Guided by the light of a (Red) Cameron Star

[Artifex]

Nice going Hotpoint, I like what you've done with the story so far. :thumbsup:

[Daryk]

This is simply AWESOME on SO many levels! :)

[Vizzer]

I think I agree with the TH that geneticists are more dangerous than nuclear physicists. One can destroy planets while the other can destroy life.

[crestrunner]

I think I agree with the TH that geneticists are more dangerous than nuclear physicists. One can destroy planets while the other can destroy life.

Eh, I'm going to have to disagree with you on this.  Life is extremely resilient, and has survived in some very extreme conditions and very hostile environments.  Our species might not survive the tender mercies of either group of scientists, but life in general ought to.

As for Captain Blud, give her a jumpship, an appropriate mix of military dropships and crew, and a Letter of Marque and Reprisal, and she would be an excellent pirate hunter privateer.  This could almost certainly become a popular holoseries drama NIOPS could market, especially in the periphery states.

[Giovanni Blasini]

Holy crap, Niops and Frobisher together.  Is the galaxy ready for that much “Science!”?

[Hotpoint]

Holy crap, Niops and Frobisher together.  Is the galaxy ready for that much “Science!”?

I think you meant to say "SCIENCE!" 

If only Skyfog PROJECT LIBRA UMBRELLA hadn't been abandoned when the Star League collapsed they could have joined too.

[Daryk]

I'm thinking it would take a bit to evacuate 2 million... there might still be some for Niops to find and collect (gotta catch 'em ALL!) ;D

[vianca]

Also at least she is not a Colonel Blood, then it is ''lock ya crown jewels'' time.

No, just the German word for it.

I do wonder if they can put a few workshops at that factory, if only to help with general upkeep of the place.
Just in case.
 

[Hotpoint]

Part XXIII - Section 1 of 2

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"Those old rumours about Amaris having a secret underwater battlemech factory somewhere on Kwangjong-ni gave me the idea that maybe the old Star League facility on Frobisher might be eventually expanded to make things other than people with gills."

General Jenna Romanov - 2837CE

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Joseph-Louis Lagrange Memorial High School – Niops Association (Niops VII) – 2832

"Perhaps our new student would like to introduce herself to the class" the teacher suggested having directed her to a position next to his desk in front of everyone.

Philomena could have really done without this but her adoptive parents were not the sort that were going to allow her not to attend school, even if Niops Social Services would have, which they would not.

"Hi, I'm Philomena" she introduced herself to the teenagers who were all staring at her with a mix of various expressions on their faces ranging from intrigue to something verging on disgust in a couple of cases. "I'm from Frobisher" she added redundantly given that the local press had been discussing the other Terran Hegemony research colony way out in the periphery ever since the story broke. "Yes, my people were genetically engineered to make us amphibious. Yes, I have gills. No, I'm not more fish than I am human or anything close to it. Yes, my eyes are pretty big, but no I don't see in widescreen or panorama. No, my legs don't turn into a tail when I'm in the water, I don't know why that needs saying but for some reason it does, and finally, yes, I have partially webbed hands and feet to help with swimming" she concluded, holding her hands up fingers spread to demonstrate. "Any questions?"

"Are you wearing that scarf indoors to hide your gills?" a girl with ginger hair asked, sounding more genuinely curious than she did mocking.

"No, I'm wearing it because it's freezing cold here and I'm still trying to warm up from being outside more than a few minutes" Philomena replied honestly. "I'm not trying to hide my bald head with the woolly hat either" she added just in case that was going to be the next question. Because she was a minor the newspapers had not published her photograph, but that seemed a little redundant given that anonymity wasn't really an option. She was the only member of Homo Sapiens Amphibia on the planet, and for that matter the only one of her kind on any planet other than Frobisher, and if she wore sunglasses to hide her very distinctive eyes that would only attract more attention out in public because blindingly bright the local star was not.

If she hadn't already been overwhelmed by most everything else she encountered on Niops VII the fact it was actually safe to look directly at the sun here would have made more of an impact on Philomena than it did. In reality she was still too busy adjusting to other things to pay it much mind. Visiting the planetarium a couple of days back had been particularly mind-blowing, not so much the holographic presentation but the realisation that there were enough seats in there to hold the entire population of Frobisher twice over.

Her father's somewhat insensitive 'Dad Joke' about her gawking 'wide-eyed' at everything like a kid from a hick town had not been appreciated. Albeit mostly because she was already concerned that she was staring at everything in the 'big city' like some slack-jawed yokel from ****** Nowhere while everyone else was staring at her.

Hoping her time as an unwilling celebrity would be short-lived Philomena had been reassured somewhat that yesterday, and for the first time since they arrived, her family, had not been the front-page story in the morning newspaper. Instead the headlines had been lauding that the recharge station at the Niops zenith point had charged its first jumpship, and this was apparently considered some cause for celebration. Still under construction, and only partially operational, the station had yet to even be officially named, but it was by far the largest structure built in space by the Niops Association and judging by the headlines they all seemed pretty damn proud of the thing.

"Ah yes, the climate where you're from, that's something we might wish to talk about for today's lesson which will be a departure from the original lesson plan" the teacher said. "Please take a seat there Philomena" he directed her to an empty desk.

"We're not going to talk about me the whole hour are we?" Philomena responded in dismay.

"Oh, dear me no" the teacher replied, "that's mostly a matter of biology, we're studying astronomy and astrophysics this morning, although we will be talking about your home as the system de jour" he told her as she sat down. "Any more questions for Philomena before we begin?" he asked, best to just get it all over with he decided pragmatically.

"What's your star-sign? Pisces?" a boy joked to some laughter.

The teacher glared at the boy. "I will tolerate many things in this class David, even a certain amount of frivolity, but references to astrology is not one of them" the usually laid-back and relaxed teacher uncharacteristically snapped. If the Niops Association ever came to dominate the galaxy it would be very bad news for anyone that subscribed to that particular nonsense, astrologers were held somewhat lower in public esteem there than people that claimed to be able to divine the future by studying goat entrails.

It wasn't like the constellations were even in the same place in the Terran sky that they were when the Ancient Babylonians first invented the ridiculous pseudoscience, the teacher thought angrily to himself. If the charlatans were remotely rigorous in their approach they would have added a thirteenth starsign, Ophiuchus, to the zodiac over a thousand years ago.

"Sorry Sir" David replied sheepishly, it was always a bad idea to hit the teacher's berserk button.

"Any serious questions?" the teacher asked, expression indicating that they had better be serious questions from now on.

"How long are you going to be on Niops before you go home?" a girl asked. "I'm asking because I'm on the swim team and we're competing against Bernard Lovell High next month. Any chance you'd be interested in being a ringer?" she asked hopefully.

"Jennifer that would be deeply unethical" the teacher chided.

"It's the only sport we don't always beat them at. We already won our case that genetic engineering shouldn't disqualify any of us from inter-school athletic competition" the girl argued. "Lovell is just bitter that all the Ironborn attend Lagrange."

Philomena blinked. "Wait, are you the 'super-soldier' kids I've heard about?" she asked looking around to see if she could notice anything different about them.

"Only some of us, there's a few more in another class, but we prefer being called 'First Generation Ironborn', not 'super soldier kids' if you please" Jennifer McEvedy replied. "I guess they stuck you in with us because people in this school are used to having gene-spliced freaks around" she suggested wryly.

"Guess so" Philomena agreed, wondering if her parents knew.

"Just be grateful that Niops isn't exactly a hotbed of religious fundamentalists that'll call you an ungodly abomination to your face" McEvedy told her. "I'll bet that would happen a lot more elsewhere."

"Some might call you a science-devil in Chinese though" a boy spoke up. "Happens to me all the time."

The teacher frowned. "Frederick, I hope you tell your parents when that happens so they can remonstrate with the person concerned" he checked.

"They know. It's mainly my stepmom's mom that does it" Frederick Hallis replied, shrugging. It wasn't like she liked his father either, albeit for very different reasons.

"Oh" the teacher responded awkwardly. Well, what did General Hallis expect if he married into a Capellan family, he thought to himself dismissively, deciding to move on swiftly. The teacher pressed a few buttons on his noteputer and a colour projection of what Philomena recognised as her home system appeared on the wall behind the teacher's desk.

"This is the Frobisher which can be found approximately ten jumps, or three hundred light years, Rimward of Niops" the teacher began. "It's slightly atypical in that the star Frobisher is not a main sequence star, it's a type K5IV, an orange subgiant, with a luminosity you would normally expect of a hotter G type star like Terra but while maintaining the spectral class of your more regular K type" he said. "Since the system's habitable planet is also only second out from its sun the planet Frobisher is also considerably warmer than the standard baseline for habitability, Terra III, with an average equatorial temperature of 37 degrees Celsius."

"Damn, that's even hotter than Alphard" one of the boys exclaimed.

"Indeed Henry, and unlike Alphard the surface of which is only fifty-five percent covered by ocean, the same cannot be said of Frobisher" he noted, looking to the girl for comment.

"We're ninety-five percent ocean, everything else is islands and none of them are very big" Philomena told them.

"Extreme humidity for most of the year and so-called 'wet bulb' temperatures are far from unusual on the surface making it feel up to twenty degrees hotter than it really is" the teacher told them. "Would you care to explain to the class what that means given your first-hand experience Philomena?" he asked the girl. "It's not something that's exactly an issue here on Niops VII" he said, smiling.

"You can't cool down by sweating" Philomena told them. "We don't just spend a lot more time in the water than we do up on the islands because we can breathe down there, we do it because you can easily die of heat exhaustion up on the surface."

"We'll discuss thermoregulation more in biology class, but I suspect you can all see why Philomena finds our own climate rather chilly" the teacher said, smiling.

"I'd never seen snow in real life before I came here" Philomena remarked. "When does summer begin anyway?" she asked.

"This is summer" Jennifer told her apologetically. "We're near the equator, and there's not that much axial tilt anyway, so it doesn't get that much colder though."

"You don't swim in the sea here do you?" Philomena asked, grimacing. Back home the sea was always warm, at least it was unless you dived really, really deep, but they had actual icebergs here. She had seen the polar icecaps from space and they were huge.

"Sometimes, but not for competitions" Jennifer told her, rightly assuming that if it meant diving into the frigid waters of Niops VII there was no way that Philomena would want to join the swim team whether she was certain to win the event or not.

"Getting back to Frobisher II" the teacher cut them off. "The gravity there is slightly higher than our own, not that it matters if you're floating of course, and they have a moon called…" he looked to Philomena again.

"Ayde" Philomena told the class. "A.Y.D.E" she spelled it out for them because it was pronounced exactly the same way as aide, and actually meant the same thing. Not that she was sure why anyone had considered that particular moon more helpful than any other.

"As you already know, except you perhaps Philomena, Alphard is itself a subgiant star, which is why Alphard IV is actually hotter than Terra III, despite both stars being otherwise similar type G yellow stars" the teacher noted. "Specifically G3 in the case of Alphard and G2 in the case of Terra."

The teacher then got very technical about subgiant stars for the next fifteen minutes, then about the goldilocks zones around different stars and Philomena started to wonder if the teenagers on this planet were geniuses because they all seemed to know a ridiculous amount about such things judging by their questions and comments. Unable to follow it all very well she ended up zoning out for much of the rest of the lesson and was relieved when the Math and English classes with different teachers later on were more her speed. Math class even seemed to use the same textbooks as school back home, which probably shouldn't have come as a surprise given that the Terran Hegemony probably printed billions of them and shipped them out to every system it controlled.

The last class of the day was biology with the same science teacher as before, and it was at this point Philomena realised that the kids weren't scientific geniuses. They must just have a cultural bias towards teaching their children astronomy and astrophysics here, she concluded, because she was well ahead of them in her grasp on the topics being covered in the biology lesson.

Then it occurred to Philomena that the reason she seemed to know so much more about the biological sciences already than they did was likely because Frobisher had its own cultural biases in that direction.

She was still thinking about that when it came time to head home, wondering how science was taught on 'normal' worlds for a while before she realised that in much of the galaxy these days it might not even be taught that much at all.

The apartment the government had assigned her family was far enough away from Lagrange High that she needed to take the school bus home, not that she was particularly unhappy not to have to walk given how damn cold it was. The same youngsters who had stared at her on the bus on the way to school in the morning did so again on the way back, although a couple of kids from her class did talk to her now at least, including the girl with all the ginger hair who she had since found out was called Alice. Alice wasn't one of the 'Ironborn' kids herself, but she was dating one, and Philomena figured that meant she was a little more relaxed about genetically engineered humans than some other people might be.

The Ironborn kids all went to some kind of weird army cadet meeting after school a few days a week apparently, so none of them were on the bus that afternoon. Alice claimed that the week before her boyfriend had been playing with live shoulder-launched inferno missiles, but Philomena sincerely doubted that was true. Who on Terra would let sixteen-year-olds do something like that?

[Hotpoint]

Part XXIII - Section 2 of 2

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Not having her own key yet Philomena had to knock on the apartment door to be let in when she got home and her father did so. "Mom's still at some meeting" Ian Johanson told his adopted daughter.

"When isn't she, either here or back home?" Philomena replied rhetorically, hanging up her coat on the rack near the door as her father closed it again. At least it was toasty warm inside the apartment, in a place that had cheap fusion power generation and bountiful geothermal energy nobody worried about turning up the thermostat, electricity was practically too cheap to be worth metering.

"How was your first day at school?" Ian asked.

"Pretty good, only got asked if it was true that I could entice sailors to crash onto rocks by singing twice" Philomena replied sardonically.

Ian Johanson laughed. "Nobody that has ever heard you sing would ever accuse you of being a Siren" he replied. "Odysseus wouldn't have been begging his crew to untie him from the mast, he would have been begging them to fill his ears with beeswax too."

"Gee, thanks Dad."

"Just calling it as I see it, Honey" Ian replied as the girl now took off her hat too as she warmed up. "You have many fine talents, being able to hold a tune is not one of them."

If that was merely a subjective opinion, and not an objective fact, Philomena might have argued with him but melodious her singing voice was not. Part of that was down to the gills and how they connected up to her regular respiratory system, it messed with hitting the high notes somehow, but most of it was down to her being tone deaf. "How was the biology department at the university?" she asked, changing the subject.

"Friendly people, some of the lab equipment was a little quaint compared to what we have back home, and their library resources leave a lot to be desired, but I think I'll be happy enough working there for a while" Ian replied. "Oh, and I got you a pet while I was there" the genetic engineer added, smiling.

"A pet?" Philomena queried, wondering if it was some kind of genetically-engineered cat or something.

"They had quite a few of them at the lab, they breed pretty fast so when I asked if I could borrow a tank and take one home they were okay with it" Johanson told her. "It's in here" he continued, heading off towards the living room with Philomena following.

When she got there Philomena took stock of the large fish tank now resting on the dining table and its inhabitant. "That is one ugly fish" she opined, looking at it.

"Ah, but what it lacks in good looks it makes up for in character" her father declared. "This one is used to be handled" he said, reaching into the tank and gently taking hold of it, the fish not trying to evade but placidly seeming to accept being picked up.

To Philomena's surprise her father lifted the fish out of the water and placed it on the table beside the tank. Rather than immediately seeming to panic and thrash about like a normal fish would as it began to drown in air the creature remained placid and just seemed to look around.

"It's amphibious" Philomena realised.

"Species name Amphibius Alphardis, usually called the Alphard Mudskipper" Ian Johanson told her. "Not quite fully grown, it'll reach just over twenty centimetres when it is" he continued, reaching for a small plastic container, taking the lid off and pouring some food on the table near the fish.

The mudskipper immediately spotted the food and the reason why its fins were so misshapen compared to an ordinary fish became obvious as it employed them like legs to make its way across the table towards the food which it started to devour.

"Back home on Alphard they eat algae, but they find the algae from the sea here too salty so they prefer cabbage of all things" Johanson told her as the mudskipper devoured the green plants.

"Not a saltwater fish then?" Philomena assumed.

"Native to a freshwater inland sea called Lerna on the Hydrae continent" her father replied. "They climb out of the water to feed on the mudflats by the water, and to avoid predators if necessary. They're a true amphibian, just as happy breathing air as they are water, although they don't spend too much time out of the water in daytime. Poor little things get sunburn."

"You'd better put that back in the water before it wanders off" Philomena advised as the mudskipper finished off what it was eating and started looking around. "Pet fish shouldn't need a leash."

Ian Johanson gently picked the mudskipper back up and placed it back in its tank. "It's adorable, isn't it?" he asked as it started swimming. "We should get it some aquatic plants for its tank. Ones that it won't eat but aren't toxic either."

Philomena looked at the fish askance. "You only think its adorable because its amphibious" she decided, wondering if some of her DNA would have come from this thing if it had been native to Frobisher instead of Alphard.

"Nonsense. You're amphibious and I don't think you're adorable" Johanson replied, trying and failing to look serious about it.

"Hey!"

"I mean you used to be fairly adorable when you were small, but the taller you got the less adorable you became" Johanson told her, tongue-in-cheek. "Whatever traces of adorableness you still had vanished right about the time you turned thirteen and started talking back and swimming off in a huff when you were angry with us."

"Okay so you think its adorable because it's amphibious and small" Philomena slightly adjusted her position.

"You don't think it's neat that we're looking at a species that is probably in the process of doing what our ancestors on Terra did nearly four hundred million years ago, crawl out of the oceans and start to colonise the land?" Johanson asked.

Philomena thought about that. "As a member of a human sub-species heading in the opposite direction I can't help but think that one of us has it badly wrong" she eventually replied.

"I guess we'll just have to rely on natural selection to sort out who has it right then. Loser goes extinct" the geneticist replied in jest. "While we're on the subject of extinction, or rather the need to avoid it, the head of the biology department came to me with a warning that keeping all our eggs in one basket on Frobisher might be unwise given that your sub-species is only one global cataclysm away from going the way of the Trilobite."

"The seas here are too cold for us" Philomena replied quickly.

"Nonsense, you are all perfectly capable of surviving in the waters here" Johanson replied.

"I don't mean it would kill us, I mean nobody with any sense would want to live in these waters" Philomena explained. "They have icebergs, actual icebergs here" she exclaimed, shivering just from thinking about it.

"The department head was actually thinking about Niops VI which is a few degrees warmer, at least on the side that always faces the sun, although the strength of the ocean currents generated by the temperature differential between the two hemispheres could cause problems of their own" Johanson noted. "I actually suggested a small colony on Alphard within the Lerna Sea, that should be comfortably warm enough for you."

Philomena frowned. "Freshwater though?"

"Think of it as an opportunity to test if we were successful in making you a euryhaline species" the genetist joked.

"I already know I can breathe fresh water, I used to do it in the bath remember, it's just that we've always lived in the ocean."

"Only because Frobisher has barely any rivers and is entirely lacking in lakes" Johanson replied. "I remember the time you forgot to rinse away all the residue left behind by your mother's scented soaps first before putting your head under and opening your gills in the bath."

Philomena nearly gagged with the memory. "They itched for a week after that and everything, and I mean everything, smelled like lavender for days" she recalled with an involuntary shudder. "That scent still makes me gag now."

"Maybe that's my fault for not considering that eventuality when I helped engineer your grandparents" the genetic engineer remarked. "The need for lavender-proof gills just wasn't on my sonar I suppose" he admitted, smiling. "Any cute boys at school? You know mother will ask about that."

"None with a fish fetish as far as I could tell" Philomena replied sarcastically, ignoring her father's look of disapproval in response to that. "I don't think bald, built-in flippers and huge eyes is considered all that attractive here."

Ian Johanson nodded. "Having once been a teenage boy myself, admittedly many, many decades ago, I can offer some advice there" he said.

"Yeah?"

"Wear a low-cut top and they won't be looking at anything higher than your neck" Johanson suggested, holding back laughter.

"DAD!" Philomena exclaimed, her cheeks going bright red with embarrassment.

"All I'm saying is that if you want them to think something other than 'fish' then drawing attention to your mammalian features is a sure-fire way to do it" Johanson told her. "Scientifically speaking."

"I can't believe you sometimes" Philomena told him, shaking her head in disbelief.

"If your Mom hadn't given much the same advice to your biological mother when she was working as my lab assistant, and trying to get your biological father to notice her, you wouldn't even exist" Johanson told the girl. "The bikini had a lot more impact than the lab-coat ever did."

"GAH!"

"You know we didn't just take you in when they died in that accident because we loved you and your parents, we did it because we were both partially responsible for your existence, me with the gene-splicing, Eleanor with the matchmaking."

"Okay, that's enough. I don't want to think about this anymore" Philomena told him seriously. "What are we having for dinner?" she asked.

"Your Mom is picking up take-out on the way home" Ian Johanson told her.

"Those noodles again?" Philomena asked hopefully. The weather might be awful but the food here was great, much more variety than on Frobisher.

"Either that or fried chicken."

"Also sounds pretty good" Philomena replied, frankly anything that wasn't the usual fish and edible seaweed from back home was fine by her. She didn't like people staring at her here but the food on Niops was fantastic, almost as good as the movies and gameshows they had on television.

"What did they feed you at school?"

"Some kind of salad with ham in it. At least I think it was ham, it was okay though" Philomena told him. "They seemed surprised I didn't have any special dietary requirements."

Ian Johanson rolled his eyes. "I take it as a personal insult that we would have engineered you to be restricted in what you can eat" he said. "The whole idea was to make you more adaptable not less."

"That's what I told them" Philomena replied. "I'm not sure if they believed me when I said I could eat stuff with so much ammonia or other chemicals in it that it would make them ill" she said. "Not that I like the taste or smell of ammonia."

"We'll we didn't want to mess with your tastebuds, we might have accidentally stopped you appreciating a good steak, not that you ever had one before we got here" Johanson replied, reaching for the television remote. "I wanted to catch the news in case they mention us again."

"Maybe you need to splice together some amphibious cows so we can have steak and burgers back home?" Philomena suggested, grinning as he switched on the viewscreen which was already tuned to the news channel.

"… continues to top the rankings in the Gunslinger Program. When asked for comment by our correspondent reporting on the competition, mechwarrior Wilhelm Sampson, better known by his nom de guerre of 'Billy the Kid', attributed his outstanding victories in both the Heavy and Medium weight classes to taking recreational drugs, drinking to excess, and dropping out of school" the male news presenter said with a disapproving expression, an image of the mechwarrior in question appearing in one corner of the screen.

"Hey, I've seen that guy, Sampson I mean," Philomena realised. "A couple of the girls at school have his picture in their lockers."

"In response SLDF High Command have issued a press statement saying that mechwarrior Sampson was only joking and that he will be reprimanded for doing so in a manner that could have led impressionable youth astray" the newscaster reported.

Ian Johanson chuckled. "So, the most skilled mechwarrior on the planet is a young, good-looking guy with a rebellious streak" he observed. "Really makes you wonder what the teenage girls might see in him" he said sardonically before grinning.

"It's a mystery" Philomena replied deadpan.

"In other news, record grain harvests on Alphard this year are expected to lower the price of staple foods significantly over the next few months" the newscaster announced. "The Office of the High Associator has claimed that this is another example of how investing taxpayer's money in other systems pays dividends to our citizens in the medium-to-long term, noting that the grain yields per acre that have been achieved his year were only possible thanks to irrigation projects funded by the Niops Association. Those of us who have come to enjoy a large glass or two of imported Alphard Ale at the bar of an evening have extra reason to celebrate, as increased production of wheat and maize on Alphard means that more Fonio, the type of millet used in its production, is available for the brewing industry rather than being made into porridge or bread" he said happily.

"I've tried that beer, it's not bad" Johanson remarked. "Better than what we could make on Frobisher anyway."

"Germanium production on Alphard also continues to increase month-by-month, although the government refutes as 'scurrilous' the rumours that this is because guards at the Crux Penal Colony have been issued electric cattle-prods from Francas to motivate the prisoners into working harder in the mines" the newscaster said. "Increased automation and heavy-duty mining equipment imported from the Free Worlds League are stated to be the sole reason for the increase in the output of germanium ore, and the government has offered to allow both the press and independent observers access to the facility to investigate for themselves if the allegations of mistreatment of the inmates have any merit."

"Penal Colony?" Philomena queried.

"Someone mentioned it in the university when we were talking about Alphard earlier, it's on a different continent than the inland sea where the mudskippers live" Johanson replied. "Captured pirates and slavers put to work swinging pickaxes so I heard."

Philomena thought about that. "Pirates and slavers? Well ****** those guys then" she decided eventually.

"Language!" Ian Johanson rebuked her sharply.

"Sorry" Philomena apologised.

"… in other mining news, recruitment on Comstock for people to work in the new coltan mine on the Hydrae continent continues, although take-up has been reportedly worse than expected due to both lower unemployment and an improving standard of living on Comstock itself as it recovers from its decades-long economic and societal malaise" the television newscaster said. "The fifty percent government-owned Hydrae Mining Corporation that was established last year has warned shareholders that it may need to increase wages in order to meet recruitment targets and that this will negatively impact expected dividends for the next few years. Deemed a strategically vital resource, the extraction and processing of coltan ore has been deemed a high priority by the government's Strategic Planning Committee since the ore contain large amounts of tantalum, necessary for our expanding electronics industry, and niobium, itself used in both the production of specialised steels and superalloys. Any viewers interested in knowing more should make sure to tune into our special report on mineral extraction in the protectorates, and its implications for the future of the Niops Association scheduled for Tuesday evening."

"Sounds riveting. I'd make sure to watch it but I'm washing my hair that evening" Philomena said wryly. "Can we switch to the gameshow channel instead?" she requested. "The show where you have to answer questions while they throw beanbags at you is on soon" she told him. That was hilarious, especially the bonus round where the mechanical flinger was sped up.

"Not yet" Johanson replied, he wasn't a fan of the gameshow channel which was a weird mix of education, comedy sadism and complete idiocy.

"And finally, before we switch over to our other studio where our regular panel of experts will be discussing the latest news from the Inner Sphere and the ongoing war there, High Associator Giles Olson answered questions today regarding how the Associator will approach the Frobisher controversy."

"You know, all things considered, I'd prefer my very existence not to be controversial" Philomena remarked drily.

"Unwilling to comment on government policy that is yet to be decided the High Associator did however offer his personal thoughts, saying that if he had been in charge on Terra back when the Frobisher project was begun he would have vetoed the whole thing due to the ethical issues involved in human experimentation."

"Not great" Johanson replied, frowning.

"However, he then went on to add that since the human sub-species known as Homo Sapiens Amphibia had, in fact, been created well over a hundred years ago, then he believed it would be morally wrong to let an entire race become extinct when the Niops Association could help prevent that. This he said was particularly the case as the people of Frobisher were Terran Hegemony citizens who had the same legal rights and protections as any other citizens and the government therefore had a duty of care towards them."

Philomena rolled her eyes. "Hey, we might be freaks but at least they accept we're people."

"I have a dream that one day my creations will live in a nation where they will not be judged by the sequencing of their DNA but by the content of their character" Ian Johanson declared in a haughty tone of voice, his expression indicating he was being rather less than serious however.

"You know if you keep referring to yourself as 'the creator' then one day God might get pissed and decide to teach you a lesson about hubris and humility Dad" Philomena warned.

"Total amateur, he didn't even make his own creations flood-proof like I did. What kind of half-assed species needs an ark to survive a global deluge anyway?" Johanson joked.

Philomena looked at him. "You know your sense of humour is more blasphemous and contrary to the will of the almighty than anything you've ever done in a lab" she told him. "It's a good thing that the only people that might face getting burned at the stake here are the ones that claim to have invented perpetual motion."

"A little harsh, but objectively what more suitable punishment could there be for anyone that doubts the inviolable truth of thermodynamics?" Ian Johanson wanted to know, sounding so sincere about it Philomena didn't know if he was kidding or not.



----------

Note from the Author:

The Rim Worlds Republic under Amaris actually did have a secret underwater battlmech factory on Kwangjong-ni although the SLDF never found it (Defiance Industries did eventually) so military gear being produced in secret underwater bases is very much a thing in Battletech.

In canon Frobisher only had a population of only 4500 by the year 3095, depite the colony being four centuries old by that point. Even though it likely had a declining population over the years there were never very many people living their (gentically engineered or otherwise) so to Philomena born there the capital city of Niops VII is going to seem like a huge metropolis (there are more teenagers attending Joseph-Louis Lagrange Memorial High School alone than there are children in total on Frobisher). Niops VII is also going to seem very, very cold to her.

I somehow suspect that astrology is unlikely to be thought of too highly in a society founded by astronomers and astrophysicists.

Jennifer McEvedy is a great believer in the notion that winning is what really counts and that playing fair is for suckers. As such she looks at Philomena and doesn't think 'big-eyed freak' but rather 'easy win for us in the swimming competition'. Where she gets that attitude from is of course a mystery.

Mechwarrior Wilhelm Sampson, AKA 'Billy the Kid' (last seen fighting the Blood Rain in Part XIV) has become a minor celebrity, thanks to performing so well in the Gunslinger Program. His scores are much higher than his promotion prospects.

If Homo Sapiens Amphibia were not engineered to be a euryhaline species (able to cope with waters of differing salinity) then the scientists on Frobisher really messed up their design requirements for an adaptable human sub-species. Having a colony of Frobisher originated people living in the freshwater Lerna Sea along with the Alphard Mudskipper amused me as an idea. According to Handbook: Major Periphery States mudskippers are eaten on Alphard as a delicacy, though an acquired taste apparently, but Frobishers keeping them as pets instead has appeal. Handbook: Major Periphery States also notes that large amounts of Tantalum and Niobium are produced from Coltan ore on Alphard (both very useful materials).

[PsihoKekec]

astrologers were held somewhat lower in public esteem there than people that claimed to be able to divine the future by studying goat entrails.

The wonders of living in such a rational place.

His scores are much higher than his promotion prospects.

Rational place indeed.

[Daryk]

Ahem... [Astronomy Minor]Terra is Sol III.[/Astronomy Minor]

Otherwise, yet more highly amusing story telling! :D

[Hotpoint]

Ahem... [Astronomy Minor]Terra is Sol III.[/Astronomy Minor]

Not in Battletech. 

At some point they adopted a policy of naming the star after the most important world in the system.

[Daryk]

Clearly, I need to talk to the Sarna admins... ;D

[Daryk]

Have some Niopsian "MTV": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7TUe5w6RHo

;D

[Hotpoint]

Part XXIV - Section 1 of 2

----------

"It'll be a good long while before we've got anything to compare to one of the huge automated factories the Terran Hegemony used to build their battlemechs in, but if the Successor States had any inkling at all what we've already got in the way of armaments manufacturing capability on Niops V they would be queueing up to try and invade us while they still could without getting their teeth kicked in."

Colonel Trish Ebon - 2840CE

----------

Project Workshop III-A – Niops Association (Niops V) – 2832

Samantha Hollister had never particularly wanted any kind of long-term position in government, she found all the bureaucracy annoying as hell, but because no good deed goes unpunished her success in chairing the old steering committee had led to her being appointed to head the Department of Trade and Industry in Giles Olson's second administration.

In Hollister's opinion 'appointed' was a misleading description of what had actually happened, with 'railroaded' being closer to the mark, but now two-and-a-half years into the job it had at least become somewhat tolerable, at least when she managed to get out from behind her desk for a reason she could justify like an inspection tour of the expanding manufacturing facilities on Niops V.

Long the industrial heart of the Association Niops V was not merely home to Project Workshop III but other manufacturing facilities as well. Factories that turned out I.C.E. powered vehicles, domestic appliances and consumer goods surrounded Chapterhouse, the only city on the planet remotely worthy of the name, and away from the civilian population a pair of munitions plants that had been built by the NAM to supply their war machines with missiles and autocannon ammunition could be found.

As the smallest of the three habitable worlds in the system Niops V also had the lowest surface gravity, being about two thirds that of Niops VII, or indeed Terra. That was enough to not cause major health problems for long-term residents but still made life just a little easier for construction workers and indeed mining operations. As the closest to the star it was also the warmest of the three, at least on the light side of the tidally-locked world, and because it was far more arid than Niops VI the weather wasn't as unpleasant either.

It was always windy of course, the atmosphere was constantly trying to transfer heat from the light side to the dark one, but at least there wasn't enough surface water to result in perpetual, torrential rain falling across much of the planet like there was on oceanic Niops VI the least populated of the three.

A spring in her step thanks to the lower gravity Hollister watched the workshop staff beavering away through a viewing window in the supervisor's office that overlooked the workshop, the supervisor himself down there somewhere sorting out some kind of problem. She found herself thinking upon the truth that being fortunate enough to possess the facilities like this one when civilisation collapsed was what had really set Niops apart from the rest of the galaxy, well that and not being complete lunatics bent on destruction. During the Amaris War, and then the First Succession War, the ability of these workshops to reproduce most any piece of advanced technology had allowed the Association to maintain a Terran Hegemony level tech-base and a standard of living that most other worlds could only dream of, and they did so despite decades of isolation.

Effectively a stable autarky until the SLDF-in-Exile arrived at their doorstep, Niops was now steadily abandoning its isolationist stance, looking for resources elsewhere and building new manufacturing capability as needed. No longer were the workshops merely replacing worn-out-parts or building the occasional war-machine for the NAM, they were being used to create an entire interstellar industrial civilisation, one piece of equipment at a time.

Putting the Hegemony back together like a giant kit, was how one commentator had described it.

The workshops were a miracle of engineering with only one major downside. Niops had exactly three of them, one having been being built by the Star League on each of the habitable worlds in the system, and because they only had those three and a myriad of jobs for them to do they had always a crippling industrial bottleneck.

Worse than that, currently they only really had two available to meet orders because Project Workshop III on Niops V, or to be more accurate III-A since the renaming, would be completely tied up and unavailable for other tasks until at least late 2834, or more likely early 2835.

For over a year now Project Workshop III-A had been working nearly flat-out, sometimes the staff even working double-shifts, to speedily construct Project Workshop III-B which was being installed in the identical building constructed to house it right next door.

Through the viewing window Hollister watched a hefty piece of equipment that seemed to be a powered hoist that had just been manufactured was picked up by an identical powered hoist and loaded onto a cart ready to be wheeled into the next building.

It was the sort of sight that gave truth to the joke being told by the staff that Project Workshop III-A had been turned into a Von Neumann machine with unionised labour.

If it had not been for the automated factory producing electronic components that had once graced Camelot Command, but was now happily working away for the Association instead, they would not have been able to free up Workshop III-A for nearly that long. There was always something important breaking down somewhere after all, but with the autofac churning out replacement circuit-boards as required Project Workshops I and II could just about cope with all the other work alone.

Pushing III-A hard to get III-B finished was putting a strain on the machinery there though, for a major maintenance overhaul. Then it would be put straight back to work manufacturing III-C although at a rather more sedate pace.

The backlog wouldn't start reducing until III-B was online, and they certainly couldn't think about pushing ahead with another major project, like an orbital shipyard for example, until III-C was completed and available too, but at least they were making progress.

Naturally progress would have been faster if the High Associator didn't keep coming up with new 'High Priority' jobs for the workshops. Repairing or replacing the aging and overworked lab equipment at Frobisher would tie up a workshop for months at least, and if they were really going to go ahead with turning out Iron Wombs for them as well something else was going to have to be shelved for now, most likely the manufacturing line for Arrow IV missiles that the military was pressing for.

If Olson's ambitions could be reined in a little then eventually they would have enough workshops to do everything they wanted them for, just not for a couple more decades at least. The long-term plan was to have one new additional Project Workshop on-line every five years starting with III-C, which should be up and running by 2840. They could be brought online more quickly, but then Niops would just run into another bottleneck instead, not enough skilled people with the necessary technical qualifications to staff them all properly. Sweating the manufacturing equipment in III-A to breaking point to get new workshops operational ahead of schedule when you didn't have the engineers and technicians needed to run the things anyway would just be stupid.

The new Technical College on Niops VII might have annoyed the university when some of their funding was diverted to there, but it should start churning out the people that would be needed to staff both the workshops and other factories being planned. Olson was at least smart enough to have pushed for that, facing down the academic lobbyists who still wielded considerable influence over society.

At some point it would likely be politically necessary to make a few new orbital telescopes for installation in other systems, most likely starting with Alphard for convenience, but Olson certainly couldn't announce that anytime soon, it would be interpreted as a bribe to keep the astronomers happy.

The only departments that actually were happy already, ecstatic even, were Geology, because they were having money and resources thrown at them to survey new worlds for potential mineral wealth, and High Energy Physics, because the SLDF wanted better lasers and particle-beam weapons and had a good sum of money in their budget to fund R&D projects.

The SLDF had of course stipulated that Professor Ogbert Farnstrom was not to be left unsupervised near any directed-energy-weapons. He might well be the smartest man in the department, perhaps even the smartest in the entire star system, which was really saying something for Niops, but genius or not he was also one mech short of a full lance in their opinion.

As a nuclear chemist by background herself, with contacts in several related departments, Hollister also knew that the materials science people were chasing a share of that military budget as well. Unfortunately for them they had been told point-blank that unless they could come up with how to make a better heat-sink, or superior armour plate, then they weren't going to get money thrown at them anytime soon.

"Excuse me Madam Secretary" Hollister's aide interrupted her thoughts.

"Yes Daniel?" Hollister replied, looking away from the viewing window towards him. The guided tour of the workshop earlier had actually turned out to be more interesting than she had expected, and afterwards she had found herself looking at the facility and the workers there with more respect.

"Just to remind you that we still need to visit the new defence plant this afternoon, and that you also told the High Associator that you would make your decision today on what you think we should do about the steel shortage" the aide reminded her.

Hollister checked her watch. "Still plenty of time to get to the new factory complex" she told him. "I don't want to get there too early, we'll just have to sit through another lecture about battlemech construction if we do, and probably suffer through a war story or two from the retired SLDF people they put in charge of getting it running on schedule" she replied. "If you've heard one rambling tale about righteously putting Stefan Amaris's goons to the sword you've heard them all."

"I don't know Ma'am, I think it largely depends on who's telling the story" the aide disagreed. "Some of them are pretty funny, at least they are if you can cope with the gallows humour" he opined. "What about the steel shortage?" he nudged again for a decision.

Samantha Hollister sighed. "We drastically overestimated how many mining robots we could get our hands on didn't we?" she asked rhetorically. "Ones that still worked anyway."

The aide nodded. "I guess Earthwerks are putting most everything they have into meeting their military contracts these days, and most of the other suppliers had their assembly lines destroyed by either Amaris or one successor State or another" he said. "We did manage to find plenty of them in scrap yards that we got cheap enough" he added in a more upbeat manner, smiling.

"Most of which are going to take us forever to get running again" Hollister replied glumly. "If it wasn't for the Engineering Department at the university offering course credits to students if they fixed them it would be ten years or more before we had the number we need to meet existing resource commitments, let alone any new ones Olson comes up with."

"Strange to think we've got a glut of germanium, but not enough iron of all things" Daniel remarked.

"We've got more of every type of metal than we know what to do with, the problem is that most of it is stuck in floating rocks and we just don't have the manpower or the necessary EVA equipment to dig it out by hand" Hollister noted, groaning at the situation they found themselves in. Mining robots, particularly the first-rate ones made by Earthwerks, could not care less if they were working in a vacuum and they could work right around the clock without ever needing to rest bar the occasional service or repair.

If they had a spare Project Workshop or two available then they could made a few of their own robots to help out, but they didn't so they couldn't.

"Screw it" Hollister eventually decided after considering the options again. "I'm going to recommend we trade with the Illyrian Palatinate" she told her aide. "They've got enough in the way of steel production to meet our needs until we can get our own up to speed, and we're not exactly short of transportation to haul it back here."

The aide nodded. "There is the matter of what we might have to trade for the metal to get the best deal" he pointed out. "They don't have much call for germanium and that's the only thing we have to trade except for…"

"Weapons" Hollister finished the sentence for him.

"The SLDF might not be happy about that" the aide warned.

"They're not using the damn things" Hollister replied, unmoved by what the military might think about it. "All those Star League era lasers and autocannons are just sitting in a warehouse gathering dust since they replaced them with improved versions. It's not like they're ever intending to use them, they're already planning to replace their new gear with even newer gear, like that fancy new Extended Range Laser they're hoping to put into mass production soon, it's more use to us now for trade than it'll ever be for our defence needs."

"Part of their objection is likely to be us arming a potential hostile neighbour" the aide reminded her. "The Palatinate does have a history with the Star League, and it wasn't always an amiable relationship."

Hollister laughed. "If our military argues that the Illyrian Palatinate is a threat then you know that they're stretching for an excuse not to give up their aging reserve stockpile of increasingly obsolescent guns" she said, amused by the very idea. "Romanov herself says she's confident that our military could give the Free Worlds League enough of a shellacking to make them back off from an attempted invasion, and the Palatinate itself barely has a military. That's why we can get a good price for our old guns from them, they have enough of a problem fighting off the larger pirate groups. We're so far out of their league we're not even playing the same sport."

The aide frowned. "They do have battlemechs" he pointed out.

"According to the data I've seen we've got more battlemech regiments than they have battlemech companies" Hollister retorted, "and that's putting aside the fact that half their hardware dates from the Reunification War or earlier" she continued. "Hell, I'd bet good money that the NAM could probably take them on its own these days. They're certainly much better trained and equipped than they used to be. "Did you see that a NAM mechwarrior got into the top ten in the heavy battlemech division in the latest Gunslinger ratings?" she asked rhetorically. "We all used to think of them as nothing but paper tigers, only fit for taking on pirates, but Romanov and her people really whipped them into shape."

"Yeah" the aide agreed. "Jason Carmichael, that mechwarrior you mentioned, I've actually met him a couple of times, my sister went to school with the guy" the aide replied. "Joined the NAM because his grades weren't very good according to her. She put a Newton on him to win his last match just because she knew him, got six-to-one odds because nobody thought a NAM guy would pull it off."

"It's all about the Newtons" Hollister replied, chuckling as she quoted the line from many a popular rap song, and at least one children's rhyme about the laws of motion.

"Don't let the Leibniz posse hear you say that" the aide warned in jest, grinning. "You know the military are going to ask why we don't just import steel from somewhere else."

Hollister shrugged. "I'm happy to argue it out in front of the High Associator" she replied. "Steel from the Palatinate is a lot cheaper than from the Free Worlds League, that's why the Mariks import from there themselves, and if we bought from the League, or the Magistracy for that matter, we'd have to pay in germanium and do we really want either of them to know we've got that much of the stuff yet?" she asked rhetorically. "We had no option but to pay in germanium for the industrial plant and machinery we needed to import from them, but we're being careful to spread out our purchases over time, so it looks like we're gradually digging it up, not that we've got warehouses full of the stuff already."

"It's a balancing act certainly, Ma'am" the aide agreed. "It's really just a shame the team of geologists sent to Copernicus to investigate the iron ore deposits discovered there by the initial surveys found they weren't as sizable as first thought."

"Meh, not every system we plant a flag on is going to be a treasure trove of easily extracted mineral wealth" Hollister replied. "It was still important to claim it before someone else did, it's only one jump from AJC after all, same reason we're talking to the people on Stafford."

"Regarding Stafford, the Department of Agriculture is still pushing for us to move the purchase of agricultural robots to a higher priority, and it we can't get any we should build a manufacturing plant for them" the aide told her. "They are adamant that Stafford is a breadbasket world waiting to happen and it's likely Islington will be too further down the road."

"Robots harvesting grain from fields twenty-kilometres across might make for quite the mental image but they'll have to make do with tractors and combine harvesters for a while yet because there is no way we'll be building our own factory for agricultural robots, or any other kind of robots, for a generation" Hollister stated flatly. Niops had hit the ground running when it came to industrial development, but all the infrastructure that would have to be put in place first before they could get to that stage was staggering to contemplate. "Wait. Why were the Department of Agriculture looking at Islington?" she asked, nonplussed. "That's got to be five jumps from here, halfway to freaking Frobisher for Pete's sake!"

"It's closer than Algenib and the people there are actually asking to be made a protectorate, so I can't imagine the High Associator not wanting to raise the Red Cameron Star over them before the next election" the aide supposed. "My guess is that people are just looking at the map and assuming that we're going to claim every system rimward from here all the way to Frobisher any day now."

"And populate them with who exactly" Hollister asked rhetorically, rolling her eyes.

"I doubt they're really considering that particular issue Ma'am" Daniel the aide told her. "At the risk of a little hyperbole people are drawn to dreams of empire and glory. It's the vision thing, aspiring to being something greater than ourselves."

Hollister rolled her eyes to the ceiling. "I blame Olson and his 'Manifest Destiny' schtick" she muttered to herself. "All those speeches about the Niops Association lighting the way to a glorious future for humanity are rotting people's brains. Everyone is losing their freaking perspective and sense of scale" she continued before turning back to look through the viewing window. "We're practically hand-building the future, and that takes a little time" she said drily.

Daniel, the aide, laughed. "Yes. Ma'am" he agreed.

"It's a damn good thing that the SLDF arrived with their own production lines for equipment because I've got no idea how we would have been able to build those ourselves this century" Hollister remarked, only exaggerating a little bit. "If they kick up a fuss about trading their surplus weaponry to the Palatinate maybe we should tell them we need the steel to make all that reinforced concrete they're pushing for."

"That might work Ma'am" Daniel replied, thinking about it. "It was a pretty smart idea to build their battlemech factory at the bottom of an old open-cast mine, but it'll need one hell of a second roof on it so it doesn't collapse when they dump a few million tons of backfill on top of it."

"Still a lot quicker and cheaper than digging a bunker complex that size from scratch" Hollister noted. "I'll bet they're looking at all the other mines right now thinking 'budget Castle Brian' or whatever so we'd better make sure they know they can't have them until they're no longer economically viable."

"I heard that someone was talking about maybe using fusion reactors to melt rock into lava and pouring that on top of the first couple of layers of backfill like cement" the aide told her. "Stabilise the whole thing, reduce the load bearing down on the structure and have a shield against orbital strikes and bunker-busters."

Hollister stared at him. "Letting those old guys from the Star League Department of Mega Engineering loose in the university was not the smartest thing we have ever done" she opined. "It's unleashing everyone's inner mad scientist I swear" she said, shaking her head in disbelief. "One sniff of building a secret underground lair surrounded by liquid hot magma and they all start laughing maniacally" she said. "Yes, I know it won't actually still be liquid rock" she added before he could correct her. More like a layer of basalt or similar igneous rock, cooled off and set, maybe several metres deep with more backfill then dumped on top. "How do you get to find out all this stuff anyway?" she asked suspiciously. "You're often better informed than I am."

"Humble minions like myself are wont to talk to humble minions in other departments Ma'am" Daniel explained. "As long as its not actually secret we try and share useful information."

"What do you tell them about me?" Hollister wanted to know.

"Nothing you need to worry about. The occasional hint that you care enough about doing your job that it annoys the crap out of you when people mess with your plans" the aide replied.

"Do you tell anyone how often I moan about the High Associator?"

"No point, everyone knows that already including him" Daniel told her. "It stopped even being interesting gossip when you bawled him out over the Francas investment thing in front of everyone in the council."

"That was a mistake, he cashed in on it by saying that in his administration he welcomed opposing views because in his heart he was still a scientist seeking objective truth, and if your hypothesis cannot stand up to counter-argument then it's a crappy hypothesis" Hollister complained. "My life would be so much easier if he was just a blithering idiot like all too many of his predecessors" she said dejectedly. "If anything the most aggravating part of the whole thing was that he wasn't mad enough about it to hold a grudge."

"I suspect he's wise to any attempts you might make to get yourself replaced by someone else" the aide theorised. He knows you're far too diligent and professional to deliberately screw up so pinning your hopes on an 'irreconcilable personality clash' with the boss might be your escape plan" he said, smiling. "We really should get moving if we want to inspect the new factory complex and still have time to get something to eat before catching the dropship back home though Ma'am" he told her.

"You're probably right on both. Where would I be without you Daniel?" Hollister asked, smiling back at him.

"Late Ma'am, you would always be running late" the aide replied. "And you would have to read more of the memos that cross your desk instead of trusting me to only put the important ones in front of you" he added, knowing full-well that she still occasionally checked a few of the others just to make sure he was doing his job properly.

Hollister grimaced. "Why anybody thinks I give enough of a crap to copy me in on what particular jumpship is going where, or recruitment decisions outside my own department, I will never know" she said, bemused as to the logic there. It was oner thing to be a details person but knowing the minutiae of issues outside your own remit was all too rarely useful, at least in government anyway, in science a decent grasp of other fields could pay off on occasion. "I'll say my farewells then we can get going. The VTOL ride should be fun" she said sardonically, the fierce crosswinds that were a constant feature of air travel on Niops V were something that were best avoided if you were a nervous flyer and Hollister wasn't exactly an enthusiastic one.

"It's a little too far to travel by road given how valuable your time is Ma'am" Daniel replied apologetically as she headed for the door.

"Remind me to sign off on building more maglev on this planet" Hollister told him.

"Will do" the aide replied, mentally filing that instruction in the category 'probably not being serious', as he followed her out of the supervisor's office.

[Hotpoint]

Part XXIV - Section 2 of 2

----------

One slightly hair-raising VTOL trip from the Project Workshop facility to a now defunct open-cast mine later Hollister stepped out of the tilt-rotor craft onto the landing pad where she was greeted by a handful of workers, including the man in charge of building the factory there. Hollister was pleasantly surprised to find that down at the bottom of the enormous pit that had been dug into the ground by heavy machinery the air was actually quite still, and she could not help but feel it was a pity that they intended to fill the hole back up eventually.

"Weather's quite decent down here, isn't it?" the engineer in charge observed, seeming to read Hollister's mind somehow. "Reminds you how much nearer the star we are here when you can actually feel the sunlight hitting you, and not just the breeze."

Only calling it a 'breeze' was underplaying the constant prevailing winds here, Hollister thought to herself, but she nodded anyway as she was led towards the manufacturing plant. Basically just a collection of blocky concrete buildings that were entirely lacking in external windows because they were all going to be deep underground eventually. Before they were buried concrete arches would be constructed right over them to support a second roof above the first, this being required so that millions of tons of rock dumped on them from above as back-fill didn't simply squish the factory flat, but they weren't nearly at that stage of construction yet.

Inside the first and largest building the production lines were already taking shape. Most of the engineers and technicians involved were SLDF personnel, rather than the civilians workers of the Project Workshops, and Hollister noted the difference in working environment almost immediately as they seemed to be operating at a near frantic pace.

"Got to get everything finished ahead of schedule" the chief engineer told her. "No point having new battlemechs rolling off the production line too late to influence the outcome of the war" he stated with quite some authority.

"You're speaking from experience I imagine?" Hollister replied, watching as a crew of engineers were assembling what she thought were a set of giant rollers for some kind of battlemech-sized conveyor belt.

The chief engineer nodded. "If we'd had the production lines for the Pulverizer, the Stag and the Mercury II running on Circe a year earlier, hell maybe even only six months, the other clans would have been a lot more reticent to take us on" he said confidently. "We were the first to get our shit together in terms of new production, excuse my language, but just not soon enough to get meaningful numbers of the new machines in the field before we really needed them."

"We're not exactly short on war material at the moment" Hollister pointed out.

"No, but if the clans find us in the next five years, or the Free Worlds League invades us, then having a warehouse full of brand-new HSR-250-Dn Hussar mechs and another rolling off the line every two weeks is going to come in handy" the engineer suggested. "With the new laser and the anti-infantry armament they're good for more than just scouting even if they are a great scout mech."

"Only one battlemech every two weeks? I thought production was supposed to be faster than that?" Hollister queried, frowning.

"It's not producing the mech itself that's the problem in terms of speeding up production" the engineer told her. "The Guardian ECM system it carries, and the Beagle Active Probe it mounts as well, take a while to put together, they're highly advanced and technically demanding pieces of kit" he said. "We're only lucky that the Mercury II mounted both, so we already had the production lines for them, they're just not capable of turning them out as fast as we would want in a ideal galaxy."

"Somehow I got the impression that the tricky part was the fusion engines?" Hollister responded, frowning.

"The extralight fusion engines used in more advanced battlemechs like our Hussar are certainly 'tricky' to make, the Successor States were well behind the Hegemony when it came to manufacturing those, but fortunately for us the Stag medium we had in production utilised a 270XL engine that has the same mass and power output as the one needed by our new Hussar so we're just using those" the engineer told her. "The production line for them is next door" he added. "We should be capable of turning out one of those a week once we're operating at full production rates if we need to, the excess ones not needed for the Hussar might come in handy for other purposes."

"Such as?" Hollister asked him, curiously.

"The Royal version of the Phoenix Hawk battlemech uses a 270XL engine, if we ever want to put those into production at some point and we might because it's a good machine" the engineer told her. "Until then we can also use them to replace the regular 270 fusion engines fitted to our standard model Tomahawk and Ahab aerospace fighters, upgrading them to Royal configurations with more mass available for weaponry and armour" he explained. "They'll even fit into a Highlander assault, but I'm not convinced having more mass for weapons and armour is worth it in that case. XL engines can't take as much punishment as regular ones and the Highlander is supposed to stand there and take it. It can't just run away when things get too hairy like a fighter or a fast mech can."

Hollister nodded, she had heard before that there as a trade-off if you wanted one of the lighter engines in your battlemech, that being the war machine couldn't take as much abuse before it went down. Mechs with XL engines were sometimes described as 'Glass Cannons' in military parlance, the extra weaponry they could mount meant they could dish it out harder but they couldn't take it nearly as well. "How much of the machine is actually going to be made here?" she asked. "As opposed to being merely assembled from parts made elsewhere?"

"In some ways it's as much assembly as it is manufacture to be honest" the engineer told her. "The endo-steel frame has to be manufactured in a freefall or zero-gee environment, so most of the chassis and limbs are going to be produced at the orbital facility up there and brought down by dropship" he said, pointing upwards. "The fusion engines, myomer muscles and electronics will be made in-house, but armour plate will also be made elsewhere. Another engineering team is putting up a plant that'll produce ferro-fibrous armour in quantity, but I've heard a rumour that they might be running way behind schedule, if they are we might be forced to use standard plate for the first few Hussars that roll out."

Hollister frowned, thinking to herself she should look into that rumour because that was the first she had heard about it. "Weaponry?" she asked, moving on.

"One day they'll all be manufactured at a new armaments factory that will eventually be installed in one of the buildings we're putting up here, but for the foreseeable future we'll be relying on weaponry made elsewhere" the engineer replied. "Once we've upgraded all the mechs belonging to the 295th our existing armaments production capacity will be freed up, and for now we can't really justify having far more capacity to turn out weaponry than we actually have machines to hang it off" he said. "I know there's a debate on whether or not to re-tool the line that makes the Improved Large Laser to make the new model Extended Range Large Laser instead, or to make a whole new one, but that's not my department."

"I suppose the ability to make spares is the reason why you would want to keep the old line as well?" Hollister asked him.

"That, and I guess if we ever found ourselves needing something to sell to pay the bills the Successor States would offer their first born for them" the engineer replied, grinning. "They might be a generation behind our new toy but they're still a generation ahead of what everybody but the clans have."

That was certainly worth considering as a long-term investment, Hollister considered. Mothballing rather than re-tooling old production lines so they could be used to make money in the future meant more up-front expenditure right now to replace them entirely, but the pay off in a few years could be truly massive.

They would have to make sure that the qualitative edge over the Successor States remained just as large as it was now of course, or ideally even larger. They weren't just potential future customers they were potential future enemies.

As she was given a tour of the rest of the facility Hollister realised that the reason everything seemed to be going to smoothly here was that the engineers and technicians putting the machinery together were the same ones who had made and assembled it in the first place way back in clan space. Not only that, they were also the people that had taken it all apart again and loaded it onto the ships which had carried it from Circe to Niops.

They all seemed happy in their work too, which largely seemed to be due to the fact that all the bulky equipment weighed noticeably less here than it had the last time they had to hump it around.


----------

Note from the Author:

Niops V is the closest of the three habitable worlds in the Niops System to its star and in canon seems to be the one where the Association maintains most of its industry (Project Workshop III was where Niops manufactured their Nighhawk powered armour in canon, though not for a couple of centuries). I'm placing Project Workshop I on Niops VII (the most populous world in the system) and Workshop II on Niops VI (seemingly the least populous) with the assumption that you wouldn't want all your eggs in one basket production wise.

Project Workship III-A (formerly just III) is currently busily putting together III-B and after that will make III-C and eventually there will also be additional workshops on the other planets too (I-B, II-B etc.). Given how advanced the workshops seemed to be, and the requirement of trained staff to operate them, I'm running with the idea that it'll take about five years to add another new one each time (eventually an A, B, and C Workshop on each planet but that's for decades in the future).

The only reason why they can get their version of the Royal Hussar into production this soon is because they already had a production line for a compatible fusion engine (the 270XL used in the Stag) and the ability to manufacture the specialist electronics needed for the Guardian ECM and Beagle Active Probe (both carried by the Mercury II).

We saw Samantha Hollister back in Part XIX. She was punished for the competance she demonstrated chairing the Steering Committee by having a job foisted upon her by the High Associator after he won the 2830 election. Every new thing he wants done requires something else to be delayed, robbing Peter to pay Paul as it were, because Niops has limited resources. The Illyrian Palatinate was a fairly major exporter of steel to the Free Worlds League in canon, and quite unique in that the usually isolationist Niops was seeking diplomatic relations with them so they must have been thought of by the Association in a more positive light than most.

[The Wobbly Guy]

The emerging Niops empire has strong asabiyya. Not surprising, given they're on a frontier and expanding, with a frontier can-do mindset and determined to expand fast enough so that they won't be easy pickings for the other powers.

[Daryk]

I LOVE this bit:

Putting the Hegemony back together like a giant kit, was how one commentator had described it.

And it's only odd to me that Niops didn't try building more workshops earlier... ;)

[Giovanni Blasini]

I LOVE this bit:
And it's only odd to me that Niops didn't try building more workshops earlier... ;)

They probably did.  I suspect that, originally, Niops V and VI weren't particularly inhabited, and their expansion and settlement came later, after the Capellan refugees arrived.  The additional Project Workshops probably accompanied that settlement, and took a significant amount of time to accomplish.

[Hotpoint]

I see the problem regarding building new Project Workshops as the existing ones tending to always be running at near full capacity doing work that cannot be easily postponed (eg. if you only have a handful of dropships in your multi-planet polity, and one of them breaks down, you've got to fix the thing ASAP).

Freeing up some capacity to turn out the occasional battlemech is one thing, but building an additional workshop is potentially going to tie up a large percentage of the manufacturing base for years.

Devoting Workshop III to ongoing Nighthawk production in the 3070's could well have put some serious strain on the system, but they probably considered they had little choice because the Marian Hegemony next door was being even more belligerant than usual.

[Hotpoint]

Part XXV - Section 1 of 2

----------

"I don't know who had the idea for all of you to get the greek letter gamma tattoos, but you'd better make sure that none of Sibling Company Zeta, or any of the other sibkos, copy you until they're at least eighteen as well."

General Franklin Hallis lays down the law to Sibling Company Gamma - 2834CE

----------

Capital City – Niops Association (Niops VII) – 2833

The neighbourhood near the university where Philomena's parent's apartment block was situated was by no means the bad part of town. Not that any part of the city was particularly run down as Niops was too wealthy, and the building stock generally too new to have actual slums, but as she followed her two friends along the sidewalk into the indisputably 'good' part of town it was pretty obvious when they had got there. This was not just because of how nice the houses actually were, though they were very nice, but also from how expensive most of the cars parked outside them looked and the fact that there seemed to be a car in front of every house, rare in a city where public transportation was good enough that most people didn't even bother to own one.

If she had not been as deep in conversation as she was Philomena might have made comment about the ornate architecture of some of the buildings, that being something that had come interest her after growing up in an underwater habitat designed by engineers that valued functionality far more than form, but at that moment she had other issues to address.

"I still say that I looked ridiculous" Philomena contended. "If I'd known you were going to dress me up like that, I would have never agreed to wear a costume you chose" she complained. "I knew I should have been more suspicious as to why you wouldn't let me see it until it was far too late to find a different outfit to wear."

"You looked great!" Alice wholeheartedly disagreed, setting the pace because she was the shortest of the three. "Everyone thought so, you won the prize for best costume didn't you?" she asked rhetorically, thinking that was a slam-dunk argument in itself. The previous nights party, held at a venue hired for the purpose by one of the richer kids in class, had been entirely awesome in her opinion and she couldn't understand why the Frobisher girl was still sore about it.

"You dressed me up as a character from that stupid anime cartoon from the Draconis Combine you like" Philomena exclaimed. "I don't know what part was worse, the blue wig or the skirt that was so short that if I had body hair I would have needed to get it waxed. All of it" she said, grimacing. It wasn't like skirts that length were ever seen on Niops normally, especially without leggings underneath, the climate was less than suitable for them.

"I did warn you to wear panties that were skimpy but not too skimpy, but besides that it's not a stupid anime it's great" Alice replied. "Getting to watch that old anime series on television is the best thing about me ever coming to Niops" she defended her favourite show.

"Hey!" Frederick objected. "What about meeting me?"

"Calm down, you make the top three on the list" Alice told her boyfriend.

Frederick pouted. "That means I don't even rate the number two spot" he realised.

"You're a great boyfriend, but you were edged out of second place by the fried chicken at Gloria's Diner" Alice told him apologetically. "You ranked above her bacon cheeseburgers though" she consoled him.

Frederick thought about that. "I'll take it" he decided eventually.

"You thought Philomena's costume was great didn't you?" Alice asked him, seeking an ally.

"Yeah" Frederick agreed, smiling and nodding enthusiastically.

Philomena frowned. "You don't think the blue wig looked stupid?"

"You were wearing a wig?" Frederick replied, feigning to be visibly confused.

"See" Philomena exclaimed, throwing up her hands.

"He's joking" Alice told her. "Right?"

"Yeah" Frederick said again, unconvincingly.

"Well, I still think it was an absolutely inspired choice of costume for the party last night" Alice declared, looking pleased with herself.

"Because my eyes make me look like a freaking cartoon character?" Philomena retorted. "Even if that wasn't hurtful nobody was looking at my ****** eyes."

"Other than the blue wig your eyes were the best asset towards making it the costume absolutely perfect" Alice contended.

"In that skirt my ass was the only asset that was getting any attention unless I was stood bolt upright" Philomena muttered bitterly to herself, loud enough to be overheard.

"That's not true is it?" Alice checked with Frederick for verification.

Frederick shrugged. "Henry walking into that table just when she dropped her purse and bent down to pick it up might have been a coincidence" he posited uncertainly.

"Right, you're only guessing that it was because of your skirt" Alice told Philomena.

"No, it was definitely because of the skirt" Frederick responded, "it's just that Henry told me he thought you had nice legs after he saw you in your swimming costume the first time, so it might have been them not your ass that caused him to not look where he was going" he suggested.

"Aargh!" Philomena exclaimed, wondering how she was going to face everyone again at school come Monday. "I'm not going to forget that you didn't choose a costume for yourself that showed anything like as much skin" she told Alice menacingly.

"I couldn't" Alice defended herself. "Frederick and I wanted matching costumes, he was Buck Rogers so I had to be Colonel Deering" she argued. "That flight suit was pretty tight though, and I did unzip it a little to show some cleavage like she did in the show."

"You could have gone as Princess Ardala instead" Frederick suggested.

"All she wears is a jewel-encrusted bikini and a see-through silk skirt!" Alice exclaimed. "Compared to her Philomena was dressed like a Catholic Nun."

"Just saying" Frederick replied, wondering if he could talk her into wearing that at the next costume party they got invited to.

"If it wasn't for what Clarissa Anderson was wearing I would have had the sluttiest costume in the party" Philomena complained, she was not letting this go. "And she is a slut so she can get away with it."

Alice looked appalled. "You can't say that about another girl. It demeans all of us" she chided.

"Even if it's true" Philomena asked, smirking.

"Yes!" Alice exclaimed. "Not that I'm saying it is" she added awkwardly.

"Here we are" Frederick announced stopping outside a townhouse. "My stepmom's in, that's her car" he pointed out the sleek electric vehicle parked on the road outside. "She works Saturday mornings at the factory catching up on paperwork so I wasn't sure if she would be back yet."

"This is your house?" Philomena asked. "This is really nice" she said, looking it over. It was a three story building made of brick and stone and far removed from the austere concrete tower block near the university where she lived with her parents.

"It's not really mine, I mean I've got a room here but most of the time I actually live in barracks" Frederick replied, punching a combination into an electronic keypad on the door.

The door lock disengaged and Frederick pushed it open.

"Why do you like in barracks if you've got a room here?" Philomena asked reasonably.

"Because he's a masochistic weirdo that likes to be woken up by bugle call at 6 AM" Alice told her, grinning.

"Nah, it's the daily bed inspections and the 5K run before breakfast that I can't get enough of" Frederick replied deadpan. "Give me a second, I'll make sure the coast is clear" he requested, stepping inside after cleaning his boots on the welcome mat.

"Are we trespassing or something?" Philomena asked, concerned.

"Nah, he just wants to make sure that his stepmom's mom isn't visiting" Alice explained. "You don't want to have to deal with that" she said. "To be honest neither does Fred, she's not a fan of you genetically engineered people."

Philomena sighed. "And I don't even look like a regular person like he does" she replied with a shrug. The number of people that stared at here was a lot lower now than it used to be nearly a year ago when she first came to Niops but some people still did, and there was even a little noticeable hostility to her presence on occasion. Alice had offered to have her boyfriend beat up anyone that stepped way out of line, but that wouldn't exactly be in keeping with a desire to hold the moral high ground.

"All good" Frederick told them, appearing at the door again and ushering them inside.

The house was even nicer on the inside than it was on the outside. "How does your Dad afford this place? How much do generals get paid anyway?" Philomena wanted to know, checking out the expensive décor.

"Well Barbara's got a good job too, but it's mostly down to the fact the bank let him have a fifty-year mortgage" Frederick told her. "He'll be over a hundred before it's all paid off, so definitely no early retirement for him" he continued, chuckling. "Barbara pretty much strong-armed him into it not long after they got hitched. He was happy enough living in married quarters in Arecibo but they had only been married a couple of months before he knocked her up and then she really wanted a nicer home and she was hormonal and terrifying."

"I was not terrifying, I was persuasive" a woman's voice interrupted them. "Maybe a little terrifying" she conceded after thinking about it a little more. "Wasn't expecting to see you Frederick, thought you were spending all day at mall with Alice."

"I'm not staying too long" Frederick replied, "Barbara this is Philomena from school, Philomena this is my stepmom, Barbara" she introduced them. "We're all going to the movies later, I hope it's alright that I brought Alice and Philomena back here until then?"

"Just as long as you not expecting to bring two teenage girls into your room with door closed it just fine" Barbara replied. "Father not approve of you having more fun as teenager than he ever did" she added, trying not to laugh.

"Geez Barbara" Frederick responded, blushing.

"Nice to meet you Philomena" Barbara addressed the Frobisher girl, doing her best to ignore her uncanny 'not quite right' appearance. According to Frederick after a while you mostly stopped noticing after a while. "Frederick mention you become friends with Alice" she said. "Alice very nice girl, bad taste in men" she added, looking pointedly at the boy.

"Oh, come on!" Frederick objected. "You married Dad and I'm practically his clone."

"Not trying to say that my taste in men any good" Barbara countered causing Alice to laugh. "Hang up coats and hats, come through into living room" she told the girls, leading the way. "Soda in fridge if you want one?"

"Not for me thankyou Mrs. Hallis" Alice replied. It somehow felt wrong to call her 'Barbara' like Frederick usually did himself. Although he did refer to her as his 'Stepmom' he rarely called her 'Mom' for whatever reason, though of course he also called his father 'Khan Hallis', 'General', or 'Sir' more than he did plain 'Dad' and you couldn't say that their family dynamics were exactly typical in many regards.

"Me neither, Mrs. Hallis" Philomena added for herself, using the style of address her friend had, as they arrived at the living room which contained some very comfortable looking chairs and a crib that was against one wall.

"Is Judith awake?" Frederick asked, walking across to the crib.

"Was a few minutes ago when I change her diaper" Barbara replied.

"Hey sis" Frederick said, leaning over the crib and looking down at the baby inside. "Yep, still awake and still more interested in looking at this thing than she ever is me" he said, tapping the mobile hanging over the baby so it moved a little more. "I still think that tiny model aerospace fighters and battlemechs would be better than stars and planets" he criticised it as his infant sister lay there seemingly transfixed by the random movement.

"Battlemechs don't even fly" Alice pointed out, going over to join him.

"LAM's only, obviously" Frederick replied, wondering why that needed to be explained. "Or maybe regular mechs with jumpjets" he added, thinking about it. Land-Air-Mechs had never really worked that all well in practice.

"Come take a look, she's adorable" Alice told Philomena.

"Wait until she throw up on you, opinion change a little" Barbara told her sagely.

Baby Judith might not have been particularly interested in looking at her brother, but when Philomena's face appeared above her as well the mobile became rather less fascinating. The infant stared at her, somehow looking almost puzzled.

"Everyone always stares at the eyes" Philomena wryly observed.

"I thought we already determined that depended on the length of the skirt?" Frederick joked, earning himself a poke in the ribs from Alice for his trouble. "Alternatively, she's thinking, 'holy crap, someone with even less hair on their head than I have' instead" he then offered an alternative explanation, one that now caused Alice to glare at him.

Philomena thought about that and couldn't entirely dismiss the latter theory. Having Alice stood next to her certainly made for a contrast, what with the girl's great mass of wavy copper-coloured hair that was barely restrained from chaotically sticking out in all directions by several scrunchies.

Naturally enough Frederick wore his hair short in a military style, something that made his look even more like his father than he would have otherwise. The girls in his sibko tended to wear it a little longer, like Jennifer with her pixie cut, but genuinely long hair was frowned upon, not just because it looked more unkempt but because it was something to grab hold of in a fight.

"I saw on television news that mother appointed ambassador from Frobisher to Niops, Philomena" Barbara commented while she slumped down on one of the chairs. Judith might be being quiet right now, but the infant had kept her up most of the previous night crying for no discernible reason and she was tired. Annoyingly Franklin was away so he hadn't been there to do half the work.

"I think they're calling her 'Envoy' rather than ambassador because Frobisher is legally going to be a self-governing protectorate, not a fully independent foreign state with diplomatic recognition" Philomena replied, looking away from the baby towards its mother. "That's assuming that the people back home agree to the terms your government wants us to, anyway."

"Do you think they might not?" Alice asked, frowning.

"Not really. Without Niops Frobisher is screwed six ways from Sunday" Philomena stated flatly. "You're probably the only people that can fix all our broken equipment and almost certainly the only one that can help us out with our population issues" she continued. "And that's putting aside the fact that the technology we have that does still work is becoming more and more valuable every day, valuable enough to attract pirates or worse, and we need protection from them too."

"Worse being the Mariks I guess" Frederick surmised. "You're further away from the Free Worlds League than we are, but just not far enough for comfort" he said while pulling faces at his baby sister to try and make her laugh.

Philomena nodded. "We've never been that worried about the Magistracy, they've always been decent neighbours, but while the Marik's aren't Kurita or Liao, thank God, they've still done some pretty heinous stuff themselves. If they could justify to themselves the killing of billions of normal people on other Hegemony worlds then they're not going to have many qualms killing a few thousand that look like me to take what we have."

"Your people safe with Niops" Barbara said confidently. "Anyone turn up looking to make trouble, General Romanova send my husband to teach them lesson not ever forget."

"Where is Dad? I thought he was off-duty this weekend?" Frederick asked, sticking his tongue out at baby Judith to try and get a reaction.

"Still off playing soldier on Reykjanes Island, should be back tonight" Barbara replied.

Frederick smiled. "Military training exercises aren't 'playing soldier' you know" he replied.

"Then why they call them 'War Games' then?" Barbara replied, smirking. "Battlemechs just big toy for overgrown boys to play with."

"How do you explain all the female mechwarriors like General Romanov or Aunt Trish then?" Frederick countered.

"Girls only humouring them like do always" Barbara replied, winking at Alice. "Nietzsche said that men like war because only time they absolutely sure women not laughing at them behind back."

"Nietzsche?" Philomena queried.

"German philosopher, 19th Century" Barbara explained, she had originally started reading philosophy because she liked to quote them to people when they seemed to be assuming that because her spoken English wasn't perfect she must be stupid and ignorant, but she actually ended up enjoying it. There was more to intellectual pursuits than just studying the hard sciences regardless of what the social hierarchy on Niops thought.

One day she hoped to get Frederick to look a bit further afield than Immanuel Kant and Georg Hegel when it came to philosophy but it was an uphill struggle so far. The only reason she managed to get him to even read those was because Karl Von Clausewitz was a fan which he considering a ringing endorsement.

After some polite chit-chat between Barbara and the girls Frederick asked Alice and Philomena if they wanted to listen to some music in his room before they headed off to the movies. Given that his room was on the top floor, and Barbara wasn't, Philomena wasn't sure what use leaving the door open was as a deterrent to unapproved of teenage activities but he left it open anyway.

"Sorry about the mess" Frederick apologised for the state of his room.

"What mess?" Philomena asked confused, looking around. There was barely a book, magazine or item of clothing out of place.

"If anything in barracks is more than a millimetre out of place he gets a demerit" Alice explained. "You can bounce a quarter on his bed after he makes it and I swear he'll happily sit there shining boots for hours" she said, not exaggerating nearly as much as Philomena assumed she was.

"If you were taught to march almost as soon as you learned to walk you'd be a bit weird too" Frederick responded with a shrug.

Alice giggled. "Tell her how you learned the ABC's at kindergarten, or whatever it is you weirdos called it instead" she told her boyfriend.

Frederick sighed. "A is for Alfa, B is for Bravo, C is for Charlie…" he began.

"You're kidding?" Philomena responded incredulously.

"No, really. I thought he was making it up too, so I checked with Jennifer" Alice told her. "You should hear some of the nursery rhymes they were taught like: 'Jack and Jill charged up the hill, to take the heavy mortar, bombs rained down and cut Jack down, and Jill came tumbling after'."

Philomena looked at Frederick more than slightly appalled.

"It's a lesson about needing cover-fire to supress enemy artillery when you attack a fortified position" Frederick explained awkwardly.

"It was brainwashing" Alice contended, and not entirely without cause.

"That's an exaggeration" Frederick replied, unconvincingly.

"It really isn't" Philomena agreed with Alice. "Isn't that how they did it in Ancient Sparta? Train the boys for war from when they were little?"

"Not exactly. In Sparta they left it a little late to really benefit from how fast kids learn when they're young" Frederick replied. "They didn't start training them until they were seven, I already knew how to read a map and call in an artillery strike by the time I was six" he said proudly. "By seven I knew where to stab a man so he bled out fast, and I could field-strip and reassemble a Mauser 960 blindfold" he said. "Lasers are a good choice for teaching little kids to shoot, no recoil, although the Mauser was way too heavy for us at that age so we usually shot it off a bench rest."

"The mind-blowing thing is that his people were genuinely the least unhinged clan as far as I can tell" Alice responded sadly, shaking her head. Most of the time her boyfriend came across as pretty normal, but then he told a few childhood stories, or spent the weekend playing with demolition charges, and it brought home that he really wasn't.

If it wasn't for the ever-present spectre of impending doom if Kerensky's clans ever found them, or one of the Great Houses attacked, the government would have almost certainly forced the SLDF to scrap the remaining parts of the sibko system that were still running. Unfortunately it was a dangerous galaxy, and Sibling Company Gamma and the younger sibko's might come in very handy in a few years if the Niops Association found itself in great need of some very good, and very enthusiastic, mechwarriors and fighter pilots.

[Hotpoint]

Part XXV - Section 2 of 2

----------

"I'm not surprised you make plastic models of battlemechs as a hobby" Philomena observed, noticing a couple of them sitting on a desk.

"Only the ones I've gotten to pilot" Frederick replied. "That's a Locust, the first mech they let me take out, that one is a Wasp, I got to fire the guns on that one, and I'm working on a Phoenix Hawk because I got to try one out last month, but it's taking longer because I have to customise the model" he said. "The one I got to take out was a Royal with an ERPPC instead of a laser and the model shop only sells the PXH-1."

"There's a model shop on Niops?" Philomena asked, wondering how there was enough local demand to keep a business like that running. Niops VII might have a huge population compared to Frobisher but there were villages in some places with practically as many people living in them as on her homeworld.

"He means the toy shop downtown" Alice explained. "If he calls it a 'model shop' instead it doesn't sound as lame."

"You're as bad as Barbara" Frederick muttered to himself, pouting.

Philomena noticed a few photographs stuck to the far wall. "Who's that with you on the beach?" she asked. The picture looked recent judging by how old Frederick looked, but clearly hadn't been taken anywhere on Niops however, way too sunny.

Frederick grinned. "That's not me" he replied.

"That is definitely you" Philomena stated with certainty.

"There's a Frederick Hallis in that picture but it's not me, and it's not the one you think it is either" Frederick told her. "The older guy is my grandfather, the original Frederick Hallis, the kid is my father when he was fourteen or so."

Philomena stared at the photograph. "I know you look a lot like your dad but are you sure you're not a clone?" she asked, looking at the boy in the picture and then back to Frederick.

Alice laughed. "Look at the woman in that other photo next to it, the one wearing the flightsuit, and then look at Fred again" she suggested. "Pay attention to the eyes."

"They're the same" Philomena realised.

"Yep, exactly the same, and I don't just mean the colour" Frederick told her. "That's my biological Mom, well kinda anyway" he continued. "I'm something like sixty-five percent dad, twenty-five percent her and ten percent a few other people combined" he told her. "I've got her 20/10 eyesight, her reaction times and her hand-eye coordination too, they're all better than my father has. I should end up a little taller than him too when I'm fully grown, but that's because of someone included in the ten percent, not because of my bio-mom."

"She's a pilot?" Philomena asked, correctly identifying what she was wearing and the insignia upon it. You couldn't live on Niops for a while and not learn that sort of thing, current and former SLDF personnel made up a fair proportion of the population and there was a definite degree of militarisation of society that she assumed had not existed before Fredericks people turned up.

"Fighter pilot, or at least she was. She was killed fighting the Clans as part of the rear-guard holding them off during the secession" Frederick told her.

"Oh, I'm sorry" Philomena replied awkwardly.

"It's okay, I never even met her in real life, but she was kinda my Mom so Barbara thought I should have a picture of her, and Dad managed to find a decent one in an old personnel database" Frederick said, smiling. "I do see her eyes every time I look in a mirror, so I suppose I have sort-of met her in a way at least" he continued. "I've read her files. She day before she died she shot down a couple of Snow Ravens, the first of which was the tenth aerial kill of her career making her a fighter ace twice over. She made ace the first-time during Operation Klondike, so I guess they made the right decision using her genes as part of the program, which is something nice to know about myself."

Philomena nodded, though unsure if she really understood exactly how his thinking processes worked there. In many ways the Ironborn kids, or 'kits' as they preferred, were far stranger than her own people, gills and all. The culture and society on Frobisher was very much Terran Hegemony in the way they did things and saw the galaxy around them, in that they were actually very much like most people on Niops that weren't of Capellan extraction, with some of the sometimes downright odd hard-core Wolverines really standing out from the crowd.

"That's Fred when he was six" Alice spoke up, pointing to a larger picture, one showing two groups of young children formed up next to each other in front of an imposing stone building, all wearing cadet uniforms. "I bet you can recognise a few other faces too" she added, grinning.

Philomena took a closer look. "That's Jennifer, and that's definitely Dave" she decided. "I think that's Henry right there" she pointed to another child.

"Yep" Frederick confirmed. "That's us stood outside city hall in Bearcat, the Wolverine city on Strana Mechty the clan's capital world" he said. "Just after they took that photo they stuffed us all in a VTOL for a visit to Katyusha City where they gave us a tour of the Hall of Khans" he said. "We actually met the ilKhan there, Nicholas Kerensky, if I'd known what was going to happen less than a year later I'd have shanked the bastard" he said regretfully.

"I don't recognise any of the kids in the other group stood next to yours" Philomena remarked, trying to rid herself of the mental image of an angry six-year-old stabbing a man to death.

"That's sibling company Beta, the sibko just ahead of ours, so a year or so older than we were" Frederick told her. "They were just regular humans like…" he paused, "well not like you but like Alice I suppose" he corrected what he was initially going to say.

"Do they go to a different school than us?" Philomena asked.

"No, they never made it to Niops, we think they all got incinerated when Great Hope got nuked, but if any of them survived then they were probably executed after being taken prisoner" Frederick told her, something cold and dark in his eyes when he said it though his tone remained even.

Philomena stared at the photograph. "But they were just little kids" she responded, appalled.

"They were Warrior Caste little kids" Frederick replied, voice still calm. "Kerensky ordered that every one of us should be killed, and that everyone in one of the civilian castes, labourers, technicians and the rest should be sterilised. When we say we were escaping from attempted genocide we weren't kidding. Once all the Wolverines that got left behind for whatever reason eventually die of old age we'll be the only ones there are anywhere."

"Fred helps out training the younger sibkos, don't you Fred?" Alice asked him rhetorically.

"Sometimes" Frederick replied. "Sibko's Zeta, Theta and Iota, the Ironborn generations from 2819, 2821 and 2822, are pretty numerous compared to us Gammas, they had expanded the program a lot by the time the Zeta's came along and also improved the Iron Womb tech. We give the instructors a hand with them sometimes. It's kinda fun with the Iota's, having a bunch of eleven year-olds running cadence behind you I mean. Zeta and Theta don't treat it as more of a game than they do serious business so you do as well."

"Cadence?" Philomena asked.

"He sings a line, they all echo what he just said" Alice explained. "People used to do it on Buffalo Meadows too. Usually just the adults trying to keep fit, not the kids though."

Philomena nodded her understanding. She had seen some of the SLDF and NAM soldiers doing that around town on occasion but hadn't known what it was called. "What about the 2820 batch?" she asked Frederick. "You didn't mention them."

"Sibling Company Eta? They didn't make it out of the clan homeworlds, we're not entirely sure what happened to them" Frederick told her, immediately making Philomena regret asking because it wasn't likely to be good whatever it was. "Kappa, the 2823 kits, was never really a thing so they'll probably re-start the program with that name eventually. That'll probably be delayed even longer now because they'll want to get the anti-agathic treatments working before they spend a load of resources on more Ironborn" he reasoned. "Mechwarriors that are still able to take the field past their tenth decade are much better value for money than ones like me that never got the gene-therapy. There's actually a good chance I'll die of old age before my Dad does, which kinda sucks for both of us when I think about it. I just hope we get the treatments before Judith hits puberty so she can have them, dad really wouldn't want to outlive his baby girl too."

Alice nodded. "My grandfather looks the same age as my father because Pop-Pop was Hegemony born but Pops was born on Buffalo Meadows like me" she said.

Developing the anti-agathic treatments, or at least making reasonable progress in that direction, was something that Philomena was hoping for too, although for a somewhat different reason. She could not help but suspect that until Frobisher and Niops were more closely intertwined at all levels that she might never be able to go home.

Given what she and her parents now knew about Niops the authorities would surely want to make sure that none of it leaked out to the wider galaxy. That meant they were going to be extremely loath to let the 'Envoy' for Frobisher and her family leave, at least not until they were certain Frobisher could be completely trusted, that trust largely predicated on utter dependency.

Frobisher was probably screwed without military protection that Niops could provide. Moreover, they were definitely screwed in the long term without technical assistance from the Association, including the provision of Iron Wombs as a remedy for Frobisher's population issues. Frobisher providing the genetic know-how to recreate Hegemony anti-agathics in return would at least make the arrangement less of a one-way street, and Philomena knew it was better to be a partner than a dependant when it came to negotiation.

The Niops Association wasn't some kind of authoritarian dictatorship that harboured dreams of ruling over its 'Protectorates' with an Iron Fist, but they definitely saw themselves as the 'Terra' in their vision of a new Hegemony. While that was probably inevitable Philomena much preferred her homeworld to be accorded status more like a regional capital such as Tyrfing once had in that arrangement, rather than effectively being a poorly-populated colonial fief like Sirius, for example.

Frederick grinned. "I still can't believe you call your grandfather 'Pop-Pop' he responded.

"What would you have called yours?" Alice wanted to know, narrowing her eyes.

"Sir, he was a general" Frederick replied.

"My great-grandmother was a general too, but I wouldn't have called her 'Ma'am' like one of her soldiers" Alice retorted.

"I think I need more friends that aren't army brats" Philomena wryly suggested. Alice was certainly more 'civilian' in outlook than the Wolverine kids but the Buffalo Meadow's people were still very SLDF in origin. Alice's great-grandmother Leigh MacArthur had commanded the 295th before General Romanov, which was why her grandfather had ended up joining that particular unit and ended up stranded in the middle of nowhere as a result.

"Any problems with maybe getting yourself an army brat for a boyfriend, because it sure seems like Henry likes you?" Alice suggested.

"Nah, that's not on the cards" Frederick interrupted, "he's still smarting from getting burned when he tried to make a move before."

"Burned? How?" Philomena asked in confusion. "Also, when is this supposed to have happened?" she reasonably wanted to know, having no idea what he was talking about.

"You know, when he asked you if you wanted to grab a milkshake after school and you gave him the brush-off with a lame excuse" Frederick replied.

"What?" Philomena responded, no more enlightened than before, maybe even less so.

"He told me you gave him a lame excuse why you had to go straight home" Frederick persisted.

"You didn't give him the old 'I can't, I'm washing my hair' line, did you?" Alice asked rhetorically, 'because that's a crap one even if I said it and I have hair, and mine does take a long time to wash and then get dry."

"No, I told him the truth why I couldn't go get a milkshake. I didn't know he thought I was making it up" Philomena replied.

"Well, what did you tell him?" Alice wanted to know.

"I told him that I had to go home and walk my pet fish" Philomena told them. "Both my parents were working late and he needs to exercise every day, we've got a schedule for him."

Alice and Frederick both stared at her. "Do you know how stupid that sounds to someone that doesn't know your pet fish is amphibious and really does need to be taken out of his tank to exercise" Alice asked eventually.

"But everyone does know, I talked about it during biology class when we discussed xenobiology and types of alien fauna" Philomena reminded them.

Frederick pursed his lips. "And you're sure that wasn't when Henry was off school for a couple of days after he got that concussion playing football?" he asked, trying to remember himself.

"Oh" Philomena responded, looking and feeling extremely perturbed as to that possibility. "Telling him 'I've got to go home to walk my pet fish' does sound pretty made-up in that scenario" she admitted.

"To the point of insulting his intelligence, albeit because of his ignorance of your pet mudskipper I'd say" Alice concurred.

"I should probably talk to him to explain" Philomena decided, wondering how best to handle that.

"Good idea" Alice told her drily.

Frederick thought about the situation. "If you want to make reparations, and maybe get asked again if you want to grab a milkshake, just wear that skirt from yesterday" he advised.

"I am never wearing that skirt again" Philomena told him forcefully.

"Okay, but don't tell Henry that" Frederick replied. "You already pissed him off because he thought you insulted his intelligence with a really BS excuse for a rejection, you shouldn't break the poor guy's heart too."

If looks could kill Philomena's large-calibre glare would have vapourised Frederick and blown out the wall behind him, which would have been a shame because it was a very nice house.


----------

Note from the Author:

Finding a leash to fit a pet Alphard Mudskipper is not easy, though not as hard as teaching them tricks (getting them to stand up on their hind flippers to beg is particularly difficult). :-p

It's not Philomena's fault that girls in anime shows from the Draconis Combine with all their Japanese cultural influences look more like her than they do regular humans (except the hair of course, not many bald Drac anime girls). The 'Big Eyes' thing in Japanese manga and anime well pre-dates the 1980's which is when the Battletech Universe diverges from our own incidentally.

Naturally, in the version of 'Where's Waldo' books Frederick had as a small child Waldo was in a forest wearing a camouflage gillie suit.

If Sibling Company Gamma were the 2816 generation (the first Wolverines from the Iron Wombs) then running with that Alpha and Beta (2814 & 2815) were regular kids and they're generally a lot less weird. Sibko Zeta (2819) was the first after the system was properly up and running and they and later sibkos are considerably more numerous than the Gamma kits.

Part XXVI will be entirely lacking in teenage crap... but I hope you all got a few laughs out of this part regardless.

[DragonKhan55]

"You dressed me up as a character from that stupid anime cartoon from the Draconis Combine you like" Philomena exclaimed. "I don't know what part was worse, the blue wig or the skirt that was so short that if I had body hair I would have needed to get it waxed. All of it" she said, grimacing. It wasn't like skirts that length were ever seen on Niops normally, especially without leggings underneath, the climate was less than suitable for them.

... you madman. You dressed Philomena up like Aqua from Konosuba?

[Daryk]

An amusing read, teenage crap notwithstanding! ;D

[DOC_Agren]

Suggesting academic departments merge? That's a material for a lifetime vendetta right there.

Don't worry..  that will take years to happen, and there will be blood to pay..

Weaksauce, our teachers were not afraid to throw chalk or a key bundle, to wake up a sleeper or shut up a chit chatter.

I have a friend who had a nun who used an eraser, but was good enough to bounce it off way to hit you on the rebound.

Part XXVI will be entirely lacking in teenage crap

the teenage crap, is what keeping this from just being another stock AU.   and the kids give us an interesting insight into the world.

[Hotpoint]

Part XXVI - Section 1 of 2

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"I drive a Crosscut loggermech all week to put food on the table for my family, but my ride at the weekend is a Blackjack to help keep all our families safe."

Slogan from a recruitment poster for the Stafford Planetary Guard - 2845CE

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Hartwood Township – Stafford – 2834

Roger Callahan wasn't sure if the majority of the town's population had turned out to watch as a mark of respect, or mostly just out of curiosity, but as his two companies of infantry and one of dismounted mechwarriors brought their rifles and carbines up in salute, and the Star League anthem started to play over a loudspeaker, at least the locals didn't seem to react negatively as the newly adopted flag of the Niops Association Hegemony was slowly raised over their community.

If he was forced to describe Hartwood in one word it would have been 'rustic' thanks in large part to the fact that the vast majority of the buildings here were made of wood, even if a few of them were quite large three-story constructions. Given the easy availability of lumber it was unsurprising that wood was the building material of choice on Stafford, but as a result the place very much resembled the stereotypical periphery backwater, with little more technology on display than you could have seen on Terra more than a thousand years ago.

There was a certain amount of mining going on up in the mountains yonder, Callahan knew, and a few small-scale industries had been established to supply low-tech farming, logging and mining equipment, but considering that their ancestors had arrived here in interstellar spacecraft it was hard to deny that Stafford had seen its technological level slide more than a little over the years.

They hadn't been completely ignorant of events in the wider galaxy before dropships from the Niops Association started arriving regularly in the last few years. Once or twice a decade a wandering jumpship had turned up looking for trade, not to raid, and they knew from them that the Star League had fallen and the Successor States had subsequently plunged the Inner Sphere into the bloodiest war in human history, so on that basis a little forced isolation wasn't a bad thing they considered. As they had gradually regressed from computers to incandescent lightbulbs powered by waterwheels being as advanced as their society got however some pining for a long-lost 'Golden Age' of less back-breaking labouring in the fields, and more microwave ovens in the kitchen, was perhaps inevitable.

As the flag reached the top of the pole a squadron of aerospace fighters hurtled overhead providing their own salute, keeping their speed below Mach 1 for the sake of both the windows in the town and everyone's hearing. Simultaneously pulled up into a steep climb as they cleared the town, accelerating off into the stratosphere and finally going supersonic once they were far enough away for that to be safe, a few people clapped and cheered which was at least encouraging.

Roger Callahan cleared his throat and took a deep breath before he began his speech. "By the lawful decree of High Associator Giles Olson and the Governing Council of Niops, by the authority invested in me by the Star League Defence Force, and with the agreement of the free people of Stafford" he began, "As of this date I hereby declare this system a protectorate of the Niops Association and its native population as Hegemony citizens from this time forward" he said grandly, hoping that he didn't look and sound as much of an officious, self-important idiot as he felt like he did standing in front of all these thousands of people in his dress uniform, a sword hanging by his side. "And now, as the people of Stafford joins those of Niops, Comstock, Francas, Algenib, Copernicus and Frobisher in becoming Hegemony citizens, living safe and free under the Cameron Star, I ask all present to offer a silent prayer to the God, or Gods, you may worship to watch over us all as we continue to expand outwards, bringing the light of civilisation, progress and the rule of law to those living under the shadow of tyranny, barbarity and ignorance."

It wasn't the speech he might have written for himself. It frankly had the fingerprints of Giles Olson all over it as the man loved this kind of phrasing, but enough people in the crowd bowed their heads at this juncture for Callahan to think it hadn't been too overblown and heavy on bombastic sentiment.

Getting the people of Hartwood onside in recent months by building them a school and delivering a half-dozen farm tractors and a combine harvester had certainly paid dividends, as a similar approach had done previously on Alphard and Comstock. The one slight difference in approach on Stafford was gifting a couple of dozen chainsaws to each of the larger logging camps too, while dangling the possibility of maybe even handing over a loggermech or two later if the lumberjacks supported Stafford signing up for this 'Hegemony' thing.

Winning hearts and minds was also the reason that for the flag-raising ceremony they had laid on a massive barbeque for afterwards, with meat imported from Francas and beer from one of the newly expanded breweries on Alphard. Whether it tipped the balance as regards local public opinion was in question, but it most likely boosted their attendance by quite a lot. The smell of burgers, hog roast and fried chicken drifting across the town square was certainly making Roger Callahan himself feeling pretty positive about how the day was going so far, as well as making him salivate.

In order not to appear too intimidating Callahan had left his battlemechs loaded aboard the battalion dropship that had set down in a clearing a couple of kilometres out of town, but after checking with the town mayor he would likely march them around later just to remind everyone why becoming a protectorate was a good thing. The next bunch of pirates that attempted to raid Stafford would soon come to regret their choice of victim as the SLDF was always looking for an opportunity to relieve some peacetime boredom, and more importantly get some use out of the mountain of unused war-materiel they had to justify the government paying for.

Hartwood Township was the largest city on Stafford, with a population well into the double-digit thousands if you included the farming communities and logging camps nearby that supplied it, but that had meant it had historically also been the subject of the most attention from various bands of scum with a jumpship and a few battlemechs to their name. Most of the other communities on the planet were village sized at best, although there were a good number of them so their combined population was larger than lived in the Niops system as a whole.

Smaller communities were less attractive for pirate raids, not much to steal, not many people to take as slaves and not as easy to spot from the air. It was thought likely that the presence of a permanent SLDF garrison would lead to greater urbanisation across the planet in the future, but that cultural inertia would see Hartwood itself, the de facto planetary capital and the hub of interstellar trade, expanding first and to the greatest degree.

Persuading the population that they weren't pirates had taken the first survey teams that visited Stafford quite a considerable amount of time, effort and careful diplomacy. In one case a gunship VTOL that was being used to scout some forested hills had even been shot at by a bunch of farmers with old hunting rifles, presumably trying to scare them off thinking they were pirates. After a couple of rounds bounced off the armoured canopy the gunship had turned back and hovered above them, the pilot on the loudspeaker patiently asking them to knock it off as they continued to fire at her tilt-rotor combat aircraft ineffectually.

Eventually, the pilot's patience exhausted, the gunship had turned its 30mm autocannon on a nearby grove of trees and blasted them to kindling with a long burst, ordering the farmers to surrender whereupon the panicked farmers immediately threw down their guns and did so as the cannon swung in their direction instead.

The pilot had then landed the VTOL, walked over to the farmers and angrily told them not to do that again, especially not to anything wearing the Red Cameron Star insignia, before getting back in her aircraft, complaining on the loudspeaker about trigger-happy hillbillies with no sense of self-preservation as she flew off.

Most encounters with the locals involved a lot less shooting fortunately, and the appearance of a VTOL in the sky above soon became a welcome sight across Stafford. The extreme number of small and widely scattered settlements that were spread over the main continent had made building a medical clinic in each of them simply unviable, Niops just didn't have sufficient personnel or all the required medical equipment to spare, but fortunately someone had a bright idea on how to solve the issue.

A couple of old Cobra transport VTOL's that once belonged to the NAM had each been fitted out with a small clinic and operating theatre in the cargo bay, which along with a high-tech Eligus Medical Diagnoser and a trio of medical personnel could handle most medical issues. The VTOL's would fly around visiting each settlement every few weeks to provide basic clinical care and check-ups, and in case of emergencies a settlement could radio for urgent help.

Although not the fastest machines in the sky the Cobra's had unlimited range thanks to their fusion powerplants, and they could set down most anywhere making them a good choice for the job. The SLDF had actually used a version of the very same machine for casualty evacuation where they were attached to a MASH unit, and Callahan pondered that could have been what gave someone the idea for a flying surgical and medical team flitting about the Stafford skies in the first place.

Considering how little it actually cost to run the service in the big scheme of thing it was probably the most cost-effective means Niops had yet devised to get the population of a world the Association wanted to raise the Hegemony flag over to freely agree. It also looked good in the press back home as feel-good stories in the newspapers about the Association being out there saving lives as it restored civilisation one world at a time made the voters, and hence the politicians, very happy.

The appeal of Stafford to the Niops Association was due to it being a very green world, offering something that Alphard most certainly did not, a potentially massive agricultural surplus. Much of the planet's surface was covered by forest and grassland, with only a few sparse patches of desert terrain and a small quantity of tundra near the poles unsuitable for farming. It was a generally pleasant world to live on too, orbiting a G type yellow dwarf that greatly resembled Sol in the Terran system and with similar gravity to the homeworld of humanity as well. Oceans covered around two-thirds of the surface, although the native fish were not regarded as particularly appetising so Terran species would need to be imported if they wanted to develop a large-scale fishing industry here as well as agriculture.

Stafford also greatly resembled Terra in climate, not so much the climate of Terra during the present Holocene era that had lasted since the last glacial period however, but rather Terra during the latter part of the Eocene epoch some thirty million years ago. It was some eight degrees warmer than modern-day Terra at the equator, with the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere several times higher than they had been there even before the development of fusion power had helped clean up the environment.

Warm weather with decent levels of annual rainfall across much of the planet and a goodly amount of CO2 to absorb made Stafford a veritable paradise for plant life, practically a planet-scale greenhouse. Plough up some grassland, or clear a few hectares of native forest, and you could plant most any crop and reap a good harvest for yourself.

It was so suitable for human colonisation that it was a wonder why the total population of Stafford III was only slightly larger than that of Alphard IV, despite it being so much more hospitable than that arid world. There were far less pleasant planets that were much further out from the Inner Sphere than Stafford which had vastly greater numbers of people living there by the early 29th Century that only an unlikely chain of events could explain it. Events which had, of course, actually transpired.

Jumpships belonging to the Free Worlds League exploring outwards into the periphery, looking for new worlds to eventually colonise as the Mariks gradually expanded their borders, had actually come across Stafford as early as the 2390's. Unfortunately, in 2398 the Capellan Confederation invaded Andurien, then part of the Free Worlds League, an event that is generally regarded as being the start of the Age of War that kept the Mariks and every other Great House far too busy fighting each other to devote as much of their resources towards outwards expansion as they had previously.

A century and a half of near continuous interstellar warfare later the Age of War had eventually ground to a halt, although as much because of Terran Hegemony diplomatic efforts as it was because the Great Powers had been struck by the sudden realisation that decade after decade of fighting had not really gotten them anywhere so far and that was unlikely to change anytime soon.

After the formation of the Star League in 2570 the Free Worlds League had started to expand outwards again, though resources devoted to the Reunification War of 2577 to 2597 and the costs incurred by rebuilding efforts afterwards did hamper this somewhat, and it might have come to pass that Stafford would have been colonised by the Mariks during the 27th century if not for another development, this one technological rather than political.

The invention of the Jamerson-Ulikov Water Purifier in 2622 made hundreds, if not thousands of previously uninhabitable worlds already within the borders of the Great Powers of the Inner Sphere suddenly viable for colonisation. Why keep pushing out into the periphery to found new colonies when you could establish them right on your own doorstep only a jump or two away from systems you already had? It already took months to travel from one side of the Free Worlds League to the other, and shorter supply lines and trade routes were cheaper and more profitable, so it was only good economics after all.

Someone eventually did land settlers on Stafford III, which is why it had a name on the maps rather than a number and of course why there were people there already when scouts from the Niops Association first got there. However the founders had arrived only a couple of decades before the New Vandenberg Uprising of 2765 had plunged the entire periphery into war, cutting them off from civilisation and any further waves of colonists.

From what Roger Callahan had heard the story was much the same for Islington, another periphery world with breathable air, good soil and a benign climate itself situated about half-way between Niops and Frobisher. Both Stafford and Islington could have been established breadbasket worlds with large populations by now if events had turned out different, but that they weren't was only good for Niops because it meant nobody had planted a flag on them yet.

His orders from headquarters were to mingle and play nice with the locals, and so after all the formalities, which included a speech by the town mayor that was about five times as long as his own had been, Colonel Roger Callahan put on his best smile and plate of barbeque in hand he mixed with the crowd making conversation. After showing off a few battlemechs later, and maybe giving a few kids a ride inside an APC or on top of a tank, the infantry and the mechwarriors were planning to take each other on in a softball competition before it started to get dark which should make for good entertainment. The locals might not play the sport themselves, but they would surely be able to tell that both sides really wanted to win, hopefully drawing a decent-sized crowd of spectators.

Contact and survey teams had been visiting Stafford for a few years now, it was less than twenty lightyears further out from the Niops Association than Alphard was after all, and with the exception of a few backwoods types the populace tended to regard them with interest rather than intrigue these days which was not to say they didn't voice doubts when they were told something that sounded deeply implausible.

"When you say you fought against Amaris you mean your unit right? Not you yourself personally?" a young farmer who had come into town for the ceremony said in response to Callahan mentioning how the 11th Army had liberated Moscow from the Rim Worlds Republic Army back in 2777.

"No, I was there" Callahan replied honestly, though if pressed for details he would have to lie and say he was with the 295th flanking to the south, rather than with the 331st assaulting the city directly from the north.

"Bullshit, you can't be older than what, forty-five?" the farmer replied dubiously.

"I'm seventy-five" Callahan replied, grinning. "I've got kids in their late forties" he told the farmer, wondering if it would look greedy if he went back and got some more fried chicken.

"He's Terran, they live forever" someone else interjected. "Special drugs they never let anyone else have."

"They weren't available outside the Terran Hegemony, but Stafford is part of the Niops Association Hegemony now so you're one of us, not one of them now" Callahan responded. "Once we've reinvented the treatments, and can mass produce them cheaply enough for all, we're going to offer them to people on every world with our flag flying over it" he said, nodding towards the flagpole. "I'd better warn you that they only works if you get them when you're a kid, so don't start thinking you're going to get a jab one day and live another fifty years because of it" he told them apologetically.

"Why does it only work on kids?" the farmer wanted to know.

"Partially to do with telomeres I think, you'll need to talk to someone smarter and better educated than me to explain it all to you properly though" Callahan replied. "Not really my field of expertise, I shoot holes in people that are a lot larger than a needle makes for a living" he added with a grin.

"How much are you people going to charge for that?" someone asked suspiciously.

"Nothing" Callahan told him. "Don't go thinking that's it's entirely altruistic though, if you're healthy another fifty or more years then you're also working and paying taxes another fifty or more years, so from that standpoint it's a great investment" he said. "Most people on Niops that weren't born on Terra like I was get to retire at my age with a pension, I'm not eligible for mine until I'm a hundred and twenty-five."

"No such thing as a free lunch I guess" the farmer remarked.

"Technically you're all eating one right now" Callahan joked.

The farmer smirked. "Are we? I'll bet you want something in return" he suggested. He didn't like the sound of these 'taxes' but if you actually got something back from the government to show for what they took off you that wasn't too bad.

"Maybe you're right" Callahan conceded. "We need Stafford to help us feed people on worlds where it's a lot more difficult to grow food, like your neighbours Alphard and Copernicus" he said. "We'll provide the tools needed to help you do that but it's a two-way-street, Alphard can provide the raw materials to feed industrial growth and you can feed the workers in their mines and factories. Working together we can make everyone better off. It's not just doing the morally right thing to help each other out, it's enlightened self-interest too, working together we can build a better future. One that none of us could manage to achieve alone" he said. "Niops is probably the only world apart from Terra itself that hasn't regressed technologically in the last half-century, but we don't have the numbers or resources to make that really count, we all need each other to make this Hegemony thing work."

"Plenty of folks say you aren't to be trusted still" the farmer observed.

"I don't doubt it. But ask yourself why we're going about this the hard way instead of just making you all do what we want with battlemechs and orbital bombardment" Callahan replied. "We could take the food you grow by force instead of paying for it."

"So why don't you?"

"Because we're not ******" Callahan explained earnestly. "There's more than enough of them already without us joining in. I know it seems like a radical notion these days, but the galaxy might actually benefit from a little more cooperation and a lot less confrontation" he suggested. "It's not that weird an idea is it surely?" he asked rhetorically.

[Hotpoint]

Part XXVI - Section 2 of 2

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"I heard someone say that you're moving people from Comstock to Alphard to work in mines and factories there?" another person asked, their tone indicating they possibly thought that was a forced transfer of labour and Callahan was full of it.

"More like we offered a good wage and they queued up to board the dropship" Callahan replied honestly, smiling. "Most of them signed a five-year contract, earn enough cash to go back home and build a house" he said. "Niops money is good, the paper money is backed by germanium like the Star League Dollar was, and we're minting gold and silver coins now too that you can spend in places that don't take paper money" he told them. "I spent some time on Comstock myself, you were lucky that you weren't as dependant on food imports as they were when the Star League fell and everyone in the Inner Sphere started slaughtering each other" he said with a sigh. "It's taking us a while to help them put their society back together, it kind-of collapsed when most of the supply shipments stopped coming and if it wasn't for Francas continuing to send them as much refrigerated meat as they could, hundreds of thousands more people would have starved to death. They're good people on Francas, hardworking ranchers that look out for each other, good meat from there too" he added, picking up a chicken leg from his plate and taking a bite out of it.

"That was darned neighbourly of them" an older man observed. "Sending food to Comstock I mean."

Callahan swallowed the chicken in his mouth and nodded. "It's always nice to see that just because the Great Houses are selfish jerks that there's still some people that actually do give a shit about their fellow man" he agreed. "If we weren't so worried about the Marik's turning up in Niops one day and doing to us what they did to the rest of the Terran Hegemony we'd have turned up here to say howdy decades ago, but after what they did to Brownsville, New Dallas and other places we thought it was better to keep our heads down. At least until we were strong enough to fend them off" he told them, sticking firmly to the cover story. "You guys aren't worth a full-scale invasion, neither is Alphard, Comstock or Francas for that matter, but we are because we've got more advanced technology than them. Tech that's worth stealing or just blowing all-to-hell to stop someone else stealing it first."

"I thought you had some old SLDF warships to defend yourself with already though?" someone queried.

"A couple of destroyers and a frigate might be enough to scare a pirate band shitless but the Free Worlds League and the rest started the First Succession War with over a hundred warships each and we don't know how many they still have, we've got to assume dozens to play it safe" Callahan replied with a shrug. "Just telling them we were neutral wasn't going to get us left in peace. We needed enough nukes stockpiled to convince them they sure as hell didn't want to stick their dicks into our hornet's nest" he said laughing, his language a little more salty and coarse than it usually was with civilians because he had noticed the locals often swore a lot themselves.

The people nearby listening all laughed along with him. "My pappy always said you can get further with a two-by-four and a kind word than you can with just a kind word" a farm-hand agreed.

"Mine used to say that when you've got them by the balls their hearts and minds soon follow" the Town Mayor interjected approaching to join them with a grin on his face.

"Sir" Callahan greeted him. "Tried the food?" he asked.

"I have, as well as some of that fine ale from Alphard, even if it tastes a mite different from ours" the Mayor replied, a few people making room for him to stand closer to Callahan.

"Different grain, they grow a lot of something called fonio because it doesn't mind drier soils than barley or wheat" Callahan explained. "You'll probably make good money exporting thirstier kinds of crops to them as their population increases, most of their planet is dry as a bone so they have to be careful what they grow."

You couldn't feed an entire planet with imported food of course, not unless it had a small population anyway because even a Star Lord jumpship hauling half-a-dozen Mule dropships could only carry about fifty-thousand tons of cargo per round trip, but a world or two producing an export surplus would certainly help with temporary shortfalls elsewhere.

With enough irrigation projects Alphard could potentially sustain a population in the low single-digit billions, orders of magnitude more than it did now. This however would require most of the northern continents there to be turned into arable farmland, an infrastructure project which would take decades to complete even if there was the manpower and heavy equipment needed to get it done, which there wasn't. If they could import enough food from Stafford to temporarily feed say another million or so workers on Alphard for a few years on the other hand, they wouldn't just be able to staff all the mines and factories the High Associator was dreaming of, they could actually turn the planet into a populous industrial powerhouse able to feed itself.

"One of your survey teams suggested we might want to grow cotton for export, that needs plenty of water, rice, sugarcane and soybeans too" the mayor told him. "Not that there won't be plenty of call for wheat or maze I guess."

"I like tropical fruits so make sure to grow plenty of those too" Callahan suggested, "Niops really doesn't have the climate for those. Most of the fruit we grow back home has to come from greenhouses heated by geothermal power and lit by UV lamps because we just don't get much sunlight."

"Yeah, we noticed a lot of you people were pale like ghosts when they first started to visit" the mayor told him. "At first we thought it was because you had been cooped up in spaceships for months or years on end but then we found out we were only three weeks away from where you come from and it just never gets bright there, even at midday."

"Theres a good reason why you'll find more people living around stars like yours up there, rather than ones like ours, even though there's ten Red Dwarf's like Niops in the galaxy for every Yellow Dwarf like Stafford" Callahan replied drily. "There's no such thing as a bright summer's day and it depresses the hell out of you if you were born and raised somewhere else like I was" he said. "Doesn't bother my youngest, he's coming up eighteen and doesn't really know how nice it is to spend time outside somewhere like this instead" he added, looking up at a bright blue sky instead of a dim red one.

"How many kids have you got Colonel?" the mayor asked him.

"Five, oldest two have kids of their own and it don't matter if I look younger than I am, the first time one of them called me 'Grandpa' I swear I felt ****** ancient" Callahan said with a grimace, a few people laughing at his expression of dismay.

There was a good reason why Roger Callahan was assigned to these jobs where making nice with the locals was required. It wasn't just that he had decades of command experience and could think on his feet, Callahan was amiable and friendly with a relaxed manner that made it easy for people to get on with him.

If the SLDF ever wanted to provoke a war with someone they would send the abrasive Colonel Jax Benedict instead. It paid to have a diverse group of senior officers to choose from.

"Someone said you've got no trees on Niops?" a man that seemed to be a lumberjack from his build and clothes asked Callahan curiously. "That true?"

"Used to be until we got hold of some from another system with a star not that much hotter than ours that we're just starting to grow now" Callahan replied. "It'll take a while though, too cold for them to grow near as fast as they do here."

The lumberjack nodded his understanding. "Best timber for construction here comes from up in the mountains where it's colder" he noted. "Slower means tighter grain and denser, stronger timber than for the exact same species of tree down here closer to sea level" he said professionally.

"Algenib has some decent forests, not massive like yours it's a bit cooler and drier than here, but I liked it there" Callahan told him. "Reminded me of climbing trees as a little kid on Terra."

"Their trees look like ours?" the lumberjack asked.

"It's surprising how much alike trees on different planets actually look" Callahan confirmed, recalling how the Circean Oaks that grew in profusion in the forests around Great Hope had been named that because of just how much the alien tree resembled oak trees back on Terra.

The lumberjack nodded. "Convergent evolution" he explained. "Plants everywhere finding the same solution for the same problem of surviving in a certain ecological niche" he said, the man surprising Callahan with his depth of scientific understanding. "Learned about it in school" he said. "Did you know that the Horse Chestnut tree on Terra is more closely related to broccoli than it is the Sweet Chestnut tree?" he asked rhetorically.

"Really?" Callahan replied, raising his eyebrows.

"Yup" the lumberjack confirmed. "Convergent evolution" he said once more. "Like how dolphins, sharks and ichthyosaurs on Terra all ended up the same shape eventually, even though they all evolved from completely different species."

"Yeah, I knew that one, never heard the broccoli thing before though so thanks for that" Callahan said, smiling.

"Don't go thinking that because we don't have fancy holographic televisions that we're all ignorant rednecks Colonel" the mayor interjected, deciding that this was a good opportunity for him to make a point. "We never stopped teaching our kids science here, we just couldn't maintain the industrial base needed to keep making all the fancy toys that you could."

"Fair enough, Mr Mayor" Colonel Roger Callahan responded, mentally reassessing his view on the people of Stafford and other colonies that had technologically regressed. "But trust me on this, if you think owning a holographic television is a mark of an advanced, sophisticated society then you've never watched some of the crap the gameshow channel broadcasts back home on Niops" he told the man in all seriousness.


----------

Note from the Author:

According to Handbook: Major Periphery States the planet Stafford is one of the breadbasket worlds of the Marian Hegemony, along with Islington and New Venice, which indicates that it's considerably more hospitable than most colonised worlds. Since it doesn't have a romanesque name I'm assuming it had a decent sized population even before Imperator Johann O'Reilly turned up and added the world to his growing empire, but it wasn't present on the star maps before him so it couldn't have been particularly developed.

Mostly for the sake of novelty on my part while Stafford is much like Terra, in terms of climate it's like Terra during the late Eocene rather than it is today (hotter, more humid and with a lot more CO2 in the atmosphere so plants love it).

Having most of the people on Stafford living in small scattered communities seems like one way to avoid dealing with too many pirate raids but it made it difficult for Niops to help each one. On Alphard where most everybody lives in the same part of the planet (the cooler parts of the Northern continents) it was easy to make medical care available to most everyone, simply by setting up hospitals and clinics in a few locations everyone could reach, but that wasn't so easy on Stafford hence the Flying Doctor service in their Cobra VTOL aircraft. The Eligus Medical Diagnoser was a technological miracle of the Golden Age of the Star League (and it's a lot more portable than all the equipment it replaced).

Alien trees looking much like trees on Earth on sci-fi shows doesn't require near as much suspension of belief as some may think (the Horse Chestnut being more closely related to broccoli than it is the Sweet Chestnut is apparently true, convergent evolution at work).

Stafford will export lumber as well as food to other worlds in the new Hegemony. You can fell a lot more trees in a short space of time with a Crosscut loggermech than you can with a chainsaw (or especially an axe) and as a bonus your part-time weekend warriors in the Planetary Guard get in plenty of cockpit time during their day jobs.

And finally, as the Niops Association Hegemony nears the day that it reveals itself to the wider galaxy by reestablishing HPG contact here's the flag they're raising over their member worlds beforehand.

[Daryk]

Love it!  The only thing wrong with that flag is the words... it doesn't need them! :)

[mikecj]

Love it!  The only thing wrong with that flag is the words... it doesn't need them! :)

Seconded.