, about her unit getting drawn into a civil conflict, about whether she had been foolish to take this contract at all with so little information. For the first time since she had arrived on the planet, she was looking forward to having some fun.

[Daryk]

She's only missing the worry about her cockpit not being actually sealed... ::)

[Elmoth]

I can see a few more things than she mentioned as turning bad for that reason as well...

[Middcore]

Chapter 13: A Chance Encounter

Once again, Mathieu found himself stuck out in the middle of the dead lake, against his will, listening to a fool. Truly, nothing ever really changed.

“Try radioing company command again,” Fleury said from where lay sprawled on top of the Galleon tank. Mathieu had heard that a galleon was a type of ship, from long long ago, on Terra. That seemed appropriate; with its broken track, right now the tank was about as useless as the rest of the disintegrating abandoned vessels that dotted the dry seabed.

“They don’t answer,” Savard replied, popping up from the driver’s hatch near the front of the vehicle. “Nobody in the whole company answers.”

Fleury swore. “The Marquis and his damned mercenaries can’t have gotten them all.”

“They got most of the second company before we ever got out here,” Savard observed. Fleury’s only response to this was to turn his head and spit over the side of the tank.

When Sacha had made his last self-pitying joyride out into the Rust, Mathieu had just been relieved at first that for once his brother wasn’t dragging him along. When Sacha hadn’t returned by sunset, he wasn’t overly concerned. Even when the sandstorm had started to blow in, Mathieu had figured the odds were better than even that his brother would sheepishly drive back into the village the next morning. The two of them had spent a night out in the wastes during a sandstorm once before as mere boys, huddled terrified inside an old hulk. They had gotten the whipping of their lives when they had made their way back home the next day, and had given solemn promises to never do anything so stupid again, but for years afterwards when it was just the two of them they had looked back with pride on their adventure.

By sundown the day after the night after the storm Sacha still hadn’t reappeared. The next morning Mathieu had borrowed a buggy and gone out to look for his brother. At least in theory that’s what he was doing. Driving around aimlessly would have been a more accurate description of what he was doing. The storm had erased any tracks. A day of wandering found no trace, but Mathieu never expected to find any.

People in the village said they were sorry. They said all the things they were supposed to say, at first. It hadn’t taken long after that for life in the village to become unbearable for him, though. He couldn’t stand the way they looked at him. Like he was somehow responsible, like it had been his job to look after his brother even though he was younger. Because after all, everyone knew that Sacha was a fool.

Anyway, there was nothing left tying him there. They had all but laughed at him at the militia base when he said he wanted to enlist. He told them honestly he had no interest in fighting, and probably wouldn’t be very good at it, but that he could drive well enough and that he was good at fixing things. They probably would have thrown him out, but by a stroke of luck, the recruiting officer had a malfunctioning climate control unit in his office.

Mathieu gathered quickly that the Garde Planétaire didn’t do much fighting, but there were always things that needed fixing. That was why most of the militia members who were supposed to do the fighting, assuming any ever occurred, had other jobs and only came to the base a few days a month, but Mathieu got to live in the barracks full-time.

He didn’t make any friends, but he had never really had friends besides Sacha. The other techs made fun of him for being a “backwards Ruster,” and when they had to explain some things to him at first as though it was his fault he had never had a chance to work on a tank or a VTOL before, but as always he caught on quickly and then was mostly left to work in peace. He couldn’t say he was happy, exactly, but he was more optimistic than he had felt in a long time. A year, maybe two in the militia would prove his mechanical skill, and then maybe he could parlay that into a civilian job somewhere else in the capital, and then maybe, just maybe, with a little luck, he could build on that experience to get a ticket off Calseraigne.

“Wonder where the Marquis gets the money to hire a bunch of mercenaries, anyway?” Savard said idly. Mathieu had no concept of how much money it took to hire a mercenary unit, or how much money it was realistic to expect the Marquis to have.

Fleury sat up and waved his finger at his companion. “He got the money for his mercenaries the same place he got the funds to build that dam out there. And for what? To get the thanks of some destitute Rusters?” It apparently did not occur to the man to ask Mathieu’s opinion on whether the Rusters were grateful for the Marquis’s project, but Mathieu had gotten used to people talking like he wasn’t there. “There’s a fortune out here, underneath us.”

When the Marquis’s plane had been shot down, there had been days of inconclusive debate at the militia base about who was responsible. Mathieu didn’t feel informed enough to venture an opinion, but he quickly realized that the Marquis was not beloved by all of his new comrades. One popular theory about the attack was that it was the work of spies from House Liao, a theory that had gained even more support after the attempted Capellan raid on the capital, although Mathieu hadn’t even known the attack was happening until after the Marquis and his mercenaries had stopped it. On reflection, Mathieu decided that as long as he didn’t have to do any fighting, he didn’t much care if the Capellans conquered the world. Regardless of whose flag flew over Calseraigne, there would always be things that needed fixing.

Shortly after that the war games had been announced and Mathieu was busier than ever as he and the rest of the support technicians were asked to get more of the militia’s vehicles running all at once than he had seen since enlisting. When the work was done and the day of the exercise came, Mathieu had been looking forward to taking a well-earned rest… until his sergeant had put him behind the wheel of a truck and told him to drive out to a dot on a map in search of a broken-down tank.

And so that was how he found himself listening to the complaints of a fool. Well, arguably two fools. Fleury was definitely a fool. As for Savard, Mathieu wasn’t so sure about him, but that was only because he talked less.

Fleury peered over the side of the Galleon at him. “Aren’t you about finished yet? When the sandstorm blows in they’ll call this whole thing off, and I don’t want to be the only ones still out here.”

Mathieu glared up at him. “What if the Capellans attacked in the middle of a sandstorm?”

“Shut up, Mathieu! You don’t know anything! You probably didn’t even know the Capellan Confederation existed a month ago.” Fleury resumed his sprawled position on the back of the Galleon. “I keep trying to tell everyone, all of this paranoia about the Capellans is nonsense.” He spat over the side of the tank again to emphasize his contempt, and Mathieu shouted in protest as the projectile almost landed on his shoulder. “Stay sharp, Ruster,” Fleury sneered, “You’re in a combat zone now after all.”

“So who do you suppose shot down the Marquis’s plane, then?” Savard asked.

“Bah! It’s simple…” Fleury began. Mathieu was sure that the two had had this conversation before, possibly several times, but apparently Savard found going through it all once more preferable to sitting in bored silence.

Mathieu would have welcomed silence, but when it came it brought a sudden feeling of unease.  He wasn’t much interested in Fleury’s theory, but it was unusual enough for Fleury to stop talking once he got going that when the steady drone of his voice did stop the effect was startling. Mathieu stopped working and looked up to see what the matter was.

“Do you hear that?” Fleury asked.

From somewhere in the desert came a muted rumble of rhythmic, reverberating impacts. Mathieu stared out across the dunes, bewildered.

“‘Mech!” shouted Savard. It was the first time Mathieu had ever heard him sound excited. “‘Mech coming!”

“Get the engine started!” shouted Fleury, rolling towards his hatch.

“The track isn’t fixed yet,” Mathieu pointed out mildly.

“Bah! You’re useless!”

Their heads disappeared inside the tank and the hatches closed behind them, leaving Mathieu standing by himself. There was a scratchy whining sound from within the Galleon as Savard tried to start the engine, then it abruptly subsided with a cough of black exhaust smoke that made Mathieu wince.

In the meantime the BattleMech footfall sounds were getting steadily closer. Mathieu trudged back to the truck, climbed into the cab, and considered what to do. There was no way to know if more ‘Mechs and vehicles might be swarming into this part of the waste any minute as the war games went on without him, and if that happened he would have preferred to be out of the way. He could drive back to the base and report that the Galleon, in addition to a thrown track, now had an engine problem which he didn’t have the parts or tools to fix. But was it better to wait until the tide of simulated battle had passed by and suggest to Fleury and Savard that they come back with him in the truck? If he didn’t, there was a chance they might have to ride out the sandstorm here in the waste. Surely they would be safe enough inside a tank. But they were fools…

Then the ‘Mech came in sight and all other thoughts vanished from his mind.

Technically, it was not the first time that Mathieu had seen a BattleMech up close. Like everyone else at the Garde base, he had walked out to gawk at the wreck of the Capellan ‘Mech the Marquis and his mercenaries had brought down. It hadn’t made much of an impression on him, looking like little more than a giant metal marionette with its strings cut.

Seeing a BattleMech functional and on the move was something else entirely. Mathieu was not awed, exactly. The sheer size of the machine was impressive, yes, but it was still just a machine, and not a very elegant or imposingly-designed one at that. Mathieu’s attention was immediately drawn to the large, almost oversized cockpit canopy which seemed in his (admittedly uninformed) opinion to leave the pilot far too exposed, although he assumed that the bubble canopy was made of tougher stuff than it appeared. More than anything else Mathieu felt an overwhelming curiosity. He wanted to take the thing apart and see how it worked.

As Mathieu watched, the ‘Mech leveled the muzzle of the weapon held in its right hand for a moment at the lifeless Galleon, then turned its attention on the nearby truck with him at the wheel. It was near enough now that Mathieu thought that he should have been able to see the pilot inside through the cockpit canopy, but the polarized bubble gave him only a faint outline of a person’s head and shoulders encased in the awkward neurohelmet. As Mathieu gazed upwards, transfixed, the ‘Mech’s left fist unclenched and pointed at him with an index finger, then jerked upwards. The gesture would have been understandable to any child playing war games in the Rust: Bang! You’re dead.

The BattleMech made a shuffling turn and stomped off into the waste. Mathieu climbed out of the truck’s cab and watched it go. Behind him he heard the creak of the Galleon’s hatches opening up again, and a steady stream of profanity.

“Was that him? What type of ‘Mech was that?” shouted Fleury

“It was a BatteMaster,” Savard answered. “At least, I think it was.”

This triggered another burst of foul language from his companion. “That’s his ‘Mech! Us just stuck here with our thumbs up our asses, and that was him!”

“Who?” Mathieu asked.

“The Marquis, you idiot Ruster! You don’t know anything!”

[Daryk]

Glad to see a new post! :)

[Elmoth]

Bang, you are dead.
Hah! :)

[Middcore]

Part III

“The end move in politics is always to pick up a gun.”
-Attributed to R. Buckminster Fuller

Chapter 14: A Bad Day

The thought crept into Kit’s mind that she might actually score a point. She was tired and sweaty and frustrated and she had channeled all of it into a reckless assault which she had not seriously expected to meet with any success. And yet the ferociousness of her attack seemed to have taken her opponent by surprise; Naila was backpedaling rapidly and in a few more steps would run out of piste to retreat.

That was what Kit was thinking about right up until the moment Naila’s blade thwacked on the top of her mask, and even for a few moments after as her brain rushed to process what had happened.

Kit ripped her mask off and stood bent over double, swearing at herself in between puffing, exhausted breaths.”Be honest with me,” she said, “Am I getting any better?”

Naila smiled at her indulgently, shaking out hair compressed by her own fencing mask and looking like she had barely gotten her heart rate up. “Yes! You don’t hold the sabre like you’re swinging a hatchet anymore. So that’s something.”

As a child, Kit had seen a couple of the samurai-themed period holovid dramas of the type the Draconis Combine’s entertainment industry churned out endlessly, bloody, moody affairs she was probably-definitely too young for, and had become briefly fascinated by swordplay. She discovered that on many other worlds Combine space, schools had kendo clubs, but her school on the backwater planet of Outpost did not. She had complained to her grandfather that it was unfair that other children got to play with swords and she didn’t, and he said that if she looked at it as “playing with swords” it was best that she didn’t get to do it, which did nothing to make her feel better about the injustice. By the time her parents had left the Combine for Galatea she had mostly forgotten about it. Her knowledge of the type of fencing that Naila practiced was limited to a hazy idea of white outfits and the phrase “En garde.”

Still, when Naila had offered to introduce her to the sport, Kit had readily accepted. After seeing Naila’s skill in their simulated ‘Mech duel, she had a vague hope that participating in a combat-inspired activity with Naila might make some of the Marik officer’s ability rub off on her.

So much for that idea.

The fitness center in what passed for Deloy’s business district had two fencing strips. Naila had pronounced the electronic scoring equipment “basic at best,” there was no one to referee, and after weeks of practice Kit was still finding it difficult to wrap her head around the rules of “right of way.” (The whole thing struck her as slightly ridiculous, and made her try to imagine a ‘Mech battle where the two sides took turns.) None of that mattered much, since whenever she and Naila sparred there was never the slightest doubt about who was winning.

“You’re very persistent. Very determined,” Naila was saying, probably not meaning for it to sound as patronizing as it did.

“Had an old CO tell me something like that,” Kit said sourly.

“If I’m being honest, though, I think this may not be the sport for you. But it has nothing to do with skill. It just doesn’t necessarily… play to your strengths.”

Kit quirked an eyebrow at her.

“Do you mind if I do a little psychoanalysis?”

“Was that a class at Princefield?”

Naila laughed and shook her head. “No, so take this for what it’s worth. The thing about fencing is that it’s very… narrow. And I don’t just mean the piste. The rules, the equipment, everything is designed to take something that was actual combat and put it in a civilized little box. There’s room in that box for a mental element, for strategy… but the range of tactics is very limited. There isn’t much room for improvisation.”

“Improvisation?”

“Right. Like the way you… improvised tactics in our simulator duel.”

Kit blinked at her, then scowled. “You’re saying that I’ll never be good at fencing because fencing makes it too hard to cheat.”

“That’s an ugly word,” Naila said, “One I was trying very hard not to use because my mother used to tell me I would get in trouble by being too honest.” She grinned. “Call it what you like, it worked well for you in that exercise with the Garde.”

The plan hatched by Kit and the Marquis had worked even better than they had  hoped. The militia had chased her in circles around the desert believing she was Everett while the rest of the Kats had taken exercise objectives and pickled off straggling militia units easily. Of course, the version of events that had made it to the press made no mention of the ruse, creating the Marquis himself with actually humiliating the GP - adding to his heroic reputation after his “victory” over the supposedly Capellan raiding force. Kit tried not to let that irritate her. Merc does the work, employer gets the credit. Old, old story.

The two women returned to the locker room, where Kit changed out of her borrowed fencing jacket into civilian clothes. Naila was back in her FWLM field uniform. Kit wondered whether the other woman even had anything else in her closet. “You know,” Naila said, “Ever since you saw off those Capellans, and then the exercise, I’ve had a spike of interest in militia wanting to give the sim pods a try.”

Kit scoffed. “I don’t know whether to say sorry or you’re welcome.”

Naila shrugged. “It gives me something to do, since my advice on military matters to the planetary government isn’t in high demand.”

“Do any of the ‘Mech-mad hopefuls show any signs of promise?”

“One or two might not be hopeless,” Naila chuckled. “There’s one in particular who certainly picks up anything on the technical side quickly. I actually had him walk that raider Hawk around the base last week and he managed not to fall on his face.”

“Glad to hear all the time Sid and I spent getting the thing walking again was well spent,” Kit said sardonically. The deal the Kats had made with the GP for the use of the militia’s repair facilities was so far turning out to be rather one-sided. Half of the Kats’ ‘Mechs were still shot up from the skirmish with the mystery raiders because the militia wanted her to prioritize resurrecting the salvaged Phoenix Hawk.

“Using it to give the wannabes some real seat time was my idea,” Naila said. “The militia brass just want it to be able to march in a parade for League Day.”

Kit remembered a conversation with Sid about the Kats’ contract on Caleraigne amounting to parade duty, and vaguely wondered whether she should be offended that they were apparently not going to be invited to participate in the actual parade, when she was distracted by the flatscreen hanging in the corner of the locker room.

It was tuned to a news commentary program, where a panel of talking heads were discussing the same thing that was being discussed on every similar program Kit had seen recently: the possibility of Calseraigne joining the Duchy of Andurien. The topic had dominated the attention of the world’s press for weeks.

But the Marquis had never had the chance to publicly announce the plan as he had told Kit, Naila, and the militia officers he intended to.

Someone in the meeting had leaked.

Kit had never been comfortable with keeping the Marquis’s secret, but she had accepted it as part of her job. She was much less comfortable with the idea that one of the other people who had sat around that table - someone else the Marquis had taken into his confidence - apparently couldn’t be trusted. Especially since one of them was the only person she had met on Calseraigne so far who had seemed entirely trustworthy.

Kit glanced over at Naila. The other woman seemed to have taken no notice at all of the commentary show. Kit chewed her lip and pondered whether she was frustrated enough to do something she knew was likely to make a bad day worse.

“Naila, what’s your take on this?” she asked, nodding at the screen, where a chyron read MARQUIS TO ADDRESS ASSEMBLY TODAY.

The Marik officer glanced up and shrugged. “I don’t know why you’re asking me. Nobody in the planetary government has, and it’s my job to advise them.”

“You’re dodging the question.” Kit winced at the sound of her own voice. The statement sounded more accusatory than she had intended. Truthfully, she had blurted it out in surprise. From the moment they had met Naila had seemed nothing but direct and forthright, a quality Kit had come to appreciate more as the situation on Calseraigne had become less and less clear.

“Sorry,” Kit said hastily. “It’s just that I’ve been relying on you to help me keep up with the politics in play here, and we haven’t talked about it… since word got out, I mean.”

Nailed paused as though considering her words carefully. “I can understand the Marquis’s reasoning. Even if we don’t fully understand the reasons for the Capellan raid, it shows they’re looking at Calseraigne, and if the resource project on the seabed is as successful as everyone seems to expect, then this planet is going to become a more valuable piece of real estate.” She sighed. “I wish the Marquis had made the leaders of the Assembly aware first, though. He’s clearly going to do whatever he thinks is best, in the end, but I can’t help but feel that we shouldn’t have been the first to know.”

“Do you feel strongly enough about it that you decided you had to let the Assembly know?”

A part of Kit regretted the words as soon as they were out of her mouth. That part got bigger when she saw the wall go up behind Naila’s eyes. It was like looking at an entirely different person than the woman she had come to think of as a friend.

“How I feel has nothing to do with it, Kit,” Naila said quietly. “If it was my duty in my capacity as an advisor to the planetary government to inform them of what the Marquis was planning to do, I would do it.”

“I’m not questioning your commitment to your duty,” Kit said, raising her hands as if she could climb over the barrier she felt rising up between them. “But you said if it was your duty. Did you tell them or not?”

Naila stared at her for a moment. “If you must know,” Naila said at last, “To be honest, I debated with myself whether I had an obligation to inform the Assembly. But I was still trying to make up my mind when the story broke.”

Kit chewed on that. “So it was someone else in that room.”

Naila nodded. “Realistically, General Bollier or his aide. I can never remember that man’s name.” She shrugged. “Of course there’s also the Marquis himself, but I don’t see why he would tell us all to keep it secret until he could inform the Assembly and then leak it himself.” She crossed her arms over her chest. “Do I get to know why this is so important to you? I get that the Marquis is your employer, but he isn’t paying you to be offended on his behalf.”

“It’s not that,” Kit said. “It’s…” Kit ran her fingers through sweaty red-brown hair in frustration. “Naila, I’m worried. Something is going on here, besides the obvious political bullshit I mean. Everyone is up in arms about what the Marquis is going to do, and nobody was even supposed to know about it, and he decided to do it because of a Capellan raid that wasn’t even really the Capellans, and someone already tried to kill him and maybe me too…” Kit knew she must sound unhinged, but she couldn’t stop the words from pouring out of her.

“Wait, wait, wait,” Naila said, throwing up her hands. “Back up. What do you mean, it wasn’t really the Capellans?”

Kit looked around. The locker room had emptied. They were alone. “I started to have doubts when I got a close look at that Phoenix Hawk,” she explained, “And when I talked to the pilot at the hospital I became sure of it.”

Naila blinked. “You talked to him? When? Not even the Garde got a chance before he died.”

The floor seemed to heave under Kit’s feet.

“He’s dead? When?”

“It couldn’t have been more than two or three days after our meeting with the Marquis when we got the news he was conscious. You talked to him?”

Kit nodded. “Right after that meeting with the Marquis. I BS’d the doctors, said the Marquis sent me. I didn’t get much useful info out of the bastard… or any, really. But there’s no way he was Liao. And when I left him, he was a long way from death’s door.”

“What I heard is that he caught a severe infection and faded fast,” Naila said, furrowing her brow. “These things do happen I guess, and the medical treatment on a world like this is hardly the best in the Inner Sphere.”

Kit took a deep breath. Now she’ll really think I’ve lost it. “Or someone wanted to make sure he didn’t talk to anybody.”

She had expected Naila to laugh. Instead, the Marik officer sat down on a bench and stared into the middle distance. “If he wasn’t Capellan, then what was he? Who benefits from a useless raid with no target? Or are we still just not seeing the target?” Kit couldn’t tell if her friend meant for her to try to answer these questions or if she was just thinking out loud, but she was overwhelmed with relief that Naila seemed to be taking her seriously at all.

At that moment Kit heard her communicator beeping from a pocket in her gym bag. She pulled it out and read a message that made her groan.

Naila looked up. “Problem?”

Kit sighed. “Not compared to what we’ve been talking about. Looks like one of my boys had a bit too much fun here in town last night and I need to smooth some ruffled feathers.”

“One of the less glamorous parts of a CO’s job,” Naila observed with a sideways smile. “I’m envious.”

“You’re welcome to sub in for me on this one,” Kit shot back.

“No thanks, I’m sure I have something to do back at the Garde base.”

“Of course,” Kit said dryly as she picked up her bag. “Look, Naila: I want to thank you for taking me seriously on this. And for…” She paused awkwardly and then powered forward. “What I mean is, I haven’t always had the easiest time making friends, and you’ve always been fair and honest to me, ever since we met at the Marquis’s reception.” That night felt like a standard year ago now instead of just a few local months.

Naila extended her hand. “I’m sure you and Émile Gamelin would get along famously if he just took time to get to know you,” she chuckled. “Have fun smoothing,” she added as Kit shook her hand. “With any luck, you’ll be done in time to see the Marquis’s speech.”

Kit was headed for the door when the other woman called after her. “Kit? Try not to worry. We’re going to figure this out. And whatever happens, remember I’m on your side.”

[Daryk]

Glad to see another update! :)

[Elmoth]

Confirming allies. Unless there is a plot twist of Naila being the bad guy (girl) of the story, but I doubt it.

I can see the usefulness of a PHX piloted by a Princefield graduate for the Kats.

[Middcore]

Chapter 15: A Bad Day (continued)

“I’m sorry, I couldn’t hear you,” the gendarme behind the desk said, gesturing vaguely at the flatscreen on the wall where commentators continued to drone on while awaiting the arrival of the Marquis at the Assembly of Deputies hall. “You are who?”

The gendarme was a slight man with thinning hair, with an appearance and demeanor more like a maitre’d than a law enforcement officer, and he didn’t seem to be finding Kit on the restaurant’s reservation list. Of course, it would help if she met the dress code. Before our next contract, uniforms, she mentally resolved.

“I’m Captain Söderlund of the Black Kats,” she repeated.

The man flicked his eyes up and down her workout clothes once more. Two of his colleagues continued to peck away languidly at noteputers. “Ah, yes. Forgive me, Captain,” the man said finally, without a trace of sincerity. “I did not recognize you. You look different when you are not, ah, soaking wet.” Kit wondered if her only legacy on this planet would be a vague memory people had of the footage of her and the Marquis being fished out of the river after his plane had been shot down. The gendarme stared at her with bored expectation.

“I understand that you’re holding one of my men,” she said, forcing what she thought was a reasonably appropriate apologetic grimace. “I was hoping I could-...”

“Ah, yes,” the gendarme said, abruptly standing. “You will follow me.”

He led Kit and Palmberg back into the detention area. There were three cells, all empty except for the last one. Behind the bars, Rask sat on a cot. “Hey, boss,” he said to Palmberg sheepishly as they looked up. Then, noticing Kit following in the burly infantry sergeant’s shadow, he hastily got to his feet. “Captain. Hello. Uh, you didn’t need to come. I mean, I’m sorry that you thought you had to come. I mean…”

“Save it,” Palmberg barked.

In the back of her mind, Kit had been expecting something like this to happen. The Kats’ squad-and-a-half of infantry were all natives of Lurgatan, where the Kats had served a contract helping to train the planet’s militia. At the end of the deployment, a handful of militiamen had decided to try out the glamorous mercenary life - specifically, a handful of the youngest, with the least attachment to their homeworld and the least discipline. Kit didn’t feel she had been in a position to turn them down. Infantry wouldn’t make your TO&E as sexy as more ‘Mechs, but they did give an outfit the capability to perform some missions an all-BattleMech unit couldn’t. Of course, the more people you added to an outfit, the more people there were to get themselves into trouble. Admonitions of “best behavior” only went so far.

“Could you give us a minute?” she asked the gendarme. He sniffed and walked back the way they had come.

“Alright, Rask,” Kit said, turning to look at the trooper through the bars. “Tell us what happened.”

“Well, Captain, what happened is… well, me and Gatzke and Gouveia were off-duty last night, so we took one of the jeeps into the city to, you know, unwind a little. And in the place we ended up, that is, the last place we ended up, we got to talking to some locals, and they were singing the Marquis’s praises for whipping the Capellans. And I said that we, well, that is you, because it’s not like me and Gatzke and Gouveia were out there in the desert tangling with ‘Mechs, but that you deserved some of the credit, too.”

“And the locals got upset?”

“Well, the ones we were talking to at first, they just got a little bit upset. But then this other bunch who were sitting at the next table, I guess they overheard us and figured out who we were, because they butted in and said some things about the Marquis, and some things about you, too, Captain, and your, ah, relationship with the Marquis, and then, uh, we got upset. And I don’t remember things after that so clearly, but I guess I ended up hitting one of them.”

Kit closed her eyes and massaged her temples. “Blake’s blood, Rask. I’m not your damn mother. You don’t need to defend my honor.”

“Well, the thing is, Captain, the first group we were talking to got pretty worked up over what the new guys said about the Marquis at the same time we were getting worked up over what they said about you, and like I said, what happened next isn’t so clear. So when I said one of them, I mean I’m not sure who I hit. It could have been one of the first bunch.”

“Oh, well that makes it better, then,” she said flatly.

“Uh, no, Captain, I guess it doesn’t.”

“Shit, Rask,” said Palmberg. “It’s embarrassing enough you’re getting in brawls with locals, but the bare minimum I expect is for you to make sure you’re punching the right guys!” He turned to turned to Kit. “I’m sorry about this, Captain.” Despite his attempts to play the hard-nosed sergeant, Palmberg’s attitude struck Kit as not that different from a sheepish child addressing a disappointed parent. The man was younger than her, which made him quite young indeed to be riding herd on kids even younger who were off their homeworld for the first time.

“It happens,” Kit sighed. “Sounds like we got lucky we didn’t end up with Gatzke and Gouveia in here, too.” And thank God we don’t let any of them carry weapons in the city.

She walked back out to the front of the station and approached the maitre’d cop, who had resumed his place behind the front desk. “I’m sorry about the trouble our boy caused,” she said. “I presume for this sort of thing there’s probably a fine we need to pay, and then we can take him off your hands?”

The gendarme looked up at her, sniffed, then looked back at his noteputer and punched buttons for several long moments. “I am afraid that is impossible,” he said. “Monsieur Rask has been charged with assault.”

Kit stifled a vulgarity, but someone else in the room supplied one for her.

“Merde!”

Kit wasn’t sure which one of the other two gendarmes had spoken, but they were both riveted to the flatscreen on the wall, and Kit was suddenly aware that the monotonous drone of the news commentators she had been tuning out was gone. She looked up.

Émile Gamelin was standing behind a podium with the seal of Calseraigne’s Assembly of Deputies. Even on the slightly fuzzy projection, the fire in the gaunt man’s eyes was striking, but Kit could also immediately tell that there was something very different about him compared to the night they had met at the Marquis’s reception. He looked… happy. Or as close to happy as Kit could imagine him. He was flanked on either side by two other, more grave-looking men in suits, who Kit didn’t recognize.

“My fellow citizens of Calseraigne,” Gamelin began, “I come to you in a moment of crisis for our planet. The liberties which our forebears fought for, the liberties we have cherished for a century, are under threat. But the threat this time comes not just from the collectivist authoritarianism of the Capellan Confederation, in spite of what fear-mongers would have you believe, but from an older form of tyranny, one almost as old as humanity itself.”

Kit’s stomach lurched. Please don’t let this be going where I think it is.

“I speak of the tyranny of inherited privilege. Since his return to Calseraigne, Marquis Guillaume Everett has shown that he sees the title given as a symbol of appreciation for his ancestor’s role in liberating our world as a token of authority to meddle in Calseraigne’s governance. Now he has announced his intention to pay homage to Catherine Humphreys of the Duchy of Andurien, binding all of us in fealty by proxy, and taking away Calseraigne’s political independence without so much as consulting the people of Calseraigne or their elected representatives.”

Palmberg emerged from the doorway to the holding cell area. “What’s going on, Cap?”

Kit motioned him to be silent. “This ****** is about to get to the point.”

“...-children who will call this world home for the next century,” Gamelin continued, “we cannot allow this to happen. That is why we and many of our fellow Deputies, lovers of freedom, loyal to the ideals that our forebears fought for, have taken action. We, the Committee For Calseraigne’s Freedom and Future, are announcing that the function of the Assembly is suspended, and a state of emergency is in effect. A decree has been issued for the arrest of Marquis Guillaume Everett. He is accused of crimes against the liberties of Calseraigne’s citizens.”

Kit spun on her heel to face the infantry sergeant. “We have to go.”

Palmberg’s brow furrowed in concern. “But what about Rask?”

****** hell. For the past minute, she had totally forgotten where she was and why she had come there. She was suddenly very acutely aware of the fact she wasn’t carrying any sidearm either, and she might now be in hostile territory. But the three gendarmes were having an animated conversation amongst themselves, half in French, and seemed to have forgotten about her just as completely.

“We’ll come back for him. I promise. But shit is about to hit the fan.” If they had been carrying weapons, Kit would have been tempted to put the snooty gendarme and his colleague at gunpoint and break Rask out. Then again, the kid might be safer here than the rest of us.

[Daryk]

In a cell in that situation is certainly safer! :D