New Avalon, same time...
'...so answer a bet for me, Admiral." General Peter Steiner-Davion of the SLDF dropped into the only comfortable chair in Elizabeth's office.
she sighed. "If I must, General, though You might get better answers from Commodore Li." she didn't even look up from the reports on her desk.
"How did a world like Kowloon, end up with so many trained jumpship navigators and enough pilots to staff that oversize militia you were hiding, and why did you hide it in a police agency?" he wasn't being hostile, but the question, in Elizabeth's opinion, was rude, something only to be tolerated because of his superior rank in the joint command.
she looked up, "Li told you to mind your own business." she stated.
The third child of the Steiner-Davion family nodded. "She did, followed by a string of that bastardized Viet more than half of your people speak when they don't think we're watching."
"She was within her rights, and I won't be to tell you...but it's not really a big secret or a big mystery, you should be able to find out from public sources." Elizabeth reached into her desk, and produced a pack of cigarettes and a row of pill bottles.
"Could you give me a summary that doesn't violate some obscure secret?" he pressed.
"Cabinet on the left, bring out the square bottle with the reddish-brown clear-and two glasses. if I'm going to give you a history class, I want a drink, and I've decided to stop drinking alone." she answered, "by the way, how's the Fiancee? you two made the beast of two backs yet?"
he turned dark crimson, but passed the bottle and the glasses to the desk. Liz uncapped it, and poured, his expression telling her all she needed to know. She gave him a thumbs-up, "Good work soldier...see, public sources...kowloon's history, early colonial expansion, and the war with the Rim Worlds. We have them because we have a population that doesn't live their lives at the bottom of a gravity well, it's dead ass simple-more than half the materials Ngo industries uses, are pulled from asteroid belts, cometary halo, and so on. who do you think mines that stuff, prospects for it, and would need their own, non-military, non-draft-vulnerable, jumpships, hmm?"
"I...I don't follow."
"Everyone else disposed of their 'primitive' jumpships." Liz explained, "because just about everyone preferred to abandon space travel and asteroid mining for planetary surfaces where things like pregnancy are kept normal by nice, earthlike gravity...but Kowloon's not exactly the safest place, right? and remember we were a first-wave colony caused by a stellar accident that dumped the original colonists in a binary system with broken ships-it was adapt or die time, diggit? this was before marsden, or McKenna, old Terran Alliance days-and my ancestors had a lot of reasons not to want to associate with the communists, or to trust a 'united earth government' that betrayed the Israelis and allowed the Sabra Genocides. some of those ships were crewed by Sol-Belters who were sympathetic, where do you think they went?"
"Oh..okay...how does that work out though-Kowloon was under Rim Worlds domination for three hundred years."
"Kowloon was occupied. How in hell do you think we kept our cultural identity? everyone focused on the planet." Liz laughed, and took a handful of pills, slammed them, and followed it with a chaser of distilled alcohol. "we were able to resist the ****** rimjobs for so long, because they couldn't ever quite get ahold of us all. they couldn't even effectively cut us off, and they couldn't erase our history or our culture, because they couldn't find it."
"and you still have a population of these...belters-"
"Rockjacks." Liz told him, "The proper term is Rockjacks. yeah, we have them. There are Belter and Rockjack concentrations in most of the inner sphere, we just happen to have kept in touch with ours, and they keep in touch with each other by whatever arcane means they came up with. They're not everyone in the Guard, but they're the trainers, teachers, and leaders in the Guard, especially in the Blackwater squadrons. Li served in the LCAF back in the day, Fourth war, diggit? and she served with the extraction force at Tamar, trying to get my brother out, but it was dirtyfeet bureaucrats who slowed her down so he died there-she made orbital insertion six hours after he was gone."
"Oh...I'm..."
"she brought his body home." Liz told him, "Li's good people, smart, and if she says something isn't your business, it likely isn't. everything I know about running a military is either her, or Mosovich teaching me. Dad was a gloryhound. Battles can be won by gloryhounds, but it takes details and preparation to win wars."
he regarded her, then scoffed. "Submariner badge, nuclear technician trained, gunnery medal with cluster and kill mark. You're something of a glory hound yourself." he sipped his drink, and winced. "dear god what is this?"
"Vodka and ijero juice." she tells him, "The spice gives it a decent burn."
"I guess...you used a nuclear armed submarine to kill a Clan Warship."
"correction, I used a concentrated attack from above employing fighter craft and kinetic impactors, along with a lot of psychology, an open ocean, and five nuclear missiles from a submarine to kill one warship." Liz stated, "Details. it wasn't heroic, it was pragmatic, and I initially refused the medal."
"Kinetic Impactors?"
"Strap a fusion propulsion unit to a rock with a simple guidance system and a cheap computer buried near the center, start it burning into the system at three gees on a course, in this case, a course that will drag it across the ionosphere at escape velocity. repeat a few dozen times, and give it a fighter escort when it's good and ****** fast. They had to come in low to use Orbom, and I challenged their warship jockey specifically on ground you can't land a 'mech on, because it's under two kilometers of salty, mineral-rich seawater, and to shake a 'mech all i'd have to do, is crash-dive the boat. they detected the impactors late, but it was covering fire that he didn't dare try to surface out of, so he hugged the Troposphere, which made ranging his ass from one hundred meters depth a breeze-My leg and my arm got ****** up because of the overpressure from his crash-it turned a twelve thousand tons of nuclear sub into an aircraft for about forty seconds and knocked my ass out for thirty minutes. the crew of my boat won that engagement and kept us alive, I was bleeding in sick-bay with a hairline fracture in my skull and a severe concussion...and don't tell the Clanners, but that sub was barely able to make port, and completely beyond repair-we used the remains of it for raw materials for the next generation of models."
"what about these...kinetic impactors?" he asked.
"Plenty of room to cut power and turn them around." Liz explained, "that much high-quality ore is not something you waste, and neither are that many shuttle-grade engines...but I had a good read on how the Clanners would react, how to lure them to a predictable location, and what the orbitals look like, thanks to Alicia Li and Bianh Vu Dao, and the Clanners were like everybody else-they focused on the planet, instead of the system." she topped her drink off and offered him another. Peter accepted gingerly. "See, everyone forgets things-things like, if a Pirate can't land, he can't raid, if he can't leave after a raid, he can't get money for what he took. once I removed my father's...'regent', I kept this in mind, especially in the context of the invaders. as big as I grew our ground force militia, it was nothing compared to what I spent wooing the Rockjacks and expanding the Coast Guard. my submarine was a relic hidden away by ancestors that lost the invasion by the Rim Worlds Republic, we rebuilt it, but part of the reason we couldn't salvage the goddam thing, is that the steels were too ancient after sitting in a dry bunker off Golden Lake for five hundred years. the only reason we had nuclear cores, was that it was too damn expensive for the Rimjobs to remove and replace every municipal power-plant on the planet with fusion units or solar, and we kept the technology for Uranium Enrichment for 'civil infrastructure'."
Peter shook his head, "marvelous." he said, "i'm not sure I believe all of that, but marvelous."
Liz gave him a smirk, "I do lay it down thick, don't I? Here..." she reached behind her, and pulled a few slim volumes from her media shelf, "Light reading, General. Tran Truk Ngo's war-diary from the Amaris conflict, a couple of condensed histories of Kowloon, and the Coventry Military Academy's chapter on my homeworld...light reading."
he laughed, but he took the volumes. "Will you need these back?"
"I've got the original of my ancestor's war diaries, the others are books I have hardcopy of. Enjoy it, but not so much your lady-love feels abandoned, hey?"