----- 5 Years Since the End of the Star League Civil War -----
Date: October 26, 2784
Location: Axton
Title: When the Bears Left
Author: Dan C. Duval
Type: Short Story (BattleCorps)
Synopsis: SLDF MechWarrior Kinete Lat patrols his Firestarter through a lava field on Axton. Operation EXODUS has been underway for three months, but the Bears (3rd Battalion, 442nd Heavy Assault Regiment, 147th Mechanized Infantry Division, LXVIII Corps, 18th Army) are still at their base on Axton, where they had provided security for the Wangker Aerospace plant, awaiting pickup to join the rest of the Exodus Fleet in the New Samarkand system.
Kinete looks forward to rejoining the “real” SLDF there, and leaving behind the “crumbling fake that claims authority.” He notes that they would have left months ago, if the 442nd’s JumpShip, the SLS Nautilus, and its attached DropShips hadn’t failed to return from a refit at Kathil. The other two battalions of the 442nd (the Lions and the Tigers) are part of the 20% remaining behind, and they apparently resent the Bears’ decision to go. The Bears have covertly extracted their Firestarters and Catapults to the pickup point, defying the orders of the 442nd’s commander, Colonel Mondevilov.
Now, patrolling the perimeter, Kinete detects a blip in the patrol sector of his buddy Charlie, but he doesn’t hear any warning from Charlie’s Firestarter. As Kinete tries to raise Charlie, the DropShip finally arrives, and the Bears’ CO, Major Soult, sounds the recall order. It looks to be a catastrophe, with a battalion of Catapults trying to board while two assault battalions close in.
Bounding back towards Charlie’s last known position, hoping to assist his friend’s Firestarter in case it had been ambushed, he finds Charlie fully intact behind enemy lines, and realizes that his friend betrayed the Bears. Kinete barely avoids destruction by a formation of Atlases, but is saved when Battalion’s ECM operators jam the enemy targeting computers. He fires his jump jets and races for the LZ, dodging lava flows.
Kinete is stunned to find that the transport is the SLS Kiwi -– an Overlord – a DropShip design he’s only heard of previously, but never seen before. On the upside, he’s impressed that Kerensky sent one for the Bears. On the down side, it’s already taking off. Major Soult contacts Kinete and instructs him to maintain top speed – they’re keeping a bay door open for him to jump into. He manages to make it into the ship before it boosts out of range, and awakens in the infirmiary.
Major Soult tells him that all the Battalion’s Catapults and many of the support vehicles made it aboard, though the rest of his recon lance (the other three Firestarters - including Charlie) switched sides to the other two battalions. Kinete can’t bring himself to hate his former comrades, who were just being loyal to their local commander, and viewed the Exodus as a betrayal of their regiment.
Notes: At its core, this is an action story of a perimeter scout racing against those he formerly trusted as comrades to get aboard a transport offworld to join the Exodus. However, there are hints that a substantially more convoluted backstory is playing out amid Axton’s ice floes and lava fields. Some research has turned up the following:
1: Who are the Bears?
No sourcebooks detail the 442nd Heavy Assault Regiment’s place in the TO&E. However, only one SLDF formation is listed as “Exodus, Elements Joined Capellan Confederation” in the original Star League sourcebook – the 147th Mechanized Infantry Division (LXVIII Corps, 18th Army). FM:SLDF states that its original duty station was on Gaeri, way out in the Onverwacht Province of the Outworlds Alliance. The original garrison unit for Axton was the 210th Mechanized Infantry Division, which was destroyed during the Civil War.
2: What had the Lions, Tigers and Bears been through together?
Based on H:LoT 1 & 2, the 147th MID took only light damage from the Outworlds Alliance’s “secret army” during the Periphery Uprising, and then went with the rest of the 18th Army to conquer the Rim Worlds Republic, taking part in the assault on Engadine. When Operation CHIEFTAN began, the 18th Army helped liberate Berenson, Mandal, Wasat, and Chisholm. In 2775, the 18th Army was assigned to rear-area garrison duty. In the final wave of assaults, the 18th hit Outreach and Sirius, and then spearheaded the liberation of Geneva on Terra.
3: What is the 442nd doing on Axton?
It’s possible that, in 2775, the 442nd was split off to guard the Wangker Aerospace plant on Axton, since the SLDF would need all the aerospace fighters it could get to break through the SDS around the Hegemony’s core worlds, and there may have been worries that, with the 210th MID gone, the CCAF might get some ideas about taking the plant’s output for itself. If that’s the case, then Kinete and company may have spent the remainder of the war parked on Axton. One would presume that a Heavy Assault regiment would have come in useful in the fighting on Terra, but Kinete’s awe at seeing an Overlord DropShip for the first time would seem to indicate that he didn’t take part in the assault on Terra, where he would have seen that ship class plenty of times. Given the threat posed by the Reagan SDS, an uninterrupted flow of new Wangker-built aerospace fighters might have counted for more than having another hundred ‘Mechs on the ground. Also, the relatively homogenous composition of the regiment's battalions indicates that they didn't see a lot of action, and didn't take major losses. H:LoT2 notes that the SLDF units that made it to Terra had long since become a hodge-podge of randomized designs as shattered commands were consolidated. It appears that the rest of the 147th MID isn’t on Axton. Either their Exodus transports picked them up on schedule much earlier, or they were never sent to Axton in the first place.
Kinete does note that Axton’s infrastructure is insufficient to support one regiment, so a whole division would be out of the question…and yet the whole 210th MID was stationed there earlier. Perhaps the CCAF moved in and started getting grabby with whatever wasn’t nailed down after the 210th shipped out, gutting the infrastructure and forcing the SLDF to detach the 442nd to stop the looting.
4: What was going on between the Lions, Tigers and Bears?
Kinete is wracked with conflicting feelings regarding loyalty. He feels that it’s his duty to obey Kerensky’s orders and join the “true Star League” in exile via the Exodus. However, he still regards the Lions and Tigers as his brothers in arms, and believes that, even though they’ve betrayed the Bears and are trying to kill him, it’s done out of loyalty to the crumbling remnants of the Star League government.
Kinete is, of course, utterly naive. Since the Lions and Tigers eventually joined the Capellan Confederation, it’s likely that they were already under pressure from the CCAF to seize the Bears’ equipment as well. I believe that this story is about the 147th MID for two reasons: Axton is smack dab in the middle of Capellan territory, and the 442nd’s regimental commander is named Mondevilov. Given that surname, it’s a possibility that he has familial ties to Tikonov. Thus, the Lions and Tigers are in no way showing loyalty to the Star League government (which, at this point, is just Minister of Communications Jerome Blake and the non-Exodus divisions that will be backing him with Operation SILVER SHIELD.)
The Lion/Tiger behavior is an aberration, given the notes in the Star League sourcebook that, following the decision to launch the Exodus plan in February 14, 2784, 80% opted to go, and the remaining 20% respected that decision and helped their departing comrades maintain total operational secrecy over the following eight months of logistical preparations. Actually attacking their fellows is beyond the pale, and may indicate that the Maskirovka was putting strong pressure on Colonel Mondevilov to maximize his contribution to the Capellan state.
5: Why did the Bears cut their departure so close?
Kinete grouses that the Bears should have left much earlier, but their JumpShip (the SLS Nautilus) never returned from what was supposed to be a quick trip to Kathil for maintenance. It’s taken until now for the SLDF to send an extraction ship. However, the timeframe seems somewhat beyond the red-line cutoff for such an extraction. With just ten days to go, it would require a command circuit to get from Axton to New Samarkand in time to join the Exodus Fleet. In that case, the JumpShips and their crews in that command circuit would be left behind, still recharging when Kerensky departs. Is the circuit made up of SLDF ships that decided to stay? Or perhaps contracted civilian ships? Why couldn’t Major Soult have used Axton’s HPG to call Kathil and/or Quartermaster Command to find out what happened to the Nautilus, and thereby work out an extraction ship in a more timely fashion? The SLSB section on the Exodus notes that SLDF Quartermaster Command was buying as many JumpShips as it could get its hands on, so leaving any behind – strung out between Axton and New Samarkand – seems wasteful.
One possibility is that Kerensky had designated the uninhabited Roxborough system as a rally point for stragglers (like the rear-guard assigned Manassas), so the ships from the Bears' command circuit could head to Roxborough to meet up with an escort ship that had enough route info to meet up with the fleet.