Guided by the light of a (Red) Cameron Star

[PsihoKekec]

I like big Boom
and I cannot lie

[Daryk]

Heck of a cliffhanger!  I can't wait for the next installment! ;D

[mikecj]

Nice!  Can't wait til you crack the shell!

[Wrangler]

Things are going get hot in the old Amaris era built bunker tonight!

[Hotpoint]

Part LX - Section 1 of 2

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"Epic flail"

Text painted on the side of a Von Luckner Tank exhibited in the Niops Museum of Military History - 2900 CE

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Plain of the Rim Worlds Republic – Von Strang's World – 2844

Wide open, lacking much in the way of vegetation until you neared Amaris City, stretching out before you to the horizon and flat as a pancake this would be beautiful ground on which to fight the archetypal set-piece battle, Franklin thought to himself looking out of the cockpit of his Cyclops, it was just a crying shame that Karl Von Strang wasn't nearly stupid enough to sally out from his capital to fight one alas.

Mitch Johnson's written report regarding his personal impressions of the baron, along with his analysis of the sections of the capital and its defences he had been able to examine first-hand, had made for interesting reading and had led to Hallis modifying his initial battleplan for storming the city. Von Strang was apparently not stupid, even if some of his grandiose plans to bring back the Republic did objectively cross the line into delusion given his demographic weakness, tiny industrial base and woefully inadequate logistical potential.

Johnson's evaluation of the man included such descriptors as 'insightful', 'surprisingly well-educated and well-informed' and 'ruthless and despotic without being certifiably crazy or utterly blind to his own limitations' which placed Karl Von Strang firmly among the upper echelon of contemporary tyrants ruling bandit kingdoms.

True, given that the competition for the title of least deranged periphery autocrat included such notables as the bloodthirsty maniac currently going by the title 'Duke of Tortuga', or the various vicious warlords fighting over Antallos, simply not being completely out of his gourd meant that Karl Von Strang was readily able to qualify as an above average despot. Since it was usually better to overestimate your foe than to underestimate him however, Hallis wisely opted to take a cautious approach to the situation and on that basis arranged his forces as if they were taking on the line regiments of a Great House, not just some jumped-up pirates.

Hallis placed three battalions of SLDF battlemechs in the centre of the line as they advanced across the plain, with the single battalion from Bolton's Rangers on the right and the heavier of the two mech battalions from the Blackheart's on the right, the rest of the Blackhearts battlemech strength, plus their fairly large complement of mechanised infantry, following them as a reserve.

With the fourth battlemech battalion hailing from Niops being a composite unit that included most of the SLDF's Rifleman air-defence and Archer and Longbow fire-support mechs, along with a token company from the NAM, Hallis placed them in the centre just behind the main line mixed in with the two companies of tanks and the infantry APC's that had been landed by the Triumph.

Following on behind to the rear were the Thor self-propelled guns and the Vali missile carriers of the artillery along with their support vehicles, the Vali batteries pulling trailers of additional ammunition behind them because experience showed you could never have too many Arrow IV missiles.

As the brigade stomped or rolled its way across the plain Hallis ordered his reconnaissance companies forward to scout the ground ahead of them. Training exercises back on Niops VII had indicated that while the Guardian ECM and Beagle Active Probe equipped Hussar HSR-250-Dn was truly exceptional at scouting it worked best when deployed alongside other machines such as the Talon which were able to quickly come to support it when necessary and had more punch.

Somewhat annoyingly to those of the Clan Wolverine persuasion the same exercises also clearly indicated that having a number of Mongoose lights mixed in also paid dividends because as a command mech it could coordinate the units more effectively. General Romanov told Hallis he needed to order his people to suck it up and use the things regardless of the name, which he did thinking it was a very good thing it wasn't called a Widowmaker instead because that would have been an absolute deal-breaker.

Thanks to secure line-of-sight only tightbeam communication utilising heavy encryption it wasn't considered necessary to maintain particularly strict radio silence and unable not to comment on what he thought were all the HSR-200-Db's out there Colonel Daniel Bolton signalled the Brigadier-General about it.

"I don't suppose you can tell me where the hell you found so many Royal Hussars, Sir?" he queried on a private channel. He doubted they were actually making them themselves, so Niops finding a big cache of the things seemed the most likely source. After all, if you could build a manufacturing line for Royal battlemechs why would you go with the Hussar of all things?

"We've been breeding them" Franklin replied. "The difficulty is working out which ones are male and which are female" he replied. "We tried it with the Atlas as well but unfortunately those things are the Giant Panda Bears of mechs" he continued deadpan. "The shame of it is the Jagermech breeds like rabbits but who the hell wants one of those?" he asked rhetorically, audibly stifling laughter.

Bolton rolled his eyes. It was becoming increasingly clear to him that Sam Tyson's observation after having worked for them for years that trying to get a straight answer out of Niops was an exercise in futility. It wasn't just the obfuscation that rankled, it was that most of them seemed to revel in doing so in a comedic or sarcastic fashion.

The rumour was ComStar absolutely hated their guts, and given the utter seriousness and air of self-importance in the manner by which those weirdos conducted themselves it was easy to see why.

The Niops Association was arguably the most well-meaning, idealistic and optimistic power of the modern era. They were also however clearly intent on attaining the title of the undisputed champion smartasses of the known galaxy and Bolton was not alone in suspecting that wasn't just because they wanted to keep their secrets with an epic disinformation campaign, they had clearly started to enjoy acting like this.

From Brigadier-General Franklin himself to the lowliest trainee assistant technician they could all be relied upon to pick up the ball and run with it. The off-handed remarks in the chow-line about the vast fleets of Caspar drones the Association had squirrelled away, or that the biotechnology company founded on Niops VI by 'House Frankenstein-Moreau' after relocating from Frobisher was close to success in their super-soldier program, really started to grate after a while.

All that said, Dan Bolton had to concede that taking up a contract with the Niops Association and this operation in particular was a dream come true for himself and most of his mercenary company. Deeply proud of their origins as a Star League regiment the battlemechs of Bolton's Rangers still proudly bore the Cameron Star and the insignia of the 208^th Hussars, and by retaining SLDF olive-drab as their paint-scheme it was almost as if the regiment had come home as they marched alongside the battalions from the 295^th who were painted up the same way.

Bolton had grown up being told stories of serving the SLDF against Amaris by his parents and other veterans of the war. Unlike the messy politics of the Succession Wars it had sounded like a fairytale, good versus evil with good triumphing at the end as the 208^th fighting alongside Aleksandr Kerensky himself brought the Usurper Stefan Amaris low.

Much of what happened after Kerensky personally executed Amaris was a complete shit-show of course, there being a distinct absence of 'happily ever after' at the end of the fairytale. On the other hand even if Snow White didn't get to marry the handsome prince at the end the kingdom was still better off if the evil queen had nonetheless been deposed and executed right?

Not that Prince Charming had ever seemed much of a good catch as far as Dan Bolton was concerned. The guy's apparent thing for comatose chicks was more than a little disturbing, and made you wonder if his usual approach to picking up girls was to produce a slightly damp silk handkerchief and to politely ask them in a refined accent, 'Does this smell like chloroform to you perchance, My Lady?'

Old fairytales with somewhat dubious undertones notwithstanding, for Bolton's Rangers to be taking the field to help overthrow the heir to the loathsome Gunthar Von Strang, while storming a city literally, and shamelessly named after Stefan Amaris himself, was well worth how much of a pain-in-the-ass the journey to get there had been. The pay itself wasn't fantastic, but the opportunity to make his predecessors in the regiment proud of him while simultaneously getting to lay his hands on some of all that fancy lostech hardware Niops boasted in excess more than made up for it.

Since they had set down well beyond artillery range of the city, nobody wanted to be subjected to a barrage of high explosive while unloading a force that included lightly-armoured vehicles and ammunition trailers for obvious reasons, it was going to be a while before they had advanced far enough to see action. This had given Bolton some time to enviously look over at more of the machines Niops was bringing to the fight while they marched, and all those gauss-rifle and ERPPC equipped mechs dripping with double-heat-sinks and ferro-fibrous armour were giving him the warm fuzzies.

The fact they hadn't used up their inventory of late Star League era equipment during the bloody slog of the First Succession War showed in the way they put together units as well. Once the brigade got moving Brigadier Franklin had dispatched a mixed company of medium mechs to each flank to act as a screening force, that wasn't in itself particularly noteworthy but the lance of Flashman FLS-8K heavies he added to each company to beef up their firepower was.

Despite the SLDF having fielded the FLS-8K in vast numbers they were barely encountered in the Inner Sphere these days, partially because the factory where they were originally produced had been blown to hell decades ago but mostly because if they broke down you just couldn't get the XL engines they needed anymore. The raison d'etre of the 8K model of the Flashman was that thanks to its 375XL engine it was fast for a heavy, able to conduct quick, rapid flanking manoeuvres that other seventy-five tonners like the Marauder or Black Knight simply couldn't. It was also, unlike its peers, able to keep up with most medium mechs which meant you could sprinkle a few in with your Griffin, Dervish and Wolverine mechs without slowing them down and therefore hamstringing their tactical flexibility which is exactly what Brigadier Franklin had done.

The FLS-8K wasn't a machine that could go toe-to-toe in a slugging match with other heavies, that XL engine made it fast but also meant it couldn't soak up the punishment they could, but used properly in the manner the SLDF had intended it was a proven winner.

Niops seemingly had a good number of them in service too, hardly that much of a surprise given that some SLDF divisions had ended up fielding entire battalions of the things once it was learned that three dozen speedy 'Flashbulbs' suddenly appearing on the oppositions flank, each one carrying a trio of large lasers and five mediums, tended to have a very detrimental influence on enemy morale.

Breaking Bolton away from his thoughts a Lighting hover-vehicle being driven at breakneck speed, randomly jinking and changing direction as it went, tore past his Awesome and hurtling onwards started weaving across the plain.

If it wasn't for all the aerials sticking out of the thing, and the distinctive radar array mounted on the back, Bolton would have assumed the driver was some kind of maniac but it was clearly some kind of artillery support vehicle. To be precise the Lightning was carting around a powerful counter-battery-radar, a system that allowed it to detect incoming long range artillery fire, calculate where it had been fired from, and then pass on those coordinates to friendly artillery so they could return the favour.

The downside of being the people actually operating a counter-battery radar was that the extremely powerful radio emissions it put out could be detected by the other side, allowing them to potentially triangulate on your position and drop more shells right on top of you.

Or at least they could if you were silly enough to stay still and let them, and the crew of the Lightning were clearly well aware that if you were screaming out, 'I'm right here, kill me' into the electromagnetic aether then not making yourself any more of an easy target than was necessary to do the job was just good policy.

Inside the Lightning, sitting in the passenger seat in front of the radar display screen, Second-Lieutenant Charlene Hammerick was glad she had remembered to put in her mouthguard because if not she might have bitten off her tongue by now. Her driver seemed to have taken his orders to make sure the vehicle was as hard a target as it could possibly be as an invitation to drive it like he was a competing in an off-road rally championship while having some kind of seizure and simultaneously popping the 'Go Pills' fighter pilots liked to chew on.

Usually riding in a hover-vehicle meant a smooth ride compared to a wheeled vehicle going the same speed, but that wasn't really the case when you kept randomly accelerating and decelerating while swerving from side-to-side.

Serving in the artillery was supposed to be a lot more chill than this, Hammerick thought to herself, recalling the stories the founder of her bloodname told of fighting battles while leisurely eating sandwiches. Choosing to follow in the footsteps of Colonel Daniel Hammerick, her mentor and genetically at least the closest thing she had to a father, had led to her eschewing a career as a mechwarrior or a fighter-pilot that most of the other kits from Zeta sibko had joyfully embraced for the life of a gunner.

It wasn't a job that came with all the kudos or the air of the romance that came with driving a big stompy robot or a sleek fighter did of course, they didn't make a lot of war movies where the protagonist spends a lot of time ten kilometres behind the front lines covering their ears, but in reality artillery still ruled the battlefield, as it had for most of the last millennium-and-a-half.

Get a few drinks into him and Daniel Hammerick could always be depended upon to mention that while ilKhan Kerensky looked down upon artillery that in the end it was the development of effective cannon that sounded the death knell of the horse archer armies of the Eurasian Steppe Nicky K seemed to have such a weird fetish about.

Born, or perhaps the correct term was 'decanted' from an Iron Womb in 2819 as the clan's breeding program was put into full swing for the first time Charlotte Hammerick was too young to really remember the Clan Homeworlds, even if she had been born there. She remembered her time spent with the Switchback Fleet somewhat more clearly but Niops was very much the place she thought of as home, that being something that differentiated the Zeta generation onward from the Gamma kits.

Just because she didn't really remember the clans that didn't mean they didn't remember her, or rather her surname name however, and like all the other bloodnamed warriors when away from Niops she used the alias her 'father' did despite its downside in her particular case.

Daniel Hammerick had probably thought it was cute to adopt the nom-de-guerre he did, but he wasn't the one that got landed with the name 'Charley Martel' as a result. It could have been a lot worse though of course. The Ironborn carrying Kirsten Mroczkiewicz genes would never forgive her for the monstrosity of a polysyllabic Polish pseudonym she inflicted upon them.

Originally the Lightning had three crew and a pair of SRM launchers, the launchers were removed to find weight for the radar and additional electronics and the place where the third crewman used to sit was now filled by a very expensive ATOAS (Advanced Trans-Optical Aiming System) and a slightly less exorbitantly priced Inertial Navigation System. Learning how to operate all that gear had taken Charlotte months, and learning how to actually use it to its full potential well over a year on top of that, and it irked her that the Stuka pilots were probably going to crow later about how good they were in delivering 'Warheads to Foreheads' with their toss-bombing runs when the tube artillery she was directing was still by far the most cost-effective and efficient means of dropping high-explosives on people.

The radar screen in front of her lit up and a warning sounded as the system detecting that enemy shells were inbound, arcing through the sky from various enemy batteries situated in and around the city.

They were probably doing it the old-fashioned way with old fashioned guns, Charlotte assumed, hitting the button that would automatically signal a warning of incoming artillery fire to friendly forces.

As per standing orders issued by Khan Hallis, as Charlotte thought of him, in the event of the brigade receiving the unwelcome attention of enemy artillery the various battalions on the move immediately widened their spacing and altered speed in order to make themselves more difficult targets and then those battlemechs and vehicles so-equipped launched smoke grenades to obscure themselves from enemy spotters.

Obsolescent or not, towed field artillery and howitzers being assigned a fire mission by men with powerful binoculars and optical rangefinders who were likely positioned up on those hills ahead near the city could still ruin your day. They would also need to be dealt with ASAP because even if their accuracy likely left something to be desired they likely made up for that with sheer numbers of guns.

As the first salvo of enemy shells arrived, either 152mm or 155mm calibre judging from the size of the size of the explosions, Charlotte couldn't really say much for their accuracy, but they definitely had plenty of gun-tubes over there. 'Hit the brakes' she ordered once the computer determined that the Lightning itself was not being specifically targeted as yet, despite broadcasting radar emissions like a red flag to a bull. Stopping was more tactically sound under the circumstances than it might first appear, the counter-battery radar worked while used on the move, but it gave considerably more accurate results if you were stationary than when you were tearing along at over 180 km/h. As the hover vehicle metaphorically screeched to a halt the ballistic computer looked at the data being fed into it by the phased array counter-battery radar and the Inertial Navigation System, it quickly calculated the arc the inbound shells were following in order to determined where they were fired from and then provided those coordinates to the ATOAS so it could crunch the numbers.

With the radar indicating a second salvo inbound, more ragged than the first most likely because some crews weren't as fast and well trained as others, Charlotte requested a counter-battery fire mission via radio and pressed a button that told the ATOAS to tell the batteries of Thor Self-Propelled-Guns following behind exactly where they should start shelling once they were set up and ready.

As the second enemy salvo arrived, a few inferno rounds mixed in with the high explosives this time which would have been a bigger deal if any of them had landed anywhere near a friendly tank, APC or mech, Charlotte was starting to get the impression that either a fair proportion of the enemy gun barrels were worn out or they hadn't been properly made in the first place because they had an apparent CEP larger than a ****** football field which offended her professional sensibilities.

You didn't need a direct hit with a sufficiently large calibre shell to ruin a battlemech's day, a near miss could cause enough damage to cripple a light mech or strip a good chunk of armour off a heavy, but if you couldn't even reliably land your rounds in the same postal code area all you were doing was kicking up dirt or at best occasionally peppering them with shrapnel.

Battletechs and tanks weren't dismounted infantry, the odd sandblasting by shrapnel was something they could ignore.

What they couldn't ignore was that with multiple batteries thumping rounds downrange at them, dozens of guns, eventually they were going to either run out of shells or they were going to get lucky and start achieving hits. Given that the Von Strang family had spent decades laying minefields and digging bunkers and fortification lines it was probably a little too much to hope that they hadn't been stockpiling ammunition as well, so it was best not to count on the former happening first.

You couldn't find shelter or hide on an open plain either. The smoke drifting over the ground made the brigade harder to see and accurately target by artillery spotters but even the thickest of smokescreens was no help if the other side just decided to drop ordnance into it until they started seeing the secondary explosions that indicated success.

No, the answer to Von Strang's artillery was to put it out of action, or at least injure or traumatise their gun-crews to the point where they weren't exactly at their best, hence Charlotte's counter-battery fire-mission request earlier that was already been acted upon.

The Thor SPG had been criticised often over the years. Some people complained that it was overpriced, others that the SLDF should have chosen a tracked design able to deal with a wider range of terrain, but nobody ever said it wasn't a fast and responsive artillery platform that didn't excel at putting shells down range at short notice.

Less than a minute after the fire-mission from the Lightning arrived, and despite the fact they had still been on the move at the time, the Thor batteries were stationary and starting to fire at the coordinates they had been given.

There were considerably fewer gun-tubes on the SLDF side but they were better, more accurate guns crewed by better, more proficient crews, who had been handed more accurately plotted stationary target coordinates.

The Thor SPG's fired two rapid salvos and then quickly relocated to a new position a few hundred metres away, making themselves a harder target for any counter-battery fire that might potentially be heading their way in return. Von Strang didn't seem to be using counter-battery radar of his own, but he still had people on the high ground that could always do it the old-fashioned way, and better safe than sorry.

[Hotpoint]

Part LX - Section 2 of 2

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On a hill overlooking the plain a captain, or rather a 'Lokhagos', who was sticking his head out of a concealed and camouflaged dugout observed the fall of shot as best he could through binoculars. He was directing the heavy guns positioned to the rear via field telephone, correcting the fire, all while hoping that the junior Tetrarch, or Lieutenant, operating the coincidence optical rangefinger from another dugout nearby wasn't quite as much of a drooling idiot as he seemed to be.

The Tetrarch did at least seemed to know where on the gadget to look into, and how to turn the dials on the rangefinder, so he had at least read the manual, but that didn't mean that the numbers he was calling out were actually correct as he sighted on battlemechs in the centre of the enemy formation and called out his range estimates to his superior.

Admittedly the smokescreen down there wouldn't be helping matters, and for every shell that fell way short another landed long, so the failure of the artillery to hit anything so far could just be down to the gunners being crap, or the guns themselves, or maybe the quality-control on the ammunition was poor, but regardless of the reason the guns were yet to achieve anything except craters and the occasional messed-up paintjob.

The person the Lokhagos was talking to on the other end of the line was also a Tetrarch, although as a glorified telephone operator it was a task that might well have been assigned to a corporal in other armies. Von Strang's military would have certainly been considered officer-heavy compared to many equivalent forces , the lack of a decent NCO corps requiring a multitude of junior officers to do the jobs that other ranks would typically do elsewhere. While keeping the masses ignorant, and uneducated to the point the majority were illiterate was an effective means of keeping them under control, you paid a price for it. One of the downsides being that you couldn't trust your average peasant conscript with complicated tasks that required them to read an instruction manual or be able to do math.

Just because the sons and daughters of the ruling classes could read did not necessarily mean that they were all capable of walking and chewing gum at the same time however. As with aristocracies elsewhere there were more than a few with the intellectual capacity of a Skatha Ape with learning difficulties, and because the cream of the crop tended to gravitate to assignments with more kudos, such as mechwarrior or fighter-pilot, the dimmest bulbs were often the ones who often wound up in the infantry.

The Lokhagos himself was in the infantry because he had once made the mistake of yawning during a speech being made by the previous Baron Von Strang rather than because he wasn't the sharpest bayonet in the armoury. All it would have taken was a better night's sleep one evening a decade ago and he could have been sat in a mech cockpit right now, instead of standing in a hole, but destiny does like to play her tricks.

Having a reputation that he had his head screwed on right had yet to earn him an overdue promotion to Tagmatarchis, but it did mean he was considered reliable enough to be trusted with an important job, that job being to hold this hill which anchored the main defence line in front of the city.

Given its tactical importance the engineers had spent years fortifying it with dug-outs, trenches and pill boxes placed all over the hill, although the latter weren't as well-constructed as they could have been given a lack of manpower and heavy construction equipment.

Despite sending in formal complaints about the shoddiness of the pillboxes constructed on the hill in the past the Lokhagos had very recently re-thought his position on the matter because the properly-made ones elsewhere were currently in the process of being systemically blown to hell one after the other by the very accurate and very large air-dropped munitions being thrown at them.

While it was certainly not good for his own troop's morale to watch their compatriots in the fortification lines the hill overlooked getting bombed, at least it wasn't them getting systemically sledgehammered, at least not yet, and watching it happen had at least gotten them to keep their damn heads down. Until the explosions started happening all to many of the less-than-professional levies manning the trenches had been treating the whole thing as an adventure, now they weren't.

Those laser-guided bombs hitting the strong-points on the line holding anti-tank guns and other heavier weapons, given their precision they could only be LGB's, were the reason the Lokhagos himself had chosen to vacate the pill box that he would have usually utilised as a Command-Post in favour of a non-descript foxhole. They might have enough bombs to start hitting the crappier less important bunkers after knocking out the AT guns, but nobody was going to waste such an expensive munition on a hole in the ground, albeit one kitted out with a field telephone so it could be used as an alternate CP.

Yelling and the sound of nearby explosions on the other end of the line indicated that the guns of the SLDF wannabes out there were conducting counter-battery missions, as was to be expected the Lokhagos thought to himself, holding the field telephone further away from his head. Radio communications could be jammed, but cheap copper wires buried underground could not, and the entire network of bunkers that surrounded the city were linked by secure landlines.

Quite why the artillery seemed so surprised and panicked by being shelled back the Lokhagos wasn't certain. They must have known it wasn't so much a possibility as a near certainty when up against an enemy more sophisticated and well-equipped than a few pirates surely? Regardless of the reason, judging by what he could hear through the field telephone, and the slackening of the volume of fire landing on, or rather in the rough vicinity of, the enemy, it might well be a while before they regained their wits, found their balls and got their act back together.

At least he had a few mortar batteries of his own to bring to bear once the enemy got closer, as well as a couple of concealed anti-tank guns and a decent, if not huge, stock of shoulder-launched Inferno missiles. The hill itself was steep enough that it couldn't be easily scaled, and the minefields on the lower slopes would bring any assault to a grinding halt while they tried to clear them making them an easy target.

With another company of men so he could man every firing position, not just some of them, a few more anti-tank guns and mortars and ideally a lance of LRM Carriers as support the Lokhagos was of the opinion he could have thrown back nearly any assault, inflicting heavy casualties on the enemy in the process. As it was, with the men and equipment he did have he was still confident that it wouldn't be his part of the line that collapsed first, and as long as his unit held this ground the approaches to the city were secure.

Just going around the hill, bypassing it on the way towards the city, wasn't tactically sound because the hill wasn't just an ideal position to direct artillery fire from, there also wasn't a mechwarrior or tanker alive that wanted to risk getting shot in the ass. For all the enemy knew there might be hidden batteries of field guns or worse dug-in up here that were only holding their fire because they were waiting for just that kind of perfect target.

The Tetrarch using the range-finder, yelled to catch his attention and when the Lokhagos turned to him to see what the fuss was he could see him pointing and gesticulating at something.

Using his own binoculars the Lokhagos took a look for himself and noting that as the enemy units approached the first section of the static defence lines that stretched out from the bottom of the hill off into the distance, these being minefields and anti-tank ditches, that their tanks which had previously been following behind the mechs were moving forward to take the lead.

As they moved up the tanks started to take fire from a few small gun positions that watched over the minefields. Light recoilless cannon, mortars and the occasional automatic grenade launcher opening up as the defenders showed they had no intention of giving up without a fight.

You had to admire the spirit of the soldiers way down there, the Lokhagos thought appreciatively for a few moments before dozens of black shapes streaking through the sky arrived above them and suddenly the whole area turned into a massive rippling series of small explosions, like a sea of smoke fire that covered a huge area.

That would be Arrow IV cluster munitions then, the Lokhagos realised with a grimace, the smoke trail left by the missiles as they tore through the air towards their target reminding him of LRM's only much bigger. Lostech my ass, he swore to himself as another volley of the things arrived to add to the mayhem.

Those submunitions might not have enough of a warhead to punch through a half-decently made pillbox but the psychological effect of being underneath all that steel rain, hundreds or even thousands of grenade-sized charges exploding all around you, was bound to throw you off your game.

The tanks rolled closer to the defence line, a number of battlemechs now moving up with them to provide additional fire support if needed, and as they got closer the Lokhagos was able to get a better look.

Von Luckner heavy tanks, a seventy-five ton favourite of the SLDF, and you had to wonder if someone had maybe thought it would be funny to send Von Luckner to fight Von Strang the Lokhagos considered as he noticed something very funny about them.

As they neared the minefields some kind of mechanical contraption fitted to the front of each seemed to unfold and then, once fully deployed, the tanks drove right into the minefields preceded by a massive dust cloud being beaten up from the ground in front of them.

'You've got to love the classics" the Lokhagos muttered to himself as he realised that the enemy had retrofitted mine-flails to the Von Luckner tanks so they could just brute-force their way through rather than mess about with mine-detectors and combat engineers.

The flails would set off most of the mines they hit, and fling others clear out of the way. While being inside those tanks when those mines went off just ahead of them would be 'exciting' to say the least, as long as those Von Luckner crews could carry out their job without being shot at by anti-tank guns and artillery it would only be a matter of time before the line was breeched.

More tanks were rolling up to follow now, as the battlemechs providing cover fire lit up any bunker that tried to do anything about it with barrages of autocannon rounds and LRMs, the explosive ammunition more likely to keep heads down than directed-energy weapons. The newly arrived second group of tanks appeared to be the slightly smaller and less well-armoured Manticore, and although they seemed to lack mine flails they did look to be fitted with bulldozer blades instead.

Pummel your way through the minefield, fill up the tank traps with dirt, and just keep on going. It wasn't exactly sophisticated but if you had air supremacy and your artillery was stopping theirs from interfering then why not?

There was no way those tanks were making it up this hill though, the Lokhagos thought to himself with relief, the slope was too steep. This wasn't therefore a disaster by any means, merely a setback, it wasn't like the minefields and ditches down there were the linchpin for the defence of Amaris City, just a means to slow the enemy down. For the enemy to proceed safely they still needed to oust him from this position in order to be able to move forward with their flank and rear secure and the terrain was not in their favour.

"Incoming!" someone yelled and the Lokhagos along with everyone else under his command ducked down as deep into their trenches and foxholes as they could.

If watching somebody else get hit by Arrow IV cluster had been disconcerting the Lokhagos quickly learned that being under it yourself was even worse as it seemed like the whole side of the hill started exploding.

Much larger explosions could be heard amidst the detonation of myriad sub-munitions, Thumper shells? Aerial bombs? Regular Arrow IV missiles perhaps? But it was the damn cluster raining down that was worse. It seemed to go on for an eternity and when it finally ended the Lokhagos gingerly stuck his head back out of his hole to look around.

"Christ" he swore, looking at the cratered moonscape.

"Incoming!" another voice yelled and the Lokhagos dropped down into his foxhole again gritting his teeth as another wave of Arrow IV cluster plastered the hill for what seemed like hours but was likely not even a couple of minutes.

After the submunitions finally stopped falling it became apparent that at least one of the missiles had been filled with leaflets, not HE charges, and as they drifted down one landed close enough for the Lokhagos to reach out and snatch it up.

"If you lay down your arms you will not be harmed. We guarantee that all those who surrender will receive all the rights and protections due to them as Prisoners of War according to the terms of the Ares Conventions" it said on one side of the leaflet.

Turning it over it to the other side however the leaflet also said, "If you don't surrender It'll be Air-Burst Shrapnel, Inferno Bombs, and Fuel-Air-Explosives next. Would Karl Von Strang die for you?" it asked rhetorically, which wasn't quite as magnanimous in tone but might sway a few more opinions.

Watching a few of his men also emerging from their trenches to pick up some of the leaflets the Lokhagos frowned. "If those conscripts could read they'd be very upset" he correctly surmised.


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Note from the Author:

The Niops SLDF is a great believer in artillery, far more so than the clans generally, and they have little or no objection to using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. The Thor SPG is well suited to counter-battery work (it's accurate, can be aimed and brought into action quickly and can rapidly relocate). Converting a speedy Lightning to carry  a counter-battery-radar proved to be a winner during training exercises back on Niops VII.

Charlene Hammerick, AKA Charley Martel continues the traditions of her bloodname by being a gunner. Choosing to serve in the artillery may end up leaving you deaf but when the big guns speak everyone else listens. If they need to be told twice you can always bring up the Vali to repeat yourself with (the Arrow IV system is lostech in the Inner Sphere, by periphery standards it's 'Wrath of an Angry God' level firepower).

Adding a mine flail to a tank in order to deal with minefields doesn't seem to be done much, if at all, in Battletech but it's a great low-tech solution to the problem (if your flail tanks aren't under heavy fire). Bulldozers (or tanks fitted with bulldozer blades) are effective against tank traps too.

The Coincidence Rangefinders being used by Von Strang's troops are also low-tech, but on the plus side they can't be jammed (or electronically detected in use, unlike laser-rangefinders for example).

Von Strang's Guard Division is going to have to come out and play because his static defences aren't holding up as well as he thought they would.

[DragonKhan55]

"We've been breeding them" Franklin replied. "The difficulty is working out which ones are male and which are female" he replied. "We tried it with the Atlas as well but unfortunately those things are the Giant Panda Bears of mechs" he continued deadpan. "The shame of it is the Jagermech breeds like rabbits but who the hell wants one of those?" he asked rhetorically, audibly stifling laughter.

Clearly you're doing it wrong! An Atlas does not want to mate with another Atlas - the face is a massive turnoff! Find a cute Banshee to do it with. Or if the Atlas wants a more "bad boy" vibe, maybe a Thug?

[PsihoKekec]

Fun thing about mine flails, after the vehicle stops, it's a good idea to have EOD guys check the surface of the vehicle before the crew gets out. It's one of the reason why tanks use either mine plows or mine rollers when breaching the minefields, while mine flails are used on specialist vehicles for actual demining.

[Cannonshop]

Clearly you're doing it wrong! An Atlas does not want to mate with another Atlas - the face is a massive turnoff! Find a cute Banshee to do it with. Or if the Atlas wants a more "bad boy" vibe, maybe a Thug?

and the real perverts of the breed go after a ride on a Goliath, but that hardly happens outside the Sol system...

[Daryk]

Excellent start to the battle!  It'll get extra interesting once Von Strang's mobile units get involved... ;)

[nerd]

Artillery adds dignity what would otherwise be a vulgar brawl.

[David CGB]

Artillery adds dignity what would otherwise be a vulgar brawl.

Yes, yes it does!

[PsihoKekec]

The majority of battle participants would disagree, but nobody ever asks the common soldiers anything.

[worktroll]

1. In the beginning there was chaos and the chaos was the Infantry, for the Infantry was alone.
2. And fear was with the Infantry and they cried unto the Lord saying, "Lord, save us for we are afraid."
3. And the Lord heard their grunts and set some of the Infantry on beasts of burden and these he called Cavalry, and the Cavalry became Armour.
4. And when the Lord had seen what he had done he laughed saying, "Well, you can't win them all."
5. The Infantry and the Armour again cried out to the Lord saying, "Lord, save us for we are afraid." And the Lord heard their cried and decided to end their weeping.
6. And the Lord said unto them, "Lo and behold, I send you a race of men noble in heart and spirit." And the Lord created the Gunners.
7. And the Lord said unto the Infantry and Armour, "When it is dark, the Gunners shall light your way."
8. And when you need smoke, there shall be smoke, and when you need HE, WP, H & I and counter-battery fire, all this ye shall have."
9. And the Lord gave the Gunners big guns and field guns, and the Infantry and Armour were jealous for they had naught.
10. And the Infantry cried out saying, "Lord, thou hast created the Infantry as Queen of Battles, but now thou hast made the Gunners King of Battles and well knowest thou what the King does to the Queen."
11. And the Lord replied, "Right on!"
12. And the Lord gave unto the Artillery rockets and missiles and, best of all, nukes. And when the Infantry and Armour saw this they fell to their knees in wonder saying, "Surely God is on the side of the greatest - THE GUNNERS."
13. And the Lord sayeth, "You got that right."

Now abideth Infantry, Armour, and Artillery; but the greatest of these is..."Artillery".

[Cannonshop]

1. In the beginning there was chaos and the chaos was the Infantry, for the Infantry was alone.
2. And fear was with the Infantry and they cried unto the Lord saying, "Lord, save us for we are afraid."
3. And the Lord heard their grunts and set some of the Infantry on beasts of burden and these he called Cavalry, and the Cavalry became Armour.
4. And when the Lord had seen what he had done he laughed saying, "Well, you can't win them all."
5. The Infantry and the Armour again cried out to the Lord saying, "Lord, save us for we are afraid." And the Lord heard their cried and decided to end their weeping.
6. And the Lord said unto them, "Lo and behold, I send you a race of men noble in heart and spirit." And the Lord created the Gunners.
7. And the Lord said unto the Infantry and Armour, "When it is dark, the Gunners shall light your way."
8. And when you need smoke, there shall be smoke, and when you need HE, WP, H & I and counter-battery fire, all this ye shall have."
9. And the Lord gave the Gunners big guns and field guns, and the Infantry and Armour were jealous for they had naught.
10. And the Infantry cried out saying, "Lord, thou hast created the Infantry as Queen of Battles, but now thou hast made the Gunners King of Battles and well knowest thou what the King does to the Queen."
11. And the Lord replied, "Right on!"
12. And the Lord gave unto the Artillery rockets and missiles and, best of all, nukes. And when the Infantry and Armour saw this they fell to their knees in wonder saying, "Surely God is on the side of the greatest - THE GUNNERS."
13. And the Lord sayeth, "You got that right."

Now abideth Infantry, Armour, and Artillery; but the greatest of these is..."Artillery".

brings a tear to the eye...right there, next to the glass shards...

[DragonKhan55]

1. In the beginning there was chaos and the chaos was the Infantry, for the Infantry was alone.
2. And fear was with the Infantry and they cried unto the Lord saying, "Lord, save us for we are afraid."
3. And the Lord heard their grunts and set some of the Infantry on beasts of burden and these he called Cavalry, and the Cavalry became Armour.
4. And when the Lord had seen what he had done he laughed saying, "Well, you can't win them all."
5. The Infantry and the Armour again cried out to the Lord saying, "Lord, save us for we are afraid." And the Lord heard their cried and decided to end their weeping.
6. And the Lord said unto them, "Lo and behold, I send you a race of men noble in heart and spirit." And the Lord created the Gunners.
7. And the Lord said unto the Infantry and Armour, "When it is dark, the Gunners shall light your way."
8. And when you need smoke, there shall be smoke, and when you need HE, WP, H & I and counter-battery fire, all this ye shall have."
9. And the Lord gave the Gunners big guns and field guns, and the Infantry and Armour were jealous for they had naught.
10. And the Infantry cried out saying, "Lord, thou hast created the Infantry as Queen of Battles, but now thou hast made the Gunners King of Battles and well knowest thou what the King does to the Queen."
11. And the Lord replied, "Right on!"
12. And the Lord gave unto the Artillery rockets and missiles and, best of all, nukes. And when the Infantry and Armour saw this they fell to their knees in wonder saying, "Surely God is on the side of the greatest - THE GUNNERS."
13. And the Lord sayeth, "You got that right."

Now abideth Infantry, Armour, and Artillery; but the greatest of these is..."Artillery".

14. And the naval officers sayeth "aww, look at them playing with their popguns. It is so cute when the children play at war."
15. And the pilots sayeth "ground and waterbound fools, the lot of them. Why limit yourself when you can carry 10 tons of explosives at Mach 1?"
16. And the Warship officers sayeth "I kills it with my McKennas."

[lowrolling]

All of this makes me yearn for the not so good feeling of time on target.

[DOC_Agren]

Here comes the Rain again,
Falling on our enemies Head.

[crestrunner]

For what they are about to receive, we give thanks.

Fire.

 

[Minchandre]

There's a saying in Israel, "When infantry make mistakes, infantry suffer. When artillery make mistakes, infantry suffer "

[worktroll]

Are all infantry called Zathras, by any chance?

[Hotpoint]

Part LXI - Section 1 of 2

----------

"It would not be far from the truth to call their drills bloodless battles, their battles bloody drills."

Flavius Josephus, 'The Jewish War', 75 CE

----------

Outskirts of Amaris City – Von Strang's World – 2844

If you were to ask a layman to suggest what the most humane weapon developed by mankind was it was likely that very few would suggest the flamethrower but ironically you could make a very good case for that being the case.

Clearly setting people on fire was not a nice thing to do, and being the one actually set alight would monumentally suck, but if used in the correct manner flamethrowers, or rather the threat of them, can win battles without the need to actually harm anyone at all.

Harm them physically that is, the long-term psychological damage that might still be incurred was another matter.

It all came down to the flamethrower, or the modern flamer, being so pants-wettingly terrifying that it could readily induce an soldier that was so brave that in other circumstances they would willingly take on a lance of assault mechs armed only with a sharp stick to immediately turn tail and run.

Evolutionary psychologists would suggest that it was because fear of fire grabs you firmly by your distant furry ancestors, and when hundreds of millions of years of deeply embedded instinct come up against the higher functions of the human brain, those being the parts capable of reason and self-control that evolved far more recently, instinct puts reason in a choke-hold and takes over.

As early as the Second World War on Terra it was discovered that you could easily get the occupants of an enemy dug-out or pill-box to vacate it by rolling up to it in a tank carrying a flamethrower and sending out a massive jet of burning fuel, not directly at the position but right beside it so those inside could not only see and hear the flame but actually feel the heat coming off it.

Most people took the hint, it wasn't exactly a subtle threat after all, and what tended to happen immediately was the waving of a white flag or the sight of the bunker inhabitants fleeing out the back in a state of utter panic.

If they were made of sterner stuff than most, or were dumb as rocks, they would stay in place and the next burst of flame would be played all over the bunker. Burning fuel would then enter through the gun slits and make them re-think their decision not to give up for the split second before they found themselves either on fire or gasping for oxygen. Either way they would no longer be capable of objectively considering their life choices up until that valuable teaching moment, valuable for other people that is, not for them, it was a bit late at that point for them.

The flamers carried by battlemechs didn't work in quite the same way as twentieth century flamethrowers, instead of burning petrochemicals they projected a jet of superheated plasma, one which was hot enough to melt lead at close range, but they were equally as horrifying.

If Mitch Johnson and his fellow mercenaries had been wondering till now why Franklin's people had brought along so many Hussar light mechs. Sure they were great scouts, and were maybe okay for hit-and-run tactics using their speed and that ER Large Laser to dictate the engagement, but they weren't normally good for much else.

It all made a lot more sense when he watched them moving up to clear bunkers and trenches however, the Blackhearts having moved up to take advantage of the gap in the minefield the flail and dozer blade equipped SLDF tanks had opened up. It looked like Niops had added flamers to all their Hussar lights for anti-infantry work and for clearing out entrenched positions and pillboxes.

Striding along, sending out jets of flame as they stomped through the increasing shattered defence lines, the ungainly looking hunched-forward Hussar, with its funny little arm arrangement at the front, certainly looked a great deal more intimidating, and a lot less goofy, when they were breathing fire.

Mixed in with Talon lights as support, fast, punchy little mechs mounting ERPPC's, and with the occasional Mongoose, the Hussar mechs looked to be doing good work in getting Von Strang's soldiers to reconsider their loyalty to their Liege Lord, flamers will do that. Johnson was also gratified that the Niops people weren't the psychopathic type who didn't bother with warning blasts to induce surrender before immolating anyone. The Blackhearts were known to use flamers as well, most units did, but only an ****** used them nonchalantly like they would less horrific weapons.

If some ground-pounder son-of-a-bitch had just fired an Inferno Missile at your mech then you were free to incinerate the guy without a second thought of course, that was just them receiving their just desserts for playing with fire first.

During the Amaris War the Rim Worlds Republic had responded to criticism of their wholesale use of flamers and Inferno Missiles by saying the SLDF used them too. This was true, however it skipped over the way they were used.

The likes of Gunthar Von Strang and Antilos Legos seemingly revelled in the use of Firestarter mechs and Ignis tanks against civilians as well as military targets, and they certainly didn't used to bother much with warning shots. For that matter the SLDF wasn't the one that came up with the WTH-0 model Whitworth medium mech, the so-called 'Warcrime Whitworth', developed expressly for the purpose of quickly and efficiently burning down cities. One of those could now be found in a museum on Niops VII after being captured from the Blood Rain supposedly, it wasn't a machine that the Niops SLDF or militia had any desire to press into service themselves, unlike captured Jackrabbit lights for example, the very name of the WTH-0 was a curse.

Presumably they had found the weight for the flamer by removing some armour, Johnson reasoned watching as a squad of enemy infantry that had been manning a trench waved a white flag at a Hussar looming over them. At least that was a non-totally-insane option if you were lucky enough to operate the upgraded HSR-200-Db 'Royal' model with its five-and-half tons of Ferro-Fibrous plate, rather than the distinctly fragile original 200-D, but he might have gone another way himself.

Inside the Hussar Mitch Johnson was currently checking out from a distance, mechwarrior Craig Gao was wishing that they hadn't dismounted the pair of arm-mounted machine-guns his HSR-250-Dn would usually mount for dealing with infantry in addition to the flamer. While it would raise fewer questions as to how Niops had managed to fit that much extra firepower into the machine, being able to rattle off a burst from an MG to keep the POW's honest would have come in handy right now.

Hopefully merely the threat of the flamer would be enough until some friendly infantry arrived to take them off his hands, there was supposedly a APC full of grunts from the Blackhearts enroute, but he prayed none of the prisoners were stupid enough to make a break for it, or worse commit perfidy by throwing a concealed grenade at him or something, because he really didn't want to char-broil these poor bastards.

According to intelligence the better educated and more loyalist elements of the local military could all be found in the so-called 'Guard Division', which was nowhere near as large as its title made it out to be, in fact even with the militia levees included Karl Von Strang could barely raise a brigade.

The conscripted peasants that formed the bulk of the opposition were trained and drilled just enough to be able to perform relatively basic military skills such as load and fire a rifle, throw grenades, load a shell into the breech of a cannon, and maybe use a shoulder-launched SRM. They were perfectly capable of manning a trench or pillbox that was protected by mines and barbed wire and some of them had proven surprisingly adept at using low-tech recoilless anti-tank guns and mortars to engage the lead elements of the brigade attacking them as they got into range.

What they were not however was disciplined, experienced or professional enough to handle it too well when their reward for managing to blow some of the armour off an approaching mech or tank was an absolute shitstorm of autocannon, LRM, directed-energy weapon and the occasional gauss-rifle slug coming back the other way.

Pundits less versed in military matters might assume that the swiftness of the collapse of the line of defence between the Plain of the Rim Worlds Republic and Amaris City indicated that they were a half-assed sham of a well-designed system of fortifications manned by incompetent officers leading ill-trained rabble, but Mitch Johnson would contend otherwise.

Quickly taking out the larger bunkers without laser-guided-bombs would have been a task in itself for a less well-equipped force than Franklin had at his disposal. Moreover, the minefields and anti-tank ditches were well placed and if the enemy artillery hadn't been suppressed by counter-battery fire the holes ploughed through them by the flail and bulldozer tanks would have been a choke-point ripe to get shellacked by barrages of high-explosive shells as soon as any units tried to push through. As for the enemy troops, the fact that many of them were still putting up a fight indicated they weren't hopelessly inept, although they clearly lacked the numbers to fully man every position, and under other circumstances with artillery and air support, and without LGB's, Copperheads and whatever crashing down on their heavy weapon emplacements then cracking their lines would have represented a very different problem.

For one thing, with large-calibre anti-tank guns acting as overwatch you wouldn't be seeing thinly-armoured light mechs so casually strolling towards trenches full of infantry in order to scare the crap out of them with massive plumes of fire.

Regarding the people on his own side, as well as noting with interest the flamers carried by the Hussar lights being used by the Niops people, Mitch Johnson would also have to give them ten-out-of-ten for just how fast they reacted to new threats, how well they fired on the move, and their frankly nearly eerie ability to quickly and ruthlessly concentrate their fire in order to deal with the appearance of a sudden threat.

Occasionally a hitherto ignored, or occasionally well-camouflaged and until then unspotted, pillbox or gun-pit would open up with whatever weaponry it housed, a burst from a heavy machine-gun, a few rounds from an automatic grenade launcher, a shell from a recoilless cannon or whatever being fired at the nearest SLDF unit. As soon as that happened it seemed like every tank and mech with line-of-sight would immediately fire back, delivering a deluge of suppressive and/or destructive fire to silence the enemy position.

A large calibre coup de grâce delivered by an AC/20 just to make sure it stayed silent tended to follow, unless the occupants came out waving a white flag that is, the whole brief episode likely dissuading the people in the next bunker trying their luck as well.

All those command mechs that were sprinkled into the SLDF formations was certainly a factor in how smooth and coordinated they were, certainly a lot slicker than the Taurian regiments that Mitch Johnson had the most experience of watching in action. Even putting aside Brigadier-General Franklin calling the shots from his Cyclops, not to mention the Mongoose lights directing their scout companies, the Niops formations were practically awash with Wolverine mediums, Marauder and Black Knight heavies and Highlander assaults, all presumably leading their own associated units.

It wasn't that the better comms systems and cockpit tactical displays to be found in those battlemechs intended to be used by unit commanders automatically turned the person sat in the cockpit into Von Clausewitz or Sun Tzu, you still needed the individual in the chair to actually know their trade, but thinning out the fog-of-war a little and being able to issue orders and direct your troops more easily certainly helped.

It was more than that though, Johnson decided, analysing how they operated. It was if they had been relentlessly, even perhaps obsessively training to fight this way for years on end. The way they singled out a target for at least an entire lance to light up, ideally a whole company, swiftly dealt with it then moved onto the next almost made you think that they regarded any other method as heretical or something.

It would be nigh impossible to know who actually did the most damage or dealt the killing blow if you did it that way, not something that a lot of mechwarriors who were, all too often, fixated on running up a tally of personal kills they could paint on their machine would want.

Asking Brigadier-General Franklin later, mostly tongue-in-cheek, how the Niops SLDF had managed to near utterly purge their usual tendency towards being glory-hounds from their mechwarriors, the reply he got only raised more serious questions. Being told by Franklin that it, 'Takes about ten-to-fifteen years of rigid discipline and focused training depending on the individual', Johnson's query as to how exactly that worked given that most of the SLDF mechwarriors on the mission were barely into their mid-twenties, Franklin's rhetorical observation in response that, 'Maybe the Boy Scouts aren't as hard-core where you come from as they are on Niops?' largely failed to satisfy Jonhson's curiosity.

There was a definite air of Niops treating this as a live-fire exercise as well, one in which they wanted to try out a few tactics and weapons, give their people some battle experience and perhaps even experiment a little using various techniques.

After the majority of the various enemy positions in the area that had been equipped with long-range anti-tank guns had been cleared out, a couple of relatively thin-skinned hover-vehicles bearing Niops markings had shot forward to join the leading units of the advance, these being the TAG-equipped Zephyr.

Johnson had expected them to start marking targets for more air-dropped laser-guided-bombs, or perhaps the homing versions of the Arrow IV missile, but as the Zephyr crews started tagging a few specific strong-points for destruction the projectiles that fell from the sky right on top of the targets were clearly artillery shells. The volume of incoming enemy artillery fire had dropped off drastically almost as soon as the counter-battery duel began and was not so intermittent that Franklin must have felt it was safe to pull at least one battery of Thor SPG's off the task of keeping Karl Von Strang's guns off their back.

The shells the Thor SPG's now working in conjunction with the Zephyr spotters were firing were very expensive, very accurate ones, Copperhead guided munitions.

Seriously, where do they get these wonderful toys, Mitch Johnson asked himself as Niops threw irreplaceable lostech at primitive concrete pillboxes?

Admittedly a copperhead shell from a Thor wasn't quite as pricy as an Arrow IV homing missile would have been, so using them to crack open small bunkers wasn't as profligate a tactic as Franklin could have chosen, but as a mercenary with an eye on the financial bottom line it still made Mitch Johnson wince to see so much priceless ordnance being used that way.

Given that this entire operation was likely Niops sending a message to both the Inner Sphere and Near Periphery that it had both the ability to project power a long way from home, and possessed sufficient stockpiles of advanced military hardware that it could afford to waste some of it on the likes of Karl Von Strang, the reasoning to their spendthrift manner was likely calculated in a currency other than, well, currency.

It helped that painting the Von Strang dynasty as pantomime villains, one prime to be put to the sword by the noble hero, was an easy sell. The last remnant of the Star League dispatching troops from an SLDF division, one that was still serving loyally under the Cameron Star having never lowered its colours, all the way to the other side of the Inner Sphere in order to put an end to the last self-professed Amaris loyalists to be found anywhere was pure propaganda gold.

Barring divine intervention, or perhaps diabolic rather, there was no way that Karl Von Strang was going to come out the other side ruling this world. If he did however there was at least one thing he could point to for his own propaganda efforts that being that stubborn-as-hell captain up on that hill yonder, although he had of course referred to himself as 'Lokhagos' Dubaruk.

After being told that if he didn't surrender the hill he was defending it would be obliterated with thermobarics and every other nasty munition the SLDF could throw at it bar tactical nukes, Dubaruk had gotten on the radio and announced he had ordered his men to withdraw from the position via the reverse slope, out of line-of-sight of the advancing Niops ground forces but SLDF observers in the air could nevertheless easily confirm their departure.

He himself however was going to stay on the hill and declared that he would continue to direct artillery fire from up there until he either was blown to hell by aviation or artillery, or else someone came up there personally to shoot it out with him. It was his hill on his planet and he was damned if he was going to let some Inner Sphere bastard take it without a fight, even if he didn't want to get his men killed for nothing.

Now he might have been thinking that the SLDF wasn't going to unleash massive amounts of very expensive ordnance just to kill one guy, especially given that it wasn't like his own artillery was being all that effective by that point anyway, but you just had to respect his balls.

He was still up there now. Brigadier-General Franklin had a couple of aerospace fighters strafe the hill, telling the stubborn enemy captain it was his final warning on the radio to which Dubaruk responded his desire that Franklin should, 'kindly go attempt parthenogenesis', his exact words.

Dubaruk definitely had guts and was probably good at scrabble too, Colonel Mitch Johnson decided, not that having an unusually large vocabulary on Von Strang's World was nearly as impressive as it would be in other places where being able to read and write wasn't mostly the preserve of the wealthy and powerful few. Scrabble was big in parts of the Taurian Concordat, mainly because they liked to laud it over their supposedly 'more sophisticated' Inner Sphere neighbours that when it came to literacy rates they had the Capellan Confederation, and more importantly the Federated Suns, beat hollow.

Not knowing how Franklin was planning on handling it from here Johnson got on the command frequency and offered to send a few 'specialists' up the hill to deal with the intractable Lokhagos in a less destructive and financially extravagant fashion than carpet-bombing. If it turned out there were more people still concealed up there, or if Dubaruk's people currently abandoning the hill tried to return, the Blackheart squad would call for assistance, otherwise the stubborn hold-out would be removed from the hill in either plastic cuffs or a body bag.

Franklin accepted the proposal and Johnson dispatched a team, requesting a few smoke shells to be thrown at the hill to obscure their approach. If the slopes and the approaches to the hill had still been covered by machine-gun nests, ones likely manned by alert personnel, attempting to get anybody up there would have been unacceptably risky but if he was really alone up there then sneaking up on Dubaruk and knocking the guy on the head was eminently doable for well-trained SpecOps troops.

As an aside, and for some reason Colonel Johnson was unaware of, but idly wondered about occasionally during the long journey back to Niops, Franklin's son in particular found the parthenogenesis line absolutely hysterical, still laughing uproariously about it months later whenever it was brought up.

Methodically securing his flanks, and not wishing to leave any enemy formations still capable of taking the field behind him, Franklin had no intention of rushing his brigade forward to meet Von Strang and his Guard Division. Opting against a rapid, and dramatic, Thunder-Run of concentrated heavy metal into the capital at speed, instead he had his mechwarriors and tankers roll up the defence lines in both directions to expand the breech and while aerospace fighters established an unchallenged CAP above he prepared for a slow, careful advance.

Even with the outer defences broken there were still scattered strong-points between them and the city a few kilometres further on, the Von Strang's had some grasp of the principle of defence-in-depth and hadn't created a system that would burst like a balloon once you punched a hole in the outside. Unfortunately for the defenders it seemed like they just didn't have the modern weaponry or numbers of personnel to get the best value out of what was actually a well-designed system of fortifications, more importantly perhaps they were also up against an attacking force that was awash with the sort of high-tech equipment needed to smash through it.

A brigade from the Lyran Commonwealth Armed Forces trying to do what Niops was would have been beating their head against a wall and would have likely incurred heavy casualties doing so. Indeed, at some point they would have likely either decided to give up and go home or else they would break out the tactical nukes.

Not that the LCAF was averse to absorbing losses of men and particularly materiel, they had an industrial depth the other Successor States could only dream of, it would simply be a case of the rewards for victory being grossly outweighed by the cost in treasure required to achieve them.

[Hotpoint]

Part LXI - Section 2 of 2

----------

Thanks to spending some time talking to Karl Von Strang during his extremely productive undercover mission, an undertaking Brigadier-General Franklin had declared was worth every penny of the bonus payment he was awarding for its success, Mitch Johnson believed had a good handle on the baron's thinking on the matters of maintaining his planet's independence, and more importantly his own position.

Even with the diamond mines conquering Von Strang's World simply wasn't worth how much blood and treasure you would have to expend in order to conquer the place. From Nico Von Strang onwards the core strategic objective of the Barony of Strang had been to balance how much of a pain-in-the-ass they were to House Steiner against how much the Archon was willing to spend to remedy the situation.

A bunch of heavily armed astronomy nerds with delusions of grandeur, access to high-tech weaponry and a credit card with no spending limit turning up instead and throwing priceless lostech at them had never really been considered as a likely scenario.

The return of the Star League Defence Force had been considered as a possibility by Nico Von Strang and his successors, the real one under Aleksandr Kerensky not these mere remnants knocking at the door now, but the firepower Kerensky could bring-to-bear was so overwhelming that it was deemed pointless to plan to resist. Maybe after another couple of hundred years of digging in, with the fortifications expanded in number and linked by underground tunnels they could give even a divisional sized combined-arms force a bloody nose, but that was something for a future baron to work on.

Colonel Bolton advocated a more audacious blitzkrieg-like punch right through to Von Strang's Palace to finish this quickly, his Rangers continuing to follow the fast-moving, hard-hitting, go straight-for-the-throat, tactical doctrine of the SLDF Hussar regiment they descended from, but he wasn't in command and Franklin wanted to do this by the numbers.

Mitch Johnson's own instincts sided largely with Bolton, the Blackhearts as a special-forces orientated regiment believed wholeheartedly in the value of sowing chaos and confusion amongst the enemy, and launched at the right time a rapid, balls-to-the-wall advance against a likely shaken enemy could easily lead to a cascading collapse in their morale and command cohesion. Since Franklin was the one signing off on the paycheques however, he was the one that got to make the final call, so slow-and-steady it was.

Given the nature of some of the terrain nearer the city you could argue that a certain amount of prudence was warranted perhaps, even if you thought Franklin was being more cautious than the tactical situation would suggest was really required. As the flat plain gave way to rockier, more broken ground, much of it crisscrossed by steep-sided valleys ideal for ambushes, even the most gung-ho of commanders would be loath to simply charge ahead heedlessly.

For one thing bringing the sides of those valleys down with demolition charges to block certain routes, or even to bring thousands of tons of rock down right on top of the force attempting to push on through, was all too obvious a tactic.

This was one of those situations where mechs equipped with jump-jets really came into their own, so when the brigade got moving again the various light scout mechs leading the way were reinforced by a company of Wolverine, Dervish and Griffin mediums plus several platoons of jump infantry.

Being able to leap small buildings in a single bound did not make jump infantry supermen, in fact because they couldn't carry much in the way of ammunition for support weapons such as light mortars or shoulder-launched SRM's with them they were even less of a threat to armoured units than normal infantry was, but they were extremely mobile and in terrain like this, or in urban warfare, they were a nice trick to have up your sleeve.

Karl Von Strang's own infantry lacked such fancy toys as jet-packs, and they certainly weren't carrying first-rate personal weaponry like the Mauser 960 Assault System that Niops issued their grunts, but it was really the training as much as the equipment that told as the SLDF gradually forced their way through a series of attempted ambuscades and booby traps.

Having a platoon of jump infantry suddenly land behind your carefully laid ambush and start shooting you in the ass, while meanwhile a Dervish jumped up to a high vantage point and starting flinging LRM's at you from an unexpected direction was bad for unit morale. As a result, more than a couple of platoons of illiterate peasant conscripts armed with Inferno launchers who had been lying in wait for a mech to march around a blind corner into view threw down their arms almost immediately.

With both air and long-range artillery support largely unavailable because of the local geography the Dervish in particular was proving a godsend to the advancing columns. Belaying its undeservingly poor reputation as merely the poor man's Archer, it not only brought missile fire down on enemy positions but also lobbed LRM's equipped with smoke-warheads to make life difficult for the men trying to hold the valleys against the SLDF advance. Lacking the various electronic sensors equipped on mechs, or even many of the Infra-Red goggles used by well-equipped troops, Von Strang's infantry were put at a serious disadvantage by the smoke which only served to make their situation even more untenable.

Some of them even mistook the billowing smoke clouds for poison gas and despite having been issued respirators, use of chemical weapons was hardly unheard of during the mass slaughters of the early Succession Wars after all, they lacked enough faith in the gas mask filters to risk it. Stories of nerve agents like mists formed of tiny droplets that only needed to touch your skin to kill you, you didn't even need to breathe the crap in, certainly didn't help matters.

Nico Von Strang, the first baron, had stockpiled some basic chemical weapons decades before, small stocks of mustard and phosgene gas shells for the artillery still in fact existed, but knowing that the Lyran Commonwealth and most everyone else had vast stocks of far superior poison gasses in their inventories, as well nuclear weapons and some real nasties like genetically engineered plagues, the Barony of Strang had no intention of ever using WMD first. Their entire game-plan was predicated on making taking the capital prohibitively costly for an aggressor and Neuroxin, or good old-fashioned GB Sarin and VX, was cheaper than mechs.

Not that the Niops forces currently marching against Karl Von Strang and his regime would need to retaliate in kind, they could simply have their warship crater the whole area with an orbital bombardment that wouldn't even leave behind any nasty radiation or traces of poison gas behind, and Von Strang knew it as he looked over a large map spread over a table displaying the current tactical situation. Small plastic models of tanks and battlemechs were being pushed around the map by a junior officer as updated reports flowed in to headquarters, at least the telephone lines were still working, and it didn't look good to say the least.

Why the hell they had hauled their accursed Terran Hegemony loyalist asses all this way just to beat up on him was still an utter mystery to the ruling baron. Didn't they have better things to do closer to home, he asked himself, trying to remain passive as more and more bad news arrived?

The latest unwelcome intelligence was that proposed counter-attack by a pair of tank companies utilising a secret route through the hills would have to be cancelled because the enemy had begun protecting their flanks by scattering fields of artillery-delivered mines. I mean FASCAM of all things for God's sake! Who still used that anymore?

If it had been the Lyrans hammering at his door it would have at least made some sense. Irritating House Steiner as much as was practically possible, given available resources and the need not to push them too far, was almost as much of the core identity of the Barony of Strang, as was venerating the Rim Worlds Republic and the name of Stefan Amaris, but this was a ridiculous amount of effort for Niops to go to for an act of political symbolism.

It wasn't like they could logistically support a colony, or even an independent vassal state this many jumps away from where they lived. What were they planning to do? Mount his head on a spike, raise some flags, get drunk at a victory celebration and then just piss off back to Niops?

In the end it probably didn't matter why they were here, what mattered was that they were and that they were beating seven shades out of his militia.

Since his peasant conscripts were only ever intended to wear down an invader by holding as long as they could, softening them up for a counter-attack by the inordinately better trained and equipped professionals of the Guard Division, it wasn't like Karl Von Strang was shocked that their line collapsed when enough pressure was exerted against it. It was how fast it had happened and the failure of his aerospace and artillery to cause meaningful damage to the enemy before the Levée en masse broke that was the problem.

Hopefully the somewhat better trained garrison troops that manned the ring of bunkers that surrounded the city itself would do better, Von Strang considered. More like a full-time gendarmerie than fully-fledged soldiers, they spent most of their time maintaining order and suppressing discontent, rather than training for war, but they were volunteers rather than conscripted rabble, and they were manning heavy weaponry that wouldn't have been considered obsolete before the Age of War.

While many of the anti-tank guns the enemy had encountered until now were primitive single-shot rifled cannon, field pieces of a design the Terran Alliance would have sneered at in its later years, all those defending the city itself were burst-fire autocannon types better suited to dealing with more modern ablative armour. Certainly the flak towers that dotted the city with their mix of dual AC/5 and quad AC/2 anti-aircraft mounts had seemingly done good work in keeping the invaders airpower away and there was no reason to suppose the turrets that surrounded the capital meant to take on ground targets would fair much worse.

Only a few years after the founding of the Barony its founder, Nico Von Strang, had managed to obtain a surprisingly large number of gun turrets for Merkava Mk. VIII tanks from Vannes, a system situated two jumps away where the Rim Worlds Republic had once manufactured armoured vehicles. The people there had uncovered an old cache of partially assembled Merkava tanks not long after the SLDF followed Kerensky out into the void, and although they didn't have the hulls or fusion powerplants to go with the turrets, making the find not nearly as valuable as it would have been otherwise, Nico Von Strang was only too happy to take them off their hands regardless.

Planted atop a sturdy plinth made of reinforced concrete, most of the structure being underground, each of the Merkava turrets ringing the city was armed with an AC/5 autocannon, a coaxial machine-gun and two missile launchers, an LRM-15 and an SRM-6 respectively, that provided them with plenty of firepower. Thanks to being mounted atop a bunker, rather than a tank chassis, they also had a great deal more ammunition at their disposal than they would normally, and with orders to keep firing until the barrel of the autocannon started to melt. The crews operating them were planning to do just that, in part because they were loyal to the Barony, in part because if they didn't the Baron might have them put up against a wall and shot, and finally because they thought that if they surrendered to these supposed SLDF people then they would summarily execute them instead.

The conscripts might be able to argue they had no choice and be spared, but the volunteers manning the flak towers and Merkava turrets weren't quite as fortunate. For all they knew the enemy commanding officer might be more Amos Forlough than he was Aleksandr Kerensky, and even the latter had his moments such as when he had the entire Amaris bloodline eliminated.

Pondering his current predicament Karl Von Strang was wondering if, in retrospect, a policy of less guns and more butter, with the majority of the population getting a bigger slice of the prosperity pie might have paid dividends here. Other the propaganda being forced daily down their throats, and the threats to their families if they didn't, the bulk of his cadre of infantry had little motivation to defend the status quo. Although uneducated, many of them had likely realised that the people at the top were probably far too busy at the moment to devote time and effort towards identifying 'traitors' and then punishing their wives and children for their crime of not throwing away their lives for the glorious Barony of Strang.

If they had more of a stake in society perhaps they might have shown more grit and determination, Karl Von Strang considered, then again maybe not? Perhaps the deluge of laser-guided-bombs and cluster munitions weakening their morale, followed the unpleasant prospect of being incinerated by flamers, had been a little more daunting than the conscripts could cope with? Sitting in a pillbox just waiting until it was your turn to eat an LGB or Arrow IV missile you could do absolutely nothing about was hardly conducive to maintaining a positive attitude.

Things would have likely gone differently if the epically grandiose plans to turn the whole of Amaris City into a Castle-Brian-esque fortress, one with all the bunkers and gun turrets linked by underground tunnels sealed with airtight doors where the men could find shelter from enemy bombardment and then reemerge to fight afterwards, had been realised.

That was just a flight-of-fancy of course, Von Strang knew. It would take a society with the population and GDP of the Barony at least another two centuries to entrench itself deeply, but as he prepared to go join his Guard Division for the counter-attack it was pleasant to dream of what might have been if these leftover dregs of the Star League had come calling in the mid Thirty-First Century not the Twenty-Ninth.

As the SLDF spearhead broke through into the plateau upon which Amaris City stood Brigadier-General Franklin ordered the town to be surrounded and effectively placed under siege, dispatching his medium mechs on ahead, once again supported by the fast Flashman heavies, to close the circle as quickly as possible.

Assigning parts of the perimeter to Bolton's Rangers and the Blackhearts, and with Hussar lights cautiously sweeping just ahead looking for any more minefields or concealed anti-tank traps, Franklin then ordered his heaviest units forward to punch a hole through into the town itself.

With a tiny population, even the capital city of Niops VII was practically a metropolis by comparison, Amaris City was hardly an example of urban sprawl and it wasn't like they were trying to fight their way into Beijing on Terra, but Franklin still insisted on doing this by the numbers with caution as the watch word of the day.

As the Hussar scouts started taking fire from the first of the Merkava turreted bunkers they pulled back out of range and the methodical process of taking out the turrets began.

A twentieth century General named George S. Patton once declared that, 'Fixed fortifications are a monument to the stupidity of man', a statement that he might have revised if he had ever been forced by circumstances to force his way into a Castle Brian, but there were certainly an inherent problems with fixed fortifications the most glaring, and obvious, being that they are, by nature, immobile.

If the Merkava turrets had been mounted on top of Merkava hulls, not concrete bunkers, then the way the SLDF dealt with them would have been less simple.

The AC/5 autocannon on the Merkava was considerably outranged by ERPPC's and Gauss Rifles that equipped a fair proportion of the mechs the SLDF had at their disposal so dozens of Marauder, Black Knight, Thug, Highlander and Pillager heavies and assaults just stomped up and started blasting at them from extreme range, picking out a few at a time and putting multiple lances to work against each turret.

The LRM launchers on the turrets did have the range to shoot back, but even if they weren't having to try and engage multiple opponents at once, which they were, Niops once again played the lostech card revealing that they had mounted anti-missile-systems on many of their machines which were now merrily shooting down a proportion of the LRM's before they could hit back.

Unable to retreat for obvious reasons, and with other turrets unable to come help, for the same obvious reason, the ring of Merkava turrets, the city's last line of defence were systematically knocked.

That didn't mean that the SLDF could now just walk in and raise a flag, as the advance began once more they suddenly started taking fire from the flak towers, the leading Thug in the formation getting sandblasted by a quad AC/2 mounting with enough gun depression to shoot down on it from the tower.

After the battle the SLDF later maintained that the wretched towers were the biggest obstacle they had to deal with during the whole operation, they were built to take pretty much anything shot of a tactical nuke right to the face, because of their height they commanded the approaches to their location, and those damn AC/2's just kept on firing.

Eventually hours later under a massive bombardment of very expensive Arrow IV missiles, along with several hits from the remaining stocks of laser-guided-bombs, and even a battery of Thor SPG's being brought up to fire their guns in direct-fire-mode, the flak towers were silenced, but by that time the decisive battle of the campaign had already taken place.

Whatever else you might say about the man Karl Von Strang was no coward, and when the Guard Division of the Barony of Strang sallied out to meet the invader he was with them, sat in the cockpit of his family Battlemaster.

He was also smart enough not to charge at the mass of advanced lostech-rich SLDF heavies and assaults bearing the Red Cameron star with his own generally lighter-weight machines. Noticing that there seemed to be an enemy unit out there closer to his own in terms of average tonnage and weapon loadout he led his men against that group, which turned out to be Bolton's Rangers.

Finding himself with dozens of battlemechs painted up in Rim Worlds Republic colours bearing down on him, all bearing the Death's Head insignia that Gunthar Von Strang's 18th Amaris Chasseurs had used during the Amaris War, Colonel Bolton was so giddy with excitement his voice seemed to go up in pitch when he ordered his battlemechs to meet the 'Amaris scum' head-on.

Being told that reinforcements were on the way by Brigadier Franklin was almost unwelcome news because this was the fight Dan Bolton had always dreamed of, and as the Rangers started exchanging autocannon, laser, missile and PPC fire with Karl Von Strang's elite he suddenly felt the need to repeatedly bellow 'Advance the Cameron Star' and 'Onward the 208^th Hussars' to his troops as he realised that this was his moment in the regiment's history.

Amidst the chaos the single lance of Tyson's Troublemakers attached to the Rangers were wading in as only the largest of assault mechs could. The Troublemakers had once been the 23^rd Heavy Assault Regiment of the SLDF and Major Sam Tyson at the controls of an Atlas was leading three other assaults against the heaviest enemy lance in the immediate vicinity, singling out an Awesome for his personal attention. Those three PPC's on the Awesome would hurt, but if he could close down the range and put his AC/20 to work he could take the bastard Tyson thought with determination.

The other 'token' participant in this operation, a company of the Niops Association Militia under the command of Captain Carmichael hadn't really expected to end up in the thick of it but they found themselves pulled into the fight because they were the next closest formation. Fortunately what they mostly lacked in experience, Carmichael himself was the only one who had actually fought in a battle before, they made up for in firepower thanks to the NAM always having favoured the Highlander and the Black Knight, types that had benefitted from the advanced Clan Wolverine technology the SLDF had brought to Niops.

Thanks to stripping out the original gauss rifle and LRM 20 for the lighter 'Improved' versions the Highlander with Carmichael at the controls was better armoured than the original, it was also blessed with CASE to stop an internal ammunition or capacitor explosion from blowing him to pieces and finally he had an Artemis IV FCS to improve the accuracy of his missiles. Confident in his machine, and pretty sure that his troops would put up a decent fight, Carmichael noticed that there was a mixed force of enemy tanks slowly closing in to reinforce Von Strang's mechs and he ordered his company to move to intercept.

Inside one of the tanks Tetrarch Marc Spillar would have happily traded his left kidney right now for a faster machine as the lumbering Burke he was commanding slowly ambled towards the fight. With a top speed of not much more than thirty kilometres-per-hour the only thing blitzkrieg about the Burke was that the trio of PPC's spewed manmade lighting and Spillar had assumed that if he ever got into a battle in the thing it would be the enemy coming to him.

The oft-told told in the Guard Division was that the Burke was the only combat vehicle in their inventory which could lose a race to one of the stationary Merkava turrets and it seemed even less funny now than normally as a force of enemy mechs suddenly arrived and started firing at him.

All those times he yearned for action while suffering through tedious duty shifts of manning the monitoring station at Guard HQ looking out for inbound jumpships had clearly bitten him on the ass, Spillar decided glumly, looking back with fondness at when that ass was just occupying a chair in front of a vid-screen while he read a book.

Despite being usually considered a long-range weapon by contemporary standards the regular PPC used by the Burke simply didn't have the reach of the ERPPC and bolts from those, along with Gauss Rifle slugs, started heading Spillar's way in large numbers. Although he could fling a few LRM's back at them in retaliation that only resulted in a larger number of more accurate missiles heading in the opposite direction which was no improvement to his situation.

Spillar couldn't even close the distance so he could bring his undeniably powerful battery of PPC's to bear. Even a plodding ninety-ton behemoth like the Highlander could easily outpace a Burke and the opposition clearly weren't stupid enough to cooperate and make it a fair fight by remaining still.

Putting gauss rifle slugs downrange, hoping to blast a nice chunk off a Burke he could take home as a souvenir, it occurred to Jason Carmichael that this engagement would also certainly see him getting that promotion to Major he was angling for, assuming he didn't stupidly get any of his people killed anyway. To be honest all that hard training over the years, and the time he spent going through the Gunslinger Program, seemed like an utter waste because this was like shooting fish in a barrel he decided as the NAM company shot the poor unfortunate tanks to pieces.

It was still a lot more fun than the start of Carmichael's military career had been though, manning the monitoring station on Niops VII looking out for inbound jumpships, and he did get to end the fight with the tanks in some style by using his jumpjets to inflict an impromptu 'Highlander Burial' on the last one.

Jason Carmichael never got to meet Marc Spillar in person, but he did squash him flat when the former's ninety-ton assault mech jumped on top of the latter's seventy-five ton tank.

Meanwhile the Guard Division had initially put up a decent fight against Bolton's Rangers but when SLDF reinforcements arrived, initially Talon lights with ERPPC's and then mediums and Flashman heavies, it all started to fall apart fast for Karl Von Strang.

To his chagrin Khan Franklin Hallis of Clan Wolverine himself never got to fire a single shot in anger, he had harboured a faint hope that he might be there to finish Von Strang off personally, but by the time his Cyclops arrived on the scene a rampaging mob of Thug battlemechs which got there first, being reasonably fast by assault mech standards, was already in the process of mopping up.

He did get to kick open the oversized doors to the baron's palace in his mech once the ****** flak towers were finally silenced, Daniel Bolton insisting on being there to record it happening for the Ranger's archives. That was pretty satisfying, Hallis thought happily as dozens of SLDF and Blackhearts infantry poured past his battlemech to secure the palace.


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Note from the Author:

Amaris City is not as heavily fortified in 2844 as it would be in canon when Clan Jade Falcon took it (with difficulty) two centuries later but Karl Von Strang is still pretty well dug-in, if not for the technological gap it wouldn't have gone so easily for the SLDF and their mercenary allies. It's noted in the Jade Falcon sourcebook, when it talks about their campaign on Von Strang's World, that Amaris City was defended by multiple gun turrets, these being Merkava VIII turrets obtained from Vannes is fanon (but makes sense).

Gigantic Flak Towers akin to those built by Nazi Germany seems to fit the aesthetic somehow, they really are tough nuts to crack.

Hope people liked all the in-jokes, references etc. Now for the aftermath.

[Daryk]

Glad to see Hallis was able to keep playing it by the numbers.  Slow and steady absolutely paid off there... :)

[PsihoKekec]

A twentieth century General named George S. Patton once declared that, 'Fixed fortifications are a monument to the stupidity of man',

Did he say that before or after being stuck at siege of Metz for a month?

[lowrolling]

Nice to see that war crimes were avoided. Executions are always allowed to be creative and colorful though.

[mikecj]

The mopping-up will be interesting.

[Hotpoint]

Part LXII - Section 1 of 2

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"What do you expect me to do? Administer garlic oil to the wound? Inject you with 25CC's of Holy Water?"

Surgeon-Major Ellen Jansen to an SLDF corporal who had been bitten by the Lady Arabella Von Strang - 2844CE

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Amaris City – Von Strang's World – 2844

According to both the patch on his uniform and his off-world-deployment-only set of dogtags his name was Colonel John Mübarek, but that still didn't stop the young private who had been sent to fetch him from the Command Post accidentally calling him Colonel Benedict. This naturally earned them a stern reprimand from the colonel himself and a mouthful of invective from the nearest NCO afterwards for their trouble. Fortunately nobody not from Niops was present in the temporary CP on the edge of town at the time, so the slip-up didn't really matter, but it was security breaches like that which could potentially bring the wrath of Nicholas Kerensky down on their heads.

Looking out into the large amphitheatre that was being used as both a temporary POW holding area and an impromptu medical centre the colonel took a deep breath before raising the electronic loudhailer to his lips. "LISTEN UP YOU ****** INGRATES" he bellowed, his amplified voice echoing off every surface as every prisoner turned in his direction. "AS YOU HAVE ALREADY BEEN TOLD FOOD AND WATER IS ON THE WAY AND ALL YOUR INJURED AND WOUNDED WILL BE TREATED AS SOON AS THE MOST URGENT CASES ARE STABILISED. IF THERE IS ANY REPEAT OF THE DISORDER EARLIER DURING WHICH ONE OF MY SOLDIERS WAS INJURED I WILL HAVE THE RINGLEADERS SHOT AND THE WHOLE DAMN LOT OF YOU TEAR-GASSED. NOW SIT DOWN, SHUT UP, AND WAIT YOUR TURN TO BE PROCESSED WHILE THANKING YOUR LUCKY STARS THAT THE NIOPS ASSOCIATION ABIDES BY THE TERMS OF THE ARES CONVENTIONS AS REGARDS TREATMENT OF PRISONERS OF WAR."

Whether it was his words that got the POW's to settle down, or that fact he had arrived with a lance of battlemechs which now loomed menacingly nearby, the previously rambunctious prisoners did as they were told enabling the medical triage teams to get back to work prioritising who the doctors should see next.

Given the cultural leanings of the Rim Worlds Republic, the city possessing a large stone amphitheatre that wouldn't have looked out-of-place in Ancient Greece wasn't as surprising as the fact that the Von Strang's apparently used to have comedies and dramatic plays performed there for the masses instead of gladiatorial combat but regardless of what it was used for normally it had made for a useful place to temporarily dump thousands of prisoners as they were swept up.

Benedict threw the megaphone to the nearest SLDF officer in his immediate vicinity. "We shouldn't have told them that we weren't going to summarily execute any of them or sell them into slavery" he opined. "Play nice and they'll take liberties every time" he complained, looking around and noting the armed SLDF infantry ringing the outside of the amphitheatre and guarding the exits. "At least this place is easy to contain and there's enough toilet facilities for this many people" he noted. Failing to take account of the latter wasn't just unhygienic it was also hell on prisoner discipline and morale.

"General Franklin left orders that we weren't to shoot-to-kill unless we faced a full-scale revolt by the prisoners" the officer who Benedict threw the loudhailer to noted quietly.

"I never said to kill the ringleaders if they act up again, just kneecap a few and it'll encourage the rest to behave" Benedict replied, wishing that the Khan had not left him in charge while he toured the city. "The Ares Conventions don't prohibit the use of force to keep POW's in line, they just frown upon putting them all up against a wall if they won't do as they're told."

Technically the Ares Conventions had not been in force since the Star League rescinded them at the start of the Reunification War, the High Council collectively agreeing that if they fought with one hand tied behind their back then bringing the periphery nations to heel would take forever, but despite their lack of legal authority they had continued to exert a certain moral one. In simplistic terms how much a state chose to still adhere to the principles contained within the Conventions had become a shorthand in many ways for how 'good' or 'bad' they were within the broader public consciousness of the Inner Sphere.

At one extreme the Federated Suns was very fond of planting themselves squarely on the moral high ground, pontificating on the innate and inviolable rights of man to the point of being nigh insufferable, and as such they usually played more than lip service to following the basis tenets of the Ares Conventions whenever it was practical to do so.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the spectrum, those inclined towards the darkly humorous maintained that the copy of the Ares Conventions that the Capellan Confederation used must have been badly translated into Mandarin because sometimes it honestly seemed like they thought it was a to-do list rather than a list of prohibited actions.

That was probably unfair, although they did always seem to be the one most willing to ignore Article VI, particularly the part that said that developing and deploying bioweapons was strictly verboten and which most other powers tended to still take somewhat seriously.

Throwing around nukes like they were on sale was one thing, unleashing genetically engineered plagues was still largely frowned upon even in the darkest days of the late 28^th and 29^th Century. Even ignoring the moral issue, the possibility that opening that particular Pandora's Box could easily come back and bite you on the ass later on if it spread and/or mutated stayed a few hands.

If you wanted to depopulate an area then nerve gas, or even cobalt bombs if you wanted it to stay depopulated, were a considerably saner option.

The one part of the Conventions that most everyone did still tend to stick to was the handling of Prisoners of War, though not necessarily for moral, altruistic reasons. Summary execution of prisoners, or their mistreatment generally, might seem like a way to look tough, or intimidate your foe, but ultimately it was an objectively self-defeating tactic. You wanted to encourage enemy troops to surrender, not to fight to the death trying to take you with them as a final act of defiance, so unless you were an idiot, or some kind of ideological purist that thought mercy was for the weak and capitulation was dishonourable to the point seppuku was preferable, you would offer generous terms of surrender and then stick to them.

"The docs say that we're going to run short on blood plasma, there wasn't nearly as much in cold storage in the city hospital as expected and our own stocks are limited" another soldier informed Benedict. "We're mostly okay on other medical supplies though, friendly casualties were on the low end of estimates so we're able to spare some of our own stocks for wounded POW's."

Benedict nodded. "We're still prioritising the treatment of friendies I hope?" he checked. That had been the order but sometimes the army medical personnel got it into their heads that the Hippocratic Oath trumped their Oath of Allegiance to the Star League."

"Yeah, we carted our most severe cases to the Intruder dropships belonging to the Blackhearts. The operating theatres there are better than anything the local hospital has."

"Probably a lot more sterile too" Benedict observed. "There been any more trouble with the local doctors we drafted in to help with casualties?"

"Not since Doc Jansen laid down the law that we wouldn't be euthanising the most seriously injured or those missing limbs just because they would be a 'burden on society' if they lived."

"Wish I'd been here to see that" Benedict responded. According to the report that arrived at the Command Post earlier regarding the incident the somewhat petite Surgeon-Major Jansen of the SLDF Medical Corps had slugged a local medic who had been in the process of injecting a POW with both legs blown off with an overdose of morphine. Apparently that was just how they usually did things here, at least for the peasant underclass, farm labourers missing limbs weren't very productive, but Jansen saw things a little differently.

Those with wealth and high status received a somewhat higher standard of care needless to say, not that even the Baron himself had access to the kind of advanced medical technology available to the SLDF. Any of their own casualties, or their mercenary allies who were missing limbs or organs following the fighting could expect to have them reinstated by cloned or cybernetic replacements once they were back in the Hegemony, and those with severe burns might eventually end up better looking than they before because the plastic surgeons back home might well decide to correct a few aesthetic flaws while they had you under the knife.

When the SLDF MASH units in their armoured ambulances had rolled in and started setting up to treat the wounded of both sides a couple of the local doctors drafted in from the city hospital had been frankly amazed by the quality of the equipment they had.

Conducting triage when you have a big eight-wheeled all-terrain truck with a half-dozen Eligus Medical Diagnosers in the back, not to mention two others each with a full operating theatre in there, was not how field medicine was usually conducted, certainly not post the Golden Age of the Star League.

It sounded bad in a certain light but the sheer lethality of many of the weapons the SLDF had employed had helped the casualty situation somewhat anyway. The ratio of dead-to-wounded was lower than it might have been if not for the considerable overkill of often hitting relatively small bunkers with large aerial bombs, Arrow IV missiles or AC/20 cannon. What was left of the occupants was often more suitable for being removed from the scene in a bucket not a stretcher.

Benedict looked around making sure that only Niops personnel were in ear-shot. "If we're short on blood just start siphoning all the Ironborn goofing off in the park once they've finished pulling down the statue of Stefan Amaris for the cameras, they're all healthy and Blood Group O Negative" he whispered. "If any of them don't want to tell them it's a direct order."

"They're all O Neg?"

"Making them all universal donors was about the least their DNA was meddled with" Benedict replied. "If we still need more blood after that we'll start draining everyone else as necessary, I'm A Positive myself so if the docs need some of that later I'll donate first. Set an example" he said, knowing that was what a commanding officer should do.

When General Romanov finally retired, and Khan Hallis was bumped up a rank to take her place as Head of the Joint Chiefs, Jax Benedict was expected by many, including himself, to be promoted to Brigadier-General and be the one that got to command the expeditionary brigade. As such when Hallis put him in charge of cleaning up the mess while he went to inspect the palace Benedict assumed this was because as a general he would have to deal with more of the boring stuff so the khan was seeing how well he would handle it.

Benedict was a field officer not a desk jockey, one generally considered strict to the point of being a martinet, but even those who disliked him personally, a group he knew included the saKhan herself, never tried to argue he wasn't a good tactician. They thought he was an obnoxious, humourless jerk at times, and for his part he considered saKhan Ebon 'flighty' and thought she lacked gravitas, but point him at an objective, and give him a battalion or a regiment to take it, and he would.

Serving under Colonel Benedict was not fun, if you wanted a relaxed command style try and get yourself transferred to Colonel Callahan's unit, he was personable, but Benedict undeniably got results and unlike Callahan he wanted promotion figuring that if he couldn't be saKhan he could at least outrank Ebon in another way.

Benedict knew that the Khan hadn't left him in charge because the man had sloping shoulders and liked to slide his work off on others, Hallis hated delegating, he was put in charge while the Khan got on with other business because he was testing how he coped with the other business of command, the stuff that wasn't all fun, yelling orders and stomping around in battlemechs.

At least the civilian population hadn't been causing any trouble, likely because they were well used to being told what to do and expected dire consequences if they disobeyed the instructions they had been given to stay at home. Once everything was running more smoothly the curfew could be lifted, there were already welfare teams rolling around making sure nobody was at risk of going hungry in the interim, but having tanks and mechs on the streets certainly helped keep order.

Other than a few disgruntled POW's that just wanted to take off their uniforms and go home causing some commotion earlier, they must have realised that the SLDF troops guarding them weren't trigger happy and honestly preferred not to shoot anybody if they didn't have to, the rank-and-file prisoners had been fairly docile. A few of the officers, particularly the more self-important and entitled ones with 'noble' lineage, had made a fuss when they were initially placed right alongside the private soldiers and NCO's, but once they were assigned their own rows of seats a short distance away from the other ranks they had mostly stopped complaining.

At some point Benedict wondered if they might have a problem with angry peasants wanting to settle scores with their former overlords once they realised the old order was gone for good, but with luck the Khan would have finished his tour by then and he could handle the politics. Hallis had been a political as well as a military leader and he had proven more capable at both than Benedict had expected when Khan McEvedy appointed him her replacement saKhan so many years ago.

Frankly if the oppressed 'labourer caste' of Erin, Benedict refused to call the planet 'Von Strang's World' on principle, wanted to construct a guillotine and exact a little justice that was fine by him, although he knew the government back home would make a fuss if the SLDF turned a blind eye to such proceedings. He knew his Terran born parents who had fought against Amaris would be happy with him for helping rid the galaxy of some of the last remnants of the usurper, and he also knew that the clans back home would approve too, unless they found out who it was actually conducting this operation anyway.

Putting such ancient history aside and looking to the future, thanks to the SLDF losses of men and material being so low it was almost certain that the Khan would approve going ahead with Operation Simon Says, they were already so close to the objective, had the capability to conduct the raid to hand and it might be decades before they were in a position to do so again. If so it was likely Benedict would get to command the operation, albeit it in close cooperation with the navy, and that was the sort of opportunity that would really help him stand out from the crowd.

It certainly sounded like a lot more fun than getting pulled into the diplomatic negotiations with Paran would be. It seemed that since the last time the SLDF was operating in this region the former Star League Expeditionary Brigade personnel there had gotten together with the various groups there and cobbled together a functioning government, which could be a good or a bad thing but either way it changed the equation. If this 'Paran Free System' was better predisposed towards the Star League now than before, thanks to the crew of the SLS Pioneer helping them fight off what seemed to have been a full-scale pirate invasion a few years back, potentially this could be great news but it would all need to be handled carefully.

Bribing them with diamonds from the Erin mines to take in refugees was always an option if it came to that, though how many people might want to emigrate was still a complete unknown at this point.

As he looked over the improved POW camp, happy to see that the first trucks bringing more food and water were starting to arrive, Colonel Jax Benedict, AKA 'John Mübarek' noted a small squad from the Blackhearts arriving, escorting a single prisoner. As he watched them cut him loose, pointing him towards where the officer prisoners were seated a few of the other ranks sat nearby seemed to spot him and after a few seconds a whole bunch of them stood up and faced him.

The lone prisoner stopped as a couple of dozen local militia snapped to attention in place and saluted him, something they hadn't done for any of the other officer prisoners.

"Who the hell is that?" Benedict asked.

"I think that's the enemy officer that stayed on the hill and continued to call in artillery after ordering his men to leave. I know the Blackhearts snuck up on him and smacked him upside the head. Guess he finally woke up, so they brought him here."

"Ah" Benedict replied nodding his understanding as the man crisply returned the salute before continuing on his way to join the other officer prisoners. "You know, all soldiers are really looking for in a commander is someone that's got guts, enough brains to know his own job and who gives a crap about them" he said. "Everything after that is just frosting on the cake" he observed, wondering what his own commanding officer was up to right now?

[Hotpoint]

Part LXII - Section 2 of 2

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Only a couple of kilometres away, it really wasn't a big town, Franklin Hallis was currently wandering through the Baron's Apartments in the palace, thinking that his wife would really hate the tacky décor. The Von Strang's probably thought all that gold leaf made the overly ornate furniture look sophisticated, but in reality it only demonstrated their complete lack of taste.

Expensive does not mean classy after all, he considered, rolling his eyes at the memory of the gold-plated toilet he discovered in the lavatory next to the master bedroom, before coming across yet another oil painting of Gunthar Von Strang striking a heroic pose hanging on a wall. "Pick out the best one of these paintings of the Vampire for the museum back home, see if any of the mercenary companies want one for a souvenir themselves and then have the rest of burned" he instructed his aide who tapped the order into her noteputer having just rejoined him after taking a short break.

Hallis scratched his nose. "Have any records we find, including personal journals and whatever, boxed up. There might be some valuable intelligence there and I guess some historian might want to be able to read them one day."

"Yes Sir" the aide replied. "What about any valuables?"

"We'll divide those up between the local peasants, it was their hard work that paid for them in the first place and if we do end up transplanting a bunch of them to Paran it should help get them off to a good start in their new home" Hallis replied.

The aide nodded. "While you were in the can I got a message from Captain Clemence. They blew the door off the planetary treasury and found about a quarter of a ton of gold bars, a couple of tons of silver and a lot of diamonds in there, cut and uncut" she told him. "On the subject of diamonds, Major Tyson is moving his lance to help secure the mine as ordered, although he did say that when he volunteered for this mission it was for a change in pace, not to just end up guarding another diamond mine. I'm pretty sure he was joking."

"The whole reason I chose him to do it was as a joke, so I hope so" Hallis replied. "On a more serious mercenary-related matter, please let Colonel Bolton know again that as well as the Rangers receiving a disproportionately large amount of the battlefield salvage, in order to make good their material losses, that Niops will provide free medical care of the highest quality to any of his wounded and injured requiring treatment once we return home" he said. "As regards the dependants of any of his people that were killed in action, it's not my call but I will push for the government to grant them the same war pensions that the loved ones of Niops soldiers that fall in the line of duty would. They fought and died under the Cameron Star against a sworn enemy of the Star League and that should count for something in my opinion."

Hallis straightened up. "Talking of enemies of the Star League I think it's time to send for our most important prisoner" he said. "Have him brought to the Great Hall, I'll see him there, but before I do have that ****** Rim Worlds Republic flag in there torn down and have a Cameron Star put up instead."

"Already got people on it, Sir" the aide replied smiling. "Planning on being sat on that throne in there when he's brought in?"

"Nah, that would be a little too much" Hallis replied. "Anyhow, I already sat on his gold toilet."

Struggling against his bonds would have been undignified and given that he was being manhandled along by two infantrymen, one either side, both half-a-head taller than him and built like powerlifters, it wasn't like escape was on the cards for Karl Von Strang anyway. Facing a firing squad or a hangman's noose with honour and courage, rather than being shot in the back while fleeing, was a more suitable end for the Baron of Strang and if it was his fate to die he would do so on his own terms.

They certainly weren't taking any risks as regards any opportunity he might have for escape. As well as the guards either side, both of whom had a neural stunstick as well as a pistol, and the plastic cuffs on his wrists, there were two more soldiers in SLDF uniforms following on a few metres behind, one with a Mauser 960 rifle and the other a sonic stunner.

As he had been led through the courtyard earlier Von Strang had seen a large Cameron Star flag being raised over one of the still partially-smouldering flak towers in the near distance, the baron noting that it was the Red Cameron Star of Niops rather than the Star League original, and he assumed at some point a similar flag was going to be raised above his palace, perhaps in some kind of ceremony.

Not dying in battle had been a little unfortunate, a more fitting and glorious end for one of his bloodline that would have mirrored how the great Gunthar fell, but fate was fickle. After ejecting from his disabled and burning mech Von Strang had momentarily considered suicide, but instead decided he would look his enemy in the eyes as they ordered his death, make sure they knew they may have beaten him but they had not broken him.

"No need to drag me along, I know the way" Von Strang informed his guards, striding along as if he was late for a dinner engagement, not heading to his probable execution, maintaining his poise despite the plastic cuffs on his wrists and exhibiting a calm, almost bored demeanour as he went.

Occasionally they would pass someone in the hallways as they made their way through the palace, most of them wearing a variation of the plain olive drab uniform of the SLDF but a few seemed to be mercenaries in somewhat more flamboyant garb. "Under the circumstances I suppose can't really do anything about the inevitable looting" Von Strang remarked, coming across a young officer wearing a mechwarrior's jumpsuit that seemed to be taking considerable interest in a statue of Apollo resting on a plinth, "but if you're planning on stealing that at least have the decency to keep the whole set together" he continued. "There's an Olympian God in each of the corridors, not that I expect any of you peons to be able to recognise any of them"

"I prefer the Roman Pantheon myself, but this is actually pretty good work" the young officer replied. "You can barely tell it was made by a robot with a laser, not a person with a hammer and chisel."

"Robot?!" Von Strang responded, losing his cool. "My Great-Grandfather hired the most talented sculptor in the Rim Worlds Republic to make those" he declared.

"If he did then the sculptor conned him" the officer replied. "I mean it would make a nice garden ornament I suppose."

"You clearly have no idea what you're talking about" Karl Von Strang spluttered.

"I minored in Art History, but if you say so" the young officer replied, smirking as Von Strang was prompted by his guards to get moving again.

"Art History?" Von Strang muttered to himself.

"As long as you major in a science at the university the government will still cover your course fees, but there's supposed to be a lot more hoops to jump through before they'll sign off on the financial grant" one of the guards told him, there was no need to be surly as long as the prisoner was being cooperative after all. "I ran across a second-lieutenant once that minored in geography, not geology, geography" he said, shaking his head in bewilderment. "Still not convinced they could read a map properly though" he added, not entirely in jest.

When they reached the Great Hall, Karl Von Strang found a familiar face already there, one that seemed to be deep in conversation with another man. Resisting the urge to swear at him, or even charge at the man, the baron instead looked at him with disdain.

"I suppose I should introduce myself to you properly" the target of the Baron's ire addressed him, smiling. "Colonel Mitch Johnson, commanding officer of the Blackhearts Mercenary Company, although given the nature of this particular operation it might be as well to use our original name, the 77^th Special Operations Group of the Star League Defence Force" the mercenary officer said, still smiling and looking more than a little smug. "Allow me to introduce my current superior, Brigadier-General Henry Franklin of the SLDF, currently in service of the Niops Association as the de facto, and de jure, Star League and Terran Hegemony in Exile," he continued. "General Franklin, Baron Karl Von Strang."

"I wish I could say it was an honour to meet you Baron, but it is certainly a pleasure to see you under these circumstances" the Brigadier responded, also seeming plenty pleased with himself. "If I have those handcuffs removed you're not going to try something stupid are you?" he asked. "My people will beat the crap out of you if you do."

"I would give neither you, nor them, the satisfaction" Vonn Strang replied flatly, holding up his cuffs.

"Cut him loose" Frankin ordered, one of the guards doing so with a pocket knife before they both took a step back, hands meaningfully resting on the pistols on their belts.

"Why am I here?" Von Strang wanted to know.

"Why are any of us here?" Franklin responded. "Is there any objective meaning to our existence at all?" he asked rhetorically.

Karl Von Strang narrowed his eyes. "I didn't mean in the philosophical sense."

"I know, I also realise that continuing to that yank your chain after already deflating your ego by taking your planet away from you is crass, but I never claimed to be a paladin of virtue" Franklin replied, smiling. "You know my wife likes to talk philosophy over dinner, I'd personally much prefer to watch the holovid but she outranks me at home" he remarked to Johnson before turning back to Von Strang. "You're here because it suited me to have you brought here."

"Did you expect me to quail before you or beg for mercy?" Karl Von Strang asked, amused.

Franklin shook his head. "Entertaining though it might be, based on Colonel Johnson's thoughts and opinions regarding your character, no I didn't" he replied. "We have your wife and son in custody, along with your sister, apart from your sister they are entirely unharmed, although all are understandably distressed."

"What did you do to my sister?"

"While we were attempting to place her in protective custody she attacked one of my soldiers, first biting him and then attempting to claw out his eyes" Franklin told him dispassionately. "The level of force needing to be applied in order to subdue her resulted in her dislocating her shoulder. She has since been heavily sedated, both for her own comfort and the safety of our medics."

"That does sound like Arabella" Karl Von Strang conceded, when they were children his little sister had attempted to severely maim him on three non-consecutive occasions. There was a reason why he had been entirely unable to find a man willing to marry her, most took the potential suitor she stabbed in the leg when she was sixteen and their father was still alive as fair warning. It certainly didn't help that Dad had thought it was hilarious.

"I assume you would like to see your family to check on their wellbeing, even the comatose one?" Franklin asked.

Von Strang smirked. "Do you intend to threaten them in order to try and force me to comply with some instruction?" he asked. "Good luck with that" he added, sounding blasé about the possibility though mostly because he reasoned that if they thought he didn't care they would be less likely to harm them. His wife wasn't the easiest person to live with, and his son was a brat, something he mostly blamed his wife for, but that didn't mean he didn't care.

He would even be upset if they did something nasty to Arabella, not distraught you understand, but at least a little perturbed, she was his baby sister after all.

"No" Franklin replied flatly. "We're not in the business of comporting ourselves in the way people like you do."

"People like me?" Von Strang queried, a wry smile on his face.

"Petty tyrants" Franklin explained.

Von Strang looked at him askance. "Petty? I rule an entire star system."

"You ruled a star system, past tense, one with fewer people living there than immigrate into the Niops Hegemony every few weeks or so" Franklin replied. "And I'll note you didn't quibble with being called a tyrant."

"Those without vision unable to see the big picture often mistake a well organised autocracy for tyranny" Von Strang responded. "Everything my ancestors and I did was for the long-term betterment of our people and in order to ensure the glorious rebirth of the Rim Worlds Republic."

"I'd say that's the most delusional thing I'd ever heard but my father claimed to have once met a man on New Dallas that thought the Confederacy would rise again."

"The Stewart Confederacy that ended up part of the Free Worlds League?" Johnson queried.

"No, the Confederate States of America, short lived separatist slaveocracy, 19^th Century Terra" Franklin explained.

"That's like a thousand years ago" Johnson said, raising his eyebrows. "Almost makes trying to bring the Star League back after less than a century of it being dead and gone sound plausible by comparison."

"The Star League was never gone, it was just resting" Franklin told him, his expression and the tone of his delivery indicating it was meant as a mild rebuke. "The Cameron Star never stopped flying over Niops."

"By that criteria then the Rim Worlds Republic never fell either as it continued right here" Karl Von Strang interjected looking pleased with what he thought was a cutting observation.

"The Rim Worlds Republic fell in 2775, Nico Von Strang didn't arrive here and declare it his personal fiefdom until five years later" Franklin responded. "There was no continuity, you're not the Rim Worlds Republic, you're a tribute band with a statue of the lead singer of the original group out front to try and fool the rubes that you're the real thing."

Mitch Johnson gave him a look.

"Okay, so we've only got the drummer from the original line-up ourselves but we're still way more the Terran Hegemony than these clowns are the Rim Worlds Republic" Franklin defended his argument, and the claim of the Niops Association to be a direct descendant of its founding polities by an unbroken line.

It wasn't quite just a polite fiction, but it certainly wasn't a position the Great Houses who also claimed to be the lawful inheritors of the Star League would be likely to accept, Johnson thought to himself.

Karl Von Strang rolled his eyes. "I fervently hope that you are not planning to torture me as much as you torture metaphors" he asked drily.

"We're more aficionados of the use of truth drugs when it comes to interrogations as it happens but rest assured that if you do end up being strapped to a chair and beaten with rubber hoses it'll be someone from the Lyran Intelligence Corps doing it not us" Franklin told him.

"You're handing me over to the Steiners? Why?" Von Strang wanted to know.

"Diplomacy" Franklin explained. "We're planning to give both your senior staff and the most objectionable elements of your state security apparatus the option of also getting to enjoy the tender mercies of the Lyran Commonwealth, or else returning with us to Niops and living out their days in our prison system performing hard labour."

"What about my, I mean our, families?" Von Strang reasonably wanted to know.

"That will have to be determined on a case-by-case basis" Franklin replied. "I'm not sure if the Baroness Von Strang will be particularly welcome wherever she ends up, the same being likely true of your son and heir, but if needs be we'll take them with us for their protection."

"How civilised of you after robbing my wife of her home and my son of his rightful inheritance" Von Strang replied.

"Her home was built on the backs of the peasants, and there is little 'rightful' about your families rule over this planet" Franklin retorted. "That said a certain degree of recognition of a modicum of legitimacy will help with the paperwork."

"Paperwork?" Von Strang queried, confused.

"Yes, the bureaucrats back home provided us with a document for you to sign accepting the terms for your formal surrender, naturally you'll be given the chance to read it before signing but I suggest you do" Franklin advised.

"Let me guess, this is one of those offers I can't refuse and the only alternatives open to me are that either my signature or my brains will be on the document?" Von Strang replied, smirking again. "I choose brains" he declared, crossing his arms in front of him.

"No, you can refuse to sign, and we won't kill you for doing so, the only downside from your perspective is the position it places your family in" Franklin told him.

"So, you are threatening my family?" Karl Von Strang replied. "I go along with your charade that this invasion, and I assume annexation, being somehow lawful, and not a grievous violation of the sovereignty of an independent power, or my family pays the price for my recalcitrance?"

Mitch Johnson looked at him with amusement. "I've got to say that if you wanted the international community to give a hoot about the sovereignty of your planet then renaming it in honour of Gunther Von Strang was a bad move to start with, one that only got worse when you decided to call your capital city Hitlerville' he opined. "Sorry, I mean 'Amaris City' of course" he corrected himself sardonically, Von Strang not appreciating the comparison judging by his expression. "You know, I've spent most of my life living in the Taurian Concordat where they outright despise the very idea of the Star League and hate the SLDF with a passion, and even there you're not going to find anybody that's going to want to be seen as aligned with the unrepentant war-criminal demographic. That is not a hill any politician wants their career to die on."

"It's not like anyone ever recognised you diplomatically anyway" Franklin noted. "Hell, from what we've been able to tell even most of the pirate bands in this neck of the woods wouldn't want to be seen as having anything to do with you. They were probably worried that if the Lyrans ever decided to deal with you once and for all they might get swept up when the Steiners cleaned house" he suggested. "Anyhow, you seem to assume that this is a carrot or stick situation where your family get the stick if you don't cooperate, it's not, there's no stick as such, but there is a potential carrot. I'm prepared to give you a choice as to what happens to them, or rather where they end up" he continued. "They can be handed over to the Lyran authorities with you or they can go into exile in the Niops Hegemony where we will guarantee their safety."

Karl Von Strang frowned. "I note that you're not offering simply remaining here as an option" he responded.

"No, that is certainly not on the cards" Franklin confirmed. "The Barony of Strang is no more, this world will revert to its original name of Erin and regardless of how the population chooses to live their lives from now on it will not be with a Von Strang in their midst, even if we're not vindictive enough to end your blood line entirely."

"Given that you were clearly vindictive enough to travel the breadth of the Inner Sphere in order to avenge yourself on my nation for some perceived slight, and on my family personally, you'll understand why I treat anything you have to say on the matter with a healthy degree of scepticism" Von Strang replied. "I must confess however that my ego is benefitting greatly from the fact you considered overthrowing me worth all the trouble and expense incurred in doing so."

"It's really just the symbolism of finally putting the matter of the Amaris Coup to rest once and for all, with the Cameron Star flying overhead demonstrating the final victory of good over evil as I'm sure you well know" Franklin replied.

Karl Von Strang laughed. "Good versus evil? What a simplistic and grossly subjective worldview you have."

"If you prefer a more objective argument then it's a clash of ideologies to see which is strongest and since we're the ones deciding your future, not the reverse" Franklin countered. "History will record that your illiterate, forelock-tugging peasantry fighting for a despot was no match whatsoever for our educated, free-thinkers fighting for a liberal-democracy."

"I assume this will be because you'll be the ones writing this history" Von Strang replied dismissively.

"Yeah, and in our society everyone will be able to read it too" Franklin told him. "Let's cut to the chase, for reasons that are largely administrative it would make my life easier if you voluntarily sign the paperwork we put in front of you, basically just dotting the i's and crossing the t's for the sake of the bureaucracy and to make the Diplomatic Corps happy, and unless you want your family paraded in shackles in front of the Lyran media for propaganda purposes you'll play ball."

"And how exactly are they any better off being paraded in shackles in front of your media?" Von Strang asked rhetorically.

"Well, I can guarantee no shackles for a start, except possibly in the case of your sister, and besides which you might want to consider the fate of President Dormax" Franklin suggested.

"Nobody knows the fate of Lucien Lormax" Von Strang replied, choosing not to use his title since he considered the man's brief term as President of the Rim Worlds Republic illegitimate.

Franklin nodded. "Exactly. After he was captured by the Lyrans during the Republic-Commonwealth War he vanished off the face of the Inner Sphere never to be seen again. If the Steiners were happy to simply disappear him when Alexsandr Kerensky was still around to keep the Great Houses on something of a leash do you really think Marcus Steiner will treat your family well?" he asked rhetorically.

"Meanwhile this bunch of do-gooders right here really like to portray themselves as the good guys, so they'll go out of their way to look merciful and make sure that the press can check if the remaining Von Strang's are being decently treated" Mitch Johnson interjected.

Franklin frowned at the mercenary. "That somehow makes our magnanimity in victory sound like merely a Machiavellian ploy for the sake of good PR." he clearly objected to the phrasing. "We're the good guys, that's our motivation for acting like the good guys" he insisted, mostly in truth. It wasn't that Johnson was completely wrong per se, but if he had been one of his own men, instead of a mercenary, saying that he would have certainly verbally rapped his knuckles a little harder for saying the quiet part out loud in public though.

"Is he for real?" Von Strang found himself asking Johnson.

"Mostly, I think. It's hard to tell" Johnson replied with a shrug.

"Christ, and to think people call the Davions insufferably self-righteous" Karl Von Strang observed. "If I agree to sign your papers would you do me the favour of putting me in front of a firing squad rather than hand me over to the Lyrans?" he requested.

"No" Franklin replied flatly.

Von Strang sighed. "It was worth a try at least" he said glumly.

"Count yourself lucky that none of your security people had the opportunity to carry out your threat towards the families of any of your soldiers that surrendered" Franklin told him. "I would have been sorely tempted to have you hanged, drawn and quartered, or else broken on the wheel if they had."

"How delightfully medieval of you" Von Strang replied drily.

"Not quite, fifteen hundred years back they didn't have the ability to do that to a man and still keep them alive" Franklin responded. "I'd have still handed you over to the Lyrans breathing, it's just that every breath would have been agony" he said. "Incidentally, if you kill yourself I might have to turn over one or more of your family to House Steiner in your place in order to still placate Lyran sensibilities for messing around on their turf" he warned.

"It's not their turf, it's mine" Von Strang replied, still weighing up suicide but with less enthusiasm for the idea than before. Who knew how the Steiners would treat his son?

"If it was yours it was only by right-of-conquest, and on that basis it's all mine now" Franklin told him. "Be grateful I'm not claiming ownership of your women like some pirate king."

"My sister would murder you while you slept and living with my wife would drive you to drink, so you should be grateful you dodged a bullet there" Karl Von Strang told him. "If I was in your shoes I'd take my mistress as a prize instead. Much easier to live with" he said before sighing. "Very well, I'll sign anything you want and fully cooperate in return for my family being properly taken care of as befits their station" he said. "Anything else? Want me to get down on my knees and beg forgiveness for the transgressions of my family against the lost unlamented House Cameron?" he asked wryly. "Swear fealty to your Great Panjandrum or whatever else it is you call your head of government?"

"His title is the 'High Associator' and no that won't be necessary" Franklin replied.

Von Strang smirked. "Not calling himself the First Lord or even the Director-General? How humble of him."

"I guess we can't all start calling ourselves 'Baron' or whatever one day and just expect people to go along with it at the point of a bayonet can we?" Johnson asked rhetorically although he did personally think that 'High Associator' was a crap title.

"You can make a throne of bayonets but you can't sit on it for long" Franklin quoted a politician from the short-lived Russian Federation that existed in the handful of years between the First and Second Soviet Union. Dictatorships were often brittle in a way that states with governments underpinned by broad public support were not, they didn't bent, they broke.

Johnson nodded. "Someone might just turn up one day with better bayonets" he suggested.


----------

Note from the Author:

The capital city of Niops has a planetarium, Amaris City on Von Strang's World has a Greek Amphitheatre, both exist because of their respective cultural backgrounds (a whole bunch of astronomy nerds and the Rim Worlds Republic respectively).

The Ares Conventions might not be in legal force any more at this point but they continued to exercise a certain moral authority as standards civilised people looked to.

The fate of Lucian Dormax, last President of the Rim Worlds Republic is unknown, but it's safe to say the Lyran Commonwealth never let him see the light of day again after they captured him during the Republic-Commonwealth War.

This is not the last we will hear of the toothsome Lady Arabella Von Strang, younger sister of Baron Karl Von Strang. He's actually one of the more saner members of his family.

[PsihoKekec]

Is Karl von Strang reincarnation of Al Bundy?