Part IV
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"Contrary to what you may have heard, Trueborns, sorry I am supposed to say 'Ironborns', are not clones. The rumours about the genetic enhancements are true though, so if you call us clones, or freaks of science, we will hit you very, very hard. Sorry, I was also told by the Principal earlier that we are not allowed to hit you if you are mean to us because we are different. This is a stupid rule and if Wolverines always obeyed stupid rules we would still be living in the Clan Homeworlds, instead of my sibko and I being forcibly integrated into the Public School System against our wills."
Frederick Hallis of sibling company Gamma introduces himself to his new class at Joseph-Louis Lagrange Memorial High School - 2829
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Arecibo Plains – Niops Association (Niops VII) – 2828
Despite the planet being slightly larger in diameter than Terra, the vast oceans of Niops VII covered so much of worlds surface that overall the homeworld of humanity could still boast the most land area of the two.
Not that you could ever claim Niops VII was exactly overcrowded. It might only have roughly three-quarters the land to live upon, polar ice caps not really counting, but with a population still only in the low single-digit millions, compared to Terra's teeming billions, one thing Niops was not lacking in was room to accommodate population growth, expected or not.
Situated less than thirty kilometres from the capital the Arecibo Plains were entirely undeveloped, although they could at least boast an excellent supply of fresh, if somewhat frigid, water and the soil was at least fertile enough for the native grasses to prosper. The large river that ran down from the glaciers in the mountains and snaked across the plains divided them neatly in two, the river itself eventually reaching the capital on the coast and emptying into the ocean there.
High Associator Olson had essentially placed a map in front of Lieutenant-General Romanov and her staff, pointed at the Arecibo Plains, and said 'They're all yours' initiating what quickly became a near deluge of dropships falling from the sky as the SLDF remnants moved in.
Invited to come observe proceedings personally Brigadier-General Craig Nellis of the Niops Association Militia had eschewed using a VTOL to come take a look and had instead chosen to come tearing up the river in a Silverfin Class Coastal Cutter, effectively the flagship of the NAM's tiny 'wet' navy. Only massing forty tons, and with plenty of horsepower, the cutter could make seventy knots and when it wasn't rescuing fishing boats in trouble on the high seas it was usually tied up at dock with nothing to do anyway.
Standing up on the conning tower for a better view as the atypically very much inland Coastal Cutter reached the plains, Nellis couldn't help be impressed not only by the sheer number of hulking dropships to be seen but also how neatly they had been parked, forming long neat rows a few hundred meters apart. There also seemed to be a veritable hive of activity going on around them. A plethora of wheeled vehicles buzzing around as well as numerous battlemechs, those types equipped with hands helping unload dropships as well as assist with other tasks where a deftly-handled thirty or forty ton robot came in very handy.
Three days ago there had been nothing here, Nellis thought to himself in wonderment, now it was technically the third most populous settlement on the planet, with tens of thousands of people already on the ground and more on the way.
The team of workers that appeared to be digging a large number of latrines indicated to Nellis they knew what they were doing because they were placing them far downstream of where numerous tents surrounding some construction work was going on. The fact that not everyone had the good-sense to do that a thousand years after doctors figured out the cause of cholera and other waterborne diseases never failed to astonish him.
A Mule transport dropship had set-down right next to the river with large-diameter pipes running from her into the water and another set of other pipes running out from her to a frankly enormous Aqueduct liquid cargo carrier. It had been mentioned that the new arrivals had actually built a Jamerson-Ulikov Water Purifier in the oversized cargo hold of a dropship so they could land and re-fill their water-tanks from any source they encountered on the way, ocean worlds, comets, anything, but it was still darn impressive to see first-hand.
Everyone was moving with a purpose with a goal in mind. Organised and efficient. It was certainly a very different scene than the one he recalled witnessing as a younger man when the Capellans arrived in their rickety old Leviathan jumpship thirty years earlier. That particular cloud of bolts and spare parts flying in close formation had been shunted into high orbit around Niops IV years ago, just in case the Association ever needed a jumpship for some reason. Meanwhile most of the eight large modified cargo dropships it had carried were mothballed for requiring excessive refit and repair themselves.
Nellis remembered being amazed at just how many tired and hungry war-refugees had been crammed into each rickety dropship as they landed and disgorged their passengers. The whole scene was both chaotic and heart-breaking and it spoke volumes for just how bad things must be out in the wider galaxy.
As the navy cutter reached the spot where a large camp was starting to be built alongside the river it slowed and to Nellis's amusement a gaggle of children seemingly appeared from nowhere to watch the watercraft pull up close to the riverbank.
"Never seen a ship that floats on water instead of in freefall before?" Nellis called out to the kids after making his way down from the conning tower to disembark, the crew having lowered a gangplank for him.
"Not in real life" one of the older children called back, Nellis now taking note that almost all of them seemed to be wearing small versions of SLDF fatigues and winter jackets. The oldest among them might have been fourteen based on their heights but if they had spent an excessive quantity in freefall they could just be taller than normal. In time gravity would claw some of that excess height back if that was the case, but that was always more difficult to see happening in children than it was in adults because the former were getting taller naturally anyway.
"We'll have to see about taking you all out fishing sometime" Nellis suggested, his offer greeted by an apparently an enthusiastic response from his audience as he stepped ashore.
"Are we supposed to call you Admiral Nellis today then? Query affirmative?" a voice Nellis recognised as belonging to Lieutenant-General Hallis interjected, the man having appeared out of a large tent nearby.
"Only if I was wearing my other hat, Sir" Nellis joked in return, proffering Hallis a salute which he returned before they approached each other and shook hands "You've already made a great deal of progress getting yourselves settled her, anyone would think you'd done this before?" he observed, smiling.
"Once or twice" Hallis replied. "Or it could be the fourth, I'm starting to lose track to be honest" he said only partially in jest. "Taking a risk sailing that boat up the river weren't you?" he asked. "How did you know you had enough depth under the keel not to ground her?"
"Because, believe it or not, back when I was a lieutenant someone thought that using her to go water-skiing up the river as a publicity stunt would be good for recruitment" Nellis told him. "It wasn't of course, it just made the NAM look like a bunch of yahoos."
One of the children, a boy, approached them, seemingly prompted to do so by some of the others. "Can we go fishing, Khan Hallis?" he asked sheepishly.
Nellis looked from Hallis to the boy, the resemblance between them was uncanny. "Your son, Sir?" he asked, assuming it must be. Hallis had already explained the 'Khan' thing, along with a quick explanation of some of the odd forms of speech his people from the 331st seemed to use at random, but it did seem a little odd for the man's own child to address that way in a non-formal setting.
"Well yes, but actually no" Hallis replied, confusingly.
"More of his DNA than a son would have, less than an outright clone, Sir" the boy told Nellis. "I am a Trueborn" he explained, proudly.
"Trueborn?" Nellis queried. This was a new one on him, though at least it sounded like it derived from English as opposed to something like 'quiaff' or 'Isorla' which did, but you wouldn't know unless told.
"Clan breeding program, children without the sex, created in a lab and grown in an Iron Womb, that's like a very fancy incubator that can bring a child to term all the way from fertilisation" Hallis told him. "Some genetic engineering but not as much as was planned for later generations" he continued. "We're not going to use that name for them anymore though, are we Frederick" he chided the boy. "Trueborn is a Kerenskyite word that implies other people are lesser."
"I apologise, My Khan" the boy responded with a bow that was met with a frown, "I mean, Sir" he tried again, this time saluting. "Dad?" he suggested finally.
"Sir is fine" Hallis told the boy, they still needed to finalise how they were going to integrate the children from non-traditional reproductive methods into a more 'normal' model of society. "I'll talk to Brigadier-General Nellis about the fishing, now you and the rest of your sibko need to get back to studying."
"Thanks Pops" the boy replied cheekily before running back to the other children.
"If you think I'm above abjuring my own bloodname you are very much mistaken!" Hallis called after him before noticing the expression on the brigadier's face, part wary, part quizzical.
"Were you…" Nellis began to ask awkwardly.
"Made by a geek in a labcoat, poured into a glass jar and decanted nine months later?" Hallis finished for him, though not using the exact words Nellis might have. "No, I had parents and arrived in the galaxy the way most people do, out of my mother" he told him. "The Clan breeding program began in 2816, Frederick there is from the first-generation, not many of them. It didn't really start to ramp up in numbers until three years later which is why you'll find a disproportion number of children aged between five and nine running around once we're more established" he told him. "Old Nick saw the program as the quickest way to increase the population, that of the Warrior Caste in particular."
"To what purpose?"
"Pretty obvious I would think, to raise an army large enough to retrace his father's footsteps back to the Inner Sphere at some point, perhaps long after his own death, and remake the Star League, or at least his vision of the Star League which bears little relation to the reality" Hallis replied. "To be honest it all seemed laudable at first, noble even, but that was before it became all too apparent that he was one mech short of a full lance up here" he added, tapping the side of his head. "Two or three mechs short on a bad day."
"That's a more polite way of saying it than I heard from other people that returned with you" Nellis told him. "Particularly the ones that had family in Great Hope."
"Yes, well, we can't know for certain Nicky gave the order but he is sure-as-shit high up on the list of suspects" Hallis replied. "Sharp of you and the High Associator to talk to as many people that weren't from the warrior cast as possible to see if we were telling the truth, by the way. Even if all that extra radio traffic to the inbound ships drove our communications people nuts."
"All I can say is that if you aren't telling the truth then you've coached a hell of a lot of people better than I ever could because, apart from some minor details, the sort of things not everyone would know anyway, their versions of events corroborated yours" Nellis told him. "The funniest transcript that crossed my desk came from a psychiatrist within your group that diagnosed Nicholas Kerensky with, and this is the dumbed-down version, sociopathy, megalomania and deep-seated daddy issues."
Hallis thought about that a while. "I could have told you that and not charged by the hour" he concluded eventually.
"Before I forget to say it, I really can arrange fishing trips for your kids, but it had better be pretty soon because in a couple of months they won't want to look at another fish" Nellis advised. "It's not like we were expecting you and the only available food we have in surplus comes out of the ocean."
"So we were told by a government official" Hallis replied. "To be honest looking down at all the cultivated land I thought you must be running a massive food surplus but I hadn't considered crop yields per hectare being so much lower here that we're used to."
Nellis shrugged. "The Terran Hegemony might have developed grain crops that would grow in pretty much any soil but you can't genetically-engineer extra sunlight. Fewer photons means less photosynthesis and the cold climate doesn't help either" he noted. "We grow a lot of our fruits and vegetables indoors hydroponically under artificial light but when it comes to something like wheat it's easier just to sow more land" he explained. "Although that isn't without problems either, the soil isn't the best here so we have to harvest seaweed to improve it, enrich the soil and give the dirt something to hold it together" he said then grinned. "My father owned a farm, my older brother inherited it when he died, not that I minded, I wanted to drive a battlemech not an agromech."
"I didn't peg you as a farmboy" Hallis admitted.
"Not everyone here is an astrophysicist, although my mother was a gravitational-wave astronomer as it happens, I joined the army because it meant getting to sleep in most days until sunrise like I was some lazy aristocrat" Nellis joked. "The bitch of it is, my brother hired a bunch of Capellans to work on the farm, so now he lounges around like some Lyran noble with peasants to plough the fields and harvest the grain for him, so he gets up later than I do."
"I'm sixth generation military myself" Hallis told him. "My father commanded the 331st before Khan McEvedy's father did, I guess it was our turn again" he added with a smile. "One of the kids you saw earlier, Jennifer, was made from her DNA so if the cycle keeps turning maybe she'll take over from me."
"Are you still making more…" Nellis began then paused, "what do you call them if it's not 'Trueborns'?"
"Not completely decided yet, I like 'Ironborn' myself" Hallis replied. "As to whether we're making more, none since we left clan space and when we get the program running again it will likely be geared towards not letting the bloodlines of the 295th die out. Their birth-rate where they ended up was extremely low" he said. "Talking of the 295th, Lieutenant-General Romanov is still going to be stuck in a meeting for at least the next half-hour or so with Admiral Bremman so she asked me to show you around. Before I do, are there any other burning questions you have that I can help with?"
"We could start with you telling me what that mech over there being used as a forklift is" Nellis asked, pointing to the one he meant.
"That's a Mercury II, one of the new machines we developed just before we came to blows with the other clans" Hallis told him.
"Ah, looking again I'm seeing some similarities to the Mercury, although I've only ever seen one in recognition books. Far too modern for the SLDF to surplus off in our direction."
"The Mercury light was a step-forward in battlemech design, a bigger step than a lot of people might know, so when we wanted to develop a new medium we scaled her up from twenty to forty tons and made the necessary internal and external changes required to allow that" Hallis explained. "Our other new medium, the Stag, was partially based on the Vulcan, but you would never be able to tell just by looking at her" he noted. "The Stag only has one hand so they're still packed away, our Pulverizer assault has two so you might see one helping out, but we only have a small number of them in operation."
"I've seen plenty of old Wasps though. There must be a nest nearby" Nellis joked. That was hardly surprising, the twenty-ton design dated from all the way back to the 25th Century and had been produced in huge numbers by just about everybody. Even the SLDF, who could afford newer fancier lights like the Hussar, Panther, and the Mercury itself, still went to war with Amaris with hordes of Wasps in their inventories.
Hallis nodded. "We wanted our rear-guard formations to hold up the clans as long as possible, maximining the number of civilians we could escape with, so we upped their complements of bigger tougher machines and stuffed the less capable lights into dropships to take with us" he said. "If we were not looking forward to adding all those battlemechs from the 295th to the roster I might be pushing to get the Pulverizer, and maybe the Stag II, into production ASAP to give us more battlefield punch, but as it is upgrading Romanov's machines gives us a lot more bang for our buck, resource wise."
"One of my staff gave me a side-by-side comparison of standard model Highlanders and Black Knights in NAM service, compared to ones re-armed with your improved weapon systems. Just a few tons of weight saved, and a little extra internal volume available, makes all the difference when it comes to increased capability."
"A couple of tons of extra armour here, some additional heat-sinks there, and pretty soon you've got a noticeably meaner 'mech" Hallis agreed. "I'll send you the specs of our version of the Archer. Halving the weight of the LRM launchers, and adding the latest model Artemis IV FCS, let us put together something that would chew up and spit out the SLDF Royal it was based upon" Hallis told him. "If it wasn't for the fact we know the clans are feverously working on even better gear I would be a very happy man."
"And you know that for certain because…"
"Because up until Operation Klondike the clans pooled some R&D work and occasionally shared information" Hallis explained. "Scientists and engineers talk among themselves, at least they do if it won't get them shot, so we know that the Coyote's, for example, were leading in Pulse Laser technology and we even had access to some of their preliminary research in that direction. There's always a time-lag between a working prototype and a production model though, so we can't be sure when they will be fielding the next generation of equipment, only that it's on its way."
The sound of fusion engines high above attracted their attention and they both looked up. "That should be one of the cargo dropships we've got emptying the cargo bays on Thunderer and Rawhide" Hallis remarked. "Even with one of the dropships being a Mammoth it is going to take a while, there's well over a half-million tons of supplies and equipment to unload from the old girls."
Old was right, certainly about the battleship. The Monsoon Class like Thunderer were nearly five-hundred years old and the SLDF had retired them a century before the Amaris War. A more modern warship like a Texas or a McKenna would tear a Monsoon to shreds but the cathedral-sized cargo bay, and the ability to carry a half-dozen dropships with her, obviously had its attractions if you wanted to move a lot of stuff from star-system A to star-system B.
"I suppose they're carrying supplies you need right away?" Nellis surmised.
"No, mostly we used them to haul metal ingots, spare parts, industrial presses and a couple of production lines for fusion engines we probably won't need for years" Hallis told him. "Oh, and about two-hundred-thousand SLDF uniforms we found in a supply cache when we were poking around the Inner Sphere a year back, pretty much all sized extra-small or extra-large just like you would expect."
"Then why unload them before the other ships?" Nellis queried, reasonably.
Hallis frowned. "The High Associator didn't tell you?" he responded in surprise.
"Tell me what?" Nellis replied suspiciously.
"We're sending Thunderer and Rawhide straight back to where we've been holed up most of the last two years, that is why we couldn't send Rawhide to go collect the rest of the 295th and their battlemechs" Hallis explained. "Between them they can carry thirty-one dropships, plus what we can stuff back into the cargo holds we are emptying for the job."
"Weren't you basing yourself out of a hidden SLDF facility?" Nellis recalled.
"Yes, Camelot Command in what is now Lyran space but the area used to belong to the Rim Worlds Republic" Hallis replied. "We're going to take it apart and haul the whole damn thing back here if we can. A repair yard for warships, another for dropships, a factories for turning out replacement parts and sections of warship armour, not to mention a full wing of Voidseeker Drones and the base computer that controlled them."
"Voidseekers?!" Nellis gasped, that was a name he had thought belonged to the past.
"Enough for a budget SDS system to defend the Recharge Station we want to place at the Zenith Jump-Point eventually" Hallis told him. "Just the sort of thing that will scare the hell out of visitors without us having to wave a warship in front of them."
Nellis looked at him incredulously. "And the High Associator was alright with this?" he asked in amazement. Voidseekers and the older, less capable, Blackwasp drone fighters had devastated SLDF aerospace fight formations during the Amaris War. Programmed like the Caspar AI drone warships to follow the orders of the man or woman heading the Star League, their lack of intelligence, or perhaps free will, saw them loyally serving Stefan Amaris as well as they had any of House Cameron.
"Honestly, I think he loved the idea of a high-tech solution to keeping uninvited guests with hostile intentions away, especially one that wouldn't raise a red flag with the clans if they're still low-key scouting for us" Hallis replied. "We assumed he would have told you straight away" he added apologetically.
"He's probably running it through committee" Nellis muttered to himself, annoyed at being kept out of the loop on defence matters.
"There was one suggestion we could disguise the Protecteur as a Caspar, she's a Lola III destroyer like the hulls they were built upon, but that might be a waste of capability. She was assigned to the 295th so if we ever needed to project some serious naval power without running the risk of the clans thinking 'Wolverines' it's only her and Cape Bon that are available. Coincidentally it was the crew of the Protecteur that pointed us towards Camelot Command in the beginning. They also had the codes needed to stop the Voidseekers attacking us."
"You people have been putting a lot of thought into this haven't you Lieutenant-General?" Nellis asked rhetorically.
"We're fairly sure the other clans want to genocide us. It concentrates the mind" Hallis replied flatly. "For that matter the Free Worlds League is only a jump away and I suspect anyone still alive on New Dallas or Brownsville is not going to consider them friendly, peaceable neighbours."
Brigadier-General Nellis nodded. It was hearing the stories of Terran Hegemony worlds lucky enough to survive Amaris then getting nuked back to the stone age by squabbling Successor States which had seen Niops keeping its head down for decades. "You're not being paranoid if they really are out to get you" he quipped.
"Right" Hallis concurred. "At some point, if their technology base continued to slide and they weren't too busy fighting the Lyrans and the Capellans, you were definitely going to be on the menu for some Marek with ambition."
"You know that, and I know that, the problem was always convincing the civilian government of that so they would agree to increase my budget" Nellis replied. "Of course, having a big chunk of the SLDF turn up one day to build a ring of lamellor ferro-carbide around us wasn't really on my scope" he continued wryly. "You're seriously bringing a warship repair yard here?"
"Only a mid-sized one, Camelot wasn't built to take anything larger than a Black Lion, that is why we couldn't make spares for a Potemkin jump-drive in the repair workshops there. Nothing that size would fit in the pressurised dry-dock so some bureaucrat decided not to give the automated factory the designs for anything Camelot would never be working on anyway. We had the codes to get it all started up but there was no way to re-program the thing even if we had all the design-specs in the right format. Which we did not."
"I was wondering about that" Nellis admitted.
"I would wager my Pulverizer that there are factories in the Inner Sphere now, the ones built by the Terran Hegemony for other people, where none of the staff working there have any idea how to fix if it goes wrong" Hallis stated with conviction, "and that they cannot switch over to producing something else instead because how the machinery in the place actually operates is an utter mystery."
Nellis grinned. "No bet" he replied. "One of my friends said that in a hundred years the only people left in the Inner Sphere that knows how anything works will be us and the phone company. That was before the war ended though, they might recover if they're not slaughtering each other anymore."
"I can't see the peace lasting, too much bad blood and there's still just enough left of the Terran Hegemony to be worth fighting over" Hallis opined. "The fighting ended in '21 because all sides were exhausted, give them ten years to raise new units and replenish ammunition stocks and they'll be back at each other's throats."
"Some might call that cynical, not me you understand but some people" Nellis replied.
"Aleksandr Kerensky used to quote a Russian Proverb that said, 'Eternal peace lasts only until the next war' and history supports his position" Hallis replied. "In a thousand years the historians will say that the Golden Age under the Star League was just a two-century long armistice between Age of War I and Age of War II."
"Keeps people like us in gainful employment" Nellis noted brightly.
"Aff" Hallis agreed.
