A man out of time, and almost out of time. SI/OC

[cawest]

You all can thank, or curse, Chris O’Farrell for giving me this idea.  An OC/SI gets ripped out of his home dimension when the Dragoons were testing a repair on one of their supporting jumpships.  What will happen next, and will it change the whole Inner Sphere?

A man out of time, and almost out of time.

Chapter 1
By cliff
Fact Checked and Sanity Checked by Drakensis
Editor (that I at least sometimes listen to, so the screw ups are all mine) Drakensis

Ethel ‘Jessie’ Bowe was slammed forward and then back as she felt the familiar sensation of fingers playing with her intestines.  Thanks to her years as a spacer, the Chief knew that something was wrong even before the built in speakers of her space-rated helmet activated.

“This is Captain Karrer of the M/V Oste.  We are declaring a mis-jump emergency.  I say again missed jump emergency…. This is not a drill.”

Jessie’s head snapped over to a display that was call a Christmas tree due to the green, yellow, and red lights it would display.  Now it was all red as systems checks came in from all over the jumpship.  She pushed a button that activated the short range radios built into every person on the ship.  “Head count, status, and then damage report.  You all know the drill.”

There were many shipping lines that didn’t require all of their jump crews to have full space suits, and Jessie called them walking dead to their faces.  This had been a test jump after major repairs and she had made sure that not only did every person have their suits and helmets, but each team leader had inspected everyone on the ship to make sure they were correctly sealed.  All before she gave the okay to make this test jump.

Jessie was looking at a bent main support beam for the KF core.  She could tell that the whole room was bent about 16 degrees and that would match what the other teams reported. The whole ship now had a clockwise twist of 14 to 20 degrees going bow to stern.

“Chief Bowe.”

Jessie frowned, “This is the chief.”

Over the speaker, “Chief,  the captain wants you to take a team and check out a chemical alarm that just activated in Cargo Bay 2 over on the hulk.”

Jessie was already turning to face toward the nearest hatch. “This is the Chief, copy.  Check out chemical alarm over on the hulk.”

“Oh my god!!!!!” Then the sound the chief knew was of a person getting sick in a closed space helmet, in Zero G reached her ears over the suits radio.

Jessie’s training kicked in and she launched herself towards the open hatch that led to the cargo bay they were checking out.  A body in a silver suit was coming toward her with pin wheeling arms.  Choking sounds came to her ears just as the Chief reached out and took a hand full of suit near the ribs.  With a hard tug the suit started rotating hard along the spacer’s axis.  In a few seconds the imparted centrifugal force would move the ‘semi-fluid objects’ away from the airways of the endangered spacer.

With the spacer now more or less out of danger, the older chief turned and looked around and she felt something fighting to come up from her stomach.  She pushed off the deck so that she could hover a dozen meters over the ‘floor’ of the sectioned off cargo bay as her mind tried to process what she was seeing.  After who knows how many heartbeats she just pushes a button on her suit.

“Captain, this is Chief Bowe.  You need to see this.  We have a problem... A big one.”

Blackwell compound,  New Valencia
Federated Suns


I don’t remember what I first remembered or what had started my mind working again from a place so black and quiet.  I think it was some sounds going on around me, but was it the beep beep, or was it the sound of me moving on plastic bed sheets?  The world started to come back as little slits of light that slowly grew larger as my eyes started to work again.

“So that is what purple tastes like.”  At least that was what I thought I said, or I could have just thought that was what I had heard.

With my mind working a little faster, I could tell that the ceiling over my head was the drop kind I had seen dozens of times before.  The local area also had a smell I knew too well for my own liking.  My mind connected the beep, beep, beep coming from my right and the plastic sheets over most of my body.  I was in a hospital…. again.  I couldn’t remember why I would be in another one, but I was damn sure in one again.

I must have made a sound because the limited world around me changed again.  A long-fingered hand came into view, and it slides the curtain from around my bed in a soft sound of metal moving on metal.  The level of sound made the back of my head want to fall off and go running under the bed.  Now that I could see better, after many eye blinks to force things into some kind of focus,  I could tell that I was definitely in a hospital room, but I thought I was in the only bed, sitting in a room that seemed very large from my point of view.

“Well, this is not the VA.”  (Again, that was what I meant to say, I think.  All my ears heard was “Wlml vaaa.”) You never ever got a private room in that place.  At best you would ‘only’ have to share a room with one other and a lot of times it was a four man room to recover in.  This all went through my mind that was still very foggy but getting better every few seconds.

The hand now had a face, but I could not see the body from a combination of my position and the lack of fully clear vision.  Before I could make my lips move again.  I got a bright light shined into my eyes and a few humph noises before the now blurrier face came back closer to me.  She was still out of focus, but I could tell it was a woman.  I must say that she smelled….. great!

In a soft voice.  “They’re not ready for you yet.  I’m going to give you something to help you go back to sleep, at least until they can see you.”

Okay what the Hell is going on!!  You never let someone sleep who just had a major head injury.  Before I can even try to ask another question, the blackness reached up and Gibb’s slapped me.

An Ting
Draconis Combine
7 Feb 3025.

Jaime Wolf was sitting in a full command meeting of the Wolf’s Dragoons.  If something important happened, then Jaime would have been told about it as soon as possible but for a mercenary unit as large and spread out as his, these quarterly meetings were important to keep everyone basically on the same sheet of music.  So far all of the line regiments had finished their reports with the Zeta Battalion commander just returning to his seat.

   Colonel Griffith Nikitich’s head popped up from his digital device.  The sudden movement from someone normally so still you would sometimes think that the man was asleep, or dead drew Jaime’s attention to the commander of 7th Kommando, the Dragoon’s special forces unit.

The colonel met Jaime’s eyes.  “Sir, I just received an update on one of my development assets, the Oste.”  He looked around “For those unfamiliar with the name that’s the pirate Merchant class jumpship that we captured some years ago.  We took her in hand and started modifying her to better support long ranged Kommando mission and WolfNet if the need came up.”  It was common for WolfNet and the 7th Kommandos to use some of the same assets from time to time and by now it was so common that it didn’t cause that many issues between the two different groups.

One of the changes to the Dragoons operating plans had been the banning of using HPG systems after they found out that there was only one group left behind from the Star League that used them.  It would cause issues if a mercenary unit had their own HPGs to use them, and - more importantly - maintain them.  If the Dragoons used a HPG on a planet that had a ComStar presence, they would notice it.  Probably the Great Houses would as well and that would be a mess of trouble.

WolfNet and the Kommandos had an exemption to that rule but used the HPGs very sparingly and only after a lot of planning was expended.  This hidden capability had saved the Dragoon’s hides more than once, but it was not a move that could be taken without risk.  To cover this gap, more jumpships were needed and they could not be ‘seen’ as being paid for by the Dragoons.  That would kind of ruin the whole idea of spying on someone.

“Yes, sir.  They were doing some testing of the last few modifications over New Valencia.  They were running a test on the jump engine with a short jump between the Zenith and Nadir points before they could be cleared to leave the start system.  End state is that the jumpship’s hull and jump core are totally wrecked and not repairable with current Dragoon assets on site.”

Jaime’s eyes only widened a little bit at this odd news.  He was always told about it when major end items were rendered useless for whatever reason.  They were a mercenary unit after all, and the loss of 380+ million C-Bills worth of equipment was a major end item in anyone’s book within the Inner Sphere.  But it wasn’t just the jumpship, the members of what everyone called Wolf’s Dragoons were also very important to Jaime.  “Mis-jumps are nothing to take lightly.  How many people did we lose?”

Griffith made a face that was rarely seen on this man, as he read down the document that he had just been sent.  “It says that we didn’t lose anyone.  But they found seven bodies in one of the cargo holds of the Mule.  They only found the bodies after a smoke alarm sounded off along with all of the other alarms that had to be sounding at the same time within a wrecked jumpship.  It turned out that this alarm was caused by a wood burning cooker of some kind smoking up the cargo hold.”

He stopped talking as he now looked at a few attached images that had been sent to him through the ComStar managed HPG network.  “Blake’s Blood!” He was a combat veteran, and what he saw almost made him gag.  He wasn’t even going to try to understand what he had just seen as his higher brain functions took a short vacation from reality.  Suddenly and without another word he slide the digital device over to his boss.

Jaime kept eye contact with the officer that was turning a mix of grey and green, but he did still reach for the device.  When Griffith didn’t say another word but looked like someone had just walked over his grave, Jaime looked down at the image.  Jaime had been a mech jock for longer than most people from where he had come from.  He had seen up close and personal a lot of ways that people could die, but what this image showed him was a first for him to witness.

Jaime looked over to Stanford Blake and kept is face still.  “This might be better for your department to take over.  Have the local WolfNet team see what they can find out about all of this.  Sometimes mis jumps can be a blessing in disguise, or so the Scorpions say.  Now who is next?  I have a meeting with Tetsuhara tonight, and I don’t want to be late…again.”  What didn’t need to be said was that this information, like anything else connected to the Dragoons, was to be kept out of any ears that were not one of them.

Blackwell Compound, New Valencia
Federated Suns
End of Feb 3025.

One second, I was in a drug induced nap and the next second I was awake like someone had flipped on a light switch or I had just mainlined a full can of Rip-it.  That wasn’t uncommon for me to perform this kind of miracle, not after what I had been through in my life.  My body has a way of burning through painkillers like a kid through their Halloween candy on the 1st of Nov.  And that skill both impressed the medics and concerned any sawbones I had been forced to deal with.  This time I made sure that I kept my body from moving, after mentally waking up.  That was another trick that I had trained myself to be able to do over my years of being in the army.

After letting my ears work out that I was alone, at least in the local area, I let my eyes slowly open.  “Yep, it’s a hospital room. Great.”  The beeping of my heart monitor and whatever the box over my head was doing to make the same noise was new.  The room was open with the privacy curtain removed to give me a view from the walls to door.  As I looked around, and I slowly let my head turn towards the light.  I had a window, and a nice sized one at that!

“Yep, not a VA or military hospital.  So. Well.  Where am I?”  I knew the drill: think and work the issue with what God and Uncle Sam gave me.

I could tell that my mind was still very fuzzy, then again, big surprise.  If I was a betting man, I was on some very heavy drugs.  I could not move my legs or arms just yet, but they felt…. heavy in a way that I couldn’t put my finger on.  About the only thing I could move was what was above the neck.  “Oh, that is not good.”

What happened to me?  Okay what did I remember?  Me and the guys were having a cookout to celebrate the judge signing off on my divorce from Crazy Woman 2 or as the guys called her….. ex-Wife Number Three.  Oh, and it was a long weekend.

Having two or three exes was not that uncommon, and if you didn’t have at least two broken relationships after twenty years of service, you were asked some pointed questions on how you were able to pull that amazing feat off and how much it cost you.

Now that I was thinking about it.  I could remember the smoke smell of good mesquite wood slowly burning, and the taste of my second beer.  Then I remembered pain, lots and lots of pain.  It was even more pain than when I had lost my M1 tank outside of Fallujah.

“Okay go back.” What else did I remember?  I had blanks spots.  But was it because of the drugs or whatever gatecrashed my cookout with a boatload of surprise violence?

Trying to work that out was cut short when the door to my private room opened.  I pulled my eyes away from the window to see a pretty face in loose-fitting clothes entering ‘my’ room.  They didn’t look like the nurses’ scrubs that I had seen before, but they looked like they did the same kind of job.

“Oh!  You’re not supposed to be awake for another hour!”  She didn’t shriek, just used a tone normally used for a boy with his hands still in the cookie jar.  It also was a voice that was just a little too loud for this room.  She walked up to the bed with sure steps and went to work.  “How are you doing?  It’s a pretty day, don’t you think?”

Oh god she was a nurse, only someone like that would sound so cheerful in a hospital this early in the morning.  Then her hands went under the covers.

OH GOD WHAT IN THE HELL IS she doing!!!! Oh, crap I can’t feel her hand!!!!  What the Hell happened to me!!!!

I was seriously about to come unhinged for a few seconds.  I saw an off yellow bottle being pulled up and then out of my limited line of sight.  Oh, please God, please let that be my pee in that pee bottle.  Please let Crackers still be down there.

Hey at least I kept my mouth shut, two points.  That was another trick you learned in the military when you dealt with hospital staff.  Keep your damn mouth shut.  She had hit a button and I started to raise in the bed and her outer hand had reached under the covers around my hips again.  At first, I had no idea what she was doing until I saw the bed pan and plastic tube come back out into my limited field of view.  You would not take the catheter out if there was damage down there.  I was able to get my breathing under control only because now that I was not flat on my back.  The new position made it so that I could also see that both of my arms and legs were in casts.  At least that explained some of why I couldn’t move my arms or legs.

Before I knew it, I had a straw in my mouth.  Oh god did that feel good!  It was a large water cup, and I drank most of the water it held without stopping unless I really needed to breathe.

After a huge amount of water, she fed me hospital food mixed in with more water like I was a baby.  She even was talking to me like a child.  I made a note that if I had the use of my arms, I might have throttled her on the spot.  I had never liked being mothered, at least not after high school.  Then again, I was not speaking back only looking at her.  When I tried to talk, only a dry croak came out.

About the only information she said of any value, was that as soon as the doctor came and talk to me, they could move deeper into my recovery.  First they could remove the nerve blocker that they had given me to stop me accidentally doing more damage to myself and to make sure I didn’t undo all the work they had done for me.  I understood the words that she was saying, but I didn’t remember nerve blockers working like the way I was feeling.  I was put through one more degrading act, before I could see the saw bones.  I had to have a sponge bath, and that is something that this normal and healthy thirty-two year old man should not have to deal with.  Then again, I remembered about a half a hundred other vets that had to deal with the same situation, after a bad run in with IEDs or RPGs.

One bad thing about getting a sponge bath by a pretty woman.  I had to use my brain to keep my mind off of what she was working on what part of my naked body.  You have no idea what doing multiplication tables can do as a distraction for….. an uncomfortable situation.  The brain was like a muscle, the more you used it the more flexible it would remain.  That was something one of my reclass instructors had told the class of old farts like me, and I had to admit it was seeming to be true at this time.  And I think it will be proven true to my satisfaction a number of times in my near future.

I was never alone after the nurse showed up for more than half a minute at any one time.  I could tell also that there were at least four ‘nurses’ keeping a physical eye on me, and my inner alarm sounded off with how they were acting like I might jump out the window or something.  When the doctor came in, he was not alone.  Now I expected the nurse to leave with the old saw bones in the room, but she had not moved from where she was standing with a thick notebook or Ipad of some kind in her hands.  It must be letting her see all of my medical readouts on one screen and who knew what else it would tell her.

“So, Mr. Mendenhall how are you feeling?”  The man in the white lab coat spoke but the tone was pure military.

For about half a second, I almost asked him how he thought I might feel, but instead I just gave him the answer he was looking for instead of being a pain.  “ukuss….hiiiiit…..meee.”

He asked me a few dozen of the normal questions that you would get after getting your bell rung, but nothing that was a surprise.  I must have answered them correctly as my throat started to work again.  At a head nod to the nurse, I felt first cold in my arm and then slowly I could feel something in other parts of my body.  That was when I found out about the rest of the damage that had been done to me.  When he told me about the broken bones and then they put an image up on the large flat screen at the foot of this bed as proof of the damage.  I could not help but be… impressed.

Okay twenty-five broken bones, and they also just happened to be each of the bones that I have broken before, and strangely the breaks were in the same places I remembered.  That has to be a record!!!  It was just too bad that my Spidey senses were ringing like the bells of a medieval church for a noble’s first wedding.  Something was going on and they were not talking about it.

###

Note:

The images:  Think of the movie Philadelphia Experiment at the end when you see what happened to the rest of the crew of the destroyer.

[worktroll]

Interesting ... tagged.

[Luciora]

 

[ImperialistDog]

one ping only Jones...  This has my interest.

[Daryk]

Interesting!  If you ever want a copy edit in addition to the fact checking by Drakensis, just let me know... ;)

[Cannonshop]

ping

[idea weenie]

This looks like it has potential, though I have a question about a couple of the ages/timeframes.

The character is mention as being 32 when he is getting the sponge bath, yet there is a comment slightly earlier about 20 years of service & 2 bad breakups.  I am assuming that he is not the one with 20 years of service?

[Brother Jim]

Sounds interesting......

[cawest]

  I am assuming that he is not the one with 20 years of service?

He has not made it 20 year mark.  it was a comparison to others that he was not that are out of the ordinary.  a friend said marriage in the military should be measured like dog years. 

[snakespinner]

ping

[mikecj]

TAG!

[Dave Talley]

Mucho taggo

[EAGLE 7]

Ping

[Orangeduke38]

Interesting Start.

[cawest]

Chapter 2
By Cliff
Fact Checked and Sanity Checked by Drakensis
Editor (that I at least sometimes listen to, so the screw ups are all mine) Drakensis

Blackwell compound, New Valencia
Federated Suns
End of Feb 3025.

Franko Demos turned off the image displayed for the rest of the room to see that was a part of a wrecked dropship cargo bay now long since cleaned up. He looked around the room at the eight other members of this mission’s support staff that he could currently draw on.  “Okay what do we know, and why?”  It was time to put his mission commander’s hat on and get this puzzle put to bed.

Franko was not just another member of the larger Wolf Net group hidden under the skirts of the Wolf’s Dragoons.  He had been a freeborn member of Clan Goliath Scorpions until he reached the ripe old age of 21, around the time volunteers were solicited to reinforce the Wolf Dragoons in their 3019/3020 supply run.

With little chance of becoming a Seeker due to his freeborn status, Franko had jumped at the chance.  It had taken only a year in his Clan’s touman to make it clear that his only future there was to be a bullet sponge for a trueborn.  The only question was whether he did so now or after rising to be a junior officer.

Half a decade later, his inquisitive nature had taken Franko (who adopted the last name of Demos on joining the Dragoons) out of the line regiments and into WolfNet.  He had not been thrilled at the assignment, until he had read the second and third reports that this ‘mis-jump’ had generated within Wolf Net.

It was amazing that only one man, that was not even a House Lord or Khan, could generate so much effort.  Franko had only arrived on this planet two days ago, and as luck would have it, the subject of all of those reports had just come out of a coma all on his own and without the use of any drugs being needed by the medical staff to help the process along.  That had been more than a major surprise to the medical staff on shift, even after the second time it happened.  The report even said that he came awake early when he had been given drugs to buy more time for the day shift medical support team to arrive.

The team’s second-in-command, Roger Donlon quickly looked around the table before coming back to Franko.  “We have some ideas and a starting point for finding out who we are dealing with.”  It sounded like he was very thrilled to be dealing with this problem, maybe overly so to Franko’s eyes.

An image was now displayed on the hologram systems built into the middle of the table, and it was of a green ID card that started to slowly rotate in all three dimensions.  “We have Master Sergeant Drake Mendenhall late of the United States Army as of 2020.  He remembers having a backyard cookout with friends on Friday July 3rd of that year.  He even gave the names of what we think that belongs to the other bodies that were found with him….. in a less viable state.  So far, we have matches only to three of the bodies to ID cards that we were able to be recovered from that mess of biological material.”

Franko nodded his head at the new information.  “What about the outbuilding that was found with them inside the Mule?”

Cindy Smethurst was a young woman who was not Clanborn (a distinction she was hopefully only half-aware of - although she wouldn’t have been picked for the Watch if she wasn’t smart enough to have some clues) spoke up next.  “It’s a storage building, as we expected but mostly made of wood instead of plastic normally found on most civilized planets.  We found colored lights for a few different holidays that match from what we know of that time period, along with yard tools, paint, entertainment disks of a mix of audio and images, and some hand tools.  It’s about mostly what you would expect from a suburb of a major city outside a military base.

The briefer rocked back in her chair, “We also found military books, books about combat equipment, military tactics, and a good-sized collection of physical paper copies of pornographic magazines.”  Cindy had a slight smirk on her face as she said those last few words.

Franko could not help but smile at the look of disgust on the face of Minuet (the only other woman in the room) at the last part of the statement.  Franko quickly made his face bland so that he would not draw any kind of a complaint. “So, we did pull him out of our past.  Will that cause us issues?”  One of Franko’s lesser-known hobbies was reading stories about hyperspace what ifs.  It was one of the reasons that he had been sent here by his commander of Wolf Net.

Pietro Omodeo was one of the pure science people who had been helping out Blackwell with some hard science math until the issue at the jump point slapped everyone, looked very uncomfortable at the question that Franko had asked.  “We do not think that he is from our past at all.  Well maybe he is not from our universe, is the right term to use for this person.”

Franko knew that a headache was in his future at that statement, but he needed to ask a question.  “Why do you think this?”

Before he could ask more, the scientist started talking again.  Pietro folded his arms in his lap and became prepared to defend his findings.  “All of the books that we found in this outbuilding were inventoried - even the damaged ones.  Once we started reading them to try to pinpoint his origins, we found dates that lead up to but don’t go past 2020 - but so far, we cannot find any mention of a Second Cold War or a strong Western Alliance.  We cannot even find one reference to the great battle of Moscow in 2013!”

The man shook his head. “We have found mention of brushfire wars in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and the Ukraine on his ‘Earth’.  Information on these little brushfire wars is not found in any books that we have been able to locate in the ComStar supplied material or any other database we have access to.  That all matches what we found out from discreet questioning of this person - and the same for the assertions (whining really) that their space-faring ability is way behind what we think was available to Terra in that time frame, like they are stuck in low orbit, without the AS Altair. Our history of 2020 is very different - if he isn’t from another universe then someone is doing a spectacular job of historical revisionism.”

   Franko might have been in over his head about the hard science of what had happened, but he knew people that might be able to help him out.  He could tell that the people in this room believed what they had said to him.  He also thought that the man in the medical room down the hall had more to tell them, it was just a gut feeling.  He folded his arms onto the desktop.  “You are going to need a dropship load of proof for anyone outside this room to believe you.  Anyway, is the house set up yet?”

On the other side of San Angeles - within the compound that held the slowly growing grounds of Blackwell Heavy Industries - a house was being set up in a living area that supported the workers of that facility.  The single-family home in question was in a preplanned middle-management zone, and it should have been ready this week for its mission, if Franko’s first brief was correct.

One of the people connected with Blackwell security spoke up.  “It should be ready within a week or so.  There have been problems getting the storage building moved, repaired, and restocked.  But there also have been a few delays in the wiring of the home with the best spy tech Wolf net could access on short notice.”  The spy tech wire chaser of the team spoke up.

Franko looked at the ‘nurse’ and doctor that would take care of Drake.  “I think we can start letting the caveman know where he is.  It will be your call on how much and how fast to tell him about the current time.”   He half-turned to look only at the Wolf Net agent that was acting as a nurse.  The funny part was that she had been a fully trained emergency room nurse from clan space, before joining Wolf Net.  “Are you still okay being his live-in babysitter?”  Franko raised his eyebrow as he waited for her reply.

Minuet did not say anything for a few seconds, but she kept looking at the mission commander.  “I am supposed to be on New Avalon by the end of the year, but I am okay keeping an eye on the caveman.  I can use the time to finish my medical studies for my cover story instead of needing to do so during the deployment travel time.  And if he gets a case of roaming hands with me?  I can work on my hand-to-hand combat skills at the same time.”

This last statement got a round of chuckles from the rest of the room.  A base idea was worked on how to break it to the caveman some shocking news over the next hour.  That he was a thousand years into the future, and on a different planet than the one he had been born on should be a little shocking, if it was true.  Just in case two different rooms in the mental ward were set up along with drugs to handle him if he reacted… violently or not to this news.  Franko and the rest were sure that this news was going to cause more than a few issues, for everyone even remotely connected to this.

Blackwell compound, New Valencia
Federated Suns
End of Feb 3025.

Ohhhh, god!  I soooooo hate hospitals!  Drake had thought that he was ready for this day, right until they turned on the TV fixed mounted on the wall.  He had been asking for the remote every time someone new came to his room and had been denied until the doctor cleared it.  He quickly found out that the local news was well the local news.  He didn’t recognize the power players or even the city names they were talking about, but his mind was still a bit scrambled after whatever happened to him.  Oh, and so far, no one would give him a straight answer on that front also.  Then there was the joy of only being awake for two days playing twenty questions with the doctors and nurses that would stop by had gotten very old.

Drake even had a problem with the daytime sitcoms that came on after the news shows had cycled off on the only channel he could use, but he rarely had to watch the daytime ones being in the Green Machine, so this didn’t raise any alarm bells.  Then came the cooking shows. Drake had no idea what they were cooking much less what they were cooking with, and it was like nothing he had seen while pulling head count at the unit’s mess hall.

Drake knew that he was going to have to talk to a head doctor, if he didn’t get a grip on his situation.  With the way he was always being asked what he could remember, and by the looks on their faces they didn’t seem to like what he was saying.  Drake’s experience said that he was going to have to deal with one of those jackwagons before he was going to be allowed to go back home.

Drake flexes his hand and tunes out the wall mounted screen and seeing the clock turn to the top of the hour.  Drake was working on getting his game face on.  “If this next doctor was not from VA or Tricare, I am going to have to ask for his phone.  Oh, and why hasn’t my TOP come to see me or anyone else from my chain of command?”

Just as the thought about VA and Tricare connected again, the head shrink’s head and upper body popped into the door and entered the room.  Talk about thinking much less speaking of the Devil and the SOB shows up right in your grill.  Two of them walked right into the room without so much as a knock.  “Jeez, I didn’t even say your name three times while looking into a mirror.”  Drake could tell that the comment went right over their heads.

Then the pair of them lowered the boom on to Drake, trapping him on the bed - all while staying out of arm’s reach.

The tall thin man had cold eyes and he was watching the odd man in the hospital bed very closely as he started to speak.  “Mr. Mendenhall, my name is Doctor Wirth.  Doctor Smith and I would like to talk to you.”

Drake was on edge and not just from the cold dead eyes.  It was everything about this man that was making Drake want to shoot him.  “Well, it’s not like I can run away from you.”  Drake did a little shake to make the exposed white plaster move a little.  “But first question to you?  Where are we?”

Alexis Smith could see that the patient was on edge as soon as they walked in and the displayed data on his heart rate, and blood pressure confirmed this to her.  She mentally reviewed some of the notes on this case and thought that if she just pitched her voice right that the man would positively respond to her.  “You’re in a military hospital.”

Doctor Niklaus Wirth fought to not shoot a look over to Alexis as she interrupted him.  He was supposed to be the one that was leading this.  “Yes, and we need to -”

Drake jumped back in with both feet as he fought down a smile as he added another point to his side of the score board.  “This don’t look like any military hospital that I know.  Now. Where. Are. We. Really?”

Doctor Smith noticed that Niklaus was not looking at the vital signs as they leveled out but were still a little high and she fought back her own smile.

Niklaus Wirth didn’t notice the sharp tone he uses on the patient.  “Look!  This is San Angeles, New Valencia.  Now can we….”

Drake does a little head tilt and wishes that he could cross his arms.  “New Valencia?  So, Mexico…. Panama…..  Yeah, seems like somewhere in Central America.”  Drake could see that he was getting to the man already.

Doctor Wirth had enough of these interruptions by this barbarian.  “SHUT UP!  And just listen while we explain this.”

Drake smirked, “Okay, now I believe this is a military hospital.”

Niklaus was standing there with his jaw swinging open.  Seeing an opening Alexis tries to take control.  “You and your friends were hit by something very peculiar in recorded history and ended up a long way from home in both space and time.  Now New Valencia is not some city state that you’re used to dealing with.  It’s a planet that was colonized by humanity several centuries ago.”

Drake gives a snort to add to his now larger smirk on his face as he looked at the tall blonde woman.  “That’s….. ridiculous.  Who do you think I am?  Buck Rogers or Cable, Doctor Brown?”

Doctor Wirth now has his mental feet back under him.  “That’s the most plausible part of this whole thing.”

Drake looked back in forth between the two doctors and he felt his heart start to drop.  “Okay... continue.”

Doctor Wirth had a smug smile on his face as he felt that he was back in control.  “The books that we found with you seem to indicate that you’re from another timeline, one that diverged from ours in the late 20th Century.”

Drake didn’t say anything for many long seconds, but he spoke in a low voice.  “I need a drink.”

Doctor Wirth gave the man a sour look.  “Not in your condition.”

Drake looked up a little too quick and he was about to say something referencing what he could do with that.  He only stopped when his mind brought up how the military doctor might react to that comment.  “I need to hit some… thing.”  He gave the man a look that should have said that you will due.

Doctor Smith had to hide a little smile by rolling her lips.  “I’m sure that the physical therapy people can help with that.”

***

Drake was punching with the only hand and arm that was not covered in a heavy caste.  He was not focused on the strike but what he had just been told.  “New Valencia?  New Valencia.  mis jump??”  He could tell that he was mumbling loud enough that the PT nurse could hear him, but he didn’t care at this point.

Drake’s eyes went tunnel vision and stars exploded in his eyes as his right leg, complete with cast is rotated to see how far it could move.  When the stars were reduced to just small pops his mind caught up.  “31st century?”

As the ball was tossed from his cast covered arm.  “New Valencia?”

He gets ready to toss it again but paused as he remembers an advert about a sale on Pharoh beer.

Drake felt tears in his eyes as his cast cover arm was pushed so far back, that he thought they wanted to break it… again.  “Why does Timbiqui Dark sound like something I should know.”

He had two hours of working with the physical terrorists - I’m sorry -  He had two hours of physical therapy after the bag of joy was opened on him by the two white coats.

It was during that fun time of pain called ‘range of movement’ testing that he started to remember why some of the terms they had used seemed to be familiar to him.  They had matched up with something in the back of his mind that was still too fuzzy for his liking.

If this had been back in the Cold War, Drake would have thought that the KGB was up to their old tricks.  Only it was impossible, then again.  He understood that he was supposed to be on a planet that was not Earth, so what did he know about what was impossible?  Drake just fought to just keep his mouth shut and did his work out on the parts of his body that were not still repairing.  Drake more or less just pushed it off to the side of his thinking that he was still on heavy drugs and things would be better soon… he hoped?

The emotional pain of the shape that was falling into place as he pieced things together distracted him from the pain of pushing the exercises further than he should have. Hard enough that the tyrants caught on before he did. It was downright embarrassing to have them cut the exercise short, snapping that if he couldn’t be bothered to stop before he hurt himself, then he should go back to his room until he had his head together enough to care.

When they were finally done, and Drake was helped back into a wheelchair he looked over to look up at the nurse’s name badge.  “Nurse Wilkes.  You know I’m not convinced that this is not some kind of game.”

The nurse with eyes like a shark looked over to the man covered in castes and then looked down at her watch.  “I’m due a smoke break, and you could use some fresh air.  How about we fix two birds with one stone?”

Drake shot her a look and gave the twin shoulder shrugs of the MI Salute, and soon he was being wheeled down a different corridor.  His PTSD was rocking and being stuck in a wheelchair with a mass of people standing over him was sooo causing him some issues that he wishes he didn’t have to deal with.  That stress caused Drake a good-sized delay in thinking after they had stopped moving on the roof top.

As it turned out the roof of his hospital had a smoking and break area just for staff to use on the roof.  From this height he was able to get a huge panoramic view of the local area with the air blowing on his face.

That was when Drake saw his first battlemech with his own eyes.  He had no problem knowing that the backward pointing bird-like legs belonged to an Officer’s Battle Pod.  Yeah, up yours Harmony Gold and your unseen!  All Drake could do was watch as a lance of the local militia walked off in the distance led by a Marauder class Battlemech.

Oh my God!  That’s a battlemech! Oh shit!  Oh shit, thought Drake.  Man, someone is losing their shit around here.  I wish they would do something before he screams his throat bloody.

That was the last thing that Drake remembered.

He had no idea that it had been him screaming or that he had been thrashing around so much that he could have been held on assault charges as his castes were slammed into the hospital’s staff.  Nurse Annie Wilkes would be put into retraining…after her concussion was resolved.

It would be days before Drake found out. Days which involved another round of surgery to make good the damage he’d done himself. And then enough recovery time for his body to recuperate from that and the shock he’d had.

No one had wanted him waking again until he wasn’t likely to reopen his wounds again, much less take out more of the staff.

Drake would probably have agreed with that diagnosis, if he hadn’t been drooling under sedation when the decision was made.

###

Drake rolled his head around at the sound of a soft knocking on the open door and he had to wince.  The door had been left open after he came back around from the Land of Nod.  Without asking for permission, besides the knock.  In walked Doctor Alexis Smith like she owned the place.

Smith walked in with a huge fake smile and set some files down at the foot of the medical bed.  “Time for your first class on Inner Sphere 3025.

Drake didn’t feel like talking, much less taking some kind of class.  “Where is pencil neck?  Oh, I’m sorry, I mean Doc Wirth.”  For the last part he tried to copy an Ivory League accent and failed miserably.

She gave Drake a sly little smile.  “Oh, he’s around here somewhere.  But now let’s get started, today we will be going over the founding of the Terran Hegemony by the great James McKenna.”  Drake was only half listening to the woman and the images that she started displaying on the screen.

Doctor Smith looked over to the man, and she could see that he was paying attention not knowing that Drake had learned a long time ago about how to make it look like he was paying attention in a briefing.  “The Admiral had realized how corrupt the Terran Alliance had become and oppressing the people of the home planet.  Seeing that no one was going to remedy this, he took action.  After arriving in orbit, he personally led the arrests and turned over many to the courts.”

Drake came back.  “He turned them over to the courts?  What happened to them and the ones that didn’t want to give up?”

Doctor Smith gave Drake an odd look.  “The courts convicted them.  And why would any of them not want to give up?”

Drake put his working face on.  “So, they all just gave up and there were not any riots are anything?”

The blonde doctor didn’t look at her notes.  “No, the people welcomed the Admiral with open arms.  In fact, after he took over the leadership of Terra, the planets closest to the home world came to him for his leadership.”

Drake still had that look.  “What?  I thought there was a Cameron that was in charge.”

The Doctor smiled.  “So, you have been listening.   Well, the Admiral saw that Michael Cameron was the best leader available when he was ready to retire and passed the leadership role over to him.  It was from there that the Terra Hegemony became the great Star League.  His House would lead the rest of the Houses into the golden age.  When any of the house lords had a dispute for the next 400 years?  They would come to the head of the Star League under House Cameron to work out the dispute.  And besides setting up the Star League, the Star League Defense force was founded.  Only the best, bravest, and brightest were allowed to join and it was outfitted with the best technology that House Cameron led the human race to develop.”

[cawest]

Drake was nodding his head as she spoke…all the while fighting back his BS detector or tossing his BS flag in her face.

He wasn’t entirely sure she wouldn’t take a swing at him if he called her on the amount of Kool-Aid she’d been drinking.  His ribs were better, but if she kicked him in the shins, it could set the healing of his broken femurs back by weeks.


###

Drake looked down as the nurse put another tube thicker than his thumb to draw more blood out of his arm.  As it started to fill, he made eye contact with the nurse.  “My god!  I think you’ll have a vampire living in the basement of this building with the amount of blood and everything else that you are pulling out of me!”

Minuet smirked.  “You will just have to drink more liquids and eat all of your vegetables, or we will have to use your femoral artery.”  She raises her eyebrow and makes a show of looking at his waist.

Drake started doing math in his head again.  “Well at least with my lungs working better I can yell that I’m being assaulted.”

The doors opened and in walked a pair of new people pushing some kind of machine with a helmet on top.  While Drake was looking at the newcomers, Minuet snickered.  “Well, you did say that your lungs were better.”

What seemed like was all day they were going at it, all while Drake had a heavy metal helmet on his head.  They even made him keep it on while lunch and a snack were served.  They were going through ink blots and asking what he saw when Drake’s personality stepped out of the box without its leash.  The few rounds of word association tests had been bad enough.  “Okay this one I swear looks like you… with breasts.”

The only one that smiled was Minuet, the rest just gave Drake a blank look and kept going before they took the helmet off and rolled him to the next lower floor.  They must not have agreed with his judgement on that one.  At seeing the open maw of a device that looked like an MRI machine from hell, Drake looked over to a male nurse pushing him.  “Are you really going to put me in that thing?”

 The nurse just looked down at Drake and he felt his heart sink.  That would be a yes.

After doing an impression of what Drake would think of as an old school torpedo being loaded into a submarine firing tube and then sitting for what seemed like hours.  Drake was pulled out just before he would have started banging on the sides.  He felt the table under him being pulled out. “Well, am I going to live?” he asked sarcastically as soon as they had him back in the wheelchair.

Nothing but silence and sad eyes were the reply.

“Well then I guess that I will see what happens in a few years if my grey matter turns into blue matter, starts running out my ears, or I have a sudden urge to eat everyone’s brains.”  He could still feel the pity in the room behind him as the door closed and Drake was pushed down a hospital corridor.

Blackwell Compound, New Valencia
Federated Suns
8 March 3025

Drake’s eyes shot open well before the sun was up on this planet, even the glass was still opaque from this angle as some kind of privacy setting.  “Okay they are taking off some of the hardware today, and if it goes well.   You are sooooo out of here by lunch.”

With a smile on his face Drake started flexing his muscles, starting with his toes and working his way up to his neck as best that he could.  Drake’s legs and left arm still hurt when he pulled this kind of crap every morning, but his training told him that a little pain was a way to know that you’re still alive, even if he knew that there were more than just a few doctors back on his old home that would not have agreed with him on that point.

“Hey Drake!  Are you up yet?  I have food and tools,” came a familiar female voice sounding from outside of the door that made Drake jump a little in his hospital bed.

“Yea, I must have gone back to sleep after working on my little stretching exercise, Come on in!”  When the door opened, he could not help but smile at the woman.  “Good to see you Minuet.”

She gave a smile that had Drake doing math problems in his head again, so that he didn’t pitch a tent in the sheets.  Minuet held up a tray of food in one hand and a tool that Drake had no clue about in the other.

“How about you cut some of this crap off of me, and then I can feed my own face.”  He asked.

Minuet drops her chin, and a twinkle comes to her eyes.  She makes a show of putting the food down on the nearby end table.  Drake had no idea what the tool was called, but she cut him out of the hard casts like nobody’s business.  Before he could even try to move more than a few inches she had slapped on what she called an air cast that Minuet pulled out of what seemed like nowhere onto Drake’s legs and arm.

Drake looked down and saw a clear bag that kept all of his left leg from moving, but at least it was not a heavy mass of plaster and bandages.  Now at least he could scratch or shift around a little when he slept.  The one air cast that went on his right leg was not as long, only going from hip to knee on that leg.  The one on his left arm was in two parts and at least made it so that he could move his arm at the elbow.

Drake looked back up at the woman just as lunch was brought in.  “Oh, joy of joy I get to void my colon and bladder without needing the ‘help’ of a second person.”  Minuet shot Drake a look that he just smiled back at her and charged along.  “You know it’s the small things in life that you end up missing the most.”

Minuet watched Drake try to get a shirt on and ended up doing more dancing than he did getting dressed.  “You know that you are supposed to have help with dressing for some time or you will hurt yourself,” she told the man.

Drake tried to put the air caste into the loose sleeve of one of the donated shirts that showed up one day.  “I have been dressing myself for a few decades, I won’t stop now.”  Drake pushed a little too much and then suddenly stopped and his eyes went wide in pain.

Minuet got up from her chair and quickly helped Drake to get the shirt on.  While he was dealing with the fasteners, she started talking.  “Blackwell is putting you up in a house within the compound with some live-in support while the investigation is still being carried out.  They are also the ones that have been paying your medical bills, in case you were wondering.”

When Minuet said the name Blackwell Drake almost froze.  He didn’t remember anyone saying that he was living on Blackwell’s dime.  He had heard the name on the news but for some reason he had not connected the dots.  Drake had been a fan boy of the Marauder and the Marauder II type mechs on his home planet.  He knew that the larger sister was made by Blackwell and Blackwell was owned by the Wolf’s Dragoons.  And the Wolf’s Dragoons were a scouting unit for the rest of the Clans.

Drake was looking down so that his eyes would not tell he was about to freak out.  “So, I will have a babysitter.”

The Wolf Net Agent was looking down at some of the notes that had been taken already.  One of the other staff had found what an Abrams tank had been, that had taken a lot of work until they found the name connected with something called an M1A2 tank.  Drake had said that due to combat damage he had been moved to staff work but little else.

At the comment of having a babysitter she looked up and gave him one of her looks at being distracted from what she had been doing.  “It will not be a babysitter.  They would be a medical professional and they will be there for medical reasons… not babysitting.”  She made sure that her tone was a little sharp at the end as a nurse would be.

Drake didn’t doubt for a second that this person would have some medical training, but they would really be there to spy on him and report back to Blackwell, but how high would it go?  Now he was glad that he didn’t go into what he had done ‘when they changed me over to staff work’ meant after my time in heavy tanks.  And no Bradley’s and all versions of the Stryker’s are not real tanks!

###

Drake looked up at ‘his’ new home from a wheelchair and tried to take it all in.  It’s not what I would have expected for a home built on another planet and a few centuries in the future, he thought.  It was different, but nice.

The sound of Minuet closing the door of the six wheeled van that had carried them from the hospital to this neighborhood drew his attention back from the house.

“Well, apparently my house is your house.”  He could not help but wince at his own statement as he thought:  Yeah, real smooth there.  And now I am sooo glad that I listened to my own paranoia while in the body and fender shop, and I’m so glad that I listened to ex-wife number 3.  She had been a major in counterintelligence when he had been a Division S2.  Her ears must be burning about now.  Drake felt like he’d been kicked in the guts, at that last part.  He still had feelings for her, it was just that it was not the right time for them, and now it never would be.

Minuet opened the door and rolled Drake the rest of the way into his ‘temporary’ home like she had done it a thousand times before.  Drake had thought that she was a HUMINT asset, but only after his brain started working through the fuzziness.  Her showing up now had proven it to his satisfaction.  It was the way that she walked and the way her eyes moved that had clued him in.  It was a lot like some of the scouts he had worked with before in combat zones.

“Well, what do you think Drake?’’ the young woman said as she pushed him into the main room of the house.

“The house?  Or you being my nursemaid?”  Drake tilted his head back and to one side to look up at the woman from his seat.  “It’s nice and at least I don’t have to go far to undergo my daily torture sessions with you being here.”

“Well, you are in a mood this afternoon.  Let me show you around the rest of the place.” Minuet said as she walked behind me to take charge of his chair to finish the little tour.  She held out a hand that was dismissed by Drake.  With a huff Drake rose and at least he was now standing on his own two feet….. and a cane.

###

Man, does this century have some screwed-up entertainment shows, Drake thought as his eyes started to close.  Minuet had her own room in this three-bedroom house that Drake had been ‘assigned’ by Blackwell Heavy Industries while they ‘investigated’ the mis-jump.

In theory Drake had his own room but so far he’d insisted on falling asleep on the new age torture device masquerading as a couch, while watching an honest to God holographic screen.  Minuet had allowed it, at the low low price of getting the same ‘enjoy the consequences of your dumbassery’ alls his wives had directed at him sooner or later.

He’d had been watching a hyper detailed recap show about a pair of gaudy painted battlemechs knocking each other around.  It was supposed to be an important match for some upcoming playoffs but it wasn’t like he cared.  Before they could conclude the commentary, his brain shutdown and he dozed through the end of the programme.

Later that night, Drake’s eyes shot open when the screen brightly flashed again to fully wake him up, and he saw a robed wonder standing up and telling him about how great ComStar was and that the Word of Blake would lead all to a better life.  At some point, while sleeping he’d missied the start of a ComStar puff-piece, and he’d woken to the nightmare of watching one of the worst televangelists ever to have lived speaking to Drake like he was his friend.  Something broke inside the time-displaced soldier after just a few minutes of him talking.   In just those few minutes of the ComStar promotion man talking, Drake started getting angrier and angrier.

“Oh, we are so not going there, you toaster worshiping fart hole.”  Drake felt something that he had not felt in a long time.  He had a mission, and it was a mission that he now very much wanted to finish.

He had been still working on what he should do with his life now that he was in a game with a catch phrase: ‘meat is cheap but metal is not’.  He’d played battletech more than a little in his past life, but he was not fully ‘into’ the lore of the game like some others he had known.  Drake had seen some of his platoon-mates sit for hours on their racks arguing about this and that, but to him it was just a game.

That is, right until Drake saw Mister Robed Wonder hovering in his living room a few hours before sunrise.  Drake had been leaning towards just drinking himself to an early death or something equally dumb.  He hit the power button harder than necessary, and he looked at the ceiling waiting until he fell back asleep.  Seeing the ComStar advert had gotten his blood going, but soon Drake found that sleep would not reclaim him.  His mind told him that there were things that needed to be done.

Well before the first light of the day, Drake had started to waddle his broke ass out to his shed, which Blackwell had kindly placed behind the house when they were done doing whatever passed for scientific studys of it.

He stopped outside and really looked at what was the only thing that was his and from a home and life that he could never go back to.  It even had his grill sitting right where it should be if he had been still back home outside of Fort Hood Texas.  Drake looked around the rest of the small yard and then back towards the house he had been staying in if not living in.  With a grin he noted that his babysitter was not up yet.  If she stuck to pattern, she would not be up for about two more hours.

#####

“Hell, the sun has been up for half an hour already,” grumbled Drake.  It took him that long to get out the back door without making too much noise.

As Drake looked around the shed, he had flash backs of the images of his friends enjoying a little food and drink.  Then he remembered what they had looked like in those images that he had been shown while still in the hospital.  A snort slips his lips that was not joyful but more resigned to his fate.

He was lost inside his memories of his friends.  They had looked kind of like what Thanos had done to the Hulk Buster Armor in the movie Infinity War.  No... they looked more like that movie Philadelphia Experiment that I saw on leave with my family.  Come to think of it, how did Banner get the armor out of the rock face so that he could be in that end scene?

Drake gave another snort at his wandering train of thoughts, but he didn’t notice the tears running down his cheek.  Even if he went home today almost all of his closest friends had died within spitting distance of this shed.  No matter how you cut it, he was about as alone as a person could be and still be among the living.

Drake had just gotten the wooden shed door open when he heard feet softly coming up behind him.  After a few seconds of thought, Drake made like he didn’t notice them walking on rocks and entered his shed.  The room looked the same, but at the same time not.  He could tell that some things had been moved around when he looked hard enough.  Big surprise, they had to move it a few light minutes away from this star and get it in this yard on a planet.

Drake made sure he did not look directly at a large plastic tub on the bottom shelf off to one side of the 20x20 foot outbuilding.  It was just one among many, some of them were from his ex-wife that she had not picked up yet.  He flipped open a few boxes almost at random that had been put into this shed over the years.  Drake was waiting to see if his babysitter would say or do anything while she watched him.  He was hoping Minuet would and not hoping at the same time that she would tip her hand enough for him to call her on it.

Drake could tell that some of the things had been moved around inside those random boxes and totes, but if they had found what he hoped was still hidden?  He was thinking that if they found those things.  Then he would have been asked a lot more pointed questions, or they would have already put a bullet into his brain pan to keep the secrets of the Wolf Dragoons being part of the Clans.  Drake heard the feet softly moving away from his back as he checked more of his stuff out.

After the third box that Drake had checked, he knew that some of his books were missing.  Right off the bat, Drake could tell that the mini-Janes’s and other books on aircraft, missiles, and tanks were not there.  He didn’t have the numbers and exact titles off the top of his head of the missing books, so he didn’t think that he could bring them up out of the blue.  Finding those books missing, Drake went straight for his old field box that went on field problems and deployments with him.

A quick check showed that the combo lock was still attached and locked on the container in question.  Drake did not think for a second that someone would not have easily cracked it, and he slowly opened the travel scarred wooden and metal trunk.  After going through some old uniforms and other items that he always tried to deploy with, Drake found what he was looking for and he held it maybe just a little too close to his chest for a few seconds.

One of the things that you have to deal with while being deployed is what to do with any of your down time.  Too much down time is as bad as not having enough decompression time.  That was why finding his Toughbook type computer was such a relief to him.  It didn’t have anything battletech related on it, but it had been loaded with all of the CDs that used to be in hardbacks coming out of Bean Book Company when he was a young man.  Later he had added different audio and PDF books to the device.  This field safe laptop was filled with books from writers like Ringo, Weber, Flint and a few others, and if he had been in one of those universes it would have been a gold mine.

It still is a goldmine, of a different sort, that is if I play my cards right.  It might have me raking it in.  Drake was biting his lip to keep from speaking aloud or showing to many emotions to hint at his hidden thoughts.

Oh, and it also was just a taste of home that he could draw on for years, if need be.  Drake turned to leave.  When he completed his stilted turning, Drake could see Minuet looking at him and the rectangular device in his hand.

Drake almost jumped out of his skin at seeing the woman standing there.  Somehow, she had successfully snuck up on him, a multi tour combat veteran.  So much for thinking that she had left to go back into the house leaving Drake to go through his past.  Drake made a mental note to be more aware of who might be around him even when he thinks that he has an idea of the local break down.

The most-likely-spy spoke and did a chin point towards his hand.  “I thought you were going after your girly rags.”  Minuet had a flat look on her face that made Drake wonder for only a heartbeat on what to say back.

Drake looked at her and felt like pushing back just a little, it just was all of those years he had spent in combat arms that was about to write a check that his butt might not be able to cash. “I could have, but with my broken wings, that would be just….. frustrating.”

He gave her a little knowing smile at seeing her turn a little red.  “I also had some movies on the thing, but not any porn.  You sooo didn’t want to take an electronic device into a porta-jon with you while in the field.  If you don’t know why?.......   Then you are way too young, and I have been hanging out with the wrong types.”  He had a mental flash of saying about this same thing when someone came over to his home and found the baby oil in the freezer.

Just before Drake stepped fully out of the shed, his eyes went to a corner that he had not checked, and he almost wanted to cry.  Sitting in the shadow were two bottles of his favorite BBQ sauce almost hidden from sight.  From where Drake was standing, he could tell one was half full and mostly gone bad for not being refrigerated after opening.  But the second bottle looked to be full and should be good as long as someone had not opened it after ‘the event’ as he mentally called it.  He looked back to the very pretty woman/spy/nurse/mother hen.  “Ah…. could you do me a favor and bring those two bottles into the house?”

Minuet picked up the two plastic bottles without saying a word, and then followed the slowly walking man from a different spot in space and time.  She watched the man when they went into the house, and Drake took a seat in a tall chair that had been supplied so that this wreck didn’t have to use a lower chair more common in modern homes.  She had to admit that the high table was more useful than the normally lower style in fashion.  At least he thanked her when she put the bottles down next to him.  She took a few steps away but not that far so that she was ‘in conversation distance’ to do her job.

Minuet wanted to see what this device was, it was one of the items that had been flagged for her to try to find out what it might be by the tech teams of Wolf Net.  All that was known about that device was that it was an electronic device of some type but with unknown power or use.  It had been opened by a skilled technical team not long after it had been found, and every square inch of the insides had been detailed imaged, but the tech was unknown to anyone that viewed it.

Drake opened the lid of the laptop and started checking out the device.  After using a dry towel that Minuet passed him, he removed a lot less dust than there should have been in his experience.  Only then did he hit the power button on the keyboard.  With a harder and longer second push of that button, Drake let out a sigh that was not just for show to the suspected hidden cameras.  The battery was dead, way big surprise there, they had only been moved to a new universe than where it had been made and last used.

Drake looked at the power cord and at the outlet mounted on the nearby wall, and he frowned.  He had been overseas enough to know that even if the plugs looked to be a match, it still was a very bad idea not to check, double check, and then ask a professional before you used it.  That was a quick way to lose both the device and data.  Drake let the male plug end drop out of his hand, then he picked up the box further down on the power wire.  Thanks to needing to do this more than a few times over the years, he knew where to find the needed symbols and numbers.  He even knew what they meant…. most of the time.

Drake pulled over a pen and paper that he made sure was always on the tabletop.  Quickly he wrote a series of numbers and symbols down along with a few other notes, like what each of the symbols meant to him.  All the while he could see his minder watching him with very sharp eyes.  “I need a power and plug adapter; do you know of a good electronics store around here?  One that might know scientific notations or symbols that could be a few centuries old?”  Drake knew that this system of markings had been around from about World War 2, but he had no clue on if they were still in use.

Minuet took the sheet of paper and used her acting skills to bluff Drake.  “Why don’t you get a uni power adapter?”  Seeing the look that she knew was confusion on Drake’s face, she told him that it was a common device for any traveler to have on hand to run their devices.  Most of the time it was the easier way to go than replacing all of your powered devices every time you had to shift to a new planet.  This was all an act because she was not supposed to know he was not from this universe.

Minuet took the information from the little box on the power cord and went to get some lunch while she was out picking up the device.  Before she left, the ‘nurse’ said that she would be back in a few hours.  While she was gone hidden cameras watched as Drake tested the sauce and was not surprised that one was bad, but Drake could not bring himself to toss it out.  One bottle went into the cooler that did the same job as a fridge back home and the other was marked not to use and placed out of the way.  Next Drake went back out to the shed and brought back some movies and music that he felt was better than the crap he had seen so far.

Yeah, that was a cover story for anyone that still might be watching him.

[cawest]

##

Drake popped the lid on the box that held a stash of porn that no wife in her right mind would let into “her” home.  You see that tote was not just holding the old NCO’s porn magazine collection to take to the field.  It also held all of the Battletech books near the bottom of the watertight plastic tub that he used down range to run games.  Now he was not the type that “lives” battletech, he just like big combat stomping things.  Between what a man he had called his Crazy Uncle had given Drake and collecting more than a few items on his own.  Drake now had all of the technical read outs in physical form along with scenarios and rule books up to the start of the Republic Era.

Drake also had some information that was printed notes from other books and a few novels to help come up with game ideas.  Drake would always find a group that wanted to play “big battles” that would take weeks to run out and didn’t need a TV or power to play.  That was key when you were in a very small FOB or COB out in the middle of nowhere.  Sometimes they would start out a game with one mech or tank each, but soon they would jump to lance vs lance battles and more than a few times they went 36 vs 36.  Drake remembered the time that they played a way larger battle that lasted over a month of solid time.  Those were great battles, and he thinks those last books and notes would have been a great help for his plan.  That is if he lived through the next few weeks to take advantage of this data.  Drake picked up one book and had a flashback of when he ran a game that he had made the younger sergeants come up with a FRAGO for a mission and then brief “their” lance before starting.

With a sad smile on his face, Drake put the book back and covered the rest of his prizes with what had proven to be effective concealment.  He made a mental note to check his laptop cache memory to see what might be hiding there from visits to sites that people had chatted about battletech in detail.  The problem was going to be that he would have to separate the game from what people thought they knew or wanted it to be a certain way in their minds.  All of that would have to be deconflicted with the current world that Drake found himself sitting in.  He didn’t pull any of this material out of their hiding spots.  He had just wanted to make sure they were still there so that he could plan.  One of the key things in survival was that you had to inventory all of the resources you had on hand.  Also, Drake could not risk someone “watching” him and thinking that he might have been in the shed too long.

Drake quickly put everything back into that tub and made sure to put it exactly as it had been when he had entered the shed.  Then he grabbed a few of the movies and music disk that he had planned on using as his cover story to come back out here.  With his tracks hopefully covered, Drake went back to the house.  Do you know how bad it sucks trying to carry stuff, without a bag, while on crutches with many broken bones?  Well Drake found out…the hard way.  Drake needed to build a cover story good enough to keep the live in spy from finding out what he was doing before he was ready.

###

After returning to the living room of the home, Drake found out that he was really going to need that power adapter for his laptop.  He shoves another shelf aside and grunts in frustration.  “If I don’t figure this out, I won’t be able to play my damn movies or music on the POS of an entertainment systems that came with this damn house.”

Drake grumbles out more as he tries to work out what he is seeing in the entertainment device.  “I’m just lucky that I never got into gaming systems, or I might have really been screwed.  I might have gone into withdrawals without them.”

While Drake worked on this project.   He remembered that time that he took a kid’s cell phone away for an entire field problem, all because he had been caught texting in the tank.  Drake had also seen that kind of thing happen to some of the younger kids on deployment when the TV screen broke or due to “dirty” power or something cooking the delicate electronics in their personal electronic devices.

Drake had become so lost in trying to get the entertainment system to work with his disk and using words that the operators of the spying system would have to later look up.  This all happened with his DVD or Blue rays spread around him, that he did not hear Minuet come back home.  She had picked up four different uni power converters on her shopping trip into town.  There was no way for Drake to know that those devices were made by a special shop buried deep in the offices of Blackwell.

The need for speed for the last second work was because no one thought to look at that part of the device while inspecting it.  The third one did the job; Minuet was so smooth that Drake didn’t pick up that was the one that she knew would work from the start and the first two had been just window dressing.   The pair of them had some fast food while watching the Kevin Costner version of Robin Hood on a 15-inch screen sitting on the dinner table between them.  She had been visibly impressed by the interface of the laptop, but less impressed when Drake had told her that it had survived being run over by a 10ton class LMTV (light medium tactical vehicle).

While the end credits rolled on the “small” screen, Drake looked over to the woman.  “So, I went through one of my totes.  I had this idea to compare the weapons of this time with mine, but I couldn’t find the book I was looking for.  I might need some help going through the rest of them to see if they were just misplaced.”  It was a risk to let her know that he was “aware” enough to notice them missing after only a few minutes of looking.

After that little bombshell, Drake did three frakking hours of PT that he would keep thinking was payback for something.  Drake didn’t know if she was trying to tire him out so that he would want to sleep in the bed instead of in the living room or not.  Most of the time Drake really thinks that she was mad about the paperwork that she might have had to do with him noticing the missing stuff from his shed.

Drake still was up before Minuet the next day despite the workout from hell.  After their morning ritual of food, bath, and the first round of torture for the day.  Drake made his way back to the shed without an escort.  Thanks to one of the uni power boxes and a very long power cord.  Drake had his old field CD player working, and with his cell phone and tablet left back on Earth of 2020 sitting on his kitchen table.  That was going to be his main source of music until he got used to the local bands.  Drake might have some music on his laptop with music videos, but normally he would just update his music play list before rolling out to the field on his phone.

Now thanks again to listening to Crazy Woman 2 sharp shoot movies and shows to many times to count.  Drake had a basic idea on how he was going to be able to refresh his knowledge base.  He just needed the space to do it and something to provide the cover for his other covert actions.  Drake wanted to know “What 3025” he was in and then he was going to work out what his next step would be from there.

###

Drake quickly set a pattern of spending all of his free daylight hours out in the Shed with his music playing in the background.  Thanks to a little window cut out in one wall of the shed, he could keep an eye on if someone entered the “shed’s” yard from the direction of the house.  Drake was only able to get little bits of information out of his “books” even with hours to work invested into the project.  Drake could not write those notes down on a note pad that might have unwanted eyes looking at it when he was not watching.  So, he worked on a document on his laptop that was a well-hidden file from anyone, even if they had worked out the first and second password that Drake had added onto the device.

This was a skill Drake had picked up on his first deployment when a snoop had been getting into everyone’s private emails “for fun”.  Yea, that guy got a full-service blanket party when he was found out and it had been supplied by the whole platoon.  You have no idea how hard it is to keep something private while living Cheek to Jaw with a dozen others without having to deal with a snoop in the mix.  Some of those boys were to smart and to inclined to some very odd criminal ways if they had too much free time on their hands to plan…or got angry at someone.

Drake bites his lip, and those thoughts became focused on that one jerk.  That oxygen thief had found out how hard it was to type with two fingers and get anywhere thanks to them being broken.  That was the punishment for stealing someone’s password.  God help you if you hacked their gamming accounts and killed off their player as a joke.

“Well at least I’m not in his boat, but this still sucks.  I hope this is not Gods way of giving me a little pay back.”  Drake thinks as he slowly worked on this first step of a project that could still see him killed.

It was hard work with the air casts that covered a good part of Drake’s body, but at least he had more than two fingers to do the work.  It was just too bad that he had other things that had to be done all the while trying to make sure that Minuet didn’t find out what he was up to.  Drake knew that by the end of the week, he would have one cast removed and that would help a lot in his data collection and setting up his next move.  It also would make it a little easier to keep what he was doing hidden.

###

Minuet was sitting across from her boss with a sour expression on her face.  “All he does, when we are not scheduled to do an activity is sit in that damn shed!”

Franko Demos was reading her last report as she was speaking but looked up before he went to a new page.  “I am not surprised.  That is the only area that we are not rubbing his nose into the fact that he is living in the modern world.  Drake has lost everything else that connected him to his memories.  How is he recovering, otherwise?”

Minuet was a pro in both the medical and spy fields to the standards of Wolf Net and the Clans they had been connected to.  “He is doing okay, physically.  We had him checked out again before releasing him from the hospital.  His brain is scrambled so bad, that the doctors are amazed that he can walk and talk at the same time much less anything like tying his own shoes or speaking in complete sentences.”

The Agent snorts.  “That he cannot pilot a mech is about the limit of their thinking and he has a heartbeat.  His last scan was better, but his brain is still a mess that they could write a dozen papers about….. if they were not ordered by Wolf Net to keep their papers to themselves.  The treatments, vaccines, and the current range of gene therapy seem to be working for him.  We should tell him about what those gene therapies will do to him in the long run.  They were not standard for his time, and even the doctors say that they have at least slowed down his bones recovering.  I also think we need to start looking at getting him a job.  He drove a tank, before he was dropped into our lap.  They found that certificate claiming that he was the top in his class for whatever a Master Gunner was.”

She stops talking and she looks over the shoulder of her boss for a few seconds.  She has a funny look on her face.  ‘He did seem to be more active all of a sudden and his mixing beer with his medication stopped like a light switch was thrown.  The surveillance team reported that they could not find a reason, it was just that one day he seemed to be more active one early morning.  They were the ones that noticed he had left the house for that….. shed for the first time.”

Franko knew that she wanted to say more.  Like “when am I going to get a real job of my own and away from this caveman?”  Sitting still was the hardest part of being and active agent.  “I will look into that; I take it that this was not in your filed reports.  Still, you’re right.  Drake was smart and aware enough about noticing those missing books of his.  Were they returned to him?  And did you make it clear that this was not acceptable behavior to those white coats over at Blackwell to try to pull something like that on US?”  What he was not saying was that the White Coats should not have tried that, without letting the Wolf Net team know they were doing it in the first place.  Their fault was that they tried to surprise Wolf Net, and that was something they didn’t like.

Minuet smiled a smile that was just on this side of dangerous.  “Oh, I did.  I don’t think they will try something like that again.  I just put the box of items they “failed to return” along with his friends’ effects on the dinner table when I got back.”  She lets her eyebrows go forward.  “He just took them back to his shed like it was some old friend that had just borrowed them for the weekend or something.”

Franko looks up again to make eye contact with his agent.  “Did they say why they kept the books?”

Minuet gave a shoulder shrug.  She was about to answer this question, but she didn’t believe it.  “They said that they just liked the images.”

She fought to keep her eyebrows from coming together. “But I think those people would like to gain access to more of those books, and not just for histrionic reasons.  I think they went fishing for some ideas for new tanks and or whatever other weapons systems they could dream up those books might spark.”

The Clan Goliath Scorpion in Franko took notice of this information.  “Really?  Maybe after we get you on your way to New Avalon.  Sergeant Mendenhall might be able to make some side money on what is in those books.  Have you learned anything more about his military background?”

“He is pretty evasive about the last few years of his service after a battle that cost him his tank and half his crew, but he did command a Main Battle tank in combat a few times.  At almost 70 tons, we could call it a heavy tank, but it seems that they had different terms like Main Battle Tank instead of light, medium, heavy, and assault.  He also was second in command of what we would call a Lance, and he took command of this “platoon” in battle and in training events.  I even saw the citations for these actions, so it’s not him talking to waste air or get into my pants.  After getting hurt and losing his tank, he was assigned to staff work.  When I pushed after that point in time, he only says that he did a lot of personnel management stuff and paperwork for the officers to get credit for.  I guess some things never change no matter the year or universe.

Franko let the last statement slide from his field agent.  She was doing good work, and if you were good?  Then a leader would cut them a little slack just to keep them happy and on the task. “Now tell me more about this Toughbook thing.”  Franko was not a tech scientist by any means, but he knew a lot of different technologies and this one sounded like it could be useful to the Dragoons.

Minuet had to pull out her notes and she went down some of the functions and different types of software that she had seen Drake use on his laptop and that it used something call a computer chip.  She had been impressed with his computer skills on his devices, and then she was impressed at how fast she had been able to pick up the unique required skills just by watching him a few times.  The software was way better and easier to use than what even the clan possessed, much less what the Inner Sphere had access to.

####

Drake looked around the living room of this house and smiled.  “The plan is almost ready and thank God my babysitter is at a full division meeting over at the hospital.”  That had given him the situation to finish the last parts of his plan.  Drake raises his hand to cover the smile coming to his face.

Drake had been able to get to this point a lot quicker than he had thought that he possibly could.  That was thanks to Minuet seeing that he didn’t need the cast/brace on his arms anymore.  The last key had been getting Minuet to “train” him how to use “modern” computers the home had been outfitted with.  He tried to phrase it as he needed to work on skills that could help him find employment.

Drake had thought what these word processors and workstations could do was some kind of sick joke.  He just Thank God every few hours that he was not a child of the Google generation.  He had been brought up with first using things like Netscape 1, Window 3.1, and thank you again crazy uncle.  That uncle had been a fan of learning how to do it the hard way first, then learn the quick way.  That old man would give him treats or movie tickets every time Drake had completed a task on those old and clunky systems.  Those problem-solving skills turned out to be very useful with the computer systems on this planet.

Still Drake had to make sure that he did not pick up those “new” skills too fast on what they called a digital home workstation.  Under his breath Drake will say that “what the future looks like from the 80s” was a little crazy making when you had been taking those classes.  He just hoped that his plan to break out of this tech slide in a day or two would work out.  Drake knew that it was time to roll a hard six, or he might still end up in an unmarked grave and a star system gave you a lot of places to hide a body.

####

Notes.

The Last Dragoon supply run:  We don’t know what and how much was brought by Khan Ward in 3019/3020 to be given to the Dragoons.  Well, besides a core that held military data for current clan tech that he gave to the Dragoons.  You have to wonder what else was dropped off as the Dragoons were cut loose with the mission to prepare the Inner Sphere for war with the rest of the Clans.

Drake’s brain.  It took some time for the effects of changing dimensions to start to fade away.

[Shadow_Wraith]

Glad to read the story update!  Im looking forward to the next chapter.

[EAGLE 7]

 I like the way the story is rolling along. Looking forward to more.

[Daryk]

Good progress!  Keep at it! :)

[Artifex]

Well, that was a treat and a half to read. Well done. I want to see more of this. :-D

[cawest]

Chapter 3
By Cliff
Fact Checked and Sanity Checked by Drakensis
Editor (that I at least sometimes listen to, so the screw ups are all mine) Drakensis

New Valencia
Federated Suns

OH, MY ****** GOD!  What was in that bottle!  What did that devil woman bring into my home!  Okay well that did not go as planned.  Drake yelled within his own mind before he passed out… again.

Drake was about to release his big plan to out himself that he knew that Blackwell was connected to the Wolf Dragoons.  Only for Minuet to go and toss a big pocking monkey wrench into the plans from step one.

(Flashback)

Drake’s head popped up from the screen and looks out the window of his shed towards the house.  Minuet had set up a metal dinner triangle, like was seen in some cowboy movies, to use as a dinner bell and she would ring it when she wanted him to come in.  She had quickly gotten tired of walking out to the Shed a few times a day to bring Drake in for mealtimes.  Little did she know how much this action had helped Drake with his ‘big’ plan.

As soon as Drake entered the backdoor, he could see items that were spread out on what he called the bar or breakfast top on the edge of the kitchen.  Some of the items on display looked familiar but looking back and forth between the bar top and Minuet, he was very clearly confused.  “What is all of this?”

The undercover Wolf Net agent pointed to the collection of bottles and other items on the high table with a huge smirk on her face.  “You have been complaining about wanting something called a margarita every few hours.  So, make some and finally change your channel for both of our sanity.”

Drake made a sour face; he didn’t remember it quite that way.  “Well, I haven’t made one from scratch before, are you sure you got the right things?”  He was tap dancing like a mug, and Drake thought that it was a good bet that Minuet knew this.

The man out of time saw the look she gave him and then went to his laptop.  Besides the ‘normal’ books on Drake’s system.  He also had a few PDF survival guides that he liked to review from time to time before ‘The Event’.  They were mainly to help if you were lost in deserts of the Middle East, US southwest, and the like.  They covered what wild plants that you could eat and what animals to avoid.  In that same file was a bartender’s guide that he had used at some of the parties that Crazy Woman 2 and he would need to attend as being part of the division’s staff.  That bartending guide was detailed enough that it could walk you through how to make replacement mixers for a huge list of drinks on the fly.

Before Drake clicked on the file, he looked over and noticed that this file had been last opened only two days ago.  Only… he hadn’t needed to open this file in some time, even before he had come to this planet and its attached universe.  That little information just happened to tell him that she had been looking around his laptop when Drake was not around.  This data also told him that she had not gotten that deep and to his hidden hard drive partition, or she would have used that heavy bottle for something other than to have him make a mixed drink.

With the file now open and the right data on display, Drake started looking at the items on the table.  “Okay what do you have here?”

Minuet put her hand on her hips and closely watched Drake work around the over hip high table.  While he checked every label, she started talking.  “No one knew what a Margarita was so this is what we came up with.”

Drake was into the project and just called over his shoulder.  “How about you grab a blender and some ice for me.”

The NCO had no idea what a food processor was, but it worked enough like a blender for them to get the job done.  Whether it would be good for anything else later was a different story, chopping up ice cubes was not easy on a machine.  The liquor bottle was in French, but Drake had a good eye and he free poured it into the chemical mess already loaded into the device and pressed the button.  A test showed that ‘the spike’ seemed too fruity and light on octane for a good mixed drink. So, Drake doubled the load and hit the button to mix it in with the rest.  There was no such thing as to strong a margarita.

Halfway through the first batch Drake had started playing music off his field CD player to drown out the holo show that neither of them was watching.

You know how it goes, one margarita, two margarita, floor!  And I’m not talking about the dance floor.

Minuet seemed to like Drake’s skill in the Two Step - that was the standard dance pattern for this planet.  Then they had more drinks until the bottle was over halfway emptied into the ice and mix for the next batch of… magic.

(End Flash Back).

Things were a blank for him after that… until his head wanted to jump off his neck to run away when the sun came up.  Next Drake, after fully waking up, noticed that there was a weight lying next to him in the bed, and having a good idea of what it might be he slowly turned to see Minuet without any clothes on sleeping beside him.

Drake slowly slipped his naked butt out of the bed, and only then did he notice all of the clothes tossed around the room.  With a smirk he collected some fresh clothes out of a tall chest of drawers. “Yeah, I hooked up with a clan chick!”  With a sudden jolt of pain, his smile faded from that thought.  “Or at least, I think that I did.”

He quietly went to the ‘shower room’ and washed himself of the funk made up of sweat and alcohol.  It took twice as long to brush the taste out of his mouth from the night before.  Still feeling like he had been hit by a tank, Drake made his way into the main living spaces of the home while not trying to wake Minuet.  After so many years of Army life starting at a young age, he quickly worked out that this interaction had started in the cleared area turned last night’s dance floor.

Not feeling like he was up to cleaning up this mess just yet, he looked at the kitchen and started to look for the culprit of why his head still wanted to launch to the jump point without needing the help of a dropship.

“Where.  Is.  IT?”  He spoke in a soft voice.

Drake had to be careful not to move his head around too much or too fast.  That could risk it feeling like his skull might fall off or give him the desire to rip his own ears off.  Soon Drake had found the device of his pain.  It was almost empty with maybe two fingers left at the bottom of the bottle.  After taking a sniff, that showed that he was a glutton for punishment, and that almost made him want to run for the sink and void his stomach, he had to step back with the bottle at full arm’s reach.

He tried to catalog what in the hell that woman brought into this house without risking another sip.  It seemed that it was like a bad mix of Od El Toro tequila and a bottle of Highlands Whisky Red that had been at a party after graduating from SLC…  Only it was mixed with some kind of fruit juice and kerosene to top it all off.

Drake made a face.  “You are hereby called Devil Juice, by the power of this being my damn house.”

Risking offending the alcohol abuse gods, Drake reached over and dumped the rest of the bottle down the sink’s drain.  He hoped the waste treatment facility was up to the task of cleaning that crap up or it was going to cause a major fish kill in the local river or ocean.  He then put the now empty bottle on a shelf with a big red ink “No!” written on the label.  Drake made a vow that he would never let a full bottle of that liquid death in his house ever again.

Drake activated the coffee maker and reached for a cup in the drying rack near the kitchen window.  There was one thing that he would say about this planet, they had great coffee, and it was way better than anything that Uncle Sam gave him in the Chow Halls or in the MREs.  To keep his stomach from trying to crawl out of his mouth after the third sip, Drake started eating some of the brown bread that was popular around here.

The hangover man was looking at a second set of mild pain pills in his hand wondering if it was worth a more upset stomach to keep his head attached to his neck.  The sound of sliding feet on the tile brought Drake’s head up to see who was trespassing.

Damn she is one hot-looking woman, even if she is a little green around the gills and had a major case of bed hair.  Thinking that discretion is the better part of valor, Drake kept his mouth shut.

Minuet pulled her favorite cup used for coffee, and unlike Drake she used a locally made cup made of thick glass of some kind.  Until the man from a different universe had come round the idea of a dedicated coffee cup was not known, much less ones made with funny sayings or images put onto their sides.  After living with this man for weeks, she knew that Drake would not say anything to her until she broke the ice.

Today that was sooo a good thing in Minuet’s book as she drank her morning wake up juice.  She was not sure her head could handle spoken volume just yet.  She was on her second cup of coffee when she started looking for that hell bottle when she saw it empty and with the words NO written in bold red ink.  She could not agree more with this statement, with a slight smirk on her face, Minuet has second thoughts that maybe it was not that bad of a bottle after all.

After she finished some buttered brown bread and after about fifteen minutes in which neither of them had tossed up their cookies into the sink or needed to make a mad dash for the toilet, the woman used her chin to point to a book that Drake had been reading before she came into the kitchen.

“So lightweight,  I thought after last night, you wouldn’t need those things for a while.”  The look on her face was…solid or even frozen.  She had known that Drake was drunker than she had been when she had made her move while dancing.  But seeing a man reading a book about sex after a night of that type of activities struck a nerve in Minuet’s psyche.

Drake looked over at what she was pointing at on the tabletop that also held his field laptop/entertainment system.  It had been extremely painfully hard for Drake to rip the cover off of his gifted copy of Wolves on the Border.  You could not just bring a book with a battlemech on the cover art into this house.  So, he removed it and replaced the outer covers with one that was more adult themed in title and in the cover art.

“Oh, I was just taking some notes.  I felt a little out of practice last night and wanted to improve on a few things.”  Drake had to give her a little grin that he hoped would get him a replay when he could fully remember what the hell happened last night.  He had not blacked out from drinking since he was in his mid-twenties, and until this morning he had thought that he had outgrown such actions.

Minuet did not say anything for a few seconds and then she changed the subject to something she thought was safer than what had happened last night.  “So did you finish your little computer skills test… Caveman?”

Drake kept his face from moving at this question.  Okay so you want to go there do you, then so can I little, Miss Hot Pants, thought the man not of this universe.

“Sure, and before you brought that bottle of death home with you last night, I was going to show you.  Just go hit the space bar on the house computer.  The results should be posted by now.”  Yea Drake had the results from his last test days ago from the center of higher learning and he had been very careful not to let Minuet see them.

Reactive armor underwear activated, and full speed ahead! thought Drake as he fought very hard not to give the game away.

Drake was watching her move over the lip of the thick glazed porcelain coffee cup from another world that he used to hold his morning coffee.  He had not taken another sip of the warm drink; he was using it as a prop as Minuet walked up to the screen mounted on the food cooler.  When she tapped the screen with her fingertip a set of very hard to find snap shots started to flow onto the screen and change as she watched.  They started with a horse, then mongoose, followed by a black bird, then a white bird, and what was close to an image of a polar bear as Drake could find.

Minuet must have been more hungover than Drake or she was in shock, because she did not say anything until the Wolverine, and the Black widow spider, had passed by to be replaced by a wolf image.  Those images were as close as Drake could get of the image of the clans as he could find in the cover provided by his classes.  He also didn’t have the time to try to find all of the different clans in his books, not that he knew the total number of them in the first place.

“What the hell is that?”  Her head snapped over to look at Drake, and Minuet’s voice held a dangerous tone that she had never used in front of Drake before.

Drake would have thought that Minuet would have been the hot kind of angry, before blowing up kind of person.  No, she was the type that went cold before I blowup kind of woman.  Drake knew that this could be trouble from long years of experience with members of the opposite sex.

Drake put down his cup and looked at the woman.  “Minuet, I am taking a chance that you are more than just my nurse and PT person in the larger scheme of things.  I need to talk to Stanford Blake or Jaime Wolf, and I need to do it with the fewest people knowing about that meeting and what will be said the better.”  Drake was very thankful for that bootleg printed copy of most of the Wolf’s Dragoon source book.  Finding that one name had saved him a lot of digging around and reading that he needed to find other things ‘with some pop’.

She was looking at Drake with wide eyes and then she pulled her house coat closer around her.  With a toss of her head, the soy stormed off and called over her shoulder.  “I have no idea what you’re talking about!”

Now Drake could not help but smile at her back and he called out to her one more time.  “So do you know of any nice places to eat on Strana Mechty?”  Drake had wanted to say something like that since the early parts of his planning, and it was sooo much better than asking about the weather.

####

Not long later, Drake thought that he might have blown it, in more than one way when things had gotten quiet in the house.  Drake sat watching the entertainment show about the latest rounds on the gaming world working up to the ‘big’ championship.  He was already showered and in his ‘house clothes’ normal for this world, he was not expecting to be seen by even his neighbors anytime soon.  He was not really paying any attention to the holo display but lost in deep thought about what his next plan might have to be.

If Drake could not get to Jaime Wolf quickly, he had to find another way to help.  He was thinking that it was looking that he had just rolled boxcars with Minuet.  There was a lot of blood about to be spilled, and Drake felt like all of it would be on his hands because he could not stop it in time.  Just like the blood of Drake’s friends that had died at his cookout.

He was absent mindedly tapping the file that he had printed out and his copy of everything that he remembers or had access to and could be useful for his short term objective.  Those pages were neatly folded and in an envelope that he had repurposed.  Drake’s little stash of books ready to hand had a good bit of material about the Marik Civil War and that should be good enough for right now.  That was going to be his opening starting point with his recovered book that Minuet had seen as back up on the kitchen tabletop.

SMACK.  Drake had clothes slammed into his face -

“What the hell!”

- and before he could get the clothes away from his eyes Minuet was speaking in that tone, that he had not heard her used before today.  “Get those on.  You have a meeting.”

When the clothes fell into Drake’s lap, now he could see her, and Minuet was not wearing her ‘nurses’ outfit and her hair was pulled back.  This was a bit more…tactical looking going from Minuet’s head to her toes.  The look was complete with some kind of pistol sitting low on her left hip in a flat black holster.

Drake kept his eyes on the woman as he rose and put on the light jacket that had been tossed to him over the cast on his left upper arm and the tossed pants were loose fitting enough to fit over his compression leggings and air cast on Drake’s left thigh.  The pants were not sweatpants, they looked a little more formal, but only just.  He does notice that Minuet kept her left hand on the hip close to the weapon sitting there as Drake put on the layer of clothes.  Minuet also kept her distance, and when possible, she kept some of the furniture between them.  That was good field craft, especially after Drake had surprised her once already today.  She was what the guys would have called Zone 5, fully defensive.

Just as he had finished with his slip-on shoes, three large men in durable clothes entered ‘his’ home from the garage without bothering with knocking.  From the look in Minuet’s face, they were expected.  Drake looked over and he could see Minuet with a flat look on her face that kept Drake from getting a read on her.  He thought that this must be what it looked like when she had her work face on, or he was a dead man… or both.

Now the five of them walked out of the house, threw the garage, and into a large hover van with only windows for the driver to use.  As the door closed behind him, he noted that it was the perfect snatch truck, and now he got more nervous the longer that they drove.  The people in the back could not see outside, but he could see three sets of eyes watching every little move that he made as they drove for what seemed like hours.

Yep, this sucks. Drake had to fight to keep from thinking that he was about to start a new life… as fertilizer.

The opening of the back door brought him awake with a start; Drake had not thought that he had fallen asleep along the drive.  He didn’t think that he had been drugged, at least without him noticing.  Everything this morning that he had eaten or drank had been made by his own hands.  Drake just thinks it was the military in him reaching up and grabbing him by the ears.  If you were sitting still for more than a few minutes, your body kind of gets trained that it’s time to stockpile on some sleep.

Oh crap, we’re in the woods!  Yep, I am going to die.  So much for stopping the Clans, ComStar, the crazy Word of Blake, and stopping the Wolf’s Dragoons from ****** up four ways from Sunday in this universe.  These thoughts raced through Drake’s brain so fast that he stumbled a little as he exited the van.

Drake looked around after his feet hit the ground and the rest emptied from the van behind him.  He could feel blood moving to his legs and the tingle of the limbs waking up from time in a position they were not used to.  I’m still not in cuffs, and I was not drugged.  Huzzah!  At least I wouldn’t be going to die on my knees. Thought Drake.  Now he could feel himself start to oscillate over his feet.

After having pulled Drake out of the van they allowed him to do a little stretching so that he didn’t fall onto his face.  The driver pointed down a trail going deeper into the woods without saying a word.  No one that had been riding in the back of the van said a word, and Drake walked with three quiet knee breakers coming up behind him every step of the way.

After one more turn, in the wood covered trail, Drake could see bleachers that overlooked a large weapon’s range.  For some time now Drake and the rest could hear and feel the sound of something large slamming around the local area.  He had been through enough Table 8’s in his life to know what he was looking at after only a few seconds of clearing the wood line.  Drake had to force himself to take his eyes off the Marauder moving below them, he was a fanboy after all of that design.  Still, it was too far away for him to tell if it was an old MAD or a new and heavier MAD II model.

With a slight push forward, Drake was escorted to the only person in the bleacher area looking over the range.  As he made his way over to the standing man, he could smell Minuet’s perfume coming up from behind him when the breeze suddenly changed.  Drake didn’t take a look to see her, as he kept watching the mech and the other man.  Then Drake saw the flash of the cannon mounted on top of the officer battle pod before he heard the crack of it firing passing through the air.  Drake had no idea who was watching the mech run through the range on his own, but that alone pointed to this person being someone with some power behind them.

The autocannon fire gave the opening Drake thought that he could use as an effective ice breaker.  “I always thought that you should have just put a large pulse laser in place of that autocannon they mounted on those things.”

Franko did not let the surprise show on his face or to move his head at the comment made by this man.  The Wolf Net agent quickly decided that he needs to fish a little and see what would happen.  There was no way that this person should know what a pulse laser even was, much less have an idea that it should go onto the Marauder II going through final testing below him.

The head agent on this planet used a board voice to start his little fishing expedition.  “They make too much heat, and the arm mounted PPCs are harder hitters anyway.”

Drake let a little smile come to his face.  He could tell by how still the man was, that he had scored a point with his opening statement and had thought to go fishing on what else Drake might let out.  That is unless he was a trained sniper, those guys were freakishly still even when they were eating.  “I don’t know what you call them currently, 2nd or 3rd generation heatsinks, but Freezers is what I think they are called in the general population of Mechwarriors.  If you have enough of those, they would fix that heat issue.  I mean as long as you’re not jump happy at the same time you put an alpha into some unfortunate soul.”

The displaced man tried to block out everything so that he could see the reaction to his next statement.  “So, 7th Kommandos or Wolf Net?”

Drake suddenly felt what he would have called a disturbance in the force, coming from those standing a little too close to him.  Now he had to work very hard to keep from flinching or showing any outside indications that he knew his escorts all had just gone ‘red alert’ in the meeting.

Franko now turned and looked over at the other man and in a low voice.  “I’m sorry, what did you say?”  He knew how to play this type of game, but there was a hard limit on what he was willing to put up with.

“They told me that I was recovered when a jump core and a part of what they called a Cosmic String crossed paths out at the jump point.  I’m betting the ship was part of the 7th or Wolf Net and you all were doing something that ComStar or the House Lords would not have liked.”  Drake was not going to say that he knew Blackwell and the Dragoons were connected at the hip this early in the meeting.  At least he was not going to say that just yet, but it was an arrow in his quiver if he needed to do a snapshot.

“Okay Mr. Mendenhall, what do you think that you know?”  Franko was surprised and he had thought that he was prepared to deal with this caveman.  It would seem that Minuet and the rest of the team had greatly underestimated this man for a very long time.

Drake smiled and then lowered his chin looking at what he thought the CIA would have called a station chief back on his home world.  He still did not look around to see if he was going to get a copper and lead headache in between heartbeats.  “Minuet, that envelope that you took out of my jacket pocket before we left the house.  Can you please pass it over to this gentleman?  Oh, and do you think we can get some drinks sent out.  I’m still recovering from a hell of a hangover from a bottle of poison that somehow found its way into my liquor cabinet.  I think we all need to keep our head cleared so that nothing rash is done that we… well that I might not live to regret.”  The tone was light, but it didn’t reach Drake’s face that he was speaking in any form of jest.

###

[cawest]

Stanford Blake was looking down at a set of thumbnail images on his office computer that had come in from the latest data drop from his agents.  They had to use the ComStar managed HPG to get information moved around the Inner Sphere to keep up with their cover story of being mercenaries for hire within the Inner Sphere.  To keep them from reading to much of the Dragoon’s mail, Wolf Net used image hiding software on top of detailed coding of the data.  The trick was picking the right image from the pack and that matched the cover codename.  That image would give him an idea about what the report was about.  That in turn would lead to a code word unlocking a short text message hidden within that double image.  A second code would split the double image and produce a full report or delete the whole mess if it was miss typed.

Blake had been working for a few hours already on these files, and he had already picked through the known important reports.  Then his eyes went to a new image that showed a caveman looking into a crystal ball.  It took him a few seconds to work on that one, but he only knew of one operation that was close to that image.  If they sent a report this way it could be very important or nothing at all.  Then again if it had not been time sensitive, they would have hand carried a report to him instead of risking the HPG.

When Stanford clicked on the image with a code, went through the long random string of a password, and then the last set of numbers, a ten-page document was pulled out from the image that had been hiding it.  It did not take long for Blake to work out it was a report from the time of the Marik Civil war.  That was a little odd, because Blake knew that Franko had not been around during that time in the Dragoon’s operation.  He had not made it to the Inner Sphere until 3020 when the Dragoons were already working for the Steiners.

Then Colonel Blake got to the part about how it was ComStar that had been the key player behind the idea of bleeding the Dragoons and then forcing them to make another resupply run.  That was not a new idea, but it was one that had fallen out of favor in Wolf Net and the rest of the Dragoons years after the event.  What Franko pointed out was that it had been ComStar that had gotten Chancellor Maximilian Liao to send the Dragoons to the FWL.  Then ComStar had been working with Anton Marik to make sure the Dragoons were cut down.  Franko was pointing to some information that Blake didn’t remember but connected a few different dots no one else had found.

Then Blake’s eyes got to the part about the former head of ROM being personally involved in killing of Joshua Wolf.  He had no idea who Vesar Kristofur or Kristopher Kelly was, but he was damn well going to find out.  That he was going to enjoy giving some of this information to one very deadly Dragoon Spider and then get the hell out of her way.  But only after he had his own private talk with this person and drained every drop of data he could before the Black Widow got her… fangs into him.  If he was a high-ranking member of ComStar?  That was going to cause more than a few second and third order effects for the command staff of the Dragoons to deal with.  He had an idea of what would happen if the rest of the colonels thought that ComStar had declared war on the rest of the Dragoons.  The short answer was nothing good.

Blake looked away from the digital document to collect both his breath and his thoughts.  After a few seconds he was starting to think that one Franko Demos was in for a promotion, if this was what he had been doing while at the same time managing the Caveman issue.  The report style needed some work, but it was not bad work in form and the data was spotty in some areas that assumptions were drawn from.  But it did have the punch that you would expect from a Wolf Net report.  He went back to the report after taking a few notes to pass back to Franko, and then Blake felt a punch in the gut as he read the last lines of those ten pages.

“Sir, besides the head and footer of this report, it was all done by the Caveman with me watching over his shoulder.  He wants to have a meeting with you and Papa Wolf.  I think it might be worthwhile, that is, if this information about ComStar is proven to be correct by second sources.  Also of note, he pointed out, without saying a word, about a dozen clan names to his watcher.  I am awaiting your orders, but I will see what else I can pull out of him while I await a reply.”  It was signed by the glyph that belonged to Franko Demos.

The hallmark of good intelligence was something called cross queuing.  It was that one source was just data, it didn’t become intelligence until a second source could be found that at least closely matched the first report.  It was the best way to keep from killing the wrong person or having your people taken out by mistake.

Maybe the Scorpions are right that mis-jumps can be an opportunity.  Blake was frozen in his chair at this thought.

Blake didn’t move for long minutes and then he re-reads the report from top to bottom one more time under a whole new light.  Within an hour of opening this one minor report, the stage was set for the start of a major shift in the Dragoons.  It started with Blake paying for the sending of a Wolf Net wide alert to find all of the persons that had been identified in this report.  As soon as the messages were prepared, they would be grouped in batches of four to six to be given to someone to make their way to the ComStar compound or data center.  The idea was that ComStar would not see Blake or anyone from the Dragoon staff to tip them off on who was sending or the affiliation of those receiving those messages starting to flow.

After most of the messengers had been sent over to the local HPG station to be put into the data flow of the Inner Sphere.  Blake was getting put on Jaime’s calendar with a special word and then he was driving over to his office before the amber alert had left this planet.  Blake had no idea if his agents would find anything, but he would make sure every record from that time was reviewed at with at least one set of fresh eyes and in a direction given to have them cast about for any breadcrumbs that might have been missed.  It was going to cost a lot of C-Bills to get this done, but it was going to be worth it.  Even if the main target was a dry hole for information.  Jaime, Nat, and a few thousand other Wolves would love to know that this piece of work was no longer among the breathing.

####

Drake now knew how many people it takes to make a 1,800 square foot home seem over crowded to a person of his generation with a military background.  He had been assigned a three-bedroom home after the hospital for him and Minuet to use.  Minuet was no longer staying in this dwelling, but her old room now held four new people as a sleeping space.  Drake’s office/classroom has three more people living there with a weapons rack, after they more or less took it apart looking to see if Drake might have hidden anything useful in the room.

The living room had two people sleeping in it, oh and Drake always had someone in his bedroom with him even when he was taking a number 2.  Thank God he was used to having people in his hip pocket when he was taking a crap or shower or drug testing.  Otherwise, he might have some… performance issues.  Drake did make sure not to go into the shed after dropping off that report to what he found out later was the Wolf Net regional manager and the retyping of that same report along with what the locals called data mining.  Even if they took that small outbuilding apart again they would not find any of Drake’s books and what they knew about computers compared to even only a power user like the man out of time was laughable.  He was just thankful for soft ground, fresh landscaping, and a set of privately owned NVGs purchased from a large hunting retail business.

As soon as Drake walked into the living room he received his first surprise of the day.  Minuet was sitting in ‘his’ chair like she owned it.  Before he could say anything, she broke the ice for them. “We always knew you were an early riser, but you could have at least cut the rest of the team a little slack every few days and stay in your room until at least the sun was up like any other civilized person.”

When Drake didn’t have a quick comeback, she kept talking and started lowering her feet off the arm rest of the high-backed chair.  He had wanted to tell her it was his house, and they could lump it or leave it for all he cared about their comfort while they guarded him.  Then Drake had remembered that it was not in fact his house, it was a home that belonged to Blackwell, and they belonged to the Dragoons just like the guest in this home.

“Let’s have a talk, Drake.”  Minuet finished rising from his chair and pointed to it for him to take a seat.  After getting his leg up so it would stop aching, and that took a few minutes and was the reason behind that he was an early riser.  When Drake’s leg was up, she was standing with her arms crossed.  “So, how?”

With those two words, Drake found that he wanted to tell her a lot more than he had before.  “I take it we are not alone with someone watching us on the cameras hidden around the house?”

She didn’t say anything, but he took the meaning of the raised eyebrow she was giving him.  “You know I spent a little over eleven years in armor and then I was moved to staff work.  Well, I was not just some paper pusher on the staff.  I was moved to Military intelligence from armor, and before you get wrapped up in the name.  No, I am not like LOKI or SAFE or even Wolf Net.  Think of it as more tactical to low level strategic intel work depending on the level of my assigned unit.  I told you about Crazy Woman 2, my 3rd ex-wife?”

When she nodded her head yes, Drake kept talking.  “She was what we call an S2X while I was the Division S2 NCOIC.  She was normally focused on the counterintelligence mission for my unit both deployed and at our home garrison.  I would like to think that both of us were very good at our assigned jobs.  I just used what I had learned from my job and her.  And then I used it against you all.  We split up because she wanted another command, I was just looking forward to doing the rest of my twenty and then picking up a hobby in a low cost of living state for at least the next decade or so.”

They spent the next few hours talking about Drake’s past after he was out of tanks for the Big Green Machine.  The pair of them didn’t even notice that a member of the security team was making a second recording of what they were saying.  The pair did not even stop talking when someone put some food in front of them.  They talked right up until they were told by one of the team that they needed to leave the house for another meeting in an hour.  That was just enough time for Drake to do his 3 Ss of s…toilet, shower, and shave and make it there close to being on time.

This time Drake was not put into the back of another blacked-out hover van for the trip to the meeting place, or even in a van for that matter.  The group were taking a ride in a real hover sedan, and this was a first for Drake.  He had seen them, but this was his first ride in one of the amazing machines.

The sedan was trailed by a small hover van with most of the team staying at Drake’s place for some reason.  After leaving the local part of the housing area, they became a convoy of four hover transports keeping pace with local traffic.  The two front sedans were blockers or bullet magnets in case ComStar had found out what Franko had sent to the head of Wolf Net and possibly all the way to Jaime Wolf’s hands.  After all you’re only being paranoid if people are not really out to get you.

####

Drake was not that surprised to be taken to the main offices of Blackwell instead of the mech and weapon’s testing range.  It was an open secret to people who played the game in this building that Wolf Net had to be hip-deep in Blackwell, if only to keep them from blowing the deals with the equipment that they sold only to the Wolves for more than a decade.  Still, Drake didn’t think that Wolf Net would take one of the top floors of the main building of the facility as the big dog’s office.

Still the office was small and on one of the insides without a window to the outside world, so maybe it was not all that unexpected for a location of a Wolf Net watcher.  For some reason, Drake was glad that Minuet was still with him for this meeting at his sides and not behind him possibly holding a gun chambered with a bullet with his name on it.  Internally he was betting that they were divided on whether to yank her off the mission or keep her close to him.  The man Drake now knew was (at least currently) called Franko Demos was standing looking at a painting on the side wall when he entered the room.  Drake was betting that it was an original oil on canvas, but that was about all he knew about it.  Yes, he was one of those people that learn all of his classical music and art from watching Buggs Bunny and the like.

Franko did a half-turn to see Drake out of the corner of his eye.  “I sent that report you produced in that field office to my boss, and he acknowledges its receipt.  I was expecting to have to wait for a few more days to maybe a few weeks to get even that much.  It can take a while to get a report that far and back, much less have him read it and then send something back to a field team.  By my math, it was in his hands for less than half a day before he sent that note back and another note to the whole of Wolf Net.  We are to be on the lookout for the persons that you noted in that outline you gave me.”

“Okay, so we are going to see the man?”  He was fighting to keep from jumping up and down.

Franko snorted, “Not yet.”  Drake could not help but feel deflated for a quick second at this statement.

Drake’s temper took over and if he didn’t still have the cast on one leg, he would have put his foot into his mouth all the way to at least the knees.  “Why the hell not!  Look the Dragoons are going to be company stored by the Combine.  You need to get them making.”  Drake throws his hands in the air and did air quotes.  “At least second generation heatsinks as fast as you can!”  In the game Drake had played, double heatsinks (DHS) were the largest combat modifier there was… at least outside of using Clan tech.

Franko had his game face on and this time it did not slip a millimeter.  The information about the formal training of this man in ‘the game’ had made Franko want to be sure that he was ready for anything Drake might toss at him.  Or so he had thought.  For the second time in as many meetings, Drake ‘the caveman’ jumped the bet on Wolf Net.  “Why and how do you know this facility can make those lost tech items?”

“Major,” Drake made a guess of the rank, but no one corrected him, so he kept going.  “The Dragoons are going to be company stored, and then they are going to be on the receiving end of the same treatment that the Light Horse had to deal with… but on a much… much larger scale than the Horses had to live through.  Blackwell is the spare parts supplier for the Dragoons, so you should be able to make anything that the SLDF could put into the field back in the day.”

Drake rocked back a little and let out a sigh.  “Look, I understand that you’re worried that you might lose something like with The Widow’s Marauder that the Bounty Hunter was able to recover.  There is a risk that others can find out about the old Star League tech you can use, not that the Bounty Hunter said a word about anything.  But you need to get started now!”

The NCO from another world fought to get his vocal volume back under control.  “Look, say if I’m wrong?  Then they can be put back into storage for some later time.  It is better to have them and not need them, than it is to need them and not have them.  Don’t you agree?”  Inside Drake cringed at using that line.  A line that he had often used when talking to younger troopers about always having a condom on you, when you went out clubbing.

Now Franko lets some emotion show on his face.  “But how do you know this can be done here?”  He was reinforcing his main question.

Drake reached into his jacket and pulled out a small paper backed book.  He didn’t need eyes in the back of his head to know someone had gone pale and started to sweat as she saw the cover of the book that Drake was passing over to the head of Wolf Net on at least this planet if not a whole sector of the FedSuns.

He could not help but smile as he thought about what must be going on in their heads at that second.  It was really hard not to let the smile get even larger than it was already.  “Major, I think that you might want to read this, but I would not let it out of your sight if I were you.”

Before Drake could say more, Minuet found her tongue.  “Ah, Drake.  I don’t think that Mr. Demos is into those kinds of books.  Besides it’s not appropriate in this day to hand something like that to someone… at work.”  Even a layman could tell that Minuet was floundering as she spoke.

Drake saw a confused look on the other man’s face for the first time.  So, he had to relent a little, and he pulled the cover back to show that the title printed there was different on the inside compared to the outside cover.  “You know that we haven’t had lunch yet.  How about Minuet, the team, and I head down to the cafeteria that you have to have somewhere in a building like this.  We can get some food and just hang out until you have a chance to read a little of it.  Do you know if they have the semi-finals matches for last night on the company screens?  We all missed them.”

##

Franko was not technically classed as a speed-reader, but he could read and understand the words very fast and way faster than the average person.  As soon as Drake and his escorts had left the room, he had picked up the book off his desk.  Franko read the first fifty pages and then flipped to the first page and found that this was the second printing of this book from back in 1996.  He had to do the math three times in his head before he could even come close to accepting the information in black and white sitting in his hands.  Drakes’ military ID had said 2020.  From the front-page Franko went to the last few chapters and read about what the future might hold for the Dragoons.  When he looked back up at the time display, he was almost shocked that two hours had passed.

The head of this part of Wolf Net could not take the time to read this whole work of ‘fiction’ in one sitting just yet, that would have to wait for a while longer.  He reached over and made a call.  Even a Wolf Net commander of his rank could not just walk into the CEO’s office of Blackwell unannounced.  “June does your boss have any free time on her calendar today?  I need to see her, it’s very important.”  He waited for a few seconds.  “Okay, I will be right there.”

It was a short walk to the inner ring of the building from Franko’s office to the outer ring that held the executives of this company.  The big boss woman for Blackwell was on this floor, and that was why Franko’s office was here.  The CEO’s secretary waved for Franko to enter the office without him stopping for more than a half step.

Megan Foster looked up from her computer when the door opened between her office and the rest of the world.  She was only the second CEO of Blackwell Heavy Industries since the Wolf’s Dragoons had become the real owners of that one-time struggling company.  The first CEO after that event had not been able to make the needed adjustments to the fact that he was not the boss anymore.  Megan had no such issues just as long as her people got paid and the company was not going bankrupt, then she was a happy woman.  So, when the most senior member of Wolf Net in this region of space asked to see you and that they had said that it was very important.  She was going to clear her work calendar to find out what was wrong.

Unlike in the CEO’s world, addressing someone by the first name was a liked form of address between peers but just addressing someone by their rank was preferred for the mercenaries.  “Major, what can I do for you?”

Franko took a seat in front of the desk and quickly got his thoughts in order, or so he was really hoping.  “Thank you for seeing me on such short notice Megan.  I think we need to increase production of some key supplies.”  A CEO’s time was very valuable, and it was never a good idea to waste her time by flowery words.

Megan put down her digital pencil and gave the spy a level look.  With the Major using her first name it had changed the dynamics of the meeting.  “Now Franko, that sounds ominous.  Is it that bad?”

Franko sucks in his lower lip and decided that he just needed to be honest.  “I really don’t know, but how long would it take to start up mass production of second gen heatsinks?  And yes, I hope that I’m overreacting.”

Now Megan had a funny look on her face.  “You want to startup Freezer production… now?”

When she didn’t get a reply but only a level look from Franko, she gave him the data as she knew it.  “It shouldn’t be that much of a problem, the original line was set up to make them, and then we downteched them to make the more common type for the Dragoons and the few that we put on the open market to keep the auditors happy.  I think that we can have the line start making them… maybe in a few weeks or so.  I will have to divert part of the output of one of the small class orbital factories for some of the supplies, at least until ground side can be brought online to supply those items.”

Now Franko smiled and he deflated a little into the nice chair.  “That is good news.  If I have to make a run to see The Boss, I want as many as we can make to take with me.”  Now he gave a shoulder shrug that only a part of him had thought that his next statement would happen.  “I can always bring them back if he doesn’t agree with me.”

Megan moves to center herself on her computer and she went looking for some data that was just a fragment in her mind.  “Hmm.  That was what I thought.  It says here that when the heatsink line was first rebuilt with the funds that the first contract from Davion gave to the Dragoons.  It was set up for later generation production with some donated equipment from the Dragoons.  They did a test run to make sure that everything was good to go for SLDF grade sinks, and we have a few hundred of them already in storage on the back lot.  I would want to check them out first, but I bet that we could get most of them refurbished for you quickly.  How long till you have to lift?”

Franko smiled and he felt like a huge weight had been lifted off of his shoulders that he didn’t know was there.  He was taking a risk that he was going to be countermanded by higher command, but in this case, he felt like it was worth the risk he was willing to take.  He kept running the numbers in his head and going from five plus regiments to less than two of broken men and women.  Losses of over 60% kept running through his head like it was some kind of storm, and that had only been the start and from only a battle on one planet.  If this was not a joke of some kind?  It made him feel like he wanted to throw up because he had a feeling that this was not a joke.

“That would be great, would you keep me informed of the total numbers at the end of each shift.  And between you and me.  You might want to see what would be needed to be done to get other items in that class of technology ready to be put in the supply chain for the guys at the pointy end of the stick.  The new heatsinks will fall under ‘clandestine support’ for right now.  As for when I have to leave.  I have no idea, but I have an odd feeling that it will be short notice when it happens.”

Uninhabited system
Federated Suns/Draconis Combine border.
End of June 3025

If asked, Drake would tell you that space travel sucks and it was so not like just taking a passenger liner across the country back on his homeworld.  Drake was still in a leg cast for the whole trip, and it was not the air cast he had been given when he was released from the hospital.  He should not have been surprised, it had only been four months and Drake had pushed too hard when he was not being watched by anyone with medical skills.  In his other life, it had taken him almost two years before he could even take a walking PT test much less try to run for a pair of miles on a track.

They had been in space for two months and you would think that it would make Drake’s life easier with a major broken bone that was taking its sweet ass time at healing.  Oh wait!  Then you have zero g and how it royally messes with your body.  You know, like ripping out the calcium from your bones and other nasty things that it does to muscle mass.  Oh, and let’s not forget that NASA had an aircraft that helps with zero g training for space crews.  Get this, the name of that aircraft was Vomit Comet, and it got this name from its crew for a very good reason.  Now let that picture worm its way into your brain… for two months.

Drake was sitting in the turning gravity deck, most of the time on orders of what passed for a ship’s doctor after reviewing all of the passengers’ medical records.  Due to his injury, he was able to spend more time there than anyone else and the space was very hard to come by for the dropship’s crew and passengers with one person hogging the space.  This might sound great, but that just meant Drake had feet in his face or head most of the time for those months of travelling between the stars.

[cawest]

The still medically questionable man felt his nose hair start to crinkle at the stench.  “You know that one of the things I didn’t remember reading about was about showers and other hygiene routines on dropships and jumpships.”  In a word?  It was that it sucks, and Drake had been a tanker that lived with four others in the field for months.  Note to self, need to invent scented wet wipes PDQ when the hell I get back on the ground! thought Drake as he fought down another gag at the smell.

With a snort he spoke aloud.  “And to think I always wanted to fly in space.  What a fool I was, and I don’t think that my nose hairs will grow back after this abuse of smells.”

A voice came from the owner of a soft ship’s shoe covering the foot next to his chest.  “I don’t know why you’re brooding so much lately Drake.  It’s not like you just found out that you’re in a fictional universe made up by a pair of guys who spent too much time in their mother’s basement,” Franko snorted back at Drake’s antics.

“Okay maybe I was a little down, but I’m not brooding.  That kind of crap is for Jon Snow,”  Drake retorted back to a man that he had a strange feeling was starting to become his first friend in this universe.

###

A single day after Drake had dropped the book on Franko’s desk, he had been brought back to the main compound of Blackwell in almost the same type of convoy as the first time he made the trip.

 This time Drake was not brought to a nice office at the top of the tallest building in the local area.  Nope, this time he was brought to a dark room 150m or more underground.  If asked, Drake would have just said that it was a SWAG on how deep underground they were, but it was deep.  Drake started to sweat under his arms as they waited in the elevator going down.  He was thinking they were going to break out the thumb screws or Narco interrogation now that some of what he knew was out into the world.

Luckily, they didn’t seem that they had any of that stuff at hand when he was brought to a concrete like walled room that looked like a police interrogation room in an old police show.  Instead, Drake had four people just wanting to ask him question after question after rephrased question and then a rephrased and paraphrased question to be sure.  He had not been caught flat footed, so he was able to address some of the issues that they had brought up and not others.  It was not like Drake had a database downloaded into his brain when he had been ripped out of his back yard cookout.

The man out of time knew from Crazy Woman 2, that sometimes just the act of being asked questions sometimes connected the mental dots, and you would remember more than you thought.  That didn’t make it easy for a person with his temperament to keep getting asked the same thing over and over and over again.  The next day Drake had turned over all of his battered TROs to the minders keeping him company at the house when they were gathered in the kitchen for the morning meal.

Drake had them all from updated 3050 going to the latest release until he had been ripped off his planet in 2020.  When asked why he had so many books in a later interview, he had replied: “What can I say, I’m a weapons guy.”  And even if they were heavily stained, ripped, and folded from hard field use they should be helpful.  He just wished that the IlKhan TRO had come out before he was snatched away from his old life.

MSG Mendenhall thought that him dumping all of those books on the white coat people distracted them from asking if he had any more books hidden away.  Drake had no idea how right that guess had been.

Drake now had the rest of those other books hidden among his Star Wars minis, Twilight 2000 books, or in watertight bags knee deep under the rose beds.  He so didn’t want any of them reading his copy of Betrayal of Ideals this early in getting used to what he could bring to the table.  Maybe later, and when he was not as worried that his new friends would put a bullet behind his right ear and forget about everything that he had told them about the possible future like it was just a morning fog.

##

Without letting the outside world know about his musings on the reactions to his second data dump Drake continued talking.  “Yeah, but you need to badly take a shower and my leg itches like crazy.  Are they here yet?”

This statement elicited a groan from Franko.  It would seem that kids today were a lot like the ones from back home, at least when it came to traveling with their parents.  So, every chance Drake got, and many times a day he would poke the bear… just for a little distraction from the plaster cast covering his whole leg.  He would ask Franko if they were there yet even while eating their meals.  This time the question had lost its power because they had been here for a week.

Word was sent to Franko by the leadership of the Dragoons to grab Drake and head to this star, a star that was rare in that it had no planets looping around it.  It was a star that very few jumpships would use due to the risk of what would happen if their jump drive failed, something that was growing more and more common within the Inner Sphere.  They were to meet someone from the leadership of the Dragoon’s and that was all Drake was told after being given two hours to pack.

They had fallen back into silence as the hamster wheel put on a g loading to their bones and muscles that was just below Terra normal.

Drake got an elbow to the ribs that made him jerk hard enough that it felt like he had pulled his neck out.  “Drake, you snore like a dropship launch.  Get up, it’s here.”

####

One of the traits of a long serving soldier is that you can go from deep sleep to moving at speed within a few heartbeats between each event.  The lights might not be on, but they would be moving at the quick step.  Drake was just following Franko as they swam through the corridors of the Merchant-class jumpship in Zero G.  The pair of them were ready to leave the jumpship much faster than the small craft crew was ready to take them to their meeting on the other ship.  While the pair made their way from one huge ship to another floating in deep space, Franko was looking out a window into the deep black of space that just gave Drake heartburn every time he looked out the thing.  That was something Drake could not do again after the first look, and he was fresh out of space sick bags.

“Hmmmmm that Gazelle is called Jeb Stuart, at least that is what is written on her sides.  That ship is from the Support Battalion, and I even think that’s Captain Piper’s ship.  I would bet that the scout jumpship is one of the 7th Kommando vessels.”  Franko did not even look over his shoulder at Drake.  “Looks like Blake is pulling out all of the stops for this meeting.”

As far as Drake had been told, he was meeting a VIP of the Dragoons.  He was hoping for the Wolf, but Franko seemed to think it would be with Blake or someone close to him in rank or a combat line commander.  As it turned out both of them were both right and both had been so very wrong.

It felt so good when Drake felt the kick of the main engine of the space bus under his… seat.  He just wished that it had lasted longer before he was again having to deal with zero g space sickness again.  But at least Mendenhall was able to grab another space sick bag from the buses’ supply before he needed them… barely.  After seeing that the meeting was going to be on a Scout-class jumpship, Drake knew that he was in for one suck of a briefing.  The Scouts didn’t have hamster wheels for gravity to keep the crew healthy while in space.

As soon as Drake was pushed through a hatch on the dropship attached to the Scout jumpship, he had other issues to deal with.  One of the vehicle bays on the Gazelle class dropship had been converted to act as a meeting room.  And thanks to Drake sneaking a peek at what remained of his Wolf’s Dragoon book and some files that he gotten from Franko, he had an idea who was who in the Dragoons.  He was supposed to be a member of that mercenary unit so it would be a break in his cover if he could not ID the key players within the unit.  Drake made a mental note about how close Jaime Wolf looks like Sean Connery from the early 90’s.  It made his brain hurt about how this was possible.

As Drake looked around the room, he noticed something else.  “Yep, each of the other people in this room was a Clanner.”  He had to mentally kick himself, as he remembered it was not until after the 4SW that Inner Sphere born people made it into the higher command slots within the Dragoons.

Drake knew that he was the prize or the key trinket for a Show and Tell on a huge scale with not only his life hanging in the balance but untold millions of others.  Still the way that they had worked it out, Franko would be the one doing all of the talking, and Drake would only be there as proof and to answer any pointed questions that might come up.

That plan lasted right until Drake saw the panel of eight Dragoon officers strapped into chairs as they floated into the grease-stained room turned vehicle cargo bay.  He was too busy working to get his straps just right in his Zero G chair to listen to what Franko was saying for many long minutes.  It was another sign that Drake had not been on dropships before if he was having so much of a problem doing this common task.

Colonel Shostokovitch from Beta Regiment broke the ice: “So, this is the Caveman that has been supplying the information in all of that crap you have been forwarding for us to read the last couple of months.”

Drake held his tongue and just raised his head from his straps to make eye contact with the speaker, thinking that maybe his inner Negan might have some fun, even if the man was massive.  He had been briefing combat officers for a while, and Drake could not fix stupid.  Okay he could fix stupid, but it was going to cause a lot of pain for the rock with lips that he was working on.

Oh wait!  I’m not in the army anymore, thought Drake and a sly smirk came to his face.  “Well, I’m the guy that is just trying to help you all out with the Combine problem.  You know how a warrior-based culture can get about having to deal with outsiders or hired guns.  It’s all for the Dragon and it’s only a war crime if someone uses the same tactics as them.”  Drake didn’t realize that part of what he said could have been used Clan in place of the word Combine or Dragon until the words had slipped out of his mouth.

Drake got a snort from someone on the other side of Jaime, but he couldn’t tell who, but it made him mad.  “Look you know that Samsonov wants to have you all under his thumb, and he will do whatever it takes to meet that goal… and his honor be damned.  He is going to let that creep Akuma run a major company store scam on you until you have to sell your mechs and souls to him and the Combine or starve in the streets.  He will have members loyal to him in the Professional Soldiery Liaison officers inspecting all of the cargo heading to you guys so that the Dragon gets his cut even if you all paid for it.  And if you don’t think that he would not do everything else he can to screw with you doing his job.  I want what you are drinking, or do you need a prescription or back alley hookup to get it?”

Colonel Ellman had been the Beta regiment commander until 3016, and now he was in charge of the Training Command that was pumping out fosters and Dragoon-raised mechwarriors to replace the losses of their fighters.  He also looked like Charlton Heston from Planet of the Apes, but today he had a confused look on his face.  “Who is this, Akuma?  I don’t think I have had to deal with this person.”

Jaime looked a little surprised until his mental walls went back up to hide his inner thinking.  “He was just assigned to us before we started heading this way.”  He turned and looked over at the head of Wolf Net.  “Stanford, you keep your people well informed I see.  Even if they were not in Combine space.”

Blake didn’t say anything for long seconds, and he was eye locked on Drake like he was watching a demon.  “Sir, I did not have time to alert my people about this new position that we were forced to make.  I barely had time to pull Jerry Akuma’s updated file off our database before we started to burn out system.”

“Yep, now I’m starting to get ‘the look’ from some of the officers around the room.”  Thought Drake.   He was also wondering how they had gotten all of this leadership out from under ISF’s eyes with the op tempo the Dragoons had been running against the FedSuns for the last few months.  That tempo also just happened to be burning through the Dragoon’s on hand stock of supplies at an alarming rate all without enough making it back to refill the supply bunkers and maintenance points.

Colonel Ellman looked first at Drake and then back to Franko, he still was unsure about Drake, and it showed in the words coming out of his mouth that had a tone like the strange man was a three-year-old saying it would rain on Sunday when it was only Monday.  The Dragoon spoke, “Okay, how do we stop this?”

Franko jumped back into the fire to get the hard looks off of Drake, a good sign of leadership that was noticed by the NCO.  “I was able to get three hundred SLDF grade double efficiency heatsinks rebuilt before I left.  We had six hundred of them in storage, but they did not store as well as we had hoped when they were put in that warehouse and forgotten about.  I think we can get about a hundred tons of them smuggled to Hephaestus each month, at least until this inspection that we have been warned about kicks in with full force and plugs any holes.”

Franko’s back went straighter in the chair.  “I took it under my authority to convert the old heatsink production line of Blackwells to this product, and I was thinking that what we can’t ship to you.  We will put into proper storage this time until we can get them to your side of space.”  After some planning he was hoping that he could be greenlighted to sell a few on the Black Market.  With a sell price of about 60k per ton, that could be very useful, if they could keep it quiet.

Colonel Shostokovitch looked like he had bitten into a lemon.  “And what do we do about the games the Combine have been playing with us already and if this… person is right about what they are planning to do?”

“We have to follow our legal orders,” came from Jaime’s mouth and Drake lost his mind.

Drake let a very loud snort fall out and he rolled his eyes.  He went full power senior NCO vs O1 without a filter between brain and mouth.  “So, you have to follow your legal orders, do you?”

Jaime turned and his frown went into full ‘_I_ am the leader of five mech regiments and supporting elements and _you_ are not’, but he didn’t say a word.

Now, Drake had briefed more general grade officers than he could remember their names, but now even he had to admit.  Jaime had the power to make you sweat with a single look.  That didn’t mean that this cowed him into silence… far from it.

So, what do you do?  Do you back down under the power, or do you charge forward into the teeth of the glare?  Well, I was a tanker in my early life so… more power Mr. Scott.  All of this went through Drake’s mind at the speed of thought.  “So did Khan Ward give you legal orders or not?”  Drake was looking right at Jaime when he had spoken in that level tone.

For the first time Jaime Wolf looked to have been spooked by what Drake had said.

Drake didn’t risk looking around the room to see what the rest of the leaders might look like, but it was a good bet that it was a dying fish like look.  He had a target, and he was mentally going… HULK SMASH!

The tone was level and he was not yelling.. yet.  “You were told to prepare the Inner Sphere for the return of the Clans led by the Crusader faction.  I was in the Blackwell factories, and it does not look that they are working on doing this task to me.  In fact, you have been hitting the FedSuns and taking out weapons factories, support facilities, and R and D campuses left and right.  You know like all of that data from Independence Weaponry you recovered and then let the Combine take off your hands so you could save face?”

Now Drake gave a slight head shake.  “All of what you destroyed could be used to fight the Clans when they come with a flaming sword in their hands.  And now the Combine is going to do to you what they did to the Light Horse, and a list of other units after the Star League fell.  And now you look surprised by that fact of life smacking you in the face.  Man, you clanners can’t think at the strategic level for more than hour without hurting yourself.  I bet you don’t even plan out past six months, unless you’re going on a long raid to break something!”

“Now, son!  What do you think you know?” came from Colonel Ellman as he rose to the defense of not only his commander but his friend.

Before he could say more, a raised hand from Jaime Wolf stopped anymore from being said.

Normally that kind of tone would have sent Drake off like a carton of eggs in a microwave set on high.  But now Drake was starting to understand why Jaime was loved by his soldiers.

Centering himself the NCO looked at the seated officers.  “The Dragoon Compromise was an idea that the Clans came up with to scout the Inner Sphere.  Now what are the Clans?  They are a group that left the Inner Sphere led by Aleksandr Kerensky, his wife and two sons.  After the Prinz Eugen mutiny he knew that they needed to stop soon.  He found five worlds that were close to support humans.  The General had too many fighters and not enough farmers and, when this fell apart, his sons made a second exodus.” 

Drake smiled.  “Would you like me to go down the different laws and caste system?  How about this?  After being trained and sent to the Inner Sphere you had warships but found that no one else did, so hid them way.  I already sent the report on what the FWL did to you all and why.  I could go into more detail but that would just waste all of our time.”

Wolf asked him the obvious question: “How do you know this?”

He gave Franko a suspicious look, but the Wolf Net agent shook his head. “If you’ve read my initial reports, the historical references we found in Drake’s collection didn’t match our own records of the early twenty-first century. We believe the reason is that he isn’t from our timeline in the first place.”

Shostokovitch snorted. “Science fiction.”

“No sir. Science fact. Or at least, based on the facts that we have.”

“But how,” Ellman asked them, “Would someone from another timeline - another timeline and a thousand years removed! - know about the Clans?”

Drake laughed a little bitterly. “Because to me you’re all just NPCs in a game!”

Everyone except Franko looked at him as if he’d gone crazy.

“Yeah, that’s what my face looked like when I figured it out,” he admitted.  “But it’s true.  In my history, FASA Corporation marketed games, books, everything they could think of for a science fiction setting - fall of the Roman Empire in SPACE! With GIANT ROBOTS!”  Drake lowered his voice, and saw that despite themselves the Dragoons fell for the old trick and leant forwards to hear him.

“One of the first merc units detailed in those books? Wolf Dragoons, a mysterious force that emerged from the periphery to fight for each Great House against the others, a twenty year odyssey that ended in betrayal. And later, when the writers decided to bring in the Clans, the distorted descendants of the SLDF, they backfilled that the Wolf Dragoons had been their spies -”

The men around the table bristled and Drake waved his hands. “Okay, their scouts, their recon.  Call it what you will.  A force that the Grand Council ordered to report so they could plan a war, and that Kerlin Ward ordered to slow-walk the entire thing so that the idea of an invasion was forgotten about.  And then to stop reporting and prepare the Inner Sphere, because the Wardens have to win every vote but the Crusaders just need once…”

“You’re nuts,” Shostokovitch said with ironclad certainty.

“If he isn’t then we’re in a lot of trouble,” Franko warned quietly. “And so far, he’s been perfectly… eerily… accurate. Can we take the risk?”

“Quineg?” Drake snarked and saw that use of Clan vernacular hit hard on one or two faces.

###

The Wolf looked at Drake like he was trying to see into his very soul for long seconds before he spoke in a strong voice.  “Mr. Mendenhall you have given us a lot to think about in a very short length of time.  Would you please leave us to have a private meeting?”

And just like that, Drake was told that the kids need to leave the room so that the adults could have a real talk without younger ears being around.  He was stuck floating in the corridor of that dropship for two hours with very little to occupy his mind.

It would have been longer, but he had decided to make his way to the small boat hatch.  Thank God the Scout class jumpship is small, and it was not enough different from the Merchant-class that it didn’t mess with my spatial awareness.  Oh, and that this tub has only the one bathroom that I knew the location of on this spaceship, thought Drake as he waited within the privacy of his own mind.

Going to the bathroom in zero g is another thing that had never been talked about in books of any kind that Drake had read.  It was kind of like all of those zombie movies that don’t talk about running out of toilet paper or what they did when it ran out.  That lack of reading was the reason that Drake’s left butt cheek is now one huge purple hickey.

“****** vacuum zero g toilet with a fixed setting and timers.” Thought Drake as a shot of pain from that part of his body made it to his brain.

Drake was still near the hatch to the small craft hatch when he saw Franko floating towards him, and he did not look that happy.  When Franko was close enough not to need to use his outside voice.  “Well, they think you’re nuts, and about half of them think it would be a good idea to just save the travel money and shove you out the nearest airlock.”

“Oh great, and what was voted on?”  He started to follow Franko and then he stopped and looked at the nearby hatch.  It was one that should lead to death pressure, and Drake had a quick thought that maybe he was about to see what breathing vacuum was going to feel like.

Franko smiled at seeing where Drake was looking.  “Wolf vetoed that idea… for now.  We, my friend, are going back to New Valencia to await further orders.”

Drake thinks Franko saw his face drop at this news.  “Oh, don’t worry too much, Drake.  I gave him that copy of Wolves on the Border and said it came over with you.  I told him it was for some light reading on the way back to the main Dragoon base on An Ting.”  Now Franko’s smile came back that Drake had come to know as sincere. “Oh, and I made sure it had a different outer cover, that will mask the story and at the same time be a better fit for a man of his age.  My boss might not agree with that statement when he finds out, but he will get over it.  I mean, don’t all men his age have some kind of irritable bowel syndrome or something like that?”

Yeah, you’re good about getting my mind off of my own issues, at least most of the time, thought Drake.

He knew that you can only lead a horse to water, but you can’t make them drink it.  He just had a hard time believing that he was having this much of an issue breaking all of those plot issues the Dragoons worked under.

The man from a different universe just hoped that the book is a big enough hammer to get his story slammed into their collective heads… even if they each had to read the thing.  The downside was that the more people who saw that book would increase the risk of ISF stealing it.

###

Colonel Ellman floated there inside the dropship Jeb Stuart, and he was a very worried man.  He was looking for his boss and not finding him, even with the Gazelle not being that large of a dropship.

Jaime had not been seen for at least the last four days now, and the rest of the Colonels were starting to get worried about their leaders’ absence from the public areas of the dropship.  It had even been noted that he had started acting funny a few hours before they had jumped away from that meeting, so Jeremy had been elected to check on the old man, no matter where he might be.  It should not have been that hard of a job to find one person this far from a planet much less a planet that held breathable atmosphere.

This dropship had been modified just slightly using drop-in/plug-in blocks to give each person a cabin in the empty combat bays.  The leader of the Dragoons was in the one that was known to have the most privacy of all of those temporary cabins.  That was something a person picked up after twenty years of working with the bloody things.  Many of a fight had been fought among those of equal rank over who would get those types of cabins.

“Hey Jaime, are you in there?”  He did not want to bang on the hatch first instead of raising his voice to get attention, Sir Newton was an ass.  If no one replied to his hail, he would do just that, but right now he didn’t want to draw that much attention to what he hoped was a non-issue.

He was a heartbeat away from that banging when the thin plastic hatch was pulled opened from the other side.  “Unity, Jaime!  You look like crap.”  Then the smell hit him like a brick to the head.

Ellman had only seen Jaime heavily drink one time in all of the years that he had known the man:  when his wife, two of Jaime’s kids, Joshua, and others had been killed by Anton Marik’s people.  Jeremy went on edge even more when he was waved to enter the converted bay/cabin.  Colonel Ellman saw the four empty bottles attached to the side table to keep them from floating around before the door slides closed behind him.

“Okay Jaime, what is wrong?”  Ellman was using the same tone that he would have used if he was helping a junior officer or one of his trainees work through some personal problems.

Jaime had a haunted look in his eyes that matched the huge dark bags under them.  He slowly floated over to a chair fixed to the deck.  “I was reading the book that Franko passed me.”  Jaime’s eyes went over to the empty bottles spread out and floating around the cabin.  “Oh, Unity! If its right?”  The words had more than a little desperation in them.

Ellman had seen the book being passed over between the Wolf Net agent and the Dragoon’s leader, but he was on the fence about this Drake person.  He did not believe for a second that this Drake had come from a different universe and that he was just a character in a tabletop game.  Right now, he was leaning towards a ROM spy or a crazy man wanting attention of some kind.

“You’re not putting any weight in to this con job, are you!?”  Ellman knew that he didn’t have half the command skills of Jaime and if Jaime lost it how long would the Dragoons last.  Then the rest of the council of colonels would look towards him to take over the leadership of the Dragoons, and he knew that was not going to be a good thing for the rest of them.

Jaime was still looking at the table with a lost look in bloodshot eyes.  “There were only three people in the meeting with Khan Kerlin Ward.  The Khan, Nat, and me.  There is no way he could have found out what was said.  And that book is given me some insights into a lot of what has been bugging me about this whole Combine contract I signed.  It even had information about Marisha and me, along with the relationship that is developing with Tomiko.”

Jaime stopped talking and his eyes turned glassy.  “It has caused me to reflect on what was said and not what I heard more than a few times.  It has also caused me to rethink more than a few things that I have been doing after taking the Combine’s coin on this contract.  I had thought that they were the most Clan-like of the Great Houses, maybe a little taste of home for all of us.  Now I can see that they are not.”

“So, what are you going to do?”  If Jaime said that the black hole in the center of the galaxy was an apple, Ellman was willing to go with that idea.  Jaime was just that kind of leader of troopers.  You would just follow him to storm the gates to hell, because he had said that the devil had stolen his toothbrush.  Now he was going to wait until Jaime told him how he was going to deal with this crazy story.

“I still don’t know if this is totally true or some kind of game that is being played on us.”  Jaime’s back straightened, and the older colonel could tell that he had come to some kind of conclusion in that second.  “We will plan for that this is all for real, but not too deeply to poison the well with the Combine.  I will keep an eye out to see if things that are predicted come to pass.  If they do, as this book states?  Then we protect our people, and the Combine can burn for all I care… if they cross us.”

Jaime’s eyes snapped over to the other Dragoon officer.  “Ellman, we went down to only a single blasted regiment!  All because I could not believe the Combine would do that to us one step at a time pushing us to do certain things!  That book said that all of our mech forces were cut by sixty percent after one massive battle.  Takashi wanted us disgraced in the eyes of the rest of the Inner Sphere so badly that we could only work for him.  The one thing that Drake got right was that I was not planning long term to protect the Inner Sphere like I had been ordered.  I think that I was just wanting to go out fighting, the way that a good clan warrior should die.  I failed my Khan, the Dragoons, and I failed you.  I WILL NOT LET IT HAPPEN!”

Jaime was almost panting for breath from yelling so hard and he was starting to waver on his feet as the massive hangover showed its effects.  “How long until we can reach an HPG?”

Ellman looked down at his watch.  “We jump again in about twenty hours.  Then it’s a six or eight day burn to the planet, unless you want to send something by radio - and you know the Inner Sphere has better codebreakers than the Clans do.  How bad to you want to send a message out?”

Jaime made a sour face and rubbed the side of his head lost in thought for a few seconds.  “Bad…but not that bad.  I wish we would have brought our own HPGs.”

This got Ellman to give a full-throated laugh.  “I can just see it.  Merc unit has its own Drum Sat system set up for passing messages across the whole Inner Sphere and offering discount prices.”

Jaime could not help but laugh also, it felt good.

####

Note

Space Sickness:  This is a real thing that cannot be tested for before Astronauts go into space.  It gives you a varying degree of headaches, nausea, and vomiting that can impact missions.

[Shadow_Wraith]

That was a very nice story update!  It was nice to see Jaime Wolf handle the possible truth of his situation.  Looking forward to see what will happen with Franko and Drake now?  Will Drake be given a chance to be a tanker when he recovers?  Hope to read more soon!

[cawest]

working on chapter 4, 5 and 6 right now.  they will have to find the right peg for the right hole. 

[mikecj]

Nicely written!  Thanks for continuing this!

[Artifex]

Awesome continuation. Looking forwards to the next steps. :-)

[Daryk]

I think Drake is beginning to accept that NPCs are people too...  Huzzah! :)

[snakespinner]

I've read all your BT stories this is your best work.
Amazing to see how someone with limited intelligence training can outfox wolfnet.