This Was Easier on the Tabletop - a Battletech SI Fic

[Chris OFarrell]

Okay, so one sidestory time and then back to the next chapter!
I'm planning at the end of each of the books to then have one interlude from a different non-SI point of view to break it up. This is the one for the break between these two books - I had put it to a vote on SB from a number of choices. Think I'll make the vote over here next time. Although a nice chap (as we saw posted earlier) put his hand up to write the GDL possibility and it was more than good enough for me to canonize it.

Anyway, here is 'You may use the Garden...'

Unity Palace, Imperial City, Luthien
Pesht Military District, Draconis Combine
28 August 3027


Alone on the Balcony of his palace, with only the whispers of the night wind to keep him company, the Coordinator of the Draconis Combine could pretend he was simply Takashi Kurita.

For a time.

Yet even in the peace of night, beyond the walls of the palace Imperial City pulsed with energy and activity. The factories, government buildings and military bases on this world formed the heart of the Draconis Combine; a heart that never stopped beating. So too were the webs of Jumpships and dropships above the Combines veins and arteries. Sending the strength of House Kurita out along the length and breadth of the Dragons realm … and spreading corruption, disease and weakness in turn.
The Lord of the Draconis Combine did not sigh or otherwise show weakness at that thought, even here. Even alone. But he did fold his arms into his robe and allow the evening breeze to wash over him, returning his gaze from the sky to the Imperial Garden below as he allowed his mind to dwell on the events that had just played out.

Minutes ago, Jamie Wolf and his party had crossed the perfectly tendered gardens, returning to where their vehicles waited to take them back to their dropship. It had disappointed him that the Colonel had not taken the rare opportunity to appreciate the gardens as he moved through them. Painstakingly sculpted down to the smallest detail, they were possibly the finest such work anywhere in the Inner Sphere. From up here, the ground level chaos and seemingly random mixing and meshing suddenly shifted into a breathtakingly intricate order and balance that was hard to perceive at ground level. Jamie Wolf, unfortunately it seemed, had blazed through the gardens and only seen the clashing without the subtleties of harmony teased through it. Not seeing how one must give for the other to take and how stability and unity of purpose was achieved in the larger picture with balance in all things.

Although Takashi would admit -very- privately, that the clear displeasure hanging around the Mercenary was understandable. If misplaced.

He and Wolf had remained silent for most of an hour as the Warlord of Galerdon had furiously ranted and accused, seemingly blind to his liege’s displeasure at his skirting the very edge of what could be tolerated and perhaps just a little beyond that as he charged the Dragoons with everything short of treason.
And only then because it was difficult to accuse paid soldiers for hire of that.
Subtlety had never been Grieg Samsonovs greatest strength.

Sadly, the tangled web of politics that was the Draconis Combine meant that tolerance had to be extended to him. A Warlord, even Samsonov, was power in the Combine. And for all his ego and coveting of yet more power, there was no denying that as an administrator he had few peers as he kept his district operating with great efficiency giving him a powerbase few could match. Yet his abrasive nature ensured that outside his district he was little threat given how much contempt he held for his peers and vice versa.

And a Mercenary commander, even the legendary Jamie Wolf, was but a passing player in this game.

He had hoped going into this meeting that Wolf would understand that. Had hoped that by letting Samsonov rant … then dismissing his demands with a casual indifference that had made the Warlords face turn a most interesting shade of purple for a moment, that Wolf would understand the Dragoons retained his support. And understand most of all that he spoke truly and honestly when he had told him that the Combine was truly the only logical place for a Samuraii of Wolf’s statue to call home.
Instead Wolf had almost coldly noted that true leaders could be judged by their subordinate’s actions. Rejecting without formally rejecting his suggestion for new contract terms and liaison officers to try and set things right.
It was clear to him in that moment that the relationship between the Dragoons and Combine had been damaged and set on a course he had not wished. His instructions to his varied servants had been to work to tie the Dragoons firmly to the Combine as their contract approached the end of its running term. To encourage them to see the Combine as their true and permanent home. After all, to have such skilled warriors as a permanent part of the Dragon would have enormously strengthened the Combine in the face of the growing strategic uncertainty of this alliance between Davion and Steiner. An alliance counterbalanced by … less than reliable allies in his Concord partners.
Unfortunately, possibly inevitably, it seemed that different viewpoints and agendas as to what those orders had meant had crashed into each other and poisoned Wolf against them all.

Samsonovs clearly wanted the Dragoons soldiers and mechs for his own, even if he hid his intentions behind a supposed concern for the Combine as a whole. Which clearly meant destroying the Dragoons as an institution, starting by dealing with their leadership - probably hoping to take them as hostages - before scattering the subunits into ever smaller chunks where they could be finally digested.
Apparently, the fool had never read up on the famous unit’s history. Anton Marik had tried a similar ploy and Takashi was entirely sure that the Black Widow would barely need encouragement to give the Dragoons traditional response to such a crude tactic. Indeed, if his Warlord continued poking and prodding at the Dragoons leadership, it could be that Kerensky might well take matters into her own hands and Buddah have mercy on Samsonov because she certainly would not...

His own efforts to quietly convince the Dragoons to make their permanent home in the Combine with both subtle pressure and careful methods had thus been stymied by the heavy-handed efforts of the Warlord, but all he could do now was let the cards fall as they would. Samsonovs impatience was bringing matters to a head too quickly with the Dragoons, who were still far too strong to be overtly pressured. And should it come to the Dragoons deciding to blast their way out of the Combine?
But he had little choice but to follow where the Warlord led unless he wished to risk challenging he or his peers, who may hate Samsonov, but tended to close ranks if the Coordinator moved for a threat to one was a threat to all unless that one had clearly and grievously overstepped…
Still. Perhaps his Warlord could be yet … reminded ... that there were consequences for acting rashly?

Takashi let his gaze once again return to the horizon as with a distant thunder, a bright star slowly ascended from the nearby military spaceport; a dropship returning to the stars. He could not tell from this distance of course, but he was reasonably certain that it was the Chieftain, Command Ship of Jamie Wolf. Clearly eager to return to his regiment and of no mood to accept his offer of hospitality.
It would be a long trip though. The return trip to An Ting would take the Dragoons considerably longer than the one that brought them to Luthien as there would be no Command Circuit of JumpShips waiting to ferry their DropShip quickly from one jump point to the next. This time, they would have to wait while their JumpShip recharged its drives at each stop along the way.
Messages via HPG however were considerably faster, taking days instead of weeks to cross such distances. Which gave time for messages to pass from Luthien to An Ting and the situation to be … shaped before Jamie Wolf returned.
So-ka. What would that situation be?
Again, the age-old conflict: ninjo or giri. It was ever a choice between his feelings for others, which was the way his heart would lead him, and the inexorable call of obligation. And while he had a choice … the Dragon did not. The Dragons duty was to protect his House and his realm and do what he must to improve its place in the order of things. It was that simple, if hard.

With that final grave thought Takashi turned and walked back into the palace and down the flight of stairs from the meeting room, passing only members of the Otomo until he arrived at a sliding door. Outside of which waited Subhash Indrahar.

“All is ready Lord” he said after bowing to his Liege and friend. Looking as always like the wise but harmless uncle with his thick framed glasses, beard and moustache, Takashi knew full well that the man's utter ruthlessness was matched only by his loyalty to the Dragon. Hence, his success in achieving what was intended for this evening, without any of the players on the board any the wiser of it.
He nodded his thanks and with that, the ISF director slid the paper screen back silently to allow entrance, closing it behind them in turn.

This room was directly under the impressive reception room he had received the Warlord and Mercenary Commander in, but it was far less glitz and glamour and far more traditional Japanese in style. A simple wooden floor and oaken walls lined with sliding paper screens (that were of course not paper but looked like it despite being bulletproof and soundproof) with the far screen open to the night and garden beyond. On the floor two long tatami mats and one smaller one topped with a handwoven rug of a snarling scarlet Dragon were set with exquisite placement; the smaller at the head of the room and the longer pair running down its length away from it. The Coordinator moved to and calmly knelt on the Dragon, Subhash taking position on the edge of the tatami behind and slightly to his right with not even a whisper of sound.

There they remained for several minutes, their eyes closed as they centered themselves … before without a sound or gesture visible, they opened their eyes in perfect synchronization and as if it was some signal to a hidden servant, the far screen slid open.

Grieg Samsonov had managed to calm himself down somewhat from his fury to the point that he almost looked calm. He entered the room on edge however, with his face something of a mask, having no Gajian present to excuse his rage. Having stormed out the meeting to return home, he had been bid to wait then to enter this room … and now found himself again face to face with his liege … and the ISF director.
Suffice to say through history, more than one high ranking Combine officer had walked into such a meeting and not walked out.
The warlord at least had the dignity (or shrewdness) to bow deeply to the Dragon on entering, holding it perhaps overlong. A gesture calculated to show contrition - or the appearance of such - for his borderline disrespect upstairs?
Takashi gave him an exactly appropriate nod in return, gesturing him with a minimal wave to a mat on his right as the screen whispered shut behind him. His aide Jerry Akuma in turn took the que from the ISF director to take a similar position behind and slightly to his right, the loyal and calm servant to his master.
Or perhaps playing the loyal and calm servant to his master? Takashi quietly wondered, the ISFs reports on the man divided as to his true intentions. But that was something for another day.

Silence reigned once more as Takashi waited silently. He could tell from the impatient twitching on his body that this inaction grated upon the Warlord, but not even Samsonov would dare speak before the Coordinator did without being invited to do so, clearly thinking this was some kind of test or punishment.
Which left him clearly surprised when the same screen Takashi had used to enter the room now opened up without warning … and Hirushi Shotugama entered the room, followed by his own aide.
Takashi easily perceived the shock both men tried to hide as they were confronted with each other’s unexpected presence before Shotugama quickly recovered and bowed deeply to his liege. Takashi again returned the bow and gestured to his left and the Warlord of Benjamin took his place. Forced, by sitting directly opposite Shotugama to stare at him as he stared back, Samsonovs contempt for the newest Warlord was subtle but quite clear to him while Shotugama merely waited for his Coordinators pleasure to begin.

But again, Takashi merely sat in silence.

An appropriate time later the first screen opened once more and now Vasily Cherenkoff entered. Once again, there was that subtle shock and once again after paying homage to their Liege, the Warlord and his aide took their places. Followed soon after by Kester Hsiun-Chi, Warlord of Pesht and his aide, each man in turn clearly not expecting his peers to be present. Each wondering how they had been gathered without their own intelligence networks picking up on it, each wondering what this unannounced meeting of the most powerful men in the Inner Sphere was about.
Finally, Ivan Sorensen entered, he took his place next to Samsonov. Alone of the Warlords here, he knew why they were here and thus why of all his close aides, he brought with him the man sitting behind him.
Takashi then closed his eyes and remained in perfect stillness for several minutes, giving absolutely no indication of his thoughts as he felt the currents flowing through the room. The bombastic impatience of Samsonov, the cool calculation of Shotugama. The curiosity and concern of the rest … and the hint of fear from the man sitting behind Sorensen as he rubbed his fingers together under the sleeves of his robes.

It was time.

“I have called you all here this evening to discuss recent events in the Davion-Steiner alliance” Takashi started finally as he opened his eyes, causing all attention to instantly draw to him.“I am sure you have all seen the broadcast regarding the Helm affair?”
There were nods around the room at that. Which was unsurprising given that the Fox had broadcasted his gloating across the Inner Sphere alongside Steiner. The information had, of course, been tightly controlled in the Combine and his Warlords had been told to simply ignore it for now while the ISF investigated.
He was sure most of them -if not all of them- had carefully ignored that directive but little probably had been learned with their enemies exercising ruthless operational security.
“Director?”

“Hai” Indrahar replied, shuffling forward carefully and bowing deeply to first the Coordinator and then the room, before offering one of his famous smiles and getting to work.
“The ISF has spent considerable time reviewing intelligence before and after the Helm operation and has managed to come to a broadly complete picture of the operation and aftermath. The best information we have is that this was indeed a surprisingly rash action from Davion and Steiner, organized ‘on the fly’ in response to external factors that drove them to do what they could with what they had available. But despite the haste of action, the operation was unfortunately a considerable success for them”.

“Do we have further information on what Davion and Steiner recovered from the cache?” Cherenkoff was first off the mark asking the question clearly on the mind of every Warlord from the way they ever so slightly edged forward on their mats, clearly wondering what Star League Lostech might be pointed at their districts.

“Total lift tonnage on the cargo dropships that arrived at Tharkad is something in excess of three quarters of a megaton” the ISF Director stated calmly and every Warlord winced at that number but remained silent as the ISF director laid out the nightmare for them. “SAFE investigation of the landing zones on Helm as well as footage brought from a trader at the Tharkad zenith point suggests they were loaded at or close to capacity. Additionally, the Heavy Guards also offloaded many armored personnel carriers and destroyed them, presumably to make room on their troop transports for vehicles from the cache. Steiner and Davion are playing their cards very close to their chest, but the best estimates we’ve collated from our sources suggest the most likely scenario is roughly two Mech regiments and two vehicle regiments. With the vast bulk of the cache contents left behind by Kerensky being spare parts and components”.

There was a furious intake of breath at that from the Warlord to his immediate right.

“That … that is enough war material for Davion to replace all the non-recoverable Mech losses we have inflicted on him over the last year! At a stroke!” Samsonov snarled, his gaze furious as he looked around the room for someone to blame for such an outrage. “And enough spare parts to have his Techs rebuilding entire Regiments of broken machines!”

“I presume that this material will be divided equally between Davion and Steiner?” Cherenkoff both queried the ISF Director and indirectly chided Samsonov, earning him a baleful stare. But as Vasily had opened the discussion and not addressed him directly, it was his right to redirect it as such and the Warlord of Galedon held his tongue. “And we can presume that there will be both political and military concerns over the division and deployment of the equipment?”

Indrahar offered a brief bow to the Warlord.

“All indicators are that the Archon and First Prince achieved an equitable split of the war material, yes. As for what will be done operationally with the equipment, we have contradictory reports that my agents are carefully working through to determine what is rumored and false, but we expect it more likely that the equipment will be used to repair and rebuild damaged units as both Davion and Steiner have a great many frontline units operating at less than full strength”.

“Then until such information becomes available, I would suggest our primary concern should be what possible Lostech has been delivered into the hands of the thrice cursed NAIS an the long term threat” Sorensen suggested with a glance at Cherenkoff, gaining a slight nod from him and a murmur of consensus from the other Warlords.

“That is the question I have reserved my best people for” Indrahar divulged, offering Sorensen a shallow bow. “However, the most interesting information we have, information I trust but must note cannot be yet verified, tells us that Hanse Davion has ultimately declared this entire operation a failure”.

There was dead silence in the room, even Samsonov looked genuinely taken aback at this pronouncement. A perfectly executed objective raid with minimal losses to the covering raids, humiliation for the enemies of the Sun's with measurable gains on a scale rarely seen materially and politically … and the Fox considered it a failure?

“The equipment recovered from Helm were, but trinkets compared to the true prize hidden there” Takashi spoke up once more, gaining attention, his face a stony mask as he -and not for the first time in recent months- silently cursed his ancestors rash actions. Actions inconveniently brought back into the light by the Free Worlds League media in the aftermath of the raid.
But he pushed such thoughts aside. It was the worst of all wastes of time, wishing about what could have been...
“We have learned that Davion’s men discovered in the raid, deep inside the cache, a Star League data core of unprecedented scope. The SLDF officer who hid the cache from First Lord Kurita had some foresight of the great war that was coming and thus took the step of placing as complete a technological database of the Star Leagues technology inside as he could construct”.
The silence in the room now became almost oppressive as every Warlord let their emotions slip openly, such a rare failing of self-control speaking to the sheer weight of such a thing. Takashi met their gazes lightly and they glanced away to regain their composure … but he let his gaze hold for just a few seconds longer on the figure sitting behind Warlord Sorensen whose eyes were, of course, correctly looking at the floor and not at him … but even there he could see the indicators of dread in the way his hands were clenched tightly under his robe and his eyes blinking quickly as he worked to maintain his composure...

“Davions troops found this core” Indrahar took back the narrative smoothly as Takashi brooded. “And given how far behind enemy lines they were without time to call in experts, they chanced removing it … and failed. In their clumsy handling of things, they managed to set off a security protocol that destroyed the core and initiated a self-destruction sequence of the entire Castle Brian complex; which detonated with such force it reshaped the mountain range it was buried under and forced an underground sea back to the surface. If it was anyone but Ardan Sortek in command of the mission, they probably would have been stripped of their rank and dismissed the service for such a failure, but Davion seems to have grudgingly accepted the loss and focused on trying to study what Lostech samples he managed to recover for reverse engineering”.

“A complete Star League data core” whispered the Warlord of Dieron, for once not loudly or angrily, but simply stunned. “Slipping through Davions grasping fingers...”

“As the Combine let it slip through ours” Takashi finished in a voice like granite..

The Warlord of Galedon frowned, his bushy eyebrows crunching at the harsh statement.

“My Lord Kurita, your honorable ancestor may have been somewhat rash in his actions on Helm, but...” and he shut up quickly as Takashi turned to pin him with a look.

“My honorable ancestor taught the citizens of the Star League that choosing to rebel against the First Lords legitimate edicts has grave consequences” Takashi corrected the Warlord as if he was a child, causing the man to flush slightly, but otherwise hold his peace before he swept his gaze around the room. No matter that Takashi actually agreed with Samsonov for once, no-one could chide his ancestors but him and the Warlord would do well to remember that. “No Warlord, I am talking about the fact that Davions information about the cache indeed, as he claimed, came from a source inside the Combine. A noble discovered the existence of this cache … and rather than inform his superiors, he chose to keep this information a secret for his own use. And in turn, he had this information compromised due to lax security by Davion agents, leading the Fox straight to the cache after he compared information with Steiners!”.
Predictably, in an attempt to overcompensate for his earlier chiding and lead the room in its response, Samsonov’s fists slammed down onto the mat and his face became twisted with anger in response to the icy tone in the Coordinators voice.

“Treason!” the Warlord snarled and the other Warlords -released from blame by his noting that the secret had been kept from everyone in the room - indicated their support for the motion with their own angry noises of agreement and support. The sheer priceless value of what had been lost to the Combine that might have been theirs was starting to sink in and anger was taking the place of shock, good. “Who is this traitor?” Samsonov pressed, his eyes flaring in a slightly disturbing way as he stared at his Lord. “Name him Tono and I promise we will bring him to you for judgement at once!”

“Fortunately, Warlord, he has already been delivered to me, on this very evening” Takashi assured the other… and with that and a glacially calm expression, Takashi Kurita ever so slowly turned his head to very deliberately focus in on the man sitting behind Warlord Sorensen. And taking the hint, every Warlord did so soon after leaving the single target of his gaze symbolically and literally alone.

The Archduke Hassid Ricol. Or the ‘Red Duke’ as he preferred to be known.

And sure, enough at the extended silence and ominous last words of the Coordinator, the man couldn’t help but glance up … and become very still as he saw the Dragon and all of his Warlords were looking at him.
Takashi took a very personal, very vindictive pleasure in the flash of fear and dread in his eyes as he realized the Dragon now loomed over him. Very aware, very angry and very ready to have its revenge.

[Chris OFarrell]

It had been over a decade now since the attempt on his life on Rasalhague - by far the closest any attempt that had come to succeeding. He could still remember the exact moment his Dropships engines had suddenly failed, putting him into a freefall for several long seconds before gravity resumed its hold, smashing his bodyguards into a stunned heap as the dropship spun on its axis out of control. The interior becoming a randomly reorienting mess as the fifteen-thousand-ton projectile plunged towards the ground with power lost across the ship … and for just a moment he had thought that it would be the end of him.
It had been Ivan Sorensen who had saved him - and he Sorensen in turn; the two of them managing to pull each other down the wildly pitching deck into the Mech bay and from there into Sorensens Mech. A crash power up to blast open a bay door and they had leapt into the open air, all but melting the Grasshoppers jump jets to get clear and land at a survivable velocity as the ship itself had smashed into the ground with the force of a tactical nuclear strike killing everyone left onboard and wrecking much of the spaceport.
As it turned out, his Son had also barely avoided dying, having shown up unexpectedly to the Spaceport to greet him in person, something the conspiracy had clearly not expected. One of the conspirators however, Governor Ottar Sjovold whose daughter had been promised to Theodore, had acted to extract his Son shortly before the Dropship had come crashing down.
His son was many things … many things indeed ... but a fool was not one of them. When news of the crash had been relayed, Theodore had swiftly confronted Sjovold for his vague reasons for pulling him away and the man had boldly admitted his involvement in the plot. Most probably, the fool had thought that with the Coordinator dead, Theodore would reward him for providing him a throne, wife AND for saving his life.

In a rare moment of pride for Takashi, his Son had not been happy.

And seeing death rather than elevation coming for him from the enraged Heir, the Governor had tried to attack him with a concealed weapon … only to be killed by Hassid Ricol sitting next to him before he could strike - or so the ISF reports said.
Of course, the ISF had been highly suspicious of Ricol for killing their only confirmed link to the high levels of the conspiracy but they found no evidence he was involved in it. Especially given that the man had been at the Starport with Theodore in the ‘line of fire’ as it were. And despite an extensive check, no proof of complicity had been found and so Ricol had been declared a hero who had unfortunately needed to eliminate the only known ringleader to save the heir of the Draconis Combine.

Until now.

Takashi didn’t know what displeased the ISF head sitting behind him more. That MIIO and DMI had compromised Ricol’s security and obtained the key to the Helm Cache from it without the ISF knowing either about Ricol’s activities or MIIOs penetration … or, that it was O5P who found out their failures? Or, even worse, that O5P had done so by compromising Maximilian Liaos spy network, no small achievement at all … and the ISF had been ignorant of that as well?!
As amusing as it had been to see his spymaster for once at a loss for words, Constance’s report was quite fascinating. Hanse Davion clearly -and rightfully- distrusted his Brother in Law. But it seemed even the Fox didn’t appreciate the depths of his brothers perfidery.

But then, in what sane universe would the leader of the vehemently anti-Liao Capellan March … be conspiring with Maximilian Liao against his Prince?

In any event, O5P had quite recently managed to subvert part of the Maskirovka chain from the New Syrtis to Sian. From that they had gotten the ‘primer’ report Davion had sent out to his two March Lords before departing for Tharkad. A report Hasek-Davion had duly passed on at the Chancellors request, Maximilian clearly eager to see if the situation in the Free Worlds League could be turned to his advantage in some way. Far more pertinent, the fact that Liao had not passed said report onto him despite his politely worded requests to share all information on the raid. Sending back only a few dribbles of media reports and dimwitted speculation, as if trying to make himself look the fool to one ally while plotting to see if he could take advantage of the other.

The Fox wins Katrina Steiner for an ally … and the Dragon must deal with such as these!?

But irrespective of if Constance was having perhaps too much fun tweaking Indrahars nose, the report had made for fascinating reading. Davions efficient MIIO had apparently identified Ricol as one head of a multi-faceted conspiracy determined to set itself against him, although Davions Quintus Allard seemed sure that the Archduke and his fellow traitors held contradictory goals. Some members of it he suspected were backing Theodore to replace him, others his Cousin Marcus. But what they could all agree on was that Takashi had to die.

Ricol or ‘Ruby’ as his codename was to this group, had been identified by MIIO primarily because he was operating as their spymaster. As an Archduke controlling a dozen worlds with business operations that some claimed rivaled Chandrasekhars, the man had trade ships and investments spread across the Inner Sphere. Both bringing in badly needed foreign capital and providing clandestine access to foreign component and technology markets for Kuritian companies, all of which raised his profile significantly in the eyes of foreign intelligence services.
Clearly, the Fox had been interested in the possibilities of a group dedicated to killing his greatest enemy and watched them closely, prepared to manipulate the situation to his advantage no doubt. But in doing so he had stumbled upon Ricols interest in Helm and following the thread to the end, found something far more valuable.

And, as a House Lord would, he had acted upon it.

As much of an unfortunate setback both in military and political terms this Helm Operation had been for the Combine, there were some silver linings he could pull from it. One of which was that five different sources inside the Federated Suns higher levels had all tried to present very carefully constructed and painstakingly ‘leaked’ pieces of a puzzle that pointed to his son as the source of the Helm Leak in the Combine. Not directly of course and barely even indirectly; the Federated Suns Ministry of Information, Intelligence, and Operations had put considerable work into laying out just enough data points for the ISF to follow up on. Which, after painstaking analysis, would lead the ISF to draw but a single conclusion.
Unfortunately for MIIOs hard work, three of the agents had already been under suspicion of being turned or ‘made’ by their enemy to deliver false information without them knowing. The fourth and fifth had not been, but now were now known to have been compromised, a fact which might save a great deal of pain later for the Combine. Yet without the dossier from Michael Hasek-Davion, it was entirely possible that credence would have been given to such claims, causing friction between he and Theodore that the realm did not need at all.
Well, did not need more than usual anyway.
It thus amused Takash that the Fox’s attempt to protect the conspiracy against the Coordinator of the Draconis Combine and turn father against son had been defeated, if unknowingly, by a conspiracy against the First Prince of the Federated Suns led by his brother in law. Karma was a strange thing, to be sure.

Of course, Takashi was not a fool. He would never act solely off information from House Davion, no matter how reliable it was thought to be by Maximilian Liao. But it was enough for him to give directions to the ISF. And with great focus and personal supervision from Subhash Indrahar, the Sons of the Dragon had fanned out searched for proof of what Davions diosier claimed - made surprisingly easy by the way the clearly panicked Ricol after Davions announcement at Christmas, had been thoroughly investigating his own internal security and operations. Clearly the man was clueless as to how Davion had penetrated him so deeply and in his broad efforts to conceal his crimes he had only helped direct the ISF teams straight to them. Most damning of which being his attempt to reach out to a half-dozen senior nobles through covert means to demand they in turn check their own internal security. Through code names and cutouts of course, but Subhash Indrahar was very very patient as he worked his way to follow the links of the chain to see where they led and untangled the attempts to obfuscate the identities of his fellow conspirators.
He strongly suspected one of the chains would lead straight to his cousin, Marcus Kurita ... but that was an issue for another day.

All in all it was enough to confirm the data from O5P and in the same stroke, discredit Davions attempt to drive a wedge between Father and Son. A cunning stratagem indeed, but thanks to Michael Hasek-Davion and O5P he had sidestepped it … and perhaps, could even be considered to have come out ahead? A few regiments of Battlemechs and Tanks with a few Lostech trinkets was a trifle of a price to pay for ripping out such a deep rooted and powerful conspiracy against House Kurita.

He would have to find a way to thank the Fox for his efforts...but for now, he had a problem; he could tell his Warlords none of this - would tell them nothing about it.

Admitting such a conspiracy existed, even if all in the room probably suspected such a thing existed in one form or another, would be a grave loss of face - and encouragement. That this group had so boldly attempted to kill him - and almost kill his only Heir - and had escaped justice for this long? Who knows what they might read into that!

And yet, for a man as powerful as Ricol ordering his death because of the Helm situation alone was equally problematic. While certainly more than within his powers (for that matter he didn’t need any reason to order a death of anyone in the Combine but only a fool of a Coordinator would ever be so coarse), it would be a politically fraught course as many nobles would no doubt decry such an action, especially his many political allies and backers. As always with the garden, it came back to balance. Upset it in too large a way and the ripples would flow out, spreading disharmony through the growth that would in time cause his problems to multiply. Especially as the expected consequences for attempting to kill the Coordinator were, of course, the harshest not simply to the person but to their family and house.

No. He would need to be a little more subtle. But of course, even if he could not openly accuse Ricol of the attempt on his life ... it did not mean that he couldn’t use that fact…

“Duke Ricol” he called the other forward with a curt gesture, wanting to get this over with. The Duke gathered himself and walked bent over from his place to a position directly opposite him, flanked by the double line of Warlords and aides on both sides and all eyes in the room glaring at him. Kneeling once more, he wasted no time in prostrating himself and not moving a muscle until finally Takashi tapped on the floor and he slowly, almost unwillingly, rose to face the coordinator.

It was the composed look of a man facing his death and trying to hold himself together … even as he desperately thought and schemed to try and stay alive.

“It pains me to see you here having made such a misjudgment, Duke Ricol” Takashi stated in a matter of fact way. “I remember well on that dark day so many years ago, when a conspiracy attempted to kill both I and my Son, you saved his life”.

“I remember it too, Tono” the other agreed with another bow.

“Your actions on that day were quite remarkable” he said slowly but carefully. Every word, every inflection chosen for maximum impact. “Few people know the truth of what you did on that day and that is a pity” Takashi continued and as the Red Dukes eyes met his for a second, Takashi let flow the full force of his rage out for just a moment … and he saw it have the desired effect. The man recoiled physically with a shiver across his body and Takashi knew then the man understood the Coordinator knew he had been part of a plot to kill him. Even as the rest of the room thought he was talking about his ‘noble’ actions saving his Son’s life.
As with so many conversations in the Combine, this one was as much about what was said as what was not said.

“I fear that there will be little chance that the memory of that day will be spoken of now” he now added, reinforcing the impression in the minds of those in the room … but saying something quite different to the Archduke. “We must concern ourselves only” he stressed, “with the actions of the here and now”.

Now Ricol blinked and started to regain some composure, glancing around the room for a moment before bowing deeply once more as he understood the message.

“My Lord”.

“We have conclusive evidence from sources inside the Federated Suns we have since confirmed by internal investigations, that House Davion Intelligence subverted your information networks and found the data you had been compiling on Helm” Subhash took over, his tone and bearing suddenly as clinical and cool as an Imperial Magistrate announcing his verdict. “A source close to you know by the codename ‘Ruby’ provided the information, unknowingly perhaps, which led Davion and Steiner straight to the cache”.
It was absolutely the truth … simply not the whole truth. Making the point about how much they knew by casually dropping of the man's own conspiracy code-name in his face … yet holding out a tiny sliver of hope to him by not identifying him.

“I am also aware that your agents on your behalf ‘inferred’ to one ‘Lady’ Deirdre Ravenna, the only ISF listed operative on Helm, that they spoke on behalf of the Dragon to prepare the ground for your operation, without clearing such liberties with the ISF” Subhash continued, his voice now turning somewhat cold - understandably so. The ISF head had, of course squeezed what few assets he had on Helm in the aftermath of Davions operation. And it had been a key starting point in their efforts to corroborate the Davion dossier, finding out that Duke Ricol had been apparently using it ‘on behalf of the Combine’ to setup the groundwork for an operation of some kind.
The ISF took a dim view of people taking such liberties with their resources, even if nominally for the good of the Combine. But especially for the use of building a private army to try and overthrow it.
“So, I would ask you now, what were your intentions for Helm?”

“My Lord Kurita, my Lord Indrahar” Ricol said in a surprisingly steady voice, albeit after taking several seconds to clear his throat and choose his words very carefully. “My intentions on Helm were, as you suggested, to recover the cache, for the Glory of the Combine. I knew that My Lord Kurita would be tied by his alliance with the Free Worlds League to not raid into the League and recover such a treasure. But at the same time, I knew that, as his honorable ancestor had noted, this was his by right of his First Lordship. Accordingly, I … decided to attempt a covert location and recovery of the cache that could be denied as officially sanctioned. I deeply regret this decision” he finished, bowing deeply once more at the two and staying down.

“Your decision has infuriated the Free Worlds League, Duke Ricol. Despite our denials that we had nothing to do with this raid in the aftermath of Hanse Davions gloating, SAFE sources have stumbled onto your Helm network - and by extension our own- and taken it as evidence we were aware of the cache and preparing to steal it” Indrahar stated icily and the entire room flinched just a little at the rarely heard tone from the normally genial and smiling man. “Which in turn has led to the Free Worlds League all but accusing the Coordinator of lying to the Captain General”.
Everyone in the room flinched at that statement. Such a loss of face for the Coordinator could be disastrous. The Concord of Kapteyn was uneasy at the best of times and could take only so many wedges of distrust before fractures would start to show...

“Had you succeed in your plan, my anger at you operating far beyond your station in this matter might, might have been offset by the material gains you brought back to me” Takashi spoke up again after a pause, his tone cold but collected. “And if you had recovered the data Core, all the Combine would have surely sung your praises. But you did not do either. Instead Hanse Davion and Katrina Steiner have been enriched greatly and the Combine - indeed, all of humanity has lost greatly. Leaving me the question of what to do with you?”

What to do indeed. It was all in the Dukes hands now and for a minute there was nothing but silence as Ricol painstakingly analyzed his situation and glanced for support around him. But the Warlords offered none – their earlier declaration of treason had neatly trapped them into this box- and in the end, Ricol finally accepted the gift he had offered him for what it was, stealing himself like a true Samurai to face him, without fear in his eyes.
The man may have been a traitor deserving of a far worse fate … but Takashi in this moment could not fault him for his courage.

“Tono, my failures are my own and no-one else's. None of my people or my family hold any accountability or part of them. Thus, I … accept full responsibility and request your permission to … atone … for them, immediately”.

The room was silent at that statement, awaiting his response. And after an appropriate time, Takashi nodded slowly, as if in a distant sort of regret at the necessity.

“If that is your choice” he said slowly, “then you may use the garden” he gestured with an arm to the night. “And your atonement will be complete in these matters” he added, one final time saying without saying that his family, House and people would not be vindictive punished for his involvement in an assassination attempt on the Coordinator, as was traditional. His Wife would not be sold into slavery, his children not ripped out training and schooling to become wards of the state and his House not stripped, reduced and divided up into a memory never to be spoken of again.
And his death at least would be relatively quick and clean, nominally redeeming his honor with his life, taken by his own hand. For a man who had tried to kill him and then tried to raise an army to overthrow him, it was far, far better than he deserved. And he knew it.

“Warlord” he now said, turning to face Ivan Sorensen, his superior, in a bow, not meeting his eyes. “I would ask you to stand as my kaishakunin in this matter”.

Sorensen glanced at him out of the corner of his eye and Takashi offered him a small nod. As much as a vindictive part of Takashi would have enjoyed seeing him suffer by atoning alone, that would be out of line for this situation. There was a right way to do these things and a wrong way and he had to play this to the end.

“I would be honored to do so” the Warlord returned his bow deeply. And now the screen behind him opened where a group guards from the Otomo waited, each standing rigidly at attention, ready to take him on his final steps. After all, this was the heart of civilization, Takashi would allow him the dignity of the final bathing, the time to write a death poem and a last meal. And so for the last time the Archduke studied the room and bowed, deeply and smoothly, his bearing resigned but taking some small solace that his honor would remain intact and his family not punished harshly.
The entire room led by him, returned the bow - just as deeply before he turned and left with his head held high, the Warlord Sorensen joining him after a nod from his Liege.
While it was not his fault, the man is his responsibility and standing with him to ensure this is done is a fitting way to end this Takashi thought silently, taking in the slightly uneasy aftermath, feeling as much as seeing the glances exchanged and uneasy thoughts of the Warlords around him. They were clearly confused as to why the Archduke had decided to give up his life so easily rather than fight to at least be stripped of some of his rank and removed from the court, where he could plot a return. Which naturally led to the question of what else had the man done (that the Coordinator clearly knew of) that had Ricol running to slit his belly open rather than risk the alternative when offered the chance to save face? Whatever it was, they would clearly never know - and more than anything else, not knowing clearly disturbed these men, who made it their business to know these things.
But at the same time they saw the final message Takashi had presented to the room by doing things in this way. A message from their Liege that if they crossed him or pushed too far - as Grieg Samsonov had nearly done earlier this evening- the Dragon would find out.

Takashi allowed them the grace of several minutes to take in this lesson, instead closing his eyes and drinking in the serenity of the night outside, hearing the very faint noise from deep in the garden where his household staff were already setting up the necessary things for the ceremony to take place. He was sure everything would be done to perfection; his staff were quite efficient at it as this was neither the first nor would it be the last time such an invitation would be extended to a guest of the Palace of Unity.

At the appropriate time, centered once more; he opened his eyes and continued the meeting; calm and seemingly indifferent to the fact he had just had a traitor executed.

“While the contents of the Helm Cache have given a boost to our enemies, I am not content to sit back and let them dictate how it is used” he said, drawing all attention once more with nods of agreement. “I would also seek more detailed information on exactly what was taken from Helm, to be sure of the threat we face. Happily, there is a way to do both he said...” and with that, the rear screen opened again and there was a collective hiss of a mass intake of breath through the room. One filled with awe, fear and surprise.

None had expected to see him here. Probably, none had expected to see him ever again.

That amused Takashi; that the most powerful men in the Draconis Combine could be brought to such a state from the mere presence of a man such as this. A Tai-Sa in full dress uniform, his DCMS uniform perfect in every aspect bar two. One being that his unit patch, a black wave speckled with golden stars and a foaming white top was not that of a unit anyone in the room bar the Coordinator and his ISF head were familiar with. Second, that the daishō belt that should have been tied around his waist -even if swords like all weapons brought into the palace were carefully held in trust by the Otomo upon entry- was conspicuous by its absence as he stepped forward with the grace of a stalking tiger and bowed, deeply.

Takashi bowed back, holding his bow almost as long and deep as his cousin.

“Kurita-San” Takashi welcomed his Cousin. “Please, join us” he gestured to the same spot that the Duke Ricol had just vacated and the man bowed once more before silently taking the position indicated opposite from him.
Perhaps the Warlords in the room thought that this meant Yorinaga Kurita was finally going to be granted permission to end his life and the Coordinators garden would be well fertilized this month. Several of them probably hoped it was the case; the reentry of the greatest Mechwarrior into the combine political structure certainly threatened to complicate the lives of some of the men sitting with him.

In any event, the planning continued well into the night as the Director of the ISF revealed some new information he had received today that offered an excellent opportunity to strike back and shift the balance of power once more in their favor.

The ancient sage Archimedes had once boasted that if you gave him a large enough lever, he would be able to move the Earth. It would be fascinating to see what leverage he would be able to apply to the Inner Sphere when the Lady Melissa Steiner was his guest on Luthien soon enough…

[mikecj]

Alas poor Ricol, I loathed him well  ^-^

[worktroll]

I wonder who will pay for this mistake ... Melissa has, after all, read the book(s).

Chris, do you have the list of the exact books on Mr. Smith's iPad? Just wondering if he had any of the rulebooks with him ;)

[paulobrito]

Wolf's on the Border, The Warrior Trilogy and The Sword and the Dagger.

[Red Pins]

Chris, I'm working on editing the complete story thus far, including the two interludes (the GDL and Kurita ones) to save it as a pdf for my ereader.  When you finish the story (not for a long time, hopefully) would you like a copy to post on spacebattles for download?

[cawest]

is there a way to post a pdf of everything todate? 

[Red Pins]

I'm still working on it.  I could email the Word file I'm working on right now, but you'd be better off reading the main story on spacebattles using the threadmarks, and the two interludes here.  Chris might have something better bit I doubt it would be a pdf right now.

[cawest]

I'm still working on it.  I could email the Word file I'm working on right now, but you'd be better off reading the main story on spacebattles using the threadmarks, and the two interludes here.  Chris might have something better bit I doubt it would be a pdf right now.

rereading it on that page is a pain.  way tomany off rails. 

[Chris OFarrell]

Okay, too much Red Bull Later and here we go.

This chapter is really three chapters sort of spliced together into Frankensteins Monster as I realizied that honestly, who cares about Smith getting Mechwarrior training and going through boot camp?
I mean character development is all well and good, but there is such a thing as taking it too far.

So, a lot of splicing and genetic engineering later and here we are, I'm hoping it works well enough. Honestly this is just a 'lets get this back on the road' to time skip Christmas 3026 to the eve of the 4th Succession War.
Lets just get this out of the way so we can move to the fun showdown with Marco Ramius.

*********

Chapter 11: Misery loves Company

“Three blasts? RUN!”

The wind started to howl in a counterpoint to the screamed command as the three men dropped their gear and moved. Clumsily through the snow drifts for sure, but fear gave renewed energy to their previously sluggish limbs. The looming bluff in front of them offered the only possible hope as the wind continued to strengthen and where once before the day had been overcast but clear, now said wind drove snow and sleet with physical force before it to mask everything in a whirlwind of white.
And brought an intense chill in the air with it that heralded something far, far worse than a ‘mere’ winter storm.

Quickly however, it became clear that two of the two men were in far better physical shape as they rapidly outdistanced the third. Overweight and with clumsy panic driving him more than the cold, calm motions of a combat veteran, he fell, screaming for his friends to wait for him as he struggled back to his feet.

His cries and pleas were swallowed by the increasing howl of the wind as his comrades faded and then vanished into the thickening whiteout as they ran, either not noticing or not caring about their comrade left behind as they fled as fast as they could move. Disoriented the straggler looked around desperately but with no-one in sight found himself alone, staggering in the howling wind as he tried to orient himself in the right direction. But the driving snow only gave glimpses. Brief flashes of snow covered crests that looked much the same …

Until for a moment, the driving snow cleared just enough to see a number of figures moving towards him before vanishing again behind a new wave of sleet.

After one frantic look around for any other recourse, he scurried quickly across to a nearby rocky outcropping and hid behind it, terrified tears slowly freezing on his face as the wind started to die down. Slowly, more and more figures started to materialize out of the mist in the same, calm walk until, finally, they were close enough to see directly.

They were men.
Or more accurately, they had once been men.

Good men. Bad men. Innocent, guilty. Men who bent the knee to no-one, men who served a Lord or a Liege.
No more.
Their faces had been torn open, limbs ripped off. Dark black stains of blood and trauma were everywhere over shattered armor and missing clothes. They were a complete impossibility, walking corpses moving in a single group. Moving in silence grasping their various weapons, their eyes a chilling, uniform pale blue.

The man cowering in terror at the sight was simply ignored by the mass as they walked slowly past and around him, not deviating from their course one bit… and then a horse with a figure on its back did come to a halt a short distance away. And, entirely unwillingly, the man's gaze slowly moved up past the legs of the horse - noting vaguely in passing that it too was a ruined and terrible corpse given unholy animation by some fay force … but this he barely noticed.
Because sitting on its back riding it was a nightmare a thousand times a thousand times worse than the dead that continued to slowly shamble past.

It was a monster in vaguely human form. A kind of horrific yet majestically terrifying figure holding a long blade of silently smoking ice in one hand and the chains digging deep into the beast underneath it, in the other. For a moment it simply remained there, its gaze directed forward in the direction the dead marched … and then its head turned slowly to regard the living creature cowering from it behind the rock.

It’s eyes glowed. Nothing like the puppets of meat marching past it; no its eyes blazed a far deeper blue that said as alien as it was, this creature was alive. That it was the master of all the dead moving around it, a malevolence so powerful it was as if a physical thing that crushed the human under him with is force, tears streaming without a word down his face as their gazes met and the man broke, looking away and silently shaking in terror.

And then … it turned away. Dismissing, utterly, the cowering flesh as a threat or even as an object of interest. Instead, it raised its terrible weapon to the sky and screamed. A piercing scream alien and inhuman, carrying over the wind and soon answered by distant screams in turn. The sky cleared then just enough to see that as far as one could see, the dead marched, straight for the Fist of the First Men where their pray waited for them-

***
******
***

Yells and profanity exploded across the lounge as the vid screen cut to black and the end credits of the season finale of Game of Thrones, season 2, came up.

The profanity redoubled as a far too happy announcer noted that was the final episode of Season 2 and the final episode that NAIS had released, thus far, from the recovered data core they had found. Without any ETA on when (or, God forbid, if) the next season would be found.

Looking around the room at my peers, I noted that they were all looking distinctly unhappy at that announcement.

I felt some pity at that. Because unlike everyone else in this room, I knew that these episodes of Game of Thrones were not from some data core picked up in the Halstead Station collection on Hoff. I still had no idea how NAIS had yanked them from my iPad; although my guess was that they had just settled for using a high-resolution holographic imager to directly capture the ipads display and its 3.5mm jack to lift the audio - if so, the quality was a hell of a lot better than I had anticipated.
But unlike my peers, I also knew that was it. It has only had seasons one and two on the devices. Well that and the blue-ray lore specials done by the cast I had ripped when I got the disks for Christmas, which in turn had been screened, one before each episode, to who flesh out the universe

Bizarre how much this series had captured attention.

Across the Federated Suns (and Lyran Commonwealth for that matter), the series had and topped viewing lists. Oh sure I knew from experience it was the kind of show that was wildly popular (and ****** I have to admit, I had grinned like an idiot when I had watched the first episode and heard that glorious opening theme for the first time in years) but in a neo-feudal society, I would have thought a lot of the novelty and ‘different’ nature that had made it popular back in my old reality would have been lost.

Boy had I been wrong about that.

If anything, it was taken as something new yet relatable. Many entertainment shows were even making the case that I had initially not thought about, that there was clear overarching parallels to the contemporary Inner Sphere given the thousand year gap between its production and now. The lost age of the Star League of wonders of its technology was of course the Valyrian Freehold vanishing and taking with them their power and magic. Dragons even equated to Warships easily enough and Valyrian Steel swords to family Mechs. For the love of God I had even picked up some vid commentary to draw lines of concurrency between the Maesters and ComStar; a neutral organization responsible for long range communications, protecting and teaching and staying totally neutral in the Game of Thrones…
And to my dark amusement, that analogy held true more than people realized given that the Maesters sure as hell had their own private motivations in the Great Game…and I’m sure ComStar would just love to have their own ‘Maester’ Precentors in place at the right hand of every Inner Sphere Lord.

The series was even being released officially in the Free Worlds League in a few months, although I was sure bootleg copies had surely jumped the border on Jumpships by now. And I had to admit to a burning curiosity if House Marik would take ‘When you play the Game of Thrones you win or you die’ as their new motto in the aftermath of that.
I was also undecided if Michael Hasek Davion was more like Stannis or Renley. Oh sure, he was a wannabe usurper with no legal claim to the Throne who wanted it because of his towering ego and absolute certainty that he could do so much better, which was Renly to a tee. But to give the man his due, he was also as ruthless, unyielding and skilled as a military commander as Stannis.  But throw in Cersei’s inability to understand he wasn’t as clever as he thought he was … or was he more a self absorbed ‘believes own shit smells like roses, is given every break and still ****** up everything’ idiot like Danny?
Or just a slimeball like Walder Frey?

Hmm. Difficult one to pick. Now, was Maximilian Liao more Varys or Pycyll? Or was that something of a ‘good days’ and ‘bad days’ thing?

My idle speculation was cut short as with a violent motion, another cadet flopped into the chair beside me, glaring at the screen as I turned to raise an eyebrow.

******!” he muttered.
I simply stared at him.
“****** IT TO HELL!” he added loudly, as if I hadn’t heard him the first time. Eventually he realized I wasn’t joining in and turned to glare at me.
“Seriously John. ******. It. To. Hell, they can’t ****** leave it there … can they?” he protested, punctuating his words for emphasis as if his profanity wasn’t enough to get the point across...

“Well, they did” I pointed out with a wry smile as the other scoffed and flopped back in his chair, staring at the ceiling.

“But it’s getting really interesting! And not just the Walkers. I mean, Danny is on the march now and Stannis just got clobbered like a Liao. I mean, who do you think is going to with the Game of Thrones and take them on? Danny has to be coming back to Westeros now right?”

Not bloody likely I silently thought as I considered how painfully slow her arc had proceeded in the books. And even when the showrunners fast forwarded her events...

I controlled my amusement at Graham’s rage as I shook my head, declining to answer as I stood, stretching slightly as I glanced around the packed common room of the second years quarters. The kid could get a little excited at times - to the point of overdoing it around other people who were also a bit excited, so I was pretty used to such overreactions by now.

Although to be fair, I was pretty sure his edginess and excitement had other roots tonight.

Tomorrow was a very big day for the group. As of tomorrow, as our training advanced; us glorious Mechwarrior Candidates would finally be given the option of using our own Battlemech in place of the Chameleons the academy used for training, in the field exercises we would soon be starting. Where appropriate anyway, for those who had them.

Read; everyone but me.

I honestly didn’t care, although everyone in the platoon seemed to think that I was on the verge of breaking into tears at the thought of still being stuck using the training ‘Mech and not a ‘real’ Mech. And took my complete indifference as a kind of ultra stiff-upper lip thing, by where ‘pappy’ was facing the horror with awe inspiring dignity worthy of note.

Yeah. Seriously. Not joking here.

My Chameleon was a perfectly solid ride as far as I was concerned. My inner mech-snob started and ended at not being given a Bugmech (or an Urbie) and the Chameleon was exactly what you wanted in your first Mech, which was unsurprising as it was specifically designed for that role. It handled very forgivingly and had a quite roomy cockpit while mounting mixed energy weapons and jump jets to train with. I was also reasonably confident (given Hanse and Katrina’s explicit statements around what they felt they owed me) that I would have a Mech waiting for me as a graduation gift so I was pretty unphased by the lack of a Mech right now. And I hoped said Mech would serve me well though a quiet and uneventful tour of duty, before being promoted to a desk. A nice 9-5 desk well behind the lines.
But until that time, I tried to just tolerate the feeling that in the eyes of my peers I had been diagnosed with a terminal illness, trying to take the sympathy of the platoon as heartwarmingly endearing more than moderately exasperating.

Which was par for the course with this bunch thinking back...

Training at Sakhara, overall, had been a curious mixture of the expected and unexpected. I mean, the first three months had played out like every Trope of bootcamp I could remember as the training teams smashed us in the face with the reality of military life. Starting with basic infantry training (Sakhara was very much the ‘every graduate is a rifleman’ school of thought with one week a month for the rest of the first year after boot still dedicated to infantry training for those not on that track) and basic military discipline.
And yes, firing a man-portable SRM launcher was ****** tits; another advantage of being at a place that spared no expense was that you did get to play with the toys and live ammo ...
Mostly through, boot was about breaking us out of the civilian mindset so we would react rather than stop and think if someone screamed to hit the deck. And yet, some of my expectations and preconceptions were challenged, I must admit. Things that, I think, came down both to the three fundamental things that made Sakhara itself quite different from the other academies in the Federated Suns and my position in the group.

First; as far as the staff and the old boys network behind the school were concerned if you were here, then you were worthy and nothing else needed to be said. Everything else was left at the door (a few classmates needed ‘encouragement’ from the instructors to get over themselves of course but still got the message soon enough). As far as the school and class were concerned, the only thing you were while you were here, was a cadet. The only thing you brought with you was your willingness to become the best soldier of the AFFS you could be.
Everything else was window dressing.
Which wasn’t to say all of us were ignorant of or refused to talk about our outside lives, just that trying to claim any kind of privilege or position or superiority based on it was a very very stupid idea quickly left behind.

Which lead in turn into the second difference.

Point of fact; this was not a vacation school.
Or a polishing school.
Or a finishing school.
Or a social club.
This was also not NAMA or Albion or Warriors Hall.
Sakhara was the single most exclusive (and it went without saying of course that meant The Best) military training facility in the Federated Suns with expectations adjusted accordingly. They would not shy away from their expectations or from failing any of us if we didn’t meet them. That we, on a per-cadet basis, would be lavished more attention and resources than any other student in any other training center in the Inner Sphere … and they would push us harder than we thought we could go - no; further than ‘we’ could go.

Which lead into point three; no cadet could or would graduate alone.

That wasn’t a statement of intent; that was a statement of fact, the training staff were at pains to point out. Teamwork wasn’t simply encouraged but worshiped at this place and given its reputation in Battletech as having one of the tightest ‘old boys’ networks in the Inner Sphere, well… it didn’t surprise me at all from this side of the fence. It was, in a strange way, almost the inverse of the Clan Sibko system. In that ****** of a brainwashing and indoctrination camp, kids grew up tight only to slowly drift as they realized they were, more or less, in direct competition with instructors just looking for excuses to start weeding the ‘weak’ out. First for Warrior status itself. Then Bloodnames and Promotions - all done by ‘fight to the death!’ rules for rank and political power - hell, any challenge to near any decision could be made a fight to the death by Clan Law.
That was not the kind of environment that inspired loyalty. Or empathy for that matter.

Yes, I’m talking about you Marthe Pryde.

And so had started ‘boot camp’ as it were (or ‘initial training, conditioning and assessment’ as the people here called it).
It hadn’t been easy. Partially because my body was pushed and pushed in ways I had never pushed it before … but also because I found myself half the time the only ****** adult in the room!

I mean boot camp was physical, but I had expected that. The first two weeks were all screaming, running, more screaming and then more running and very long days. Followed by nights on a cheap bed in the ‘boot barracks’ asking myself what in the ****** I was doing on this bed instead of a massive luxury one in a palace covered in female Canopian stereotypes?
I (grudgingly) gave thanks to Ardan and the Heavy Guards for forcing me through Zero-G calisthenics every day on our Helm trip, then congratulated myself on following Ardans advice to keep up the routine -and indeed step it up a notch- on the way here, which let me get through the physical screening part of training with little trouble. Combined with common sense and a few things I remembered from EssBe military veterans on the topic of ‘surviving boot’, I felt I had adjusted well enough and against my expectations, I had even found myself starting to rise to the challenge. Initially because I didn’t want to disappoint the powers that be, but over the weeks even that fell away.
Here in this artificial bubble, the rest of the Inner Sphere could be put on hold. No need to worry about how I might have butterflied this or that. No time to worry about Myndo Waterly wanting to burn me at the stake as an ultra-demon born from the evil and twisted HPG of Hanse Davion. Or about Aldo or Fredrick or Michael screwing things up.

No; all that mattered was that ****** wall on the obstacle course we needed to tackle together by forming a human pyramid. Which was harder than one might think. Because the other cadets? Oh boy...

I mean, I never set out to become ‘the guy’ trying to keep the children behaving and morale up. It started simply with not wanting to be dragged out for more PT because some ****** was about to walk right into the DIs trap I saw coming a mile away. So, one day early on I gave advice which had been taken and, surprise surprise, paid off for everyone so instead of a whole bunch of individuals we suddenly had a team. Then suddenly people were coming to me for advice that I gave, to yet more success. And then when we were given tasks as a team and told to get down to it, everyone increasingly looked to me to take charge. Possibly because I was the oldest member of the group by a considerable margin. Possibly because I actually gave advice that worked, who knows?
Most of the time I did little more than make sure everyone was reading from the same script and encourage ideas. Making sure we kept an eye on the ball, but otherwise hands off. But as time passed, I found myself increasingly having to be the one to take that first step as everyone seemed to keep deferring to me...

This unofficial leadership, such as it was, hadn’t really been an issue though until said DIs had formalized my position by making me ‘Platoon Leader’ at the halfway mark of the boot camp training where we were expected to do more tasks as a group and sort out things ourselves. It was of course technically a very prestigious, very impressive achievement. One saying that the staff had marked me out as a natural leader for the group … or perhaps just the one who ****** up the least.

Either/or I suppose.

But, in reality, the position meant I had formally gotten the blame for the kids ****** up, had to actually plan and act rather than just suggest and had to take in hand a lot of annoying administrative crap the DIs gleefully palmed off. Leaving me dancing on an exasperating loose/loose line of either micromanaging the squad leaders of the day, or, giving the kids enough freedom to learn something … by mistakes.
Frankly, I had felt I was getting a hell of a raw deal … but with little choice I had done the best I could to make sure all the little stuff was done, that no-one cut corners and that all ****** were quickly rectified (and most critical that any ****** were owned and admitted to rather than covered up). While providing a shoulder to lean on or some advice from a massive array of book, movie and TV quotes, stories and parables adapted to Battletech life to encourage everyone onwards on those ‘why the ****** am I here?’ evenings.
By the end of boot camp and our final field exercise as we marched on fumes and high-caffeine drinks into the main quad, exhausted and covered in the results of crawling through the planets ‘charming’ forests dodging ‘Mechs for thirty six hours, we were a very tightly knit group … and the whole damn lot of them looked up to me as the ‘old man’.
God help us all.
So yes. I liked them … but it didn’t mean they didn’t drive me nuts.

I mean, they were still all a bunch of egomaniacs; card carrying cultists on the Mechwarrior track. All convinced they were destined to ‘be the next Natasha Kerensky’ - God help me Kevin and Roger both used those exact words at different points.
Yet, for all that, they were genuinely decent people. Indeed, to my mild surprise - and against my expectations - they had pushed past their initial Blueblood tendencies rapidly to really embrace the equality of the platoon. And not simply because it was enforced by the DIs. Going in, I had expected every trope of snooty noosed brats looking down their noses at a ‘commoner’ like me as they brutally struggled to find a way to prove themselves the ‘dominant’ player in the group … but neither I nor the other two ‘commoners’ in the platoon were treated any differently on the basis of birth.
If anything, they seemed bizarrely fascinated by us and our ‘normal lives’... or perhaps, that was just me.

Not to sound like an egomaniac, but none of them seemed to know what to make of me. The number of question marks around my life compared to others was, I must admit, noticeable. I mean my basic story was straight forward; I was a MIIO desk sitter a lot older than these guys who had lost all of my family a long time ago but had always wanted to be a Mechwarrior. And, after some outstanding field service to House Davion above and beyond all expectations in MIIO, Quintus Allard had quietly rewarded me personally with this ‘scholarship’ to Sakhara.

The problem with the story was that these young men and women may be headstrong Mech cultists, some with family history in the AFFS back to before the Reunification War they would remind you of at the drop of a hat … but they were not stupid. Graham still sulking and glaring at the Vid screen, for example, was the son of Olivia Fenlon. Duchess of Chesterton and Foreign Minister of the Federated Suns. He had been the first to point out one night that if being given the chance to become a Mechwarrior was my wish and reward (a lie I now deeply regretted as it meant now I had to pretend to be at least a prospective member of the damn Mech Mafia), it would have made much more sense if I was just told to walk down the road to either NAMA or Albion with a verigrahped letter… not shipped across the Inner Sphere to a ridiculously expensive and exclusive training academy...but it was an excellent way to train me while also keeping me way off the beaten track.

Once again; privileged. Not stupid.

Probing had been discouraged quickly enough by the instructors, especially after Katherine Board, an Aerospace cadet from Charlie platoon had (through a ‘friend of a friend’) backtracked the genesis of my trip to the academy as from Tharkad just after the Helm announcement. It didn’t take an NAIS scientist to put two and two together from that timing and soon had come whispered pleas in the night for me to talk about what had gone down on Helm and what secret Lostech had been brought back. At least until I had eventually made it crystal clear that if I even dreamed about anything I may or may not have been involved in, Quintus Allard would promptly have us all hauled off to an MI5 black site for a very long and unpleasant chat.
When they realized I was actually not joking, the questions had stopped. Said realization happening after Katherine’s ‘quiet chat’ with some nice men in suits in the Commandant's office that took place a few days after she had spilled the beans on my trip from Tharkad. A conversation she would absolutely not talk about.

Like I said. Smart kids.

Anyway. Boot camp had ended at the three month mark in early May with, I’m proud to say, none of my platoon dropping out. And after a week of R&R that I mostly spent, once more, shepherding the damn kids far too eager to celebrate their first week of freedom since arriving on planet with the usual pastimes (read; mostly getting laid in the nearby ‘Ditch-Town’ which had spring up to support the base and was always welcoming to rich young nobles); we moved from boot camp into something much more serious that would last until October.
‘Tier I Military Specialization in Battlemech Piloting and Operations.’
Or as I called it, ‘Mech-101.

That intense six months challenged me far more than boot. Mechwarrior training might have been easier than say flight school, but it was still a hell of a learning curve. Especially when the least of the other cadets had over 1000 hours on Industrial mechs. Most (unsurprisingly) had years of private training - and the Gleeson twins Marri and Kyle actually had genuine combat experience with their parents’ house guards against Capellan raiders.

I, on the other hand ... had taken one ride in the back of a Victor. And it showed.

Thankfully Sakhara didn’t directly grade students against each other, instead using a sophisticated weighted metric from the other AFFS academies, normalized against the Sakhara long term average. The class size was simply too small to do otherwise - and it would have been toxic to the whole ‘teamwork above all’ spirit. And as our first posting would always be two years with the academy training battalion rather than competing for assignment choices, everyone was in the same boat. In short; while I was clearly well behind the curve as far as Battlemech proficiency was concerned, I had cadets coming from each and every direction willing - almost eager - to help me rather than be relieved I was no threat to their own standings and content to let me struggle.
None more than tiny little Julia Bourne, who seemed determine to repay my helping her out early on through some of boot by dragging me to the Mech simulators every spare hour we had to bring me up to her own demanding standards. Which, frankly, I was damn grateful for because a Battlemech was way harder to pilot than one might think...
But I’d be damned if I fell over at the first hurdle just because I started a little bit behind the rest of the class - and to give them credit, the class never rubbed my ‘noobness’ in my face. And with Julie and the other cadets pulling me along until I caught up, I successfully completed the first six month ‘check’ course.
Meaning, in practical terms, we were expected to be able to move our Mechs cleanly on varying terrain and not trip over our own feet. To be able to march in column or move in tactical formations smoothly and to move through static positions like going prone, falling down and getting back up. Not to say basic competence with jump jets, which was fun!
Gunnery wise, we could all shoot moving targets with an acceptable accuracy - at least on a firing range - and qualified with all types of weapons at a basic level, occasionally using other designs to prove it. While on the technical side, we were also expected to know every switch, button and configuration in the cockpit by heart and able to recite, from memory, critical checklists like cold-starting a fusion reactor, in our sleep.

[Chris OFarrell]

So October 3027 came and we moved from Mech-101 to Mech-102, as well as increasing classroom time on the kind of things you’d expect junior officers to be shoved through. For me, that successful ‘graduation’ was the focus of my world - and a source of immense pride- but less so for the rest of the platoon who were rather more distracted by things like Hanse Davion and Katrina Steiner announcing that the former was going to marry the latter’s daughter.

Suffice to say, the ‘WTF’ response was … impressive to see from the ground floor. Nobody, and I mean nobody around me had seen it coming and pretty much nothing else had been talked about for a week. It was also darkly amusing that the consensus from the talking heads in the March and on New Avalon was conservative - even pessimistic - about the possibilities for this union bringing any immediate change to the status quo against our shared enemies (read the Draconis Combine). An opinion that, prima facie, seemed to make the most sense. Especially if you made the assumption that this was the natural next step from the enormously successful Helm operation and that Hanse’ visit to Tharkad had been all about. Meaning that after the wedding came the hard work to look at issues like military options.

Boy were those talking heads going to be spittaking when Hanse gave his toast…

I think I could also see the subtle hand of MIIO in there as the talking heads continually brandished leaked costs, headaches and disruption the recent Thor I and Galahad II exercises had caused (to the ‘annoyance’ of the AFFS press corps) across the board. Proof, as it were, that perhaps we may see a more intense 3rd Succession War grinding take place and build up to withstand the enemy better, but certainly nothing major offensive wise for many years.
AND, as everyone seemed to want to repeat ad-infinitum, this was ultimately the culmination of Katrina Steiner's famous peace proposal. Ergo, this was about her getting said peace, not fighting. So it clearly meant a defensive posture and building up.

Which was ****** hilarious really.

Katrina Steiner was so often portrayed as a kind of reluctant warrior in Battletech fiction - and even by the media here! A very skilled soldier who was tired of war to the point of writing that rather vague and silly peace proposal…

Yeah, that was complete bullshit.

Katrina wanted peace for her people. Absolutely and unequivocally. She detested the zero-sum waste and death of Succession War 3.0, no question about that either. But that did not mean for a nanosecond that she wouldn’t use war if, like any tool of statecraft, it could give her and her people what she wanted. Hanse’ strategic genius had presented her, in 3025, with a plan of breathtaking audacity and brilliance to upend the game board by smashing the weak flank, securing it and then hitting the Combine in the future, in a one-two punch. And after careful consideration, the veteran soldiers desire to take the initiative and ruthlessly exploit it had won out in her mind.
And thanks to me, she knew phase one had been a ridiculous runaway success and I had little doubt she and Hanse were in the final stages in fine tuning the plan based on my information to drive that dagger in just a tad deeper into Mad Max’s back … and perhaps to twist it a little this time as well?
Now, that wasn’t to say Katrina was simply a ruthless pragmatist. Not at all. She absolutely had an idealistic side that I had, as it so happened, crashed right into on Christmas Day. It was when the power trio (as I had come to think of Hanse, Katrina and Melissa) had invited me to a Christmas dinner with them in the Royal Apartments. And by invited I meant Melissa had appeared as if by magic inside my room through a secret passage and lead me unerringly to the Royal Apartments with a tolerant smirk at my giddiness at being led through a castles genuine secret passages!). Katrina, Melissa and Nondi had a cute tradition of a casual and private Christmas Dinner, a smorgasbord of various foods. Nothing terribly fancy but entirely ‘homey’ and far more welcome because of it. Hanse and Ardan had of course been invited to this years dinner … along with me.

Which had been quite a touching gesture, once again, from the group.

And it had been a nice, casual atmosphere, something I had not felt really since I had been ripped into this reality. Just this odd pseudo-family sitting around and chatting about everything, although most of the discussion seemed to be about me and the 21st century, the group finding fascination in so many things little and big that were different in my ‘reality’ to theirs. Predictably perhaps through, the discussions eventually led to the hope being raised that the Federated Commonwealth would lead to an end to the Succession Wars and with that hope, Katrina had raised her glass proudly and offered a toast; to the restoration of the Star League.
I got the feeling it was a sort of a pro forma thing for her, yet clearly something she believed in.

Dito Hanse.

And alone in the group, I had not joined in.

That had hardly gone unnoticed when Katrina had then asked me, in a tone of genuine curiosity, why?

I’m not sure why Devil Consequences on my shoulder sounded like Sheev Palpatine as it materialized cackling while telling me ‘Do it … do it!’ but honestly, even without any prodding I think my response would have been the same as I snorted, looked her in the eyes and scoffed; “****** the Star League”.

The silence in response to that remark was both shocking and amusing. With Katrina for the first time I could recall, looking genuinely shocked. And her sister looking at me like I had just said ‘The black cat cannot do long division’ or something equally nonsensical. Hanse seemed to almost choked on his coffee as Ardan sighed like Kif Kroker ... but was betrayed by a tiny grin on his face he was trying to hide.
Melissa however took the prize when after a shocked two seconds, she had silently gotten up and walked to the sideboard, picked up the bowel of popcorn, walked back, sat down and started calmly munching while staring at us all with intent eyes and all without saying a word.

Seriously, she was the Inner Spheres Troll Queen, no question.

And after a silent beat from the entire group staring at her actions, Katrina had recovered enough to sit up, turn to face me with that look on her face and ask me (in an intent but non hostile way to be fair) to justify this statement.

It wasn’t a suggestion, but a request.
And so I had.

And perhaps as the arguments had rolled on for another three or four hours, I must have pushed perhaps a little too hard, abusing the crap out of my position as a universal outsider able to talk about things like the Reunification War debates that they may not even have known about from perspectives they couldn’t as I issued a scathing judgement over the Star League as a flawed creation whose countdown to destruction had inroxably been activated the second the Camerons had set the whole thing up as a pyramid scheme.
Which actually made me wonder if the lack of any contact from Hanse, Katrina, Melissa or Ardan wasn’t simply OPPSEC but came down to the fact that I had scorned and poured my contempt over one of their greatest dream and hope; the rebirth of the Star League with one of their kids or grandkids at its helm.

Because I couldn’t keep my mouth shut.

Still, even if I was a little on the outer right now, I held no regrets about offering them my somewhat unique perspective on the subject of Ian Camerons Tyranny. God knows if they had listened or not though-

A sudden wack to my back however snapped me out of my reminiscing and I turned to find that Graham had, finally, finished his raging over the fact that there was no more Game of Thrones. The credits had ended and everyone was ambling out of the room - it was getting close to lights out after all.

“Come on” he said with a sigh as he got to his feet, stretching mightily. “We should get some sleep, big fun day tomorrow!” and then he froze in the act of stretching and winced, his face looking as if he had just realized he had just hit me with a deathly insult. “Sorry, I didn’t-”

“Let’s not start that again?” I half suggested and half pleaded and the man solemnly nodded and kept his mouth shut, clearly wanting to leave me my dispossessed dignity.
For ****** sake how could I even be dispossessed if I technically didn’t even have a mech before? Seriously guys I’m not bothered!

Still rather than have that discussion again, I kept my silence and headed out, following Graham to the nearby stairwell. But my roommate halted on the first floor switchback, looking out the windows with a frown.

“What?” I asked in concern, coming up next to him and he jerked his head into the sky.

“Dropship” he said simply and I followed his gaze. There was indeed a star falling out of the sky seemingly straight for us - although such things were relative of course. The starport that serviced the academy was actually twenty klicks away, connected by a highway and private freight maglev ... but in planetary terms; it was coming for us.
Paranoia being habit forming, I glanced off to the side where one of the perimeter defense towers could be seen skylined against the massive wall around the campus. Static defenses were a hit-and-miss thing even with Battletechs iffy PGM technology. Most people who wanted to build up a hardpoint defense would just buy a bunch of LRM carriers from Quickimart, but there were benefits to armored static turrets with a commanding defensive position on the perimeter for both AAA work and for at least delaying a ground attacker long enough for your real defenders to get up and running.
The tower however was cold with its boxy missile launchers and quard linked AC-5s in lockdown - and beyond them I could see the running lights of a Cadet Lance on perimeter patrol. Three third year cadets and an officer leading them, all of whom looked to be casually strolling and not rushing to defend against an attack ... so I’m sure we were good.

Anyways, the ship seemed to land without incident and moments later, the buildings interior lights suddenly dimmed and a recording of The Last Post played over the intercom. The two things telling everyone it was lights out in ten minutes and everyone started moving with a purpose.

Because they meant lights out.

Boot camp might be over and the shouting lessened, but the instructors here still much enjoyed catching cadets out of their beds or making too much noise and finding creative ways to collectively punish us for it (generally involving a 3AM wake up for room inspection for everyone) so everyone was in bed before we heard the stomping of instructors moving down the hallway looking for anyone out of place.
They needn't had bothered; all the Mechwarriors in this building were trying desperately to get sleep to come so they could fast forward to the glory of tomorrow and getting their precious, precious Mechs.

I however stayed away for some time. Thinking about the Game of Thrones in the Inner Sphere and how close the next ‘War of the Five Kings’ (or five First Lords technically) was. With the White Walkers off on Strana Mechty biding their time and gathering their power, as the current Littlefinger/Grandmeaster plotted and schemed and ****** with everyone from Terra…

Because ‘Chaos is a Ladder’ really seemed to suit Myndo Waterly even if she wasn’t technically in charge. Yet.

Yup. You know on reflection, being isolated away in this little corner of the Inner Sphere away from the massive changes about to sweep through it sounded just about perfect. So, I rolled over and went to sleep that night in blissful ignorance of how my structured and bubbled life was about to come to a screeching halt on the morrow.

[Chris OFarrell]

Sakhara had a 26 hour rotation. The academy however ran to Terran Standard time, which meant that occasionally ‘dawn’ was local midday. It was a somewhat unusual thing, although far from uncommon across the Inner Sphere, with most planets and starships syncing to TST (still GMT or Zulu time) directly or indirectly, up to and including ‘leap’ units which led to some crazy local calendars, to keep everything synced to a Sphere wide dating standard.
It was a bit bizarre and hard to get used to, but then that was the point. Sakhara Academy was filled with a lot of recruits for whom this was likely their first journey offworld and so getting used to living this way was a big part of getting used to being a soldier.

Today however, 05:00 was just about at sunrise. So when ‘Reveille’ ripped through the speakers in the building and I groaned myself awake, it wasn’t either pitch black outside or the middle of the day, which was about as good as it got.
So I rolled out of bed - and was almost run over by Graham blazing past me with a gleeful look on his face as he made for the showers. Rolling my eyes tolerantly I efficiently grabbed a fresh uniform and headed after him.

The entire training company of Mechwarriors was ready in record time this morning and we assembled outside the barracks in formation at exactly 06:50. Waiting for us was our primary instructor Sergeant Major Anthony Johan, an ex Light Guardsmen I strongly suspected had been seconded to the Rabid Foxes a few times given how scary Ninja and freakishly competent he was. We fell into formation quickly, now very practiced at standing at exactly the right distance from each other in one line of twenty and one of Sixteen. Every single Mechwarrior cadet in the second year. Thirty five of them all but vibrating in place with their eagerness to get started reviewing their Battlemechs … and me, the guy who honestly couldn’t give a f-

“Company” barked Johan. “Tenn….hut!”

We all snapped to attention with the distinctive crack of well polished boots slamming into the asphalt simultaneously.

“Present….arms!” he snapped and with he spun around and brought his arm up in a salute with ours as we all faced the distant tower that loomed over the middle of the base HQ building. A giant Golden Sunburst flag started to rise in a stately fashion now, as from speakers all over the base, the anthem of the Federated Suns started to play and all military personnel halted whatever they were doing to face it and salute.
The words were not exactly the same, although a decent amount of the original was still there, but now mixed in with stuff about how House Davion and the Federated Suns were going to kick your teeth in and/or die trying if you tried to conquer them...
But the music was still the same.

La Marseillaise. Which was actually pretty damn awesome I have to say.

Because seriously, the nobility of the Sun's loved the whole French schtick, or at least a thin veneer of it. I had even picked up enough French from my classmates to be able to at least get the gist of what was being said now, even if they always cringed and told me to please use English whenever I tried to speak it.

But the French thing was a mostly harmless veneer, compared to say ... the Combines thin veneer of “Bushido”. A veneer which twisted true Bushido into something with only the most vague similarities to the actual ancient code. Entirely for, as best as I could tell, justifying horrific crimes against humanity off the cuff and rigidly setting a de facto caste system into place.

In any event, the song finished and with that the Sergeant snapped out “Two!” and everyone's hands snapped back to their sides before he turned and did a walk along both lines, glaring at everyone and looking for anything out of place. He finally reached me, last person in the second line and … paused for a couple of seconds making a ball of ice settle into my stomach as he stared intently at me as if this was the first time he had ever seen me.
I wondered what was out of place and just what creative punishment he would come up today, given that denying me ‘my’ Mech was off the table…
But he said nothing, almost seeming … I don’t know?
Whatever it was, after those couple of seconds he moved on.

Okay, the ****** was that about?

“Company! You will proceed immediately to Mech Hanger bravo and report to Captain Rogers who will be waiting for you there” the Sergeant ordered, naming the commander of the second year trainees.
And no, he didn't look anything like Chris Evans - but he was quite a decent guy all the cadets respected, who got to play Good Cop to the NCOs bad cop.
Even if he didn't have a mighty shield.
“You will be there within thirty minutes or do not expect to do a damn thing with your Mech today. Is that clear?”

“SERGEANT YES SERGEANT!” I screamed along with the rest of the company. Thirty minutes would be doable, but we’d have to take it at a jog. Of course, if any of us failed it would mean that cadets physical conditioning had started to backslide, so I’m sure they would have a very fun day in that case-

“Smith!” Johan yelled out my name unexpectedly and I snapped my head to face him.

“YES SERGEANT!” I yelled back.

“You are with me today” he declared, with a gleam in his eye I didn’t like at all.

“SERGEANT YES SERGEANT!” was however the only response I could give back ven as internally I was bemoaning my immediate future.

“Fall out!” he yelled and with that the rest of the company was running - I got more than a few back slaps as everyone thundered past me with expressions on their faces of children being told on Christmas morning that now they could go downstairs and see what Santa had left them-

“Smith, MOVE YOUR ASS!”

“SERGEANT YES SERGEANT!” I yelled as I realized belatedly he was already on the move and I had to run to get back into formation behind and next to him as was proper, as he power walked around a corner to where a jeep was waiting for us. The basic design of such vehicles honestly hadn't changed much in a thousand years for much the same reason the US army kept it simple as hell even in my time; minimal possible logistics footprint. That was kind of a big thing when the nearest spare part for something might not be in the same star system...
And everyone still seemed to feel the need to drive them like lunatics.
With a squeal of tires we were off, with I barely having time to strap in before the man floored it. He did slow down just long enough to pace the platoon who were perhaps moving a little too slow for his liking, but his screams quickly fixed that as they picked up the pace before he drove off, leaving them in the dust as we … also headed for the hangers?
My confusion however only increased as I realized we were not heading for the cadet’s hangers.
Instead, to my great surprise, we pulled up outside Omega hanger. And to my greater surprise, we hadn't hit anything on the way.

The academy had five Mech hangers in total. Alpha, Bravo and Charlie were the first second and third year students’ hangers respectively. Delta was in mothballs - maintained but mostly kept as an active reserve in case some idiot blew up one of the other hangers or flushed coolant over the floor or something. Omega was half the size the students’ hangers, but it was where the training officers who didn’t directly lead the cadets stored their Battlemechs.
After all, they would hardly be expected to leave their Mechs at home, would they!?
Perish the thought!
And technically most of them were in fact still serving AFFS officers ‘on loan’ to Sakhara so they had to have their Mechs close to hand, ‘just in case’.

Which wasn’t actually a joke; Sakhara had been attacked in the Succession Wars, albeit rarely. But even so it was just a Mechwarrior thing, rather than an AFFS mech being reissued to a Mechwarrior to use it on the front lines, it would be thrown into a hanger in the rear…
Yeah, still didn't get this Mech cult BS.

Anyway, the front gate of Omega was closed (after all you didn't want anyone just walking into a hangar filled with a hundred million House Bills worth of Mechs) but the Sarge led me to a side door in the otherwise sealed hanger. He slotted his access card into the port above the keypad and entered a six-digit code I knew was changed on a week to week basis...

And then, to my surprise, he paused and turned back, holding the door open.

“Cadet, you are no longer my responsibility” he said directly. “But you still carry the honor of the Company with you until such time as I relieve you of that responsibility. Do not embarrass me, the Company or the Academy or I will make you regret it, clear?”

“Sergeant, yes Sergeant!” I gave the only reply I could, but it came out a little more surprised than determined, before at his impatient gesture I forced my legs into motion and moved into the building … at which point the door boomed shut behind me leaving along in near darkness.
Okay, so that just happened I blinked. A ‘skin-crawling icy ball in stomach spider sense’ certainty that something far bigger than a simple ‘make work’ deal was happening if the Sarge had handed me off to someone else like that. And as I heard the jeep outside start up and drive off, leaving me along without orders in what seemed to be an abandoned Mech hanger...
Okay this is either the start of a horror flick … or a porno. Well, let's see where this goes?

My eyes had adjusted enough now to determine that while the building lights were off and the front gate was clearly sealed, there was some kind of light ahead so I shrugged and started to walk forward down the narrow corridor formed by the walls of the Mech bays left and right of me. I emerged onto the main floor of the hanger and glanced around briefly, finding it deserted and silent. Dark too, the main lights and secondary lights in the bays were all off … except in one, three bays down which was fully illuminated. Taking the unsubtle hint, I strode towards it. My polished combat boots against the reinforced floor seemed far too loud in the silence of the bay but I killed the urge sort of sneak around like a kid somewhere he wasn’t supposed to be. Clearly this was where I was supposed to be, to meet … someone?

I mean there was no real chance that this was a ROM plot to grab me or anything like that. And I was being silly if I thought the Free Worlds League was looking for retaliation for you know, stealing the Helm Cache from them. And just because I had verbally flicked ****** Steiner in the head on Tharkad, it didn’t mean he had a reason to try and break in and have me killed or anything … did it?

I tried not to let my imagination run away with me as I reached the Mech bay … which to my surprised, was sealed. The heavy doors were only deployed to help contain things when work was being done on the Mechs that might get messy. Things like coolant changes, clearing them off after a day of running around in the mud or if equipment that might send showers of sparks everywhere had to be used … but I couldn’t hear anything going on at all behind it.
After standing around for a good five or ten seconds and finding no-one visible, I was about to call out - when with a sudden rattle and scream of metal on metal, the massive shutters started to move, rolling along rails in the ground and folding backwards on themselves to show what was hiding inside and I glanced up into the Bay.
Then up some more.
Finally I took several steps back and really craned my neck.
The chicken-walker legs, angular body on top of them and distinctive weapons with a third main gun looming over its body … this monster was unmistakable.
Well unless you were to mistake it for a Zentradi Officers pod - and ****** you Harmony Gold; I can see it. Unseen my ass!

It was a Marauder - and I stood there for a moment, admiring the quiet menace the design gave off before noticing a few unusual things.
For starters, it clearly wasn’t the famous MAD-3R. The third gun ‘over the shoulder’ was much smaller and looked like an energy weapon mount, a laser I thought. Which would strongly suggest this was a MAD-3D … except for the two extra medium lasers mounted under the ‘chin’ of this design.
I didn’t know of any canon designs that mounted this weapons loadout.
Then as I stepped closer, I noticed a distinct faint hexagonal patterning in the slate-grey paint of the unit and I felt a sudden surge of recognition. I had only seen that pattern on Mechs once before …
On Helm.
And with another glance, the subtly different angular body above me suddenly clicked again with a memory from Helm of a dozen of these machines, tied down like giant Gullivers on the Flatbeds as they were driven to be loaded up on the cargo Dropships…

“That’s ferro-fibrous armor - and this is a modified Two-Romeo” I muttered in shock, aloud without realizing it. This was a Lostech machine...a Royal Lostech machine-

“Well spotted” a vaguely familiar voice spoke up and I didn’t jump like I had jump-jets only because I had been holding myself ready on the expectation that someone would probably try to do the whole ‘suddenly from the darkness’ deal to be all mysterious. “Although technically it was a Royal Machine, but NAIS have done a little work on it” the voice continued as I turned to locate the source … and found to my genuine shock, Ardan Sortek stepping out of the darkness.
Okay - this was … unexpected.
No wonder Sarge has been acting so weird this morning around me...

“Colonel” I greeted him as I pushed past the shock, as I started to come to attention but he waved me back to stand easy.

“Hats off John” he instructed, indicating that he was talking to me ‘Ardan to John’ not ‘Colonel to Cadet’ … but even so he clearly paused to take in my AFFS BDUs and nodded in approval, clearly thinking back to to the mission on Helm and the fact as a ‘MIIO field agent’ I had winged about being forced to wear an AFFS uniform without rank on the grounds that I wasn’t a serving member of the AFFS.

This uniform I had earned with far far too many pushups.

“Uniform looks good on you” he said, with the smile of a friend rather than the approval of an Officer.

“Well this one certainly fits better” I smiled back as he came to a halt in front of me and I extended my hand, which he took and shook firmly. “So, while it’s always good to see you, after no contact for the last year … what’s with the cloak and dagger?”

“First, I’m sorry about the lack of contact, we all agreed that it would be best for OPPSEC and ensuring you were left alone if we just went dark on you” Ardan apologized, his expression genuinely apologetic. “Lady Melissa especially wanted to keep you as a pen pal, but was convinced by her mother that even through cutouts it risked drawing too much attention to you”.

“Um, thanks” I nodded. “Classes were hard enough without dodging ROM snatch teams. But that begs the question; why are you here now?”

“I’m not here” he corrected me with shrug. “Officially anyway. Unofficially, well, everyone else was getting their Battlemechs today and Hanse and Katrina were both very eager for you to get yours”.

I blinked.
Then I turned back again to the monster looming behind me.
Then I turned back to Ardan and tried to work my mouth.
I think what came out was something like ‘Bwhaaa?’ but from the snort of laughter I think he got the gist of my reaction as he reached into a pocket and pulled out an envelope, handing it over without a word.

I took a deep breath to try and settle the goosebump/butterflies in stomach/tingling feeling as I opened it then took out the single piece of paper and carefully unfolded it, showing an embossed seal of the Federated Suns … no I realized in some shock.
That’s the fist and sunburst of the Federated Commonwealth!
I blinked at the embossed seal inlaid into the rich, textured paper which otherwise just had a verigraph strip and with a deep breath I very carefully pressed by thumb to it.

The strip illuminated as the biometrics checked my thumbprint, then a moment later words started to appear as if by some Harry Potter magic from inside the paper. Starting with a whole bunch of random looking numbers at the top, followed by a short amount of text that I started reading.

To John Smith, Cadet AFFS-3026-44032

As of receipt of this message you are hereby requested and required to take formal possession of Marauder MAD-3FC-001X/SLDF9933931-RC (hereafter referred to as the ‘Battlemech’). Ownership of the Battlemech has been formally transferred to you as of 01/02/3028 in both Federated Suns and Lyran Commonwealth registries of Battlemech ownership.

All licensing and documentation has been signed to this effect on the above date by First Prince Hanse Davion and Archon Katrina Steiner, including authorization of the use of this Battlemech in AFFS and LCAF authorized military actions and drawing on AFFS and LCAF supply lines per field orders governing the use of personal Battlemechs in both services.

So ordered this day by the order of Hanse Davion and Katrina Steiner.

This message will self destruct thirty seconds after verigraph activation-

I yelped in alarm and dropped the paper, jumping back half a step as the last words on the page made my heart jump in my chest, expecting the thing to suddenly ignite or explode or something as it fluttered to the ground and … sat there.

“For the record” Ardan was clearly trying not to laugh, “that last line was Melissa's ‘contribution’”.

Of course it was I silently thought as I closed my eyes for a second and took a deep breath to control myself.
Nothing in Battletech ever suggested she was such a Troll Queen, or was that something I did?
I still wasn’t entirely sure it was a change for the better.
So I leaned down and carefully recovered the paper, folding it back up and placing it into the envelope and the enveloped into my pocket as it started to sink in that … I owned a Battlemech. A Battlemech gifted to me by Hanse Davion and Katrina Steiner. And not just any Battlemech. But a ****** Royal Command NAIS pimped out custom job.

The class is going to go ****** nuts over this I sighed mentally even as increasing parts of me were squeezing in delight… then it caught up with me that Ardan had said ‘For one thing’ and I looked back at him, then glanced around the massive hanger.

“Are we free to talk?” I asked carefully and Ardan nodded to the monster in front of me.

“Yes, but we might as well go for a walk and talk there” he said with a tolerant smile and I fought the very strong desire to squee and run off like a kid being let off the leash to go nuts on a funpark, heading for the cramped spiral staircase come spiral ladder that let us climb up to the upper catwalk and from there, across a retractable gantry and into the mech, stripping out of my field jacket as I entered the sleeping monster.

The cockpit was surprisingly roomy. No so much as the Chameleon which was designed for an instructor to comfortable sit in with a student, but big enough to easily fit Ardan into the Jump Seat behind my chair. I again strangled a squee when I saw the SLDF neurohelmet waiting for me, looking like it was half the size (and felt much less than half the mass) of the monster I had been using and I rapidly shrugged into the SLDF cooling vest hanging from the side of the chair, with long practice. Following that, I kicked the field jacket into a convenient storage locker and sat in the ejection seat, working to strap in and put on the helmet as Ardan in turn stepped into the Mech, slapped the gantry retraction button just outside the hatch and dogged said hatch down.

As I strapped in I checked my controls out; there were a lot more screens and buttons than my Chameleon had been running with. Even so, the layout was clean and the extra systems were clearly bundled into expanded C3 capabilities set apart from the base Mech controls, which were all pretty much identical.
With that said, I was still totally getting a bad case of new toy syndrome here and after a moment to centre myself and not starting to turn on all the other systems and play with them, I flicked on the main computer console to my right.

“Bringing external power online” I called calmly as I keyed the startup sequence.

A humming came as the computers booted and diagnostic data started to scroll down the screens. There was a sudden increase in pressure as the life support systems engaged and brought a positive pressure to the cockpit and I took a second to pop my ears as the life support system stabilized and air started to flow. The screen flashed through several more checklists automatically (and I couldn’t help but notice it was moving through the list MUCH faster than my Chameleons computer) until finally it completed and a single question came up on the main screen.

COMMENCE NEURO HELMET SYNC ON DEFAULTS? Y/N
 
I grinned and hit Y … and barely managed to avoid doing a Neo style ‘woah’.
There was a brief moment of vertigo as the connection was established and already I could feel that it was a hell of a let better than my old helmet.
I knew that Star League helmets were a lot better at getting a cleaner signal from the brain and back to the brain, but even without having gone through the painstaking day long calibration to tweak the helmet exactly to my brainwaves, it still felt better than my old unit.
I honestly had no idea but it felt gooooood. Like I was twelve meters tall ready to crush everyone under my gigantic -

Okay, no, bad Smith. Bad! No mech cultist attitudes!

I refocused myself on the diagnostic screen to confirm the neural connection was stable -it was- and with a deep breath, hit the button to proceed to the ‘engine start’ checklist, saying the same aloud for Ardans sake-

Buzzzz.

“WARNING” the display said and Betty scolded me, sounding disturbingly like my second grade teacher catching me doing something I wasn’t supposed to do. “VOICE COMMAND SYSTEM AND SECURITY VOICEPRINT SYSTEM NOT ENGAGED. DO YOU WISH TO SETUP NOW?”

I hit no-

Buzzzz.

“WARNING” she again chided me. “MEDICAL SENSORS NULL RESPONSE. ARE YOU SURE YOU WISH TO PROCEED?”
Ah, that’s right, I hadn’t put on the various sticky sensors onto my skin that monitored my health for the life support systems. But as I wasn’t going into combat, it was hardly necessary to do so I think.

I hit yes-

Buzzzz.

“WARNING” the mech interrupted me once again. “NEUROHELMET CALIBRATION HAS NOT BEEN PERFORMED FOR OPTIMAL PERFORMANCE. ARE YOU SURE YOU WISH TO PROCEED?”

I wonder if it’s about to note that my copy of Winrar is two and a half centuries past my thirty day evaluation period I thought in annoyance before cultivating my patience and stabbing YES one last time wishing there was a ‘Yes to all’...

Thankfully however, that was the last objection.

First, came was the distinctive humming of the fusion reactor as it ignited and cycled to power. The sound on the external power cable from the Mech bay disconnecting. A click-thud more felt than heard of the Gyro unlocking from parking mode and starting to spin up to operational speed. Then the shiver of actuators across the mech doing ‘micro flexes’ under computer control to confirm they were all good to go as the computer worked through its checklist.
Until, finally, all indicators and displays switched over to normal operational modes and the compressed holographic display activated, projecting a 360 degree view into a 180 degree band along with all the usual tactical and navigation indicators overlaid. Secondary screens switched in sequence showing communications, sensors, weapons and systems status. I made sure to double check the weapons were all SAFE with the MASTER ARM switch clearly set to OFF and that sensors were on passive - you did not power up high frequency phased radars inside the hanger - and with that, in less than sixty seconds I was ready to go.

“Okay, we’re good to taxi” I called over the intercom, feeling a bit of a thrill … and terror ... at that thought as I carefully gripped the two joysticks that controlled my arms and set my feet on the pedals that controlled my throttle … and hesitated.

I mean, I had navigated my Chameleon through the hanger probably a hundred times by now and this would not really be any different even if this beast was half again as heavy.

But … it was. Because this was my Mech.

I remembered when I had finally picked up my very first brand new car back on Earth. How I had driven it out of the showroom ever so carefully, the new car smell everywhere and turned onto the road outside … and freaked out as it hit me that now I was in traffic with other people who might just damage my beautiful new car, or I might damage it I misjudged its handling or something! Making me almost dangerously cautious and timid when driving for a few days.

So I sort of sat there for a time, hesitating as I held the twin joysticks and rested my feet onto the pedals…

“You awake John?” Ardan’s voice cut into my thoughts suddenly and I didn’t quite jump.

“Um, sorry, was just …” I muttered but Ardan actually laughed at me and it seemed to cut the tension knot in my shoulders a little.

“John, relax. We’ve all had that moment when we were given our first Battlemech where we were terrified of so much as scratching it” he assured me, reading my mind casually. “Don’t think about it too much, they’re made to be scratched. Just put it into crawl-mode and call for a run down towards the proving grounds in Alesso, that’ll give us plenty of time to talk”.

“Very good” I agreed, tapping the map display and laying in a NAV point to it. The proving grounds were the live fire grounds for Mech and vehicle combat, almost fifty klicks away from the grounds of the academy proper. There was a nice highway to it reinforced for Mechs and it was NAV-linked with repeater systems on the road, meaning you could literally put your Mech or Tank into autopilot and let it drive itself. More or less.

So I hit the communications board and brought up the preset for the local traffic control, smirking as I took note that the callsign my classmates had ‘assigned’ me had already been loaded onto the board.

“Tower, this is Pappy. Ready to Taxi, requesting transfer to the Gauntlet” I called out to the control tower that brooded over this part of the base and controlled all ground traffic, the better to make sure no idiot firstie stepped on someone.

“Pappy, Tower. You are clear to taxi, follow the green lines you are clear straight out” the tower came back quickly.

“Clear to taxi, follow the Green lines, solid copy” I called back the instructions. The hanger lights ahead of me snapped back to full intensity - although the polarized armored glass didn’t let it get bright enough to annoy me- and a loud BUZZ - BUZZ - BUZZ siren sounded along with flashing yellow lights to tell everyone in the bay that a Mech was about to start moving. I gave it the ten second count as I had been trained and then toggled a switch on my left stick that put the Mech into ‘crawl mode’, governing its speed to a maximum of twenty KPH and locked the torso before pushing the pedals down carefully.

[Chris OFarrell]

The monster under me hesitated and then moved, walking as I swept my gaze carefully both out the window and across my HUD, but the hanger seemed to be completely empty of personnel. The main doors ahead were opening up steadily and I only had to wait a few seconds at the ‘Red Line’ at the front of the hanger until the ‘traffic light’ went green and I walked into the daylight. A quick glance around showed that I was clear and I turned onto the green line, following it around to the perimeter gate and an access road that led me around the edge of the base (and I noticed I got more than a few looks from people inside the buildings and on the grounds behind the fence as I’m pretty sure this was the only Marauder on-campus) before turning onto the highway that led to the spaceport and then the proving and live fire testing grounds beyond, switching off the governor to throttle up to a comfortable 40KPH walk.

Man this thing has a smooth stride I marveled. Word was that ‘chicken-walker’ legs were much more of a rough ride, but this thing was way smoother than my Chameleon had been with a great balance. And the reactor was purring like a kitten, sounding identical to the reactor on my old ride, which was surprisingly comforting.

“So, what do you think?” Ardan spoke up as we accelerated away from the base along the empty, open road as I linked in the autopilot to the traffic control system around the base that would take me along the road without needing me to pay too much attention.

“She’s incredible” I answered, and I think he could hear the grin on my face in my voice. It might have been the more advanced neurohelmet or perhaps just the knowledge that this was my Mech (Gods dammit I was not a ****** Mech cultist, but it didn’t mean I couldn’t enjoy stomping around in a giant robot!) but I felt incredibly energized moving along. I also marveled at the fidelity in the holographic HUD and secondary sensor displays compared to the trianing Mech, it was like going from VHS to BlueRay in its resolution and image quality. And the sensors were marvels, easily picking out and tracking things like ASFs doing circuits at the distant spaceport and even what looked like a Mechanized Infantry platoon rolling along in the hills off in the distance. The LIDAR systems presented far higher resolution images of the targets, right down to the unit insignia and splatters of mud.
I mean it didn’t make any practical distance in terms of target acquisition and engagement or anything, but it looked sweet as hell.

Royal Command sure got the best toys.

“So what’s with the modifications to the design?” I asked, trying not to sound too much like a kid who had just opened his present wanting to know how it worked...

“Well like the 3Ds, we stripped out the AC5 and put in a large pulse laser but we mounted it on a new gimbal mount that Independence Weaponry is playing with for their 3Ds - gives 360 degree coverage with the third gun” Ardan explained. “Also a couple of extra mediums on the chin as you saw. We’re hoping to use this design as a prototype for possible future upgrade paths once we get the Lostech back into production. But if nothing else, Independence is very eager to see about rolling out the gimbal mount across the 3D line. These kinds of turrets have always been a bit fragile, but they are reasonably confident this one will hold up”.

“So a bracket fighter” I concluded. “PPCs to lay down long range firepower, lasers up close and the large pulse to add in with the lasers or cover the rear arc?”

“Exactly so” Ardan confirmed as I eyed off the weapons displays.

The PPCs may lack the damage boost of their Clan counterparts, but the extra range – and lack of a minimum if for some reason I didn’t want to use the lasers – was more than welcome.

“And without the ammo and the armor plating reinforced, this thing is going to take a hell of a pounding to put down” I added before letting my smile fade away as I tried to push past the shiny and focus on the small matter of who was in my back seat. “But as eager as I am to give this a run through the testing ranges, I’m guessing we’re not out here to play with the new toy?”

Ardan was silent for a moment and I thought I could hear a sigh.

“No, no we’re not” he agreed. “To business then.  “First, congratulations on your progress here. I knew we were throwing you in the deep end here but by all the reports Hanse and I saw from DME, the training staff seem to think very highly of you and your abilities”.

“I’m lucky to have a hell of a team around me” I shrugged, feeling slightly self conscious about the praise. “DD alone seems determined to drag the class average up a few points by himself”.

“DD … Dean-Davion?” Ardan queried and I nodded … then felt like an idiot as I realized Ardan couldn’t see that. “That’s him” I said. “If you looked up the word ‘determination’ in the dictionary you’d see a picture of his face”.

“Well he is a Davion” Ardan snorted at that. “I don’t think a lack of determination, for good or ill, has ever been something they lack”.

“You’ve not wrong” I agreed, thinking about my slightly determined classmate. A very distant cousin of the First Prince who hailed from Argyle, Michael Dean-Davion or ‘DD’ as we all called him was, like most Davions, allergic to anything like favoritism. His work ethic matched mine - although mine was just a frantic attempt to close the gap with my classmates while his was a frantic attempt to push it out further.
On the other hand, like me, he had come in from outside the Mech cult. His branch of the family had a quite proud tradition in aerospace fighters since his great Grandfather been awarded the Golden Sunburst, posthumously, by Andrew Davion for his efforts to avenge his father's assassination, spearheading the Brigade of Guards legendary ‘no quarter!’ curb-stomping of the Warriors Cabal until a freak golden BB had taken him down in the final battle. And since that day, his family had been all about the Aerospace side of the AFFS.

However in an odd inverse of the typical ‘sad story’ in Battletech of someone being dispossessed or losing the ability to pilot a Mech, DD had been invalidated into Battlemech training, having been born with a chemical imbalance in his head that made him increasingly susceptible to spatial disorientation in zero-G maneuvering.

It had clearly been a gut punch to him that he had been unable to carry on the family legacy but he was a Davion with a capital D. His determination to switch to a different track and serve in a different way had won him praise from the very top of the family; with a letter from Hanse Davion delivered to him just after the graduation at boot, personally congratulating him for his success thus far and complimenting him on behalf of the whole extended family for showing Davion metal in the face of adversity. Lauding him for putting aside his preferences for Aerospace combat to find a different way to serve after being medically blocked.
Suffice to say DD had been supercharged from that day on, seemingly desperate to prove himself worthy of his distant uncles praise, to the point we (as in his entire class) had needed to yank him back once or twice.

“At any rate, it wasn’t easy, but I’ve made good friends and earned my place with them” I said, hoping for a quick reading on what this visit was all about. “But, once again, I’m sure you didn’t come all this way to just tell me how well I was doing in basic?”

“What gave it away?” asked said lightly.

“Hanse Davions personal pimp hand does not personally deliver Battlemechs” I said in a deadpan tone.

“Pimp hand … that’ would be like ‘right hand’?” Ardan asked in some confusion.

I opened my mouth, then promptly closed it again.

“Yes” I said instead, not trusting any other answer I might have given.

“Ah. Then yes. I’m sorry, but we’re pulling you out”.

I had half expected that answer, but I couldn’t help but feel a sudden surge of annoyance and anger.
Damnit, I had earned my place here and I was about to be yanked out just before finishing the second tier of Mech training? I mean sure, I had pledged personal alliance to the First Prince and agreed to a position as a personal advisor/aide/guy with him meaning I was emphatically at his disposal … but seriously?
“Can I ask why?” I asked back, trying to hide my feelings before suddenly it hit me that Ardan Sortek would not come to pull me out personally unless something had gone very, very wrong. “Oh God, does ROM know about me or something?”

Okay, now my anger was rapidly turning into ‘I need to get the ****** off this planet before the toaster worshipers attacked!’

“What!? No! Nothing like that. As far as we know, your true history and your ‘official’ cover are both intact” Ardan hastened to explain. “It’s just that Hanse and Katrina have made some recent decisions around coming events … and, well, I’m going to deal with them and we all want you with me when I do so because, frankly, you’re the closest thing to an expert we have and as you were on the way anyway...”

I blinked at that and let my mind swirl for a second to try and think about what in the hell, on the eve of the 4th Succession War, there could be that would require Ardan to personally deal with the situation and bring me -

It was blindingly obvious, really, when I thought about it.

“The Dragoons” I said with certainty. There had been zip in the news about them aside from the occasional border raid, but then if things were running roughly to the events of the original timeline (and I couldn’t see much of a reason why that would change) then the implosion would be inside the Combine where the press of the Federated Suns wouldn’t have visibility.

“The Dragoons” Ardan confirmed, sounding pleased at my deduction and bringing my attention back as I took a deep breath at the confirmation

I thought that there was a general understanding we wouldn’t touch them or their Clan connections with a ten-foot pole until after the 4th Succession War...

“What went wrong?” I asked in a level tone knowing a bad turn could make things rather difficult right now even without touching the Clan baggage. The Dragoons little private war had been one of those things that had actually been something of an authorial fiat WTF. Take them out of the equation or worse, have them remain with the Draconis Combine and the Federated Suns front with the Combine could have been a bloody disaster. Their actions both on Misery and then in the 4th Succession War had not quite single handedly held the line to allow the Lyrans to stomp the Combine in the other direction and allowed the AFFS to give one of the biggest curbstomps in Battletech history to the Confederation for minimal losses to the Combine … but it hadn’t been that far off either.
Time was not running on rails, that I was reasonably confident of now, but the 4th Succession War had been deep into the first layer of operational movements to set up Hanse’s punchline at the wedding by the time I was thrown into this universe and trying to cover for the Dragoons situation turning the wrong direction was-

“On the contrary, it’s more of a question of what went right” Ardan corrected me. “To bring you up to speed, MIIO and DMI were running a number of operations to take advantage of the information ‘Wolves on the Border’ brought to us as well as your own recollections of events. I’m taking it you remember Captain Frank Woomack?”

I thought back. For obvious reasons I had not been allowed to keep copies of my Battletech material, but I had read and re-read them many times in the lead up to my meeting with Kym in the park and the name triggered a memory … ah, right.

“He was a Dragoon taken as a POW after one of their raids against the Suns right? And Quintus used him to backchannel a message to Jamie Wolf?”

“Just so” Sortek confirmed before pausing as a twin Beep Beep ping from the sensor console indicated a new contact and I saw a pair of Ripper VTOLs sweeping over the hills to the left and curving up the valley in a tight two-by-two formation - seemingly wanting to take a closer look at me. I triggered the long-range optics and scanned, seeing the troops in the back pointing at my Mech and raised a right arm in salute in return as they whipped past at which point Ardan continued.
“Things played out much the same way this time around on Udibi and he was taken as a POW” Ardan continued, “although it seems several of his subordinates who were present in the novel evaded capture. At any rate, Quintus again used him as a back channel to Jamie Wolf ... but this time he gave him a holodisk to take to Jamie Wolf - and I mean directly as we brought him to New Avalon to brief him on quite a few things in play - before handing the holodisk over and sending him back to the Combine, due to arrive at Alpha Regiment a week before Jamie would have returned from visiting Luthien”.

“... This is going to be either brilliant or catastrophic isn’t it?” I muttered - just loud enough for my microphone to pick it up given the snort that came from behind me.

“Well, that remains to be seen. The takeaway I can give you right now from our sources is that the attempt to take the Hephaestus ran straight into Seventh Kommando, which in turn led to the ‘patriot’ team being wiped out. They blew their demolition charges when it was clear they had walked into an ambush. Took a chunk out of the station, but it was still more or less intact. Someone, we think Akuma, their PSL, panicked at this point and things spiraled much more quickly out of control but the Dragoons were ready and fought back, hard. Far more aggressively than they did in the original timeline given by your material, preempting the DCMS moves”.

“Interesting” I muttered. “Wolf was almost suicidal determined in the original timeline, against his Officers, to stick to the contact with the Combine in the face of every possible provocation. On the grounds that if they didn’t they would be labeled renegades by the entire Inner Sphere”.

Of course if you knew that you would be declared renegades by the Combine no matter what you did as part of a state level plot, well, you might as well be declared renegades for making the first punch rather than taking it, I guess…

“The Prince noticed that as well” Ardan agreed. “So, he made it a point on the holodisk to include a message assuring Jamie that he knew the claims against the Dragoons and Kerensky were falsehoods - even included a vid message from Archon Steiner saying the same thing just for good measure … and let him know that his Hegira plan was compromised by the ISF via a traitor named Fadre Singh”.
I took a few seconds to swallow that bombshell as I tried to think through the implications.
Hanse Davion had forced Jamie Wolf to save himself.

Well, someone had to do it if he wasn’t going to…

“So … Jamie knows that Hegira is compromised. Doesn’t know for sure Kurita knows, but Davion knows and named a traitor in his unit now working for the Combine who was briefed on the plan and is being fingered … so he can’t take the chance. He has to move first. So when these ‘patriots’ try to seize his space station exactly as he was warned, he skips the slow slide into war and launches a pre-emptive attack to break out?”

“Something like that” Ardan said and I could hear the shrug in his voice. “Communications are still a bit confused, but the dependents got clear safely while Jamie, once more, went to Misery … and found some help waiting for him to tip the odds a little in his favor”.

“Oh?”

“Cranston Snord”.

[Chris OFarrell]

It was a good thing my Mech was on autopilot as I’m sure I would have stumbled at that announcement.

“...once more?” I asked after a few seconds of dead silence and working my jaw.

“Nondi Steiner paid him a visit at the start of the year” Ardan explained and I could hear the grin in his voice now. “Well she and most of the 3rd Royal Guards who were redeploying towards the Terran regions. She dropped in at 3AM local time having not told him they were coming. First hint they Snord got was when the museums security guards hit the alarm button and screamed that a fleet of dropships were landing a few kilometers away. Then Nondi Steiner, casual as anything, walked the rest of the way on foot … flanked by a battalion of Mechs on each side. The Irregulars started to deploy before realizing who had come knocking and stood down. Snord came out to greet her and…”

“She let him have it with both barrels?” I shivered. I had actually made my peace with Nondi on the day I left Tharkad when she had taken me aside and we had had a bit of a heart to heart. A few mangled ‘Your future hasn’t been written yet’ and ‘No fate but what we make for ourselves’ quotes from Back to the Future and Termination had gotten my point across in the end as she promised me that she would stand with her family - and the Federated Commonwealth, never against it and we had left on decent terms as I promised to only judge her actions.
By the same token, I could guess easily exactly how she would have felt about Snords actions. How he - on Jamies orders - had repaid her sisters strong loyalty to him over the disdain of much of the LCAF with, well … breach of contract was about as nice as it could be said, treason as a landholding Lyran noble nominally was a very real thing-

“Actually … no” Ardan chuckled and I blinked.

“No?” I asked incredulously and again tried to turn around and face him before remembering I was strapped into a moving Battlemech and felt my face flush. “The man took a Castle Brian on a Lyran planet for a landhold as a Lyran landholder, didn’t tell her sister about it, operated under the directions of someone other than his employer and, most recently, actively worked to hide a whole butload of Lostech Star League technology from his employer rather than give her a set share of it as was required? And … she didn’t chew him up and spit him out?”

“Not at all” Ardan explained and again I could hear the smile. “Didn’t you know Smith, that Katrina had actually known about his little Castle Brian from almost the beginning when LIC investigated why he was so determined to pick this specific bit of land for his landhold?”

“...I did not” I started to smile as I saw where Ardan was going with this.

“Ah, then you also didn’t know that Katrina had been watching him the whole time - as well as his secret communications and orders from Jamie Wolf all along?”

“I did not, but it certainly sounds like something she would do after having her suspicions raised” I let my smile grow into a full scale smirk. So that’s how Katrina played it...

“Indeed!” Ardan said. “So, I’m sure it wouldn’t surprise you either that she knew all along that he had lied about what he had recovered from that Colossus on Phecda? And she in fact was fully aware that it had been full of Lostech he had hidden from her and that he had underreported its cargo load too?”

“Not at all, given what you just told me” I agreed in as exaggerated a solemn voice as I could manage before snorting and rolling my eyes. “Okay, so he was caught red handed. What happened next?”

“Nondi pretty much told him she was here to audit his Castle and with ten times more guns than he had backing her up and the full legal authority from Katrina, he had little choice but to take her downstairs … at which point she asked him how long to get all the Lostech he had stashed away mounted on his Mechs and all the Lostech mechs here back into action. And what Lostech spares he needed to retrofit his other Mechs up to the same level-”

My jaw now did drop open. “She what?”

“-and also swapped him two lances of Thugs from the Helm cache for two mixed lances of contemporary machines. Plus augmented his Lostech hoard with hundreds of tons of Gauss Rifles, extended range energy weapons and EW gear. Then shoved him onto his dropships and sent him skipping across what shipping was available into the Draconis March” Ardan explained calmly. “After he was away, she and the 3rd did a thorough sweep of his base with his daughter before leaving, confirming they had accounted for everything. So when Jamie Wolf reached Misery, Snord jumped in to meet him via a Pirate point about the same time and invited himself to the party, without so much as a by-your-leave. Although honestly, Cranston didn’t leave Wolf much choice - and I suspect that Wolf was glad he came back for what might have been the Dragoons final stand”.

“So … Misery went better than originally?”

“Snords people seemed to provide the edge Wolf needed - and the will to do more than engage in an angry slugging match. Add to that the fact the Irregulars probably had had more practice than anyone in the Inner Sphere at raiding and running rings around superior forces and the fact that Wolf detached the Black Widows to operate with him...”

Even without seeing him, I could see Ardan wince and I understood the sentiment. Cranston Snord and Natasha Kerensky both led incredibly skilled, mobile raiding forces who thrived when the odds were against them. Facing them together wasn’t simply a question of facing the sum of their parts …

“We have not gotten Wolfs full report yet, he’ll deliver it to me when I arrive. But from what our sources on the ground and a spyship Quintus had sulking in-system somewhere tell us, it was for the Combine, even more of a bloodbath than the original battle. It seems that Snord and Kerensky kept their little force away from the rest of the Dragoons and well hidden. When the DCMS forces moved against the Dragoons main force, they managed to work their way around, undetected, to smash into Tetsuhara’s headquarters with nearly two battalions of Mechs, mostly upgraded, without any warning. They pretty much trashed the place and obliterated his air support, ammo stores and anything else they could burn - even knocked out a number of his dropships before withdrawing at the exact same time as Wolf launched his ambush of the Ryuken at the Opdal Glacial Fields. The 8th Sword had already diverted to cover the HQ attack rather than relieve the Ryuken and it seems Kerensky and Snord led them on a wild goose chase probably using the Satellite recon data to keep outmaneuvering the Sword and their enhanced weapons to snipe them down. And without the 8th to force Jamie to pull back from mauling the main battle line or a threat of enemy Aerospace assets, Jamie pressed hard and unleashed his own air support. It was too much and the DCMS units lost all cohesion. Tetsuhara managed to rally about a regiment and a half from the disaster and pulled back to his ruined base with another half regiment of the Sword of Light, calling for Samsonov to deploy immediately and reinforce”.

“Let me guess” I said dryly. “He didn’t show up?”

“How did you guess?” Ardan asked dryly. “Of course, he might have been a tad distracted by the fact that the DCMS jumpships at the Zenith point were being overrun by an AFFS naval squadron”.

I blinked.
Then I blinked again.
“The what?”

“It was Yvonne Davions plan. She took a hell of a gamble on your sources John, but it seemed to have paid off. She pulled together a dozen mixed assault ships crammed with marines, even sweet talked Nondi into loaning her two Achilles class ships from the LCAF. I think the spy ship Quintus had in system must have had a Black Box, because the assault team arrived when the Kuritan jumpships were at three quarters charge with the DCMS landing on Misery. One Jumpship was scuttled by its crew, another blew their drive when they tried to hot load it, most of the rest were taken without any critical damage and were jumped out under a jamming net - Samsonov only found out when they missed their daily status check in, stopped answering and sent a dropship to investigate. He had his own Jumpships with him behind the moon he was sulking on and rather than reinforce failure, he took on the surviving Sworders and jumped out.”

“That’s going to blow a massive hole in Galedon” I let my mind furiously work - while keeping half an eye on my Mechs systems, shifting slightly in the harness as I considered things. Jumpships were not something that could be replaced so easily. Hell, I’m actually surprised that Yvonne Davion had risked reprisals against the AFFS and LCAF Jumpship fleets by grabbing them like that. It was something, barely, acceptable, boarding Jumpships and capturing them intact. But it was still an infrequent thing. That many Jumpships being taken in a coordinated raid, especially against the Combine who had a long policy of conveniently ignoring rules of war and conventions of war (and if necessary, blaming an ‘overzealous officer’ who would gladly take their own life in ‘apology’ with their family secretly rewarded for such a sacrifice).
Still, I wouldn’t tell my Grandmother to suck eggs and Yvonne Davion was the AFFS’s ultimate Grandmother, so I would just hope she knew what she was doing.
“The Dragoons switched sides, the Ryuken gone, Galedon Regulars trashed and the shipping to move more units in or around gone ... Takashi is not going to be happy”.

“Oh, it gets better – or worse depending which side of the border you are sitting on” Ardan assured me and I could hear his satisfied smirk. “As soon as we had conformation Misery was underway, Hanse unleashed the Eridani Light Horse on objective raids against the Combine, targeting the worlds all these units had left naked, with orders to burn every warehouse, military base and weapons stockpile they could find – so long as it was not going to endanger civilian targets of course. Each regiment had two worlds to hit and if they’re on time, they should be jumping back into our space within the next week or so”.

“Well that’s certainly a way to rub salt in the Dragons wounds” I muttered. Give Hanse Davion some future knowledge, he does not ****** around. “Anything else happen that I should know about? Oh. anything happen with the New Dallas Core?”

“Recovered in May last year. It’s at NAIS being analyzed. Annoyingly and as crazy as it sounds John, you’ve almost give us too much too fast. We just don’t have enough qualified and cleared people at NAIS to focus on this many things at once! Still, our first analysis of the core does confirm it seems to have just about every military platform, engine system and weapons system put into service since before the Age of War to the Star Leagues fall, including quite a few the Helm Core does not have”.

“Don’t suppose it has HPG data?” I asked hopefully.

“First thing we checked” he sighed. “I’m afraid not; we’re going to have to do that the hard way from first principles”.

“A pity, but I suppose we’ll have to just settle for a straight flush rather than the royal flush” I huffed. So, Helm and New Dallas ticked off? That meant that the nascent Federated Commonwealth pretty much held all the cards in terms of Star League technology, minus a few niche outliers. Which reminded me. “How about Nighthawks?”

“Also a negative there” Ardan said, almost apologetically.

“Oh well, can’t win em all” I shrugged against my straps. “Any other lostech news?”

“We commenced final model Freezer production at the start of this year” Ardan informed me in a matter of fact way that made me jerk my head up in surprise from the sensor board.

“Production - hang on a minute, wasn’t this supposed to be the year of no activity!?”

“No new activity, yes” the Colonel agreed as we strode past a small convoy of cargo trucks trundling down in the other direction and I very carefully made sure the autopilot kept us on a nice straight line and didn’t walk us into them. “But remember that even before you showed up, the Federated Suns had been not quite openly investing a lot of time and effort to recreate Freezers, from Hoff in the 3020s onwards” Ardan reminded me. “Kincaid Defiance Industries were already subcontracted to build the finalized prototypes for field use, we just gave them the data, quietly, to upgrade to full production of the ultimate Star League version … after Katrina's people found the mole you had warned us about of course. Can you believe it was the CEO himself, Simon Kincaid”.

“The CEO? Seriously? Why? Was he a deep cover Maskirovka agent or something?”

“Nothing so clever. Apparently the Capellans just offered him a lot of money”.

I think my silence served as a decent enough ‘Flat What’ to that statement.

“So … he had a license to print money and customers in the AFFS and LCAF who would want every single unit he could build from now until forever …  and he sold out to the Capellans?”

“I don’t understand it either” Ardan admitted and I could hear the shrug in his voice “or, more likely, LIC isn’t telling us everything. At any rate, they are confident it was him and after the Molehunters pulled him up and handed him off to LOKI...” his voice trailed off at that.

“Go on” I asked after steeling myself, feeling a tinge of guilt and trying to squelch it. Traitor or not, I was the one who had set the mole hunters on his trail. Which meant, essentially, I was responsible for what had happened to him. LOKI were hyper-fanatics at the best of times. Against genuine traitors that Katrina and Simon Johnson would green light their methods to be used on? Honestly, I didn’t want to even think down that line, lest I have enough high-octane nightmare fuel to last me months...

“Well, with the mole eliminated, Katrina authorized the release of both some technological samples and the engineering data from the Helm Core, under very tight control, to KDI. They spent most of last year upgrading their lines and perfecting the process but they managed to get their first production run done just after New Years.  Current production is two hundred per month, should be up to about six hundred per month by end of the year”.

“Nice. Very nice” I smiled broadly. Double Heat Sinks were the single greatest upgrade to 3025 era technology, bar none – that held just as true in Batletech as in here. Prototypes had been played with since not long after NAIS opened - as Ardan had just reminded me - but like a lot of ‘Level 2’ technologies there had been a left-hand/right-hand deal in FASA over exactly what was ‘really’ going on in the Battletech universe. With Stackpole writing the Clans technology as entirely out of context and the Inner Sphere starting a crash weapons program from Clan salvage and Jamie Wolfs help … while the sourcebooks had the technology starting to come online in the 3030s at a glacial rate and genuine ‘Level 2’ technology in the 3040s … all of which was mysteriously missing when the Clans attacked anyway.

It seemed that history would take a different path this time around (it damn well would if I had anything to say about it!) much sooner than originally. Even six hundred units per month wasn’t terribly much to work with, half a Battlemech Regiment at best, but it would provide plenty of spare parts for the Helm units until production really kicked off. And allow testing of upgrade kits and so on…

“Well keep in mind the pulse laser and extended range PPCs are not in production” Ardan cautioned me, like a parent telling their hyper-active kid on Christmas day to be careful with their shiny new toy. “Ditto the armor plating to try not to get too banged up - oh, turn off here”.

“Here?” I frowned in some surprise.

“Here” he confirmed and I flicked off the autopilot and turned off the road onto the access road … to the spaceport. And the distinctive shape of a Union class dropship sitting on the pad in the colors of the Davion Guard. My stomach tightened at that.

“...we’re not going to the firing range are we” I sighed - and I actually felt genuinely annoyed at that, because I really wanted to blow shit up with this thing.
And that was not Mech Cult.
That was just New Toy Syndrome.
“And I’m not going to be able to say goodbye either” I added.

“I’m afraid not John” Sortek apologized - and sounded sincere but his tone left no room for debate, he just switched to Colonel Mode. “Your kit was packed up as soon as you left your barracks and shipped here. As soon as your Mech is loaded up, we’re going to be launching and making a 2G burn to jump a couple of ships to get to Robinson before Wolf, who should be arriving a day after we do, if we can hold to the schedule. Then, you and I are heading for Robinson to have it out with Wolf - and Snord. Possibly Sandoval depending on how that briefing goes. If all goes well, we’ll win the Dragoons over to the Federated Commonwealth as a key - possibly the key - part of the long term plan to deal with a Clan Invasion”.

“And if all doesn’t go well?” I asked dryly as I lined up very carefully for the ramp up to the Mech bay I was being directed into.

“Worst case scenario, you may well get a chance to see how your new Mech does in combat after all!” he said sounding far too cheerful for my liking.

“Swell” I deadpanned as I ascended into the crowded dropships Mech bay and lined up to the gantry clearly meant for me. As I turned around and backed into place, I saw the bay door was already closing up and I could hear the rumble of the ships massive fusion reactor starting its power up cycle. I took one last look at Sakhara and sighed.

All without knowing that I wouldn’t see four fifths of my classmates alive, ever again.

[Red Pins]

rereading it on that page is a pain.  way tomany off rails.

?  Why not use the threadmarks tab, and skip all the garbage?  Nevermind.

[ThePW]

As much as it's clear that everyone talks ALL AT ONCE on SB (which is why I never posted on other game/theme sites: The fear of my own posts being buried), it's also clear that SB's forum has many bells & whistles that make me salivate (the Thread, Side Story tabs specifically). What is annoying that IDK which forum to follow for this story. SB or here, because I'm clearly hooked for this line of thought...

[cawest]

?  Why not use the threadmarks tab, and skip all the garbage?  Nevermind.

did not know about them to you said something.  he just posted what I had been looking for. 

[Dave Talley]

I have been reading the other stuff, mostly decent stuff since the unlock, but damn they can write faster than i read, I can sign in and see I am three pages back, read for three pagds and I am three from the end because there is so much crosstalk

[DOC_Agren]

Wait, WTF

All without knowing that I wouldn’t see four fifths of my classmates alive, ever again.

[Starfox1701]

Of gods I'm glad to not have to try and wade through that other thread on SB any more. More please sir!

[Red Pins]

Of gods I'm glad to not have to try and wade through that other thread on SB any more. More please sir!

Really?  I actually prefer it.  That 'Threadmark' system is a real advantage.

[Tegyrius]

Yeah, but the threadmarks aren’t worth the constant derails and second-guessing the authors.

[Maingunnery]

Yeah, but the threadmarks aren’t worth the constant derails and second-guessing the authors.

But with the threadmarks you won't even see that.

[cawest]

so how many mec RGTs did the FC have or use in the 4th SW?.  why do I want to know.  Smith said that 600 DHS will refit half a RGT a month.  I was wondering how many months (in a perfect world) it would take to complete this upgrade.   

[Greatclub]

we don't know how fast production is going to grow; therefore any numbers we come up with are arsepulls. My pull is that militia regiments in cold areas are likely to be using SHS for years to a decade.

[cawest]

we don't know how fast production is going to grow; therefore any numbers we come up with are arsepulls. My pull is that militia regiments in cold areas are likely to be using SHS for years to a decade.

when Smith got his mech, he was told that current DHS output was 200 per month, then 600 per month by the end of the year (3027?).  all of those SHS that are pulled out of front line machines could keep or get a few machines back into combat form in those cold area.  win-win

[Red Pins]

They might save those single HS for vehicles and the rare Light unit that can't generate enough heat to overwhelm them easily.

[Starfox1701]

Truth be told the hs would do the most good on the combine front. Liao forces come off as almost completely iimcompetent in most cases during the war.

[drakensis]

so how many mec RGTs did the FC have or use in the 4th SW?.  why do I want to know.  Smith said that 600 DHS will refit half a RGT a month.  I was wondering how many months (in a perfect world) it would take to complete this upgrade.   

36 frontline RCTs and 12 frontline Mech regiments, 24 March Militias and 5 regiment-strength training cadres.

[Red Pins]

Geez, Drak.  Sometimes you scare me just a bit.