JUST KEEP YOUR INJURED LOOKS TO YOU…
The private station around the equally private subway was all stone and tile, and the small train was at rest. With nothing to interfere with it, the sound of my former second in command getting knocked flat on his ass echoed loudly off the live surfaces.
Watching her face past the dark-haired woman rubbing her knuckles, I was pretty sure that if it hadn’t been beneath Katrina Steiner’s Archonal dignity, she’d have been giggling up a storm. Under the ‘Oh, I’ve just been punched’ shock and what I was pretty sure was a dash of arousal, Morgan Kell looked sheepish. “I suppose I deserved that, Salome,” he admitted.
“Damn straight you did,” his attacker replied, and offered him a hand back to his feet - and used it to pull him straight into a desperately tight hug. A moment later, the man who’d been standing next to Salome Ward when our train arrived - with the family resemblance, he couldn’t have been anyone but Patrick Kell - threw his own arms around both of them.
Standing a little behind where the two of them had been, Katrina Steiner caught my eye and motioned me towards what was probably the elevator to the surface. Once the doors were closed, I asked impulsively, “You’re not staying for the reunion?”
She gave me a considering look for a few moments, then shook her head, smiling slightly. “I’m on duty at the moment, so I’ll leave them to immediate family only. I can renew acquaintances later, when Melissa is out of her lessons. She’s taken her conversation with you to heart.”
I blinked. “With me?” I said, puzzled and not hiding it.
“She’s as interested in dropships as most children her age are in mechs,” Katrina said. “Her room is full of model kits and she’s memorized the stat sheets of what’s probably every design still flying and half the ones that aren’t.” She was very much the fond mother at the moment, rather than The Archon. The elevator doors opened and she stepped out; I followed, and couldn’t help glancing at the cordon of bodyguards falling in around us. Their principle kept talking. “Now that your Argo is flying again she’ll want to know all about it.”
I raised an eyebrow. “I’d assumed she’d be included in the salvage recovery list.”
“No,” she said. “A single hull like that is more valuable to you than to the Commonwealth as a whole.”
I glanced at the guards, and didn’t mention the Locura. She went on, “Besides, she’ll need time in a yard to be fully flightworthy again, and I’ll have them evaluate the design for whether or not we want to convert some of Logistical Command’s Behemoths.”
I nodded. “I’m not sure myself,” I admitted. “But if Melissa is checked out on vac suits, we could probably set up a tour.” Twelve-thirteen was old enough for that, I thought. “Argo’s safe enough overall, we did a lot of work on the trip, but she’s, y’know. Well-managed construction site safe. We’ve only had one blowout over three months, but… we’ve had one blowout.”
Katrina winced slightly. “I’ll send up a site team from her detail, but probably not. She is trained for suit operation, she insisted even if it hadn’t been a reasonable measure, but I have a harder time justifying it for the Archon’s sole heir than I do for my daughter.”
“I understand,” I said, as we turned a corner and came to a door flanked by two more guards. “Maybe after the refit’s complete, then.”
“That’s more workable,” she said. Ahead of us, one guard held down a control on the far side of the door, and the other opened it.
It was a conference room, in the same rich-materials-spartan-lines style as the rest of the palace I’d seen, with a table like an interrupted ring set with nine seats, with nametags. Selvin Kelswa and Simon Johnson and Edward Regis I recognized at least by reputation - respectively the Duke of Tamar, head of Lyran Intelligence, and the uniformed head of the Lyran Commonwealth Armed Forces. Marie Lestrade-Aten, an elderly woman with piercing eyes, I didn’t know anything to speak of about, but the double-barreled family name said ‘Skye’, even if the nametag hadn’t confirmed her as that state’s Duchess.
The three more occupied nametags said Internal Policies, Foreign Affairs, and Chancellor of the peoples (A man and two women, respectively, all in the ‘distinguished’ age bracket), none of whom I recognized in the slightest. Katrina walked to the empty slot with her name on it, and Lestrade-Aten waved me to the unlabeled seat next to her. “Sit down, girl,” the Duchess said.
“Yes, Ma’am,” I said, and since none of the others had risen when Katrina entered, did as I was bid.
The eight most powerful people in the Lyran Commonwealth looked at me as a collective body for a moment, and then General Regis leaned forward. “Give us your impression of the Federated Suns’ strategy in its conquest of the Capellan Confederation,” he said. “How it worked, and where it failed?”
I took a breath in, let it out, buying myself time to think. “First,” I said, “understand that most of what I’m about to say comes from an interview with Davion himself between the cease-fire and the final surrender and annexation. Operational security meant that I received very little in the way of strategic briefing before the assaults began, and of course during the campaign itself most of my attention was only on St. Ives. Getting the overview from him, then, introduces both bias from FedSuns interests and hindsight.
“That said, what actually happened was not the planned outcome. The initial phase began after my meeting with the First Prince in January 3019, and that was logistical. He began concentrating the AFFS’s high-capacity dropships along the Capellan front by relay transfer, and dusted off contingencies for taking major targets in the one-jump cordon from the border. The plan from that stage and all the way up until actual operations started was to use each of the attack operations as cover for the others, forcing the Confederation to pick which worlds to defend first.
“Tikonov, Ares, and Necromo were primary targets, whose capture was considered integral to the overall success of the operation. St. Ives and Grand Base were considered optional objectives, whose capture would have been valuable and would be worked towards sincerely but which were primarily included as a way of increasing pressure on potential Capellan counterattackers. Menke was also a spoiler attack, specifically aimed at paralyzing McCarron’s Armored Cavalry from either relieving one of the primary or secondary targets or conducting a deep raiding operation that would force an AFFS response.
“At the eleventh hour-”
“Pardon, what?” the Chancellor - Clarice Ruckers, according to her nameplate - asked, leaning forward slightly.
“Sorry,” I said automatically. “The very last moment; in this case, probably no more than a week in advance of the first wave jumping. Prince Davion received confirmation, which he credited to tips from LIC for directing existing inquiries-” I nodded to Simon Johnson “-that the Duke of New Syrtis would be meeting in person with Maximilian Liao.”
“Did…” Kelswa started to ask, then paused and changed what he’d been intending to say to, “Did the Duke have the authority to negotiate in that fashion?”
“Not absent some pressing crisis,” I said, “and not without telling New Avalon about the meeting. Once he had confirmation of the meeting, Davion advanced the operational schedule and tightened the secrecy measures around the operation, trying to arrange for the first wave to coincide with the meeting.”
“Ahhhh,” Johnson said, sitting back in his seat and smiling.
‘Malalai Maathai’ was the name on the Internal Affairs minister’s nameplate. She frowned behind her veil. “Could you unpack that for non-specialists?” she said.
“Davion correctly predicted that both Liao and Duke Hasek-Davion-”
Kelswa snapped his fingers and muttered, “that was it.”
I ignored the byplay. “-would bring substantial bodyguard units to their meeting; a full-strength elite regiment, the Red Lancers, and an equally elite Regimental Combat Team, the 6th New Syrtis Fusiliers, respectively. Liao’s reaction to the apparent betrayal of a major offensive his conspirator hadn’t warned him of was predictably furious, and the resulting battle left both men hospitalized in the crossfire.”
Maathai nodded. “Continue,” she said.
“By the time Liao had died, his children had finished the abortive… disagreement… about which of them would succeed him.”
“Candace Liao,” Johnson said.
“Before her father’s death, Candace had held personal fief on St. Ives, and was active in commanding the defense there. The fifty-regiment figure often quoted for the Capellan Confederation Armed Forces was at least ten regiments ahead of the reality to start with, and many of the forty she did have were at least one-third understrength, leaving her without the resources to effectively relieve any of the operational targets. Combine that with having lost Tikonov, Ares, and Necromo, and the high probability of further reinforcements arriving on St. Ives, Menke and Grand Base, and the fact that she would have lost at least half of her state’s production capability with those worlds…”
I shrugged. “Maximilian Liao would have done something desperate, possibly brilliant, and probably insane. But Candace Liao decided that negotiating with Davion was wiser than betting on a miracle, and the Fox was able to find concessions that they could both agree on.”
Katrina nodded. “So, in summary?” she prompted.
“Davion planned for an ambitious but not unprecedented campaign, then drew an inside straight with it,” I said. “In the long run, this will multiply the Federated Suns’ strength, not add to it - they’ve added two new jumpship production sites, which will go a long way towards getting their transportation capability in line with the rest of the military. But if they’re ready for any kind of significant foreign adventure sooner than the thirty-fifties, I’ll be shocked. They’ve got too much digesting to do.”
“Necromo was a jumpship yard, not just a dropship yard?” Maathai asked.
“The First Prince confirmed it himself,” I said, “and it was all over the rumor mill by the time we left St. Ives.”
A series of glances made its way around the other people at the table, one I didn’t have enough context to interpret. Katrina was smiling slightly.
“How would you describe Davion’s odds of keeping his new territories?” Lestrade-Aten asked.
“Overall, excellent,” I said. “As long as he keeps Candace and Tormano Liao on-side and cooperative, and he does have the tools and the brains to do so, the odds of a successful Confederation-wide rebellion are low. By permitting the Pure Capella and True Capella splinters to form and stabilize in low-value territory, he’s drawn off extremists and provided an object lesson to any Capellans who’d otherwise be on the fence that things could be much worse.”
Among the massive dump of news stories that we’d found at the end of the three-month journey through uninhabited red dwarf after red dwarf was the Free Worlds League’s crushing conquest of the two rebellious Capellan factions, and the human interest stories that highlighted how gentle Davion rule was in comparison.
I voiced the thought that woke: “I’d give better than even odds that Davion deliberately arranged at least some of the news coverage on their fate to highlight the lesson.”
Ruckers, who as an elected representative herself probably had the best direct appreciation for deliberate messaging of that sort, smiled.
“That will, of course, not in any way prevent smaller rebellions and lesser forms of civil unrest from flaring up, driven by individual personalities and so on. Capellan space will require disproportionately heavy garrison attention at least until the recruitment-age cohort fills with citizens who don’t remember living outside Davion rule, and will remain relatively restive for considerably longer than that.
“Those smaller rebellions will be well-supported by outside agencies; both the Combine and the League will be eager to divert at least some of the FedSuns’ attention from its borders with them. I don’t know enough about ComStar’s internal politics to judge whether they’ll merely offer preferential coordination and money laundering to support those, or if they’ll move more openly to disrupt the success of a state with the potential to end the Succession Wars. The Taurians are unlikely to stick their necks out in the same way as the larger powers, but they already sell military hardware onto the mercenary market, so I’d expect the main actors’ agents to buy there and pass on to the rebels.”
I paused and considered for a few moments. “A lot of things will depend on just how the conversion between Capellan and Federated Suns political systems go - the transition from authoritarian to permissive. I don’t know enough about the details or fields involved to make a judgement there. A really botched job would be about the only thing that could actually threaten Davion control over Capellan space, which tells us where ComStar ROM will be concentrating its efforts if nothing else.”
Another glance went around the room, and Lestrade-Aten sat back and went ‘Hmmm’.
From there, we talked in turn about my opinions of the Free Worlds League-
“I have to admit that I don’t know a lot about the internal situation in the League,” I said. “But I do know that it’s more complex as a reality on the ground than in the Combine. Predicting any actual details of what will happen in the League in the immediate future will need more details about the current situation and personalities than I have. That said, the clear historical precedent is for infighting, civil strife, that kind of thing. The League’s citizens and leadership know that that’s their weakness just as well as we do, and Atreus has been trying to centralize and stabilize things for centuries at least.
“The shock and fear of the Capellan Confederation just falling like that will add a great deal of urgency to that dynamic, as will the differences between the Confederation’s strength and the AFFS’s idea of ‘proper border protection’. Atreus’s ideal will be to use that fear to sell the provinces on additional central powers, then to negotiate a secure and stable peace on their new border so that they can concentrate their strength against… us.”
I could see Ruckers visibly take note of the beat of hesitation where I had to remind myself I was part of the Lyran Commonwealth, now.
“Both Combine ISF and Comstar ROM will want to reinforce the central government’s ability to act, because they want the League to help act to counterbalance the Federated Suns. The decision from our side will be whether we try to fight that goal by stirring up the provinces and trying to spark another civil war, or if we try to use diplomatic means to lessen border tensions, and…” I trailed off and shrugged. “Like I said, I don’t know enough to offer an informed opinion right now.”
-the Draconis Combine-
“They are fucked in a way orthogonally opposite from anything that could be considered ‘fun’.”
Half the room either smirked or snickered outright.
“While Director Johnson-” I nodded to him, “-would have a better idea of how much of that they know from our side, they have to have a fair appreciation of just how much trouble they’re in from Davion’s angle. Even if they can get the League to keep the League March tied down, the Federated Suns having two productive ‘interior’ Marches rather than just one makes the Combine’s position ultimately unsustainable thanks to the forces freed up for offensive action in the Draconis March.
“The smart thing to do in their position would be to sue for peace, make whatever concessions they have to to secure ten to thirty years, and then turn all of their energies to infrastructure and economic rebuilding. Their production base is so underdeveloped that they have the most to gain of any of the Successor States, even relative to the Federated Suns, so it would be to their relative advantage.”
I paused. “Well, OK,” I said, parenthetically, “the smartest thing to do for them would be to go for a negotiated surrender while they’ve got a bargaining position. But the conservatism of their political establishment and the cult of aggression in their political mythology mean that they can’t bring themselves to do either of those.
“What they’ll do instead…” I trailed off, thinking. “Honestly, there’s no telling. It will be desperate, violent, and built on a high-risk, high-reward paradigm because they won’t be able to stop themselves from trying to win, but there are too many options to predict what the result will be in any kind of detail. They probably won’t reach for the weapons of mass destruction until the knives finish coming out, but other than that, I’ve got no idea.”
-and ComStar-
“The outer layers of Comstar, the ones that actually perform socially beneficial functions, are for the most part genuinely committed to… call them ‘good works’. Like any large and even partially meritocratic organization, though, there’s a tendency for one of the selection pressures narrowing the higher ranks to be the desire for power. Crosspollinate that with a doctrine that emphasizes their noble role as the true holders of civilization and knowledge-” I tried not to sneer, and failed, “-and the doctrinal mutation that only Comstar should hold knowledge of any kind is very possibly inevitable. Combine that with the fact that Comstar’s survival and power outside of Sol are completely dependent on a particular facet of technological superiority, and the first priority of the First Circuit is making as certain as possible that they’re the only ones with access to the Star League’s technology.”
Maathai shook her head disbelievingly, but I could see Regis and Johnson looking grimly thoughtful.
“That being the case, if they know about the memory cores, they’ll regard them as the greatest possible existential threat. They will spare no expense or effort to locate every copy, and balk at no atrocity to destroy them. NAIS, and any similar research institution we attempt to establish, will be only barely less important.
“The good news, for us, is that Comstar has spent most of the last couple of centuries drawn down to a fraction of its possible strength as part of a strategy that might be called security by obscurity. Their military forces are completely unblooded and would barely manage to be rated green by outside standards, and while their intel arm does have action elements, they’re very limited in numbers compared to the reach of their signals intelligence service.”
“Signals intelligence?” Ruckers asked, glancing at Johnson.
I nodded to him, also. “It’s not my field of expertise, but my baseline assumption would be that any signal sent by any HPG, anywhere, that could be theoretically cracked, has been. From the very beginning of the HPG network. Terran Hegemony Intelligence, to start with, but Comstar since the start of the Succession Wars.”
“That explains your prediction that ROM will be working to undermine Davion government of the League March,” Duchess Lestrade-Aten said. “And if they’re aware of the library cores from Helm, Artru, and New Dallas we can expect to see their hand as well.”
“It’s likely,” Katrina said, and inclined her head in a slight bow of apology in my direction. “I pressed her for one too many details during our live conversation after she returned from Helm. The transmission was coded, and we’ve deprecated the cipher used, but Simon, Edward, and I have been proceeding in the assumption that that information is compromised, including setting up decoy compartments that imply considerably less completeness in the Helm Library Core than was actually the case.”
Ruckers and Lestrade-Aten both looked… irritated. The latter asked me, “What sort of action against us do you expect from Comstar?”
I held up a hand and folded out a finger. “First, rabblerousing and instigation of insurgents, in the same mold as Davion will be seeing both in the League March and elsewhere.”
A second finger. “Second, League and Combine operations against us can expect ‘fortunate coincidences’ to fall their way wherever HPG messages or deniable electronic intelligence are concerned.”
Another. “Third, perhaps not immediately but once it becomes clear that those measures aren’t having the desired effects, then they will funnel military assets to the League and Combine, either directly or via false ‘SLDF caches’, to shore them up against us and perpetuate the balance of power that lets Comstar exercise such influence.”
The fourth. “And finally, if or when it becomes necessary for either us or the Federated Suns to move offensively against one of the other two states, Comstar will either find or manufacture an excuse for a full Interdiction. We must be prepared.”
-and, finally, the unification of the Magistracy of Canopus, Taurian Concordat, and Aurigan Coalition into a tightly woven defense-and-trade pact.
“...Iiiii must have missed that while I was in transit,” I said, gobsmacked.
The man behind the Foreign Affairs nameplate, Ragnar Lomin, hadn’t said anything up until now, just listening, and he didn’t say anything now. But he did snicker.
“Um,” I said, thinking. “It makes sense,” I said after a few moments. “I imagine that part of the Periphery is feeling pretty lonely after the CapCon’s fall and, well, my raid. The Taurians have plenty of heavy industry but not the population or tax base to really support it, and both of the others are - were? - only barely making it as interstellar concerns. And the additional military reserves to draw from would be valuable to all of them.”
“McCarron’s survivors went to Herotitus to rebuild, rather than Galatea,” Regis said, “and the Aurigans were able to hire them. Multiple landholds, apparently. We’re not sure how that deal connected to the Aurigans expanding their holdings right up to the Magistracy’s border, or where what’s clearly an SLDF Regimental Combat Team came from, but they seem to have managed it essentially peacefully.”
“Kimi, would be my guess,” I said. “One thing or another made them nervous enough to pull out the hardware they’d be praying to, either before or after they - signed on with the Aurigans?”
Lomin nodded.
“So, yeah,” I said. “Twelve Taurian, ten Canopian, and that’d make, umn, eight Aurigan regiments - mech regiments, call it? And I know that Detroit is probably able to make them as many basic combat vehicles as they want. Combine that with a great big question mark around Taurian nuclear doctrine and they should actually be fairly secure. Good for them.”
“How do you expect this development to affect our own dealings with Davion?” Katrina asked.
“Honestly, I don’t think it will matter,” I said, then amended, “Or at least, not on its own. Thirty regiments is enough to be difficult to conquer and to put a decisive end to piracy in the area, but not enough to stop an all-up offensive like we saw against the CapCon, and both sides know it. This new coalition would have to be suicidal to progress past saber-rattling and they wouldn’t be worth the price of invading. The risk factor there, for both sides, is the chance that ComStar will invent something and divert Davion’s attention away from the main fronts, where we’d rather have it.”
“Moving on to longer-ranged threats, all of us have been briefed on the Clans of Kerensky,” General Regis said. “How would you stop them?”
“...Tricky question,” I said. “Umn… The first thing I’d do would be put together a specific force for fighting Clan-style trials. The odds of them keeping their rules after they’ve been used against them are low, but a, a super-elite regiment or three would be relatively cheap and useful in other roles as well, and they can be mixed with any of the escalated options.
“The second thing would be to advance LIC agents through the Deep Periphery trade routes, with orders both to gather intelligence and look for opportunities to increase infighting and instability in Clan space. This would have a good chance of delaying and weakening the eventual invasion, but if discovered would provoke it instead, so we’d want to set up a communication line to evaluate those disruption chances before going ahead - despite how long the loop would be.
“The next cheapest option, tactically, would be to redevelop nuclear anti-shipping and anti-fighter tactics, and forward-deploy the tools to apply them. Keeping those operations outside the Ares Conventions’ fifty-thousand kilometer limit from inhabited worlds would make the diplomatic fallout a little easier. This would, implicitly, represent an open commitment to maximum force on both sides of the conflict, which would need careful consideration at the highest levels-” I nodded to Katrina, and then swept an including hand across the rest of the table, “-even if the stakes already involved national survival and potential enslavement of billions.
“The option that I’d recommend as Plan A would be to commit to developing the LCAF to a state capable of fighting the Clans and winning. With the correct doctrine and tactics, the technology in the Helm Library Core comes close enough to parity with that used by the Clans for success, and the Commonwealth has a massive advantage in population and tax base. Given sufficient development and preparation time, I believe that a force capable of rivaling the Star League Defense Force is achievable; the standard needed to reduce the Clans to a solved problem is far smaller than that.”
Maathai was wincing. What the Lyran Commonwealth called ‘internal policies’ included taxation and the treasury, and I could see her imagining the expense.
I gave her something halfway between a nod and a seated bow. “The price tag will be astronomical,” I admitted, “but it will work.”
“How ‘astronomical’?” Regis asked. “How many regiments would you recommend?”
“Hmm… Seventeen Clans, between four and ten Galaxies each, averaged by bidding idiocy and the need for reserves to four each is sixty-eight total… I’d recommend ninety each of battlemechs and aerospace fighters, and one-thirty-five or so of armor, as the starting number. It should not be regarded as conservative in the first place; if we assume that the Clans bid themselves down to say, seven invading Clans, forty, forty, and sixty might work. I’d be reluctant to, myself.”
Kelswa whistled. “And that’s for only one front,” he said.
“For only that front,” I agreed. “Call the absolute minimum sixty, sixty, and ninety if we include both League and Combine borders at current garrison levels.”
“You don’t feel that the Federated Suns’ Regimental Combat Team model is ideal, then?” Regis said.
“I think that it undervalues artillery and aerospace cover,” I said, “and over commits to both armored and infantry assets. Doing so makes it better as an occupation force, but in direct combat it’s wasteful of the lives of its infantry and of the jumpships required to move it. RCTs have a role, but it’s a role that doesn’t involve moving them anywhere.”
“What would you call ideal, then?” he asked.
“A five-regiment combined arms brigade, containing one standard aerospace regiment, one standard battlemech regiment, a four-battalion armor regiment, a regiment of battle-armored infantry with organic transport vehicles, and a support regiment consisting of one thirty-six unit battalion of artillery vehicles, one standard battalion of scout units to call fire for them, and a dedicated command battalion for the entire formation,” I said. I’d done a lot of thinking about it. “Plus medical, logistical, and repair elements, probably attached to the support regiment.”
He nodded, and looked at Katrina.
She glanced around the table, then told me, “Thank you, Commander Blackwing. That will be all we need to ask you today. Sargent Roland will have a file for you on your way out; I’d like you to go through it and get back to me with your recommendations for letters patent for your subordinates who were involved on Helm and Artru.”
“I’ll do that, Your Highness,” I said, standing and saluting - Outworlds style, palm flat and parallel to the forearm, both in front of the chest - before accepting the implicit command and getting out. I wasn’t sure what a ‘letter patent’ was, but I could figure it out.
Landholds. Katrina was talking about landholds.
Feudal systems, even simplified and partial ones like the Commonwealth’s, had obligations going both up and down, and both legal and implicit. One of the obligations sitting on Katrina Steiner’s shoulders, at the very top of the pyramid, was to make sure that exceptional service was rewarded - by wealth and by status alike.
The file she’d handed me was a list of worlds, and fairly exhaustive information about them, all across the Lyran Periphery. Economics, local personalities, institutions and traditions… I’d spent the better part of a week buried in the files from proverbial dawn to figurative dusk, with my own personnel files spread all around me the entire time.
I’d turned it in, and the next day had my marching orders - to have all of the named officers ready for a full Court appearance five days hence, suitable clothiers for dress uniforms appended. Most of the list had saved enough to cover their own needs, and I paid for the rest, so we were all there, as directed.
It’s one thing to read that the Archon’s throne is flanked by a pair of battlemechs. It’s another to be there and realize that the room still looked big in comparison to them. After the Argo’s main cargo bay, it was the second largest enclosed space I’d ever seen - and this one wasn’t some spartan productive space. The floor was seamless glass-smooth marble set with polished bronze seals six feet across every dozen or so feet up the literal red carpet from entrance to throne; the ceiling was easily a hundred feet up and vaulted in best medieval cathedral fashion. Along the walls, great banners hung in hundreds, each bearing more seals - from the numbers, I suspected that the wall banners were for individual worlds, and the floor seals for shires and provinces.
The entire wall behind the throne was dominated by a colossal Lyran flag - and the ceremonial Griffins weren’t painted in the usual blue-with-vertical-white-stripe of the Royal Guards, but in gloss black with an angled slash of blue across their torsos.
My colors.
The ceremony to invest each new noble with their fief and swear them to their responsibilities was surprisingly short, perhaps five minutes or so even with traditional call and response and timed waits for objections, but Katrina had instructed me to pick a planet for every officer from Major on up, less myself and Morgan Kell, and I had thirty-eight Majors and thirteen Colonels on that list.
She did each of them individually, which already had me in awe of her stamina when she called a recess for lunch after the last of my battalion COs had been ennobled and gifted an average of a company of mechs, a battalion of armor, and a squadron of fighters each. I wasn’t sure I could have given full attention to each person, but I had a good enough vantage point to see that she was, and that she was making a real impact on each of them. I was impressed.
The call to break for lunch cued dozen of doors, recessed in apparently decorative alcoves along the walls, to open and let through a positive army of liveried staff. In less than a minute they’d unloaded chairs and tables alike from rolling handcarts, and wheeled entire buffets into place to fill them.
“Not much like a prom, is it?” Sophitia teased in an undertone, and I snickered.
“Not much like at all,” I admitted cheerfully. As injokes went, it was pretty weak, but it reminded both of us of our very first date, back on Hoff, and that was good for both our moods.
Naturally, somebody intercepted us on our way from the buffets to the table one of the servers had discreetly pointed out as ours. Less predictably, it wasn’t a social climber or political animal. Despite the attention some barber had made to get his dark hair and goatee into perfect order, and the tailoring of his black-frogged scarlet jacket and bloused black pants, he managed to look somehow indefinably scruffy, and in this context, the use of a silk sash with matching katana and wakizashi for a belt was more than a little scandalous.
The man in the wheelchair he was pushing, on the other hand, I’d met. “Colonel Wolf,” I said, bowing around my loaded plate.
“Captain Snord,” Sophitia echoed, and I glanced to the side, first startled at the identification and then distracted by how good she looked in black. She noticed and gave me the ‘pay attention, dummy’ elbow.
Snord and Wolf were both smirking, but the latter said, “Apparently we’ve been assigned to join you.”
I was a little surprised, but a quick glance around showed that the Major Ward and the Kells were at Katrina’s table. “I don’t mind,” I said. “It’s over this way, or so I’m told.”
It was indeed that way; all four of the place settings had appropriate nametags, and Wolf’s was missing the usual chair.
We got all of our plates set down and took our seats, and then all four of us stared in awkward silence.
Wolf broke the deadlock by turning to Snord and saying, “So, any news on Rhonda?”
The younger man smiled. “Apparently her big news was that she’s walking again. Just a couple steps, but she wasn’t leaning on anything.”
“Good!” Wolf said. “It’d be a waste to have her benched this young.” Despite the potential resonance with his own dismemberment, he looked and sounded entirely positive.
“Your daughter was hurt?” Sophitia asked Snord. “What happened?”
Snord’s face clouded over, then he sighed. “She got in a fight with a real jackass. He coldcocked her then kept going. So I figured we had better odds here than back in the old country.”
From what I’d heard of Rhonda Snord, the odds of her rubbing a trueborn the wrong way in any Clan context were pretty good. “Given what I’ve heard of both,” I said, and managed not to look too amused at the way both men focused with instant intensity, “that was probably the right call. Though, how did you manage to end up, well-” I gestured around the throne room, “-here? I was in the room when the Archon got the news about you two staying connected, and I hadn’t thought she got that angry.”
Snord smirked. “I got lucky, and found the right six apology presents.”
Six presents? I gave him a puzzled look, before the data point of how calm Katrina and her cabinet had been about finding the Locura connected with the memory of how many warships the Wolf Dragoons had been issued to support their mission. I laughed without restraint, and ignored the way heads turned. “That’d do it,” I said cheerfully.
Snord gave me a nervous look; I’d been told in both lifetimes that I had an unnerving cackle, so I just smiled at him. “So, what’s she got your people doing, now that you’re back?” I asked.
“The regiment I got handed to take to the Combine are working for the Foreign Legion,” he said, motioning at Wolf. “The old hands, well, we were attached to Lostech hunting detachments, but we all got called back to base points in the last month or so.”
I would bet I knew why; the cybertech people were convinced that the Argo’s nav database held SLDF site data for more than just the Periphery district. Something about ease of coding versus security that I didn’t follow in detail, but if they were right then there was a lot more data just waiting to be decoded. Veteran relic-hunters like Snord’s original company would be valuable adjuncts to any mission to take advantage of that.
“I promised to take good care of his little lambs,” Wolf said. “I never thought I’d end my days as a den master, but it’s more rewarding than I expected.”
“We’ll just have to hope they’re ready for Natasha,” Snord said.
“Um?” Sophitia said around her latest mouthful of lunch. She swallowed, and said, “I thought that she’d, well, been held in prison?” There hadn’t been many ‘irreconcilables’ among the Wolf Dragoons taken at Solaris, but Kerensky had made the list, with a vengeance.
“The Combine sent a deep raid early in the year,” Wolf said. His reaction to the mention of the woman whose fire had crippled him was subdued; they’d been close friends before that, and he seemed to find it more a matter of regret and loss than anger. “They hit the prison she’d been sent to and took any prisoner with military skills, then dropped the rest on the planet the moon was orbiting. I’m told she’s serving in the Legion of Vega, now.”
Well, that was less than ideal. I puffed my cheeks out with a huff of air. “Well,” I said, “it could be worse. At least she’s in the Legion of Vega rather than a unit they actually supply and support.”
“You didn’t see her at her best,” Wolf said in Kerensky’s defense.
“I know,” I agreed. “I mean that statement in the liveliest respect for her skills as a combatant and as a trainer. If you’d said they put her at Sun Zhang, I’d be much more concerned.”
Wolf raised an eyebrow. “You think that Natasha would be more effective off the battlefield?”
“The public story about her independent company with you is that they were put together primarily from expendable discipline cases,” I said. “Is that wrong?”
“No,” he admitted, clearly wondering where I was going with it.
“Were they better than the rest of your people before she got her hands on them?”
“No, but her training techniques relied on being in the field,” Wolf said.
I was skeptical about that, but- “Sun Zhang isn’t exactly shy about putting their cadets in harm’s way. Anyway, though, you see my reasoning.”
“Yeah,” Snord agreed. “But, hey, mind if I ask a question?”
“Go ahead.”
“You really think Aleksander Kerensky was, well…” He trailed off, unable to repeat the term ‘coward’ of that man.
I let out a breath, puffing my cheeks out in the process. “No, not really,” I said. “I just… He wasn’t equal to the needs of his position, and the Star League paid the price for it.”
Most of the rest of the courtly lunch hour was taken up explaining that, and when the discreet army of servants appeared at our elbows to clear things away, I’d only gotten through about three quarters of what I’d picked out.
“Thank you, Commander Blackwing,” Wolf said as everyone started to stand. “I won’t claim I agree with you on every subject, but I’m at least comforted that you’re intelligently wrong. Whether or not the way you’ve upset the status quo is for the best, I’m glad to know you haven’t done it casually or frivolously.”
“No one ever gets to know history’s judgement in their own lifetime,” I said. “But we have to do the best we can with what we’re given. After that, all we can do is tell the world that we tried.”
Soon we were back into the waiting ranks again, this time with anticipation hovering heavy in the air. Sending battalion commanders to nowhere worlds like Trell I, with the forces to hold them, was a message about the scale of the debt Katrina felt was owed. But if Majors were being granted entire planets, no matter how poor, the list of more senior names would be assigned to real prizes, and everyone in the audience knew it.
Katrina listed off the commanders of the support departments first. Doctor Tiber, who’d run medical, she sent to Incukalns, and Doctor Raven from maintenance went to Aur. Lona Alevito, my head artillery commander. she sent to Chahar. Other names, increasingly directly involved in the fighting, followed, to worlds I recognized like Son Hoa, Circinus (which had apparently been conquered in the last couple of years?), and Kwangjong-ni.
Io Sasagawa was the last of the regimental COs, and as she stood up from swearing allegiance in return for title to the one-time capital of the Rim Worlds Republic, Apollo.
“Asha Blackwing of Alpheratz, stand forward,” Katrina’s voice rang out of the throne room’s speaker system as her eyes landed on me.
I took a quick little breath to brace myself and walked forward, sweeping my cape - the uniform called for just a dueling cape, but the tailors had insisted on lengthening it to only an inch or so short of the floor - out to one side and going to one knee before the throne. “As you command, Your Highness,” I said, and heard the sound system pick up my voice just as well as hers.
There was a moment of silence; I felt sweat trickle down my neck, raised by the tension and the heat of the spotlights.
“Lyrans,” Katrina Steiner said, “Look at this woman. You have heard the noble deeds that I have rewarded already this day. You have seen the hands that wrought them paid in the coins of wealth and glory for their worth and value to our state and people. You have counted the future in worlds made habitable once more, in rivers made to run pure, and in the ruin of our enemies. You know that their titles are value given for value received, in absolute equilibrium
“And yet,” she said softly, and paused to let it ring in the air.
“And yet, these things were not done by my and beginning, nor yet by their own. They were done by hers. It will tempt some to decry her for acting under a mercenary’s star, to say that what she commanded was so merely for pay, and I say that that is not so. She was not so poor or desperate before that day on Helm; she could all so easily have claimed everything that world held for herself alone.
“She did not. Rather than think only of profit, she chose to bring it to the Lyran people… and ask all but nothing in return.”
That was flattery. Katrina had channeled all of the Helm Core’s civilian applications through the Renaissance Development Corporation, and my 45% share of even the early trickle of licensing fees from Alarion was enormous.
Katrina plowed on. “How great a repayment is called for for such a debt?”
With no visual or auditory cue whatsoever, but perfect dramatic timing, the lights in the great hall dimmed.
“Rise and turn, Asha Blackwing,” Katrina ordered, and I did, my eyes drawn upward to a holographic map hovering in mid-air above the glittering crowd. The projector system had been installed when the Star League was new, notable enough even in that day to be called out in the tourist descriptions. The latest editions said that it was supposed to be nonfunctional, but…
Every star in the Lyran Commonwealth was visible, Skye, Tamar, and Donegal all showing in different shades of blue. The former Circinus worlds were the same shade as the rest of Donegal…
Until they, and a great swathe along the outer edge of the Commonwealth all the way to Trellshire along the Combine border, changed shades.
“For centuries, the citizens of the Lyran Periphery have been neglected,” Katrina Steiner said from behind me, her voice solemn with regret - and resolve. I started to turn, and her hand on my shoulder kept me in place. “Always, Donegal and Tamar, and the Commonwealth as a whole, have felt their resources and protection were needed more urgently, and elsewhere, and entire worlds have languished, destitute, for want of the investment and security to set them fully on their feet.
“Fortunately for us all, sometimes, two problems can solve each other.
“Asha Blackwing, will you swear true and eternal allegiance to the people, constitution, and crown of the Lyran Commonwealth?”
I glanced down at the nobles in the audience, and Sophitia’s face at the front of the crowd - then looked back up at the map showing the state itself. “I do so swear,” I said, as clearly and firmly as I could.
“Will you swear for the rest of your mortal days to care for and guard the people of these worlds shown before you?”
Jesus X Christ on a crutch. “I do so swear,” I repeated.
“Will you swear to give them justice, and safety, and every wisdom and opportunity?”
“I do so swear.”
“Will you swear to stand forever between these, your people, and any who would do them harm?”
“I do so swear,” I said one last time, and Katrina stepped forward next to me and took my right wrist to raise it over our heads like a boxing referee announcing the champion.
“Then, my lords and ladies of the Commonwealth, I give you Asha Blackwing, Warden of the Rift Approaches!”
“Soph, did you know she was going to do that?”
“Of course. I helped plan it.”
“I hate you.”
“Love you too, darling.”
There was, needless to say, a colossal amount of work to be done. The ‘Rift Approaches’ that Katrina had called into being weren’t just a sinecure or a publicity stunt. She was dead serious about creating a fourth member state for the Commonwealth out of the worlds that had been taken from the Rim Worlds Republic at the dawn of the Succession Wars, even if only to have a dedicated defensive cordon against a potential Clan invasion.
That meant creating an entire provincial bureaucracy and judiciary from basically whole cloth. It meant negotiating with ComStar for the HPG stations to coordinate all of that. It meant a vast amount of studying to learn the details of all of my new worlds, and of all the threats facing them. Dozens of smaller merc units were already in place as garrisons, and I had to gain an understanding of them and of the new detachments my subordinates - my nobles - were bringing with them as they headed to their worlds.
Fortunately I didn’t have to worry about finding the hardware; Katrina hadn’t been speaking generically. While I was off in Davion space, she and the LCAF had dispatched two expeditions, the first a covert commando team carried on a Scout-class jumpship and sensor-packed Leopard to find and disable the ComStar satellites that monitored the dead world of New Dallas, and the second a major expedition that had descended on the place and wholesale scooped up nearly a dozen regiments of ‘primitive’ battlemechs and four times as many combat vehicles of the same vintage.
First-generation Terran Hegemony Mackies were cripplingly inferior to any modern battlemech more than a third their size, but they and their contemporaries were more than enough to see off pirates - and free more modern forces for other duties. In my case, organizing them into strike forces to hunt down the pirates’ home bases to burn them out.
Katrina had also already picked out where my capital would be; Finmark had been one of the Rim Worlds Republic’s main shipbuilding centers, and while the warship yards had been wrecked by nuclear fire, there was at least a starting point in the asteroid mining infrastructure that had been abandoned, along with any surviving relics. The planet itself was in the depths of a nuclear winter even centuries later, and she’d selected it as a good candidate for a pilot and demonstration project for Renaissance’s terraforming tech, learning experience and publicity stunt in one.
The first scouting and relief teams had moved in even before I’d left Solaris, surveying the damage and providing medical care and supplies for the fifteen thousand or so hunter-gatherers that were the surviving descendents of what had once been a population of millions.
There were a thousand and one things still to do even before I left Tharkad, but there was one big one to take care of first.
We lost all control over how it would happen the instant we handed Katrina her invitation.
Neither Sophitia or I were exactly in love with spectacle for its own sake. She’d held out for a formal ceremony in a proper church on a civilized planet with nobody shooting at us, but she still hadn’t wanted to invite anyone outside the unit. Inviting my new boss had seemed like both an appropriate formality and a nice gesture.
Katrina Steiner, as a person, took that invitation in the spirit it was intended, but The Archon had other agendas besides merely spending a bit of time with allies and potential friends, and all of them were hard to argue with. She wanted to reinforce the political reality and power of the Rift Approaches and the other member states’ support and commitment to it; that meant that we needed an Occasion that would command attention, and that Katrina and Lestrade-Aten and Kelswa needed to attend in all their splendor.
Their presence, in turn, made the event a social occasion, and an invitation to it proof of or coin among the assembled glitterati of Tharkad and every world close enough to reach us in time. Invitations were worth favors to whoever could offer them - and, sitting at the elbow of the grandmaster of the Tharkad Social Scene as she worked that advantage ruthlessly, I kept my ears open and my big mouth shut.
For I thank Old Yale, and I thank the Lord… a corner of my mind sang, trying to distract the rest of me from the Big Moment that was looming increasingly large in the immediate future. ...And-I-also-thank-my-father-who-is-Chairman-of-the-Board!
The music carrying through the door in front of me - and through the stonework underfoot, because that was a big organ - changed, and I took a careful breath and stepped forward as the smiling churchmen (I had no idea what their job was properly called, but they worked here full-time, at least) swung the twenty foot tall doors open wide, the intricate carvings and painting and gilding worked into every inch of them, just like the entire rest of the headache-inducingly overpacked building, glittering and flashing as they moved
The nave ahead of me seemed bigger than it was, and it was more than big enough to start with. Light reading of the tourist bumpf about the Cathedral of Saint Arandelle of the Immaculate Snows included the statistics of the interior spaces, and while the nave was longer than the Archon’s throne room, it was also only a little over half as wide, and had a slightly lower ceiling. It was a smaller space, and further constrained by the fact that the nave proper was divided from its side-aisles by a full-length colonnade, rather than being fully arched like the throne room.
But the resulting narrowness increased the impression of height, fooling the eye and stretching proportions upwards, especially without any battlemechs around to give scale. The side-aisles had full-height roofs, and it seemed their entire walls were vast expanses of impossibly intricate stained glass, with only enough actual stonework to frame them. The kaleidoscope shading those windows threw onto the floor and packed in-guests was obvious.
As much as most worlds’ customs disapproved of same-sex marriages, there was still a clear expectation that the party that asked for the marriage would ‘be the groom’. The fabric my own billowing cloud of white had been made of had seemed slightly off to me in ordinary light, but under the jewel-toned scatter of the cathedral’s windows, it seemed to blaze with impossible purity out of the corners of my eyes. I chalked up another reminder about the wisdom of listening to experts, and concentrated on one, not hyperventilating, and two, keeping my steps at the pace we’d worked out as best.
The stunned look I could see Sophitia giving me as I got close enough for either of us to make out facial features made the incredible amount of faffing around we’d done in the previous days worth it, and the years of waiting, and even the damned corset. I tried to keep my own reaction to an appropriately demure smile, and failed miserably.
Hiding the other reaction to the contrast of her new blue-and-white LCAF dress uniform with her unbound ruby-red hair was easier.
I knew who else was by that altar, all of them but the officiating priest personally, and of course I knew the plan for the day backwards and forwards, but looking back at my actual memories of the moment, I could only tell you how they stood or what they were wearing from the benefit of pictures I’ve seen since.
At the time, all I saw was her.
I didn’t register the passage of time, either, all my concentration on just drinking in the sight of her face, grinning just as much as I was with her eyes glittering emerald just so. The priest’s voice was a drone like a gnat, unregistered until she said, “I do.”
That meant it was time, and I dragged up just enough concentration to listen.
“Do you, Asha Blackwing, take this woman to be your wife from this day forward?” the priest asked. “To join with you and share all that is to come for better or for worse, until the day that death alone parts you?”
I took a deep breath.
“I do.”
Tell The World That We Tried
A Battletech Fanfiction, inspired by Fitzgerald’s CYOA at https://imgur.com/gallery/M41mI
By Valles
A Battletech Fanfiction, inspired by Fitzgerald’s CYOA at https://imgur.com/gallery/M41mI
By Valles
The private station around the equally private subway was all stone and tile, and the small train was at rest. With nothing to interfere with it, the sound of my former second in command getting knocked flat on his ass echoed loudly off the live surfaces.
Watching her face past the dark-haired woman rubbing her knuckles, I was pretty sure that if it hadn’t been beneath Katrina Steiner’s Archonal dignity, she’d have been giggling up a storm. Under the ‘Oh, I’ve just been punched’ shock and what I was pretty sure was a dash of arousal, Morgan Kell looked sheepish. “I suppose I deserved that, Salome,” he admitted.
“Damn straight you did,” his attacker replied, and offered him a hand back to his feet - and used it to pull him straight into a desperately tight hug. A moment later, the man who’d been standing next to Salome Ward when our train arrived - with the family resemblance, he couldn’t have been anyone but Patrick Kell - threw his own arms around both of them.
Standing a little behind where the two of them had been, Katrina Steiner caught my eye and motioned me towards what was probably the elevator to the surface. Once the doors were closed, I asked impulsively, “You’re not staying for the reunion?”
She gave me a considering look for a few moments, then shook her head, smiling slightly. “I’m on duty at the moment, so I’ll leave them to immediate family only. I can renew acquaintances later, when Melissa is out of her lessons. She’s taken her conversation with you to heart.”
I blinked. “With me?” I said, puzzled and not hiding it.
“She’s as interested in dropships as most children her age are in mechs,” Katrina said. “Her room is full of model kits and she’s memorized the stat sheets of what’s probably every design still flying and half the ones that aren’t.” She was very much the fond mother at the moment, rather than The Archon. The elevator doors opened and she stepped out; I followed, and couldn’t help glancing at the cordon of bodyguards falling in around us. Their principle kept talking. “Now that your Argo is flying again she’ll want to know all about it.”
I raised an eyebrow. “I’d assumed she’d be included in the salvage recovery list.”
“No,” she said. “A single hull like that is more valuable to you than to the Commonwealth as a whole.”
I glanced at the guards, and didn’t mention the Locura. She went on, “Besides, she’ll need time in a yard to be fully flightworthy again, and I’ll have them evaluate the design for whether or not we want to convert some of Logistical Command’s Behemoths.”
I nodded. “I’m not sure myself,” I admitted. “But if Melissa is checked out on vac suits, we could probably set up a tour.” Twelve-thirteen was old enough for that, I thought. “Argo’s safe enough overall, we did a lot of work on the trip, but she’s, y’know. Well-managed construction site safe. We’ve only had one blowout over three months, but… we’ve had one blowout.”
Katrina winced slightly. “I’ll send up a site team from her detail, but probably not. She is trained for suit operation, she insisted even if it hadn’t been a reasonable measure, but I have a harder time justifying it for the Archon’s sole heir than I do for my daughter.”
“I understand,” I said, as we turned a corner and came to a door flanked by two more guards. “Maybe after the refit’s complete, then.”
“That’s more workable,” she said. Ahead of us, one guard held down a control on the far side of the door, and the other opened it.
It was a conference room, in the same rich-materials-spartan-lines style as the rest of the palace I’d seen, with a table like an interrupted ring set with nine seats, with nametags. Selvin Kelswa and Simon Johnson and Edward Regis I recognized at least by reputation - respectively the Duke of Tamar, head of Lyran Intelligence, and the uniformed head of the Lyran Commonwealth Armed Forces. Marie Lestrade-Aten, an elderly woman with piercing eyes, I didn’t know anything to speak of about, but the double-barreled family name said ‘Skye’, even if the nametag hadn’t confirmed her as that state’s Duchess.
The three more occupied nametags said Internal Policies, Foreign Affairs, and Chancellor of the peoples (A man and two women, respectively, all in the ‘distinguished’ age bracket), none of whom I recognized in the slightest. Katrina walked to the empty slot with her name on it, and Lestrade-Aten waved me to the unlabeled seat next to her. “Sit down, girl,” the Duchess said.
“Yes, Ma’am,” I said, and since none of the others had risen when Katrina entered, did as I was bid.
The eight most powerful people in the Lyran Commonwealth looked at me as a collective body for a moment, and then General Regis leaned forward. “Give us your impression of the Federated Suns’ strategy in its conquest of the Capellan Confederation,” he said. “How it worked, and where it failed?”
I took a breath in, let it out, buying myself time to think. “First,” I said, “understand that most of what I’m about to say comes from an interview with Davion himself between the cease-fire and the final surrender and annexation. Operational security meant that I received very little in the way of strategic briefing before the assaults began, and of course during the campaign itself most of my attention was only on St. Ives. Getting the overview from him, then, introduces both bias from FedSuns interests and hindsight.
“That said, what actually happened was not the planned outcome. The initial phase began after my meeting with the First Prince in January 3019, and that was logistical. He began concentrating the AFFS’s high-capacity dropships along the Capellan front by relay transfer, and dusted off contingencies for taking major targets in the one-jump cordon from the border. The plan from that stage and all the way up until actual operations started was to use each of the attack operations as cover for the others, forcing the Confederation to pick which worlds to defend first.
“Tikonov, Ares, and Necromo were primary targets, whose capture was considered integral to the overall success of the operation. St. Ives and Grand Base were considered optional objectives, whose capture would have been valuable and would be worked towards sincerely but which were primarily included as a way of increasing pressure on potential Capellan counterattackers. Menke was also a spoiler attack, specifically aimed at paralyzing McCarron’s Armored Cavalry from either relieving one of the primary or secondary targets or conducting a deep raiding operation that would force an AFFS response.
“At the eleventh hour-”
“Pardon, what?” the Chancellor - Clarice Ruckers, according to her nameplate - asked, leaning forward slightly.
“Sorry,” I said automatically. “The very last moment; in this case, probably no more than a week in advance of the first wave jumping. Prince Davion received confirmation, which he credited to tips from LIC for directing existing inquiries-” I nodded to Simon Johnson “-that the Duke of New Syrtis would be meeting in person with Maximilian Liao.”
“Did…” Kelswa started to ask, then paused and changed what he’d been intending to say to, “Did the Duke have the authority to negotiate in that fashion?”
“Not absent some pressing crisis,” I said, “and not without telling New Avalon about the meeting. Once he had confirmation of the meeting, Davion advanced the operational schedule and tightened the secrecy measures around the operation, trying to arrange for the first wave to coincide with the meeting.”
“Ahhhh,” Johnson said, sitting back in his seat and smiling.
‘Malalai Maathai’ was the name on the Internal Affairs minister’s nameplate. She frowned behind her veil. “Could you unpack that for non-specialists?” she said.
“Davion correctly predicted that both Liao and Duke Hasek-Davion-”
Kelswa snapped his fingers and muttered, “that was it.”
I ignored the byplay. “-would bring substantial bodyguard units to their meeting; a full-strength elite regiment, the Red Lancers, and an equally elite Regimental Combat Team, the 6th New Syrtis Fusiliers, respectively. Liao’s reaction to the apparent betrayal of a major offensive his conspirator hadn’t warned him of was predictably furious, and the resulting battle left both men hospitalized in the crossfire.”
Maathai nodded. “Continue,” she said.
“By the time Liao had died, his children had finished the abortive… disagreement… about which of them would succeed him.”
“Candace Liao,” Johnson said.
“Before her father’s death, Candace had held personal fief on St. Ives, and was active in commanding the defense there. The fifty-regiment figure often quoted for the Capellan Confederation Armed Forces was at least ten regiments ahead of the reality to start with, and many of the forty she did have were at least one-third understrength, leaving her without the resources to effectively relieve any of the operational targets. Combine that with having lost Tikonov, Ares, and Necromo, and the high probability of further reinforcements arriving on St. Ives, Menke and Grand Base, and the fact that she would have lost at least half of her state’s production capability with those worlds…”
I shrugged. “Maximilian Liao would have done something desperate, possibly brilliant, and probably insane. But Candace Liao decided that negotiating with Davion was wiser than betting on a miracle, and the Fox was able to find concessions that they could both agree on.”
Katrina nodded. “So, in summary?” she prompted.
“Davion planned for an ambitious but not unprecedented campaign, then drew an inside straight with it,” I said. “In the long run, this will multiply the Federated Suns’ strength, not add to it - they’ve added two new jumpship production sites, which will go a long way towards getting their transportation capability in line with the rest of the military. But if they’re ready for any kind of significant foreign adventure sooner than the thirty-fifties, I’ll be shocked. They’ve got too much digesting to do.”
“Necromo was a jumpship yard, not just a dropship yard?” Maathai asked.
“The First Prince confirmed it himself,” I said, “and it was all over the rumor mill by the time we left St. Ives.”
A series of glances made its way around the other people at the table, one I didn’t have enough context to interpret. Katrina was smiling slightly.
“How would you describe Davion’s odds of keeping his new territories?” Lestrade-Aten asked.
“Overall, excellent,” I said. “As long as he keeps Candace and Tormano Liao on-side and cooperative, and he does have the tools and the brains to do so, the odds of a successful Confederation-wide rebellion are low. By permitting the Pure Capella and True Capella splinters to form and stabilize in low-value territory, he’s drawn off extremists and provided an object lesson to any Capellans who’d otherwise be on the fence that things could be much worse.”
Among the massive dump of news stories that we’d found at the end of the three-month journey through uninhabited red dwarf after red dwarf was the Free Worlds League’s crushing conquest of the two rebellious Capellan factions, and the human interest stories that highlighted how gentle Davion rule was in comparison.
I voiced the thought that woke: “I’d give better than even odds that Davion deliberately arranged at least some of the news coverage on their fate to highlight the lesson.”
Ruckers, who as an elected representative herself probably had the best direct appreciation for deliberate messaging of that sort, smiled.
“That will, of course, not in any way prevent smaller rebellions and lesser forms of civil unrest from flaring up, driven by individual personalities and so on. Capellan space will require disproportionately heavy garrison attention at least until the recruitment-age cohort fills with citizens who don’t remember living outside Davion rule, and will remain relatively restive for considerably longer than that.
“Those smaller rebellions will be well-supported by outside agencies; both the Combine and the League will be eager to divert at least some of the FedSuns’ attention from its borders with them. I don’t know enough about ComStar’s internal politics to judge whether they’ll merely offer preferential coordination and money laundering to support those, or if they’ll move more openly to disrupt the success of a state with the potential to end the Succession Wars. The Taurians are unlikely to stick their necks out in the same way as the larger powers, but they already sell military hardware onto the mercenary market, so I’d expect the main actors’ agents to buy there and pass on to the rebels.”
I paused and considered for a few moments. “A lot of things will depend on just how the conversion between Capellan and Federated Suns political systems go - the transition from authoritarian to permissive. I don’t know enough about the details or fields involved to make a judgement there. A really botched job would be about the only thing that could actually threaten Davion control over Capellan space, which tells us where ComStar ROM will be concentrating its efforts if nothing else.”
Another glance went around the room, and Lestrade-Aten sat back and went ‘Hmmm’.
From there, we talked in turn about my opinions of the Free Worlds League-
“I have to admit that I don’t know a lot about the internal situation in the League,” I said. “But I do know that it’s more complex as a reality on the ground than in the Combine. Predicting any actual details of what will happen in the League in the immediate future will need more details about the current situation and personalities than I have. That said, the clear historical precedent is for infighting, civil strife, that kind of thing. The League’s citizens and leadership know that that’s their weakness just as well as we do, and Atreus has been trying to centralize and stabilize things for centuries at least.
“The shock and fear of the Capellan Confederation just falling like that will add a great deal of urgency to that dynamic, as will the differences between the Confederation’s strength and the AFFS’s idea of ‘proper border protection’. Atreus’s ideal will be to use that fear to sell the provinces on additional central powers, then to negotiate a secure and stable peace on their new border so that they can concentrate their strength against… us.”
I could see Ruckers visibly take note of the beat of hesitation where I had to remind myself I was part of the Lyran Commonwealth, now.
“Both Combine ISF and Comstar ROM will want to reinforce the central government’s ability to act, because they want the League to help act to counterbalance the Federated Suns. The decision from our side will be whether we try to fight that goal by stirring up the provinces and trying to spark another civil war, or if we try to use diplomatic means to lessen border tensions, and…” I trailed off and shrugged. “Like I said, I don’t know enough to offer an informed opinion right now.”
-the Draconis Combine-
“They are fucked in a way orthogonally opposite from anything that could be considered ‘fun’.”
Half the room either smirked or snickered outright.
“While Director Johnson-” I nodded to him, “-would have a better idea of how much of that they know from our side, they have to have a fair appreciation of just how much trouble they’re in from Davion’s angle. Even if they can get the League to keep the League March tied down, the Federated Suns having two productive ‘interior’ Marches rather than just one makes the Combine’s position ultimately unsustainable thanks to the forces freed up for offensive action in the Draconis March.
“The smart thing to do in their position would be to sue for peace, make whatever concessions they have to to secure ten to thirty years, and then turn all of their energies to infrastructure and economic rebuilding. Their production base is so underdeveloped that they have the most to gain of any of the Successor States, even relative to the Federated Suns, so it would be to their relative advantage.”
I paused. “Well, OK,” I said, parenthetically, “the smartest thing to do for them would be to go for a negotiated surrender while they’ve got a bargaining position. But the conservatism of their political establishment and the cult of aggression in their political mythology mean that they can’t bring themselves to do either of those.
“What they’ll do instead…” I trailed off, thinking. “Honestly, there’s no telling. It will be desperate, violent, and built on a high-risk, high-reward paradigm because they won’t be able to stop themselves from trying to win, but there are too many options to predict what the result will be in any kind of detail. They probably won’t reach for the weapons of mass destruction until the knives finish coming out, but other than that, I’ve got no idea.”
-and ComStar-
“The outer layers of Comstar, the ones that actually perform socially beneficial functions, are for the most part genuinely committed to… call them ‘good works’. Like any large and even partially meritocratic organization, though, there’s a tendency for one of the selection pressures narrowing the higher ranks to be the desire for power. Crosspollinate that with a doctrine that emphasizes their noble role as the true holders of civilization and knowledge-” I tried not to sneer, and failed, “-and the doctrinal mutation that only Comstar should hold knowledge of any kind is very possibly inevitable. Combine that with the fact that Comstar’s survival and power outside of Sol are completely dependent on a particular facet of technological superiority, and the first priority of the First Circuit is making as certain as possible that they’re the only ones with access to the Star League’s technology.”
Maathai shook her head disbelievingly, but I could see Regis and Johnson looking grimly thoughtful.
“That being the case, if they know about the memory cores, they’ll regard them as the greatest possible existential threat. They will spare no expense or effort to locate every copy, and balk at no atrocity to destroy them. NAIS, and any similar research institution we attempt to establish, will be only barely less important.
“The good news, for us, is that Comstar has spent most of the last couple of centuries drawn down to a fraction of its possible strength as part of a strategy that might be called security by obscurity. Their military forces are completely unblooded and would barely manage to be rated green by outside standards, and while their intel arm does have action elements, they’re very limited in numbers compared to the reach of their signals intelligence service.”
“Signals intelligence?” Ruckers asked, glancing at Johnson.
I nodded to him, also. “It’s not my field of expertise, but my baseline assumption would be that any signal sent by any HPG, anywhere, that could be theoretically cracked, has been. From the very beginning of the HPG network. Terran Hegemony Intelligence, to start with, but Comstar since the start of the Succession Wars.”
“That explains your prediction that ROM will be working to undermine Davion government of the League March,” Duchess Lestrade-Aten said. “And if they’re aware of the library cores from Helm, Artru, and New Dallas we can expect to see their hand as well.”
“It’s likely,” Katrina said, and inclined her head in a slight bow of apology in my direction. “I pressed her for one too many details during our live conversation after she returned from Helm. The transmission was coded, and we’ve deprecated the cipher used, but Simon, Edward, and I have been proceeding in the assumption that that information is compromised, including setting up decoy compartments that imply considerably less completeness in the Helm Library Core than was actually the case.”
Ruckers and Lestrade-Aten both looked… irritated. The latter asked me, “What sort of action against us do you expect from Comstar?”
I held up a hand and folded out a finger. “First, rabblerousing and instigation of insurgents, in the same mold as Davion will be seeing both in the League March and elsewhere.”
A second finger. “Second, League and Combine operations against us can expect ‘fortunate coincidences’ to fall their way wherever HPG messages or deniable electronic intelligence are concerned.”
Another. “Third, perhaps not immediately but once it becomes clear that those measures aren’t having the desired effects, then they will funnel military assets to the League and Combine, either directly or via false ‘SLDF caches’, to shore them up against us and perpetuate the balance of power that lets Comstar exercise such influence.”
The fourth. “And finally, if or when it becomes necessary for either us or the Federated Suns to move offensively against one of the other two states, Comstar will either find or manufacture an excuse for a full Interdiction. We must be prepared.”
-and, finally, the unification of the Magistracy of Canopus, Taurian Concordat, and Aurigan Coalition into a tightly woven defense-and-trade pact.
“...Iiiii must have missed that while I was in transit,” I said, gobsmacked.
The man behind the Foreign Affairs nameplate, Ragnar Lomin, hadn’t said anything up until now, just listening, and he didn’t say anything now. But he did snicker.
“Um,” I said, thinking. “It makes sense,” I said after a few moments. “I imagine that part of the Periphery is feeling pretty lonely after the CapCon’s fall and, well, my raid. The Taurians have plenty of heavy industry but not the population or tax base to really support it, and both of the others are - were? - only barely making it as interstellar concerns. And the additional military reserves to draw from would be valuable to all of them.”
“McCarron’s survivors went to Herotitus to rebuild, rather than Galatea,” Regis said, “and the Aurigans were able to hire them. Multiple landholds, apparently. We’re not sure how that deal connected to the Aurigans expanding their holdings right up to the Magistracy’s border, or where what’s clearly an SLDF Regimental Combat Team came from, but they seem to have managed it essentially peacefully.”
“Kimi, would be my guess,” I said. “One thing or another made them nervous enough to pull out the hardware they’d be praying to, either before or after they - signed on with the Aurigans?”
Lomin nodded.
“So, yeah,” I said. “Twelve Taurian, ten Canopian, and that’d make, umn, eight Aurigan regiments - mech regiments, call it? And I know that Detroit is probably able to make them as many basic combat vehicles as they want. Combine that with a great big question mark around Taurian nuclear doctrine and they should actually be fairly secure. Good for them.”
“How do you expect this development to affect our own dealings with Davion?” Katrina asked.
“Honestly, I don’t think it will matter,” I said, then amended, “Or at least, not on its own. Thirty regiments is enough to be difficult to conquer and to put a decisive end to piracy in the area, but not enough to stop an all-up offensive like we saw against the CapCon, and both sides know it. This new coalition would have to be suicidal to progress past saber-rattling and they wouldn’t be worth the price of invading. The risk factor there, for both sides, is the chance that ComStar will invent something and divert Davion’s attention away from the main fronts, where we’d rather have it.”
“Moving on to longer-ranged threats, all of us have been briefed on the Clans of Kerensky,” General Regis said. “How would you stop them?”
“...Tricky question,” I said. “Umn… The first thing I’d do would be put together a specific force for fighting Clan-style trials. The odds of them keeping their rules after they’ve been used against them are low, but a, a super-elite regiment or three would be relatively cheap and useful in other roles as well, and they can be mixed with any of the escalated options.
“The second thing would be to advance LIC agents through the Deep Periphery trade routes, with orders both to gather intelligence and look for opportunities to increase infighting and instability in Clan space. This would have a good chance of delaying and weakening the eventual invasion, but if discovered would provoke it instead, so we’d want to set up a communication line to evaluate those disruption chances before going ahead - despite how long the loop would be.
“The next cheapest option, tactically, would be to redevelop nuclear anti-shipping and anti-fighter tactics, and forward-deploy the tools to apply them. Keeping those operations outside the Ares Conventions’ fifty-thousand kilometer limit from inhabited worlds would make the diplomatic fallout a little easier. This would, implicitly, represent an open commitment to maximum force on both sides of the conflict, which would need careful consideration at the highest levels-” I nodded to Katrina, and then swept an including hand across the rest of the table, “-even if the stakes already involved national survival and potential enslavement of billions.
“The option that I’d recommend as Plan A would be to commit to developing the LCAF to a state capable of fighting the Clans and winning. With the correct doctrine and tactics, the technology in the Helm Library Core comes close enough to parity with that used by the Clans for success, and the Commonwealth has a massive advantage in population and tax base. Given sufficient development and preparation time, I believe that a force capable of rivaling the Star League Defense Force is achievable; the standard needed to reduce the Clans to a solved problem is far smaller than that.”
Maathai was wincing. What the Lyran Commonwealth called ‘internal policies’ included taxation and the treasury, and I could see her imagining the expense.
I gave her something halfway between a nod and a seated bow. “The price tag will be astronomical,” I admitted, “but it will work.”
“How ‘astronomical’?” Regis asked. “How many regiments would you recommend?”
“Hmm… Seventeen Clans, between four and ten Galaxies each, averaged by bidding idiocy and the need for reserves to four each is sixty-eight total… I’d recommend ninety each of battlemechs and aerospace fighters, and one-thirty-five or so of armor, as the starting number. It should not be regarded as conservative in the first place; if we assume that the Clans bid themselves down to say, seven invading Clans, forty, forty, and sixty might work. I’d be reluctant to, myself.”
Kelswa whistled. “And that’s for only one front,” he said.
“For only that front,” I agreed. “Call the absolute minimum sixty, sixty, and ninety if we include both League and Combine borders at current garrison levels.”
“You don’t feel that the Federated Suns’ Regimental Combat Team model is ideal, then?” Regis said.
“I think that it undervalues artillery and aerospace cover,” I said, “and over commits to both armored and infantry assets. Doing so makes it better as an occupation force, but in direct combat it’s wasteful of the lives of its infantry and of the jumpships required to move it. RCTs have a role, but it’s a role that doesn’t involve moving them anywhere.”
“What would you call ideal, then?” he asked.
“A five-regiment combined arms brigade, containing one standard aerospace regiment, one standard battlemech regiment, a four-battalion armor regiment, a regiment of battle-armored infantry with organic transport vehicles, and a support regiment consisting of one thirty-six unit battalion of artillery vehicles, one standard battalion of scout units to call fire for them, and a dedicated command battalion for the entire formation,” I said. I’d done a lot of thinking about it. “Plus medical, logistical, and repair elements, probably attached to the support regiment.”
He nodded, and looked at Katrina.
She glanced around the table, then told me, “Thank you, Commander Blackwing. That will be all we need to ask you today. Sargent Roland will have a file for you on your way out; I’d like you to go through it and get back to me with your recommendations for letters patent for your subordinates who were involved on Helm and Artru.”
“I’ll do that, Your Highness,” I said, standing and saluting - Outworlds style, palm flat and parallel to the forearm, both in front of the chest - before accepting the implicit command and getting out. I wasn’t sure what a ‘letter patent’ was, but I could figure it out.
***
Landholds. Katrina was talking about landholds.
Feudal systems, even simplified and partial ones like the Commonwealth’s, had obligations going both up and down, and both legal and implicit. One of the obligations sitting on Katrina Steiner’s shoulders, at the very top of the pyramid, was to make sure that exceptional service was rewarded - by wealth and by status alike.
The file she’d handed me was a list of worlds, and fairly exhaustive information about them, all across the Lyran Periphery. Economics, local personalities, institutions and traditions… I’d spent the better part of a week buried in the files from proverbial dawn to figurative dusk, with my own personnel files spread all around me the entire time.
I’d turned it in, and the next day had my marching orders - to have all of the named officers ready for a full Court appearance five days hence, suitable clothiers for dress uniforms appended. Most of the list had saved enough to cover their own needs, and I paid for the rest, so we were all there, as directed.
It’s one thing to read that the Archon’s throne is flanked by a pair of battlemechs. It’s another to be there and realize that the room still looked big in comparison to them. After the Argo’s main cargo bay, it was the second largest enclosed space I’d ever seen - and this one wasn’t some spartan productive space. The floor was seamless glass-smooth marble set with polished bronze seals six feet across every dozen or so feet up the literal red carpet from entrance to throne; the ceiling was easily a hundred feet up and vaulted in best medieval cathedral fashion. Along the walls, great banners hung in hundreds, each bearing more seals - from the numbers, I suspected that the wall banners were for individual worlds, and the floor seals for shires and provinces.
The entire wall behind the throne was dominated by a colossal Lyran flag - and the ceremonial Griffins weren’t painted in the usual blue-with-vertical-white-stripe of the Royal Guards, but in gloss black with an angled slash of blue across their torsos.
My colors.
The ceremony to invest each new noble with their fief and swear them to their responsibilities was surprisingly short, perhaps five minutes or so even with traditional call and response and timed waits for objections, but Katrina had instructed me to pick a planet for every officer from Major on up, less myself and Morgan Kell, and I had thirty-eight Majors and thirteen Colonels on that list.
She did each of them individually, which already had me in awe of her stamina when she called a recess for lunch after the last of my battalion COs had been ennobled and gifted an average of a company of mechs, a battalion of armor, and a squadron of fighters each. I wasn’t sure I could have given full attention to each person, but I had a good enough vantage point to see that she was, and that she was making a real impact on each of them. I was impressed.
The call to break for lunch cued dozen of doors, recessed in apparently decorative alcoves along the walls, to open and let through a positive army of liveried staff. In less than a minute they’d unloaded chairs and tables alike from rolling handcarts, and wheeled entire buffets into place to fill them.
“Not much like a prom, is it?” Sophitia teased in an undertone, and I snickered.
“Not much like at all,” I admitted cheerfully. As injokes went, it was pretty weak, but it reminded both of us of our very first date, back on Hoff, and that was good for both our moods.
Naturally, somebody intercepted us on our way from the buffets to the table one of the servers had discreetly pointed out as ours. Less predictably, it wasn’t a social climber or political animal. Despite the attention some barber had made to get his dark hair and goatee into perfect order, and the tailoring of his black-frogged scarlet jacket and bloused black pants, he managed to look somehow indefinably scruffy, and in this context, the use of a silk sash with matching katana and wakizashi for a belt was more than a little scandalous.
The man in the wheelchair he was pushing, on the other hand, I’d met. “Colonel Wolf,” I said, bowing around my loaded plate.
“Captain Snord,” Sophitia echoed, and I glanced to the side, first startled at the identification and then distracted by how good she looked in black. She noticed and gave me the ‘pay attention, dummy’ elbow.
Snord and Wolf were both smirking, but the latter said, “Apparently we’ve been assigned to join you.”
I was a little surprised, but a quick glance around showed that the Major Ward and the Kells were at Katrina’s table. “I don’t mind,” I said. “It’s over this way, or so I’m told.”
It was indeed that way; all four of the place settings had appropriate nametags, and Wolf’s was missing the usual chair.
We got all of our plates set down and took our seats, and then all four of us stared in awkward silence.
Wolf broke the deadlock by turning to Snord and saying, “So, any news on Rhonda?”
The younger man smiled. “Apparently her big news was that she’s walking again. Just a couple steps, but she wasn’t leaning on anything.”
“Good!” Wolf said. “It’d be a waste to have her benched this young.” Despite the potential resonance with his own dismemberment, he looked and sounded entirely positive.
“Your daughter was hurt?” Sophitia asked Snord. “What happened?”
Snord’s face clouded over, then he sighed. “She got in a fight with a real jackass. He coldcocked her then kept going. So I figured we had better odds here than back in the old country.”
From what I’d heard of Rhonda Snord, the odds of her rubbing a trueborn the wrong way in any Clan context were pretty good. “Given what I’ve heard of both,” I said, and managed not to look too amused at the way both men focused with instant intensity, “that was probably the right call. Though, how did you manage to end up, well-” I gestured around the throne room, “-here? I was in the room when the Archon got the news about you two staying connected, and I hadn’t thought she got that angry.”
Snord smirked. “I got lucky, and found the right six apology presents.”
Six presents? I gave him a puzzled look, before the data point of how calm Katrina and her cabinet had been about finding the Locura connected with the memory of how many warships the Wolf Dragoons had been issued to support their mission. I laughed without restraint, and ignored the way heads turned. “That’d do it,” I said cheerfully.
Snord gave me a nervous look; I’d been told in both lifetimes that I had an unnerving cackle, so I just smiled at him. “So, what’s she got your people doing, now that you’re back?” I asked.
“The regiment I got handed to take to the Combine are working for the Foreign Legion,” he said, motioning at Wolf. “The old hands, well, we were attached to Lostech hunting detachments, but we all got called back to base points in the last month or so.”
I would bet I knew why; the cybertech people were convinced that the Argo’s nav database held SLDF site data for more than just the Periphery district. Something about ease of coding versus security that I didn’t follow in detail, but if they were right then there was a lot more data just waiting to be decoded. Veteran relic-hunters like Snord’s original company would be valuable adjuncts to any mission to take advantage of that.
“I promised to take good care of his little lambs,” Wolf said. “I never thought I’d end my days as a den master, but it’s more rewarding than I expected.”
“We’ll just have to hope they’re ready for Natasha,” Snord said.
“Um?” Sophitia said around her latest mouthful of lunch. She swallowed, and said, “I thought that she’d, well, been held in prison?” There hadn’t been many ‘irreconcilables’ among the Wolf Dragoons taken at Solaris, but Kerensky had made the list, with a vengeance.
“The Combine sent a deep raid early in the year,” Wolf said. His reaction to the mention of the woman whose fire had crippled him was subdued; they’d been close friends before that, and he seemed to find it more a matter of regret and loss than anger. “They hit the prison she’d been sent to and took any prisoner with military skills, then dropped the rest on the planet the moon was orbiting. I’m told she’s serving in the Legion of Vega, now.”
Well, that was less than ideal. I puffed my cheeks out with a huff of air. “Well,” I said, “it could be worse. At least she’s in the Legion of Vega rather than a unit they actually supply and support.”
“You didn’t see her at her best,” Wolf said in Kerensky’s defense.
“I know,” I agreed. “I mean that statement in the liveliest respect for her skills as a combatant and as a trainer. If you’d said they put her at Sun Zhang, I’d be much more concerned.”
Wolf raised an eyebrow. “You think that Natasha would be more effective off the battlefield?”
“The public story about her independent company with you is that they were put together primarily from expendable discipline cases,” I said. “Is that wrong?”
“No,” he admitted, clearly wondering where I was going with it.
“Were they better than the rest of your people before she got her hands on them?”
“No, but her training techniques relied on being in the field,” Wolf said.
I was skeptical about that, but- “Sun Zhang isn’t exactly shy about putting their cadets in harm’s way. Anyway, though, you see my reasoning.”
“Yeah,” Snord agreed. “But, hey, mind if I ask a question?”
“Go ahead.”
“You really think Aleksander Kerensky was, well…” He trailed off, unable to repeat the term ‘coward’ of that man.
I let out a breath, puffing my cheeks out in the process. “No, not really,” I said. “I just… He wasn’t equal to the needs of his position, and the Star League paid the price for it.”
Most of the rest of the courtly lunch hour was taken up explaining that, and when the discreet army of servants appeared at our elbows to clear things away, I’d only gotten through about three quarters of what I’d picked out.
“Thank you, Commander Blackwing,” Wolf said as everyone started to stand. “I won’t claim I agree with you on every subject, but I’m at least comforted that you’re intelligently wrong. Whether or not the way you’ve upset the status quo is for the best, I’m glad to know you haven’t done it casually or frivolously.”
“No one ever gets to know history’s judgement in their own lifetime,” I said. “But we have to do the best we can with what we’re given. After that, all we can do is tell the world that we tried.”
Soon we were back into the waiting ranks again, this time with anticipation hovering heavy in the air. Sending battalion commanders to nowhere worlds like Trell I, with the forces to hold them, was a message about the scale of the debt Katrina felt was owed. But if Majors were being granted entire planets, no matter how poor, the list of more senior names would be assigned to real prizes, and everyone in the audience knew it.
Katrina listed off the commanders of the support departments first. Doctor Tiber, who’d run medical, she sent to Incukalns, and Doctor Raven from maintenance went to Aur. Lona Alevito, my head artillery commander. she sent to Chahar. Other names, increasingly directly involved in the fighting, followed, to worlds I recognized like Son Hoa, Circinus (which had apparently been conquered in the last couple of years?), and Kwangjong-ni.
Io Sasagawa was the last of the regimental COs, and as she stood up from swearing allegiance in return for title to the one-time capital of the Rim Worlds Republic, Apollo.
“Asha Blackwing of Alpheratz, stand forward,” Katrina’s voice rang out of the throne room’s speaker system as her eyes landed on me.
I took a quick little breath to brace myself and walked forward, sweeping my cape - the uniform called for just a dueling cape, but the tailors had insisted on lengthening it to only an inch or so short of the floor - out to one side and going to one knee before the throne. “As you command, Your Highness,” I said, and heard the sound system pick up my voice just as well as hers.
There was a moment of silence; I felt sweat trickle down my neck, raised by the tension and the heat of the spotlights.
“Lyrans,” Katrina Steiner said, “Look at this woman. You have heard the noble deeds that I have rewarded already this day. You have seen the hands that wrought them paid in the coins of wealth and glory for their worth and value to our state and people. You have counted the future in worlds made habitable once more, in rivers made to run pure, and in the ruin of our enemies. You know that their titles are value given for value received, in absolute equilibrium
“And yet,” she said softly, and paused to let it ring in the air.
“And yet, these things were not done by my and beginning, nor yet by their own. They were done by hers. It will tempt some to decry her for acting under a mercenary’s star, to say that what she commanded was so merely for pay, and I say that that is not so. She was not so poor or desperate before that day on Helm; she could all so easily have claimed everything that world held for herself alone.
“She did not. Rather than think only of profit, she chose to bring it to the Lyran people… and ask all but nothing in return.”
That was flattery. Katrina had channeled all of the Helm Core’s civilian applications through the Renaissance Development Corporation, and my 45% share of even the early trickle of licensing fees from Alarion was enormous.
Katrina plowed on. “How great a repayment is called for for such a debt?”
With no visual or auditory cue whatsoever, but perfect dramatic timing, the lights in the great hall dimmed.
“Rise and turn, Asha Blackwing,” Katrina ordered, and I did, my eyes drawn upward to a holographic map hovering in mid-air above the glittering crowd. The projector system had been installed when the Star League was new, notable enough even in that day to be called out in the tourist descriptions. The latest editions said that it was supposed to be nonfunctional, but…
Every star in the Lyran Commonwealth was visible, Skye, Tamar, and Donegal all showing in different shades of blue. The former Circinus worlds were the same shade as the rest of Donegal…
Until they, and a great swathe along the outer edge of the Commonwealth all the way to Trellshire along the Combine border, changed shades.
“For centuries, the citizens of the Lyran Periphery have been neglected,” Katrina Steiner said from behind me, her voice solemn with regret - and resolve. I started to turn, and her hand on my shoulder kept me in place. “Always, Donegal and Tamar, and the Commonwealth as a whole, have felt their resources and protection were needed more urgently, and elsewhere, and entire worlds have languished, destitute, for want of the investment and security to set them fully on their feet.
“Fortunately for us all, sometimes, two problems can solve each other.
“Asha Blackwing, will you swear true and eternal allegiance to the people, constitution, and crown of the Lyran Commonwealth?”
I glanced down at the nobles in the audience, and Sophitia’s face at the front of the crowd - then looked back up at the map showing the state itself. “I do so swear,” I said, as clearly and firmly as I could.
“Will you swear for the rest of your mortal days to care for and guard the people of these worlds shown before you?”
Jesus X Christ on a crutch. “I do so swear,” I repeated.
“Will you swear to give them justice, and safety, and every wisdom and opportunity?”
“I do so swear.”
“Will you swear to stand forever between these, your people, and any who would do them harm?”
“I do so swear,” I said one last time, and Katrina stepped forward next to me and took my right wrist to raise it over our heads like a boxing referee announcing the champion.
“Then, my lords and ladies of the Commonwealth, I give you Asha Blackwing, Warden of the Rift Approaches!”
***
“Soph, did you know she was going to do that?”
“Of course. I helped plan it.”
“I hate you.”
“Love you too, darling.”
***
There was, needless to say, a colossal amount of work to be done. The ‘Rift Approaches’ that Katrina had called into being weren’t just a sinecure or a publicity stunt. She was dead serious about creating a fourth member state for the Commonwealth out of the worlds that had been taken from the Rim Worlds Republic at the dawn of the Succession Wars, even if only to have a dedicated defensive cordon against a potential Clan invasion.
That meant creating an entire provincial bureaucracy and judiciary from basically whole cloth. It meant negotiating with ComStar for the HPG stations to coordinate all of that. It meant a vast amount of studying to learn the details of all of my new worlds, and of all the threats facing them. Dozens of smaller merc units were already in place as garrisons, and I had to gain an understanding of them and of the new detachments my subordinates - my nobles - were bringing with them as they headed to their worlds.
Fortunately I didn’t have to worry about finding the hardware; Katrina hadn’t been speaking generically. While I was off in Davion space, she and the LCAF had dispatched two expeditions, the first a covert commando team carried on a Scout-class jumpship and sensor-packed Leopard to find and disable the ComStar satellites that monitored the dead world of New Dallas, and the second a major expedition that had descended on the place and wholesale scooped up nearly a dozen regiments of ‘primitive’ battlemechs and four times as many combat vehicles of the same vintage.
First-generation Terran Hegemony Mackies were cripplingly inferior to any modern battlemech more than a third their size, but they and their contemporaries were more than enough to see off pirates - and free more modern forces for other duties. In my case, organizing them into strike forces to hunt down the pirates’ home bases to burn them out.
Katrina had also already picked out where my capital would be; Finmark had been one of the Rim Worlds Republic’s main shipbuilding centers, and while the warship yards had been wrecked by nuclear fire, there was at least a starting point in the asteroid mining infrastructure that had been abandoned, along with any surviving relics. The planet itself was in the depths of a nuclear winter even centuries later, and she’d selected it as a good candidate for a pilot and demonstration project for Renaissance’s terraforming tech, learning experience and publicity stunt in one.
The first scouting and relief teams had moved in even before I’d left Solaris, surveying the damage and providing medical care and supplies for the fifteen thousand or so hunter-gatherers that were the surviving descendents of what had once been a population of millions.
There were a thousand and one things still to do even before I left Tharkad, but there was one big one to take care of first.
***
We lost all control over how it would happen the instant we handed Katrina her invitation.
Neither Sophitia or I were exactly in love with spectacle for its own sake. She’d held out for a formal ceremony in a proper church on a civilized planet with nobody shooting at us, but she still hadn’t wanted to invite anyone outside the unit. Inviting my new boss had seemed like both an appropriate formality and a nice gesture.
Katrina Steiner, as a person, took that invitation in the spirit it was intended, but The Archon had other agendas besides merely spending a bit of time with allies and potential friends, and all of them were hard to argue with. She wanted to reinforce the political reality and power of the Rift Approaches and the other member states’ support and commitment to it; that meant that we needed an Occasion that would command attention, and that Katrina and Lestrade-Aten and Kelswa needed to attend in all their splendor.
Their presence, in turn, made the event a social occasion, and an invitation to it proof of or coin among the assembled glitterati of Tharkad and every world close enough to reach us in time. Invitations were worth favors to whoever could offer them - and, sitting at the elbow of the grandmaster of the Tharkad Social Scene as she worked that advantage ruthlessly, I kept my ears open and my big mouth shut.
For I thank Old Yale, and I thank the Lord… a corner of my mind sang, trying to distract the rest of me from the Big Moment that was looming increasingly large in the immediate future. ...And-I-also-thank-my-father-who-is-Chairman-of-the-Board!
The music carrying through the door in front of me - and through the stonework underfoot, because that was a big organ - changed, and I took a careful breath and stepped forward as the smiling churchmen (I had no idea what their job was properly called, but they worked here full-time, at least) swung the twenty foot tall doors open wide, the intricate carvings and painting and gilding worked into every inch of them, just like the entire rest of the headache-inducingly overpacked building, glittering and flashing as they moved
The nave ahead of me seemed bigger than it was, and it was more than big enough to start with. Light reading of the tourist bumpf about the Cathedral of Saint Arandelle of the Immaculate Snows included the statistics of the interior spaces, and while the nave was longer than the Archon’s throne room, it was also only a little over half as wide, and had a slightly lower ceiling. It was a smaller space, and further constrained by the fact that the nave proper was divided from its side-aisles by a full-length colonnade, rather than being fully arched like the throne room.
But the resulting narrowness increased the impression of height, fooling the eye and stretching proportions upwards, especially without any battlemechs around to give scale. The side-aisles had full-height roofs, and it seemed their entire walls were vast expanses of impossibly intricate stained glass, with only enough actual stonework to frame them. The kaleidoscope shading those windows threw onto the floor and packed in-guests was obvious.
As much as most worlds’ customs disapproved of same-sex marriages, there was still a clear expectation that the party that asked for the marriage would ‘be the groom’. The fabric my own billowing cloud of white had been made of had seemed slightly off to me in ordinary light, but under the jewel-toned scatter of the cathedral’s windows, it seemed to blaze with impossible purity out of the corners of my eyes. I chalked up another reminder about the wisdom of listening to experts, and concentrated on one, not hyperventilating, and two, keeping my steps at the pace we’d worked out as best.
The stunned look I could see Sophitia giving me as I got close enough for either of us to make out facial features made the incredible amount of faffing around we’d done in the previous days worth it, and the years of waiting, and even the damned corset. I tried to keep my own reaction to an appropriately demure smile, and failed miserably.
Hiding the other reaction to the contrast of her new blue-and-white LCAF dress uniform with her unbound ruby-red hair was easier.
I knew who else was by that altar, all of them but the officiating priest personally, and of course I knew the plan for the day backwards and forwards, but looking back at my actual memories of the moment, I could only tell you how they stood or what they were wearing from the benefit of pictures I’ve seen since.
At the time, all I saw was her.
I didn’t register the passage of time, either, all my concentration on just drinking in the sight of her face, grinning just as much as I was with her eyes glittering emerald just so. The priest’s voice was a drone like a gnat, unregistered until she said, “I do.”
That meant it was time, and I dragged up just enough concentration to listen.
“Do you, Asha Blackwing, take this woman to be your wife from this day forward?” the priest asked. “To join with you and share all that is to come for better or for worse, until the day that death alone parts you?”
I took a deep breath.
“I do.”
...WE’LL TELL THE WORLD THAT WE TRIED.