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.