Ia Drang Plateau, Kowloon...
nearly two kilometers above the rest of the continent, covered in wheat and barley fields, orchards, and farms, it's practically a different world up here, a giant Mesa nearly a thousand kilometers across, with a massive canyon system, the Ia Drang Plateau.
Kristiana stood on the edge, looking down at the tropical northern rainforests north of Hue, from above much of the cloud cover. There are three ways people come to the Plateau, the first, is by Highway One, running through the former Rim Worlds administrative capital in that city. The second, was by air, which is how Kristiana got here. The third way, is to come up the coast road from Dalat on the coast of the Western Sea.
"We're pretty isolated up here, Miss." The flight had been in a single-engine biplane out of Bienh Hoa at the confluence of the Little Yangtze and the inland sea known locally as Golden Lake.
"The view is spectacular." she said, turning from the edge to face her host.
"it's alright." he answered, "it's better in the dry season, you can almost see all the way to Nha Tranh from this spot. This is probably the best land on the planet for Winter Wheat and Barley, we grow some apples up here too, and of course, other earthlife foods, Ia Drang is the breadbasket for the entire continent-though the Ranchers down south in the Temperate zones would argue that."
"I'm told this is also a center of faith." she said, leading into the interview.
"Well, there's the LDS, or Saints, or Ell-Dees, which the rest of the galaxy calls Mormons, they're pretty big up here, same for the Kahanist Yisroel congregations, and of course, your vanilla protestant christians. about the only groups you won't find up here, are Muslims or Comstar, one of those because of some bad blood going back a few millenia, and the other because they kind of know to stick to their compound on the East Coast."
"But don't Jews, Muslims and Christians all believe in the same god?" she asked.
"Yeah, but they all have different interpretations of what God wants." Blakeman replied, "My family, most of them, are LDS, which is a variant of Christianity that isn't real popular in the rest of the galaxy and was wiped out to a man by McKenna's takeover on old Earth. You might say that Kowloon's a bastion of peoples ev'ryone else wanted gone a long time ago, and you wouldn't be wrong. The first settlers here were anticommunists from Asia and a selection of 'problematic' religious groups that were being actively suppressed back on old earth, including zionist jews, 'conservative' christians-whatever that was defined as, and various stripes of radicals that didn't fit into, or want to fit into, the Terran monoculture that was dominant under the Terran Alliance and then Terran hegemony. Made our ancestors real unpopular types, not replacing god with the State and all...and we weren't any more popular with the Rim worlders."
"The rim-worlders?"
"House Amaris, the Rim Worlds Republic. They spent over a decade fighting to conquer us, had to get Terrie tech and terrie help doing it, then spent the next two hundred years trying to wipe out our various cultures and languages." He folded his arms and looked out across the landscape below, "Hardened us, is all it did. Even when they got their buddies to orbitally bombard the old capital-if you look southwest, you can see the scar down there, where Dinh Diep used to be. Funny thing, that..."
"Funny?"
"Yeah, the rimjobs spent two centuries trying to make us conform, and we only got independence for a little over a decade from them, before the Lyrans hit us with something we couldn't fight and rolled us right in." he said.
"What did they 'hit' you with?"
"Trade deals." He said. "Kerensky bailed on the Inner Sphere, you know that from your history books, the Lyrans faced very little opposition scooping up the disorganized remains of the Rim Worlds Republic...but see, Kowloon here? they didn't have to fire a shot. Instead, they threatened a trade embargo that would've forced Marjie Ngo into either letting the economy die, or open trade with the ****** rimjobs. That trade would've given those mother ****** a lever on us just as we'd finally broken their yoke, but the Lyrans, at least, wouldn't try to destroy our churches or suppress our culture...so she took the gamble."
she walked with him past the biplane and up a gravel-paved path to the farmhouse. "Do you feel it was a bad deal?" she asked.
"Not really. It's becoming one, but there's always been a cycle of that, no government is perfect, but some governments are less imperfect than others. if you don't learn what to compromise on, you end up forced to take the worst without the good." He stopped at a concrete cap nearly four meters wide, "This was once a missile base-back in our first independence, before the Rim Worlders came. They had the resources of MANY worlds, we had only our own...so we lost, and endured pogroms, and occupation for centuries because of it."
"you say it's 'becoming' a bad deal, can you explain what has changed?"
"While the old duke was alive, Kowloon had a voice." he said, "Not the strongest voice, and sure, the old man spent his time in prison under Alessandro, but they didn't interfere too deep in how we did our own business, they left us our institutions and traditions. The current Duke is an absentee landlord, and the Guv'nor he's got, this Regent, Stonecipher, the man's from Broken Wheel, out on the Feddie side, sent here because he was making trouble but too decorated a soldier to just cashier...now, see, the folks out on the Broken Wheel side, they hate anyone who looks...well...like me." he indicated his face, "Asians, right? because they're always fightin' the Cappellan Confederation, which is largely descended from China's overflowing commie hordes. He sees a man like me, he sees the enemy he's been fighting his whole life, and now he's been put in charge of a whole planet full of them."
"How did this happen to you?" Kristiana asked.
"Hans marries Melissa, now he's got to do something about reducing his cousin's powerbase, noble politics. So, he's got troublemakers he needs to shuffle away, but he can't just have 'em killed outright because they're not actually doing anything wrong besides being aligned with the wrong guy or wrong cause. Insert a 'temporary' assignment to cover for a Noble who's actually loyal and wants to make soldiering a career, and you get to send the troublemaker far, far away from where he can actually make that trouble, while covering a loyal man. Common folks have no say in this, it's Feudal Lord business so far as the Guv'mint is concerned, and in this case, it's a solid officer with a proud history of bandit hunting going to an area where there are frequent bandit raids. at the level of a First Prince or Archon, it's win-win...only it ain't."
"Because he came with all of his prejudices?"
"That's a big part of it, there's also the big part of wanting to run things how things are run where he's from...and maybe a bit of his sterling reputation maybe wasn't so honestly earned, maybe he got a lot of those wins against bandits by making arrangements and fluffing reports, only see, Kowloon isn't that important in the eyes of a warrior prince. We're not a major academy world, we don't build large formations of deployable battlemechs, we're not positioned on the border with another Great House to fight. We have two exports-one is industrial tooling, but that's right down into those niggling details that aren't sexy enough for a warrior king who really isn't that great shakes when it comes to economics of war. as long as the 'mech factories churn out enough battlemechs, he's not the man asking where the machines the workers are using to build 'em come from, so long as they stay working."
"And the other export?"
"talent. Kids here, they enlist. The Lyran Draft board doesn't have to send out the letters, because our best kids line up, it's cultural pride, to an extent, but they also don't stay, they do their mandatory five and come home. meaning that we've got a deep tradition with the lowest ranks in the armies of the Commonwealth, but it doesn't reach up to the Regimental level, and it's in the least glamorous side of the service most of the time. I lost my oldest son in the Combine in the fourth war, and my youngest son died in the war of '39, both infantry like their old man, my daughter finished her tour four years ago, and came home, she's got a shop in Ia Drang city, one of the best noodle places in the city."
