RE: Tell The World That We Tried [Battletech] [CYOA]
11-15-2018, 09:38 PM (This post was last modified: 11-16-2018, 12:53 AM by Valles.)
11-15-2018, 09:38 PM (This post was last modified: 11-16-2018, 12:53 AM by Valles.)
Rails? What rails?
NOW STRANGERS CRY IN FOREIGN TONGUES…
The two Banshees at the front of the knot of mechs filled almost the entire width of the corridor, and they weren’t taking fire. They’d start, if we tried to push them in a rush, but both sides of the rat’s war had found the hard way that trying to take out the shield mechs cost more in ammunition and heat scales than it gained in damage to the shields. The close confines of the tunnel, and the limited ventilation, meant that dozens of fusion reactors running in a tight space already had the air at sauna heat or more.
The extra readouts running in the margins of the video made that clear, black box data pulled from the records of one of the mechs that had been present.
One Banshee stepped forward; the other stepped back. Then the second stepped right, fitting itself in behind its cohort.
Ten meters behind them was the recovery vehicle, stacked with spare shields, and another five behind that and over in the ‘clear’ lane, a Von Luckner heavy tank. It vanished in smoke contrails from its missile launchers, pouring fire down the narrow gap the displaced Banshee had opened up. The cloud bank immediately filled the visual display, lit from within by headlights and the muzzle flash of its autocannon.
More missiles and muzzle blast zipped over the top of the tank’s turret, the Atlas behind it unleashing an equal fusillade down the line as the Victor that had been facing them didn’t quite manage to get out of the way in time.
The way the next bit was supposed to work was for the tank to reverse out of the firing line and back into the shadow of the Banshees, and for the Atlas to sidestep at the same time. That would get their armor out of the way and clear a line of sight for the Demolisher and Stalker pair behind them. Originally, it would have been a Sturmfeur and a Stalker, but the automatic transfer belts that pulled missiles from the magazines to the turret launchers had turned out to not deal well with the slightly chunkier dimensions of the SRMs, and they’d been withdrawn until we could find some better way of dealing with the resulting jams.
Instead, the Stalker’s lasers and SRMs ripped great rents and chunks out of the Atlas’s rear armor, most of the plating evaporating under the assault and visible structural damage apparent in all sectors.
I paused the video.
“You see?” Setsuka Carter said, glaring up at Minakshi James with a malice much more serious than her 4’ 9” frame should have been able to back up. But, on the other hand, she was one of the relatively few owner-operator pilots I had, meaning that the Atlas was hers, even paid off from the debts that had tied her in when I recruited her and her brother on Hoff, years before.
Minakshi, the Stalker driver, wasn’t a terribly tall girl herself, only an inch or so taller than me, and she’d been a street rat on Solaris before signing on. She was still in her teens and gangly with it, though she’d be gorgeous once her body finished filling out. She glared straight back, but stayed quiet.
I sighed. “All right. Formal ruling, command judgement… No fault error in the course of operations.”
Minakshi brightened. Setsuka fumed. I kept talking. “As such, the unit bears all repair costs. Since we’re on campaign, the Assault Guards were willing to play ball with spares, and the tech department says you’ll be back in action in three days.”
Setsuka turned her mismatched eyes on me, looking startled. “You’ll cover my repairs?” she said.
A thought occurred to me, and I leaned forward. “The crews haven’t been charging you before now, have they?” I asked. If somebody was running that kind of protection racket in my unit, I was going to have to make a very explicit example. I’d specifically set things up to forbid that kind of bullshit.
“Al and I have been doing our own,” she admitted after a moment.
I shook my head incredulously, but her Confection hadn’t taken more than armor damage until now, so I supposed it must be possible. Even if I didn’t really see how. “Well, if you prefer to do it that way, fine. But yes, you can draw parts, tools, and other technical labor from the unit pools as needed as long as you’re signed.”
“...Oh,” she said.
Minakshi rolled her eyes, and before she could add anything that would re-escalate the situation, I said, “All right, both of you go get some sleep. We’re back into it in the morning.”
The tunnels of St. Ives were rightly infamous. The one that Setsuka and Minakshi had been fighting in was eleven kilometers long, in total, with a deadfall, or pit trap, or side-accessed shooting gallery for crossfires, or turret nest, or vault door…
That got away from me. Point is, there was an obstacle every couple of hundred meters. I think the longest distance we saw without something to slow us down was three hundred and seventy eight; the shortest was only ten. Not counting the cases where several hassles were set up right on top of each other.
The only virtue from our end was that, since this was also a major access route for supplies going into the factory and its attached small city, it had to be relatively straight, without enough in the way of twists and switchbacks to interfere with the trains whose rails we were stomping over.
That lack of virtue included the opposition. The St. Ives Lancers were ton for ton lighter than any of our units, though not by a whole lot for everyone but the Assault Guards, but they were more skilled than my people were, and when we’d untangled all the wreckage it did turned out that most of the losses the Capellans had taken at the spaceport had been fast hovercraft that would’ve been slaughtered in the tunnels. Their heavy units, like the Demolishers and so on, hadn’t even made it to that battlefield… So we’d been seeing them ever since.
Between the shield-Banshees and the numbers advantage, our losses pushing in through the tunnels were a lot lower than what other Davion units had seen making tries to take St. Ives in the past - which is to say, we’d only lost about one company to the lance worth of hard kills we’d confirmed, as opposed to two or three.
I hadn’t been living in my cockpit the way Revons was, or in a set-up command center like Larcher, so I was pretty sure that I was the only one of the main command team to be getting any sleep to speak of. Which was kind of backwards, given that I was the youngest by at least five years, but there you go.
With several times as many people and mechs as the defenders, we were keeping the pressure and operations on around the clock, in the hopeful theory that it would pile enough fatigue on the Capellan troops for them to start making useful mistakes. In practice, it seemed to be about canceling out the stress-level advantages they reaped from actually knowing the ground and where all the traps were.
Traps like the one I got the call about at the next best thing to four in the local morning.
“The bastards have caved it in!”
I was, just barely, still awake enough to ask useful questions rather than just going ‘huh?’. “Which tunnel? How big is the fall? Did we lose anyone?”
That calmed the voice on the other end down. “Sorry, Ma’am. Brasscap Actual here-” Somewhere in the Assault Guards, by his callsign, though offhand I didn’t know which battalion. “And these fucking Capellan assholes just dropped what looks like a two hundred meter long chunk of the south tunnel on top of three companies of our people. And two of their own mechs, too.”
“Fuck,” I said, and scrubbed a hand over my face. A one-to-eighteen exchange rate was worth doing that, for the Capellans, but what it said about their fanaticism… “All right. That’s probably too big to clear the normal way, but have the engineers take a look at going up and over the top of the fall.”
The Capellans had standardized their drop-blocks at the same height as the tunnel, which meant that there had to be a cavity at least that high above it. We’d need to shoot out the retraction mechanisms, but that was easy - and the amount of mass involved meant we’d likely have time.
“In the meantime, I’m going to go re-emphasize no pursuit into uncleared zones to people. Again,” I finished.
We both signed off and I started to make the calls I needed. This was going to fuck our loss ratios.
The next alarm found me already in the cockpit. Unfortunately, it found me in the form of a sudden shockwave whumping through my gut and chest.
I waited a hard-counted ten seconds before I gave in and decided that no one was going to call me. I glanced at the secondary displays - I hated the compressed panorama readout that the SLDF had decided was ‘optimal’, but Marauder No. 2’s cockpit had enough multi-function screens to dedicate three to cameras showing right, left, and rear views with a lot less distortion.
The mushroom cloud was easy to find. “King, Joker Actual,” I said. “I’m seeing a major detonation at what looks like the eastern camp gate. What do you know?”
“Joker, King, everything’s still confused over there but it looks like a truck bomb, mixed concussion and incendiary-”
Another detonation, more distant, was easily audible first over the com line, then a second time with my own ears.
“Fuck! West gate, too,” the operator in the command post said.
“Full alert, all gates, all camps, now,” I said. “Call me on this channel if you have details. Joker, out.”
I didn’t pay attention as the rest of the command company formed around me, not until I heard Malin Reyes mutter, “They want us looking at the gates.”
Reyes was the oldest person in the unit, and he’d been a mercenary mechwarrior since he was seventeen. He’d fought for every Successor State, against every other Successor State, and that wealth of experience, the insight it gave him, was why I kept him in my command element. I kept organizing our response to the truck bombs… And then at the end of it, I added, “...And remaining perimeter and watch stations, check your sectors. If this is all of it, it was a waste of their time and they have to know that. Joker, out.”
“Good thought, Boss,” Reyes said.
I grinned unconsciously. “Says the man who knows he put it in my head. Thanks.”
“‘Swhat you pay me fo-” Reyes started to reply, before a priority channel from the dropship Ise cut across the transmission.
“-erfucker! Pirate jump, we missed it!”
I didn’t bother complaining about the poor com protocols. “We have new company in system?” I asked.
“Three Invaders, one Merchant, seven Unions, two Leopards, two Intruders, at the lunar pirate point and burning at two-point-five. ETA at orbit, three hours and a bit,” the voice on the Ise had calmed down enough to give real data.
Most Capellan regiments ran with only two battalions, so that was about bang-on right.
“Good work, that means we’ve caught them in time to be ready,” I said.
Once again, defending fighters rose from St. Ives and closed in on descending dropships. This time, though, rather than running the gauntlet, most of the ships broke off back for orbit - and left a scatter of falling sparks in their wake - and two remaining dropships.
Watching from the ground, I could still hear Sasagawa giving orders. “Spades, take the pods. Swords, kill those Intruders. Bronzefin, you’re on overwatch.”
That left the unit’s fighters hunting for the drop pods and the mechs inside them, and the AFFS regulars going after the Capellan fighters to keep them from interfering. I could watch the two waves of icons, one rising, one falling, come together, and see the lights start to wink out.
I could also hear the startled swearing and the way confusion set in, if not the reason why, as the dropships in the landing wave started trying to escape back to orbit… And, a moment later, the way the ships in orbit dove again for the ground.
Sasagawa called me: “Joker, the drop pods are decoys, repeat, decoys. The mechs must still be on board the dropships, and we’re out of position. We’ll try and get some but we won’t get them all.”
“Understood,” I said, already doing the math and coming out with an estimate that there had to be a hidden fifth tunnel, a sally port, at whatever the landing’s target point was. “I won’t joggle your elbow. Joker, out.”
I wasn’t going to joggle her elbow. “Ise, this is Joker Actual. I need an updated landing site.”
“Thirty kilometers east of Site Eight, plus uncertainty. Sir, if they maneuver they could throw that off by at least that much distance.”
Inconvenient. “Basically right on top of us. Got it.”
The need to stay organized to fight meant that we couldn’t really blanket the landing zone, but setting up both free battalions ten or so minutes apart meant that even if the entire reserve of defenders sallied, they’d be able to combine quickly enough for a fighting retreat.
I was confident that that would be enough, but I never expected it to be needed. I was sure there was a sally port, but I didn’t think that Candace Liao would take the risk.
Yeah, uh, I was wrong.
They popped out just as the dropships pushed their cargoes out the door and it started raining mechs.
We found out a bit later that there’d been a forward deployment chamber, enough to hold a full regiment, not far under the surface, with dozens of easily collapsed access ramps to let them flush its entire contents out onto the surface quickly.
The last strategic thought I had time for was, “King, Joker. Relay to AFFS command and Hangman. Emphasize. We have one regiment confirmed on the surface. They’ve left the cupboard bare. Joker out.”
After that, the next impression was the command company’s Rifleman cutting loose at the falling mechs overhead, trying to take out the jump harnesses supporting this mech or that. I started to track my PPCs up to try the same thing, but a Vindicator touched down ahead of me and I switched targets to that.
The autocannon missed, but the beams didn’t, and from the way they ripped deep into its torso I knew it was one of the so-called ‘Avenging Angel’ variants, which traded half their armor for another twenty kph of top speed. I could see the goal there, the Vindicator was slower than most mechs its weight, but the decision to take all the needed weight out of armor rather than scaling back the weapon loadout a bit was… questionable.
As I demonstrated by firing again, this time missing with both beams but raking the autocannon across the missile-carrying side of my target’s torso. A secondary detonation tossed the weak-side arm free and left it staggering madly, unable to steady long enough to bring the PPC in the remaining limb to bear in my direction.
A salvo of LRMs from somewhere behind me meant it didn’t get the chance; internal compartmentation had saved the Vindicator’s reactor and gyroscope from the ammo detonation, but with the armor and structural members that would have interdict them sheared away, the missile warheads were able to punch straight through the remaining bulkhead. The medium dropped like the proverbial marionette, and I turned to try and find the next target.
...Which found me, instead. The Quickdraw’s pilot was either a very quick thinker or he’d been listening to rumors and planning ahead of time; by the time I saw him he was only a split second from slamming into me in a well-aimed shoulder charge.
I’d come a long way as a pilot since 3015. Four years of practice and experience had me up to the standard expected of a basic mechwarrior graduate - I’d even qualified to be rated Regular.
But I wasn’t that good. Marauder No. 2 went down hard, flailing its clubbed gun arms in a way that would have been comical under most other circumstances, and I tasted blood as the impact of landing made me bite my tongue. Trying to clear my head, I looked up at the Capellan machine as it trained all its weapons straight back down at me - at this range, even the missiles would probably hit.
I picked one leg up off the ground, drew it back for a kick. The Quickdraw fired, the thunder of missile impacts and the poison-green blaze of laser fire glaring off their smoke filled my senses. Alarms wailed, but my own armor held.
The kick didn’t work; my target danced back out of reach, and the I could see the EST. HEAT bar my HUD threw next to it tick back down towards safe levels that would let the pilot fire again.
A blur of motion, a flash of plasma flame, and the distinctive modified silhouette of Aspis touched down behind the Quickdraw and took one leaping stride on the momentum of its jump jet leap - and used that speed and impulse to drive its sword straight in through the heavier mech’s rear armor plating. I could see the tip of the weapon emerge from the weak point of one of the missile launcher housings, impaled straight through the Quickdraw’s entire body, then withdraw again.
The last of the three mechs to land on my command company, a Wasp, was long gone by the time I got No. 2 back to its feet, and…
“They’re retreating?” Sophitia asked over a private channel.
...The rest of the Capellans were following.
“They’ve got what they were after; they’ve linked up without getting chewed up in detail.” I checked the logs of the artillery fire missions; they’d been firing since practically the first sighting of the 1st St Ives, good. “We’ll bleed them some more, but odds are they’ve won this round.”
All told, the Capellans showed a net gain of about two battalions out of the operation, including the command lances and so on folded into their numbers. Despite that, all of us on world were still sure that we had everything we needed to take St. Ives away from the Confederation for the first time in the planet’s history. They’d traded most of the dropships and about half of their defensive depth before the main garrisons could get back into position.
Our orders to do just that staying unchanged wouldn’t have surprised anyone. Nor, given that the five regiments of McCarron’s Armored Cavalry - the Capellans’ de-facto central reserve for all that they were technically a mercenary outfit - were only a few jumps away, at Menke, would orders to withdraw entirely.
Ceasefire in place, and orders to secure and set up a real-time HPG channel between St. Ives and Tikonov of all places…
Since the protocols specified for the signal linkage were in the clear, I was pretty sure that the only serving military who weren’t awake and watching avidly were the ones on guard and watch duty - and that they were listening to audio-only.
As the second-most-senior officer on the planet, I had… a better viewpoint, while Marshall Larcher watched from her command post.
On the big screen that dominated the little conference room, Hanse Davion inclined his head. “Let me open by offering my personal condolences, Celestial Wisdom. While I cannot apologise for the fortunes and dictates of war, I know the cost and pain of a lost parent, and regret your loss on those terms.”
Seated, alone, at the table that faced that screen, Candace Liao returned the not-quite-a-bow, managing not to dislodge the elaborate headdress that went with her ornate robes in the process.
Padme Amidala, eat your freakin’ heart out.
“We thank you for your courtesy, Your Highness,” she said, with barely any hidden venom. I was impressed by her acting skills. “I wonder, in turn, if His Grace the Duke of New Syrtis is expected to recover from his injuries? The Capellan people have always found him to be an honorable foe, at least.”
“His doctors expect him to regain sufficient function for day to day life, but that the full duties of his office would prove challenging, going forwards. His title and post have already passed to his son’s hands,” Hanse replied.
One of the Capellan officers standing along the opposite wall from me, facing across Candace’s table and the central line between it and Hanse’s display, wasn’t able to conceal his disappointment.
Which was fair, since the entire exchange was full of so much bullshit I could feel the flies teleporting in to buzz around it. The dispatches that had finally caught up with us while the realtime link was being set up had explained, among other things, why we’d been rushed out the door so quickly: MIIO’s internal security operations had caught wind that Michael Hasek-Davion was planning to personally meet with Candace’s father, Maximilian Liao.
In other words, that the noble responsible for defending the entire Capellan border of the Federated Suns, probably the third most powerful man in that state, was in secret negotiations with the leader of the hostile realm he faced.
That Michael had no fondness for his liege lord was no surprise to anyone, which was why he hadn’t been told of Hanse’s plans for the operation I’d become part of… and why the first reports of our and other units arrivals had caught both sides of that secret meeting by surprise.
The Capellan Red Lancers and FedSuns 6th New Syrtis Fusiliers had been able to get their principals out of that room in between massacring each other, but neither unit would be combat effective again any time soon, and the fact that Candace was in this conversation as the Chancellor of the Capellan Confederation was ample proof that her father had not survived his wounds.
“And so, even this campaign of yours is not without costs to date, Your Highness,” Candace said, “and make no mistake, many more to come. Tikonov and Necromo have fallen, and the coats of the Northwind Highlanders turned. But Ares, and St. Ives, and Grand Base remain in question, and Archibald McCarron is yet in the field.”
“They are,” Hanse Davion agreed equably, then warned, “But, though war is never certain, the answers to those ‘questions’ that are likely is apparent. Do not think my realm unprepared to bear the costs they require.”
Candace inclined her head in agreement. “And so the time is come to… discuss terms.”
On the big screen, I could see Hanse’s eyes light up and widen slightly, his nostrils flare as he took a quick breath. “I would be willing to consider such a thing, in principle,” he said.
“So.” Candace Liao closed her eyes, then opened them again and met his gaze squarely. “The fundamental principle by which We must measure Our decision is that a peace or surrender which reduce the Capellan people, their spirit and culture, to no more than a ground upon which the image of the Federated Suns is stamped, would be just as much an extinction as the most grudging military conquest… And more certain.”
“I am prepared to guarantee the good treatment and health of the Capellan people,” Hanse said, “and to avoid interference in voluntary matters of custom, but my own oaths and obligations to the subjects of the Federated Suns require me to guarantee them certain freedoms in excess of existing Capellan custom. Those oaths apply regardless of the the duration said subjects have been under my care, and given the long and tragic history between our nations, I would be remiss to leave open future conflicts.”
He paused, then softened that veiled promise of conquest. “It is my hope, however, that a more detailed examination of the particular points will reveal common ground.”
“My hope, as well,” Candace Liao all but whispered.
I found out later - from the gorgeous Nordic horse’s mouth, as it happened - that Katrina Steiner’s message had hinted at the possibility of an alliance, if the Federated Suns’ relatively young and untested ruler could prove as much a peer to her, personally, as his state was to the Lyran Commonwealth.
‘Impress me,’ had been the exact words, the challenge, that Morgan Kell had relayed to Hanse Davion.
Hanse had reacted by pulling two thirds of the Federated Suns’ Overlords and Triumphs to the Capellan March, and using their greater carrying capacity to shock two or three times as many regular units as would have otherwise been possible forward into carefully selected targets in Capellan territory. Backed up by heavier mercenary formations with their own starlift, he’d been able to concentrate overwhelming force without quite exceeding what his logistics could bear.
Homestead and Holloway, taken by the Screaming Eagles Mercenary Brigade to open the approaches to Grand Base, weren’t really worthy of mention; only one of them had had even a company’s worth of garrison, and aside from their position there was nothing significant about them.
Tikonov, the single largest industrial center in the entire Confederation, had been well protected beforehand, but under the onslaught of the three regiments of the Vegan Rangers, two brigades of the Deneb Light Cavalry, and the 5th and Heavy Davion Guards RCTs, the entire place had been pretty much rolled over.
The Deneb Light Cavalry was a long-standing combined arms division within the Armed Forces of the Federated Suns that used an organization surprisingly close to what I’d ended up with - and I suspected that if I could pull it off, I’d be imitating them and adding an additional armor regiment to the one each of mechs, fighters, and armor that the unit had per brigade. The ‘Regimental Combat Team’ model, on the other hand, I didn’t think was super functional - a third armor regiment for each battlemech one was excessive for the transport hassles it brought, and their ideas about how to combat load the five regiments of infantry gave me hives.
The AFFS had been fighting to, dreaming of taking Tikonov for decades at least, and Hanse taking personal command of that operation wouldn’t be doing his internal prestige any harm no matter how strategically risky it was. The two or three regiments the Capellan Confederation Armed Forces had been able to scrape up to try and retake the place had been hilariously outnumbered.
For centuries the other states of the Inner Sphere had known that the jumpship yard at Capella could not, did not, account for all of that state’s jumpship production, but the other source of ships, the elusive ‘Site B’, was a mystery to anyone outside the CapCon. The context that Older-Me had first read Necromo’s name in, a warship yard, convinced Lyran Intelligence that it must have been Site B, and I guessed they must have told Davion during Solih’s negotiations with him. Certainly the 7th Crucis Lancers RCT had confirmed it, when they took the place.
At last report, McCarron’s Armored Cavalry, which provided five of the eight mercenary regiments that had been the CapCon’s main strategic reserve, were still fighting at the time of that first conversation - after taking sixty percent losses against the Wild Geese, the four regiments of the Illician Lancers, and the 3rd Ceti Hussars RCT. Their pulling it out wasn’t likely, with the odds up to three to one against.
Ares was famous for the warfare conventions signed there, but in this day and age it was a company planet for the Inner Sphere’s most prolific and widespread purveyor of extremely budget military hardware, Quikscell Corporation. Between line defenders and corporate security, the three mercenary regiments of the Fighting Urukhai had ample opportunity to live up to their name, and were making a damned good go of it.
Grand Base, the number two battlemech production site in the CapCon, was the home of the picked elites of Warrior House Fujita and the Capellan Death Commandoes, who managed a full regiment on the books between them. They hadn’t even tried to make an open fight of it against the 1st Davion Guards RCT, Dioscuri, and Team Banzai, but the ongoing cycle of stealth strikes and commando raids made it impossible to call the planet ‘secure’.
The Capellan Confederation had been riding the ragged edge of disaster for a long time, long enough for pretty much everyone both in the state and out of it to forget how narrow their margins were. Both of their major neighbors were hostile and badly outnumbered them, their production capacity in any given field could only barely keep up with losses… They’d used mercenaries as their primary response forces, for gods’ sakes!
But those mercenaries were McCarron’s Armored Cavalry, who were getting their asses kicked, and the Northwind Highlanders, whose beloved ancestral homeworld was and had been and was almost certain to remain in FedSuns hands. I wondered how long the Suns had planned on the ability to just offer it as a landhold to claim their loyalty; quite possibly decades.
Without them, the closest thing the Confederation had had to a fireman brigade was the elite bodyguard regiment of the Red Lancers… Who had been ripped to shreds against Michael Hasek-Davion’s handpicked New Syrtis RCT… and Hampton’s Hessens, a mercenary unit whose biggest skill was avoiding potentially risky fights. If they’d showed up for the attempt to retake Tikonov, the odds might have been only bad for the Confederation forces, rather than suicidal.
Not that the CapCon had had a choice but to try. Without Tikonov, or any two of the other targets aimed at by the AFFS, the weakest of the six Successor States went from ‘hanging on by its bleeding fingernails’ to ‘tumbling past the event horizon’.
Losing Tikonov, Necromo, and at least one of the others… Candace Liao would have needed a miracle to save her state in the long run, and she was too realistic to believe in those. If she’d tried, the FedSuns and Free Worlds League would have just sniped out the rest of the Confederation’s valuable, productive worlds and then gotten around to the more marginal ones as time and logistics permitted - probably fighting each other in brand new battlegrounds in the process, with all the cost to the Capellans living there that implied.
Her sister Romano, who in another world would have succeeded their father as Chancellor, was… less rational on many subjects. Fortunately for everyone else, one of those subjects had been the belief that simply ordering their younger brother Tormano to take his battlemech company and ‘suppress the resistance to her just rule’ would help her do that here, too.
He’d taken his company to the meeting hall of the Prefectorate, the body that formally selected the next Chancellor from among its numbers… And climbed out of his mech and spoken in favor of his oldest sister, Candace.
Tormano Liao was another realist.
With her sister in chains and formal title as Chancellor, Candace had turned her attention to what she could do for her nation… which in the end, was choose who the conquest actually came from, and get the best terms she could.
The fine details of the surrender of the Capellan Confederation and its incorporation as the Marik March of the Federated Suns were still in progress when the unit lifted for our new garrison postings, and they were still in progress when we started landing at our garrison stations. Honestly, the entire process was complicated enough that the final negotiations wouldn’t be sorted for years.
But the broad strokes, the key points, were settled. The Capellans immediately dismantled their thought-control police and associated courts, along with the vast slave-labor battalions of the ‘Servitors of the State’. All Capellan nobility and military swore allegiance to the Federated Suns, and would have a timeline for correcting the overcentralization of control that had been the Confederation’s greatest internal weakness. All former Capellan subjects would be gradually introduced to the rights and freedoms required under more liberal FedSuns laws over the course of ten years, starting with the freedoms of speech and press.
In return, there would be no general occupation, no reprisals or large scale reparations. Internal tariffs would maintain Capellan industry until it could recover enough to compete with those of the wider Federated Suns, and current owners and staff, and the Capellan nobility, would continue in their positions, subject to monitoring and performance checks.
Which was totally different from Capellan political loyalty monitoring, just ask either side.
Anyway. The working language of the Marik March would stay as Chinese, and the legal recognition of castes other than the Servitors would continue even if their membership was no longer government-assigned.
The Federated Suns’ High Council, comprised of representatives from every planet in the nation, had suffered a long slow decline to its current status as a nominal body without even a rubber-stamp function, every scrap of power stolen by Davions past for both good reasons and more personally greedy ones. The CapCon’s House of Scions, and the Prefectorate that it selected from its own ranks, meant that ironically the totalitarian state had a greater degree of political input from those outside the ruling family. Candace’s biggest political victory in the negotiations was in convincing Hanse to split the High Council into separate March-level that could act as checks on March Lords, and appoint two members each to a ‘Council of Marches’ that would do the same for the First Prince’s throne and governmental Privy Council.
For… fairly obvious reasons, the former CCAF’s units would be stationed outside the Marik March for at least a generation, so the AFFS would provide the units to protect and secure the new borders and interior sites. Initially this was being done with whatever was available, including my people, but in the long run the area would be staffed by either new-formed units or ones that had never done much fighting against the CapCon - and hopefully keep the chances of incidents down that way.
Not to zero, of course. There was already at least one regiment near the Marik border that had sworn an eternal crusade to reclaim the true State from perfidious Davion and the traitors who had spread their legs to it. A corner of my mind was a bit suspicious at the geographical distribution of the ones that hadn’t been squashed right away and were being permitted to draw off ‘deserters’ and recruit their fellow fanatics from more placid areas to join them - they were all right up against the Marik border.
I wondered if Marik was in on it and was being ‘gifted’ those worlds as part of a border settlement, but enh, not my problem.
Blackwing Military Solutions and Services had been contracted until April of 3020; with the preliminary surrender signing happening in October of the year before that, we still had a whole six months left for Hanse to make use of us. The fact that he was pleased with our performance on St. Ives and Tortuga could be read in the fact that the fast-cycle destination he’d whipped us out to via our dropships and AFFS and Capellan jumpships was exactly the area that Katrina wanted us to be in.
We’d been assigned to ‘accept’ and garrison pretty much the entire rimward border of the CapCon - the spaces that lay up against Taurian and Aurigan territory. Anchored on one side by long-time FedSuns space, and on the other by the RCT facing the breakaway True Capella, we put a mech battalion, armor battalion, and ASF wing each on Rollis, Corodiz, Larsha and Ward, and about a third of that on Yuris, Zanzibar, Muridox, Pojos, and Hurik.
And yes, for any super canon purists in my crossdimensional audience, the Aurigan Reach did exist. Currently under the rule of High Lord Tamati Arano II, but I’d checked and his daughter was named Kamea. She was a couple of years younger than me, but from what I remembered, that was about right, too.
I didn’t anticipate any real trouble, at least until the end of the Davion contract. The surrender was a done deal, after all.
The Taurian and Aurigan borders of Capellan space weren’t heavily garrisoned to start with. With twelve regiments, the Taurian Defense Forces could have rolled over the border worlds easily enough, but they were already committed, either against the border with the hated Davion Nemesis or to anti-pirate operations against the raiders that swarmed in the unorganized space around their state. The Aurigans could barely muster two, scattered between their noble houses from the two battalions of the Aranos all the way down to individual owner-knights, but without any expectation of invasion they did a better job backing off the pirates.
Facing them, the CapCon had had basically one regiment. One regiment, and the threat of McCarron. That was all they’d needed, given the circumstances and the difference between what was a Great House and what… wasn’t.
The mercenary forces that provided two thirds of that were cake to deal with. Some of them weren’t any too fond of the FedSuns or House Davion, but they were used to weighing odds and hadn’t raised any fuss before they pulled out on their way to Galatea and their next contract. The last battalion were CCAF line troops, the second battalion of Kamakura’s Hussars, stationed on Ward as more of less the central node for the entire Aurigan border.
Communications with the Hussars had been distinctly… curt. They weren’t in the slightest bit happy to see us, which under the circumstances I had to admit was fair.
Ward’s only continent reminded me of what I’d read about Earth’s Japan - long, narrow, mostly mountainous, built by volcanic activity over a subduction zone. It was temperate and most of the livable flat-ish ground was on high plateaus, but Ward was a warm planet whose shallow oceans made it seem even more so. Setting up a base camp around our grounded dropships was easier than the… complications… of sharing billet space with the Hussars, and the weather was nice enough that it wasn’t a hardship.
The big day of the handover dawned gloomy, though, overcast and misting down an even coating of what was too light to be called rain and too heavy to be called fog. At the center of the Hussars’ base, a flagpole carried the colors of their regiment and of the Capellan Confederation, with a parade ground in front of it and a raised stage set up behind.
I, and Sophitia as my aide, and the seconds of my other companies, would be on that stage, facing the battalion and company commanders from the Hussars. A huge holoprojector was balanced, less precariously than it looked, right at the edge of the stage centered between us, while neat rows of a selection of our men - most of the Hussar mechwarriors, and a cross section of my own infantry and armor crews - waited below us.
Under the circumstances, we were all wearing rain gear over our dress uniforms, trenchcoats for the CCAF and ponchos for my people.
Don’t look at me in that tone of voice; I like ponchos.
Starting time was based on Sian local time at the Forbidden City; for us, late afternoon. For them, in a reference I doubted anyone else on Ward got, 11:11 in the morning.
Major Nathaniel Hopkins was one of the Inner Sphere’s characteristic weird background fusions; his hair was carrot-red and didn’t mismatch his name, but his features were pure Oriental. If he’d been taller, he’d’ve been lanky. Instead, not even able to look over the top of my head, he just seemed stringy.
Not to mention hungover; his eyes were sunken and bloodshot, and reddened in the aftermath of both heavy grieving and heavy drinking.
He was a good speaker, despite all that; I’d read the planned speech ahead of time, and I could easily follow along despite the incompatible accent and the fact that most of my attention was concentrated on vainly trying to exert my formidable psychic powers to convince the rain to hold off just long enough for us to get everyone inside.
The hair on the back of my neck stood up a second or two before he went off script. The wrapup of his speech was supposed to be an expression of his confidence in his people’s ability to meet the new challenges of a changing world, carrying forward the honor and legacy of the Capellan Confederation as et cetera, et cetera, blah blah blah.
Instead he was expressing his confidence in his people’s ability to stand up for their nation when even the Chancellor had betrayed them, and carry forward the battle against the eternal enemy-
I turned towards him in time to see the gun come out, one of the CCAF’s standard issue Ceres Arms 3mm laser pistols. He started to raise it, his eyes fixing on me as the sights came up to fit into his gaze.
I stepped in and reached out, slapping one hand against the side of the barrel and swatting it out of line, and aimed the other hand at his wrist going the other way. The emerald flash of the tracer beam went wild off to my right as taking it away dragged his finger off of the ready trigger.
I heard Sophitia’s voice cry out in pain behind me.
Hungover, sleep deprived, or whatever else, Hopkins was still blinking and trying to catch up when I caught the gun in a firing grip of my own and took two steps straight back. “Sophitia?” I called.
“She’ll live, probably,” Reyes replied instead. The icewater trickling down my neck and into the center of my chest froze solid. “MEDIC!” he called.
Hopkins’ face started to twist into a snarl, and he came up on the balls of his feet, starting to lean forward to move. Good enough for me, under the circumstances. I shot him in the face, then turned to cover the rest of his officers on the stage as the body fell.
Most of them were shocked and wide-eyed. The only one who’d gone for his own weapon froze in place and very slowly took his empty hand out of his coat.
“Major Mamba?” I called over my shoulder. “Disarm them.”
The commander of my infantry contingent said, “Yes, Ma’am,” and soon his bulky form crossed into my vision, carefully staying to one side of my firing line and working his way across to the Capellan officers, who by this point had their hands raised. Only after he had all of their weapons - and had stepped away too far for them to rush easily - did I let myself glance to the side at the ranks of men on the parade ground.
There were two or three knots where individual Capellan soldiers were being pinned by their fellows, and about twice as many where I suspected that had happened and the resisters had either had the fight go out of them or been taken over by my people. Along the front edges of the formation I could see where some of them had disarmed themselves, setting their weapons neatly on the ground and then stepping away.
“We’ve got it,” I heard Rex Lincoln, the armor battalion CO, say from just behind me. From the tone of his voice, he probably thought I was about to shoot them all and that I needed to be calmed down. It was like he was trying to talk me off a ledge.
I safed the laser. “Good,” I said, and shoved it in his hands as I went to check on Sophitia.
The wild shot had hit her in the side of the stomach, just below her ribs. Reyes and the medic team that had rushed up from their place on the parade ground were still working, and I could see that her breathing was shallow at best, but Sophitia was still conscious. She looked up at the sight of me and tried to smile around her gritted teeth, giving a thumbs up to try and reassure me she was all right.
Obviously, I wasn’t buying it.
Somewhere out of sight, in the direction I was pretty sure was the base hospital, a siren started up.
One of the medics, noticing where his patient was looking and what she was doing, glanced up from his work long enough to give me a nod of his own. “We’ve got this,” he said, which did a lot more to reassure me than her gesture had.
I took a ragged breath, checked the time, and headed to the microphone stand. “Obviously, I’m not going to give the formal speech I had planned under these circumstances,” I said. “If for no other reason than that we don’t have time. Instead, I’m going to hit these two hilights - first, the Capellan Confederation has been on a precipice for a long time, always at risk of tumbling over into the precipice of final collapse and war across every city and every planet. Today, joining the Federated Suns, you are farther from that threat to your homes and people. Your margins are wider by all that the Federated Suns can marshall, your reserves are deeper by the entire strength of the AFFS.
“Second, your own new station has been confirmed. You’ll be part of the force marshalling on the world of Crossing, because the spirit that drives…” I waved at the dead body cooling in the strengthening rain, “that makes you a risk that neither side can afford to leave in Capellan space at this time. In time, as you prove your loyalty or at least good sense, you’ll return home, but for now, House Liao requires you to serve by freeing other forces rather than directly.”
With a click and a hum that probably no one else was close enough to hear, the big holoprojector in front of me turned on, a ghostly image of the Celestial Court on Sian rising into the air above it. I went silent, and watched with all the others.
Four men and two women waited in front of the great dias that supported the Celestial Throne, facing each other across the lush red carpet, and two more men faced down the pathway from the foot of the dias. Seven wore different sets of robes, but I recognized some if not all of the iconography - even if context hadn’t made the identities of the heads of the Warrior Houses obvious. The last, one of the two by the dias and the youngest present, wore the uniform of the Capellan Confederation Armed Forces, in its most formal dress incarnation.
Senior Colonel by twenty-three; Tormano Liao was doing as well for himself as anybody with his family name could be expected to, these days.
Eight new people, wearing the sunburst-shouldered dress uniform of the AFFS, walked up the carpet and peeled out in turn to take their places interspersed with the heads of the Warrior Houses. One of them I recognized as Marshal Larcher, making it easy to guess - if I hadn’t already known - that the others were the heads of the other RCTs of the Davion Brigade of Guards.
Candace Liao entered next, walking up the center of the carpet towards the throne - her throne. In the ornate, draping ropes of the Chancellor, she seemed slight and burdened but awesomely dignified. The image quality was more than good enough to read her expression - if she wasn’t nearly as placidly calm as she looked, I was seriously impressed by her acting skills.
I put the odds at seven out of eight on ‘acting’.’
There was a quiet sound, like a hiss of drawn breath underlying the rush and patter of the rain, from the Capellan side of the parade ground as, rather than ascending to the throne, Candace stopped on the bottom step of the dias - one step above her brother and the seniormost of the Warrior House heads.
She stopped in place, waiting.
Finally, Hanse Davion walked up the carpet. He wasn’t a large man, but in the same striking dress uniform as his Guard commanders he started to seem that way, a tendency accentuated by the great cloak of cloth-of-gold that streamed back from his shoulders and swept along the floor in best Formal Monarch style, trimmed in the glittering fur of some creature I didn’t recognize but was pretty sure wasn’t actually Terran ermine. The crown on his head glittered too madly in the lights to be sure what metal it was made of, a simple pointed circlet in design but positively crusted with gems.
As he passed each of his own Guard commanders, they went to one knee, heads bowed, and when he reached the first step of the dias - Candace Liao stepped out of the way.
He climbed past her, to the top of the dias, standing before the Celestial Throne itself, then turned with a sweep of his arm that swung the long cloak out of the way.
For a moment, he and Candace studied each other, her looking up and him looking down.
Finally, she bowed her head and said, “In these last centuries much blood has been tragically spilled for the right to claim at last the throne of the Star League, seeking to settle the competing claims of the five Great Houses of the Inner Sphere. Now, in the final court of monarchs, one such claim has been decided. Hanse Davion, First Prince of the Federated Suns, the Capellan Confederation lies defeated at your feet. What would you wish of us?”
“Candace Mei-Ling Liao, Our will is that Capella’s people should grow wealthy and content upon their own worlds, that they should swear brotherhood and allegiance with those New Syrtis, and Robinson, and New Avalon, to together shoulder the burdens of the war that is long come upon us all - and in the end, to together taste the sweet fruits of peace.”
It was the first time I’d ever heard Hanse Davion use the royal plural. He went on, “If there are any reservations in your hearts at this course, let them be spoken now.”
“Your Highness,” Candace replied, lifting her eyes to meet his. “Each of Our - my - ancestors to sit on the throne behind you has done so in consultation with the wisdom and will of the noble houses who represented and cared for his people. Much is made of the freedoms enjoyed by the people of the Federated Suns, but in the passage of time less and less has been heard from the voices of your High Council. Shall the House of Scions, too, go slowly silent, and with it, the Capellan people?”
“No nation or institution wrought by mortal hand or mind is flawless,” Hanse said, after a moment of dramatically appropriate consideration. “And the flames of war have not had the courtesy to wait for the wisdom and deliberations of the High Council, spread as it is across the great distances of space. This truth is among the quiet shames of the Federated Suns, that those voices have, indeed, meant less than in brighter ages now past.
“Therefore, We swear to you this day, in Our own name and for all of Our House to follow, that the members of the High Council shall be divided into the Councils of Robinson, of New Avalon, and of New Syrtis, which may know their homes and members, and act with celerity, and appoint from their own numbers representatives to the new High Council, together vested with the power to bind and to loose Ourselves and Our heirs. In joining Our people, those who have in the past sat in the House of Scions shall meet again as the Council of Sian, with representatives of their own.”
Candace Liao took one breath, deep enough to be caught by the cameras… and knelt. “Your Highness, my heart has no further fears. I, Candace Mei-Ling Liao, head of House Liao, do hereby surrender and forswear any and all rights held by my family to the title of First Lord of the Star League, and pledge the eternal allegiance of myself, and my kin, and all our works to the service of House Davion, to serve at their will and at their pleasure, in whatever capacity we be required and subject to all the penalties and disgrace of oathbreakers before the eyes of men and Providence.”
Hanse Davion looked down at her for a moment, as Tormano Liao and the heads of the Warrior Houses knelt in turn, a ripple starting next to the dias and marching away from it each in turn.
He sat on the Celestial Throne, and said, “Rise, Candace Liao. We, Hanse Adrian Davion, head of House Davion, accept your oath, and swear in return to ward you from harm and care for your interests as your liege lords. Your enemies shall be Our enemies, your children shall be Our children, and while you keep faith, Our sword will ever guard you - as it shall chastise should that faith be broken. Rise, Candace Liao, Duchess of the League March.”
NOW STRANGERS CRY IN FOREIGN TONGUES…
Tell The World That We Tried
A Battletech Fanfiction, inspired by Fitzgerald’s CYOA at https://imgur.com/gallery/M41mI
By Valles
I pushed play on the recorder again.A Battletech Fanfiction, inspired by Fitzgerald’s CYOA at https://imgur.com/gallery/M41mI
By Valles
The two Banshees at the front of the knot of mechs filled almost the entire width of the corridor, and they weren’t taking fire. They’d start, if we tried to push them in a rush, but both sides of the rat’s war had found the hard way that trying to take out the shield mechs cost more in ammunition and heat scales than it gained in damage to the shields. The close confines of the tunnel, and the limited ventilation, meant that dozens of fusion reactors running in a tight space already had the air at sauna heat or more.
The extra readouts running in the margins of the video made that clear, black box data pulled from the records of one of the mechs that had been present.
One Banshee stepped forward; the other stepped back. Then the second stepped right, fitting itself in behind its cohort.
Ten meters behind them was the recovery vehicle, stacked with spare shields, and another five behind that and over in the ‘clear’ lane, a Von Luckner heavy tank. It vanished in smoke contrails from its missile launchers, pouring fire down the narrow gap the displaced Banshee had opened up. The cloud bank immediately filled the visual display, lit from within by headlights and the muzzle flash of its autocannon.
More missiles and muzzle blast zipped over the top of the tank’s turret, the Atlas behind it unleashing an equal fusillade down the line as the Victor that had been facing them didn’t quite manage to get out of the way in time.
The way the next bit was supposed to work was for the tank to reverse out of the firing line and back into the shadow of the Banshees, and for the Atlas to sidestep at the same time. That would get their armor out of the way and clear a line of sight for the Demolisher and Stalker pair behind them. Originally, it would have been a Sturmfeur and a Stalker, but the automatic transfer belts that pulled missiles from the magazines to the turret launchers had turned out to not deal well with the slightly chunkier dimensions of the SRMs, and they’d been withdrawn until we could find some better way of dealing with the resulting jams.
Instead, the Stalker’s lasers and SRMs ripped great rents and chunks out of the Atlas’s rear armor, most of the plating evaporating under the assault and visible structural damage apparent in all sectors.
I paused the video.
“You see?” Setsuka Carter said, glaring up at Minakshi James with a malice much more serious than her 4’ 9” frame should have been able to back up. But, on the other hand, she was one of the relatively few owner-operator pilots I had, meaning that the Atlas was hers, even paid off from the debts that had tied her in when I recruited her and her brother on Hoff, years before.
Minakshi, the Stalker driver, wasn’t a terribly tall girl herself, only an inch or so taller than me, and she’d been a street rat on Solaris before signing on. She was still in her teens and gangly with it, though she’d be gorgeous once her body finished filling out. She glared straight back, but stayed quiet.
I sighed. “All right. Formal ruling, command judgement… No fault error in the course of operations.”
Minakshi brightened. Setsuka fumed. I kept talking. “As such, the unit bears all repair costs. Since we’re on campaign, the Assault Guards were willing to play ball with spares, and the tech department says you’ll be back in action in three days.”
Setsuka turned her mismatched eyes on me, looking startled. “You’ll cover my repairs?” she said.
A thought occurred to me, and I leaned forward. “The crews haven’t been charging you before now, have they?” I asked. If somebody was running that kind of protection racket in my unit, I was going to have to make a very explicit example. I’d specifically set things up to forbid that kind of bullshit.
“Al and I have been doing our own,” she admitted after a moment.
I shook my head incredulously, but her Confection hadn’t taken more than armor damage until now, so I supposed it must be possible. Even if I didn’t really see how. “Well, if you prefer to do it that way, fine. But yes, you can draw parts, tools, and other technical labor from the unit pools as needed as long as you’re signed.”
“...Oh,” she said.
Minakshi rolled her eyes, and before she could add anything that would re-escalate the situation, I said, “All right, both of you go get some sleep. We’re back into it in the morning.”
***
The tunnels of St. Ives were rightly infamous. The one that Setsuka and Minakshi had been fighting in was eleven kilometers long, in total, with a deadfall, or pit trap, or side-accessed shooting gallery for crossfires, or turret nest, or vault door…
That got away from me. Point is, there was an obstacle every couple of hundred meters. I think the longest distance we saw without something to slow us down was three hundred and seventy eight; the shortest was only ten. Not counting the cases where several hassles were set up right on top of each other.
The only virtue from our end was that, since this was also a major access route for supplies going into the factory and its attached small city, it had to be relatively straight, without enough in the way of twists and switchbacks to interfere with the trains whose rails we were stomping over.
That lack of virtue included the opposition. The St. Ives Lancers were ton for ton lighter than any of our units, though not by a whole lot for everyone but the Assault Guards, but they were more skilled than my people were, and when we’d untangled all the wreckage it did turned out that most of the losses the Capellans had taken at the spaceport had been fast hovercraft that would’ve been slaughtered in the tunnels. Their heavy units, like the Demolishers and so on, hadn’t even made it to that battlefield… So we’d been seeing them ever since.
Between the shield-Banshees and the numbers advantage, our losses pushing in through the tunnels were a lot lower than what other Davion units had seen making tries to take St. Ives in the past - which is to say, we’d only lost about one company to the lance worth of hard kills we’d confirmed, as opposed to two or three.
I hadn’t been living in my cockpit the way Revons was, or in a set-up command center like Larcher, so I was pretty sure that I was the only one of the main command team to be getting any sleep to speak of. Which was kind of backwards, given that I was the youngest by at least five years, but there you go.
With several times as many people and mechs as the defenders, we were keeping the pressure and operations on around the clock, in the hopeful theory that it would pile enough fatigue on the Capellan troops for them to start making useful mistakes. In practice, it seemed to be about canceling out the stress-level advantages they reaped from actually knowing the ground and where all the traps were.
Traps like the one I got the call about at the next best thing to four in the local morning.
“The bastards have caved it in!”
I was, just barely, still awake enough to ask useful questions rather than just going ‘huh?’. “Which tunnel? How big is the fall? Did we lose anyone?”
That calmed the voice on the other end down. “Sorry, Ma’am. Brasscap Actual here-” Somewhere in the Assault Guards, by his callsign, though offhand I didn’t know which battalion. “And these fucking Capellan assholes just dropped what looks like a two hundred meter long chunk of the south tunnel on top of three companies of our people. And two of their own mechs, too.”
“Fuck,” I said, and scrubbed a hand over my face. A one-to-eighteen exchange rate was worth doing that, for the Capellans, but what it said about their fanaticism… “All right. That’s probably too big to clear the normal way, but have the engineers take a look at going up and over the top of the fall.”
The Capellans had standardized their drop-blocks at the same height as the tunnel, which meant that there had to be a cavity at least that high above it. We’d need to shoot out the retraction mechanisms, but that was easy - and the amount of mass involved meant we’d likely have time.
“In the meantime, I’m going to go re-emphasize no pursuit into uncleared zones to people. Again,” I finished.
We both signed off and I started to make the calls I needed. This was going to fuck our loss ratios.
***
The next alarm found me already in the cockpit. Unfortunately, it found me in the form of a sudden shockwave whumping through my gut and chest.
I waited a hard-counted ten seconds before I gave in and decided that no one was going to call me. I glanced at the secondary displays - I hated the compressed panorama readout that the SLDF had decided was ‘optimal’, but Marauder No. 2’s cockpit had enough multi-function screens to dedicate three to cameras showing right, left, and rear views with a lot less distortion.
The mushroom cloud was easy to find. “King, Joker Actual,” I said. “I’m seeing a major detonation at what looks like the eastern camp gate. What do you know?”
“Joker, King, everything’s still confused over there but it looks like a truck bomb, mixed concussion and incendiary-”
Another detonation, more distant, was easily audible first over the com line, then a second time with my own ears.
“Fuck! West gate, too,” the operator in the command post said.
“Full alert, all gates, all camps, now,” I said. “Call me on this channel if you have details. Joker, out.”
I didn’t pay attention as the rest of the command company formed around me, not until I heard Malin Reyes mutter, “They want us looking at the gates.”
Reyes was the oldest person in the unit, and he’d been a mercenary mechwarrior since he was seventeen. He’d fought for every Successor State, against every other Successor State, and that wealth of experience, the insight it gave him, was why I kept him in my command element. I kept organizing our response to the truck bombs… And then at the end of it, I added, “...And remaining perimeter and watch stations, check your sectors. If this is all of it, it was a waste of their time and they have to know that. Joker, out.”
“Good thought, Boss,” Reyes said.
I grinned unconsciously. “Says the man who knows he put it in my head. Thanks.”
“‘Swhat you pay me fo-” Reyes started to reply, before a priority channel from the dropship Ise cut across the transmission.
“-erfucker! Pirate jump, we missed it!”
I didn’t bother complaining about the poor com protocols. “We have new company in system?” I asked.
“Three Invaders, one Merchant, seven Unions, two Leopards, two Intruders, at the lunar pirate point and burning at two-point-five. ETA at orbit, three hours and a bit,” the voice on the Ise had calmed down enough to give real data.
Most Capellan regiments ran with only two battalions, so that was about bang-on right.
“Good work, that means we’ve caught them in time to be ready,” I said.
***
Once again, defending fighters rose from St. Ives and closed in on descending dropships. This time, though, rather than running the gauntlet, most of the ships broke off back for orbit - and left a scatter of falling sparks in their wake - and two remaining dropships.
Watching from the ground, I could still hear Sasagawa giving orders. “Spades, take the pods. Swords, kill those Intruders. Bronzefin, you’re on overwatch.”
That left the unit’s fighters hunting for the drop pods and the mechs inside them, and the AFFS regulars going after the Capellan fighters to keep them from interfering. I could watch the two waves of icons, one rising, one falling, come together, and see the lights start to wink out.
I could also hear the startled swearing and the way confusion set in, if not the reason why, as the dropships in the landing wave started trying to escape back to orbit… And, a moment later, the way the ships in orbit dove again for the ground.
Sasagawa called me: “Joker, the drop pods are decoys, repeat, decoys. The mechs must still be on board the dropships, and we’re out of position. We’ll try and get some but we won’t get them all.”
“Understood,” I said, already doing the math and coming out with an estimate that there had to be a hidden fifth tunnel, a sally port, at whatever the landing’s target point was. “I won’t joggle your elbow. Joker, out.”
I wasn’t going to joggle her elbow. “Ise, this is Joker Actual. I need an updated landing site.”
“Thirty kilometers east of Site Eight, plus uncertainty. Sir, if they maneuver they could throw that off by at least that much distance.”
Inconvenient. “Basically right on top of us. Got it.”
The need to stay organized to fight meant that we couldn’t really blanket the landing zone, but setting up both free battalions ten or so minutes apart meant that even if the entire reserve of defenders sallied, they’d be able to combine quickly enough for a fighting retreat.
I was confident that that would be enough, but I never expected it to be needed. I was sure there was a sally port, but I didn’t think that Candace Liao would take the risk.
Yeah, uh, I was wrong.
They popped out just as the dropships pushed their cargoes out the door and it started raining mechs.
We found out a bit later that there’d been a forward deployment chamber, enough to hold a full regiment, not far under the surface, with dozens of easily collapsed access ramps to let them flush its entire contents out onto the surface quickly.
The last strategic thought I had time for was, “King, Joker. Relay to AFFS command and Hangman. Emphasize. We have one regiment confirmed on the surface. They’ve left the cupboard bare. Joker out.”
After that, the next impression was the command company’s Rifleman cutting loose at the falling mechs overhead, trying to take out the jump harnesses supporting this mech or that. I started to track my PPCs up to try the same thing, but a Vindicator touched down ahead of me and I switched targets to that.
The autocannon missed, but the beams didn’t, and from the way they ripped deep into its torso I knew it was one of the so-called ‘Avenging Angel’ variants, which traded half their armor for another twenty kph of top speed. I could see the goal there, the Vindicator was slower than most mechs its weight, but the decision to take all the needed weight out of armor rather than scaling back the weapon loadout a bit was… questionable.
As I demonstrated by firing again, this time missing with both beams but raking the autocannon across the missile-carrying side of my target’s torso. A secondary detonation tossed the weak-side arm free and left it staggering madly, unable to steady long enough to bring the PPC in the remaining limb to bear in my direction.
A salvo of LRMs from somewhere behind me meant it didn’t get the chance; internal compartmentation had saved the Vindicator’s reactor and gyroscope from the ammo detonation, but with the armor and structural members that would have interdict them sheared away, the missile warheads were able to punch straight through the remaining bulkhead. The medium dropped like the proverbial marionette, and I turned to try and find the next target.
...Which found me, instead. The Quickdraw’s pilot was either a very quick thinker or he’d been listening to rumors and planning ahead of time; by the time I saw him he was only a split second from slamming into me in a well-aimed shoulder charge.
I’d come a long way as a pilot since 3015. Four years of practice and experience had me up to the standard expected of a basic mechwarrior graduate - I’d even qualified to be rated Regular.
But I wasn’t that good. Marauder No. 2 went down hard, flailing its clubbed gun arms in a way that would have been comical under most other circumstances, and I tasted blood as the impact of landing made me bite my tongue. Trying to clear my head, I looked up at the Capellan machine as it trained all its weapons straight back down at me - at this range, even the missiles would probably hit.
I picked one leg up off the ground, drew it back for a kick. The Quickdraw fired, the thunder of missile impacts and the poison-green blaze of laser fire glaring off their smoke filled my senses. Alarms wailed, but my own armor held.
The kick didn’t work; my target danced back out of reach, and the I could see the EST. HEAT bar my HUD threw next to it tick back down towards safe levels that would let the pilot fire again.
A blur of motion, a flash of plasma flame, and the distinctive modified silhouette of Aspis touched down behind the Quickdraw and took one leaping stride on the momentum of its jump jet leap - and used that speed and impulse to drive its sword straight in through the heavier mech’s rear armor plating. I could see the tip of the weapon emerge from the weak point of one of the missile launcher housings, impaled straight through the Quickdraw’s entire body, then withdraw again.
The last of the three mechs to land on my command company, a Wasp, was long gone by the time I got No. 2 back to its feet, and…
“They’re retreating?” Sophitia asked over a private channel.
...The rest of the Capellans were following.
“They’ve got what they were after; they’ve linked up without getting chewed up in detail.” I checked the logs of the artillery fire missions; they’d been firing since practically the first sighting of the 1st St Ives, good. “We’ll bleed them some more, but odds are they’ve won this round.”
***
All told, the Capellans showed a net gain of about two battalions out of the operation, including the command lances and so on folded into their numbers. Despite that, all of us on world were still sure that we had everything we needed to take St. Ives away from the Confederation for the first time in the planet’s history. They’d traded most of the dropships and about half of their defensive depth before the main garrisons could get back into position.
Our orders to do just that staying unchanged wouldn’t have surprised anyone. Nor, given that the five regiments of McCarron’s Armored Cavalry - the Capellans’ de-facto central reserve for all that they were technically a mercenary outfit - were only a few jumps away, at Menke, would orders to withdraw entirely.
Ceasefire in place, and orders to secure and set up a real-time HPG channel between St. Ives and Tikonov of all places…
Since the protocols specified for the signal linkage were in the clear, I was pretty sure that the only serving military who weren’t awake and watching avidly were the ones on guard and watch duty - and that they were listening to audio-only.
As the second-most-senior officer on the planet, I had… a better viewpoint, while Marshall Larcher watched from her command post.
On the big screen that dominated the little conference room, Hanse Davion inclined his head. “Let me open by offering my personal condolences, Celestial Wisdom. While I cannot apologise for the fortunes and dictates of war, I know the cost and pain of a lost parent, and regret your loss on those terms.”
Seated, alone, at the table that faced that screen, Candace Liao returned the not-quite-a-bow, managing not to dislodge the elaborate headdress that went with her ornate robes in the process.
Padme Amidala, eat your freakin’ heart out.
“We thank you for your courtesy, Your Highness,” she said, with barely any hidden venom. I was impressed by her acting skills. “I wonder, in turn, if His Grace the Duke of New Syrtis is expected to recover from his injuries? The Capellan people have always found him to be an honorable foe, at least.”
“His doctors expect him to regain sufficient function for day to day life, but that the full duties of his office would prove challenging, going forwards. His title and post have already passed to his son’s hands,” Hanse replied.
One of the Capellan officers standing along the opposite wall from me, facing across Candace’s table and the central line between it and Hanse’s display, wasn’t able to conceal his disappointment.
Which was fair, since the entire exchange was full of so much bullshit I could feel the flies teleporting in to buzz around it. The dispatches that had finally caught up with us while the realtime link was being set up had explained, among other things, why we’d been rushed out the door so quickly: MIIO’s internal security operations had caught wind that Michael Hasek-Davion was planning to personally meet with Candace’s father, Maximilian Liao.
In other words, that the noble responsible for defending the entire Capellan border of the Federated Suns, probably the third most powerful man in that state, was in secret negotiations with the leader of the hostile realm he faced.
That Michael had no fondness for his liege lord was no surprise to anyone, which was why he hadn’t been told of Hanse’s plans for the operation I’d become part of… and why the first reports of our and other units arrivals had caught both sides of that secret meeting by surprise.
The Capellan Red Lancers and FedSuns 6th New Syrtis Fusiliers had been able to get their principals out of that room in between massacring each other, but neither unit would be combat effective again any time soon, and the fact that Candace was in this conversation as the Chancellor of the Capellan Confederation was ample proof that her father had not survived his wounds.
“And so, even this campaign of yours is not without costs to date, Your Highness,” Candace said, “and make no mistake, many more to come. Tikonov and Necromo have fallen, and the coats of the Northwind Highlanders turned. But Ares, and St. Ives, and Grand Base remain in question, and Archibald McCarron is yet in the field.”
“They are,” Hanse Davion agreed equably, then warned, “But, though war is never certain, the answers to those ‘questions’ that are likely is apparent. Do not think my realm unprepared to bear the costs they require.”
Candace inclined her head in agreement. “And so the time is come to… discuss terms.”
On the big screen, I could see Hanse’s eyes light up and widen slightly, his nostrils flare as he took a quick breath. “I would be willing to consider such a thing, in principle,” he said.
“So.” Candace Liao closed her eyes, then opened them again and met his gaze squarely. “The fundamental principle by which We must measure Our decision is that a peace or surrender which reduce the Capellan people, their spirit and culture, to no more than a ground upon which the image of the Federated Suns is stamped, would be just as much an extinction as the most grudging military conquest… And more certain.”
“I am prepared to guarantee the good treatment and health of the Capellan people,” Hanse said, “and to avoid interference in voluntary matters of custom, but my own oaths and obligations to the subjects of the Federated Suns require me to guarantee them certain freedoms in excess of existing Capellan custom. Those oaths apply regardless of the the duration said subjects have been under my care, and given the long and tragic history between our nations, I would be remiss to leave open future conflicts.”
He paused, then softened that veiled promise of conquest. “It is my hope, however, that a more detailed examination of the particular points will reveal common ground.”
“My hope, as well,” Candace Liao all but whispered.
***
I found out later - from the gorgeous Nordic horse’s mouth, as it happened - that Katrina Steiner’s message had hinted at the possibility of an alliance, if the Federated Suns’ relatively young and untested ruler could prove as much a peer to her, personally, as his state was to the Lyran Commonwealth.
‘Impress me,’ had been the exact words, the challenge, that Morgan Kell had relayed to Hanse Davion.
Hanse had reacted by pulling two thirds of the Federated Suns’ Overlords and Triumphs to the Capellan March, and using their greater carrying capacity to shock two or three times as many regular units as would have otherwise been possible forward into carefully selected targets in Capellan territory. Backed up by heavier mercenary formations with their own starlift, he’d been able to concentrate overwhelming force without quite exceeding what his logistics could bear.
Homestead and Holloway, taken by the Screaming Eagles Mercenary Brigade to open the approaches to Grand Base, weren’t really worthy of mention; only one of them had had even a company’s worth of garrison, and aside from their position there was nothing significant about them.
Tikonov, the single largest industrial center in the entire Confederation, had been well protected beforehand, but under the onslaught of the three regiments of the Vegan Rangers, two brigades of the Deneb Light Cavalry, and the 5th and Heavy Davion Guards RCTs, the entire place had been pretty much rolled over.
The Deneb Light Cavalry was a long-standing combined arms division within the Armed Forces of the Federated Suns that used an organization surprisingly close to what I’d ended up with - and I suspected that if I could pull it off, I’d be imitating them and adding an additional armor regiment to the one each of mechs, fighters, and armor that the unit had per brigade. The ‘Regimental Combat Team’ model, on the other hand, I didn’t think was super functional - a third armor regiment for each battlemech one was excessive for the transport hassles it brought, and their ideas about how to combat load the five regiments of infantry gave me hives.
The AFFS had been fighting to, dreaming of taking Tikonov for decades at least, and Hanse taking personal command of that operation wouldn’t be doing his internal prestige any harm no matter how strategically risky it was. The two or three regiments the Capellan Confederation Armed Forces had been able to scrape up to try and retake the place had been hilariously outnumbered.
For centuries the other states of the Inner Sphere had known that the jumpship yard at Capella could not, did not, account for all of that state’s jumpship production, but the other source of ships, the elusive ‘Site B’, was a mystery to anyone outside the CapCon. The context that Older-Me had first read Necromo’s name in, a warship yard, convinced Lyran Intelligence that it must have been Site B, and I guessed they must have told Davion during Solih’s negotiations with him. Certainly the 7th Crucis Lancers RCT had confirmed it, when they took the place.
At last report, McCarron’s Armored Cavalry, which provided five of the eight mercenary regiments that had been the CapCon’s main strategic reserve, were still fighting at the time of that first conversation - after taking sixty percent losses against the Wild Geese, the four regiments of the Illician Lancers, and the 3rd Ceti Hussars RCT. Their pulling it out wasn’t likely, with the odds up to three to one against.
Ares was famous for the warfare conventions signed there, but in this day and age it was a company planet for the Inner Sphere’s most prolific and widespread purveyor of extremely budget military hardware, Quikscell Corporation. Between line defenders and corporate security, the three mercenary regiments of the Fighting Urukhai had ample opportunity to live up to their name, and were making a damned good go of it.
Grand Base, the number two battlemech production site in the CapCon, was the home of the picked elites of Warrior House Fujita and the Capellan Death Commandoes, who managed a full regiment on the books between them. They hadn’t even tried to make an open fight of it against the 1st Davion Guards RCT, Dioscuri, and Team Banzai, but the ongoing cycle of stealth strikes and commando raids made it impossible to call the planet ‘secure’.
The Capellan Confederation had been riding the ragged edge of disaster for a long time, long enough for pretty much everyone both in the state and out of it to forget how narrow their margins were. Both of their major neighbors were hostile and badly outnumbered them, their production capacity in any given field could only barely keep up with losses… They’d used mercenaries as their primary response forces, for gods’ sakes!
But those mercenaries were McCarron’s Armored Cavalry, who were getting their asses kicked, and the Northwind Highlanders, whose beloved ancestral homeworld was and had been and was almost certain to remain in FedSuns hands. I wondered how long the Suns had planned on the ability to just offer it as a landhold to claim their loyalty; quite possibly decades.
Without them, the closest thing the Confederation had had to a fireman brigade was the elite bodyguard regiment of the Red Lancers… Who had been ripped to shreds against Michael Hasek-Davion’s handpicked New Syrtis RCT… and Hampton’s Hessens, a mercenary unit whose biggest skill was avoiding potentially risky fights. If they’d showed up for the attempt to retake Tikonov, the odds might have been only bad for the Confederation forces, rather than suicidal.
Not that the CapCon had had a choice but to try. Without Tikonov, or any two of the other targets aimed at by the AFFS, the weakest of the six Successor States went from ‘hanging on by its bleeding fingernails’ to ‘tumbling past the event horizon’.
Losing Tikonov, Necromo, and at least one of the others… Candace Liao would have needed a miracle to save her state in the long run, and she was too realistic to believe in those. If she’d tried, the FedSuns and Free Worlds League would have just sniped out the rest of the Confederation’s valuable, productive worlds and then gotten around to the more marginal ones as time and logistics permitted - probably fighting each other in brand new battlegrounds in the process, with all the cost to the Capellans living there that implied.
Her sister Romano, who in another world would have succeeded their father as Chancellor, was… less rational on many subjects. Fortunately for everyone else, one of those subjects had been the belief that simply ordering their younger brother Tormano to take his battlemech company and ‘suppress the resistance to her just rule’ would help her do that here, too.
He’d taken his company to the meeting hall of the Prefectorate, the body that formally selected the next Chancellor from among its numbers… And climbed out of his mech and spoken in favor of his oldest sister, Candace.
Tormano Liao was another realist.
With her sister in chains and formal title as Chancellor, Candace had turned her attention to what she could do for her nation… which in the end, was choose who the conquest actually came from, and get the best terms she could.
The fine details of the surrender of the Capellan Confederation and its incorporation as the Marik March of the Federated Suns were still in progress when the unit lifted for our new garrison postings, and they were still in progress when we started landing at our garrison stations. Honestly, the entire process was complicated enough that the final negotiations wouldn’t be sorted for years.
But the broad strokes, the key points, were settled. The Capellans immediately dismantled their thought-control police and associated courts, along with the vast slave-labor battalions of the ‘Servitors of the State’. All Capellan nobility and military swore allegiance to the Federated Suns, and would have a timeline for correcting the overcentralization of control that had been the Confederation’s greatest internal weakness. All former Capellan subjects would be gradually introduced to the rights and freedoms required under more liberal FedSuns laws over the course of ten years, starting with the freedoms of speech and press.
In return, there would be no general occupation, no reprisals or large scale reparations. Internal tariffs would maintain Capellan industry until it could recover enough to compete with those of the wider Federated Suns, and current owners and staff, and the Capellan nobility, would continue in their positions, subject to monitoring and performance checks.
Which was totally different from Capellan political loyalty monitoring, just ask either side.
Anyway. The working language of the Marik March would stay as Chinese, and the legal recognition of castes other than the Servitors would continue even if their membership was no longer government-assigned.
The Federated Suns’ High Council, comprised of representatives from every planet in the nation, had suffered a long slow decline to its current status as a nominal body without even a rubber-stamp function, every scrap of power stolen by Davions past for both good reasons and more personally greedy ones. The CapCon’s House of Scions, and the Prefectorate that it selected from its own ranks, meant that ironically the totalitarian state had a greater degree of political input from those outside the ruling family. Candace’s biggest political victory in the negotiations was in convincing Hanse to split the High Council into separate March-level that could act as checks on March Lords, and appoint two members each to a ‘Council of Marches’ that would do the same for the First Prince’s throne and governmental Privy Council.
For… fairly obvious reasons, the former CCAF’s units would be stationed outside the Marik March for at least a generation, so the AFFS would provide the units to protect and secure the new borders and interior sites. Initially this was being done with whatever was available, including my people, but in the long run the area would be staffed by either new-formed units or ones that had never done much fighting against the CapCon - and hopefully keep the chances of incidents down that way.
Not to zero, of course. There was already at least one regiment near the Marik border that had sworn an eternal crusade to reclaim the true State from perfidious Davion and the traitors who had spread their legs to it. A corner of my mind was a bit suspicious at the geographical distribution of the ones that hadn’t been squashed right away and were being permitted to draw off ‘deserters’ and recruit their fellow fanatics from more placid areas to join them - they were all right up against the Marik border.
I wondered if Marik was in on it and was being ‘gifted’ those worlds as part of a border settlement, but enh, not my problem.
Blackwing Military Solutions and Services had been contracted until April of 3020; with the preliminary surrender signing happening in October of the year before that, we still had a whole six months left for Hanse to make use of us. The fact that he was pleased with our performance on St. Ives and Tortuga could be read in the fact that the fast-cycle destination he’d whipped us out to via our dropships and AFFS and Capellan jumpships was exactly the area that Katrina wanted us to be in.
We’d been assigned to ‘accept’ and garrison pretty much the entire rimward border of the CapCon - the spaces that lay up against Taurian and Aurigan territory. Anchored on one side by long-time FedSuns space, and on the other by the RCT facing the breakaway True Capella, we put a mech battalion, armor battalion, and ASF wing each on Rollis, Corodiz, Larsha and Ward, and about a third of that on Yuris, Zanzibar, Muridox, Pojos, and Hurik.
And yes, for any super canon purists in my crossdimensional audience, the Aurigan Reach did exist. Currently under the rule of High Lord Tamati Arano II, but I’d checked and his daughter was named Kamea. She was a couple of years younger than me, but from what I remembered, that was about right, too.
I didn’t anticipate any real trouble, at least until the end of the Davion contract. The surrender was a done deal, after all.
***
The Taurian and Aurigan borders of Capellan space weren’t heavily garrisoned to start with. With twelve regiments, the Taurian Defense Forces could have rolled over the border worlds easily enough, but they were already committed, either against the border with the hated Davion Nemesis or to anti-pirate operations against the raiders that swarmed in the unorganized space around their state. The Aurigans could barely muster two, scattered between their noble houses from the two battalions of the Aranos all the way down to individual owner-knights, but without any expectation of invasion they did a better job backing off the pirates.
Facing them, the CapCon had had basically one regiment. One regiment, and the threat of McCarron. That was all they’d needed, given the circumstances and the difference between what was a Great House and what… wasn’t.
The mercenary forces that provided two thirds of that were cake to deal with. Some of them weren’t any too fond of the FedSuns or House Davion, but they were used to weighing odds and hadn’t raised any fuss before they pulled out on their way to Galatea and their next contract. The last battalion were CCAF line troops, the second battalion of Kamakura’s Hussars, stationed on Ward as more of less the central node for the entire Aurigan border.
Communications with the Hussars had been distinctly… curt. They weren’t in the slightest bit happy to see us, which under the circumstances I had to admit was fair.
Ward’s only continent reminded me of what I’d read about Earth’s Japan - long, narrow, mostly mountainous, built by volcanic activity over a subduction zone. It was temperate and most of the livable flat-ish ground was on high plateaus, but Ward was a warm planet whose shallow oceans made it seem even more so. Setting up a base camp around our grounded dropships was easier than the… complications… of sharing billet space with the Hussars, and the weather was nice enough that it wasn’t a hardship.
The big day of the handover dawned gloomy, though, overcast and misting down an even coating of what was too light to be called rain and too heavy to be called fog. At the center of the Hussars’ base, a flagpole carried the colors of their regiment and of the Capellan Confederation, with a parade ground in front of it and a raised stage set up behind.
I, and Sophitia as my aide, and the seconds of my other companies, would be on that stage, facing the battalion and company commanders from the Hussars. A huge holoprojector was balanced, less precariously than it looked, right at the edge of the stage centered between us, while neat rows of a selection of our men - most of the Hussar mechwarriors, and a cross section of my own infantry and armor crews - waited below us.
Under the circumstances, we were all wearing rain gear over our dress uniforms, trenchcoats for the CCAF and ponchos for my people.
Don’t look at me in that tone of voice; I like ponchos.
Starting time was based on Sian local time at the Forbidden City; for us, late afternoon. For them, in a reference I doubted anyone else on Ward got, 11:11 in the morning.
Major Nathaniel Hopkins was one of the Inner Sphere’s characteristic weird background fusions; his hair was carrot-red and didn’t mismatch his name, but his features were pure Oriental. If he’d been taller, he’d’ve been lanky. Instead, not even able to look over the top of my head, he just seemed stringy.
Not to mention hungover; his eyes were sunken and bloodshot, and reddened in the aftermath of both heavy grieving and heavy drinking.
He was a good speaker, despite all that; I’d read the planned speech ahead of time, and I could easily follow along despite the incompatible accent and the fact that most of my attention was concentrated on vainly trying to exert my formidable psychic powers to convince the rain to hold off just long enough for us to get everyone inside.
The hair on the back of my neck stood up a second or two before he went off script. The wrapup of his speech was supposed to be an expression of his confidence in his people’s ability to meet the new challenges of a changing world, carrying forward the honor and legacy of the Capellan Confederation as et cetera, et cetera, blah blah blah.
Instead he was expressing his confidence in his people’s ability to stand up for their nation when even the Chancellor had betrayed them, and carry forward the battle against the eternal enemy-
I turned towards him in time to see the gun come out, one of the CCAF’s standard issue Ceres Arms 3mm laser pistols. He started to raise it, his eyes fixing on me as the sights came up to fit into his gaze.
I stepped in and reached out, slapping one hand against the side of the barrel and swatting it out of line, and aimed the other hand at his wrist going the other way. The emerald flash of the tracer beam went wild off to my right as taking it away dragged his finger off of the ready trigger.
I heard Sophitia’s voice cry out in pain behind me.
Hungover, sleep deprived, or whatever else, Hopkins was still blinking and trying to catch up when I caught the gun in a firing grip of my own and took two steps straight back. “Sophitia?” I called.
“She’ll live, probably,” Reyes replied instead. The icewater trickling down my neck and into the center of my chest froze solid. “MEDIC!” he called.
Hopkins’ face started to twist into a snarl, and he came up on the balls of his feet, starting to lean forward to move. Good enough for me, under the circumstances. I shot him in the face, then turned to cover the rest of his officers on the stage as the body fell.
Most of them were shocked and wide-eyed. The only one who’d gone for his own weapon froze in place and very slowly took his empty hand out of his coat.
“Major Mamba?” I called over my shoulder. “Disarm them.”
The commander of my infantry contingent said, “Yes, Ma’am,” and soon his bulky form crossed into my vision, carefully staying to one side of my firing line and working his way across to the Capellan officers, who by this point had their hands raised. Only after he had all of their weapons - and had stepped away too far for them to rush easily - did I let myself glance to the side at the ranks of men on the parade ground.
There were two or three knots where individual Capellan soldiers were being pinned by their fellows, and about twice as many where I suspected that had happened and the resisters had either had the fight go out of them or been taken over by my people. Along the front edges of the formation I could see where some of them had disarmed themselves, setting their weapons neatly on the ground and then stepping away.
“We’ve got it,” I heard Rex Lincoln, the armor battalion CO, say from just behind me. From the tone of his voice, he probably thought I was about to shoot them all and that I needed to be calmed down. It was like he was trying to talk me off a ledge.
I safed the laser. “Good,” I said, and shoved it in his hands as I went to check on Sophitia.
The wild shot had hit her in the side of the stomach, just below her ribs. Reyes and the medic team that had rushed up from their place on the parade ground were still working, and I could see that her breathing was shallow at best, but Sophitia was still conscious. She looked up at the sight of me and tried to smile around her gritted teeth, giving a thumbs up to try and reassure me she was all right.
Obviously, I wasn’t buying it.
Somewhere out of sight, in the direction I was pretty sure was the base hospital, a siren started up.
One of the medics, noticing where his patient was looking and what she was doing, glanced up from his work long enough to give me a nod of his own. “We’ve got this,” he said, which did a lot more to reassure me than her gesture had.
I took a ragged breath, checked the time, and headed to the microphone stand. “Obviously, I’m not going to give the formal speech I had planned under these circumstances,” I said. “If for no other reason than that we don’t have time. Instead, I’m going to hit these two hilights - first, the Capellan Confederation has been on a precipice for a long time, always at risk of tumbling over into the precipice of final collapse and war across every city and every planet. Today, joining the Federated Suns, you are farther from that threat to your homes and people. Your margins are wider by all that the Federated Suns can marshall, your reserves are deeper by the entire strength of the AFFS.
“Second, your own new station has been confirmed. You’ll be part of the force marshalling on the world of Crossing, because the spirit that drives…” I waved at the dead body cooling in the strengthening rain, “that makes you a risk that neither side can afford to leave in Capellan space at this time. In time, as you prove your loyalty or at least good sense, you’ll return home, but for now, House Liao requires you to serve by freeing other forces rather than directly.”
With a click and a hum that probably no one else was close enough to hear, the big holoprojector in front of me turned on, a ghostly image of the Celestial Court on Sian rising into the air above it. I went silent, and watched with all the others.
Four men and two women waited in front of the great dias that supported the Celestial Throne, facing each other across the lush red carpet, and two more men faced down the pathway from the foot of the dias. Seven wore different sets of robes, but I recognized some if not all of the iconography - even if context hadn’t made the identities of the heads of the Warrior Houses obvious. The last, one of the two by the dias and the youngest present, wore the uniform of the Capellan Confederation Armed Forces, in its most formal dress incarnation.
Senior Colonel by twenty-three; Tormano Liao was doing as well for himself as anybody with his family name could be expected to, these days.
Eight new people, wearing the sunburst-shouldered dress uniform of the AFFS, walked up the carpet and peeled out in turn to take their places interspersed with the heads of the Warrior Houses. One of them I recognized as Marshal Larcher, making it easy to guess - if I hadn’t already known - that the others were the heads of the other RCTs of the Davion Brigade of Guards.
Candace Liao entered next, walking up the center of the carpet towards the throne - her throne. In the ornate, draping ropes of the Chancellor, she seemed slight and burdened but awesomely dignified. The image quality was more than good enough to read her expression - if she wasn’t nearly as placidly calm as she looked, I was seriously impressed by her acting skills.
I put the odds at seven out of eight on ‘acting’.’
There was a quiet sound, like a hiss of drawn breath underlying the rush and patter of the rain, from the Capellan side of the parade ground as, rather than ascending to the throne, Candace stopped on the bottom step of the dias - one step above her brother and the seniormost of the Warrior House heads.
She stopped in place, waiting.
Finally, Hanse Davion walked up the carpet. He wasn’t a large man, but in the same striking dress uniform as his Guard commanders he started to seem that way, a tendency accentuated by the great cloak of cloth-of-gold that streamed back from his shoulders and swept along the floor in best Formal Monarch style, trimmed in the glittering fur of some creature I didn’t recognize but was pretty sure wasn’t actually Terran ermine. The crown on his head glittered too madly in the lights to be sure what metal it was made of, a simple pointed circlet in design but positively crusted with gems.
As he passed each of his own Guard commanders, they went to one knee, heads bowed, and when he reached the first step of the dias - Candace Liao stepped out of the way.
He climbed past her, to the top of the dias, standing before the Celestial Throne itself, then turned with a sweep of his arm that swung the long cloak out of the way.
For a moment, he and Candace studied each other, her looking up and him looking down.
Finally, she bowed her head and said, “In these last centuries much blood has been tragically spilled for the right to claim at last the throne of the Star League, seeking to settle the competing claims of the five Great Houses of the Inner Sphere. Now, in the final court of monarchs, one such claim has been decided. Hanse Davion, First Prince of the Federated Suns, the Capellan Confederation lies defeated at your feet. What would you wish of us?”
“Candace Mei-Ling Liao, Our will is that Capella’s people should grow wealthy and content upon their own worlds, that they should swear brotherhood and allegiance with those New Syrtis, and Robinson, and New Avalon, to together shoulder the burdens of the war that is long come upon us all - and in the end, to together taste the sweet fruits of peace.”
It was the first time I’d ever heard Hanse Davion use the royal plural. He went on, “If there are any reservations in your hearts at this course, let them be spoken now.”
“Your Highness,” Candace replied, lifting her eyes to meet his. “Each of Our - my - ancestors to sit on the throne behind you has done so in consultation with the wisdom and will of the noble houses who represented and cared for his people. Much is made of the freedoms enjoyed by the people of the Federated Suns, but in the passage of time less and less has been heard from the voices of your High Council. Shall the House of Scions, too, go slowly silent, and with it, the Capellan people?”
“No nation or institution wrought by mortal hand or mind is flawless,” Hanse said, after a moment of dramatically appropriate consideration. “And the flames of war have not had the courtesy to wait for the wisdom and deliberations of the High Council, spread as it is across the great distances of space. This truth is among the quiet shames of the Federated Suns, that those voices have, indeed, meant less than in brighter ages now past.
“Therefore, We swear to you this day, in Our own name and for all of Our House to follow, that the members of the High Council shall be divided into the Councils of Robinson, of New Avalon, and of New Syrtis, which may know their homes and members, and act with celerity, and appoint from their own numbers representatives to the new High Council, together vested with the power to bind and to loose Ourselves and Our heirs. In joining Our people, those who have in the past sat in the House of Scions shall meet again as the Council of Sian, with representatives of their own.”
Candace Liao took one breath, deep enough to be caught by the cameras… and knelt. “Your Highness, my heart has no further fears. I, Candace Mei-Ling Liao, head of House Liao, do hereby surrender and forswear any and all rights held by my family to the title of First Lord of the Star League, and pledge the eternal allegiance of myself, and my kin, and all our works to the service of House Davion, to serve at their will and at their pleasure, in whatever capacity we be required and subject to all the penalties and disgrace of oathbreakers before the eyes of men and Providence.”
Hanse Davion looked down at her for a moment, as Tormano Liao and the heads of the Warrior Houses knelt in turn, a ripple starting next to the dias and marching away from it each in turn.
He sat on the Celestial Throne, and said, “Rise, Candace Liao. We, Hanse Adrian Davion, head of House Davion, accept your oath, and swear in return to ward you from harm and care for your interests as your liege lords. Your enemies shall be Our enemies, your children shall be Our children, and while you keep faith, Our sword will ever guard you - as it shall chastise should that faith be broken. Rise, Candace Liao, Duchess of the League March.”
...AND DIRTY UP THE DOORSTEP...