Date: June 30, 2236
Location: Freedom
Title: Inverted
Author: Giles Gammage
Type: Short Story (Shrapnel #4)
Synopsis: A man with a head wound and amnesia regains consciousness in a toppled armored car. He emerges into a massacre site, where hundreds of civilian vehicles are still burning, and is rescued by Flo Vannier, who decides to take him back to her settlement for medical treatment. Since he can't recall his name, she calls him X. At Flo's nearby jeep, they meet Hank Dupont, Flo's companion, who identifies X's clothes as the uniform of the Alliance Fourth Para-Cavalry. Flo dismisses that fact, noting that X could either be a deserter or a rebel, since they've been taking uniforms off dead Alliance soldiers for weeks.
They drive back to the settlement, the sound of artillery bombarding Jefferson City 50 km away faintly audible. In the settlement's police HQ, Hank reports to Sheriff Terry Kaplan that the Alliance ambushed a civilian relief convoy, leaving X as the only survivor. Other town councilors are introduced as Kelly Saint-Yves, Julian Marchant, and Malcom Leroy. They debate what to do with X, and whether either the rebels or the Para-Cav constitute legitimate authority, given the circumstances, and agree to postpone a decision until X recovers and decides what he wants to do.
Outside, walking to Dr. Vannier's house, Hank tells X he's planning on raising an anti-Alliance militia with guns looted from the massacre site. Noting X's military uniform, he suggests there could be a place for him in the settlement.
As X drifts off to sleep, he hears a disturbance outside, and sees VTOLs and jump infantry entering the settlement, and hears Sheriff Terry Kaplan's voice demanding all citizens assemble in the town hall. Flo refuses to go, and two Para-Cav troopers insist at gunpoint. X, using a pistol Hank had given him, shoots them dead, noting that it had worked for him despite being gene-coded to the Terran officer it had been taken from. Hank arrives and shoots a Terran soldier who had been firing blindly into the clinic.
Flo goes to the town hall to try to calm the situation down. X takes the jump pack off the dead Terran and tells Hank to have his militia surround the hall, while he picks the Terrans off from above. Moving to the VTOL landing zone, X destroys the Terran transports (unchallenged by sentries, since he's in Para-Cav gear).
X moves to where he expects the Terrans to rally for a sortie against the militia, and guns several down before he is confronted by Sheriff Kaplan, who is holding Flo hostage. X complies with Kaplan's demand to surrender his pistol, but the gene-lock prevents it from firing when the Sheriff tries to kill X with it. X then shoots Kaplan with the rifle he took from the jump trooper, then finishes him off with a shot to the head from the pistol. Flo tells X that Malcom Leroy, the settlement's teacher, had been the one to summon the para-cav.
Noting that X was able to fire the gene-locked gun, she asks who he really is. X responds that it doesn't matter - not identities, histories, nor political factions - only firepower. With that, he departs into the darkness.
Notes: Chronologically the earliest BattleTech short story at the time of its publication, Inverted gives a closer look at the politics on the periphery of the Outer Reaches Rebellion. Per the original sourcebooks, years of mercantilist misrule by appointed Terran governors led to a rebellion against Terran Alliance authority, and declaration of independence by President Tudella Dupont. The Alliance forces sent to put down the rebellion ran into armed merchant vessels contesting the jump points. Though outgunned by the Alliance WarShips, the merchantmen wiped out ten percent of the Alliance troop carriers with suicidal ramming attacks. When the Alliance forces attacked the heavily fortified Jefferson City, they were repulsed by the determined defenders, who launched a sortie and seized some of their artillery, turning it against them.
Unable to breach the walls, the 4th Para-Cavalry settled in for a siege, and killed every Freedomian they found out after dark, while dealing with insurgents slipping into their camps to steal weapons and kill their soldiers. This story takes place two weeks into the siege, well before Alliance reinforcements arrive to raze Jefferson City to the ground on August 25.
X is/was clearly an Alliance Para-Cavalry officer, but having lost his personal history to amnesia, his survival instincts turn him almost feral, calculating that the unsettled environment means power comes from the muzzle of a gun, especially in the hands of someone able to use it, and is constantly calculating moves that will enable him to take a position of authority in the future. Makes one wonder how much that reflects his pre-amnesia persona. He certainly was able to rise to command rank in the Alliance para-cavalry - and keep in mind that the para-cavalries were the same units used by the Alliance government to massacre crowds of protestors on Terra, per the Periphery sourcebook.
Colonized in the 2100s, Freedom is at most 100 years old, and seems to primarily be centered on Jefferson City. The Star League soucebook indicated that the Alliance tried to maintain a mercantilist relationship with the colonies - restricting what tech they could bring out (making them reliant on the Ryan Cartel for weapons and other contraband) and trying to establish a system where the colonies sent raw materials back to Terra in exchange for manufactured goods. Despite that, Freedom apparently has a well developed heavy industry sector - manufacturing a wide variety of buses, trucks, hovercars, etc. (Unless all those vehicles were shipped in - doubtful, since this predates DropShips, and anything brought in would have to fit on a shuttle.) The rebels were also able to construct fortifications around Jefferson City that kept 6,000+ Alliance jump troops with artillery and armor at bay for six weeks. My takeaway is that the Alliance's mercantilist restrictions were overstated, or the Ryan Cartel was delivering a lot more than MANPADS and ice.
(Hank's militia also doesn't seem to have been in the loop for getting Ryan Cartel guns, since he's looting them from the destroyed convoy...of course, since X's armored vehicle got nailed by something heavy enough to take it out, and since Hank found guns among the wreckage, it's a good bet that the rebels running that convoy had some serious firepower - opening up the argument that it was, in fact, a legitimate military target for the para-cav.)
I enjoyed the look into local politics, with both pro-rebel and pro-Alliance characters, and others that just want to help as many people as possible get through the carnage.
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