The still medically questionable man felt his nose hair start to crinkle at the stench. “You know that one of the things I didn’t remember reading about was about showers and other hygiene routines on dropships and jumpships.” In a word? It was that it sucks, and Drake had been a tanker that lived with four others in the field for months. Note to self, need to invent scented wet wipes PDQ when the hell I get back on the ground! thought Drake as he fought down another gag at the smell.
With a snort he spoke aloud. “And to think I always wanted to fly in space. What a fool I was, and I don’t think that my nose hairs will grow back after this abuse of smells.”
A voice came from the owner of a soft ship’s shoe covering the foot next to his chest. “I don’t know why you’re brooding so much lately Drake. It’s not like you just found out that you’re in a fictional universe made up by a pair of guys who spent too much time in their mother’s basement,” Franko snorted back at Drake’s antics.
“Okay maybe I was a little down, but I’m not brooding. That kind of crap is for Jon Snow,” Drake retorted back to a man that he had a strange feeling was starting to become his first friend in this universe.
###
A single day after Drake had dropped the book on Franko’s desk, he had been brought back to the main compound of Blackwell in almost the same type of convoy as the first time he made the trip.
This time Drake was not brought to a nice office at the top of the tallest building in the local area. Nope, this time he was brought to a dark room 150m or more underground. If asked, Drake would have just said that it was a SWAG on how deep underground they were, but it was deep. Drake started to sweat under his arms as they waited in the elevator going down. He was thinking they were going to break out the thumb screws or Narco interrogation now that some of what he knew was out into the world.
Luckily, they didn’t seem that they had any of that stuff at hand when he was brought to a concrete like walled room that looked like a police interrogation room in an old police show. Instead, Drake had four people just wanting to ask him question after question after rephrased question and then a rephrased and paraphrased question to be sure. He had not been caught flat footed, so he was able to address some of the issues that they had brought up and not others. It was not like Drake had a database downloaded into his brain when he had been ripped out of his back yard cookout.
The man out of time knew from Crazy Woman 2, that sometimes just the act of being asked questions sometimes connected the mental dots, and you would remember more than you thought. That didn’t make it easy for a person with his temperament to keep getting asked the same thing over and over and over again. The next day Drake had turned over all of his battered TROs to the minders keeping him company at the house when they were gathered in the kitchen for the morning meal.
Drake had them all from updated 3050 going to the latest release until he had been ripped off his planet in 2020. When asked why he had so many books in a later interview, he had replied: “What can I say, I’m a weapons guy.” And even if they were heavily stained, ripped, and folded from hard field use they should be helpful. He just wished that the IlKhan TRO had come out before he was snatched away from his old life.
MSG Mendenhall thought that him dumping all of those books on the white coat people distracted them from asking if he had any more books hidden away. Drake had no idea how right that guess had been.
Drake now had the rest of those other books hidden among his Star Wars minis, Twilight 2000 books, or in watertight bags knee deep under the rose beds. He so didn’t want any of them reading his copy of Betrayal of Ideals this early in getting used to what he could bring to the table. Maybe later, and when he was not as worried that his new friends would put a bullet behind his right ear and forget about everything that he had told them about the possible future like it was just a morning fog.
##
Without letting the outside world know about his musings on the reactions to his second data dump Drake continued talking. “Yeah, but you need to badly take a shower and my leg itches like crazy. Are they here yet?”
This statement elicited a groan from Franko. It would seem that kids today were a lot like the ones from back home, at least when it came to traveling with their parents. So, every chance Drake got, and many times a day he would poke the bear… just for a little distraction from the plaster cast covering his whole leg. He would ask Franko if they were there yet even while eating their meals. This time the question had lost its power because they had been here for a week.
Word was sent to Franko by the leadership of the Dragoons to grab Drake and head to this star, a star that was rare in that it had no planets looping around it. It was a star that very few jumpships would use due to the risk of what would happen if their jump drive failed, something that was growing more and more common within the Inner Sphere. They were to meet someone from the leadership of the Dragoon’s and that was all Drake was told after being given two hours to pack.
They had fallen back into silence as the hamster wheel put on a g loading to their bones and muscles that was just below Terra normal.
Drake got an elbow to the ribs that made him jerk hard enough that it felt like he had pulled his neck out. “Drake, you snore like a dropship launch. Get up, it’s here.”
####
One of the traits of a long serving soldier is that you can go from deep sleep to moving at speed within a few heartbeats between each event. The lights might not be on, but they would be moving at the quick step. Drake was just following Franko as they swam through the corridors of the Merchant-class jumpship in Zero G. The pair of them were ready to leave the jumpship much faster than the small craft crew was ready to take them to their meeting on the other ship. While the pair made their way from one huge ship to another floating in deep space, Franko was looking out a window into the deep black of space that just gave Drake heartburn every time he looked out the thing. That was something Drake could not do again after the first look, and he was fresh out of space sick bags.
“Hmmmmm that Gazelle is called Jeb Stuart, at least that is what is written on her sides. That ship is from the Support Battalion, and I even think that’s Captain Piper’s ship. I would bet that the scout jumpship is one of the 7th Kommando vessels.” Franko did not even look over his shoulder at Drake. “Looks like Blake is pulling out all of the stops for this meeting.”
As far as Drake had been told, he was meeting a VIP of the Dragoons. He was hoping for the Wolf, but Franko seemed to think it would be with Blake or someone close to him in rank or a combat line commander. As it turned out both of them were both right and both had been so very wrong.
It felt so good when Drake felt the kick of the main engine of the space bus under his… seat. He just wished that it had lasted longer before he was again having to deal with zero g space sickness again. But at least Mendenhall was able to grab another space sick bag from the buses’ supply before he needed them… barely. After seeing that the meeting was going to be on a Scout-class jumpship, Drake knew that he was in for one suck of a briefing. The Scouts didn’t have hamster wheels for gravity to keep the crew healthy while in space.
As soon as Drake was pushed through a hatch on the dropship attached to the Scout jumpship, he had other issues to deal with. One of the vehicle bays on the Gazelle class dropship had been converted to act as a meeting room. And thanks to Drake sneaking a peek at what remained of his Wolf’s Dragoon book and some files that he gotten from Franko, he had an idea who was who in the Dragoons. He was supposed to be a member of that mercenary unit so it would be a break in his cover if he could not ID the key players within the unit. Drake made a mental note about how close Jaime Wolf looks like Sean Connery from the early 90’s. It made his brain hurt about how this was possible.
As Drake looked around the room, he noticed something else. “Yep, each of the other people in this room was a Clanner.” He had to mentally kick himself, as he remembered it was not until after the 4SW that Inner Sphere born people made it into the higher command slots within the Dragoons.
Drake knew that he was the prize or the key trinket for a Show and Tell on a huge scale with not only his life hanging in the balance but untold millions of others. Still the way that they had worked it out, Franko would be the one doing all of the talking, and Drake would only be there as proof and to answer any pointed questions that might come up.
That plan lasted right until Drake saw the panel of eight Dragoon officers strapped into chairs as they floated into the grease-stained room turned vehicle cargo bay. He was too busy working to get his straps just right in his Zero G chair to listen to what Franko was saying for many long minutes. It was another sign that Drake had not been on dropships before if he was having so much of a problem doing this common task.
Colonel Shostokovitch from Beta Regiment broke the ice: “So, this is the Caveman that has been supplying the information in all of that crap you have been forwarding for us to read the last couple of months.”
Drake held his tongue and just raised his head from his straps to make eye contact with the speaker, thinking that maybe his inner Negan might have some fun, even if the man was massive. He had been briefing combat officers for a while, and Drake could not fix stupid. Okay he could fix stupid, but it was going to cause a lot of pain for the rock with lips that he was working on.
Oh wait! I’m not in the army anymore, thought Drake and a sly smirk came to his face. “Well, I’m the guy that is just trying to help you all out with the Combine problem. You know how a warrior-based culture can get about having to deal with outsiders or hired guns. It’s all for the Dragon and it’s only a war crime if someone uses the same tactics as them.” Drake didn’t realize that part of what he said could have been used Clan in place of the word Combine or Dragon until the words had slipped out of his mouth.
Drake got a snort from someone on the other side of Jaime, but he couldn’t tell who, but it made him mad. “Look you know that Samsonov wants to have you all under his thumb, and he will do whatever it takes to meet that goal… and his honor be damned. He is going to let that creep Akuma run a major company store scam on you until you have to sell your mechs and souls to him and the Combine or starve in the streets. He will have members loyal to him in the Professional Soldiery Liaison officers inspecting all of the cargo heading to you guys so that the Dragon gets his cut even if you all paid for it. And if you don’t think that he would not do everything else he can to screw with you doing his job. I want what you are drinking, or do you need a prescription or back alley hookup to get it?”
Colonel Ellman had been the Beta regiment commander until 3016, and now he was in charge of the Training Command that was pumping out fosters and Dragoon-raised mechwarriors to replace the losses of their fighters. He also looked like Charlton Heston from Planet of the Apes, but today he had a confused look on his face. “Who is this, Akuma? I don’t think I have had to deal with this person.”
Jaime looked a little surprised until his mental walls went back up to hide his inner thinking. “He was just assigned to us before we started heading this way.” He turned and looked over at the head of Wolf Net. “Stanford, you keep your people well informed I see. Even if they were not in Combine space.”
Blake didn’t say anything for long seconds, and he was eye locked on Drake like he was watching a demon. “Sir, I did not have time to alert my people about this new position that we were forced to make. I barely had time to pull Jerry Akuma’s updated file off our database before we started to burn out system.”
“Yep, now I’m starting to get ‘the look’ from some of the officers around the room.” Thought Drake. He was also wondering how they had gotten all of this leadership out from under ISF’s eyes with the op tempo the Dragoons had been running against the FedSuns for the last few months. That tempo also just happened to be burning through the Dragoon’s on hand stock of supplies at an alarming rate all without enough making it back to refill the supply bunkers and maintenance points.
Colonel Ellman looked first at Drake and then back to Franko, he still was unsure about Drake, and it showed in the words coming out of his mouth that had a tone like the strange man was a three-year-old saying it would rain on Sunday when it was only Monday. The Dragoon spoke, “Okay, how do we stop this?”
Franko jumped back into the fire to get the hard looks off of Drake, a good sign of leadership that was noticed by the NCO. “I was able to get three hundred SLDF grade double efficiency heatsinks rebuilt before I left. We had six hundred of them in storage, but they did not store as well as we had hoped when they were put in that warehouse and forgotten about. I think we can get about a hundred tons of them smuggled to Hephaestus each month, at least until this inspection that we have been warned about kicks in with full force and plugs any holes.”
Franko’s back went straighter in the chair. “I took it under my authority to convert the old heatsink production line of Blackwells to this product, and I was thinking that what we can’t ship to you. We will put into proper storage this time until we can get them to your side of space.” After some planning he was hoping that he could be greenlighted to sell a few on the Black Market. With a sell price of about 60k per ton, that could be very useful, if they could keep it quiet.
Colonel Shostokovitch looked like he had bitten into a lemon. “And what do we do about the games the Combine have been playing with us already and if this… person is right about what they are planning to do?”
“We have to follow our legal orders,” came from Jaime’s mouth and Drake lost his mind.
Drake let a very loud snort fall out and he rolled his eyes. He went full power senior NCO vs O1 without a filter between brain and mouth. “So, you have to follow your legal orders, do you?”
Jaime turned and his frown went into full ‘_I_ am the leader of five mech regiments and supporting elements and _you_ are not’, but he didn’t say a word.
Now, Drake had briefed more general grade officers than he could remember their names, but now even he had to admit. Jaime had the power to make you sweat with a single look. That didn’t mean that this cowed him into silence… far from it.
So, what do you do? Do you back down under the power, or do you charge forward into the teeth of the glare? Well, I was a tanker in my early life so… more power Mr. Scott. All of this went through Drake’s mind at the speed of thought. “So did Khan Ward give you legal orders or not?” Drake was looking right at Jaime when he had spoken in that level tone.
For the first time Jaime Wolf looked to have been spooked by what Drake had said.
Drake didn’t risk looking around the room to see what the rest of the leaders might look like, but it was a good bet that it was a dying fish like look. He had a target, and he was mentally going… HULK SMASH!
The tone was level and he was not yelling.. yet. “You were told to prepare the Inner Sphere for the return of the Clans led by the Crusader faction. I was in the Blackwell factories, and it does not look that they are working on doing this task to me. In fact, you have been hitting the FedSuns and taking out weapons factories, support facilities, and R and D campuses left and right. You know like all of that data from Independence Weaponry you recovered and then let the Combine take off your hands so you could save face?”
Now Drake gave a slight head shake. “All of what you destroyed could be used to fight the Clans when they come with a flaming sword in their hands. And now the Combine is going to do to you what they did to the Light Horse, and a list of other units after the Star League fell. And now you look surprised by that fact of life smacking you in the face. Man, you clanners can’t think at the strategic level for more than hour without hurting yourself. I bet you don’t even plan out past six months, unless you’re going on a long raid to break something!”
“Now, son! What do you think you know?” came from Colonel Ellman as he rose to the defense of not only his commander but his friend.
Before he could say more, a raised hand from Jaime Wolf stopped anymore from being said.
Normally that kind of tone would have sent Drake off like a carton of eggs in a microwave set on high. But now Drake was starting to understand why Jaime was loved by his soldiers.
Centering himself the NCO looked at the seated officers. “The Dragoon Compromise was an idea that the Clans came up with to scout the Inner Sphere. Now what are the Clans? They are a group that left the Inner Sphere led by Aleksandr Kerensky, his wife and two sons. After the Prinz Eugen mutiny he knew that they needed to stop soon. He found five worlds that were close to support humans. The General had too many fighters and not enough farmers and, when this fell apart, his sons made a second exodus.”
Drake smiled. “Would you like me to go down the different laws and caste system? How about this? After being trained and sent to the Inner Sphere you had warships but found that no one else did, so hid them way. I already sent the report on what the FWL did to you all and why. I could go into more detail but that would just waste all of our time.”
Wolf asked him the obvious question: “How do you know this?”
He gave Franko a suspicious look, but the Wolf Net agent shook his head. “If you’ve read my initial reports, the historical references we found in Drake’s collection didn’t match our own records of the early twenty-first century. We believe the reason is that he isn’t from our timeline in the first place.”
Shostokovitch snorted. “Science fiction.”
“No sir. Science fact. Or at least, based on the facts that we have.”
“But how,” Ellman asked them, “Would someone from another timeline - another timeline and a thousand years removed! - know about the Clans?”
Drake laughed a little bitterly. “Because to me you’re all just NPCs in a game!”
Everyone except Franko looked at him as if he’d gone crazy.
“Yeah, that’s what my face looked like when I figured it out,” he admitted. “But it’s true. In my history, FASA Corporation marketed games, books, everything they could think of for a science fiction setting - fall of the Roman Empire in SPACE! With GIANT ROBOTS!” Drake lowered his voice, and saw that despite themselves the Dragoons fell for the old trick and leant forwards to hear him.
“One of the first merc units detailed in those books? Wolf Dragoons, a mysterious force that emerged from the periphery to fight for each Great House against the others, a twenty year odyssey that ended in betrayal. And later, when the writers decided to bring in the Clans, the distorted descendants of the SLDF, they backfilled that the Wolf Dragoons had been their spies -”
The men around the table bristled and Drake waved his hands. “Okay, their scouts, their recon. Call it what you will. A force that the Grand Council ordered to report so they could plan a war, and that Kerlin Ward ordered to slow-walk the entire thing so that the idea of an invasion was forgotten about. And then to stop reporting and prepare the Inner Sphere, because the Wardens have to win every vote but the Crusaders just need once…”
“You’re nuts,” Shostokovitch said with ironclad certainty.
“If he isn’t then we’re in a lot of trouble,” Franko warned quietly. “And so far, he’s been perfectly… eerily… accurate. Can we take the risk?”
“Quineg?” Drake snarked and saw that use of Clan vernacular hit hard on one or two faces.
###
The Wolf looked at Drake like he was trying to see into his very soul for long seconds before he spoke in a strong voice. “Mr. Mendenhall you have given us a lot to think about in a very short length of time. Would you please leave us to have a private meeting?”
And just like that, Drake was told that the kids need to leave the room so that the adults could have a real talk without younger ears being around. He was stuck floating in the corridor of that dropship for two hours with very little to occupy his mind.
It would have been longer, but he had decided to make his way to the small boat hatch. Thank God the Scout class jumpship is small, and it was not enough different from the Merchant-class that it didn’t mess with my spatial awareness. Oh, and that this tub has only the one bathroom that I knew the location of on this spaceship, thought Drake as he waited within the privacy of his own mind.
Going to the bathroom in zero g is another thing that had never been talked about in books of any kind that Drake had read. It was kind of like all of those zombie movies that don’t talk about running out of toilet paper or what they did when it ran out. That lack of reading was the reason that Drake’s left butt cheek is now one huge purple hickey.
“****** vacuum zero g toilet with a fixed setting and timers.” Thought Drake as a shot of pain from that part of his body made it to his brain.
Drake was still near the hatch to the small craft hatch when he saw Franko floating towards him, and he did not look that happy. When Franko was close enough not to need to use his outside voice. “Well, they think you’re nuts, and about half of them think it would be a good idea to just save the travel money and shove you out the nearest airlock.”
“Oh great, and what was voted on?” He started to follow Franko and then he stopped and looked at the nearby hatch. It was one that should lead to death pressure, and Drake had a quick thought that maybe he was about to see what breathing vacuum was going to feel like.
Franko smiled at seeing where Drake was looking. “Wolf vetoed that idea… for now. We, my friend, are going back to New Valencia to await further orders.”
Drake thinks Franko saw his face drop at this news. “Oh, don’t worry too much, Drake. I gave him that copy of Wolves on the Border and said it came over with you. I told him it was for some light reading on the way back to the main Dragoon base on An Ting.” Now Franko’s smile came back that Drake had come to know as sincere. “Oh, and I made sure it had a different outer cover, that will mask the story and at the same time be a better fit for a man of his age. My boss might not agree with that statement when he finds out, but he will get over it. I mean, don’t all men his age have some kind of irritable bowel syndrome or something like that?”
Yeah, you’re good about getting my mind off of my own issues, at least most of the time, thought Drake.
He knew that you can only lead a horse to water, but you can’t make them drink it. He just had a hard time believing that he was having this much of an issue breaking all of those plot issues the Dragoons worked under.
The man from a different universe just hoped that the book is a big enough hammer to get his story slammed into their collective heads… even if they each had to read the thing. The downside was that the more people who saw that book would increase the risk of ISF stealing it.
###
Colonel Ellman floated there inside the dropship Jeb Stuart, and he was a very worried man. He was looking for his boss and not finding him, even with the Gazelle not being that large of a dropship.
Jaime had not been seen for at least the last four days now, and the rest of the Colonels were starting to get worried about their leaders’ absence from the public areas of the dropship. It had even been noted that he had started acting funny a few hours before they had jumped away from that meeting, so Jeremy had been elected to check on the old man, no matter where he might be. It should not have been that hard of a job to find one person this far from a planet much less a planet that held breathable atmosphere.
This dropship had been modified just slightly using drop-in/plug-in blocks to give each person a cabin in the empty combat bays. The leader of the Dragoons was in the one that was known to have the most privacy of all of those temporary cabins. That was something a person picked up after twenty years of working with the bloody things. Many of a fight had been fought among those of equal rank over who would get those types of cabins.
“Hey Jaime, are you in there?” He did not want to bang on the hatch first instead of raising his voice to get attention, Sir Newton was an ass. If no one replied to his hail, he would do just that, but right now he didn’t want to draw that much attention to what he hoped was a non-issue.
He was a heartbeat away from that banging when the thin plastic hatch was pulled opened from the other side. “Unity, Jaime! You look like crap.” Then the smell hit him like a brick to the head.
Ellman had only seen Jaime heavily drink one time in all of the years that he had known the man: when his wife, two of Jaime’s kids, Joshua, and others had been killed by Anton Marik’s people. Jeremy went on edge even more when he was waved to enter the converted bay/cabin. Colonel Ellman saw the four empty bottles attached to the side table to keep them from floating around before the door slides closed behind him.
“Okay Jaime, what is wrong?” Ellman was using the same tone that he would have used if he was helping a junior officer or one of his trainees work through some personal problems.
Jaime had a haunted look in his eyes that matched the huge dark bags under them. He slowly floated over to a chair fixed to the deck. “I was reading the book that Franko passed me.” Jaime’s eyes went over to the empty bottles spread out and floating around the cabin. “Oh, Unity! If its right?” The words had more than a little desperation in them.
Ellman had seen the book being passed over between the Wolf Net agent and the Dragoon’s leader, but he was on the fence about this Drake person. He did not believe for a second that this Drake had come from a different universe and that he was just a character in a tabletop game. Right now, he was leaning towards a ROM spy or a crazy man wanting attention of some kind.
“You’re not putting any weight in to this con job, are you!?” Ellman knew that he didn’t have half the command skills of Jaime and if Jaime lost it how long would the Dragoons last. Then the rest of the council of colonels would look towards him to take over the leadership of the Dragoons, and he knew that was not going to be a good thing for the rest of them.
Jaime was still looking at the table with a lost look in bloodshot eyes. “There were only three people in the meeting with Khan Kerlin Ward. The Khan, Nat, and me. There is no way he could have found out what was said. And that book is given me some insights into a lot of what has been bugging me about this whole Combine contract I signed. It even had information about Marisha and me, along with the relationship that is developing with Tomiko.”
Jaime stopped talking and his eyes turned glassy. “It has caused me to reflect on what was said and not what I heard more than a few times. It has also caused me to rethink more than a few things that I have been doing after taking the Combine’s coin on this contract. I had thought that they were the most Clan-like of the Great Houses, maybe a little taste of home for all of us. Now I can see that they are not.”
“So, what are you going to do?” If Jaime said that the black hole in the center of the galaxy was an apple, Ellman was willing to go with that idea. Jaime was just that kind of leader of troopers. You would just follow him to storm the gates to hell, because he had said that the devil had stolen his toothbrush. Now he was going to wait until Jaime told him how he was going to deal with this crazy story.
“I still don’t know if this is totally true or some kind of game that is being played on us.” Jaime’s back straightened, and the older colonel could tell that he had come to some kind of conclusion in that second. “We will plan for that this is all for real, but not too deeply to poison the well with the Combine. I will keep an eye out to see if things that are predicted come to pass. If they do, as this book states? Then we protect our people, and the Combine can burn for all I care… if they cross us.”
Jaime’s eyes snapped over to the other Dragoon officer. “Ellman, we went down to only a single blasted regiment! All because I could not believe the Combine would do that to us one step at a time pushing us to do certain things! That book said that all of our mech forces were cut by sixty percent after one massive battle. Takashi wanted us disgraced in the eyes of the rest of the Inner Sphere so badly that we could only work for him. The one thing that Drake got right was that I was not planning long term to protect the Inner Sphere like I had been ordered. I think that I was just wanting to go out fighting, the way that a good clan warrior should die. I failed my Khan, the Dragoons, and I failed you. I WILL NOT LET IT HAPPEN!”
Jaime was almost panting for breath from yelling so hard and he was starting to waver on his feet as the massive hangover showed its effects. “How long until we can reach an HPG?”
Ellman looked down at his watch. “We jump again in about twenty hours. Then it’s a six or eight day burn to the planet, unless you want to send something by radio - and you know the Inner Sphere has better codebreakers than the Clans do. How bad to you want to send a message out?”
Jaime made a sour face and rubbed the side of his head lost in thought for a few seconds. “Bad…but not that bad. I wish we would have brought our own HPGs.”
This got Ellman to give a full-throated laugh. “I can just see it. Merc unit has its own Drum Sat system set up for passing messages across the whole Inner Sphere and offering discount prices.”
Jaime could not help but laugh also, it felt good.
####
Note
Space Sickness: This is a real thing that cannot be tested for before Astronauts go into space. It gives you a varying degree of headaches, nausea, and vomiting that can impact missions.