Tell The World That We Tried [Battletech] [CYOA]

[Valles]

Realized, very belatedly, that I'd forgotten to post this here. So let me start fixing that.

(Also, am I blind and missing the button to neutralize only imported colors, but not other formatting?)

Edit: Let's try something else...

---

WON’T YOU LEND YOUR LUNGS TO ME...
 

Tell The World That We Tried
A Battletech Fanfiction, inspired by Fitzgerald’s CYOA at https://imgur.com/gallery/M41mI
By Valles

 
So this was a hangover.
 
In the liminal space between sleeping and waking, it was easy to check the streams of memory, laid out in separate elements for consideration for the first and perhaps the last time. The older me had never drunk more than a glass or so of champagne in a given year. The younger had four years of hardened party experience and was capable of rating this hangover as a 4.6, plus-or-minus 0.2, on a 1-to-10 scale of ‘Are you sure you didn’t just oversleep?’ to ‘Allow the doctor to explain just how close you came to dying of alcohol poisoning’.
 
The once-younger would be living a comfortable-ish, quiet life with a loving family in twentieth century Earth, able to make both a critical technological revolution and a massive fortune with an engineering degree a thousand years in advance of the times… And of doing a perfectly good job taking care of, loving, my-our family there.
 
The now-younger me, me-me, had been unwillingly dragged to enough wakefulness for the memories to merge together into a vaguer and probably more competent gestalt ‘me’, and incidentally to recognize that infernal breebling as the phone rather than the alarm clock.
 
Landlines, my god. Future of the eighties, go fuck yourself.
 
I sat up, tossed the traffic cone at the hotel room’s door, and stood carefully to shamble over to the nearer wall, and the phone hanging from it. “Euuh?” I mumbled. Actual verbalization wasn’t going to come online for another thirty seconds or so.
 
“...Hello, this is Raleigh Wallace, with the Law Office of Pierre, Watson, Wallace and Watson,” the voice on the other end of the line said, after a moment’s nonplussed pause. “Have I reached the number of Asha Blackwing?”
 
“Mmmm,” I affirmed, and let myself slump down the wall to the floor. The chill of the fake wood paneling against my completely bare bottom woke me up enough to add, “S’rry…” A yawn interrupted me before I could finish, “...was asleep.”
 
“Ah, I apologise for waking you, then, Miss… Blackwing?”
 
I ‘mmm’d a confirmation, and he went on. “My firm has been retained as executors of the will and estate of the late Sieg Rostig, Count Guanahani.”
 
A moment’s mental check turned up where I’d heard that name before - my, younger-me-that-was-from-this-universe, mother had mentioned the name once as being her best guess of who my father was. “My mother mentioned the name…” I said.
 
“Your Alpheratz Sports Association medical evaluation confirmed the genetic relation,” Wallace - I wondered if he was one of the senior partners in the firm’s name, or a relative - said.
 
Despite myself, I winced. My encounter with the ASA bureaucracy hadn’t worked out well for anyone involved, even if the changes in my life had done wonders to reinforce that I’d made the right choice in the end. ...In the end. Add that to this additional bit of bad news, and my mother’s death a few months ago… Younger-me wouldn’t’ve dealt well, at all.
 
“Most of Count Guanahani’s estate is tied up in the title and associated properties, but you were named as a secondary beneficiary. We’d appreciate it if you’d be willing to visit us to discuss matters in more detail.”
 
I yawned again. “Yeah,” I said. “Um… When’d be convenient for you? I’m, uh, between obligations right now.” Unemployed and blacklisted, to be blunt and depressing about it.
 
“The Guanahani estate is the highest priority on Mr. Watson’s docket. We are at your disposal,”
 
A senior partner of the firm would clear his schedule to accommodate mine. ...Okay then. I glanced at the clock, then hauled myself to my feet. “All right,” I said, “about where are your offices?”
 
While he explained the directions, I headed to my desk, the cord stretching away from the handset over my bare shoulder, and grabbed a post-it - apparently, they were eternal - and a pen to write the address down. “All right,” I said again. “Including travel time… If I have the train schedule right, I can be there about twelve.”
 
Alpheratz had a twenty-six-and-a-bit hour day, so that would be an hour before local noon.
 
“Certainly,” Wallace said. “We’ll be waiting for you.”
 
We said our goodbyes and hung up, and I went to the little studio apartment’s closet to assemble a formal-ish outfit out of the collection of club and casual wear there.
 
The streams split again as I caught a look at myself in the mirror. The younger half said that the girl with the rippling six-pack and rippling other things needed to get back on her workout schedule, I was starting to lose tone. The older half was mostly bowled over by the hormone surge, and a little tempted to start looking into Dead or Alive cosplay.
 
I shook both off and went to take a shower; I needed to hustle if I was going to make my train.
 

***

 
The lightest sweater I owned, a wonderfully comfortable and almost shapeless gray thing, concealed the hilariously daring neckline of the little black dress; the low-riding leggings combined with the not-actually-scandalous hemline to seem almost modest, and make a nice contrast with the sweater. Scrunchy for the hair, let it dry on the train, and grab an overpriced scone from the stall in the station then eat it en route, along with coffee - one of the things the two mes disagreed about. The day was a little warm for the sweater, but what could you do?
 
Even if I hadn’t been kind of suspicious at how eager a smooth senior lawyer was to hustle me into signing before I’d read all the papers they waved in front of me, I’d’ve gone over things on principle. What I found doing that reading made me absolutely sure to make that an ironclad rule going forwards.
 
Dear Old Dad’s assets fell, it turned out, into three categories. The first, and biggest, was tied up in the title of Count Guanahani - noble title to an entire continent on one of the Outworlds Alliance’s richer and more industrialized worlds, and with it hundreds of thousands of square kilometers of land, much of it wilderness but no small amount quite valuable indeed. The second was in a great honking pile of cash from the liquidating and consolidating he’d done of his investments from his deathbed - eight hundred thirty-two million c-bills worth, all told.
 
The third was the skeleton of a mercenary regiment, fully equipped and existing on paper if only someone would take on the work of it, but almost completely lacking in personnel. It had had people, not so long ago, but only the training cohort had survived the radiological weapon that had killed the rest of the people my dad had put together to fill it… along with him.
 
I looked at the elderly and esteemed Mister Watson after I found the three signatures of my fellow bastards accepting shares of the cash and signing away any interest in taking command of the latter, and was quietly pleased when he squirmed, ever so slightly.
 
Then I flipped to the next page and picked up the pen.
 
“There is,” the lawyer said before I could sign, “something not present in the contract that you should be aware of.”
 
“Oh?” I asked, saccharine-sweet and not hiding that I was already annoyed and suspicious.
 
He bowed slightly. “The Alliance Military Corps is… aware of the assets entailed in the unit holding company, and determined to acquire them. The formal proofing period for a newly established mercenary unit is three months from the date of transfer of ownership, and in such a case as this… The verdict is not in doubt.”
 
I looked down at the paper. Three months to put together enough of a company to get the heck out of dodge, with a one-fifth share of the cash to work with. And probably dirty tricks thrown my way at the same time, before the final kangaroo court.
 
A hundred and sixty eight million cbills was more than enough for a comfortable life anywhere in the Inner Sphere or out of it, but…
 
“Give me a lever and a place to stand,” I whispered, and signed on the line.
 

***

 
Of course, there were a fuckton of logistical problems to work through to get everything out of the Alliance inside my three-month deadline, but I had at least the start of a plan.
 
Step one was meeting the people I already had.
 
As usual, the retina scan and magstrip and everything else sophisticated declined to work. I’d’ve thought it was just their being as decrepit as the rest of the shabby commercial block by the spaceport, but the last time a sensor like that had worked properly I’d been, like, twelve. It had driven the doctors mad the last time I’d gone to the hospital.
 
Fortunately, the keypad access involved physical buttons, and did work.
 
“Look,” a voice ahead of me was saying, “I get wanting to hang onto the Regiment. I get that. But even the OWA isn’t gonna let a pile of brand new loot walk free, and then where are we? The Colonel was a straight shooter. He wouldn’t’ve wanted us to just end up Dispossessed - and if we wanna avoid that, we’ve gotta take our share before the local yokels get their hands on it.”
 
“Sure, but the yokels aren’t the only thing we’ve got to think about,” answered another voice, in a Draconis accent. “There’s our Lord’s heirs, as well. The Outworlds can go to hell, but I’m not comfortable just… stealing from them.”
 
“Fortunately, that won’t be necessary,” I said, stepping out of the back hallway and into the impromptu conference area. It was stuffed full of young, fit bodies, about twice as many as older-me remembered from school classes and three times as many as younger-me did - which’d put the total at about sixty.
 
Hail, hail, the gang’s all here.
 
The bald guy who’d been sitting on the floor at the front of the denser cluster of hardbodies on the right hauled himself to his feet. “The fuck are you?”
 
“And how’d you get in here?” asked the first voice, attached to an extra-sparkly pretty-boy wearing actual jingly spurs on his boots. No points for guessing his service branch.
 
The other of the two who’d already been standing up was a - well, being blunt, she looked like a Standard Issue Japanese Schoolgirl, dressed up in fatigues three sizes too big for her.
 
I gave them all a grin. “Hi,” I said. “I’m Asha Blackwing, nice to meet you. And I got in here because as of about noon yesterday, my name’s on the lease, so the lawyers handed over the master key.” I realized after the fact that I was posing a little, and nevermind that jeans and a t-shirt wasn’t much to show off. Not that my body needed the help, admittedly…
 
Now that Bald Guy was standing full height, I realized that he was shorter than I’d expected. Still taller than me, because frankly I was tiny, but shorter than the bishonen.
 
“You are our Lord’s daughter?” Schoolgirl asked, sounding a little dubious, while her two fellow leaders were busy looking me up and down.
 
Guess she was straight; pity.
 
“Apparently one of four,” I said, and hopped up on one of the cheap folding tables in the absence of a spare chair. It creaked but didn’t go down. “In order of age, some kind of accountant or something, a religious whackadoodle, a medical doctor, and me. They already had lives, and the old man’s will dictated that all the mercenary stuff go together as a unit if possible, so…”
 
I trailed off and spread my hands. “I’m gonna at least make a try at it,” I said.
 
“You call the Colonel ‘the old man’?” Baldy said, sounding like he was looking for an excuse to be offended.
 
I shrugged. “My life up ‘til now’s been notably short on paternal presence and child support,” I said, “And as much as the latter’s been made up for, ‘Dad’ is for people you know, and ‘my father’ seems…” I paused, hunted for the right word, then wrinkled my nose and finished, “Stilted.”
 
Baldy seemed about to fart more testosterone in my face, and/or take a swing, making younger-me’s competitive instincts perk up to process his stance and the most likely angles, but Bishonen interrupted him. “What do you know about being a mercenary?” he asked.
 
“That there’s a hell of a lot I don’t know?” I asked sweetly; it got a laugh out of enough of the room to count the joke as a success. “More seriously, I do know that it’s a hell of a lot different from being a sports team captain, or an engineering intern. The will talks about the formed unit, and I’ve gotten what you’d call under-the-table warnings that if we can’t get a working regiment inside three months, all our hardware goes to the Outworlds Alliance Military Corps… And they get to decide what ‘working’ is.”
 
Several people in the crowd swore, and everyone got more sober - aside from the ones who’d obviously already figured as much.
 
“So,” I went on, “obviously we need to be gone by the time they can serve their predetermined verdict. I figure that I can handle hiring enough jumpship and dropship crew to get by and get us to Galatea or someplace else we can, umm, consolidate? And there, we’ll have good odds hiring officers, too.”
 
Not many heads were nodding yet, figuratively or otherwise, but the kids - I was pretty sure I was the oldest person in the room, and younger-me had only been twenty - were listening. “You are certain about the crews, My Lady?” the Schoolgirl asked.
 
“Mondai arimasen,” I said, ‘not a problem’. “I have a plan…”
 

***

 
Rare is the profession that does not have its own favored watering holes, its own drinking establishments claimed and hallowed by local tradition. This is even more true when there’s a geographic element in play.
 
Thus, it was a given that there were Spacer Bars; and younger-me had, among her various sins, acquired a long list of acquaintances and drinking buddies some of whom would, inevitably, know where around the spaceport they were to be found. Really, the hardest part had been deflecting the various passes and other invitations sent my way while I was going down the list.
 
Convincing hard-up twentysomething crewmen to tell me anything and everything I wanted to hear was a skill younger-me had long since mastered, so in short order I was on the way to the hard part, and starting with bringing the small table of older crewmen a refill.
 
The married couple were in middle age, seventies maybe - grey haired and a little shopworn, but unbowed for decades yet. They had been paying attention pretty-much only to each other; when they caught sight of me their hands practically teleported from interlacing over the table to casually laying nearly a foot apart. Their friend was a little younger, perhaps fiftyish, with only hints of silver and the subtly different facial tan of a man who spent a lot of time in vacuum sunlight.
 
He looked me up and down and said, while his friends concentrated on not looking guilty, “So, let me guess. You’ve got a great lead on a bunch of LosTech prospectors who just need a pickup to carry their loot away.”
 
I set the new drinks down in front of them, then sat down at the round table’s free seat with my beer. “If I did, I wouldn’t be sharing it with you,” I said, while my brain once more turned over the question of whether to go to Helm or New Dallas first. “Actually, I was wondering how jumpship crews got hired.”
 
One of the married couple gave me a suspicious look, but it was his husband that said, “Is that why you tied my poor reactor watch in a knot?”
 
I shrugged. “I wanted to make sure this was the table I needed… And it’s not like they’re complaining.”
 
The little pervs.
 
“You could have just asked,” the spacewalker pointed out.
 
I shrugged uncomfortably. There were lots of good sides to being the melange that was me, but some of the weak points from one side or the other had survived. “Flirting guys I know how to deal with. Serious conversations out of the blue are harder.”
 
“You’re the kid that inherited Hasenpfeffer and Rockall,” the suspicious one said, like he’d just figured something out, and I smiled.
 
“Asha Blackwing, nice to meet you.” Hasenpfeffer was an Invader class jumpship, a hundred and fifty-two thousands tons of mostly liquid helium, germanium, and imitation germanium products. Like all jumpships, there was only one thing she was good for aside from floating helplessly in microgravity like the expensive lump of nigh-uselessness she was - but that one thing was the key to interstellar travel, because the supercooled, finely-managed mass of physics-breaking intricacy that made up all but a tiny fraction of her mass was capable of translocating both her, and any more capable spacecraft - known as dropships - that was docked to her three carry collars up to thirty lightyears in seconds.
 
Or she would have, if one of her docking collars hadn’t been broken.
 
Rockall was a Merchant class, much the same but about four-fifths the size, with only two collars. Though both of hers worked, at least.
 
“Why not just go through a hiring service?” the other husband asked.
 
I held up a finger. “Because the hiring service needs to stay in good with the Alliance government.” Finger number two. “Because the Alliance would really like to have a free combined arms regiment with transport.” Finger number three. “Because if we’re still in Alliance territory in eighty-seven days, a judge gets to decide if we’re a ‘real’ merc unit with a right to keep our gear.” Finger number four. “And, obviously, the judge also works for the Alliance.”
 
I lowered my hand. “Granted that judges are rarely amused by somebody playing silly buggers with the law like that, I still figure trying to hire under the table is a smaller risk. Thus the need to find someone who knows what the hell they’re doing.”
 
EVA guy gave me a look. Took a pull of his (new) drink. Decided, in the end: “You’re paranoid, kid.”
 
I thought about that. “...Yeah, probably. Question is, am I being paranoid about the right things.”
 
The married couple looked at each other, having a quick, wordless conversation, then the suspicious one sighed and his husband told me, “Well, for starters, I think you’re gonna need to go to the hiring services, anyway, particularly Comstar.”
 
I couldn’t keep myself from making a face. Comstar, the sixth and most secretive faction of the Inner Sphere, was the one of the lot least affected by the way the Succession Wars had ripped infrastructure and institutional memory to shreds, for the good and simple reason that they’d secretly arranged the murder and destruction of anyone and anything who might stop it while they busily flew under the radar.
 
“Yeah, they’re kind of creepy,” the helpful one agreed.
 
Yeah, let’s go with that.
 
“But,” he continued, “because they’re everybody’s phone company, they’re not tied to any local interest like that. They’ll play straight with you. This far out, there aren’t gonna be more than a handful of jump crews around, but you can probably get ahold of enough officers to train up a raw crew. Dropships’ll be easier, though if you want to poach any of ours-”
 
I raised my hands in innocent surrender. “I wouldn’t expect to,” I said, more or less honestly.
 
The suspicious one snorted. His husband thwapped him on the wrist and said, “In the end, forget the Alliance - your big trouble’s gonna be getting the locking gear on Hasepfeffer’s collar fixed, and making sure you get all the pirates weeded out of your intakes.”
 
“...I hadn’t thought of that angle,” I admitted. “Too focused on my time limit.” I thought for a few seconds, then huffed quietly. “Have to be Comstar for those parts, unless they’re simple enough to be fabricated on-site. Ugh.”
 
“Well, you’ve got something to work with,” the EVA guy said. “Right?”
 
I huffed and nodded. “A bit of startup cash,” I understated, “and the hardware, and the ships - collateral for a loan if I really have to. A handful of people, maybe a company’s worth.”
 
“And whoever you know.”
 
“Like who?” I asked. “A pack of drunken college students?”
 
“I gather most soldiers at least start off young and stupid,” he deadpanned, and I had to laugh.
 

***

 
The song throbbing through the floor and the thin warehouse walls from the depot where our first few techs were getting introduced to the handful of ‘mechs we had on-planet wasn’t anything older-me would have recognized from living in the turn of the twenty-first century, but that didn’t keep it from reminding me irresistibly of the Glitch Mob version of Seven Nation Army - deep, relentless, and thoroughly electronic.
 
“Sorry about the noise,” I said to the appointment that had been waiting for me. He was ambiguously adult, which in the thirty-first century could have meant anywhere between a mature mid-twenties or a baby-faced sixty-something, tall and handsome and powerfully muscled.
 
Pity about the Snake Plissken mullet. Ugh, future of the eighties, go fuck yourself.
 
“I’ve heard lots worse,” he assured me, in an accent that I had to fight for a moment to place as ‘Somewhere in the Free Worlds League, Maybe?’ “I remember a planet where the local beats were literally that, all percussion and no melody to speak of… Anyway.”
 
He smiled and held out a hand to shake. “Major Jules Rakis, late of the Syrian Lancers by way of Reuban’s Roughriders. I gather that you’re hiring cadre?”
 
I accepted the handshake, didn’t fight when he turned it into a kiss to the air a half-inch or so over my knuckles, and walked around behind the desk. “Have a seat,” I invited him. “Coffee?”
 
“Black, please,” he said.
 
I poured him one of the mismatched mugs I’d salvaged from my shitty apartment and slid it over, sitting down while I watched to see how he’d react to the well-aged Student Fuel.
 
He hid the flicker of a grimace well.
 
“Tell me about the Roughriders,” I said.
 
Summarizing the story he gave me, the Roughriders had been formed from a group of League troops who’d gotten sick of their nation’s ‘curse’ - the endless bucket-of-crabs civil strife between the League’s component provinces and noblemen - and decided to strike out on their own as a community of comrades.
 
To hear him tell it, they’d been fairly good at the fighting part of the mercenary business, but had trouble making it work as a business. Successive contracts for the Capellan Confederation, the Draconis Combine, and the Federated Suns had taken a slow toll on the Roughriders’ equipment and hiring lists, slowly bleeding their strength out until a short company had loaded aboard their last dropship and battered jumpship to take up a planetary defense contract here in the Outworlds.
 
When the raid their employers in the local government had feared and expected came, they’d fought it off and more - annihilated it, in one of the knock-down drag-out fights to the death that had become vanishingly rare as production rates for advanced hardware like battlemechs fell and fell and fell…
 
And run afoul of the reason for that rarity, as Rakis and a handful of other survivors trickled back to civilization and Alpheratz, Dispossessed to a man, their dropship wrecked and their jumpship taken by small craft while they could do nothing but watch helplessly from the ground.
 
I let him hang for a moment, skimming over the (Comstar-verified) references he’d brought with him, but, honestly, I couldn’t afford not to take the opportunity. I needed a field commander who knew his business too badly if I wanted to make things work.
 
I stood up and reached over the desk as I admitted it. “Welcome to the Blackwings, Major,” I said.
 
This time he shook properly. “Glad to be here,” he said, and stood too. “Where do you see me?”
 
“Come on and I’ll show you around,” I said, and led him out of the shabby little office and into the Wubs.
 
The four Goblins - forty-five ton medium tanks with capacitor-fed laser main guns and built-in infantry compartments that made them… decent… infantry fighting vehicles - had been the only combat units rolled out of the Triumph-class dropship that my people had taken to get here. The few survivors of the incarnation of the regiment that my father had led had taken their old dropper, and everything aboard it, as part of their severance pay, with his blessings.
 
Inconvenient for me, of course, but still, best of luck to them.
 
But anyway. Four Goblins was enough to mount all of the infantry and tank crews we actually had; our mechwarriors and fighter jocks were harder off, but-
 
“We have the equipment to mount all of them. A wing of Corsairs, eight Battlemasters, twice that each of Marauders and Centurions,” I went on.
 
Rakis shook his head disbelievingly. “Did you raid a Davion armory?”
 
“In a manner of speaking.” I waved a hand at the tanks, the couple of utility trucks parked with them, and, behind the wall, the massive dropship parked on the pad our warehouse backed up against. “They lost a delivery shipment in the Second War. Short-lived radiological weapon killed the crews, left things just drifting. This is the salvage, just found.
 
“Dropships, three Unions, the Triumph, and a Condor,” I said. “Jumpships, Invader and Merchant. There’s repairs needed but Comstar is swearing they can have the parts fabricated and installed inside a month and a half. But… There’d been a dud radioweapon, back when. The old incarnation of the unit set it off by accident; The casualties were heavy, and most of what was left got out of the business.”
 
He winced. “I can see what you need cadre for.”
 
I laughed blackly over the bass drop. “Yeah,” I agreed. “But anyway, without ship crews, it’s all packed up waiting, we can’t get at it. And that makes me itchy, for a lot of different reasons.”
 
“I know a couple of different people I can call,” Rakis said. “Nobody that’s captained a ship before, but men that’ve been in the business long enough to know it.”
 
I beamed up at him. “That’ll be a lifesaver,” I said, blissfully ignorant, and waved him towards the crowd working on overhauling one of the Goblins. “Come on, meet the crew.”
 

***

 
Keeping in mind the advice I’d gotten, I kept reaching out to my own ‘contacts’, by which I meant the various reckless college kids younger-me had gotten fucking wasted with. All of younger-me’s proper friends had stopped talking to me after that ASA disaster, pretending they were horrified at what she’d done rather than just afraid they’d be called out for doing the same, but fuck ‘em. The frat boys were happy enough to answer questions if it meant they got to stare at my tits, so mutual use and abuse was the order of the day.
 
So, knowing one of the loslytz-chugging testosterone poisoned beer-can-headbutters worked at an accounting firm - and lets be honest, as many of the fuckwits as I knew, statistically, at least one had to - I called him up and asked if he had any coworkers in the grim gray depths of a mid-life crisis.
 
He did me one better. He found a divorcee.
 
“Can I offer you a drink?” I said, smiling up at the man as he arrived at the table in the little cafe not far from his office. “The coffee’s more than decent, but the loslytz looks right at home with the rest of the drink menu, fair warning.”
 
‘Loslytz’ was a staple of Alpheratzi alcoholic… anything. Brandy made from the native losaplum, cheap loslytz tasted like somebody ran an old lawnmower over a patch of menthol and then used the scraped off green mat from its underside as a flavoring agent, and expensive loslytz didn’t taste like much of anything. Losaplums, nasty as they were flavorwise, were a weed-tree, so doing something with the fruit had been a tradition since the planet was settled.
 
“...Coffee’s fine,” he said, looking uncomfortable.
 
Also uncomfortably like Danny DeVito, which made him actually shorter than me.
 
I waved the waiter over, then, once he had his cup, asked, “So, what did Joe say?”
 
“That he’d heard a job offer that might work out for me,” he said, and scrubbed a hand across his scalp from one fringe of hair to the other. “But… I mean, it’s… You’ve gotta know, something first.”
 
“That you’ve been having a rough time, lately?” I filled in. “I asked him if he knew somebody that was.”
 
He looked down at his coffee, then back up at me. “Why?” he asked.
 
“I’m putting together a business startup, obviously. We need a financial director; someone that knows money, contracts, investment, inventories,” I said. “Which, leaving aside temporary troubles, we both know you are.”
 
He made an uncomfortable gesture, but didn’t deny it.
 
“The kicker is, though, that the startup is a mercenary regiment. Which means that not only do we need someone with all of that experience and training, we need one that’s willing to pick up stakes and leave home, certainly for years and possibly permanently. Most financial professionals don’t match that mold - but…”
 
“A guy that got taken to the cleaners in a shitty divorce hasn’t got so many ties,” he finished darkly. He hesitated for a moment, then admitted, “I don’t know how big a business a regiment is.”
 
“About twelve hundred people, in our case, once we’ve filled all the positions called for. Which we’re a ways from; we’ve got maybe seventy now. Lots of professionals, lots of money tied up in equipment that’ll be getting shot at… But also a lot of cash coming in, if we can do it right.”
 
“Loans?” he asked, and I knew that I had him. His eyes were lit up with interest, his round face starting to smile.
 
“None outstanding,” I said. “Most of the setup is accounted for in a windfall. The catch for us is… I’ve been told by a couple different people that there’s elements in the government, the Outworlds government, that have decided it’d be… easier… to just legal away our validity as a regiment and confiscate that hardware than to hire us. So, we have a deadline of about a month and a half to have at least our ship crews hired and ready to go, so we can be over the border before the judgement day’s on us.”
 
“Ship crews,” he repeated, his eyes getting a little wider as he did the math for what I was talking about with ‘lots of money in equipment’.
 
“Yeah,” I said quietly, both confirming the detail and agreeing with the feeling behind it. The silence sat there for a moment, more or less comfortably, before I said, “So, sounds like you’re interested, Mister Poisson?”
 
He smiled. “Call me Phil,” he said.
 

***

 
Tracking down a set of simulator pods was an expense I fully expected to pay for itself fairly quickly. There were limits to the skills they could impart, of course - some amount of ‘field’ time would be absolutely necessary - but practicing against the computer could at least get a newbie up to some kind of not-tripping-or-crashing competence, and slow down the acquisition of rust for people who knew what they were doing. All while costing a lot less per hour than putting operational time on the real units.
 
And if it let me learn some of the business earlier, well, it benefited the rest of the unit, too.
 
To younger-me’s intense disappointment, I’d turned out to have nowhere near the kind of three-dimensional thinking needed to make a good aerospace fighter pilot. I did a bit better than standard at orbital mechanics, thank you Kerbal Space Program, and no worse than any other rookie at tracking my opponents, but as far as situational awareness of ground and altitude went, I was garbage.
 
Naturally, I’d found that out in the most embarrassing possible way.
 
My stab at battlemechs, though, was going better. Not well, but better.
 
When I finished the drill, I climbed out to let the next person in line take their turn, scrubbing at my face and hair with a towel off the stack next to the door. The simulators were designed to be as realistic as possible, within the technical limits of LosTech, including dumping literal oven-heat over their current victim, and even stripped to nothing but workout spandex, cooling jacket, and diving-er-neurohelmet, that was enough to have me ‘glowing’ like the proverbial sun.
 
“Exercise complete,” Rakis said, giving me the same appreciative look-over as about two-thirds of the rest of the room, but less subtly. “Kowalczyk, Peron, good teamwork. Blackwing, situational awareness is better but still your weak point. Mochida, the zigzag was a good tactic but don’t get used to counting on it; better gunners would have punished you hard for getting out in the open like that.”
 
I nodded along with the others while the Major moved on to the other bank of pods and the lance we’d been practicing against. It was more or less what I’d expected.
 
“Sorry about that last shot,” Peron lied blatantly to me, grinning. “Just not quite enough to catch up with superior talent.”
 
“Sure I’m not,” I replied, as sugary as the sweetest cake, except that the cake was a lie. “Which is why you’re saying that here rather than on the mats. We could make a contest, maybe? Here, there, maybe a race for tiebreaker?”
 
He shuddered and backed away, hands raised defensively. “OK, I’m not that dumb.”
 
I laughed, and he joined in.
 
As the little crowd started to disperse, a wave from the edge of the room caught my eye - deliberately.
 
I took another scrub through my hair with the towel - already damp - and strolled over to the secretary we’d hired from a temp agency for our time still on Alpheratz. “Hey, Maxwell,” I said. “Who’ve you got for me?”
 
The woman standing next to him was - well, a soccer mom. Middle-aged-ish, carrying a bit of extra solidity, not unattractive but not a standout either, brown hair, about three inches taller than I was. She extended a hand to shake. “Io Sasagawa,” she said, in a Lushann accent. “Late of the Flying Nightmares.”
 
The First Alliance Air Wing, to give them their proper name, was the elite unit of the Alliance Military Corps - which was to say, probably the very best aerospace formation anywhere. “Nice to meet you,” I said, accepting the handshake. “Asha Blackwing.”
 
“You’re… the Colonel? Of the merc regiment?” she asked, disbelievingly.
 
“I inherited the hardware and I sign the payroll,” I said with a smile. “And I have an excellent lieutenant-colonel to make sure I don’t make any irretrievable mistakes. Anyway, what can I do for you?”
 
Sasagawa shook her head disbelievingly. “Well… Long story short, I’m looking for something better for my daughter to do with her life than fighting a losing battle against pirates for fifty years. She’s old enough to fly, and I’ve taught her the basics… And I understand you’re hiring pilots.”
 
“We are, yeah,” I agreed. “We’ve got seven so far, and ships for thirteen more. Though, we would need to see what she can do, not just...” I trailed off, without a graceful way to finish the sentence, and made a vague ‘you can guess’ wave of my hand.
 
A hint of a smile crossed her face. “Doing a favor for her mom? Don’t worry. My wingman and I both come along as part of the deal… As long as us having our own fighters isn’t a problem.”
 
She was definitely teasing me. “It isn’t,” I said. “Worst case, we break out a shoehorn.”
 
Squadron leader from the First Wing? Oh yes, I wanted her.
 
Not like that, mostly.
 
...Stop judging me.
 
I took another scrub at my hair with the now-damp towel. “Lemme jump in a shower real quick,” I said, “Let Maxwell get you some of the good coffee or something, and then we can talk over what we can do for each other. ‘Kay?”
 
And Maxwell’d better have her resume to check. Getting taken by too-good-to-be-true’d be embarrassing.
 

***

 
The conference room wasn’t really big enough for seven people; it was an afterthought tucked into the semi-habitable corners of our warehouse, and even with arrangements made so that everyone could, barely, fit, the ventilation was iffy enough to leave the door propped open with a fan going.
 
Down the back side of the table, Sasagawa seemed indecently comfortable in her old working uniform, now with suspiciously darker patches where most of the insignia had been carefully unsewn. The three empty circles I’d used for a Major seemed lonely.
 
Singh’s bodysuit had him sweating visibly even though he was directly in the path of the fan; he’d hung his leather jacket over the back of his seat and looked tired. He’d probably have done better to change into downside clothes rather than the spacesuit undergarment, but hell, what did I know? He’d clipped his two-full-circle bar to the jacket, under the nametag.
 
Rosenkreutz, the infantryman, had hung his captain’s insignia with his dog tags, there not being much place on a muscle shirt for it. He’d gotten much easier to deal with after the first time I’d visited one of the infantry sparring sessions - in other words, once he knew that I could stand up to him.
 
Itangre was on the opposite side of the table from him; it hadn’t been a deliberate decision to sit the military side across from the business side of things, but sometimes people didn’t need that to organize themselves. We’d picked her up from a company that made refrigerators; she’d decided that running her own Human Resources department was worth traveling. She hadn’t managed to take her eyes off Rosenkreutz since she arrived, but at least she wasn’t literally drooling.
 
Poisson was opposite Sasagawa. He was wearing Business Standard Button-Up Shirt And Tie just like Itangre, but managed to make it seem rumpled and sloppy rather than neat and Professional. He had a sheaf of papers in front of them and was shuffling them repeatedly with quick motions of his stubby fingers.
 
Rakis had a broad-lapelled coat on over a mechwarrior’s thin undershirt, and a bandana over his hair, at the other end of the table from me. He knocked on the table once with his artificial hand and looked at Singh. “So, how are the jumpships?” he asked.
 
Singh swiped a hand across his forehead and said, “Comstar’s repair work on Hasenpfeffer checks out. We docked and undocked four times and had no problem. Power watches have both jumpships up and running… They’re still warming things back up, but they’ll be ready to go before the rest of us are. The other crews are still moving into their dropships, but they should be good to go by the same time.”
 
Two gold teeth gleamed in Rakis’s grin. “Excellent,” he said. “How are we doing for cash?”
 
“Nothing coming in, of course,” Poisson answered, fingers going still on the table. “But the repair bills are paid, we’ve got stocks now, and reserves are still good. Call it one-thirty-four or so, and we’ve got all the big-ticket stuff for before we leave paid so it’s basically just payroll and rent.”
 
I leaned forward a little to ask for a couple more details, since one of the reasons our medical head wasn’t preset was that he was out looking for supplementary medical equipment, but Rakis rolled right over me. “Speaking of payroll, hiring?”
 
I nudged Itangre under the table with my toe, and she shot me a quick, grateful glance before she ably covered her embarrassment and confusion, and while she carried on about our efforts to find the last few experienced pilots Sasagawa needed, and fill out the tech and support echelons, I made a note to talk to Poisson and see if he had an estimate on what Doctor Tiber wanted and how much they expected it to run.
 
Rosenkreutz shot Itangre a wink while she talked, and didn’t get any less smug when she ignored him.
 
Rakis cut Itangre off mid-detail. “So, long and short is, we’re set for support echelon, we’ve got one or two trickling in for pilots, and no news on the rest?”
 
“I… understand that that’s what was expected, yes,” she confirmed, showing a flutter of nervousness.
 
He started to frown, but since it was completely true, I interrupted, “Yeah, that’s more or less what we figured, especially since we had you concentrate on pilots.”
 
His expression got crosser, but he didn’t say anything about it, just moved on. “How are the pilots we do have shaking down?” he asked Sasagawa.
 
She looked at him, then down the table at me; I nodded, ignoring the ratcheting glare. “We’ve got a good idea where our people are at. For now, I’ve settled on organizing as one active flight squadron and two reserve ones, just because of the limits we have on launch bays. In a lot of ways, I’d rather match our experienced people as leads to rookie wingmen, but that’d make us more vulnerable while we’re on the move. So for now, we’ve got one experienced squadron that we’ll set up to fly out of the Unions, and hold the others to unpack when we’re on-planet.
 
“Until then, I’d like to get more flight time in for my people, but the simulators are helping a lot.”
 
“Good,” Rakis said, though he’d thought buying that equipment would be a waste of time and effort, and scooted his chair back, getting ready to stand.
 
“How’s Chi Tau working out?” I asked Rosenkreutz. Chi Tau had been an athletic fraternity at the University of Alpheratz that had had their charter revoked at a time convenient for us, so we’d had about twenty of them decide that soldiering sounded good, as a block.
 
“They’re drunken idiots,” he said, which was unquestionably true. “But they’re used to working as a team and they’re used to training hard. They’re getting there.”
 
“All we can ask for,” I said, and, since experience had shown that Rakis wouldn’t, looked around the room. “Anything anybody wants to bring up while we’re all here?”
 
Sasagawa straightened. “Are we expecting to get more techs before we move?” she asked Itangre.
 
“I’ve been keeping my eyes out for someone experienced enough to run technical and vet new recruits,” was the reply. “But… no takers. What I’ve been told is that most high end techs tend to semi-retire, get a job doing maintenance on an urban reactor or something. I also keep getting told that Alpheratz isn’t really the place for that, that the kind of people we need tend to concentrate at mercenary hiring centers, either because that’s where they left their last job, or because they bought a ticket there.”
 
Sasagawa frowned but nodded. “I understand. It’d be good to be able to do more check flights, but not good enough to run down our maintenance margins.”
 
Nobody else had anything, so I nodded. “Okay, then. One thing from me - Phil, did Doctor Tiber give you an estimate on the med gear he was looking for, to factor in?”
 
Round eyes blinked in a round face, and Poisson shook his head. “No, I hadn’t known he was buying. What will he be…?”
 
I frowned slightly, and made a mental note to make sure to get them both secretaries to make sure stuff like that got shared in future. “He said it’d depend on what he could find a hospital willing to part with, but the rough estimate he gave me was three to ten million cbills.”
 
Rakis choked, eyes wide, and Rosenkreutz whistled. “What are we buying for that much?” the latter asked.
 
“The Doctor had a whole shopping list,” I said, “and most of it is stuff major hospitals get bespoke if at all. Soft tissue imaging scans, so he’ll be able to diagnose things like cancer without opening somebody up to look in person, chemical labs, and, the big one, and the thing that made me so happy to hire him in the first place because he can do it, nerve-input grafts.”
 
Singh sat straight up, eyes wide.
 
“With him, and that,” I explained to the others, “If one of our people, say, loses a foot, we’ll be able to do the prep work to fit a working prosthetic ourselves, rather than having to let it heal ‘dumb’ and at best need to cut all the skin off the stump months later to do the fitting then, if they can at all with the nerves healed, too.
 
“Now, odds are we’ll get damaged equipment, and need to do our own repair work, but what gave the Doctor the idea is that a lot of the testing kits he’d seen medical technicians using are pretty much the same as we have for working on battlemech. Once we’ve done that, not only will we be able to keep our people alive better, but we’ll have something we can trade with the locals whenever we’re stationed on a Lostech world.”
 
Poisson nodded. “A traveling doctor show probably won’t make much money, relatively speaking,” he said, “but it’d save us on our health plans, and have good dividends in the favor trade.”
 
“That was my thinking,” I said. “Anyway, I gave him the go-ahead to get, um, agreements in principle? And then bring the details to you.”
 
He nodded again. “Woulda been better to know at the start, but I oughta been keeping track, too. I’ll track him down and see what he’s got.”
 
“Thanks, you’re a prince,” I said, and gave the table a look over, ignoring Rakis, then smiled and said, “OK, I think that’s everything. See you all in a week; that’ll be the last meeting before we lift, so have your last chance lists ready.”
 

***

 
Alpheratz, of course, had a local year, about ninety local days. According to that standard, it was mid-fall. The native deciduous trees were in the process of withdrawing all water from their long, frond-like leaves, leaving them dessicated until revived by the coming of spring. Terran transplants were all conifers, still dark and green - the rapid seasons killed Terran deciduous dead - but for now, the grass was still alive.
 
The day itself was chill, about seven degrees - forty-five Fahrenheit, older-me would have said - and raining just hard enough to be an actual rain rather than an irritating mist. Perfect mood-weather for grave visitation, but bitter and miserable in a physical sense. The nearest other person was a hundred meters away, standing under a black umbrella.
 
I’d chosen a raincoat. It seemed more fitting, somehow. The raindrops pattering on the hood filled my ears.
 
“Hi, Mom,” I whispered to the small, plain gravestone. It was all I - all younger-me - had been able to afford for her.
 
Really, more than I could have afforded. The need to pay that off had been part of what drove me into a position where that asshole from the ASA could convince himself I was prey.
 
“If you hadn’t heard on your side, already… My father’s passed on too, a couple months ago now. He left me… Well, a hell of a lot. About a quarter billion c-bills, and… and his merc unit. What’s left of it.”
 
I took a deep breath around the knot in my throat, then let it out again. My eyes were burning.
 
“If I’m really me. That… Maybe it’s another thing you’d know better than me, now, looking from outside. The night before I got the news… I met a man. White suit, white beard, black eyes, like, all of them, black. He… had a deal he wanted to make. A chance to be somebody I’d like better, somebody whose life I’d like better. A chance to make a better future, to change every world the way you told me you wanted me to, back before… Before.
 
“Maybe a deal with the Devil, whether or not I’d been listening to his enemies.”
 
I took another breath, chuckled through the incipient tears. “Or maybe I took too much Dream Dust that night. The leadup’s kinda vague. But… in the end, I think it did happen. Have to think it happened. That I’m… not me. That I traded with me, that I’m… that other soul, in your real daughter’s body.
 
“I’m sorry about that. I was… a bit older, and people didn’t live as long there, so… she’s probably lost some time. But she’s got my life, my family, and they’ll be good to her.
 
“But, I… I think I remember this, this world, this history. Remember… not just now, not just the past, but… things written that haven’t happened yet. What, and where. Things that… could have gone so much better.
 
“I have to think I’m not crazy. Check it, sure, not just… charge ahead, but… I have to try. Use the unit, use what I know… as a lever to make things better. Save the worlds. End the wars… as much as humans ever can. A man’s reach must exceed his grasp, ‘else what’s a heaven for… But.”
 
I tried to sniffle; it turned into an inelegant ratcheting sluuuurp from inside my sinuses. “But that means I have to go out, away, into the Inner Sphere. I… don’t think I’ll have a chance to be back. Not for… not for a long time, and maybe not ever. So…
 
“I guess… in the end, I just wanted you to know… that your daughter’s all right, and she loves you still.”
 
 

...MINE ARE COLLAPSING...

[classicdrogn]

Been following this on ... SB or SV, it's hard to keep them straight in my memory. Regardless, good stuff, V! And I say that as someone who holds a moderately negative opinion of Battletech in general.

[Norgarth]

It's all white on white to me.

As Classicdrogn said, I've been reading this on SV, and have been looking forward to the next installment.

[Valles]

Ha! That worked.

And the next chapter is in progress and at about 50%. I have the day off tomorrow and hope to make good progress.

[Bob Schroeck]

Good stuff. I'm not a Battletech fan at all and I enjoyed that immensely. Can't wait to see the next installment when you have it done.

[Valles]

PLANT MY FEET AND BITTERLY...
 

Tell The World That We Tried
A Battletech Fanfiction, inspired by Fitzgerald’s CYOA at https://imgur.com/gallery/M41mI
By Valles

 
And you may find yourself on the bridge of a starship.
 
And you may find yourself with a gun to your head.
 
And a pirate’s hand on your ass.
 
And you may ask yourself, ‘Well, how did I get here?’
 
The day had started well, as had the week. We’d gotten everything and everyone packed aboard Shipping Report, the dropship that had carried the survivors of my father’s mercenary unit back to Alpheratz, and lifted for orbit.
 
We’d spent a half hour or so in orbit, for me and the other native Alpheratzi to say goodbye - I’d blubbered, I’m not too proud to admit it - and then burned for the Nadir jump point.
 
Kearny-Fuchida Hyperspace Jump Drives, to give them their proper full name, did not like gravity. Trying to activate one in a measurable gravitational field would, if you were lucky, brick the drive like a high-amp busbar shorting into a computer’s motherboard.
 
If you weren’t, well, imagine the consequences of splinching in a universe that didn’t run off of Harry Potter’s semi-slapstick magic.
 
For ease of navigation, ease of search-and-rescue, and simplicity, jumpships tended to concentrate their arrivals at the ‘safe’ distance from the north and south poles of the local star, relative to the local ecliptic plane.
 
Those who were in a great hurry, and dead to all caution, could instead aim for the balance point between two major bodies, the first Lagrange Point, where the gravity of both dominant bodies - moon and planet, planet and star, or what have you - was exactly equal…
 
But my father and his survivors hadn’t been, so they hadn’t. Nadir it was.
 
Four days in transit brought us all the way out - Brachistochrone trajectories are a hell of a drug - and I and the rest of the  spent another couple days keeping out of the way of the ‘ship crews as they juggled loading and organization. One of the jumpship reactor techs was an older man who’d made a hobby of martial arts, and I was able to puppy-eye him into giving demonstration classes for me and the infantry boys on how that worked in zero-G, so that kept our free time occupied with something other than being bored and nauseous.
 
He visited the sparring groups in the carousel gym a few times, too. He wasn’t bad, but it was pretty clear that zero-G was his strongest field.
 
I didn’t spend all that wait playing, of course, anymore than he did. Most of our people, by numbers, were techs and medical types, who hadn’t been in space before any more than I had. All of us had a lot of adapting to do, and inevitably a certain amount of that adapting caused enough trouble to filter up to me.
 
Fortunately, it was all the kind of trouble that most people’d be able to laugh at after the fact.
 
What wasn’t funny was the fact that, when the Jump finally happened and we were officially an interstellar operation, every light and screen on Hasenpfeffer’s bridge winked out like the proverbial pulled plug.
 
There was a nervous moment of absolute blackness before, with a click and a buzz, the battery-powered emergency lights at the corners of the bridge snapped on, casting everything into ruddy, deep-shadowed dimness.
 
“The fuck?” one eloquent member of the confused babble filling the small space asked. I could only agree, silently, and stay hanging safely out of the way with my foot through one of the anchor loops.
 
The Jumpship’s skipper bounced from station to station for a moment, then spun and rounded on me. “What the fuck did your thumb-handed fuckstick dropper jocks do to my ship?” he demanded.
 
One of the key points that made me so bone-deep certain that me-me was different from older-me was social perception. Subverbal cues, contextual implications. Older-me had often thought of it as a magical superpower assigned to most of the human race whose delivery envelope with his name on it had gone mysteriously missing.
 
But younger-me, now, younger-me had been a butterfly, dancing through the zephyrs of the party-flowers like they’d handed her a five-page report on each interaction - one inch margins, double-spaced, twelve point Times New Roman - with enough agonizing detail to satisfy even the most joy-hating lit teacher.
 
And, since me-me lived in her body, I could do that, too.
 
You have no idea how much of a relief and revelation it was.
 
Anyway, the upside was that the skipper wasn’t nearly angry enough - he was nervous, and he was trying to divert attention from it.
 
So I just rolled my eyes at him. “Okay, first. I really doubt that a hard docking is gonna take down the entire computer system,” I said. “Especially since we can still hear the air cyclers going, so we know it’s not power grid. Second, whatever it is, it’s coming out of my pocketbook, not yours, so the fuck you care? Third, blame later, fix now.”
 
Neither tactful nor productive, in retrospect, but there was no me that didn’t have at least a bit of a temper.
 
He swelled up like a bullfrog and almost took a swing at me, then throttled it back, probably using the knowledge that I’d have just fed it to him, and kicked himself across the room to hover over one of his people’s shoulders while they worked, and I tried not to worry.
 
That was really all I could do; younger-me’s college degree was in something useful, if at an undergrad level, but a Jumpship’s systems were too large and interconnected for a warm body that didn’t know the particular ecosystem in question to be of much use. They’d lose more time explaining and teaching me than they gained from the work I could do.
 
...Actually, there was one thing. “Let’s go see if the dropships have power,” I suggested to Rakis, and he nodded.
 
By the time we got back with the news that all three Unions were just as blacked out, diagnostic work had proceeded to theorizing a misjump or some kind of EMP weirdness - which sparked a furious debate between most of the bridge crew about which piece of evidence did or didn’t match which theory.
 
I’d reached the point of trying to work out a way to interrupt and muffle the useless fight that didn’t step on the skipper’s toes too much when one of the few bridge crew that wasn’t taking part perked up and said, in a promisingly triumphant tone, “Ah-hah.”
 
Before I could bumble my way over to ask what he’d found, the lights came back up.
 
“...What?!” the skipper said, even more surprised than he’d been when they went down in the first place.
 
“The hardware tests weren’t working,” the crewman who’d fixed everything said, “because there’s nothing wrong with it. It was all a software lockout, so when I hotwired the console right…”
 
“It all came back,” I finished for him. “Come see me about a bonus, later, OK?”
 
He glanced over his shoulder and shot me a surprisingly shy grin while the rest of the crew returned to their station and got to work.
 
Two more bits of news were announced, close enough to almost overlap from different ends of the compartment:
 
“This isn’t Mitchella; spectral class is M8, not anything like a G2. But we’re right at the zenith anyway…”
 
“Dropship inbound, estimate two thousand tons, acceleration one gravity. Three-plus escorting fighters, ETA assuming zero-zero one hour fifteen plus-minus.”
 
In a situation like this, only one quote would do.
 
“...It’s a trap,” I Ackbar’d, then took a breath and let it out. “But we can deal. Okay. Okay. We’ve got intercom back, right? Call Sasagawa, make sure she can have her people ready to fly by the time they get here-”
 
There was a rippling hiss, and an unpleasant crackling rattle of shattered metal, glass, and plastic. The woman at the com station recoiled as her panel exploded into low-velocity shrapnel.
 
“Call no one,” Rakis ordered, and I turned to look at him just as he swung the needler in his hand to point at me.
 
“...What, pray tell, the fuck?” I managed to ask, around the panic choking my throat.
 
“You really are as dumb a bimbo as you look,” he told me.
 
Behind me, I heard the skipper huff. “For fuck’s sake, Rakis,” he grumbled. I didn’t take my eyes off the gun. I couldn’t take my eyes off the gun, even if expending the effort of will to do so wouldn’t have been a terrible idea.
 
“Shut up and get the meat tied up,” the traitor replied, then went back to looking directly at me - a lewd, raking elevator eye. “C’mere, Tits McGee,” he ordered, and sighted down the needler when I hesitated.
 
I pulled my foot out of the anchor loop and pushed off, gently drifting over into arm’s reach. He grabbed me, not gently, and pulled me close for a kiss hard enough to cut my lip against my teeth, trapping my body against his. With my head tilted all the way up, I could see him look around the room before he slung his free arm over my shoulder, hand reaching down to squeeze my bottom with even less in the way of consideration. The gun in his other hand rested against my temple.
 
“Figured it out yet?” he sneered.
 
I swallowed, a hysterical corner of my mind wondering if he could feel my heartbeat hammering through my chest the way I could. “The Roughriders never fought that pirate group at all,” I guessed, my mind racing the proverbial mile a minute. “You joined forces. Took over, were taken over, one of those. Sent… infiltrators, scouts, back into civilized space. Looking for opportunities. Having gear and needing people, I qualified. Some, most, all maybe, of the hires you brought were just like you.”
 
I tilted my head back a little, to indicate the skipper. “And since he’s one of them, one of your hires, he could go in and edit the navigation settings for the jump, send us… wherever else, rather than Mitchella.”
 
I swallowed. My throat was dry enough to almost hurt. “You’d already set that jump point up as a rendezvous. You have at least one jumpship of your own, you have to to move infiltrators and so on around, and to do raids… It’s here, it was waiting, with the Leopard docked. But a jump point’s pretty big, and it had time to drift, there’s a gap - you know it’d be an hour, two hours away.
 
“So, you didn’t just change the destination. Once we’d arrived, the computers were set up to lock everyone out, turn off all the lights, create confusion, make it look like a tech error. Make sure that we were all too busy doing diagnostics to get ready to fight… So when the Leopard got here, with a boarding crew, they’d have an easy time of it.”
 
Rakis had an ugly smile, when he wasn’t trying to hide it. “Mechs, fighters, and ships, all mine for the taking,” he agreed. “Put a bullet into the head of that brainless coward Sangnoir, and I’m Lord of the Band… with a nice little bit of ass right in my bed where it belongs.”
 
Another squeeze left no doubt who Rakis was referring to. I was probably going to have bruises. “Roll right over the playacting brats while they’re still staring at the spotlights like blinded neardeer… Easy fucking money. But some clever little shit-” he snarled, looking off in the direction of the technician who’d gotten the computers unlocked, and pulling the gun away to start aiming in his direction.
 
So. From the top. At least two pirates, Rakis and the skipper. Rakis certainly armed, skipper probably - at the very least I’d have to treat him as such.
 
Positioning. Skipper was somewhere behind me, well out of reach - the exact distance was irrelevant, only that I’d have to travel to reach him. Once I moved, I’d have exactly as long as it took the skipper to draw, aim, and fire to either deal with both of them, or find some way of getting into cover. Fortunately, being small could work for me there…
 
Rakis himself was more troublesome. He was a little under thirty centimeters taller than me, and fifty kilos heavier, very little of it fat. I knew, because I’d seen him practice, that he was decent in a fight, in the unpolished but effective kind of way that an experienced brawler would be, which meant that even aside other factors, like, oh, loaded guns, trying to get in anything even remotely like a wrestling match with him would be very, very dumb. He had my face pressed into his shoulder, full-body contact against his along the front for both of us, with one arm thrown over my shoulder and down my back to molest me…
 
But my arms were up, next to my chest where I’d curled in from the ‘hands raised don’t hurt me’ posture, and he’d just taken the barrel of his gun off of me.
 
Most importantly, he thought I was bed candy, not a threat. Time to demonstrate why that was stupid of him.
 
As the needler came off of line with my head, I reached up with my right hand and grabbed it around the barrel from below, shoving sharply upwards and twisting so that it curled right out of his grip. It hissed like a live thing in the process as I dragged his trigger finger across and off of its perch, spraying about a dozen darts upwards to decorate the ceiling, but that was OK, there wasn’t anybody hanging off of the ceiling - the jumpship’s bridge had been designed with a very definite up and down, front and back, despite the fact that the thing would never be out of microgravity without something going very terminally wrong.
 
Using that hand and an ankle hooked around his as anchors, I leaned back a few inches to get room to move, and drove my knee right up from between his legs to somewhere around his kidneys.
 
Not really, but from the strangled scream as the boniest and hardest part of my leg landed right in the tenderest possible place, he probably wished it had been literal. The sudden impetus shot him upwards and me downwards, and left me the proud owner of a brand new needler. I flipped it around, tried to aim up at his center of mass, and walked a long burst up one leg and across his chest before I pushed off the ‘floor’ and launched myself up behind his now thrashing, blood-spewing body.
 
Not a moment too soon, as the Skipper had been armed, with a laser pistol that strobed almost painfully in my lower peripheral vision as he shot where I’d been split-seconds earlier. I reached out with my free hand and caught the back of Rakis’s shirt to still myself and put his body between me and that threat.
 
There was a scuffle starting as one of the bridge crew pulled out a hidden holdout and started to aim at me, only to have the woman next to him push off of her station and tackle him hard, both of them drifting off across the room under the impact.
 
The laser fired again, this time with a crackling hiss added in as it burned its way through the drifting mist of different-sized blood droplets, and missed somewhere over my shoulder. I could feel the sparks of melted metal from the wall land on the back of my neck and go cool, like bacon grease, with a shadow where my braid was drifting.
 
I had the gun, and Rakis’s body as a shield. Thinking about the way he was twitching and starting to go still as vast amounts of blood leaked out of his blown-open chest didn’t occur to me; I was busy.
 
It’d come back that night, and a lot more, later.
 
I peeked out to start thinking about taking a shot - the skipper was aiming at me, and I barely ducked back in time for another laser blast to hit the corpse in the side, spraying my face with steaming, sticky wet stuff, which meant that I couldn’t see.
 
I scrubbed frantically at the eyes with the heel of the hand holding the gun, then froze as the shouting from the hand-to-hand scuffle was overridden by sharp, popping snaps, loud enough to make the ears hurt but too short to really register as it.
 
Someone had a slugthrower, and I could only freeze and hope that they were on my side. Bullets would go through what was left of Rakis, and I could only keep his body between myself and one threat at a time.
 
What felt like a very tense minute or so ended in wet gurgles. I risked another peek, blinking my relatively-clear eye against the stinging… stuff… and saw that one of the bullets had caught the skipper in the head, and a growing blob of blood clinging to the still-pinned body of the pirate who hadn’t gotten his gun out; he had three of the bridge crew holding him down, one of them hugging each arm with their legs twisted through his to pin him, and the third knifing him in the chest over and over.
 
I closed my eye again and let go of both Rakis and the needler to scrub properly. “Okay,” I said, raising my voice to project, “Three pirates on the bridge, all accounted for? Is anybody else hurt?”
 
“No.”
 
“I’m fine.”
 
“Think my wrist’s broken, but I’ll live.”
 
“I’m okay.”
 
“I want to throw up.”
 
“We can all take turns later,” I said, trying for ‘dry’ and mostly getting ‘shaky’. “Right… so, okay. Somebody help her get that set and splinted… and the rest of us need to get on the intercoms and find out how many more traitors we have.”
 
Not all that many, it turned out. Aboard Hasenpfeffer, the pirates had concentrated on the bridge crew, while there had been too few aboard Montresor for the ‘fight’ to be more than a quick, hopeless scuffle when the lights came back on. The ones on Davos Seaworth had kept their head down until after I called. Two had ‘given themselves up in return for good treatment’, and fingered another four aboard, who hadn’t put up a fight.
 
El-Ahrairah, though, had been the scene of several running gunfights. About half of her crew and tech staff were injured, along with a couple of the mechwarriors… and there’d been three deaths.
 
I took a moment to close my eyes and swear internally, then opened them again and told the intercom line, “Okay, here’s what I want you guys to do. There’s only so many docking ports that Leopard can be coming for-”
 
“Two on each Union, four more on the ship,” one of the bridge crew chipped in.
 
“-so I’ve got a plan for dealing with them…”
 

***

 
One of the pirates we’d captured had mentioned that the Leopard’s name was Heartripper.
 
Charming people.
 
With all of Hasenpfeffer’s docking collars full, they couldn’t do a full hard link, but with careful maneuvering it was possible to get a shirtsleeve seal between ordinary airlocks… as long as the relative velocities were low enough.
 
“Definitely Montresor Airlock 4,” came the voice of the bridge watch we’d left, over the intercom handset. A radio would have been more convenient, but even with all the jumpship’s mass wrapped around it, the extra transmission would have had a (slight) chance of spooking our targets, keeping them from coming in fat and happy like we wanted. The handset was good enough, so there was no sense risking it.
 
“Right, we’re moving, Blackwing out,” I said, and hung it up before turning to face the motley band of mechwarriors, techs, and ship crew that we’d gathered together in Hasenpfeffer’s cargo bay.
 
“It’s Montresor,” I told them, raising my voice to be heard, and followed the jumpship crewmen who took off down the correct passageway. “Airlock Four!” I called after them.
 
On the rushing way through the corridors, our improvised mess of anti-boarding ‘troops’ strung out into three more or less synchronized globs - the jumpship crew, who spent most of their working lives in microgravity, raced ahead, zipping the entire length of each passageway without even touching the walls. The spare bodies we’d pulled to a central location from the dropships spent a lot of time in transit, or swinging around on the bola-style centrifuges built into docking collars, but had to deal with free fall often enough to know what they were doing and make good time…
 
And the groundsiders like me, well, we tried.
 
When I finally caught up, not quite tail-end charlie but close, after I’d stopped a couple of times to hook fellow groundlings into grabbing range of something they could use to continue, I found my people bunched up behind a couple of armor plates that had been basically held in place and anchored with tack welds - one of the techs in the crowd was still wearing his mask, and holding a portable welding kit in place of an outright weapon.
 
I wasn’t sure if he meant to use it on things in the environment, or on pirates, but either way, I figured it would work.
 
I hadn’t asked for the plates, but what I had asked for was even better than expected.
 
“Where did you find a mounting pintle?” I asked. The thing might have been held up by a pair of pipes and a ruined crowbar, but it was unmistakably a purpose-made swivel mount, meant to let one person direct the massive 20mm cannon that mechwarriors laughably called ‘a machine gun’.
 
“They came with the trucks, apparently,” said one of the two techs crouched by the thing - the one holding onto the back end, not the one holding what looked like a noteputer, a battery, and a couple of wires leading off into the firing mechanism at one end, and taped to the battery’s terminals at the other.
 
That didn’t explain why the things were aboard the battlemech transports, rather than with the trucks themselves aboard Shipping Report, but the clanging from the airlock hatch suggested we didn’t exactly have time to get into it.
 
I kicked myself into the cover of the armor plates and settled in to wait, absently staring at the charred discoloration around the nearest weld spot.
 
Eventually, with one last clang and a whirr of its motor, the airlock opened, revealing a crowded mass of variously washed and tattooed bodies, all of them holding a dizzying array of weapons. And flashlights.
 
“Th’duck?” one brighter-than-the-rest example towards the back of the pack mumbled, “Shouldn’t the lights be off?”
 
The female pirate - I wouldn’t dignify her with ‘woman’ - at the front of the crowd was staring at the machine gun like a mouse trapped in a terrarium with a hungry cobra.
 
For a moment, I thought about ordering them to surrender, but one of the others in the front rank swore and tried to swing his rifle up, at which point the biggest problem with my plan became apparent.
 
Namely, pretty much nobody in that little corridor was wearing ear protection when the twenty millimeter cannon went off.
 
I ducked behind the shield panel again as the thunder went on for what seemed like an hour. A wildly swinging laser tracked into my field of view, across the corridor, and up the far wall, interrupted by the shield on that side and the additional one fitted to the machine gun, but by the time the ammo ran out, there was nothing. I waved the men forward, shouting ‘get ‘em’ at the top of my lungs, but I couldn’t hear my own voice as I swung around the shield, needler in my other hand… and checked in place.
 
The airlock wasn’t splashed with blood; it was painted. I swallowed carefully - throwing up in zero g would be bad - and kicked forward, trying to aim for a path empty of bodies, and… pieces.
 
It didn’t really work.
 
Probably fortunately for me, the job the long burst had done on the pirate crew was just as complete as it looked. I came out into the open of the Leopard’s cargo bay from ‘below’ and took a quick look around as my people followed. “No one in sight,” I said to myself - or tried to, through the ringing in my ears - and used waves of my arms to part off smaller teams to head fore and aft from the bay, sweeping through the ship to deal with its crew.
 
The next problem was a doozie. The entire frame of the ship shivered, easy to feel through my hand on the handhold… and then gravity came back.
 
Somebody on the bridge had lit off the main transit drive.
 
The floating horror in the airlock hit the bottom with a pattern of thuds and a splatter; some of the latter painted itself down the ventral wall of the cargo bay like the early stages of a Jackson Pollock piece. Next to the big exterior doors, the battlemech gantries swung and swayed, metal groaning as its weight grew. They were empty, the four Stingers that had been in them deployed into open space to maneuver under retrofitted reaction control systems and what had been designed as ordinary jump jets, but they hadn’t been locked down properly after the mechs were deployed, either. One of my people snatched for a dangling hose and caught it just as it swung free, pulling themselves up against it and wrapping themselves around it with their boots braced on the rim of its nozzle.
 
Another missed her grab, and fell the full length of the cargo bay. The sound her body made as it hit the aft bulkhead was horrible.
 
I pulled myself closer to the grab-bar next to the airlock and ignored the cooling wetness painted across my leg and arm, in favor of hooking the other elbow through and around the bar. I already weighed more than I should; Heartripper’s main fusion torch couldn’t spool up from nothing in an instant, but a Leopard’s maximum acceleration was three full gravities.
 
I could hear someone swearing at the top of their lungs through the ringing in my ears, the terrified and incoherent screaming that I honestly do not know if it was or wasn’t me, and the roar of the drive. Certainly the handful of faces with me at the airlock looked just as scared as I did - and as pained, as spiking agony started to build in the shoulder supporting my weight.
 
I reached up with my free hand, getting a grip to try and haul myself up enough to take some of the ache off…
 
...and the man next to me slipped.
 
There was every reason not to grab for him; my own position was precarious at best. We had to be up to two Gs by that point, we were hanging by our literal fingertips over a forty foot drop, and…
 
And I’d caught his wrist before I even realized what was going on.
 
He was a big guy, probably twice my weight, and I felt something give unpleasantly in my left shoulder as the jolt from stopping his fall snapped through my arms and body. I started running through every bad word I knew, in four different languages, and hung on, ignoring the bruising force as he latched onto my hand with both of his.
 
Fuck, that hurt. Fuck, that hurt. And it went on and on without any break. I didn’t know how long we’d been under way, or if there was any chance of the team that had already headed for the bridge interrupting and taking control, or if my hands would start sweating and slip, dropping him to…
 
The tech on the guy’s far side, the same one who’d been hacking the 20mm’s firing control, took one of her hands off the grab bar and reached down to catch Faller’s wrist, latching on and hauling with me. It didn’t actually make the situation better - both of us together weren’t strong enough to pull him back up, not with that much acceleration pulling against it, and there still wasn’t any hint of relief - but it made me feel better about it.
 
And probably him, as well, come to think of it.
 
Despite my fear and, let’s be honest, despair, it was less than a minute before the acceleration died away to nothing. One of the teams had taken the bridge.
 
I drifted next to the hatchway for a moment, rubbing at my shoulder like that would somehow help the pain inside it, then went to find a radio and find out what the hell had happened outside.
 
After the excitement of boarding and the Nantucket Sleigh Ride, what that turned out to be was an anticlimax.
 
Sasagawa and her wing, a short and rather Mongolian looking guy named Tamman Cruz, had popped out of their bays on Davos Seaworth and swung right onto the tail of the most dangerous of the pirate fighters, a big, agile Draconis-built Slayer. With room to work and fair warning, the Slayer would have had fairly good odds, as long as the wingmate ahead of it, a slow-footed Lucifer, didn’t slow it down dangerously. Slayers had enormous fuel reserves, and their main gun was effective at a longer range than the 165mm autocannon Sasagawa and Cruz had aboard their Lightnings - a good pilot could make a solid go at kiting them to death.
 
With them already in its weak quarter and at point-blank range, and the fact that the Slayer’s pilot just plain wasn’t as good as they were, though, the end result was never in doubt.
 
One of the other pirate wing pair, a Sparrowhawk, only barely survived the opening pass as the rest of our own fighters had launched, and that pilot, and his remaining fellows, had seen the writing on the wall. By the time the bridge team had taken over there and gotten Heartripper’s drive shut down, the Sparrowhawk and his companion in the Centurion (The 30-ton aerospace fighter was actually the older design to use the name, by about three centuries. The battlemech type in our inventory had originally been named for it, despite the fact that a licensee in Lyran space still produced the things) had surrendered, along with the four apparently not absolute lunatics who’d gone spacewalking in their mechs.
 
The Lucifer had pointed his nose in the direction of the pirate Jumpship - ‘Bloodspiller’ - and opened his throttle all the way. Whether he was intending to save enough fuel to slow down, or if he’d just panicked, would go unanswered; something critical gave in the fighter’s overstressed hull about the time I reached Heartripper’s bridge, and ripped the craft apart in a brief flare of light.
 
“Damn,” I said, once I was sure I was interpreting the bridge screens right. “Lucifers may be shit, but a fighter’s a fighter. I’d rather have captured it.”
 
I hadn’t realized that the bridge team had Sasagawa on the line; her reply out of the speakers startled me. “I figured as much. Will it be a problem if I made promises to get the other six to cooperate?”
 
“Not in principle,” I replied. “What did you offer them?”
 
“Just their lives, technically, but I came pretty close to promising to let them go free,” she said.
 
I thought for a second. “Nothing about where?” I asked.
 
“...No,” she confirmed, sounding amused and speculative.
 
“I’m sure we can find someplace that doesn’t have a mandatory death sentence for piracy,” I said. That wouldn’t be anywhere in the Outworlds, though. “And what we tell the authorities there can… depend on how helpful they are.”
 
I paused. “Note to self. Look up an interrogator smart enough to not default to torture, once we’re grounded and recruiting again.”
 
Sasagawa laughed. “Ghengis-” I had no idea why her wingmate had that as his call sign, “-isn’t terrible at it.”
 
“I don’t think I want to know which ‘it’ you have in mind,” I replied. “Besides, I’d bet that somebody in this scummy crew will be rattled enough to vomit out everything we could ever possibly want to know.”
 
“I doubt there’ll be anything important,” she said, “but I’m not letting you take my money over it.”
 

***

 
Sasagawa had been wrong. There was something important.
 
This pirate band weren’t just pirates… They were slavers, too.
 
That wasn’t, in itself, surprising. It was a common vice for pirates. Also common were isolated bases in otherwise uninhabited systems, places to set up repair gantries and sprawl out, everything from food and water to microchips brought in by raiding or trading spoils to other scum. The pirates would laze about getting drunk and expend just enough effort to make sure that their captives were doing the work properly.
 
Most pirate bands, though, had only a hundred or so victims at any one time, or rather, fewer slaves than they had fighters.
 
This lot had set up on a planet a lot like a hotter version of Mars - about a third of a standard gravity, no liquid water to speak of, and a thin atmosphere of pretty much entirely carbon dioxide, but rather than being outside the standard habitable zone, it was right along the inner edge. The usual temperature during the daytime was about a hundred and ten, centigrade, or two hundred and thirty Fahrenheit, dropping by close to thirty degrees during the night - or, on the high plateau we were at, an average of thirty degrees less than both of those.
 
Their central base was a looming piled mass of concrete and rock, built from blocks that had obviously been slagged free from a nearby outcrop with battlemech lasers, then assembled in place by the same machines, before the concrete was sprayed in the gaps as sealant. Probably, by hostile-environment standards, it leaked like a sieve, but with a touch of positive pressure and a fusion-powered enviro plant to crack oxygen and nitrogen out of the air, it would do well enough.
 
Another pirate dropship, Flesheater, was grounded in the open as we hit high atmosphere. I’d half expected them to try to run, but they’d been able to see that we had aerospace support. Despite her vicious name, Flesheater was just an ordinary cargo hauler, barely armed and barely armored - and even if she hadn’t been, and we hadn’t had an ASF squadron, three Unions like we were coming in would have eaten her alive… And there was no Jumpship for them to run to.
 
Their best hope was to try and fight it out with us on the ground.
 
It was tempting to try to put down on the same impromptu landing field the pirates had put together for their own dropships, but I’d decided against it. First, I knew that landing under fire was risky, and I didn’t want to expose my people and ships to interference from any defenses set up around the field.
 
Second, and more prosaically, the cleared and leveled area had been set up to hold only two dropships, not four, and I didn’t want to crowd things.
 
Fortunately, the pirates had made their base in an area that saved them the maximum possible effort - the only major rock outcrop for miles around was their quarry, the tallest thing short of the horizon or visible over it the looming bulk of their base.
 
“Hey, Boss?” asked one of my pilots (Name started with a T, probably? Native to one of Alpheratz’s outback agricultural settlements, the equivalent of an Australian sheep station. A skinny guy with a blotchy red birthmark across his face.) over the company channel as we walked in along the top of that rocky ridge. “I get why we didn’t just land on top of ‘em, by why walk in this way, rather’n just in from the west or something?”
 
The stony footing was weathered and a little uncertain, and every now and again I or one of the other two newbie mechwarriors would stumble and have to fight to catch our mechs before finished tripping. Originally, of course, we’d had a full company of trained mechwarriors, but…
 
Two of them - including Rakis - hadn’t made it through the boarding action, and a third had been shot badly enough to be unable to pilot for the foreseeable, so the three best of the trainee squad had been dropped into spare cockpits.
 
I’m not sure which aspect of the fact that I was one of those three terrified me most; there were far too many competitors.
 
“A couple of reasons,” I answered, once I had my balance back and could be sure I wouldn’t swear into the open channel. “First, since we’re moving over rock, we can have more confidence that they haven’t dug mines or IED cavities into the approaches - the voids’d be easier to detect. Second, this is the only vector that isn’t full of those greenhouses.”
 
The pirate stronghold was surrounded by low, wide buildings walled in more stone-and-concrete, and roofed in billowing transparent polymer sheets. The bad guys almost certainly had an industrial roller to push the stuff out for them.
 
“So, if they’ve got an infantry component in thermal suits or something, they can’t pop out at us with inferno missiles. Or fill the greenhouses with misted diesel to turn them into fuel air bombs.”
 
Somebody, not the guy who’d asked the question, swore quietly at that thought.
 
“And,” I went on, “Even if there isn’t a threat there, we know they’re using manual labor to work those fields, and if they fight us out there, that’d put our rescues in the crossfire.”
 
There were a lot of greenhouses; there were probably several thousand farm workers tied up in operating them, plus whatever technical plant had to go into chilling the things down to something humans and human-edible crops could survive in. The central citadel wasn’t big enough to hold that many people, not without conditions I’d bet money the pirates wouldn’t put up with for themselves.
 
“Actual?” asked a different voice (Female, cute, dyed her hair in contrasting teal-and-scarlet stripes. Pity about the mohawk, future of the eighties, go fuck yourself. From somewhere in the FedSuns.) Under most military com regimes, the commanding officer of a force or unit would be referred to as the actual bearer of that unit’s call sign. “What’s the plan for those rescues? We haven’t got anywhere near three thousand bunks.”
 
“We move the jumpships to planetary L1,” I said. “Including docking and other farting around, that makes for about two hours of flight time. Once they’re charged to jump, we fit everybody at standing room only, and head out. We took one jump from Alpheratz to dead space, then another to get here - and that puts us one jump from Loparri. So if we head to that pirate point, total time from ground-to-ground will be about four, four and a half hours. With emergency scrubbers and canned oxygen, it should be doable.”
 
“That’s… gonna have consequences,” a third man said slowly. I recognized the voice as Captain Clair, the most experienced mechwarrior we had left, a fireplug of a man from Baliggora, as far into the back of the beyond as it was possible to get. “It’ll put us still in Outworlds space when the deadline runs out and they get to declare us illegal and confiscate all our gear. We’ll be lucky if we don’t end up shooting our way out.”
 
“Yeah,” I admitted. “But what can we do? Just abandon these people?”
 
“Outworlds’d send a proper evacuation, if they knew they were here,” he pointed out. “And these habs’ve been stable this long.”
 
I thought it over. “Maybe,” I admitted. “We’ll see, after we’ve got control sorted. Speaking of which, I see the top of that tower, so game faces on. Able Club One, you have field command.”
 
“I accept field command,” Clair said formally. “Break. Spades, are you ready for a recon pass?”
 
“We are,” Sasagawa confirmed from where she’d had her fighters orbiting at high altitude. “Looks like you’re still about a half-hour away.”
 
Looking up, I could see three contrails bend and dip as the craft making them dove to start their approach. A minute or so after they vanished, one of them - a Lightning, I couldn’t tell whether it was Cruz or Sasagawa - scorched by overhead then pulled up and started climbing.
 
A minute or two later, Clair came over the line. “Okay, this is Club Actual. Everybody put datachannel D up on a monitor.” There was about enough of a pause for me to start reaching for the right control. “Now, you can see here that the greenhouses have some kind of bunker pod in each of ‘em-”
 
I got the right screen pulled up, showing an aerial photo of the slightly jumbled radial pattern of greenhouses surrounding the central pyramid of the pirate base, along with the scaley-looking scar interrupting the pattern where our rock outcrop had been quarried away. Sure enough, each greenhouse had a glittering metal box or can tucked into each corner. “-so we can guess that hitting the rest of the place won’t kill anybody. Be careful anyway, but don’t feel like you gotta hang yourself out to stop it.”
 
Outside, the first greenhouses were coming into view.
 
“Most of you’ve heard it over and over again, but to make sure you got it straight, we’re lookin’ at one heavy, three medium, and five light ‘mechs. No sign of ‘em on the overhead, so keep your eyes out on all sides.”
 
At forty kilometers an hour, and a horizon as close as this, we were in among the outermost greenhouses while the briefing was still going on.
 
The PPC bolt came as far more of a surprise than it should have. Off to the sides, additional silhouettes rose to their feet amid clouds of dust, battlemechs, pirate mechs, standing up from where they’d lain prone in the lee of the greenhouses under actual-for-fuck’s-sake mech scale ghillie suits.
 
“Fuck,” Clair said. “Ambush! First lance, turn right! Second lance, turn left! Third lance, find that heavy and crush it!”
 
As I understood it, there were two kinds of ambush. The first kind was taking place from too far away for the victims, in this case, us, to reach the enemy, and was dealt with by taking cover and holding things in place until the ambush-ee could recover from the surprise and start planning.
 
The second kind, the kind we were in now, was sprung from close enough to turn and charge straight into the teeth of it, disrupting the ambusher’s mental plan for how things would go and turning the surprise back on them.
 
The eight Battlemasters that were leading our company split up, thundering out to meet the light mechs that were swarming forwards from their cover with a storm of fire ahead of them. It was ridiculous to watch a Locust scramble out of the way of an assault mech four times its size, but there was a real chance that the threat could have worked. Every mech had a good end and a bad end - not just in terms of weapons arcs, but armor biased forwards, where the pilot would want to point towards the enemy. Even a light mech, if it got around behind a larger one’s rear, could do real damage.
 
If things had been going the way the pirates intended, they’d’ve been popping out and pouring damage into our most vulnerable quarters from point-blank range, using their superior speed and maneuverability, along with their greater experience, to cut us apart from inside our guard.
 
But, on the other hand, we outweighed them over four to one, and outnumbered them twelve to nine besides. Quantity, as the cliche went, had a quality all its own. I had to think that if they’d had an alternative other than outright surrender, or running into a deadly wasteland that would kill them in time, they’d’ve had better sense than to pick this fight at all…
 
But there was nowhere to run, and long experience meant that most human worlds allowed only one penalty for piracy, leaving them nothing to lose.
 
“Ostsol on the right,” called one of the other members of my lance, and I swerved with the others, between us laying six particle beam blasts and nine hundred millimeter shells downrange at the pirate - who, from the flashy paintjob under his coating of dust, was probably the bad guys’ commander.
 
Most of that, given our inexperience, missed horribly, but a few of the cannon shells sparked their way across the Ostsol’s torso, and one of the PPCs carved a glowing trench a bit lower. The effect was visually spectacular; battlemech armor was ablative against energy weapons, and white-hot sparks blasted their way free as the material vaporized under the stream of excited electrons.
 
The pirate had to know that that was only the beginning, but he didn’t let it keep him from returning fire. The internal coating on my cockpit windows polarized along the path of the 8cm laser beams, with a great dark blotch lingering where one impacted against the Marauder in front of me.
 
Meanwhile, I was coping with the way my mech reacted to firing its weapons in anger for the very first time. The rush of oven-like heat that I’d seen described in novels was real, as was the mushy feeling from the controls as myomers overheated and then cooled back to safe levels again.
 
Future of the eighties, go fuck yourself, I thought. A sweatband of some kind would be absolutely a good idea, and I made a mental note to invest in one, despite how cliche it would make me feel.
 
Because I’d held myself back to just one PPC and the autocannon, I was able to fire again relatively soon as I stomped forwards. This time I hit with the energy cannon, as did the more experienced mechwarrior assigned to ride herd on us rookies. Alas, hitting the same area of a moving, jinking battlemech was a lot more of a challenge than just hitting it at all, so neither that or the additional lucky autocannon burst actually made a breach in the plating.
 
This time it was my turn to eat the lasers, as the Ostol lunged forwards into short range and opened up in a full alpha strike. The world went white and purple, my entire forward view blotted out by the glare protection and flying sparks as the barrage ate into my armor. The controls shuddered under my hand like antilock brakes, and I could feel that shuddering echo through the full frame of the machine around me as the balance systems and gyroscope went berserk trying to compensate for the relative pittance of weight lost in evaporated and displaced armor.
 
There was no individual detail that resembled being in a car fishtailing its way across black ice, but the overall experience felt much the same anyway, including the stunning crash at the end as my mech lost its footing and measured a full length across the dusty stone.
 
I’m not sure what I yelled as I came up brutally short against the cockpit straps, dangling face-down from the seat, but I know it was obscene, and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t in French. I tried to struggle back into motion as quickly as I could, but I can’t say that it was as quick as I’d’ve liked; slamming all your weight against the coolant-piping and bulletproof panels of a cooling vest was uncomfortable on its own. Having squishy, tender boobs in the middle hurt.
 
I braced both of the Marauder’s arms on the ground and used them for balance as I got one of its feet under it, forcing myself to ignore the light show I could see out of the corner of my eye as I fought to get my mount moving again.
 
I did, eventually, just in time to see the lance-leader’s… What was his name? Green? Grimm? Greer? Something like that? Anyway. In time to see his Marauder rear back and boot a visibly ragged and scarred Ostsol in the chest, knocking the lighter heavy back on its heels to stagger a couple of steps away. Which was more than enough space for the remaining two members of our lance to unload an alpha strike each, at close enough range that almost half the fullisade actually hit, blasting through the eroded remnants of the pirate’s armor and all but ripping the machine to scrap in a single volley.
 
I looked around as the wreck crumbled, trying to find the next target, only to see the handful of lights still standing bolt for the hills in practically the same motion and instant, leaving our company, a bit scarred but every one of us still battle-worthy, holding the field and a clear shot to the central base.
 

***

 
“Anyway,” I said, sitting back in my seat aboard Al-Ahrairah and letting the Alliance Military Corps rep who’d flown over from the charging station at Ramora’s nadir jump point accept the glass I’d poured, “after that, our part of the fighting was pretty much over. We gave the remaining pirate mechwarriors the same terms we’d agreed for the ones that surrendered in space. I figure we’ll put them all ashore into the hands of the law on Melcher; they don’t have the death penalty there, and it’s more or less on our way.”
 
Station keeping in deep space as she was, physics said that Hasenpfeffer and her dropships would have been in microgravity conditions. Biology, though, said that spending weeks or months of voyage time in full microgravity would have ruinous effects on the bones and muscles of her crew and passengers, so the long-ago designers who created the Invader-class jumpship had found solutions, more or less.
 
The crew quarters for the jumpship herself were built into internal carousels, rings that rotated to create what felt to the body and the inner ear like a slightly screwy kind of gravity. For docked dropships, the docking collars were designed to come apart, playing out long cables so that the dropships swung around at the end like bolas while the jumpship did an easy one-RPM microgravity spin. Only the docking collars and the structural frame linking them needed to be reinforced against the illusory weight, but it kept passengers at a full standard gravity, up to the mechanical limits of the system’s ability to take strain.
 
The Merchant class had been the first jumpship fitted with the system, and the sixty-thousand ton limit, rooted in engineering and materials, had been carried forward when other designs copied it. Which neatly explained the rule ambiguity older-me remembered from studying the rules of the Battletech game; the mass limit for the booms that extended a jumpship’s KF fields over a dropship was one hundred thousand tons of mass, give or take, while the limit for a standard dropship collar’s bola was 590 million newtons of force, IE, about equivalent of sixty thousand tons at one standard gravity.
 
The AMC officer sipped her brandy, then gave it a pleasantly surprised look. Younger-me had done more than enough drinking to know a good brandy when she found it, even if older-me had teetotaled. “The way you put that implies more fighting from, what, factions of the Bloody Hands?”
 
“Without the threat of battlemechs,” I said, “and without ‘Lord’ Sangnoir to keep things in line personally, the slaves rose up. Their supervisors and so-called ‘masters’ were too busy worrying about getting away from us, so, there wasn’t much blood on the part of anybody I’d weep for.”
 
I couldn’t help making a face at some of the wrecks we’d found when the worst abusers’ victims had been done with them. “Not that it wasn’t ugly,” I admitted. “Sangnoir’d recruited most of his men by promising them harems of pretty girls and generally living like kings, and the way they decided to take advantage of that left a lot of scores to settle. The ‘field hands’ he had growing food and feeding the narcotics operation didn’t have as much reason to hate, but we still only got one of the four mechwarriors that tried to go to ground back.”
 
“How many bodies?” she asked, looking like somebody’s concerned grandmother. For all I knew, she was.
 
“Three,” I said. “One dumped outside without a breath mask, the other two with farm tools… Anyway. The serious medical cases, you’ve already got, and there were a couple of hundred that asked to sign on with us.”
 
She looked uncomfortable. “I’ll have to ask if some of my people can interview those persons,” she said.
 
Ah, so that was the angle. I smiled. “We’re on a time-limit, of course,” I said, “but you’re welcome to speak to anyone you have time for before we’re ready to jump. We’ve been perfectly frank about our difficulties with the Office of Procurement, and the tactics they pushed on Alpheratz… And they’re free adults. They can make their own choices; while there are contracts, they allow no-fault withdrawals as long as the unit isn’t under employment.”
 
For a customs officer, she didn’t have much of a poker face. But on the other hand, all she had to work with was a quartet of unarmed shuttles and a single pair of Sholagar light fighters. Her ability to stop me was purely based on the rule of law. “We do have a responsibility to our people to make sure that they’re not being taken advantage of while they’re vulnerable,” she said defensively.
 
I made a petting motion and a shushing noise. “Drink your brandy,” I said soothingly. “I know it’s not your fault. I promise, we’ll be out of this system long before the deadline.”
 
She huffed and started to swell up, offended - then caught the reaction, actually thought it over, and laughed. “All right,” she admitted. “I’ll take that. My people would probably stage a ridiculous number of convenient malfunctions if I asked them to get in your way after you pulled off a rescue this big, anyway.”
 
“I’d rather not be responsible for doing that to your discipline,” I said, and has some of the brandy myself. “But yeah, go ahead, talk to anybody you want to. This business is going to give me enough trouble sleeping without shanghai’ing anybody.”
 
“Boarding actions are… ugly,” she agreed. “But you know you don’t have to sign up for them, and for the rest, right?”
 
I looked at her face; she was genuinely concerned. I thought about that for a second - turning over everything, maybe taking the not-so-small fortune that’d still be left and going relic hunting on New Dallas and bringing that Core home, forgetting about Helm entirely and leaving the Sphere to stand or fall against the Clans, and against fucking Comstar, on its own merits.
 
But…
 
“I’ll take trouble sleeping over never looking in a mirror again,” I said. “And there’s way too many worlds left to save.”
 
She shook her head and smiled sadly. “You’re a good kid,” she said. “Where will you go next?”
 
“There’s a recruiting center, a gather point for mercenaries and hiring offices, like Galatea but smaller and closer. A planet called Hoff.”
 

...BREATHE UP THE TIME THAT’S PASSING...

[Valles]

BREATH I’LL TAKE AND BREATH I’LL GIVE...
 

Tell The World That We Tried
A Battletech Fanfiction, inspired by Fitzgerald’s CYOA at https://imgur.com/gallery/M41mI
By Valles

 
“Purpose of your visit?”
 
“Business; Mercenary recruitment and hiring.”
 
“Ah, anything to declare?”
 
“We had our equipment checked in orbit, so. Itemized list… and affadavait.”
 
“...Okay, these seem to be in order. Length of your visit?”
 
“Six months to a year, probably. We’ve got a lot of work to do.”
 
“Ah, I can give you a temporary pass, but…”
 
“I’ll need to confirm it with a higher office for a stay that long. How long will I have?”
 
“Thirty local days.”
 
“That’s plenty of time, don’t worry.”
 
“How many in your party?”
 
“Right now, four. Overall, three hundred and two adults, seventeen ages zero to twelve, fourteen ages thirteen to seventeen.”
 
“...Ahh…”
 
“I was figuring to take care of the full numbers with the long-term visas; four for a trip to go do that will be plenty.”
 
“All right! In that case, here you are, and welcome to the Hoff!”
 
I thanked the customs girl as politely as I could, but all I could think was, ‘The Hoff? Oh, Jesus X Christ on a crutch, FASA.’
 

***

 
Anyway.
 
Canon treated the Dragoons’ rating system and role as a mercenary clearing house as a new thing, but it turns out that Comstar had always had a bit of competition from all the major mercenary units. The Robes had the final contract enforcement and payment side of things sewn up as far as the units went, but the hiring of individual mercenaries and support specialists wasn’t something that the Mercenary Review Board had any real ‘in’ to affect. When Comstar had tried to run the old Mercenary’s Guild out of business, about seventy years before, they’d done a good job of smashing the Guild’s ability to exert any influence on the hiring of merc units… But they hadn’t been able to dislodge the Guild from its role as an interface and regulator between individual mercenaries and their units.
 
In short, the Mercenary’s Guild was our trade union.
 
Combine that with the gathering of private subcontractors, wannabes, and predatory camp followers that inevitably entailed wherever the big gorilla units settled with the fact that anyone who managed to impress them was likely set, and most ‘local mercenary guild hiring halls’ were actually temporary stops around the landholds and long-term contract sites of the major mercenary outfits.
 
The Wolf Dragoons certainly qualified, and so did McCarron’s Armored Cavalry, but on Hoff, it was the Eridani Light Horse. There are two things it’s important to know about the ELH.
 

1. They are not, actually, delusional.
   
2. They like to act like they are.
   

 
The deliberately cultivated illusion that the ELH were members of a military that had been defunct for, at this point, centuries wasn’t something even they actually believed to be literally true. No more than the handful of frothing lunatics to be found in any organization their size actually expected the Star League Defense Force to actually return and link up with them seamlessly after having just stepped out for a bit.
 
What they did have, though, and the SLDF act was a vital part of it, was a consciousness of the Light Horse as a thing, as a tribe or the proverbial ‘band of brothers’. That esprit de corps and the traditions that were woven into it at every level had as much to do with the ELH’s success and endurance as any amount of hardware or military skill…
 
And that success was absolutely something to take seriously, no matter how threadbare some of its starting assumptions had become.
 
So, when the Light Horse rep I was meeting with asked if I was interested in contracting with the SLDF (which, again, extinct aside from Little Nicky’s bloodsport cultists, and he didn’t know they existed), I played along.
 
“If the SLDF needs to contract security or supplemental forces, I’d certainly be interested,” I said, “but at the moment, I’m expecting most of our work to be done for the member states.”
 
More background? More background.
 
The era I was in was characterized by a vicious, ongoing feud and struggle for dominance between the five nations, and their ruling noble houses, that had survived the fall of the Star League. At its height, the Star League had encompassed pretty much every known human settlement, sorting existing ‘member states’ into three ranks. At the top, the Terran Hegemony, of which the League as a whole was a de-facto empire. In the middle, bought off, the other five Great Houses of the Inner Sphere, whose descendants were still fighting over the corpse. At the bottom, blatantly exploited and for the most part not involved willingly, were the Periphery nations, like my own native Outworlds Alliance.
 
When the Star League fell, taking the majority of the SLDF with it, the Terran Hegemony, with its ruling house recently extinct and no independent army aside from the SLDF, had been dismembered between the other Great Houses - the Successor States.
 
That owed as much to the fact that the SLDF’s commanding general had taken every follower he could off into deep space in history’s most elaborate murder-suicide attempt rather than stick around to get involved in, or for that matter try to stop, the incipient power struggle as it did to anything else, of course.
 
The Eridani Light Horse, then the Star League Defense Force’s 3rd Regimental Combat Team, had stayed. Over the decades, they’d evolved an elaborate legal fiction that their mercenary contracts were merely temporary billeting and support agreements between the ‘SLDF’ and the ‘loyal member states of the Star League’.
 
“At the moment,” I continued, “BMSS has a good deal of capital and hardware, mostly from salvage and other windfalls, but we’re a long way from being able to field our full intended complement in personnel. Our CFO is currently negotiating a base site on Daniels-”
 
The larger and less hospitable of Hoff’s two major continents had some fairly nice bits and decent sized cities thereon, but for the most part the interior was one big desert. Renting a hundred or so square miles to stomp-and-or-roar around in during training had proved surprisingly cheap.
 
“-and we’ve leased an office in Snapperville to handle hiring and the like through.”
 
“And you’d like me to clear through your hiring agent’s Guild Certification,” the rep said. He didn’t look more than Older-Me’s age, which given the Major’s insignia he was wearing, was impressive. So was the colossal burn scar that vanished under his eyepatch and explained why he wasn’t in a combat arm any more.
 
“All five of them,” I agreed, and suppressed a smile at his faint boggle. The certification fees were one of the major direct moneymakers the guild used to finance its own operation as a separate entity from ComStar’s bonding commission, and very few new merc outfits bothered to acquire more than one. For good reason. This conversation was going to cost me something like half-a-million cbills.
 
Fortunately, renewals would be cheaper.
 
“Do you have the relevant Guild Identification Numbers?” he asked politely.
 
I popped the briefcase I’d borrowed from Phil Poisson, our CFO, open and started pulling out file folders. The three on the top of the pile went over first. “Ludovic Clair, Lira Suzuki, and Moses Rosenkreutz should be in the Guild’s files already,” I said, “But I myself, and Io Sasagawa-” the last two folders, “-won’t be as yet.”
 
He gave me a quick grin. “Even better,” he said, riffling quickly through the papers. “Mechwarrior, tanker, jump infantry, command, and… yes, fighter pilot. Mostly fairly junior for your positions-”
 
“Me in particular,” I agreed wryly.
 
He ignored the comment discreetly. “But solid records for their level of experience - and Sasagawa looks like a real jewel.”
 
“She’s been a lifesaver,” I agreed. “I’ve given some thought to putting her in command, running the unit as, umn, an owner-ranker, but decided against it.”
 
He blinked. “I’ve heard of one or two operations that did that,” he admitted. “Seems to depend on the personalities, even more than usual.”
 
“You need exactly the right people on both sides to avoid tangling the chain of command,” I guessed-and-or-agreed, “Yeah. And my last try at a, a mentor-partner didn’t turn out well.”
 
“Sounds like a story.”
 
“You could say. Turns out he was a pirate plant that happened to have a legit Comstar resume.” Nothing about why I’d expect Comstar to back pirates. “The boarding operations were a mess.”
 
My nightmares hadn’t exactly stopped so much as subsided to part of the background of my new life, like periods.
 
That got me a second look over, with less attention to my lips and bustline and more to my eyes. “I’m told they usually are,” he said, with noticeably more respect.
 
I smugged for a second, to let him know I’d caught him doing the reevaluation, then let him off the hook with, “That’s where we captured the Leopard, Buccaneer, and one of our Merchants. We dropped the prisoners that surrendered on terms on Melcher, and maybe one in ten of their prisoners decided to stick with us rather than staying in the Alliance.”
 
“Why Melcher?”
 
“No death sentence,” I said. “Mandatory life for piracy, sure, but no death sentence on the planet at all.”
 
“Ah. A pity, but if you’d given your word, I suppose the best option.”
 
A pity that they hadn’t all been killed, christ, future of the eighties, go fuck yourself. I couldn’t even argue that they wouldn’t have deserved it, but… What a filthy business.
 
I did my best to keep that off my face as he plowed through what looked like the rest of the paperwork. “The ones that didn’t have terms stayed in the Alliance, too,” I said. “Anyway. Check good for the fees?”
 
He blinked at me. “‘Check good’?” he repeated.
 
“Will you take payment by check, or should I arrange a Comstar draft?” I said, reminding myself not to be impatient with the man.
 
“Oh. Yes, a check is fine. If it bounces…” He trailed off and shrugged, then smiled with a hint of threat in it. “I imagine you’ll have larger problems than your recruiting.”
 
“Like Comstar making off with seven years’ operating budget,” I agreed, and laughed at his expression.
 

***

 
Of course we didn’t just have an enormous pile of cbills sitting in a bank account somewhere. Or rather, we did, but only about six months’ worth. The rest had been put to work, and frankly if Phil’s ex-wife hadn’t been such a colossal bitch, I’d’ve been inclined to send her a christmas card for setting me up to snag such an experienced money-man.
 
With interstellar markets and travel times for even information being what they were, finding good investments was more art than science, and while Phillip Poisson was certainly an artist, he was artist who was used to working in the medium of the Outworlds Alliance’s economy, not the Draconis March, so for the most part we’d gone for low-risk investments like bonds.
 
Bonds are nice and simple, but between the numbers involved, and the rest of the money that wasn’t ‘the most part’, that still left plenty of paperwork. I was relying heavily on Phil’s judgement and experience, but I wanted, needed to understand what he was doing and if possible, why.
 
Then, there was all the paper trail to keep track of everything the unit consumed even just sitting in one place - water supplies and food, welding wire and solder, laundry detergent and dish soap, the list didn’t stop going on and on.
 
So, I was spending most of my desk time in the recruiting office reading reports and inventories - or resting my eyes from them. That didn’t help when I was on the other side of the planet, of course, but it made climbing onto the Leopard I’d named Norway’s Greatest Son for the flight from our reservation on the far side of the planet to the spaceport at Snapperville to take my shift at the office something of a relief.
 
The rotation I and the other ‘recruiters’ had set up had basically two of us in Snapperville at any given point - one running ‘office hours’ and the other out and gladhanding their way through the bars and watering holes. The weekly flight to the reservation would take one of us out of town and bring a replacement in, letting everybody involved spend three weeks out of five with our people, training, working together, and the rest.
 
This was necessary, of course, because, one, the interdependent and deadly-dangerous nature of mercenary work meant that signing with a unit was a big risk and people liked to have a measure of their commanders first, two, a lot of mercs just didn’t think in terms of ‘application forms at a business address’ and a lot of support types, like medical personnel, didn’t think any other way, and three, because the Guild bylaws about who was even allowed to perform contract negotiations were ridiculously strict.
 
Seriously, the hell, guys? I felt kind of lucky I was even allowed to have a specialist present. Did you want people getting cheated?
 
Anyway. Before I got sidetracked: I was in the recruitment office, waiting to see if anybody would bite and killing time with paperwork when, to give in to the inner Noir Detective, she walked in.
 
She was tall and made it look great; movie-star face, swimsuit-model figure, nice muscles, and the proverbial legs that went all the way up. Low boots with heels, spandex pants with warning stripes up the side of one leg, jean jacket over what I suspected was an off-the-shoulder blouse thing, brilliant red hair pushed back by a headband that screamed ‘mechwarrior’.
 
Future of the eighties, thank you.
 
“Hello,” I said, fairly gently given the awkward nervousness in her face. “Are you here to apply as a mercenary?”
 
“Ah, yes,” she said, holding out a data chip and a sheaf of hardcopy. I stood up and leaned forward to take it, smiling internally as her eyes flicked down away from my face for a split second - I hadn’t bothered to button my dress shirt all the way.
 
Score.
 
I slid the chip into a reader and skimmed over the resume; Sophitia Braun, Solaris native, proficiency testing certs for battlemech operation, which usually meant learned-at-a-parent’s-knee. That was usually neutral; unofficial instruction was more likely to miss a usually-basic bit of background or theory, but what it did teach ended up known cold. One hitch with a company-scale unit that I’d heard through the grapevine had dissolved a week or so back, diced up between their creditors. And…
 
I stopped, staring at the entry.
 
Looked up at her.
 
She blinked back, mostly innocent with a hint of playful smug.
 
I set the reader on the desk, got up. “Would you like any coffee?” I asked, walking around the side and out towards the reception area.
 
“Ah, no, I’m okay,” she demurred, confidence dissolving into a hint of worry.
 
I came back a moment later with no coffee, holding one of the magazines that all waiting rooms seemed to accrete without trying.
 
Sat down, opened it, flipped through. I thought I remembered that this one had had…
 
Yep. Listing of Solaris champions, including headshots.
 
And there she was.
 
“Huh,” I said.
 
I set the magazine aside and went back to the chipreader, finishing my pass through the resume.
 
“You have a family ‘mech?” I asked, and hid a squirt of amusement at her nonplussed blink.
 
“Ah… Yes,” she said. “Aspis has been in our family since 2849. My mother started training me to pilot him when I was five.”
 
“It doesn’t say here what type?” I prompted gently.
 
She blushed brilliantly, but seemed pleased. Aw, cute. “Oh! Sorry. Aspis is a Centurion. A modified Dash-A-L variant, with jump jets, a hand fitted to the right arm, and a sword.”
 
I blinked. “A sword,” I repeated.
 
“Yes,” she confirmed. “It’s actually pretty easy to take off limbs with it. Torso mounted weapons are harder, you have to hit the muzzle with the tip exactly right and not as they’re firing… Um. It works!”
 
The last was almost defensive.
 
“I believe you,” I said.
 
The universe, on the other hand, I was less sure about. I kept going, “We operate a number of Centurions ourselves, though they’re all standard Dash-A models. Overall, I wouldn’t anticipate any trouble fitting you in on that score… What made you decide to leave Solaris? You were clearly doing well there.”
 
She gave me an incredulous look, then laughed. “I guess you don’t follow Solaris news?” she said.
 
I shrugged. “I’m from the Outworlds. Even if I’m a mechwarrior myself, we don’t get much news from the Commonwealth, much less Solaris.”
 
“Well, two things happened,” she said. “I found out that my stable had been giving me only a quarter of the standard contract-”
 
Despite myself, I winced.
 
“-and three of the arena managers blacklisted me after…” She stopped, hesitated, then braced herself and finished, with a hint of a blush, “after my ex-girlfriend decided to publish some photos she’d taken as revenge.”
 
One of the aspects where the ‘future of the eighties’ bit showed itself most clearly in the thirty-teens was in LGBT rights. Bluntly, they weren’t there. Homosexuality existed, even homosexual communities, but they confined themselves to narrow underground niches of society and experience - and if they, we, tried to leave those niches, the consequences could range from uncomfortable through professionally crippling - as Sophitia had found - to personally lethal.
 
Arguably, trans people were better off - Canopian and Terran medical tech could do a safer and more complete job of any transition than 20th century doctors had been able to pull off, leaving less chance of being discovered after the fact - but even that was very much a case of it being wise to make a complete break.
 
“Bastards,” I said mildly, and had to smile at her relieved look. “That won’t be a problem with us,” I added, and sighed internally at the realization that yeah, I’d already decided to accept her application. Not that there would have been that much doubt, I mean, Champion of Solaris, but I knew that that wasn’t why.
 
And no, it wasn’t because of my powerful and deep seated yearning to tap that.
 
I mean, that was there, but it wasn’t why either.
 
No, this was the impulse that made you pick up an abandoned puppy and take it home for a bath and some of your leftover hamburger. She was adorable.
 
“If anybody does try and make an issue out of it, just let me know - but I wouldn’t expect it. We’ve got a few other people who are out, and if there’s been any trouble, it’s kept too quiet for me to find even when I was looking for it.”
 
I tabbed through her resume for a moment. “So, you signed with Aaronson’s Angels off of Solaris?” At the fifteen-hundred cbills a week of a rated-regular mechwarrior, not the three-times-that premium her Solaris title should have guaranteed her. I scribbled, ‘Have Phil give this girl negotiating lessons’ in the margin of my paperwork.
 
“Mm,” she agreed. “Our first contract was to raid across the Draconis Combine border, five worlds, one after the other, but… We didn’t have our own jumpship or dropships, and we had three different hired ships back out or charge ‘surcharges’ to pull us off the planets we were attacking. The Federated Suns didn’t go through with the penalty clause for taking longer than agreed to do the raids, since the company had done a good-faith best, but… Between one thing and another, even with everybody in the company taking a pay cut,” Ah, that explained that, “we just couldn’t make it work. I’ve been trying to make my last week’s five hundred stretch since then, but…”
 
She trailed off, and I sighed. No, they really had been cheating her. “Okay,” I said, “let me get this out…”
 
I walked around the front of the desk and leaned over her shoulder while I spread one of our contracts out in front of her, laying out obligations, benefits, and so on.
 
When I glanced over at her, I found her watching my face, looking… tolerantly amused. “I can read a contract,” she told me.
 
Her eyes were intensely green.
 
I couldn’t help drawing a breath in between my teeth, though I couldn’t tell you what I was bracing myself for. “Yeah,” I said, “but…”
 
I reached down and flipped to the next page of the contract. “This bit is a standard pay scale, set by the Mercenary’s Guild and Comstar’s Mercenary Review Board, and, yeah, fifteen hundred a month is the basic rate for a mechwarrior… Before skill, rank, and experience modifiers.”
 
I could see her eyes move to follow my finger to the table - and then down slightly as she read the other entries. “...Oh,” she said. “So that’s why Captain Aaronson looked so upset when I talked to him about joining everyone else in the pay hold.”
 
“Yeah,” I said, as gently as I could. The fact that she’d apparently had to raise that additional cut herself made me think a little better of the man. Not well, but better. “You were already doing him a huge favor.”
 
She let out a little huff of breath. “Thank you for being nice about it,” she said.
 
“Yeah, well, what was I gonna do? Not tell you? I’m not a bitch,” I said, straightening up and heading back to my seat.
 
“It’d be good for you,” she pointed out, giving me a look like I was some kind of hero or something.
 
“Yeah, until word got out I was running scams, or you realized and went for a better offer,” I said uncomfortably. “It’s just money. I can afford that.”
 
She giggled, which I’d’ve found much more thrilling if I hadn’t been busy squirming. Compliments on my figure? Younger-me taught me how to handle that. Being looked up to for basic human decency? Neither side had any tool in the box for that kind of awkwardness. “So, do you have any other advice for me?”
 
I struggled for a moment, but there was never any real doubt. “Yeah,” I said, sighing a little, and pointed at the contract in front of her. “Don’t sign that.”
 
Beat, for comic effect. “Well, not right away, anyway,” I added, once she’d had time to blink and start to process. “Keep that, and get a contract copy for every other unit on-planet, then sit down and compare them to decide what you want to do. Shop around, don’t just go for the first offer. Hell, play us off against each other - see if you can get a little bit of bidding war going.”
 
Sophitia stared at me for a couple of seconds, then picked the contract up and tucked it into her folder. “Will it bother you if that means I don’t decide to join your unit?” she asked.
 
I shrugged. “Not as much as getting you on false pretenses would’ve,” I said, and extended my hand to shake hers as we both stood. “Trust is too important in the field.”
 
“Thank you for the advice,” she told me, with a smile that launched another flight of butterflies through my tummy. “I’ll certainly be back when I’ve made my decision, whatever it is.”
 
“I’ll look forward to it,” I said, smiling back like a dope, and, all credit to younger-me for the courage for it, added as she reached the door, “After all, even a ‘no’ means I have a chance to ask you out.”
 
She glanced at me over her shoulder, blushing a little. “We’ll see,” she said, and closed the door behind her.
 
I sat down to hyperventilate a bit.
 

***

 
The chunk of land we’d leased as a base was smack in the middle of a single desert the size of Europe; a thousand miles or so to the east, monsoon rains pulled in by summer heat faded it into a broad seasonal grassland, but to the west a major mountain range kept the matching moisture from that side along the coast. What little moisture reached this far inland, or flowed through passes to fall on the near side of the continental divide, had wound itself into a long, twisting, mostly seasonal river system, gradually carving a viciously dissected canyon system straight through the desert.
 
The canyon bottoms were full of local plants that might as well have been cactus, eagerly feuding with invasive Terran mesquite and sheltering a variety of things that scurried, scratched, bit, or stung. The native rodent-equivalents had venomous barbs at the end of their tails, and they weren’t shy about using them, or about singing at the top of their tiny little lungs like so many frogs.
 
I wasn’t sure which original Hoffian settler had christened the critters ‘mouspions’, but it was apt.
The uplands between the canyons had smaller, thornier cacti and grasses you could have shaved with in between the primary crop of rocks, but were home to a different species of mouspion, which was both better at avoiding people and less confrontational when cornered, so I’d taken our landlord’s advice and had our camp built on the high ground.
 
And there was a good bit of it. Planning ahead for the trip to New Dallas and the inevitable time grubbing around in the ruins there, I’d sprung for proper sealed prefabs with full environmental plants. If need be, we could have set up on Hoff’s moon in full vacuum, and they were more than up to keeping the AC on during the midday heat.
 
The buildings whose functions couldn’t be fit inside a collapsible box, like mech repair gantries, were cheap steel tubing and concrete under corrugated metal skins, and it hadn’t taken long for my people to decide that most work that had to take place in them would be scheduled during the night.
 
At some point, I wanted to come up with some kind of self-portable equivalent of the Mobile Field Bases I remembered from the Mechwarrior games, but they didn’t exist in 3015. As far as I could tell, there was no technical reason they couldn’t - I’d mathed out all the individual bits that’d need to go into one, since they were for the most part the same as the ones that’d go into a carry cubicle on a dropship, plus some odds and ends - but if the notion had occurred to anyone, it hadn’t survived the Succession Wars.
 
For the time being, though, that was in the future.
 
Along with the actual base, we’d used our access to fusion engines and heavy equipment to hack some rough-and-ready roads into place between the camp, the nearest town, and the local airfield that we’d all but taken over with our dropships. Then added some more wherever the landlord and local government asked; it was a good way to build goodwill and cut down on our rent payments. We didn’t have the right grading equipment to finish them off, but this far into the boonies, most vehicles the locals used didn’t need that kind of fine care - and for the ones that did, having the main cuts made for them made things a lot easier on the local road crews.
 
All that, and the pay and supply runs dropped into the local economy, had built up more than enough goodwill for me to dragoon the local law enforcement and handful of retirees with military experience into showing a succession of my people every blind turn, box canyon, and other ambush spot in our entire reservation, while we set up target cutouts and sensors to go with a dozen different computer models of the entire area, all ready to randomize with each other and feed into training scenarios.
 
The Davion rep that had dropped by to check things out had been working very hard not to make any impressed or interested noises, and I figured that the locals would have a more official training base moving in when we left. More power to ‘em; I’d already dropped a copy of our combined database of the targets in the files of the civil planning commission. I probably could’ve sold it, but enh, I’ll take the goodwill, instead.
 
The training cycle put most of the exercises on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, with analysis and repair work on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, and leave, shopping, and the weekly round trip to Snapperville on Sunday. It’d quickly become a tradition for the returning recruiter to go out with whoever they’d brought back during the Monday exercises, half for the hazing value, half for evaluation, and half to ease both sides (back) into the routine.
 
Naturally, the betting pools were fiercest on Mondays, and today, I was looking forward to being completely outclassed and humiliated.
 
“OK, try Datachannel B now,” I said into my neurohelmet’s microphone. I counted myself lucky that most of our gear was from the Second Succession War, and that that meant that the pickups that lined the helmet were light enough for it to feel more like a heavy-duty motorcycle helmet than the monstrous diving-helmet things that passed for modern production.
 
“...Handshake confirmed,” Sophitia’s voice replied, and I could see Aspis mime a thumbs up out of my cockpit windows.
 
“Ohkay,” I said, grinning. While the mechanical bits of her family ‘mech were better tuned than even our factory-fresh Centurions, the computer systems were a lot dodgier, and it had taken nearly an hour of massaging to get to this stage - convincing them to admit they were talking to the central computer system in the HQ truck. “Now we flip to training mode, and hit ‘remote accept’, then confirm.”
 
“Training… remote… Yes, I have it,” she read back, more slowly. “Downloading?”
 
Now that the tech problem was solved, I leaned back in my seat and stretched, enjoying the physical sensation and the usual narcissistic rush that came from knowing what any onlooker would have made of the sight. “Yeah,” I confirmed, once I was sure I wasn’t going to groan into the mike. “HQ has a whole plan for waypoints, targets, and the lot made up for us, and they’ve batched it all together in one file for our computers to throw at us in the field. Now that we’ve got Aspis talking to the main node, it’s sucking that down by radio, confirming it, and tucking it away, which takes a bit.”
 
“Why not just load the file in the mech bay?” she asked.
 
“Mostly because a lot of the time the planned runs change depending on what we turn out to need to practice more of, so we’d end up doing downloaded ones anyway,” I said. “Also, this way nobody in the field can cheat and read ahead rather than taking things cold.”
 
Hallelujah for universal Star League technical standards.
 
“Joker, King,” came over the radio. “We’re showing it working on our end, too. Figure ten minutes for the whole thing and a full crosscheck.”
 
The unit’s radio callsigns were assigned in a pattern. Each company of line forces got a combination of a phonetic alphabet letter and a card suit; spades for aerospace, clubs for battlemechs, diamonds for armor, and hearts for infantry. Rear-line elements were face cards; Queen for medical, Jack for technical, and King for administrative and (most often), the actual HQ truck that was responsible for coordinating everything.
 
The artillery section, once we got it manned, would be the Dealer, and the command lance, in play but not tied down to any of the basic units, was Joker.
 
“We’ve got a short bit at the start,” Lu Clair went on, “so while that’s running, Nutcracker, why don’t you take your pass through, and we’ll let the Champ catch up?”
 
‘Champion’ as Sophitia’s personal nickname had probably been inevitable, but I could’ve done without the reminder of that confrontation with Rakis for mine. Still, the fact that you couldn’t pick those yourself was part of the point, and I knew it could have been a lot worse.
 
Also, I’d been able to shortstop the techs’ attempt to make my noseart into a pair of split-open walnuts by improvising a version of one of my favorite meme images, which made it easier to be philosophical. (The impressive part had been the fact that somebody had actually cared enough to spend money on having Comstar search their databanks for the origin of the connection between a picture of a bird and the phrase ‘I’d sell you to Satan for one corn chip’.)
 
“Sure, what the hell,” I agreed, and started redoing my seat restraints. Most mechwarriors apparently didn’t bother strapping in properly, not least because the usual standards of dress in the profession - I was wearing a sports bra with mesh sections for better breathability and a pair of bike shorts that would’ve worked just as well in a bikini, to go with my cooling jacket and neurohelmet - tended to leave a lot of room for chafing. I, on the other hand, spent an uncommon amount of time falling down, and had invested in padded strap-covers for the worst trouble spots. “Let’s see if we get a pratfall for the collection today.”
 
The file-listing we’d used to identify the mechs for pilot assignment seemed to have become permanent in my case, but from the glassy-smooth purr as Marauder No. 2 shifted into motion and across the training course’s starting line, the ‘mech didn’t mind.
 
This time, the tech crew had set the run up with two targets right out the gate, appearing almost before the destination waypoint. I settled the sights onto the further of the two, about the edge between short and long range down the valley, and checked down to one-quarter speed before I let one of the PPCs loose.
 
Even at low power, the flash and crash of manmade lightning got a reaction out of the local wildlife; the usual territory-calls coming in through the outside pickups went silent, and there was a splashing commotion from the muddy stream winding down the mostly-dry riverbed as several of the crocodilians basking there decided they wanted the water’s cover right now, thank you.
 
All that was fairly usual; also as usual, I’d missed the shot.
 
That was why I’d slowed, though. The more stable firing platform meant that the followup autocannon burst did go on target, one paint-loaded practice round spraying across dirt a few meters from the smoldering scar the missed PPC shot had left, but the other two dousing the metal tank cutout in vivid blaze-orange goo.
 
That done, I throttled back up to a dead run to make up the lost time and charged into shorter range of the nearer target. This one I hit on the first try, which was rare enough to leave me feeling a little pleased with myself as I wiped away the little sweat that was escaping my headband.
 
There wasn’t time for anything more like proper celebration; the sensor system threw up an alert as I crossed whatever its programmed plan had for a marker line, simulating reactor activations, one in front and one behind.
 
Throttle down, swerve left, arms decoupled… I acquired the trailing target and fired a ranging shot from that laser; it was barely in range and the jitter from running slashed the aimpoint crazily all around the target. That was all right. A split-second more to settle the solution and estimate the lead, and I put the same arm’s PPC bolt… well, a couple meters to the right of the bullseye, but the important part was that it was still in the good-hit zone.
 
I swerved back to the right, torso twisting at the same time to bring the other arm to bear dead ahead and fire - the target was too distant for a laser, this time.
 
The PPC shot missed.
 
I kept turning; the left arm came on target first, but I held fire. Core temperature was still way too high; feeding the other PPC would have spiked it right into the danger zone, and…
 
The turning of my Marauder’s upper body on the waist ring brought the target into the relatively limited tracking range of the autocannon. Despite appearances, it wasn’t quite fixed in its emplacement on the upper right glacis - it had a few degrees of tracking ability, mostly for fine adjustments. I let it center in its zone, then fired again, and hissed in irritation.
 
The three-shot burst had fallen short, raking through the dirt and battered brush in front of the target.
 
I glanced at the heat gauge. Technically, it’d be safe… but training was supposed to be about good practice, and I wanted my good practice to be sustainable fire. I waited, made myself wait, until the bar passed the marker and I let the other PPC speak.
 
This time it was a hit.
 
My turn had put me into dry bed of the river, a clear expanse of sand and dried mud around a snaking sluggish creek; I stuck with that course, following it around the bend in the valley and up to the next waypoint.
 
Five more targets appeared one-by-one, and went down in seven shots over the course of a couple of kilometers.
 
The last waypoint brought me cresting up over the top of an earth dam - they’d said it was rated to take the weight of any of our mechs, but I joggled the throttle to step over it rather than on it anyway - and into the flood control lake beyond, right at the edge of our reservation.
 
Then, squeep-squeep-squeep-squeep, four more targets came up, two on either side of the lake.
 
“Oh, you fuckers,” I said to the absent and invisible techs who’d programmed the course, and turned towards the nearer pair, unloading both PPCs one after the other, then the autocannon at the one I’d missed… and one of the lasers as that missed, too.
 
The heat alarm was one I went out of my way to avoid hearing, but it was shrieking just like I couldn’t tell I’d been dumped a couple of feet from a twenty-foot tall bonfire.
 
More importantly, though, turning to face one pair of targets had given the other ones clear ‘shots’ at my rear armor, and I knew that I had seconds at best before my score started assessing the consequences.
 
So, I crossed my fingers, spread the Marauder’s arms wide… and tilted the machine all the way back to the balance point… and then a little further. The balance alarm blatted harshly, but seventy-five tons of armor and electronics keeled over into the water with what had to be the biggest splash this little retention pond had ever seen, a commotion made even bigger as the mech’s clublike arms ‘slapped’ at the water to slow the fall.
 
The impact at the end was still enough to drive the breath out of me, but when my eyes uncrossed, I was staring up through my canopy at a meter or so of muddy water and the clear sky beyond.
 
Most Class Twenty Autocannon fired 165mm shells, but at the angle the targets would be ‘firing’ at me at, even those would just skip off the surface. I was safe… though so were they.
 
Controls from SEMIAUTO to NEUROASSIST, local scan from COMPOSITE to SONAR, and…
 
Carefully, I rolled the mech over from its back to its front, without more than a flash of paint showing above the surface for a split second, then did a painfully slow crab-crawl a couple hundred meters to the side, making sure each foot and stub wrist was fully set and moving only one limb at a time. Besides keeping myself from an embarrassingly unplanned tumble, doing it that way meant that the surface of the water stayed undisturbed by currents, turbulence, and eddies that any notional enemy might use to track my position.
 
With radar and the like shut off, and the reactor’s heat blurred under the cool - well, lukewarm - water, and the surface of the water to act like a thermocline and bounce scans as neatly as shells, nobody without sim telemetry would have any way of knowing where I’d pop up again.
 
Keeping my own sonar scan going let me watch the lakebottom to make sure I had enough depth to hide in, and eventually, I’d reached the spot I’d picked and tucked the legs forward, folded double under the flattened main torso and only barely submerged.
 
Then I flipped controls and scans back to combat presets, stood up, and opened the throttle. Laser shots as I stood both missed, but the followup - autocannon and PPC - both hit, letting me finally turn to wade up into the last checkpoint.
 
When I flipped the radio back on, Ludovic Clair was laughing his ass off at me. “What the hell was that, Boss?” he asked around the giggles.
 
“A brilliant strategy, more or less,” I defended.
 
He just laughed harder, and from the sound of the background noise coming over his pickup, he wasn’t the only one.
 
I blew a raspberry into my mike, then said, “So, are we ready to see the Champion’s run? I’m curious.”
 
“Give us another minute to laugh at you, maybe?”
 
“I will be timing you,” I told him sourly, which of course only got more laughter.
 
Despite the larking about, they got Sophitia started in good time, and the contrast was as dramatic as could’ve been wished. I hadn’t seen this run’s video of me, but I’d seen other recordings, taken from the camera clusters we’d installed at the tops of the mesas. I kind of lumbered around mechanically, like wide-load truck.
 
Even just getting from Point A to Point B, Sophitia made her Centurion look graceful, and when the targets started popping up, she whirled from side to side around her base vector without even slowing down, beams stabbing out at seeming random - and never missing. Twenty-five ton advantage or not, it was blatantly obvious that if I’d tried to fight her, she’d have taken me apart with barely a scratch.
 
Certainly she took the course apart that easily. She jet-hopped easily over the dam in less than half the time I’d needed; she hadn’t slowed down from a dead run the entire time. I watched through my cockpit windows as she splashed through the holding pond, churned water light with even more mud in her wake, and could see her mech stiffen as she saw the last four targets come up as a group.
 
Sophitia launched herself into the air on roaring jumpjets, spinning in flight. The right arm threw out, tracking the flare of a large laser across one target, followed a second later by both medium lasers, fore and aft, firing in unison and hitting opposite targets - both near an ML’s maximum effective focus distance! - in practically the same instant.
 
“Oh, now you’re just showing off,” I grumbled, smiling, even as a flight of LRMs roared out near the top of her jump and arced smokily down towards the last target. Most would miss, the practice rockets didn’t have combat grade electronics any more than they had standard propellants or warheads, but it was obvious the salvo was on-target enough to count.
 
Sophitia ‘oof’ed over the line as she splashed down again. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she claimed, but there was a smile in her voice. As her mech walked into the final marker area, Clair came on the line.
 
“Sophitia Braun, one hundred percent hit rate. Looks like we’ll have to do more to challenge you. Asha Blackwing, fifty-six percent hit rate, up two full points from your last first day back. Unfortunately…”
 
“Not enough to save me buying the beer tonight,” I finished, still in good cheer. It was pretty rare that I didn’t end up paying that penalty, so I’d decided to get used to it.
 
All in all, life wasn’t bad.
 

***

 
I was in my (air conditioned) office on the base when five people walked in through the open door.
 
Lira Suzuki, Moses Rosenkreutz, and Ludovic Clair were more or less a set, though they didn’t look it. All of them were nineteen, formally Captains, and in command of one of the unit’s ground-force sub-units.
 
Lira was from Dieron, originally, before her father had signed on with mine so his family could escape the Combine’s notoriously ruthless internal security apparatus - for something he had done, she’d implied. She was even shorter than my own five foot two and looked about four years younger than she was. ‘Not disappointing Little Sister’ was kind of an odd way to run a tank battalion, but she’d been making it work.
 
Moses was the son of a merc family who’d ended up in infantry when he discovered he couldn’t use a neurohelmet; he was also short, maybe five four in thick-soled boots, and had compensated by developing a set of muscles a Bollywood star would have envied to go with the kind of absolute lack of self-preservation that would have a honey badger edging away nervously. He didn’t command his people so much as drag them in his wake, and we’d had a couple of quiet conversations - the first of them his idea - about chains of command for when those habits caught up to him.
 
Lu was from the far end of the Outworlds, and he’d sold his family’s land and gone for soldier after pirates killed his family - to learn what he needed to take revenge, originally, though the Second Air Wing had caught up with the dropship of the band responsible before he had a chance. The unit he’d found to learn from had been desperate enough to sign him as a trainee at thirteen, so he was actually the second most experienced member of our command team, assuming you didn’t count the transport commanders.
 
Which, well, they didn’t, so, good enough.
 
The last of my unit commanders had taken our aerospace crews well in hand after holding a wing-level command in the Outworlds Alliance Military Command, which by most lights made her the only one of us actually qualified for her job. Io Sasagawa had come as a package deal with her daughter Callisto, but she’d have been worth it even if the kid had been incompetent rather than just green. She’d figured that mercenary work offered a better future for her daughter than a lifetime defending a state that had been slowly but inevitably circling the drain for centuries, and the fact that she was probably right was about as sad a commentary on the state of the universe as could be made.
 
Seriously. Future of the eighties, go fuck yourself.
 
The final member of the little group had, when Lu signed off on his recruitment papers, actually asked to avoid an officer position and just remain a line mechwarrior. Despite the liver spots, wrinkles, and enormous bald spot, Malin Reyes was physically fit enough to stand up to the rigors of battlemech operations, and there was nothing wrong with his mind.
 
I looked from one to the other to the next as Lu and Moses set down the folding chairs they’d brought in, and the other three occupied the mismatched chairs in front of my desk. “Why do I feel like I’m about to be hit with an intervention?” I asked, trying for ‘light’ to cover the instinctive nervousness.
 
“It’s not that bad,” Sasagawa said uncomfortably, then visibly braced herself before she said, “We wanted to talk to you about Braun.”
 
“...Was I not supposed to hire a Solaris Champion, or something?” I asked defensively.
 
“No!” she denied, then sighed and scrubbed a hand wearily over her face; it was weird to see her professional control fray. “K’so… I don’t know how to explain this.”
 
Reyes cleared his throat. “Fact is,” he said, “Major and the Captains are mostly here to back me up.”
 
Oh. That probably meant… “So this is an ‘experienced noncom’ counseling session. OK; what have I missed?”
 
He chuckled, his few remaining teeth showing in a grin. “So far, you’re doin’ pretty all right,” he said. “Idea is to keep it that way.”
 
I nodded. “Yeah. All right. Lay it on me.”
 
Reyes nodded. “‘Kay. First thing, we noticed you bein’ careful ‘bout havin’ good reasons for how you do your Coloneling around Soph; helps you like to explain things to start with. Keep payin’ attention and you should be all right there. Second, though…”
 
His good cheer sobered. “Some folks in the unit, they ain’t so happy ‘bout workin’ with, or for, a swish.”
 
It took me a moment to parse the slang. “People’ve been trying to wipe out homo cooties for three thousand years,” I said, “and it hasn’t slowed it down that I know of.”
 
I only realized I was angry after I heard my own voice; I took a breath to calm down. “Anyway, though, I have been thinking about that,” I said. “Admittedly, my first impulse is tough shit and they know where the fucking door is, but I had a thought… The Light Horse, the other units on planet, I imagine they’ve got at least a few people whose closet doors broke for one reason or another - and turned into ‘problem cases’ because of it. I’ve been wondering if we might use that to set up swaps for whoever’s decided they just can’t live without veto rights on somebody else’s love life.”
 
Lira and Lu both looked uncomfortable at best, but Moses looked… thoughtful. Sasagawa was giving me a stare like she’d never seen me before, and Reyes grinned again.
 
“That’s not a bad idea,” he said. “I’ve got some old cronies I can put the word out onto the grapevine through, if you like?”
 
“That’d be a help,” I agreed, and glanced at the others. “I’ll need you guys to put together a list of candidates, OK?”
 
Sasagawa glanced at the younger trio and nodded. “We’ll have them for you,” she said. “Though… I think there’s a chance that dealing with things this way will raise issues with men who would be able to deal with one or two homosexual comrades but be concerned by increasing numbers.”
 
I shrugged. “Eventually, we’ll reach an equilibrium point. I’m hoping that having that list will serve as a release valve to buy time until we do.”
 
She nodded. “If we put it right, I think we can count on that,” she said.
 
I rapped my knuckles on my desk - which was really just a tabletop set on top of a couple of file cabinets. “Good,” I said. “Questions, comments, concerns?” That was my usual way of starting to wrap up a meeting.
 
“Idle curiosity,” Reyes said. “If you was thinkin’ ‘bout this on your own, why not raise it ahead a’ time?”
 
I grinned at him. “Because most of our people would get screwy ideas about authority chains, I’ve only known you for about two months, and Sasagawa’s spent her entire career in regular military where the only advice about in-unit relationships is ‘Don’t’.”
 
Sasagawa herself laughed. “Not quite that bad, but… Yeah, that makes sense.”
 
I made a shooing gesture. “OK, then, there’s nothing left but my raging girlcrush, and frankly, that’s nobody’s business but hers and mine, and I know we’ve all got paperwork.”
 
“I don’t,” Reyes pointed out.
 
“I can fix that for you if you like,” I offered, as sweetly as I could, but he was already on his way out the door, and did nothing but speed up at the sound of my voice.
 

***

 
I had to be amused that, between one thing and another, it turned out to be exactly one day short of a year after I became me, out of the merger of Younger-Me and Older-Me, before I went out to join an actual party for the first time since everything changed.
 
But on New Year’s Eve, December 31, 3015, I could finally break that streak and let my figurative hair down. (My literal hair was swept up around a black-laquered stick pin into a bun that looked casual and artless and had actually taken a paid specialist an hour to get right, and it had been worth every penny.)
 
I was young, rich, and - without false modesty - good looking, and I’d arrived at the party on the arm of a girl I was coming more and more to genuinely like.
 
I never uttered the dread words, never taunted Murphy’s ghost or the malicious fates, but apparently they’d been listening for the opportunity, and their revenge for offering it arrived as a wave of urgent com calls, beeping their way through the guest list of the Mercenary Commanders’ Ball.
 
I pulled out my own noisemaker and read the text on its little pager display. JUMPSHIP ARRIVED NADIR POINT MONOLITH CLASS NO CIVILIAN SCHEDULED LIKELY COMBINE INVASION
 
...Well, fuck.
 

...AND PRAY THE DAY’S NOT POISON...

[Valles]

STAND AMONG THE ONES THAT LIVE...
 

Tell The World That We Tried
A Battletech Fanfiction, inspired by Fitzgerald’s CYOA at https://imgur.com/gallery/M41mI
By Valles

 
I didn’t usually bother to put on the full femme fatale. Among other reasons, swinging my hips that much started making unfamiliar muscle groups complain, it took what felt like three times as long as just doing whatever-it-was, and for the most part the men around me were more useful thinking with their brains rather than their testicles.
 
But this wasn’t the most part.
 
As head of the Eridani Light Horse, Brevet-General Reinbach Kerston was the most powerful man on the entire planet of Hoff. When he threw a party, it was by definition a significant occasion for any native Hoffian - particularly if they were, wanted to seem, or wanted to become the kind of influential local that an otherwise-independent outside ruler would be wise to court.
 
The local glitterati had exchanged several small fortunes and not a few feuds to obtain invitations, and I wouldn’t’ve been surprised to learn that at some point murder had been done for the sake of same.
 
But there was a list of people whose invitations were guaranteed. The ranking House Davion representative, whose degree of cousinship to the main-line Davions I’d never caught but whose main job was to negotiate new merc contracts. Comstar’s Precentor Hoff - who, thankfully, had declined to attend. A handful of the richest and most powerful natives, first and foremost His Grace, Bradley Cheel, Duke of Hoff...
 
And every other merc commander who happened to be on-planet, including me.
 
So, the ELH’s 3016 New Year’s Ball was tailor-made for networking, and for making an impression. All a good reason to put my best foot forward.
 
None of that was why I’d let the inner vamp loose.
 
That was in honor of my date.
 
Her leaning down to help me out of the limo didn’t expose anything; her sleek, blood-red dress had a halter design that rose all the way to her neck in front. She was wearing only a minimum of makeup - Mechwarrior’s habit; if you’ve never sweated mascara into your eyes, count your blessings - and her only jewelry was a pair of ruby stud earrings, but from the rate of camera flashes from the sides of the red carpet, I was far short of the only one who thought she was outshining the flashy invitees dripping in sapphires and topaz.
 
“I told you,” I murmured, leaning on her hand just enough to make the offer feel appreciated. “Fashion can vary all it likes, but style is forever.”
 
...OK, no, while the heels I had on made my calves look bitchin’, they were pretty tall. I actually did end up needing her help for balance to get out of the limo without incident. I’d picked my dress, the matte-est black I could find, for a hemline that slashed up from next to one ankle to above the other knee, and at the range we were at I could see her eyes dart from there up to the one-shoulder neckline.
 
Success.
 
She flushed when she realized I’d caught her looking, and I grinned and tucked a hand into her elbow as we walked up the wide, shallow steps.
 
Once we were into the ballroom, I could see the points where the space’s bones filtered out from under the decoration - the removed movable walls that would have turned it into a series of largeish conference rooms, the temporary nature of the tables and bandstand, and the like.
 
“I’m impressed,” I murmured to Sophitia. “They went all out.”
 
They really had. The decorations gussying the rather plain basic space up were top grade. It looked like about a kilometer’s worth of shimmering silk had been hung in place of simple crepe paper, for instance. You could probably have bought a light ‘mech for the combined price of what was on display in the room. I wondered if they were rented, or if the Eridani Light Horse kept a container’s worth of Fancy Party Stuff in storage and brought them out at need.
 
She gave me a sidelong look, then looked around the room. “...I guess the decorations are nice? But… I feel like I’m back at Prom.”
 
“I thought that’s what all fancy parties felt like?” I said, ‘innocently’, then giggled at her sidelong look. The only other time I’d seen her so horrified was when she found out just how lousy my gunnery was. “No, seriously, in the end any ballroom’s just a big open space. Quality’s in the decorations and the canapes.” I glanced over at the buffet speculatively.
 
Sophitia groaned. “Where do you put it all?” she asked, but started us moving towards the table anyway.
 
As though she didn’t know; she exercised just as hard as I did. I flexed the arm that didn’t have a sleeve playfully. “More meat for the guns,” I said.
 
Anyway. The snacks were excellent, aside from my discovery of a truly foul pastry thing made of black sludge and lies. The crust had looked so good…
 
Sophitia had been dragged away by a couple of fans when Major Berin caught up to me. Berin’s Beasts were firmly in the ‘midrange’ of merc units; a battlemech company, seven of them lights, with a lance of Hetzer assault guns for backup rather than aerospace support. They had their own modified Union class and seemed to be doing pretty all right for themselves.
 
He offered a handshake; a bit of a knuckle-crusher, but it felt perfunctory, like habit rather than a challenge, and he smiled when I twisted my hand out of the vise. “So, mind if I ask a prying question?” he said. His accent sounded… Andurien, maybe?
 
I smiled up at him, and used the excuse of a gracious kind of ‘go ahead’ wave to take a step back so that my neck wouldn’t be at such an angle. Stupid tall people. “Go ahead.”
 
“Did you bring her-” he nodded in the direction of the Champion Holding Court, “-to show off that you had her skills, or to show off that homo-friendly recruiting schtick you’ve been setting up?”
 
I shrugged, trying to bury my irritation. “A little from Column A, a little from Column B,” I said.
 
…It didn’t work. “And more than either, Column C, it got me the most gorgeous date here,” I added, and smiled with as many teeth as I could.
 
An expression that actually gained some humor at the way he started unconsciously sidling away, though I was pretty sure that that was because of Teh Gey Cooties rather than because of any concerns about my doing him a violence.
 
“Uh, right,” he said awkwardly, and cleared his throat before he plunged ahead into, “So, yeah, before I stuck my foot in my mouth-”
 
Well, the self-awareness made me feel more charitably towards him, at least. I wondered if it was an intentional bit of de-escalation on his part.
 
“-I was leading up to ask about a thing I’d heard, that you were looking to trade some of your people with other units.”
 
“Your homosexuals for my homophobes, yeah,” I said. “You’ve got somebody in mind?”
 
“...Yeah,” he said, looking a little nettled. “I… I’ve got a brother-sister team of mechwarriors, and the brother’s… with one of my techs. Thing is, they’ve got a family mech that I’d be losing, too, our heaviest.”
 
“And you’re willing to trade them away over their bedroom games?” I said, and shook my head. “Well, OK, your loss.”
 
“Yeah, so, I was thinking we set up to trade the mechs, too-”
 
I made a slashing gesture. “Nada, no. Not a straight trade, anyway. They decide to walk the next day and I’m down a mech and up a creek without a paddle? No thanks.”
 
“-and put the price of whatever you send my way down as a lien on their Atlas,” he finished, rushing a little.
 
A lien? That… could work, probably. An Atlas would be a funny fit for the unit; everything we already had was faster, and finding 400 MW fusion plants to let it keep pace would be impossibly expensive as well as nigh-impossible, and eating all its weapon space besides. So, weird as it sounded, the particular kind of mech involved made the deal less appealing…
 
“How much have you talked it over with your people?”
 
“It was their idea,” he admitted.
 
...But not impossibly so. I extended my hand to shake again. “I think we have an agreement in principle,” I said. “Bring them and their paperwork by our business office, say, this coming Thursday?” Our regular shuttle flights between base and planetary capital were on Wednesdays. “And I’ll have my CFO and department heads there and we can work out the details.”
 
He checked his memory. “About noon?” he suggested, and I was nodding and about to agree out loud when, halfway across the ballroom, an alarm screeched.
 
We both looked, and saw an older man in SLDF uniform - Brevet-General Kerston himself - pulling his com out of an inner pocket of his jacket. Another com went off in a different part of the room, and a third, and twice that many people were already reaching for theirs when my bodice went VRRRRN and I had to grit my teeth.
 
Vibrate mode was substantially less pleasant than I’d counted on when I stashed my com down there.
 
Don’t look at me in that tone of voice; there was literally no place else in my dress that had room for the thing, and fuck dealing with a purse.
 
I turned around for nominal discretion’s sake and fished it out while Berin was still figuring out what was going on, reading the little single-line text display. God, I missed smartphones. Future of the eighties, as always, go fuck yourself.
 
Any humor in that thought vanished as I read the tickertape: JUMPSHIP ARRIVED NADIR POINT MONOLITH CLASS NO CIVILIAN SCHEDULED LIKELY COMBINE INVASION
 
“‘They might have passed a very pleasant evening, had shit not gotten real,’” I muttered, once the initial shock wore off, and keyed an acknowledgement in while I looked up at Berin. “Combine Monolith just jumped in,” I told him, and nodded as his expression changed away from puzzlement and into understanding. “So, I’m going to go collect my date then have a talk with our friendly neighborhood Davion.”
 
“What are all the calls about?” Sophitia asked, when I had made my way back to her side.
 
“Invading jumpship, probably,” I summed up, “Where’s… crap, Something-or-other-Davion?”
 
“Sanromea-Davion,” she corrected with an eyeroll, and pointed at the cluster of people on the far side of the canape tables. “Over there.”
 
“Right, thanks,” I said, and leaned up to kiss her on the cheek before I kicked my heels off and - being honest - scurried over to and under the buffet.
 
No, literally, under. I ducked down and sidestepped twice to pop up on the other side, startling the older woman who’d been waiting her turn in the crowd and crush of presumable merc commanders gathered around the man with the ability and reason to give them money.
 
Give us money.
 
Sanromea-Davion was wearing his dress uniform. The Armed Forces of the Federated Suns were fairly practical, in a Rambo-ish way, when it came to duty gear, but their dress uniform was… Something.
 
High cavalry boots - no spurs, apparently he wasn’t a Mechwarrior? - under creased pants, and a short fitted jacket with a rank epaulette on the right shoulder, silver braid over tan. One broad stripe, one narrow, I thought that that was Major; seemed about right, he was a Greater Davion, but fairly young…
 
But the left shoulder, the entire left half of the jacket, was covered in a polished natural-yellow leather rayed… thing, like the left half of a simplified FedSuns sunburst had been folded over the top of his shoulder. Embroidered lines radiated out across the right half of the jacket from the points of the rays.
 
I had to admit that it was a heck of a striking statement, but damn was that weird.
 
“What are you all coming out of the woodwork now for?” he wondered, looking at me as I put one hand on the canape table for balance while I put my shoes back on. His voice was lighter than I expected, a tenor rather than the kind of rumbly tone that would’ve matched the rest of him; under the slow metabolism that rounded his face under the beard and challenged his tailoring, he was a big, obviously muscular man.
 
“Your people haven’t got the word to you, yet?” I asked right back. “Monolith-class jumpship at the nadir jump point, just arrived. We’re not on a trade route big enough to see a civilian one, which probably means the Combine has come calling.” I grinned and tapped one toe on the ground to re-seat my shoe properly. “Seller’s market for defensive contracts, right?”
 
His left hand dropped down to a pocket that his dress uniform didn’t have, and I could see him bite back the urge to swear for a moment before he took a breath, let it out, and said, “Right. You-” he pointed at an otherwise anonymous man in the middle of the crowd, “-were here first, let’s start this over from the top.”
 
“Yes, Leutnant-Colonel,” his first target said in a Lyran accent you could have cut with the proverbial chainsaw.
 
That was what broad-narrow meant; Leftenant Colonel. Yes, they actually spelled it that way; ‘Lieutenant’ would have been too traditional, or something.
 
I settled in to wait my turn as Sophitia finished walking the long way around. “I asked one of the servers to find some pens and paper for us to take notes with,” she confided.
 
I grinned. “You’re a wonder,” I told her.
 

***

 
Any doubt that it had been the Combine incoming was long gone, along with doubts about their objectives. An invasion would have brought an Overlord and several cargo dropships, probably along with some conventional backup, and a resource raid - AKA an official pirating expedition - would have done the same, but this force had arrived on nine Union class.
 
They were just here to break things.
 
Their choice of where to land said what.
 
“King, Baker Club Seven. Contact,” I said into my radio line. “Nav Oscar West. One bug mech, probably a Wasp.”
 
“Clear this channel, Baker Seven. This is scouting reports only,” replied Leftenant Colonel Omar Chandrasekar, and I bit down the urge to argue that just because I wasn’t a scout didn’t mean I was blind. I was pretty sure that our AFFS liaison-slash-commander had been sent to Hoff as a way to shuffle his incompetent ass somewhere the Eridani Light Horse could carry his dead weight, out of the way of actual operations.
 
Against the 3rd Sword of Light, that was… concerning.
 
Nav Oscar was the far end of the only bridge for nearly an hour in either direction capable of taking the weight of anything more than the lightest battlemech. The Kitt River was a major one; it had carved a substantial canyon on its way to the sea, and from what we’d seen, the Combine forces were light on jump jets. To get enough force in place to push through the fixed defenses the ELH had set up to protect their dependents, they’d need the bridge, since those same defenses had forced their dropships to come down in the farmland to the west.
 
Or a bridge. Most of the fighting was shaping to happen fifty klicks to the south of us, where the ELH had set themselves up on the shortest approach between the Combine drop zone and the reservation where their own dependents lived.
 
The Wasp stuck around for a few seconds more, then ducked back out of sight.
 
I guess that proved his threat-warning system was working, able to tell him that he’d been painted by at least my targeting gear.
 
“Dog Club Actual, this is King,” the command channel said. “Divide by lances and move them to the nav points I’m sending you. You’re equipped with scout mechs, fast-movers with jump jets and superior mobility…”
 
I tuned the rest out, wondering to myself how the fuck I’d ended up trapped in a badly-scripted tutorial level when I was in real life rather than a computer game.
 
I’d settled in to the haze of frustration and worry that went with that - what if this fuckwit trapped some of my people under the guns of a real push, or any of a dozen other ways for his utter lack of flexibility to get someone or a lot of someones killed - and fielding the private sideband calls from subordinates who were nearly as worried by Chandrasekar as I was.
 
At least lying through my teeth to reassure them distracted me.
 
...Where was I taking that? Grammar got away from me. Anyway, right before the 3rd Sword was expected to hit the outer perimeter the Light Horse had set up around the far side of their bridge, I got a call - screens showed it as Very Short-Range Relay, meaning that it had come in via landline and then been linked into our tactical comnet by the headquarters van.
 
“This is Nebula to Asteroid Actual,” the line said, sounding frustrated and tired. “Please acknowledge.”
 
Huh what? I flipped the push-to-talk. “Nebula, this is Blackwing. I have you loudness four by clarity five, over.”
 
Nebula was the call sign of the overall defense command.
 
“Thank you, Blake,” the operator on the other end muttered, almost certainly forgetting her line was still live. “Blackwing, command wants to know what you can shake loose for a flanking push, because we’ve been trying to talk to your liaison about this and getting nothing but stonewalling and blowoffs. He stopped responding to our last three calls. Even a company’s worth of distraction would work, over.”
 
“Nebula, we’ve been seeing nothing but the same scout lance for the last hour. I can leave my tracks and infantry here to keep the door shut and give you a battalion, but they’ll probably see us coming… And sadly, my contract says you’ll need to go through Longline.” That being Chandrasekar’s personal call-sign. “Over.”
 
“Blackwing, hold on this line, please,” Nebula said, her voice full of we’ll-see-about-that.
 
Well, what better thing did I have to do? I held.
 
Fortunately, this being a military channel run by actual adults, there was no hold music.
 
Eventually, the line clicked open again. “Blackwing, this is Nebula Actual.” The new voice was male, deep, and smooth as honey, perfectly trained. Aside from the accent, I was intensely reminded of Patrick Stewart. “Longline has been claiming to face a full strength company with armor support.”
 
Huh? “This is the first I’ve heard of armor,” I said. “We’ve seen one mech at a time, no more. Jenner, Wasp, and Cicada. No eyes-on, but we’ve also received sensor scatter from what our Warbooks are calling a Charger. There could be more than one of each, but…”
 
“More likely it’s just a single recon lance.” Nebula Actual - His Grace the Duke of Hoff, Bradley Cheel himself - sounded substantially grimmer than he had during our single brief meeting, at the ill-fated New Year’s party a week before. “Blackwing, attention to orders, per contract of employment Section 2 Subsection 3 Point 17.”
 
“Attending,” I said, just as crisply as if I weren’t throwing a digital copy of the contract up on my screen to look up just what exactly 2.3.17 was about.
 
“As Duke of Hoff and ranking available authority of the Federated Suns, I am issuing a direct order to Colonel Asha Blackwing, commanding the Blackwing Military Solutions and Services mercenary regiment. You will take your battlemech battalion and proceed south along the west bank of the Kitt River to strike the Draconis Combine forces now besieging Knightburg in the rear, destroying any scouting or blocking forces that attempt to stand in your way with all speed.” He hesitated a moment. “I will leave the decision between a demonstration attack and a full secondary assault to your discretion, with the comment that just as much as you will depend on the Eridani Light Horse to prosecute the opportunity you will generate, they will be depending on you to create an opening.”
 
No, that wasn’t intimidating at all. “Punch out any Combine mechs in our way, move south to hit the Sword of Light in the rear soonest. Understood,” I said, and skimmed through the legalese on my screen as quickly as I could to confirm that… Yeah. Holy shit.
 
“Good. We’ll be waiting when you get here. Nebula Actual, clear.”
 
I took one deep breath after the line cut out, then made a call to the command truck.
 

***

 
I’d be lying if I claimed the good start was any of my doing. I’d expected the scout lance that had been monitoring us to fall back, hold at long range and shadow us, rather than trying to stop us outright - but when we thundered off the western end of the bridge and through the empty streets of the small town that had grown around it, all four of them popped out of the second cross-street.
 
Maybe they thought that we’d sent only a single lance after them, or maybe they were hoping to destroy the bridge while we had mechs on it - I don’t know and had no way of knowing, then or now. Whatever they were planning, they’d left it too late.
 
The Cicada caught it first; Reyes’ Crusader slowed and stumbled from the sixty-kph dead run we were moving at as its entire body seemed to vanish in a wall of contrails, reaching out hungrily for the smaller ‘mech like a monster’s tentacles trying to snatch prey away under the bed. He’d flushed every single missile tube his machine had at what I would bet money was ideal range.
 
Even before the pall of smoke had faded away, the cloud and street were lit from within.
 
‘Mech scale lasers delivered their deadly energy outside the range of human vision, at frequencies that the lenses and liquid parts of the eye filtered out and the retina didn’t respond to. If they hadn’t, a single shot would have blinded every eye on the battlefield - an act prohibited by the long-ago Ares Conventions, and kept away from as a gentleman’s agreement ever since. It was a genie no one wanted to deal with, without being useful enough to risk a cycle of retribution for.
 
Still, having a visual confirmation of your chosen target was useful, so battlemech lasers were also equipped with a tracer function that added a harmless but apparent visual beam. Federated Suns units tended to tune their tracers to a sunny golden yellow; the Combine liked blood red, the Capellan Confederation green, the Free World’s League used violet, and the Lyran Commonwealth favored blue. Most mercenary units matched their current employer, but the ELH still used the SLDF’s pure white.
 
So, when Reyes fired his 5cm lasers and made the entire cloud of missile smoke flash yellow with scattered light, it wasn’t bright enough to blind me or make my cockpit windows polarize to solid black - but there was still enough energy delivered to finish the coup de grace and drop the forty-ton mech like a stone.
 
Weiler, in the command lance’s other Marauder, fired next, a more moderate barrage rather than a full alpha strike catching the Jenner and tracking clouds of sparks and molten metal off of its armor. Jenner and Wasp alike both fired back at him, and the Charger started to lean into motion, a parked car, its owner long-ago evacuated, smearing under its planted foot like a man stepping on a chunk of dropped banana.
 
Sophitia rushed forward, her mech’s feet seeming to skid only inches off of the pavement as howling jump jets launched her almost entirely forward before one toe dipped down delicately and caught against the asphalt, twisting Aspis on three different axes at once to duck under the assault mech’s swinging fist and drive her sword, like an extended lance, deep into ‘golden BB’ gap around its waist’s rotation collar.
 
The reactor was in there somewhere, and she found it, leaving the Charger slumping like a dropped marionette in her wake. I very much doubted that there was any luck or coincidence involved, and from the way the Wasp pilot turned to track her, he agreed.
 
I didn’t fire, not wanting to give the game away when I probably couldn’t get enough weapons on-target to put him down immediately. I just pitched Marauder No. 2’s torso down and opened the throttle all the way to EMERGENCY.
 
Right before the deafening crash, I started to straighten, and twist. “Fuck out the way, bitch!”
 
Seventy-five tons at eighty kilometers an hour was a hell of an impact; I was again grateful for my cockpit straps, and the Wasp was picked bodily up off its fleet by the slightly-rising vector of the crash and knocked several times its own length down the street to sprawl with its ‘head’ embedded in the side of an abandoned van.
 
I slowed down back to nominal top speed, but no further, making a beeline for the planned turn south and ignoring what was left of the recon lance behind us. Flashes of yellow and blue-white light, reflecting from that direction, made it clear that the rest of the battalion was firing en passant and hardly needed my help to finish two battered light mechs.
 
We were under radio silence as we thundered south; if the Sword of Light wasn’t distracted by its battle to break past the Light Horse, they’d certainly have seen us coming in the clouds of dust and debris as hundreds of tons of war machine made a beeline over and through every obstacle in the way, but voices on the radio would have let the unengaged operators on their dropships have a chance to warn them. None of that, though, kept us from listening to the ELH’s own chatter as the 3rd Sword of Light hit their lines.
 
By the sound of it - and if you weren’t in the middle of it, thirty-first century combat chatter was pretty confusing - the Combine tried to roll right over the Light Horse in their first push, and ending up reeling back with a bloody nose.
 
Technically, the Eridani Light Horse were a Star League-style Regimental Combat Team, consisting of a relatively small number of sub-regiments, two of them ‘light horse’ formations whose multiple battalions of recon mechs were paired with a heavy armor element, and the third, the one whose rest-and-replenishment cycle had been interrupted by the Combine raid, made up of mechs defined by their high mobility and substantial short range firepower - Strikers.
 
The 3rd Sword, meanwhile, were a heavy cavalry operation, just like the Combine liked - heavy mechs, about as fast as could be expected. Dragons, Quickdraws, the occasional Ostsol or Ostroc - and backing them up, medium mechs with about the same movement profile, common for other Successor States but otherwise rare in Combine service. Griffins, Wolverines, Shadow Hawks, and the like.
 
More armor than the Light Horse, and more range, but about the same amount of firepower, and less agility. Overall, the smart money was on the Combine, but not by all that much. The scatter of company and lance strength merc units on planet added in weren’t nothing, but weren’t enough to be decisive on their own. No matter how skilled or experienced their people were individually - and the range was pretty wide - they didn’t have the practice coordinating to stand up to the same numbers of unified enemies… Besides which, the times being what they were, the vast majority of them were lightweight machines that had a distinctly limited battlefield half-life.
 
My people, meanwhile, had a company of the light scout mechs that striker types had originally been designed to hunt, another company of relatively sluggish long-range snipers, and a company of big, heavy brutes that were well suited to crushing anything they could manage to catch.
 
Roughly speaking, anyway. All of our snipers were Marauders, all of our brutes were Battlemasters - but there was a lance of Marauders filling out the company with the Battlemasters, Reyes’ Crusader was actually best-used for indirect fire-support, Sophitia’s Aspis was a medium mech take on the ‘brute’ mission role, what they called a trooper… In practice, everything was a mess, and at that, my people were a lot more regular than most formations.
 
Anyway, the 3rd Sword of Light, according to the intelligence briefing we’d gotten right before they landed, didn’t have an assault-weight element, and probably precious-few 60kph heavies - which meant that my people were comfortably the heaviest element on the field. Tonnage wasn’t everything - witness the Charger, which was eighty tons but proverbially useless - but an average of ten-to-fifteen tons advantage wasn’t nothing, either.
 
And, of course, our arrival would take the numeric odds, before losses, from about four-to-three to five-to-three, which could matter a lot, especially since we’d be by far the freshest and least-damaged element on the field.
 
“Club elements, this is King,” the command channel said in Chandrasekar’s voice. “Report progress and formation cohesion, over.”
 
I almost put Marauder No. 2 into a ditch in shock. What the fuck? Had that clown managed to forget that we were supposed to be under radio silence? Did the mouthbreathing moron even know what radio silence was?
 
Hurriedly, I flipped my comm system to LOS/LASER ONLY and patched a RELAY ALL header on, then told my microphone. “All units, Joker Actual. Emphasis - maintain radio silence. Ignore Longline until I say otherwise.”
 
I hit the SEND button hard enough to momentarily worry I’d broken a nail.
 
Consciously, I knew that we probably weren’t very likely to manage to actually surprise a veteran formation, but if we got blown because of a busybody meddling idiot only fifteen minutes out I would probably end up needing sat on.
 
Assuming the Light Horse were able to bail our green asses out, anyway.
 
Chandrasekar tried to fuck things up a couple more times, sounding increasingly testy, but none of my people broke, and it paid off in spades. I was proud of them.
 
At the time, I just took the fact that we hit the rear perimeter - a Wolverine whose entire left side had been gutted, and a pair of twenty-tonners - as luck, or at least the monitoring lance we’d run over having gone down too quickly to get a warning sent that we’d broken out into their backfield.
 
Both of those were wrong. Turned out, I found out later, the officer the Combine had running comms for the 3rd Sword of Light was secretly a MIIO - Federated Suns Ministry of Information, Intelligence, and Operations - plant, put in place more than twenty years ago. He’d been the one who received the garbled warning that our victims had been under attack… And had said nothing.
 
He’d also had a part in planting the false intelligence that made the Combine think that all three ELH regiments were off-planet and that the only real opposition they’d face would be a scratch force of smaller merc units hired on the spot.
 
People didn’t call Hanse Davion ‘The Fox’ for his pretty whiskers.
 
Anyway, during the battle itself, all I knew was that we’d taken the Sword of Light completely by surprise, and I knew it because even as the understrength picket lance was going down in a criss-cross of PPC fire, we could see the spread of an impromptu repair depot behind them exploding into motion like a kicked anthill. More than half a dozen mechs were powered down, either lying down in one pose or another or crouching so cherry-pickers could be lifted up to the loading hatches for their ammo bays, ammo trucks and flatbeds covered in spare armor parked all around them.
 
One tiny figure was visible against the stream of motion, bolting towards a face-down Griffin with the awkward lump of a neurohelmet carried at the end of one arm and banging against its leg. Another flurry of activity filled the basket of a cherry picker as they tried to stuff all their remaining 80mm ammunition into the magazine of the Dragon they were working on right away.
 
“Okay, radio silence is over!” I announced on our main channel. “Able, advance in line abreast. Baker, form behind and give fire support. Dog, keep our flanks clear and remember to gang up. Everybody, start with the weakest and work your way up!”
 
I fired an AC burst at the Dragon I’d noticed; the loading crew flinched as 105mm shells screamed by only a couple meters over their heads and smashed into the upper rear armor. A couple went down, thrashing, as shrapnel caught them, but one of the faster thinkers grabbed at the cherry picker’s control box and moved it away as fast as they could.
 
Thank god. I waited a second or two longer than I needed to before I followed up with one of my PPCs, touching off the same ammo bin they’d been filling. The Dragon burst apart in orange fire and knocked the moving picker basket over, sending the loading crew tumbling to the ground.
 
If they were lucky, they’d survive. I hoped so; that wish, and the two seconds of grace, was all I could offer without fucking myself over.
 
I looked for my next target; motion attracted the eye and the PPC bolt I put into the battered Quickdraw as it stood up was only one of literally a dozen. Mechs are tough but not that tough - it went down again before the movement even finished.
 
“Blackwing, just exactly what do you think you’re doing?” came over the command line from King, cutting past the hurried back-and-forth between my people.
 
One of the reasons commanding from the front kind of worked for mechwarriors was that the SLDF had come up with a way to use neurohelmet bandwidth to control their mechs’ communication functions. This had obvious benefits in terms of conveying information within a lance - you could mentally mark a target at the same time you called a warning, painting it for your lancemates’ targeting systems, and also limit the signal to only those allies who needed it rather than spamming another lance ten kilometers away on a general channel - which was why the SLDF had developed the function in the first place.
 
But it also meant that a junior commander, or a senior one who was still too immature to sit still, could dispense with a lot of the usual paraphernalia of phone banks and messenger sections and at least pretend to run all their own comms themselves.
 
Anyway, at that point, it let me send the command to have King’s channel routed directly to me rather than continue to broadcast to the entire mech battalion. “Hitting the Combine rear,” I snapped, jockeying the throttle to step over an abandoned armor truck rather than on it. “In combat right now.”
 
“You can’t possibly have covered fifty kilometers that quickly.”
 
“Nearly an hour at sixty kay-pee-aitch,” I snarled, and joined the fusillade against a Jenner that had popped out around the hill ahead of us, blocking line of sight to the main battle lines, even as the light mech’s pilot reversed direction in a mad skid and bolted back for cover. “Can, have, did.”
 
Dumbass.
 
“You - do you have any idea what kind of risks you’re talking about?” My brain filled ‘you little brat’ in from his tone without the words actually being said.
 
“Fairly good one. Light Horse’d seen all three Combine battalions regularly in the early fight,” I replied, throttling back a little to hold formation as the Battlemasters advanced in the vanguard. “Nebula’d’ve let us know if they shook one loose or broke contact entirely. Less than a battalion, we’d just run over rather than ‘into’.”
 
“Of all the cocky, reckless, ill-considered stunts-” Chandrasekar started to vent, before I interrupted him and shut the channel entirely.
 
“Fuck, contact!”
 
And contact it was, about a company, company and a half of Combine heavies swinging around the same hill the Jenner had managed to escape past.
 
I opened fire; just about everyone else did, too. Seeing the way our targets just… weaved out of the way of most of it, I could feel my heart sink. The easy part was very definitely over.
 
Two Dragons lunged at and then around the Battlemaster - paint scheme looked like Lisa Capet, She Of The Day-Glo Mohawk, who was one of our better mechhandlers - in front of me, laser and autocannon fire playing over its sides as they raced to work around behind it. I picked the more battered of the two and let rip with a PPC again, which missed. The autocannon followup didn’t.
 
I checked my ammo; about two-thirds, after what I’d spent against the repair laager.
 
The shudder and blast of missiles landing around me and on my armor made me swear and belatedly dive into my own evasive swerves. Threat response pinpointed the Griffin they’d come from, just in time for me to slam on the brakes - both of Marauder No. 2’s feet dug divots in the ground at the abrupt stop - and throw off the incoming PPC blast to scorch by in front of me with stark flash that was obvious even through the polarized viewports.
 
A moment’s mental debate didn’t last; I kept firing at the Dragon, this time tagging him with my own PPC shot, and shaped my course closer, figuring to swerve off again once I was in short range.
 
He and his buddy both left off tormenting Capet and turned towards me. I evaded harder, not that it did much good. My damage displays lit up with armor impacts, as though I couldn’t tell from the hammer and crash of incoming fire. Missiles, autocannon shells, the scarlet blaze of lasers - though both of those missed this time - it was all aimed at me, and I knew that my armor couldn’t keep up with it for long, even if the sheer rush of adrenaline seemed to be keeping me ahead of the balance issues for now.
 
Yellow flared from above me, harsh and intense, as Sophitia fired mid-air. The way the Dragons had turned towards me meant that combined speeds were eating distance with shocking quickness, and I had to veer off to avoid getting too close. I didn’t fancy my chances of dogfighting veteran pilots like this.
 
Then the next salvo from the Griffin arrived and the entire point became moot as the berserk gyro made my running steps stutter and sent me tumbling down to measure my mech’s length in the already torn-up cropfield.
 
“Motherfucker,” I yelled, and started fighting to get back up. If my armor held for long enough, I might be able to avoid being chum in the shark tank… If.
 
“Hold him for me, would you?” Sophitia’s voice came over the com line, and I looked up as I got my feet under me to see the Capet’s Battlemaster step up behind one of the Dragons and - I swear on God, Blake and Kerensky’s collective morally-bankrupt mass murdering graves, I am not making this up - shove its arms under the smaller heavy’s and lift, pulling the thing into a wrestling hold and immobilizing it for the several seconds it would take the pilot to try kicking backwards.
 
That was more that enough time for Sophitia to lead Aspis into three steps forward and drive a sword-thrust into the Dragon’s cockpit, then pull free. When the Battlemaster let go, the Combine mech dropped to the ground like the proverbial stringless puppet.
 
The other Dragon tried to sweep around the two, keeping what it thought was a safe distance, and cut between me and them in the process.
 
The problem with Marauders is that temptation is always with you. They mount not one but two particle projection cannons, the most massive energy weapons still in production. Manmade lightning at your fingertips. They call to the soul, they hunger, forever yearning to unleash their destruction into every pitiable fool that ever cut you off in traffic.
 
And if you indulge them too often, the demands they put on your reactor will cook you alive.
 
But every now and again, the Stars Are Right and circumstance aligns to make that the right choice.
 
Like, say, a back shot into an enemy heavy at ideal range.
 
The cannon burst missed low, stitching across the heavily armored panels protecting the hip joints. The lightning bolts, meanwhile, hit squarely against the rear torso armor, just as though I’d planned on it.
 
Thing is, the side torso bays of a Dragon are full of ammunition and not much else, and while there wasn’t much left of a PPC bolt after boring through their rear armor, there was enough. Everything from the entire left arm to several hundred individual O-rings went every direction as both missile and autocannon magazines cooked off spectacularly.
 
For the record, no, I didn’t plan for that to happen, it was dumb luck.
 
I looked up as the smoke started to clear, trying to find that damned Griffin, and not having much luck.
 
“Hey, I think they’re bugging out,” someone said on the general channel, and once I looked for it, I started feeling like they were right.
 
“We’ll pursue for now,” I said, and switched channels. “Comet, Asteroid. Sending you our location nav now; We’re seeing a short company withdrawing southwest.”
 
“Asteroid, this is Comet. Our people are seeing a due-west pull. Looks like they’ve had enough. We’ll pursue them; Actual wants you to drop in to our positions securing Knightburg and hold the door for us.” The Eridani Light Horse dispatcher had an accent that sounded almost but not quite Combine.
 
“We can do that,” I confirmed. “I can detach my scout company if you’d like a reserve; I figure the slower odds and ends will make up for it on my end.”
 
“How fresh are they?”
 
I flipped the command display up. “About State Seven, State Eight,” I said - each ‘state’ representing an averaged ten percent of nominal maximum armor. “The Combine focused on our heavies, they’re closer to Six.”
 
There was a moment of silence that I guessed was a conversation happening on the other end of a muted line, before Comet came back, “We’ll take them. Voice Channel 9, Encrypt Charlie-4. There’s a Fedrat regular tank company in the line; Sanromea-Davion himself, callsign Sparkle, on Channel 3, encrypt Baker-19.”
 
“Right, let me give the orders,” I said. “Asteroid, out.”
 
“Estimate five minutes to form and get moving. Comet out.”
 
I flipped channels and let Dog Company know that they’d be keeping up the chase, then switched again. “Sparkle, Asteroid here. I have two heavy companies, State Six, reporting as reinforcement; where do you want us?”
 
“Asteroid?” was the immediate reply. “Blackwing, the chit with the cleavage? Didn’t you have a full battalion?”
 
Apparently Sanromea-Davion’s tact went away in battle. “They are very nice,” I agreed, sweet as poison, “And yeah, but the Light Horse are taking my scout company with them for the pursuit.”
 
“Good call,” he agreed more professionally. “We could use them here, but not as badly. I’m pushing nav points; one company southwest of city center and one northwest. This’ll be temporary, until we can get new armor hung on our lighter elements so they can take over as pickets.”
 
“We’ll be central to provide a counterpunch after that,” I guessed, as the two markers came live.
 
“More or less,” he replied.
 
“I’ll get on it, then. Asteroid, out.”
 
It was surprisingly hard to break off the pursuit, even though the Combine mechs were already pulled almost entirely out of range - mostly by breaking line of sight behind cover, at this stage. I didn’t intend to let ‘surprisingly hard’ stop me, though, and if there was any grumbling from my people Lu Clair and Toshi Hannah, who had the two companies, didn’t let it reach me.
 
I was pretty sure that if there had been, at least in Baker Company, I’d’ve heard it. Lack of mechwarriors had meant that I’d had to fold the command lance into Baker to make up the numbers, and in my admittedly limited experience, grumbling tended to happen on the company channel.
 
Before it had been shot up by the Combine and stepped on and through by the ELH, Knightburg had been a decently nice town. Probably not one I’d ever have wanted to live in - it was open and sprawling in a way that reminded Older-Me’s memories of a smaller Oklahoma City, which had always struck me on visiting as one of the lesser circles of Hell - but moderately prosperous from the combination of grain elevators, barge shipping, and strip-mall stops off the major highway the bridge had been built for. I was pretty sure that it had been completely evacuated, and slightly less so that insurance payouts would… eventually… cover enough of the damage to let the local economy recover.
 
Anyway, we’d settled in for about ten minutes, just enough time to start getting bored, when things started happening again. Mostly over the radio, at first - an explosion of chatter and swearing from the Light Horse as the Sword of Light doubled back and punched straight through a weak point in their lines, leaving temporary confusion in their wake as the lighter regiment tried to reform and about face.
 
They were an elite formation; it wouldn’t take long. Usually, the maneuver would have been utterly pointless, but even as it was happening, I could see the flare-around-a-polarized-center signature of fusion torches burning in the sky overhead. They’d launched their dropships in a quick up-and-down ballistic hop, and were now headed beeline for the new landing site.
 
Sanromea-Davion came onto my line even before the last of the nine Unions had touched down: “Asteroid, Sparkle. Estimated landing site is Nav Mike. Get there, cripple the dropships before the Sword shows up. You’ll be setting the pace; I’m attaching Stardust, Ring, and Crater to back you up.” Smaller merc units, about two companies of light mechs between them - and all in worse repair than my Dog Company. “Assault elements’ll be following.”
 
“Nav Mike, cripple dropships, two companies support with more coming. Understood. Should I try and pull back if I can pull it off before the Sword arrives?”
 
“Feel free, but don’t count on it. Get moving. Sparkle, Out.”
 
We got moving, crashing west with all due haste. I didn’t think we’d pull it off any more than Sanromea-Davion did, but it would be really nice if we could beat the 3rd Sword of Light to our target and be gone before they could properly vent their wrath.
 
...Yeah, no, we were gonna be in the shit.
 
Of course, if I’d been able to find any goddamn artillery cadre, it would’ve been moot. Just send a scout lance to report the shot and shell the hell out of them. But as much as precious few units, merc, feudal, or regular, used the stuff, skilled artillerymen were even rarer, and their employers tended to hang onto them like death.
 
“All right,” I said as the looming domes of the grounded dropships came into view over the windbreak treeline. “They’re sitting targets with plenty of short-range firepower, so everybody stick to long range. Shoot low; we need to strand them, not go for hard kills. And remember to move and jink, because they’ll have plenty of LRMs in the air.”
 
Going for a long-range sparring match would hinder our own ability to do serious damage, which given the sheer toughness of dropships was already pretty limited, but first, the battle was essentially already won and I wasn’t going to go for extra risks for bonus points, and second, just being out here and shooting was enough to keep the 3rd Sword from escaping. Theoretically, they could load under fire, but it’d be slow and full of risks and most importantly would take long enough for the ELH to finish catching up to them.
 
I was sweating pretty hard during that fight, for reasons more figurative than the usual oven-heat of a battlemech cockpit. This was a significantly bigger exposure than that first southward charge; then, I’d known via the Eridani exactly where the main Combine force was, and all of my mechs had been essentially fresh, and there’d been backup immediately at hand.
 
Now, all my support was several minutes behind either me or the enemy, I had no idea when the hammer would fall, and all of my people - aside from Sophitia, who was sexy, sexy bullshit - were showing increasing amounts of armor damage.
 
Still, unless the Combine were already at their Combat Loss Grouping - the point where armor attrition started reaching critical levels across enough of the unit to trigger a snowball or death spiral effect where each loss increased pressure on survivors who weren’t in any shape to take it - having their two battalions pile on top of mine was going to be…
 
I tried to stop worrying about it in favor of pouring fire into the dropships, but the worry kept gnawing at me, and in the end, for good reason.
 
The alarm as my autocannon ammunition reached one quarter - fifteen rounds remaining - came almost simultaneously with the rush and hammer of LRMs that hadn’t come from the dropships’ launchers.
 
One of those missiles found Marauder No. 2’s right knee joint, which had basically been stripped bare by that point. The joint seized, the leg folded, and being that I wasn’t competent enough to ride that out, down I went.
 
I was really getting to hate that. Especially the rush of fear that it always brought - and the matching rush as a Jenner in Combine colors landed from a jump-jet leap and turned towards me. Its armor was scorched and scarred and at least one panel on one of its legs had fallen away completely… But all of its weapons looked to still be in working order, and I knew that, immobilized and already damaged as I was, they would really hurt, even before the two buddies I could see following it caught up and added their share of pain.
 
The splintering crash as the slab prow of a Von Luckner exploded out of the treeline and hit the slight rise of the road I’d fallen half-across did a bit to distract me from my immanent ass-whupping. The fifty-odd KPH of a VNL-K65N’s top speed wasn’t terribly fast, even by tank-or-mech standards, but it was enough for one riding up a ramp - or a bit of sloped ground firm enough to act like one rather than just getting mashed when seventy-five tons of tank hit it at speed - to launch into the air like a more plausible version of the Dukes of Hazzard. I saw at least a meter of clear air under its treads before the thing slammed back down to earth, fishtailed for a second, then powered out by somehow accelerating straight into the legs of that very startled Jenner.
 
The closing rate wasn’t as fast as when I’d hit that Wasp - had it been only an hour and a half ago - and Jenners were bigger and usually tougher than bug-lights… But this one was already damaged, and their joints made legs relatively vulnerable to damage like being whacked with a very angry heavy tank. Both knees and ankles snapped away under the assault, dropping the dismembered mech-torso on top of the Von Luckner’s armor and sending it tumbling safely away.
 
The noise and impact had to be at least as colossal as landing from that jump had been, but the tank’s crew worked through any of that admirably and in moments the turret was tracking to bring the big 165mm autocannon mounted there to bear on the other Jenner and core its chest out in a single crushing burst.
 
Sophitia’s Centurion landing on top of the last one and stabbing down through the thin upper armor even as she rode its collapse out was practically an anticlimax.
 
“You owe all of us a drink, Mechjock,” came good-naturedly over the short-range line. Apparently I’d been rescued by Sanromea-Davion’s personal ride.
 
I finished pushing myself up. “I’d throw in a kiss on the cheek, but I think your wife would strangle at least one of us.”
 
There was a moment of startled silence, then a laugh. “I got divorced years ago,” he said.
 
“OK,” I agreed. “My girlfriend would stab at least one of us.”
 
“Not over just one kiss,” Sophitia protested, sounding bubbly and delighted. She’d later tell me that that was the first time I’d publicly called her my girlfriend.
 
“I won’t push my luck. We’re closing, now. We need all their attention for at least the next minute.”
 
I glanced at the battalion display. “We won’t have much longer than that in close action.”
 
“Trust me.” Even as we were talking, the rest of his tank company was lunging forwards, guns roaring.
 
I flipped to a general channel. “OK, folks, big push time. Follow the treadheads in, and hang on to your hats!”
 
As casual as I tried to sound about it, it was seriously into pucker time. All I could do was trust that Sanromea-Davion knew something I didn’t, and tuck myself in behind the impromptu assault lance that had formed from the very slowest elements of my fellow mercenaries - an Awesome, a Stalker, and what had to be the shittiest and most rustbucket Atlas in the entire Inner Sphere. With all of that in between me and them, I was hoping that any Combine gunners that decided to look our way would go for the more dangerous, easier-to-hit assault mechs…
 
And that whatever it was our boss knew was enough to keep us from getting swarmed under.
 
I sent a PPC bolt and cannon burst - twelve rounds left - in the direction of the target the Awesome picked, and even as all of it missed, hoped that whatever the other shoe was would be able to pull things out for us. Another target, and another, passed and fell - adding my own two cents to the fusillade well after my cannon fell silent, even if most of the actual hits were coming from the others.
 
The confusion was colossal, but not enough to obscure the fact that the mechs we were firing back at, the ones deliberately drawing our attention, were the most intact of the Combine force - were the ones fighting to cover the retreat of their fellows up and into the Unions’ mechbays. Despite everything, despite a failed mission and what had to have been colossal losses if they weren’t rolling over us entirely, the 3rd Sword of Light were living up to their reputation as their nation’s elite - they were still under discipline, still organized and as coordinated as the situation permitted. If I’d been less busy - being honest, in less of a combat trance -  I’d’ve been impressed.
 
The end of that trance, and the final end of the battle itself, came as a shock as the world through my viewports went first searing white, then polarized black. I could feel shockwaves pummeling my mech, hear the bone-deep roar of thundering fusion torches, as the Combine dropships lit off their drives and bolted upwards with a speed that had to be their full flank thrust, abandoning the ragged company or two of mechs that hadn’t been able to load aboard.
 
In the shocked relative silence as they lifted away, I came back to myself. My head hurt, my mouth and throat were sandpaper dry. My hair, and ‘piloting suit’, and the lining of my cooling jacket were soaking, dripping wet, and my skin crawled and slimed with the same pouring sweat that had gotten them that way. I realized that I was shockingly thirsty, and that the cockpit was an inferno so miserable it had my flesh trying to crawl into my cooling jacket to hug its icey inner layer.
 
Reactor core temps were well under the danger zone, but that didn’t make the environment next to them pleasant.
 
I glanced at the armor displays, mine and the battalion’s alike. There was a lot of red and orange; missing limbs, and five mechs missing entirely. The only company that wasn’t at CLG was Dog, just sweeping back into combat datalink range on the heels of the Eridani Light Horse’s 21st Striker as they bounded and raced forward across the battlefield, descending on the equally battered Combine survivors as entire lances against a single mech.
 
I put both lasers and a PPC shot into the rear of an enemy Wolverine as it turned to face the new threat - and, after I missed all but one of the laser shots, let Sophitia finish it while I reached for one of the eight-ounce bottles of water I kept netted to one side of my cockpit.
 
We’d made it.
 
 
 

...IN LONELY INDECISION...

[Valles]

You'd be astonished how hard the talky scenes fought me.
 

---

[/hr]
 
WITH FINGERS WALK THE DARKNESS DOWN...
 

Tell The World That We Tried
A Battletech Fanfiction, inspired by Fitzgerald’s CYOA at https://imgur.com/gallery/M41mI
By Valles

 
In the end, I was confident that Captain Gars would see the funny side of things, but ‘in the end’ was not ‘now’. Once we had him and the hot potato he represented safely handed over to the Davion regulars - who had their own words to say about his inspection tour, once they got over their shock - I took our pay and the last handful of recruits from Hoff and booked it to Galatea, safely out of the Federated Suns.
 
Three months aboard ship to get there was more than enough time to start going stir-crazy, but between organizing a couple of tournaments - sim pod deathmatches, martial arts, cards, anything that would kill time and distract people really - and the fine old military traditions of ‘voluntary’ makework and cross-training, there had been no cases of actual Space Crazy. I’d gotten to hand out trophies for the tournaments, but sadly I’d been just as banned from the kickboxing brackets as Sophitia had been from the sim pods...
 
I got horrified looks every time I said it, but I was pretty sure that the traveling-from-place-to-place part of the job was my favorite part of being a mercenary. Nothing to do but read, practice, and try to work out after the fact where I’d gone from ‘dating, probably’ to ‘live-in girlfriend’.
 
In contrast to the relaxed pace of travel, landing on Galatea itself had been two months of trying to be ten places at once in the middle of the proverbial zucking foo. As much as I’d hated the hassle, it had been good to us as far as recruitment went. The permanent pool of people and specialists at the Mercenary’s Star was night and day compared to the ones that had set up shop on Hoff. We’d gotten enough mechwarriors to fill in both of our remaining companies - two with their own rides, a Thunderbolt and a Panther, of all things, bringing our unused reserve up to a full lance - and Lira had managed to assemble enough armor crewmen to bring the rest of our Puma assault tanks out of storage.
 
Speaking of which, I really would love to read the original design documents on those things. Flank-mounted LRMs? The heck?
 
Anyway. I hadn’t had any luck finding an engineer qualified to do the planning side of major refit work, so for now we were stuck with more-or-less stock hardware. I had the best of the people we did have headscratching their way through trying to rearrange the Puma’s missiles, but at this rate it’d be years before they got anywhere. I - and more importantly, our Puma crews - would just have to live with the screwball launchers.
 
After a week or so of exactly the same (bad) news as far as artillerists were concerned, I’d gone out and dropped more money than I was really comfortable with on outright hiring a smaller merc unit that specialized in artillery - and had the six track-mounted Thumpers to prove it - to turn a selection of gormless farmboys reckless enough to consider infantry and wiser and more nervous drivers from our motor pools into a trained artillery battalion.
 
Well. ‘Trained’. They were green as hell, but better than nothing.
 
Anyway. About the time our artillery crews could officially hit the broad side of a map grid, the House Steiner hiring rep dropped by - and we had a contract.
 
It was even a short trip. Four jumps and we were landing and moving into our new garrison digs around the middle of August, 3016.
 
Our charge was an agricultural world, one of several in the area whose products fed through the two jumps to the industrial hellhole of Hesperus II. The fact that Hesperus was the largest single producer of battlemechs in the Inner Sphere - quite possibly in all of human space, depending on just what unknown numbers the Clan worlds could turn out - made the sites that kept its miners and factory workers fed of not-insignificant strategic importance themselves. Besides that, it was also on one of the secondary invasion routes to the forge-world, which was a second count of reasons for the Commonwealth to keep the place well secured.
 
The original settlement of the place had been direct from Terra. The starting population had been about equal parts conflict refugees fleeing fighting in Africa’s Congo Basin, and climate refugees from the lower parts of the Mississippi river valley in North America whose homes had been wiped away by rising sea levels. In the more relaxed climate of the day, the two populations had merged without enough trouble to register on the history books, setting up agriculture of imported and native species, light mining, and industry suitable for both.
 
Unfortunately, they hadn’t set up things like microchip factories, and the Outer Reaches Rebellion and later collapse of Terran Alliance interstellar influence had left the planet high and dry with a rapidly crashing quality of life. Corporate speculators from Skye, when they came sniffing around, had bought up much of the planet’s land and industry for pennies on the dollar and set themselves up as what rapidly evolved from de-facto to de-jure nobility, and shifted things around to suit themselves - even to the point of changing the system’s name from Abri to the current Fianna.
 
Despite that, French was the local language, Roman Catholicism the cult of choice, and the local liturgical calendar said that this time, Lent started in September.
 
Given all the Louisianan settlers going into the planet’s makeup, and the fact that a full half of the planet’s population lived in the capital city, that meant that the Tuesday before - this Tuesday - was a hell of a bash.
 
The nobility had always looked a bit cockeyed at that fact, so over the centuries, the ceremonial organizers of the Carneval had come to be known as The Secret Masters. They stepped out of their ordinary lives in the season ahead of the bash - about five standard months, given the long local year - to put on distinctive black butterfly masks and get everything squared away and planned out. These days, their identities were hardly actually secret, anymore than the thousands of staff members and volunteers who actually carried out the preparations were disguised by their little black domino masks - but it was as much part of the pagentry as the music, floats, and beads.
 
Even the revelers wore masks, though theirs were brilliantly colored and patterned, whether they were hand-made feather and fabric art pieces or cheap molded plastic on elastic strings. They filled most of the massive city’s streets, teeming under the glass skyscrapers and the wrought-iron balconies of the apartment blocks, throwing confetti and flowers down into the canals that had replaced shifting delta streams.
 
Here and there along the railings that protected most of the drunks from falling in, fully uniformed police officers (in little black masks) waited to intercept the determinedly stupid from doing a header into the inevitably filthy water, or worse, into the little boats of the Pirate Bands, poling their splendidly dressed way along in the wake of their Champions, the equally-decorated industrialmechs that bore great carved and woven banners emblazoned with the ‘secret’ symbols of the city’s various neighborhoods.
 
At the height of the Star League, hundreds of different Bands had clashed for glory, honor, and the sheer fun of it, competing to use their punting poles to knock away their rivals’ banners, and driven a rich tourism industry.
 
The long decline of the Succession Wars had taken a toll; fewer industrialmechs were around, fewer owners were willing to risk damage when parts were so rare and so dear… And the pilots for them could be rarer still. I’d learned all this when one of the Secret Masters dropped a ‘whisper’ in my ear, wondering if one of my pilots would be willing to moonlight piloting a Champion.
 
I ducked Marauder No. 2 under a bridge and straightened on the far side, wading forward with a deliberate shuffle at a fraction of top speed. It’s hard to get a battlemech to actually dance. Balance, grace, timing - you have to be pretty damned good to get them all going in sync rather than fighting the gyro the whole way, and being honest, I wasn’t just not good, I was a pretty shit pilot.
 
On the other hand, the funky chicken was a pretty shit dance, so I was able to make it almost look deliberate as I moseyed down the canal with hips wobbling and elbows flapping. The massive crest of blazing iridescent polymer ‘plumes’ I’d had the sniggering techs install over the black-and-royal-blue parade paint wobbled drunkenly, well out of time with my miserable attempt at a boogie.
 
The crowds, equally drunk, cheered, which just showed that it was about time the bartenders cut them off.
 
The Captain, perched in a web of safety lines on the armor outside my opened cockpit, pointed at the rival crew’s mech coming around the corner ahead of us. “There she is!” he said, and called down to the crews in the boats, “Hey, get ready!”
 
The Crew that the Secret Masters had matched the Centurion in front of us held the neighborhood around the main police academy - a training ground - and the decorators that they’d introduced to the regiment’s bemused but increasingly enthusiastic techs had blended the white and gold the department used with the brown, gold, and scarlet that same machine had carried into Solaris’s arenas, just like the flashing patterns of reflective ‘beads’ fixed in mosaic along the visible armor panels of the torso showed scenes of hard practice and the triumph it brought.
 
Scattered reflectors in the black sections of my own armor made that into a starfield that the otherwise ridiculous plumes surrounded like a corona, and a progression of battles and flying dropships marched up the blue bend that crossed the torso - ‘war among the stars’, as the designer who’d set it up had put it. I couldn’t deny that it fit with being the neighborhood around the garrison base.
 
I took my hands off the controls for a moment as I stood still so that the Captain could call the ritual challenges - and trash talk - across to his opposite number. My schoolgirl French had been improving since we got the contract, both by study and practice, but I was still well short of being able to make heads or tails of Creolized local dialect in full flower - and with the need to both manage relatively complex movements and avoid swamping or stepping on the nearby boats, my fingers were starting to cramp.
 
I finished popping the last joint just about the time the two Captains wrapped up their call-and-response, and muttered “Hang on,” to mine as the next phase of the festivities started up. By tradition, the two Champions were supposed to make some series of flashy and distinctive movements, showing off and pretending to psyche each other out before the boatmen and their poles ventured onto the attack. They couldn’t interfere with each other, to keep casualties down, and there were pretty strict limits on how much we pilots could try to protect our banners, so this exchange was our moment.
 
As expected of our opponent, the showing off was spectacular. She picked long banner pole up and spun it around like a majorette leading a marching band, the flag fluttering and popping with the speed of motion, once or twice letting go of the thing entirely to send it spinning into the air to catch again on the way down. I wasn’t sure how impressive it would’ve been considered at person-scale, but in a battlemech it was ‘fuck me running’ territory.
 
Even if Marauder No. 2 had had, y’know, hands, there was no way I could ever have matched it.
 
Fortunately, I knew a secret that I could exploit mercilessly.
 
I flipped a direct audio channel open and said, “Hriiiiii… Wheep wheep wheep!”
 
Tilting the ‘mech’s torso forward almost enough to dip the cockpit into the water flared the crest of ‘feathers’ almost vertically, into a broad fan of color, while short, bobbing steps forward in time with the ‘wheeps’ looked, with the feet underwater, almost like quick hops. Two more repetitions, and then I changed it up, leaning back closer to true and lifting both arms as high as I could, with the elbows rotated, properly revealing the shockingly bright blue ‘feathers’ along their undersides.
 
Tilting the torso as far to the right as it would go went with “Bzaww bzaww…”
 
Bob. “Wark!”
 
Tilt to the left. “Bzaww bzaww…”
 
Bob. “Wark!”
 
And so on in that vein.
 
The Centurion was paralyzed, trembling a wobbling in its tracks as the intelligence controlling it checked out into a place of aching ribs and oxygen debt, barely able to keep her mech on its feet much less attempt to protect her banner.
 
Success.
 

***

 
“I enjoy nature videos,” I explained to the reporter and his camera crew later, still wearing my little black domino mask. “Documentaries on wildlife, that kind of thing. It’s a way to kill off-time when you’re in transit, and you can never have too many of those. Those vid-makers tend to like to check in on how Terran birds of paradise are doing on any planet they’ve been imported to, because birds are always cute and their courtship displays make good footage. So, that’s how I knew that I could disable my opponent with laughter, because a certain pilot who looks suspiciously like Sophitia Braun thinks that birds of paradise are the funniest thing in the universe.”
 
I paused for comic effect, then sighed. “It was a clever plan, so of course it turned out to be useless and we lost anyway. Ah, well, I got to make her laugh at least.”
 
He gave me an uncomfortable look, then tried to prompt, “That’s a surprisingly frank way of putting it.”
 
“I refuse to be ashamed of being in love, any more than I’m willing to be ashamed of having grey eyes,” I said flatly. “Anybody who wants to claim it’s a moral failure, or some kind of sickness, is wrong, and probably needs to pick some real problems in their own lives to worry about, instead of mine.”
 
“Um,” Wide, nervous eyes.
 
I deliberately relaxed and sat back in my Interview Chair, smiling. Threatening the man, while personally satisfying, would break the impression I was after. “Hey, is, ‘Why become a mercenary’ on your question list there?”
 
Easing off got his aplomb back. “No, but I’d like to hear it,” he said, with a smile that probably had thousands of local teeny-boppers go pitter-pat.
 
Only about ten percent of my mind needed reminding that I was in a relationship.
 
“There are basically three kinds of people who become mercenaries,” I explained. “The first kind are the ones who’ve been raised to it, who inherit a tradition along with the weapons and mechs - for them, it’s the only life they know, just as much as any backwoods farmer. The second kind, they’re the ones that earn those protest placards outside our gate - there’s enough people in the worlds that there’s always somebody who just plain likes fighting and killing, and channeling and regulating that into military work isn’t the worst response by a long shot.”
 
We’d had a pretty regular crowd stationing themselves outside our base, mostly without incident. Especially after I managed to get in touch with enough off-duty police to explain why it was a bad idea for everybody to have them right up against the gates.
 
“The third kind are the ones who are desperate,” I finished seriously. “Who absolutely need the cash, or to have a hard-forged tribe at their back. People like me,” I admitted. “There are ‘Dykes Die’ and fag-bashing signs in next to the pacifists out there, and if it was just me walking out those gates, I’d be lucky if it was just a beating or rotten fruit and not a nice spot of gangrape.”
 
The camera guy’s fingers were white-knuckled on the grips of his machine, but he held the lens steady while my interviewer fought to avoid meeting my eyes.
 
“But, my point is,” I continued, “it’s not ‘just me’, it’s me and all my friends.” I gestured around the office, metaphorically taking in the entire compound and all of my people in it. “And we’re the ones with the tanks and battlemechs, so the only ‘defenders of decency’ you see on the picket line are the ones who are actually brave, rather than just looking for an acceptable target to abuse to feel better about themselves. The only people who could make something of it have all got much bigger concerns than my private life.”
 
“People like Duke MacLaine?” the interviewer prompted.
 
“Or Comstar’s Mercenary Review Board, or LCAF - Uh, Lyran Commonwealth Armed Forces, obviously - Command or any of its opposite numbers in other states,” I agreed. “Comstar’s stock in trade is neutrality and impartiality as much as it is communications; they can’t afford to be perceived to care about anything. The national militaries, meanwhile, are too busy fighting each other or trying to discharge their other responsibilities to consider their employees’ sex lives in any terms other than ‘does this open a vulnerability?’ - and my being out of the closet means no, it doesn’t. What’s SAFE going to do, threaten to expose me as a -” I pitched my voice into abject horror “-depraved bisexual?” Back to scorn. “Please.”
 
“If they don’t care about that, what do they care about?” he asked, and gestured out the picture window that let my office overlook what was probably the quietest open space in the city today. “What made Tharkad decide that you were what they were looking for for our world?”
 
I held up three fingers on one hand, then folded them down one by one. “First,” I said, “Size. Fianna is too populated and significant to trust to just a company, but isn’t one of the key strategic points that can justify the commitment of a full regiment. Closer to the latter than the former, given the role your exports play in feeding Hesperus and its mining worlds, right? So, a mech battalion with organic support is about right.”
 
“‘Organic’?” he asked.
 
“Permanently attached and included,” I expanded. “Second, and the other primary one, is that our experience level is right. We’ve seen enough action to know that we won’t dissolve at the first sight of an actual enemy, so we can be trusted with serious second-line work rather than just bean-counting, but we’re also not an experienced veteran outfit that would be better used in raiding or offensive action.
 
“Third, a relatively minor factor, we did our recruiting in either the Outworlds, the Federated Suns, or on Galatea. We only have a handful of people who were born in the Free Worlds’ League, none of them with what you’d call strong ties of loyalty there - and most of the more local competitors have had more, mmm, cross pollination. There’s no guarantees, of course, but it’s unlikely that the League has any agents to spy on us.”
 
“Do you think that Tharkad expects us to be attacked?”
 
“I don’t think they do,” I said. “Like, call it a one in three chance of an attack - but the amount of certainty they can put that down with is plus-or-minus thirty percent. If it does happen, probably we’ll only see a raid aimed at shutting down the spaceport, like the one I gather happened in 2980.”
 
“That took five years to rebuild from,” he said, looking horrified. “Why would they want to cut off our imports like that?”
 
“Local or standard?” I asked interestedly. Fianna’s local year was about twenty-seven standard months; it orbited well out from a hot white star.
 
“Local, of course,” was the answer.
 
“Weird to think about that being a real length of time; Alpheratz’s local year is only three months,” I mused, then shook the thought off. “But no, more seriously, the League doesn’t care in the slightest about your ability to import things. They care about your exports. Flour, dried meats and fruits, nutrient supplements - one way or another, Fianna supplies something like eight different planets with at least some of those things. Without that, food needs to be imported from elsewhere in the Commonwealth, probably a number of jumps away, or there’d be major famines. Jumpships carrying Mammoths full of food can’t be used for military operations, which’d make things completely worth it from the League’s perspective.”
 
“How do you plan to stop them?”
 
“That,” I said flatly, “I can’t tell you. If we do get a League raid, every clue I drop to the watcher I’m sure SAFE has tuned in to your broadcast is another risk to my people’s lives and your world’s safety - the better they can predict us, the better they can counter us. I will say that unless they decide to commit an entire regiment to the job, they’ll find the price higher than I expect them to be willing to pay.”
 
“Is that your mission, then? Making sure our planet is safe? Or just Tharkad’s investments? There’s been no sign of going after the raiders on Nouveau Congo.”
 
That seemed rather loaded to me. But… “For the FWL force, we can push them off the continent and offworld at any time; any one of my battalions would outweigh and outnumber them handily, but the Duke doesn’t agree and won’t authorize it.” I shrugged. “Meanwhile, as far as defensive objectives go, we have an entire list, explicitly in our contract,” I said. “Most of it’s minutia and legalese, but the long and short is that we’re here to protect the lives and property of Lyran citizens, and everything else flows from that. We’re under Duke MacLaine’s orders because that reinforces law and order; we’re to protect the starport because of the role it plays in supporting millions of other lives; we’re to keep enemy forces out of the city because of the risk of casualties and property damage… et cetera, et cetera,” I said, making the requisite ‘roll on’ hand gesture.
 
The reporter looked puzzled. “How does lending your battlemechs out as Mardi Gras Champions help that?” he asked.
 
“Well, besides helping hone their skills, and keeping them from getting so bored they lose their ability to react and adapt,” I said, “it helps break the image of our being nothing but the ‘Grim Merchants of Death’. It draws us out of this compound and out into the city, in people’s minds if not so much in fact, and puts a human face on things. The difference between ‘visitors’ and ‘intruders’, if you like - and the novelty value draws a lot of interviews just like this one, which double down on that effect.”
 
“That doesn’t seem very compatible with your only needing to worry about Tharkad’s opinion of you,” he pointed out challengingly.
 
“Every time those crowds of morons outside the gate pysche themselves up, they push a little closer,” I explained. “And military bases of all kinds are off limits for good reasons. I don’t have… discretion… about that. LCAF regs, the Duke’s orders, and our own experience… If the protest groups try and get close enough to rush the gate, for whatever reason, we won’t have any choice but to keep them out by ‘any and all means neccessary’.
 
“That’d be an escalation with risks I’d rather avoid, because if these so-called pacifist idiots break out the cobblestones and Molotovs…” I trailed off and sighed. “Anything at all that takes the wind out of their sails before that point is worth trying.”
 
“...You’d shoot at protesters?” he asked in horror.
 
“Our contract defines rules of engagement for given, um, tension levels. At the one we’re at, we’re expected to act like we’re expecting suicide bombs,” I said grimly. “If an idiot decides to act like one of them in front of our guards, it doesn’t matter that we know the difference between a threat and a protest. We’re in breach if we don’t react. I’m about at the point of blocking out a couple days of my schedule to just sit in the PPSC-” given that the city of Saint Cabrini represented fifteen of Fianna’s hundred million people, the local police department had more officers than I had men by about an order of magnitude, no matter what the actual firepower difference was like “-station foyer until someone gets frustrated enough to admit they have time for me.”
 
“You haven’t been able to make an appointment?”
 
“Nope,” I confirmed. “But showing up in person worked to get our water hookups turned on. We didn’t bother with power, we just tucked a spare mech away in a corner with jumper cables.”
 
Not literally jumper cables, of course, the kind of wiring you needed to drain a base’s worth of power out of the Nissan 200 in one of our spare Centurions was thicker than my arms, but enh, close enough.
 
I had to laugh at his expression. “Yeah, I know how that sounds,” I said, “but we have them in reserve for other reasons, so it only makes sense to get more uses out of them.”
 
“Put that way, I suppose it does. Going back a little… You said you were from… Alpheratz?”
 
“Capital planet of the Outworlds Alliance,” I confirmed. “K-class star, and the orbit’s kind of wobbly, so it tends to be blazing hot for about two weeks, warm for a week before and after, then cool the other two months. A lot of terran animal life does OK, and some kinds of plants, but the native ecosystem is still alive and well. Population-wise, you’ve got a big divide between Omniss, who are usually living in the countryside and pointedly not sending back their census returns even if they pay taxes, and the city folks like me who don’t have any religious objections to high technology. My father, who I inherited the unit from, was the landholder to one of the continents on Ramora, another OWA world - but that went to the legitimate sibling.”
 
“What do you think of Fianna, in comparison?”
 
“Is it always so hot here?” I whined.
 

***

 
The head of the Prefecture of Saint Cabrini Police Force - Préfecture de police de Saint Cabrini - was an older woman about my own less-than-imposing height and maybe two-and-a-half times my weight. Watching her step around her desk to extend her hand to shake, the martial arts computer at the back of my brain that Younger-Me had programmed estimated that only about a third of that difference was fat.
 
“Not the usual reaction to my weight,” she said, her grin obvious given the 70% cocoa skin tone that was normal on this planet. “I don’t see many people who decide to be more polite.”
 
“An actual fight would be hard to guess without knowing how fast you are,” I said, and accepted the waved offer of a seat in front of her desk. “But if you got your hands on me, you’d crush me like a grape.”
 
She laughed and dropped into her chair with a thump. “Probably not. I was always more comfortable with a bean gun than in a brawl, but it’s good to know I’ve managed to keep in shape.”
 
We were both being modest, and within her own competitive weight class - meant most literally - her lack of reach would have been a disadvantage… But I genuinely would rather not have gotten in a fight with the woman, and not just for situational reasons.
 
“I’d say so,” I agreed, and laughed. “I’ve been learning how hard it is to manage with my paperwork, I can’t imagine yours.”
 
She rolled her eyes. “You would have to remind me,” she grumbled humorously, then sobered and straightened in her seat. “On the record, you’re here to request crowd control officers be stationed around Camp Robichaux, to keep the demonstrations from pushing in on your security perimeter.”
 
“That’s correct,” I said. “I don’t know if you saw the interview I gave Channel 3, but my contract explicitly puts security posture and rules of engagement under Duke MacLiane’s control, and I have written orders requiring lethal force be applied before permitting intrusion - and prohibiting sending my infantry out with bayonets or clubs to clear things that way.”
 
She nodded. “You’ll have your people. Judging by the size of crowd you’ve been seeing, we’ll start you with half a dozen during the day and two during night hours, and we can work up from there if things get more serious. I’ve been required by the Duke to ‘respect your commitment to protect your people’, so I can’t ask anything about your own arrangements, you understand.”
 
“Outside of the base proper, I’m allowed to follow your lead,” I said, and spread both of my hands, palm up. “You’ve got the crowd specialists, you’ve got the experience. I have, at best, some people that have been ordered to disperse outright riots in battlemechs once or twice. I’ve got a container of tear gas rounds for standard SRM launchers on order from Hesperus, and some firefighting gear with hoses, but my people are soldiers, not cops. I figure that we can pass your people on site some of our headsets or com frequencies if they want to ask for our help for one reason or another, but ideally, I’d really like if that never came up. If there’s something you need from me that can make that less likely, let me know.”
 
She winced, and nodded. “Having open communication lines is better than not,” she agreed. “We have a packet we have for event planners who expect to need police crowd control. I’ll have Susie-” her secretary, I guessed “-find a couple of copies for you when we’re done here.”
 
Not waiting for me to agree, she reached down and hit a control out of sight on the bottom of her desk.
 
When she looked back up at me, the hair on the back of my neck stood up. I got the impression that the warmly humorous woman I’d been speaking to a moment before was a mask that had been put on by an unyielding icon of will and iron. The real Wilhemina Codrescue was the woman I was talking to now, not the tool she used to handle the political parts of her job.
 
“Off the record,” she said, and even her voice was different, harsher, “Somebody’s fucking with both of us.”
 
I sat up and paid attention. “Like how three quarters of the crowds I’m getting are astroturf, not real protesters?”
 
She gave me an odd look. “What in the world is ‘astroturf’?”
 
“Plastic fake grass for sports arenas,” I said. “In this case, a metaphor, as opposed to an actual grass-roots movement. Most of the ones that we’ve been seeing who were actually angry are the gay-bashers; the ‘murderers go home’ crowd stick too closely to the script, and my more experienced people say they’ve got the wrong feel to be genuinely pissed.”
 
She gave a thoughtful grunt of understanding. “Yes, exactly. I had ‘carefully anonymous’ orders from Skellig Palace to keep my people away from Camp Robichaux no matter what happened, and specifications on how I had to phrase any press releases that boiled down to pouring gasoline on the fire.”
 
Ohhhh fuck. “Somebody’s trying to create an incident,” I said. “But they have to keep appearances, hence why my giving that interview was enough to force them at least a little bit off your back.”
 
“Somebody senior enough in the Ducal government to send from the Palace’s own hardware without any worry about covering their tracks,” she confirmed, and the hairs standing up on the back of my neck tried to reach escape velocity.
 
“Lovely,” I said.
 
She snorted. “Until I can track who this is down and pin them under every charge I can find, watch your back,” she told me. “We don’t know what they actually want, or what other resources they have to get it.”
 
I nodded. “I have a couple more ideas about pushing back against the smear campaign, at least,” I said.
 
“Legal, I hope.”
 
“Immaculately.”
 

***
 

“Okay, I can admit it,” I said gracefully. “You were right and I was wrong. I’m enjoying the hell out of it.”
 
Sophitia looked pardonably smug. “I told you. Immortal Warrior might be ridiculous, but it’s well plotted and written.”
 
I laughed. “I wouldn’t go that far, but it’s fun stupid, at least. Where do you want to add it to the rotation?”
 
We were sitting at an outside table at a little cafe in the shopping district slash park at the southeast end of Finger Island.
 
Saint Cabrini had been built, like New Orleans, in the delta of the main river draining an agriculture-heavy continent. Fianna had four, two island and two isthmus-linked, and three quarters of the largest and most temperate of them was the same watershed. It was one of the reasons the place was such an agricultural success - not only did it have a lot of good farmland spread between two continents, but most of that farmland could ship its produce by river to just two central collection points, Saint Cabrini and Saint Isidore. Once the food had been processed, dried, and compressed there, a simple water link brought anything headed offworld to the spaceport at Saint Cabrini.
 
Un-like New Orleans, Saint Cabrini had been designed to rest well above the waterline of most storm surges, built on stilts and pilings and dredged-and-packed artificial islands by planners who’d consciously created old-feeling districts on the more outlying ones, only four or five stories and faced in brick and stone, with wrought-iron balconies and all the rest you’d expect.
 
Since the river flowed northwest to southeast, and since Finger Island extended further out from the rest of the delta than most of the others, we had a great view over the water at the mouth of the river and the two skyscraper-filled islands that framed it.
 
Sophitia hmm’d thoughtfully. “Well, I have to admit that I haven’t been enjoying Last Court as much as I thought I would,” she said, and I nodded. Last Court was set amid the ‘hostage court’ among the noble prisoners of the Amaris Empire, most of whom had ended up murdered or executed, and its writers had pulled no punches.
 
“Sounds like a plan,” I said, not without relief as much as I tried to hide it. I didn’t have the same kind of problems with depression that Older-Me had, but ‘catharsis’ still wasn’t my first reaction to that kind of program.
 
She giggled. Well, I knew I wasn’t a good actress.
 
I saw the cafe’s host come out onto the rear patio with a man and a woman in business dress in tow. “Looks like it’s showtime,” I said, and she twisted in her seat to watch them come.
 
Lord, I loved to watch that woman move.
 
I stood up and extended a hand to shake as the other half of the lunch meeting joined us. “Monsieur Savimbi, Madame Ingles. Thanks for agreeing to meet us.”
 
He shook my hand firmly; she seemed worried about cooties. Both of them were a shade or two paler than the usual local dark skin tone, both probably somewhere in their sixties. “Our pleasure,” Savimbi said in a reedy voice. “I’ve been impressed with your interviews. Usually, military commanders seem stiff and awkward, but you’ve been smooth enough to seem practiced, and communicated some fairly complex points quite clearly.”
 
“If nothing else,” Ingles said, “I’m curious why you’d bring both of us along for your date.” She didn’t quite spit the word, and I got the distinct impression that Savimbi very much wished he was close enough to step on her toes.
 
I smiled with many teeth. “Well, why don’t you sit down and we can get our orders out of the way, and then I’ll explain?”
 
There was a tense near-silence as the waitress came by to get their drink orders. I tried to get things flowing by asking questions about the food - the menu was very local, and all in French - and Savimbi probably would have cooperated if Ingles hadn’t been glaring daggers at all of us. It would have been easier if she didn’t need to be present, but…
 
“Now that that’s out of the way,” I said eventually, “I can stop being coy about things. Madame Ingles, you’re the President and main business mind of the smallest of the three trivision production studios operating on Fianna. Monsieur Savimbi directs almost all of your programs and handles most of the production side. You’re currently producing two seperate trivid series, both technically intensive and quite expensive. One is doing well enough to stay in the black, and the other…”
 
Savimbi sighed. “Has proven to be a mistake.”
 
Ingles was watching me carefully, and with a bit less disdain now that we were on business.
 
I nodded sympathetically. “Meanwhile, I have what might delicately be called a public relations problem. Demonstrators, slanted news stories… Everywhere I turn there’s something calculated to make my people look worse and offend all our neighbors. I need some way to lower those tensions. Counter-propaganda.”
 
“Which you want us to make for you,” Ingles said. She still looked like she was sucking on a lemon, but the other half of her expression was thoughtful. “You want, what, a new show glorifying the noble mercenary lifestyle?”
 
I shook my head. “No need to go that far. I was thinking of a documentary series, a look at the day-to-day lives of my people, interviews about where they’re from and what their lives were like…”
 
Savimbi was nodding. “Less expensive without the need for technical effects or detailed sets and costuming, quicker to shoot…”
 
Sophitia cleared her throat. “I have a list of people in the regiment with interesting stories,” she said. “I haven’t been able to convince all of them to share, some of these are difficult personal memories, but you should have enough to make at least a good start.”
 
Savimbi paused and looked at her intensely for a moment, then waved in my direction. “You coached her interviews, didn’t you,” he said, smiling.
 
Sophitia blushed. “I had to go through a lot of my own,” she admitted. “So, I had a good idea how to prepare.”
 
“She was a lifesaver,” I said. “And she’s done ten times as much publicity work as anybody else in the unit, so, she’d be your point of contact.”
 
“I presume that you don’t expect us to work for free,” Ingles said, giving Savimbi a quelling look.
 
“Of course not,” I said. “This is an investment in not having my people saddled with an atrocity, after all.”
 
“Well, we were thinking in terms of forty-five minute episodes,” Sophitia said. The standard hour-long programming block came with commercial breaks, of course. The exact proportion varied depending on the planet - on Fianna, it was three to one. “The Fianna standard season is sixteen episodes? What would your initial quote be?”
 
“One hundred thousand cbills, for the lot,” Ingles said, almost triumphantly.
 
Savimbi sat up straighter. Most of the Battletech game material gave prices in the thousands or millions of cbills, routinely - which obscured the real-life reality that one cbill was actually a pretty hefty amount of money, to a degree that occasionally made me reconsider my choice to stay in the merc business. “Sixty-two hundred cbills an episode for a documentary?” He caught himself and shook the shock off.
 
"That will work." Sophitia smiled at the way both of them blinked in surprise. “It’s… not all that much, compared to the Blackwings budget.”
 
A part of me still twitched to hear the unit called that, but I had to admit that the mixed emotions chasing across Ingles’ face were amusing.
 
“If it does what we need, and as long as that budget is spent effectively, we can live with the costs,” she went on. “And Monsieur Savimbi’s reputation is a large part of why we picked your studio to approach first.”
 
“So, you put up the working cash, we put up the production team and materials, and afterwards… what?” Ingles asked.
 
“What about creative control?” Savimbi asked.
 
Sophitia smiled at him. “We’ll rely on you, Monsieur Savimbi.”
 
I - figuratively - bit my tongue. This was something she knew better than me; all I knew about television production I’d learned from TV itself, and the time she’d spent studying under Phil Poisson, our CFO meant that the Soph of today was very much not the teen prodigy who’d been brutally taken advantage of by her stable managers and first merc commander.
 
She went on, “The work we’ve done on our own, ahead of time, has been assuming that each episode would look at a different part of the base and the unit, probably following them through a day and adding in interviews, but that’s not something we’re hard-set on if you have an idea that might work better.”
 
Ingles looked like she was coming around to the idea. “Do you have a particular timeslot in mind for airing?”
 
Sophitia shook her head. “No, not really,” she admitted. “Not past ‘good enough for the exposure we need’, anyway. Unless you mean in terms of air date? That we’d like as soon as reasonably possible. The longer our demonstrators-”
 
Or the conspirator driving them.
 
“-have, the more chance of the trouble we’re trying to stop.”
 
“No, she meant time and day of the week,” Savimbi said. “With the budget you’ve agreed to, we can get an excellent one - prime viewing hours, probably even a peak day.”
 
A thought occurred to Ingles, and she asked, “So, aside from the business side of things, is there a particular lifestyle you’d like this to support?” The distasteful twist to her mouth and voice made it clear what she meant by ‘lifestyle’, even if she didn’t actually wave at the homosexual couple she was sharing a lunch with. From the way she jolted and glared at Savimbi, I figured he’d kicked her under the table right after.
 
I leaned forward and started to say, “We’re not-”
 
Sophitia interrupted me with a squeeze on the hand, and when I glanced at her she was giving me her ‘I’ve got this’ look.
 
I huffed and sat back. “Sorry,” I told her.
 
She gave me the smile that never failed to make my heart do the proverbial pitter-pat, then turned back to Ingles with a rather different smile that I’d never seen her make before. “We have no intention of doing any editorializing in either direction,” she said.
 
Ingles flinched back like she’d discovered she was sitting across from a cobra.
 
Savimbi was made of stronger stuff. “Would you prefer to avoid the subject entirely?”
 
She shook her head. “No,” she said. “Relationships are part of life in the unit, and a factor in why some of us joined. But they should be treated in the same terms as any other factor - or, for that matter, any other relationship.”
 
“But it’s not any other relationship,” Ingles said.
 
“Isn’t it?” Sophitia asked sweetly.
 
Savimbi kicked his boss again and said, “So, in terms of narrating and presenting things, would you be willing to take a personal role, Mademoiselle Braun? Your name would add a significant interest factor.”
 
And thereby, contribute to the success of both the program and our goal.
 
“I’m willing,” Sophitia said, which got a startled look from me, given how little she cared for crowds and fannish gushing, “but I’d assumed that the main language of the program would be local French, with translation for interviews. And my French is… very basic.”
 
Savimbi looked thoughtful, doing sums in his head, then nodded. “If we also film five-minute adapter blocks to go with each episode, perhaps some kind of comic relief, then we can fit it to the standard fifty-minute Comstar program block, for offworld syndication. The news channels settled on one translator for dubbing your interviews, and we can get ahold of her fairly easily. If we produce two audio tracks at the same time, one in English, and one in French, it won’t run our costs up noticeably and will make reselling the series relatively easy.”
 
Sophitia sighed and nodded, looking like she was sitting down to a full meal of seriously overcooked brussels sprouts. “That will work,” she said.
 
For the record, of the two of us, I was the one that liked brussels sprouts in the first place.
 
“What subjects were you thinking of for the individual episodes?” Savimbi asked, digging around in his jacket until he came out with a pad of notepaper.
 
“Medical, food services, site security, administration, supply, individual episodes for motor pool, ASF, and battlemech repair, base maintenance, communications, and battlemech, armor, infantry, artillery, aerospace, and dropship operations,” she reeled off without a pause for breath.
 
I was impressed; I couldn’t have done the full list without thinking about it mid-stream.
 
Savimbi’s pen was flashing across his pad. “I don’t know enough to say whether all of those have enough material to make an interesting episode,” he admitted, “but it sounds like a good place to start. Have you given any consideration to examining your Jumpship crews?”
 
“We did,” Sophitia said, “but the trouble there is that there’s no real difference between mercenary and normal jumpship ops. If anything, commercial jumpships are boarded or attacked more often - and anyway ours are operating as commercial carriers while we’re on contract.”
 
The lightweight dress shirt and pants I was wearing did have pockets; I’d insisted on it when I was buying them. When my com went off, its buzzing was against my hip. I got up, leaning to whisper in Sophitia’s ear, on the way even as it buzzed a second time. “Comcall,” I whispered. “You got this?”
 
She turned and gave me a confident smile. “I do,” she said.
 
“Knock ‘em dead,” I said, and hurried off, pulling the infernal device out and clicking it on before it could buzz a fourth time.
 
“Hello?” I said.
 
“Blackwing. Chief Codrescue here. I need a favor.” The career policewoman’s voice was terse, tense, and, under the iron control… concerned.
 
I headed for the restroom sign. “What do you need?”
 
“I need a heavy element to back up one of my security cordons. A repair crew uncovered a Star League bunker.”
 
The Star League Defense Force had been notorious for digging hidden bunkers and storage caches everywhere it went, and stuffing them full of all the military hardware its planners had thought they could ever need. Even today, there was at least one find a year on the order of a lance or so of Griffins or a dozen extended-range lasers. The SLDF had been the largest, best funded military organization in history, and I swear to God something like half of their procurement budget had ended up tucked away in an infinite variety of holes in the ground against the proverbial rainy day, like some kind of sympathetic magic totem against the dreaded phantom of a budget cut.
 
And come to that, the big prize on Helm was still in the future.
 
“I can get you that,” I said. “What’s in the hole this time?”
 
“A refinery, it looks like. Mostly automated, tanks full of… something. Chem hazard markings, security clearances. ‘Compound G-3’, whatever that is.”
 
G-3, G-3… Oh, right, the bell that rang was from Gundam’s Universal Century timeline, the gas that Zeon had used to wipe out the Earth Federation’s spaceside populations. Some kind of combination corrosive and nerve agent.
 
...Which, thinking about it, I wouldn’t put past FASA or whoever as being a reference. Certainly Gundam was old enough.
 
That niggling detail tilted, slid, and clicked into place in my head, clearing the nagging feeling that I was missing something that had been bothering me practically since I landed on the planet.
 
Fianna...
 
Star League bunker...
 
Gas...
 
Redjack Ryan.
 
“Motherfucker,” I said. “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.”
 
Fortunately, I could usually think while swearing. “Okay. Okay,” I said. “Right, I’ll make a call and have my people scramble… Umm. Three companies, one each mech, tank, and infantry? The first for intimidation and proactives, the other two for actual security? Can you get an escort cordon to the base to lead my people there?”
 
“You’ve heard of G-3.”
 
“I’ve heard of a gas codenamed that,” I said. “I don’t know that it’s the same one. If it is, fuck, how much is there?”
 
“At least forty thousand liters, probably twice that.”
 
I could feel my flesh crawl. “If those spill, probably the entire city dies,” I said, feeling the banal whisper of half-forgotten sourcebooks in the back of my mind.
 

...MIND IS ON THE MIDNIGHT...

[Valles]

GATHER UP THE GOLD YOU FOUND...

Tell The World That We Tried
A Battletech Fanfiction, inspired by Fitzgerald’s CYOA at https://imgur.com/gallery/M41mI
By Valles

“All right,” said the head of the largest armed force on the planet of Fianna, sitting back in one of the flimsy chairs of this temporary command post by the scenic sewer entrance leading to our shiny new Star League bunker. “You’ve fed some of this gas to the gadget. What is it?”

Doctor Clarissa Ndele, head of the chemistry department at the University of Saint Cabrini, looked pained. I sympathized; the chemical analyzer she’d brought out of storage was itself a Star League survivor, capable of taking even a few molecules in, breaking them down, and producing a chemical formula and model along with a database referent - in the twentieth century, it would have taken an entire chemistry lab to duplicate the trick. “Madame Prefect-”

“Chief Codrescue is fine,” the stocky woman grumbled.

“-I still don’t know. Think of it as having found a fingerprint on a murder weapon; we now know that we’re dealing with a ‘pseudo-conotoxin’, but my department is still searching for referents to clarify what that is.”

I held up one hand. “I’ve heard of actual conotoxins,” I said, and both of them looked at me. “They’re the active ingredients used by a group of venomous snails from Terra.”

Doctor Ndele nodded and made a note. “That will help,” she said.

Codrescue looked relieved, so I figured I’d better expand on it before she got too relaxed. “As far as I know, cone shells are about the only thing in the Terran biosphere that can literally kill you dead before you hit the ground, poisonwise.”

“How big are these ‘cone shells’?” Codrescue asked.

I measured a couple of inches between thumb and forefinger. “Fit in the palm of your hand, easy,” I said. “Five, ten centimeters, maybe, for a big one? But the mouthpart they use to deliver venom can reach any part of their shell, so, I wouldn’t handle one with anything but tongs for love or money.”

“And the Star League put forty tons of this in the suburbs of Saint Cabrini,” Codrescue said, looking disgusted.

I didn’t have an answer to that, so I looked at Doctor Ndele. “More importantly, do you have ideas of how secure the existing tanks are, and what agents we’ll need to destroy the stuff?”

Up to and including fusion plasma; I’d strip down one of our bugmechs if I had to.

“We won’t be,” Codrescue said.

“...hey what now?” I said cogently.

Her expression was even less pleased than I’d have expected from her grim tone. “I’ve already spoken to the Duke,” she said. “He’s made it quite clear that this ‘precious military asset is to be preserved for the future use of the Commonwealth.’”

Jesus fucking christ.

“The good news,” Doctor Ndele said weakly, “is that the tanks are as stable as they ever were. Unless the entire roof comes down on them, they should hold for another two centuries without trouble.”

If I had to guess, I’d say that ‘bring the entire roof down’ is exactly what Redjack Ryan’s scum would have done.

“What about moving them?” I asked. Both of them looked at me like I was insane, and in answer I pointed down the empty street outside the tent - and at the water visible at the end of it. “Dropships float just fine,” I said. “We have tugboats push Norway’s Greatest Son right up to the end of that street and load the tanks into her. Have her crew work in full vac suits, and get the tugboats to move her out to sea - then they do a nice, gentle plus-point-one lift to orbit and set her down on one of your moons. Unload that shit safely away from anyone.”

Doctor Ndele looked thoughtful. “That… We could get them onto the dropship, but I’m not sure about the lift to orbit.”

“What if you end up with a crash?” Corescue asked.

I shrugged. “I’d rather have that happen outside the city,” I said. “Or if there’s another dropper that’s in better repair I’ll borrow it at gunpoint if need be. But for something like this, we can do a lot to make sure those risks are minimized.”

“Try not to say that where I’ll have to do something about it,” Codrescue ordered, then got to her feet. “I’ll need to go brief the Duke. Both of you, make the preparations for moving the tanks.”

“Bracing, shock casings, and levers to move them an inch at a time if need be,” I agreed, standing too. “And… I’ve still got two of the one-time-pads LCAF command issued me. I’ll write up a report in one of them and drop it by Comstar for Tharkad, see if they have anything to add.”

Codrescue gave me a sharp, thoughtful look, then nodded. “Good,” she said. “Do that.”

***

Setsuka Carter and her brother Albert had joined the unit on Hoff, right after the Combine raid. Bert and his boyfriend had settled neatly into Charlie Company as mechwarrior and tech respectively, and I’d fitted Setsuka and the Carter family ‘mech into the command lance, mostly because that way I minimized the impact its lack of speed had on deployments. With only the other three mechs of the command lance forced to stay close, the actual frontline companies could maneuver more freely.

The Carter sibs had grown up on the base housing of a merc unit working a long-term garrison assignment on some FedSuns planet I’d otherwise never heard of; high gravity, high temperature, and with a vigorous jungle ecosystem that had swallowed most attempted Terran imports whole. Bert was only about five foot six, and at four nine, Setsuka was the shortest person in the entire unit, thanks to the gravity they’d grown up in.

Naturally, she piloted an Atlas. Equally naturally, she dressed in ruffles and petticoats.

Basically appointing her as my secretary had been Reyes’ idea - and largely his doing. I’d found out after the fact, when I came in to my office (on Galatea, at the time) and found her setting up a new desk in outer area.

Now, she poked her head in my door. “Boss, got a call for you to make?”

I looked up from the ‘Gas Moving Day’ plan I’d been working on with relief. “What’s up?” I asked.

“Boende camp has a stomach bug going around. Captain Clair’s saddling Roland up right now to send out a filler lance, but, number four on the list is the Champ.”

Boende was the largest city - not much of one, less than twenty thousand people - on the continent of Nouveau Congo, the second-smallest and least settled of Fianna’s four continents. A couple of days before, when Duke MacLaine had finally given the OK to root out the Free Worlds League-employed merc company that had been stooging around in the wilds of Nouveau Congo since before we landed. He’d only been willing to allow one mech company, but since he hadn’t thought to mention other assets, I’d had one of our heavy armor companies, one of the Goblin companies, and the Long Tom battery sent along with… And, of course, ASFs could be on-site in less than an hour via suborbital hops.

Explaining the name I’d given our Leopard-class, and playing the Warren Zevon song it was a reference to, had made the ship’s nickname inevitable.

The ‘filler list’ was a listing of whose turn it was to fill in for people unable to carry out their regular duties, rather than leaving gaps or pushing it onto the same people every time.

Sophitia, meanwhile, was neck-deep in getting the documentary series we’d commissioned up and running, to a degree that had surprised me.

“Sounds good so far,” I said. “What’s the catch?”

“You’re number five, Boss,” she said, smirking. “Gotta keep your op hours up!”

On the one hand, it’d be nice to get out of this office. And I really did need to spend more hours in the cockpit; I was starting to fall behind on training.

On the other, this shit I was working on actually did need to get done.

...And on the gripping hand, I kinda felt like making the implicit statement that the rules didn’t apply to me would be bad for morale. And I had an idea.

“I’ll go,” I said, and started dashing off a quick memo asking my ‘department heads’ - Sasagawa, Clair, Suzuki, Rosenkreutz, and Singh - to each put together their own take on how they’d recommend moving the gas canisters to the abandoned shaft mine we’d located on the largest of Fianna’s three moons. A couple of quick commands attached the handling guide Doctor Ndele had put together for me, and a whack of the enter key sent the lot winging on its digital way.

“Call the bays and let ‘em know, okay?” I said on my way out.

“Will do,” Setsuka confirmed from behind me.

One of the advantages of working out of the pre-existing Camp Robichaux was that we had access to permanent, full-featured mech bays, each built into reinforced structures that reminded me intensely of submarine pens. Three-hundred-year-old thumbprint scanners on the lockers in the mechwarriors’ changing room, and all the other minor details they implied - about half of them still worked, but I didn’t stop. I could change in my cockpit on the way, and that way I’d have two uniforms with me rather than just the one to last however long it took people to get over that stomach bug.

Permanent mechbays used the same catwalk system as dropship bays - two swinging, telescoping gantry arms, whose hinges were on elevator tracks so that they could be set at any height for easiest access to the mech in the bay. Inactive in its bay, though, Marauder No. 2 was crouched to less than half its usual height of eleven meters or so, with the torso slumped forwards a bit, which put the cockpit about six feet or two meters up. Swinging up onto the already-deployed mounting ladder beneath wasn’t any harder than mounting a horse - easier, in fact, since an inactive battlemech wouldn’t shy away like a nervous animal might.

Flopping into the command couch, I flipped the comm panel on while I waited for the reactor capacitors to charge. “Filler four, beginning startup,” I said, after a quick riffle through the available lines and their labels.

“Boss?” Lu Clair said. “I thought Braun was next on the list.”

“She was,” I said, “but she’s busy wishing she wasn’t a movie star and I’m next after her.”

“Works for me,” he replied. “Weren’t you working on the gas thing, though?”

“I’ve got about three quarters of a draft plan, but I want to see what you and the others come up with on your own first,” I said. “It’ll be on your desktop.”

“...Colonel, are you playing hooky?”

“Would you let anybody else go back to their office on the grounds of ‘I was doing paperwork’?” I replied, deliberately evasive.

“She is,” came the cheer from one of the other warriors on the line (Kaniela Niel, hired on Galatea, originally from somewhere out towards former Rim Worlds space). “Oh, wow, Colonel.”

“Don’t you start,” I grumbled. “I’m already behind on my proficiency log anyway.”

“How be-” Clair started to ask, then broke off and sniggered, I presume because he’d just looked it up himself.

“Fucking paperwork,” I grumbled.

“All right, objection withdrawn. Boss, I know you know this, but for the rest of you, we finally got the OK to track down the League merc unit that’s been bumming around on the jungle continent. PCA-” Planetary Command Authority, AKA the Duke of Fianna “-thought one mech company would be plenty, and our darling worrywart commander thought that’d be too fair a fight, so besides Baker, we’ve got Quebec, Sugar, and Nan 1. Baker picked a shitty restaurant, so we’ll be slotting in for people with the shits.

“Captain Toshi-” Toshiro Hannah, with Lira Suzuki and Moses Rosenkreutz one of the first three people I’d met in the unit “-has everbody dug in at Boende until we get there, but after that, Knight’s come through for us and found the base we’re looking for…”

While Clair explained, I flipped the boot-up switch. The computer thought to itself for a few moments, randomizing its presets, then said in its flat monotone: “What? What are you worth?”

“The things you love,” I replied, “or the people you hurt?”

“Voiceprint and neural handshake confirmed.”

A flick of my thumb stopped the music player from cueing up the song I’d just finished quoting - a function that had seemed cute when I set it but turned out to be a bit of a pain in the ass in practice - so that I could keep one ear on Clair’s briefing. As he’d implied, I knew most of it already, but there was no sense being sloppy.

“Reactor, Online. Sensors, Online. Weapons Systems, Online. All functioning systems, nominal,” the computer went on as Marauder No. 2 straightened to its full height and one of the small civilian pickups we’d bolted flagpoles on top of as ‘guide cars’ pulled up in front. The flashing lights on top of the pole were yellow, so I just jiggled the steering joystick enough to tell the computer to shuffle its footing. No red flags came up, so I knew that things were working right.

When the pole flashers went green, I lumbered into motion and followed the pilot truck out and onto the apron, and from there to the private loading road that led right from the base to the spaceport.

It was after school hours, and I could see clusters of human figures appear in the yards and windows overlooking the road as the impromptu lance tromped towards our ride - kids admiring the titans of war. That changed even less than war itself did.

Breaking out onto the the blast-scarred ferrocrete of the spaceport tarmac did wonders for the stress levels; not only was there less to run into or step on, but against the flat, predictable backdrop of the pavement, a mech’s limited machine vision systems could actually do a worthwhile job picking up obstacles or intrusions to feed to the neurohelmet checksum. Less stress was a good thing; it gave us time to brace for dropship loading.

I hated dropship loading. It had all the ‘don’t step on that’ issues of crowded streets, matched with close quarters with no room to maneuver and lots of expensive equipment to smash if you got anything wrong. I’d take it over being shot at, but only just. Star League mechs had been able to run loading on autopilot, letting special markers and sensor feeds from the dropship tell the mech exactly where it was so the idiot box could get the machine where it needed to be for the crew to lock the attachment points down.

(There were straps involved, but also cables, and latches that linked feet and rear hardpoints directly to matching brackets in the bay. I didn’t know whose children the SLDF had threatened to get that bit of standardization through, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they had to follow through at least once.)

Once Marauder No. 2 was slotted in, I put her to sleep and started changing. I’d sweated enough in my day-to-day clothes to need to launder them already; no sense making it worse on myself. There was a chance that the crews working to get the other mechs of the fill lance put to bed would glance in the cockpit and catch an eyeful, but one, it wasn’t like I’d be showing a lot more than standard piloting gear, two, Younger-Me had given shows that put that kind of awkward peeping to shame so what was the point, and three, what did I have to be ashamed of, anyway? So fuck it.

If any of them noticed and used the opportunity, they had better sense than to make it obvious to me; I finished by shrugging on my cooling jacket and strapping in, then pulled out the keyboard GM had thoughtfully provided on a dentist-chair arm and pulled up the file I’d been working on.

Launch interrupted that project. It wasn’t that hard to move under the leisurely gravity-and-a-half that took us up to orbit, but typing would have been so awkward that I’d’ve ended up deleting everything afterwards. Less than twenty minutes in freefall in the middle, and then we were braking towards a landing on the ferrocrete of the Boende city airport. Even a tiny dropship like a Leopard was bigger than that was really designed to handle, but the Star League engineers who’d laid the pavement had reinforced it enough to take the weight without damage, and ferrocrete’s temperature-resistance was enough to absorb the head from the landing thrusters and vectored main drive… for a little bit. Long enough.

Toshi had Baker Company - or rather, all seven effectives still left in it at this point - ready and waiting by the time we touched down, and we literally walked off the dropship and fell into traveling column, stepping carefully over the fence that surrounded the airport and out into the raw jungle that covered its back sides. What little sprawl Boende had all moved up the banks of the river, south of us.

We had been moving most of the afternoon and were almost to the laager point we’d picked outside of what we thought was the Night Heat’s operational area when the ambush hit. We were crossing the same river that eventually ended at Boende for about the fifth time, this time by a bridge rather than having to ford.

I knew the tankers would be glad of that; Sugar’s Manticores could just button up and roll across the bottom, since they were fusion-powered, but Quebec’s Goblins had to go through an entire fafftastic fording procedure every time they did it, which frustrated everybody. And getting Nan - both the Scorpions and the Long Toms and ammo trailers they were dragging - across was even more of a hassle. Each time we’d had to ford, there had been a ferry - which had spent the entire time it took everyone else to cross hauling the artillery pieces back and forth, back and forth.

It would’ve been better if we’d been able to just stay on one side, but with the way the river meandered through the jungle, that… wasn’t really practical.

Anyway. This time, there was a bridge. Toshi led the mechs across it and we were all standing around waiting while the first lance of Manticores rolled after us, at which point the charges in the bridge supports went off and dropped forty meters of span straight in the water, along with the two Manticores that had been on it. The two that had been following them skidded to a halt, the one in front coming to a final rest with the first couple meters of its bow over the edge.

Naturally, there was much swearing.

Equally naturally, that wasn’t the end of it. Long range missiles erupted from the trees along the shoreline, flickers of motion showing as camouflaged mechs came to their feet and fired on the cluster of tanks and trucks that made up the artillery element, rockets falling all around the thin-skinned ammo carriers like rain.

“Dealer, bug out, now!” Toshi snapped, swinging his Marauder around to acquire the nearest of the LRM platforms and opening up with both PPCs. “Quebec, cover them! Sugar, go hull down on the bank and prepare for fire support, and get off the bri-”

His orders cut off with brutal suddenness as a Hunchback lunged out of its own cover and opened up, its burst of autocannon fire landing across the vulnerable rear plates of his armor - and joined, moments later, by the blaze and flash of laser and PPC bolts from the same direction.

More mechs, two lances worth, stood up out of the river and started firing; the hammer of SRM warheads landing on my armor filled my ears as I tried to work out what the fuck.

Okay. Okay. We were under attack. Ambush, at least one company… I laid my crosshairs on a Stinger that was bounding out of cover, fired both lasers and a PPC. The PPC missed; both of the lasers tracked quick slashes across his torso armor, each getting maybe half of the intended energy on-target.

That was when I got a good look a the livery it was wearing.

Under the coat of mud, leaves, and branches, now shedding off of it like rain, was a black and scarlet badge of a slavering cartoon wolf’s head…

And behind the Stinger, a Warhammer shouldered out of the woods - solid black.
Mo-ther-fuck-er.

“All Bakers, fall back into the water,” I ordered, “Sugar, focus fire, Warhammer first-Fuck!”

I’d been obeying my own instructions, backpedaling towards the river with a fine disregard for the risk of tripping over something, and laid down my very best barrage in Kerensky’s direction.

I swear to fucking god, the woman managed to dodge particle beams in a seventy-ton battlemech. How the fuck? Her reputation was not exaggerated, apparently.

The Commando in the river sent another salvo my way, even while ten PPC bolts flashed across two-thirds of a kilometer of water and all but filled the air around Kerensky’s warhammer. The area was so saturated with electrical charge that you could see the beams bend crazily as the magnetic fields interacted. All the evasive maneuvers in the world were useless with that much pain flying around that randomly; she took three hits and made a hard swerve to the left, getting most of the way out from under the company-wide torrent of LRMs that followed the beams in.

I was backpedaling furiously as all of this happened, and the proximity warning barely got my attention in time to shift to one side and turn, swinging one of No. 2’s blocky forearms around to catch the Stinger behind me - in Night Heat colors, so they were here, too - across the top of its head. The impact probably wasn’t enough to destroy it, but from the way he went down, it had well and truly rattled his cage.

To my right, a Centurion blew up, a concussive fireball of propellant-orange and capacitor-silver staggering the Hunchback and every other mech nearby.

Another salvo from the Manticores cast the entire battlefield in stark black-and-white, two shots hitting Kerensky again and smashing armor free from the other side of her Warhammer’s torso, and another three all but annihilating the unwary Dragoon Wasp that had been cutting in front of her. My intention to follow up on that salvo failed as the criss-cross of dozens of mechs trying to fight in brutally tight quarters broke my line of sight.

Instead I took a split second to track the Rifleman that was emerging from the woods next to her her and broke my own rules by hitting the alpha strike button. The air defense mech twitched under the assault - I’d missed with my lasers but for a wonder both PPCs and the autocannon burst had all hit - but didn’t stagger or fall. I wouldn’t have expected him to; the Black Widow Company was famous for a reason. But it did delay his evasion long enough for the LRM flight that had been crossing the river to land, saturating him and his armor with explosions until the automatic safeties jettisoned the entire front-torso glacis before it could shatter into a wave of shrapnel even more dangerous than the missiles themselves.

My core temps were high enough that firing either PPC would have been unwise, but that didn’t stop me from raking laser tracks across the Rifleman’s body, one beam starting low and finishing high and the other zigzagging across center and right body and finishing on the arm. Neither shot would have been enough to more than warm up an intact armor section; lasers needed more time on target to start affecting those - but the structural framing and subsidiary equipment that lay under that armor was less enduring. Burning a hole straight in would still have been better, but that was a challenge at the best of times.

I didn’t expect much from the autocannon burst that I sent on its way downrange after the lasers had finished, but he zagged at just the right - or, from his perspective, wrong - moment and walked straight into all three shots, one of them finding the magazine serving his own cannons and brewing the entire machine up in another spectacular fireball.

Instants later, one of our remaining Marauders went down, its leg wrecked by the damned Hunchback. Even as its pilot struggled to haul himself back up to foot-and-stump, a barrage of fire from all directions started to pour in, everything from a Wasp’s medium laser to a storm of missile contrails from the ambushers still dug in along the shoreline as they turned to focus on the weakest member of the herd.

Kerensky added to the mess, pouring everything she could into a Centurion and somehow - my leading theory was malignant witchcraft - getting almost all of it into the center-torso plating and boring through to the gyroscope in one go.

No. 2 rocked as it stepped backwards into the soft mud of the river bottom and its battle-churned waters, wobbling to compensate for the suddenly steep bank and swearing as the uncertainty of the motion drew the attention of several of the Night Heat mechs. I picked out one, a Hermes II, and gave it my usual ‘sustainable’ salvo - a PPC, both lasers, and an AC burst. The long-range guns both missed, but I was able to hold the lasers on target as I took another step back into deeper water.

I risked a glance around, seeing how much of the company was left - and how close we were to being free. Four down, but all of us were into the water, and as I looked I could see Sargeant Ritter - easy to pick out because he was piloting his own Thunderbolt, Crusher, Inc., rather than one of our standard types - lock onto the Hunchback and give it his short-range bracket.

I looked back at the Hermes and its friends and took another step back, now into water almost up to my waist. I fired again, lasers and cannon and the PPC from the right arm rather than the left, this time having the lasers jiggle uselessly across its armor and managing to land smashing hits from the particle beam and cannon shells.

The Hunchback had turned his attention, and the monstrous firepower of his 165mm autocannon, towards the water, and lucky lucky me, I was the winning contestant. Malign luck or his skill put the burst right into the left-torso plating that protected my own AC magazine, and probably would have breached it outright if No 2 was still stock - but we’d moved some of the heavy protection on standard Marauder’s legs to shore up the weak torso plating, and it held. Barely.

If I took another hit there, I’d be in real trouble. “Okay, everybody,” I started to say as the last rearguard reached the depth of water I had in mind. “Go ahead and du-”

As though she’d heard my worried thought, Kerensky turned her PPCs onto me.

The event happened too fast for senses or memory to separate the timing; my cockpit flashed white-purple as particle beam radiance fought with protective polarizing layers, and sheer brutal agony lit off in every nerve of my body, flowing in through the sides of my skull and down my spine to flood out to the extremities.

I screamed, flinched, convulsed. The world vanished into a helpless impression of motion, confusion, and violence.

The pain filled the left side of my chest and arm, somehow, impossibly, growing worse. I staggered, fell.

The world went dark.

***

I came to with a splitting headache and the feeling of one of my feet soaking in water, and the smell of wet mud.

I opened my eyes, but it was what felt like several seconds and was probably ten times that before I could process the slow brown leak trickling into my cockpit from the bottom end of the crack that ran right across the left-hand window pane.

Water was leaking in. That was why my foot was wet; it had pooled in the bottom of the cockpit and my foot was dangling into it. I was on my side, half lying on the command couch’s armrest and half hanging from my straps. I could feel the discomfort stabbing into my side.

My head hurt.

Most of the cockpit displays were yellow, running on battery power. A couple more were red, warning of real trouble. The left torso and arm were black.

Gone.

Water was leaking in. That was bad, I knew. I struggled to remember why, glanced at the readouts. One of the red ones was cockpit integrity, and… I squinted to read the text. Humidity. Humidity was bad for…

Electronics.

My head hurt. The neural backflash from the ammo explosion was fading, slowly, but it still hurt like hell, made it hard to think, made trains of thought stutter and skip.

Focus, Ash. Water in the cockpit, rising in a slow leak, flooding…

Flooding. Once the water level reached the main control console, it’d short the inputs. No 2 would be dead until they could be dried out and checked, reset, by a tech.

How long? I didn’t know and couldn’t make an estimate, not with the pounding in my head and the way I was fading in and out.

I couldn’t just stand up.

I tried to remember why. What had I seen up there the last time-

An ambush.

Fuck! Where were my people? What about the unit? I tried to punch open a radio connection; bruised my finger poking it full strength into the console next to the button instead. Hit it second try.

Nothing on the frequency we’d been using.

I hadn’t hit the button I actually wanted; the console automatically cycled to the next tuning, seeking a strong return like a car radio. That wouldn’t do any good. That wouldn’t help.

Help what? Water was leaking in.

Right. Electronics, damaged. I needed to stand up, get out of the water. Or patch it?

I looked around. Clothes, drinking water… my fridge was flooded, I realized with a spurt of hysterical annoyance. Uh… Rations, medkit, survival kit… Nothing to patch a seal with. I made a mental note to try to remember to have those added to our equipment list.

“-erstand what you’re saying, but there’s no way on this world or any other that we’re gonna pull it off, Kerensky,” the radio said, in a man’s voice that I didn’t recognize. “They’ve still got at least nine Manties and all those Goblins, and more importantly, they’ve got that Long Tom battery set up. We poke our noses into their sight and the entire grid square turns into a shooting range. It doesn’t matter that we beat the half of their mechs that are left right up to their CLG. I lost an entire lance worth, including my Bellringer, and don’t try and pretend you didn’t take a battering even if you only lost two.”

A moment of silence, then he finished, resolutely: “I’m invoking my unfulfillable clause, and if you’re smart, you’ll do the same.”

The woman’s voice that answered him sounded like melted chocolate, if chocolate could get pissed off. “And what about the secondary objective? Will you walk away from that obligation, too?”

Dammit, Tasha K, why you have to be so hot?

“Duke Jason MacLaine is a treacherous, backstabbing asshole and my ‘obligations’ to him weigh very lightly on my mind, employer or not,” the first speaker snapped, then sighed. “But fine. If you want to sweep the river and make sure we got Blackwing herself, my boys will back you up… As long as you do the actual wading with your heavies. I’m not losing anybody else to this pisspot of a job.”

“Fine,” Kerensky bit off. “Command lance, with me. We’re going fishing.”

...I was going to die, wasn’t I?

I was really going to die. It was real.

My head hurt.

Water was leaking in.

I couldn’t stay.

I couldn’t go.

No way out.

I desperately wished that Sophitia was there, wanted to put my arms around her and curl against her strong body until we both fell asleep. I was desperately glad that she wasn’t trapped there with me, held at bay by something even she couldn’t fight.

No way out.

In retrospect, I could see the fuckups. Not bringing enough backup, not holding the aero forces overhead. Trying to focus on Kerensky rather than her more vulnerable backups.

I guess it didn’t matter.

No way out.

The other mistake, THE mistake, swallowed them all.

I hadn’t told anyone. Hadn’t left any records. They’d’ve been impossible to explain, ridiculous, insane claims… But now they were going to die with me. Helm. New Dallas. The Clans, and Comstar…

I’d fucked it all up. If only I could -

Could I?

I fumbled at the console, diving into settings…

Yes. Yes, there was an option to add data to the black box recorders. Make sure it survived the destruction of the mech.

I hit the toggle and started talking as fast as I could. My voice was slurred, almost drunken. My head still hurt. I couldn’t think of a better way to organize it than stream-of-consciousness, reeling madly from one topic and fragment of thought to another, trying to remember and record everything, every critical piece for the people who’d need it.

The signal-monitor I’d set to follow the intensity of the hunters’ sonar spiked. They’d found me.

“-aaand I’m out of time,” I interrupted myself. “Soph, I love you. Phil should have papers saying that everything’s yours, now. Take care of yourself, and of the rest, okay?”

I hit the toggle again, then swatted for the transmit function with one hand while the other whacked the big yellow EMERGENCY REACTOR RESTART button.

The computer made an attention tone. “Welcome back, my friends, to the show that never ends.”

That was…

My voice provided the right lyric without consulting the rest of my brain. “We’re so glad you could attend, come inside, come inside.”

There was a flush of heat - what it did to the smell in the cockpit was indescribable but tragically very memorable - and the lights brightened, most of the board going from yellow to green.

“Reactor online, sensors-” the computer was saying. I spoke over it as I got Marauder No. 2’s feet under it and surged up out of the water - though not much out, it was deep here.

“Dealer, Dealer, Joker Actual here calling final protective fire, location-” what were the grid coordinates? No fucking clue and I really doubted that I could read the numbers off right in the state I was in, “-western bridgehead, sensors…” I flailed at the console. Channel F came up. “Channel Fox.”

The mech that had almost stumbled over me was the Dragoon Crusader. I lifted No 2’s arm up out of the water and punched the blocky club-limb against its chest, then pulled the triggers. At that range, the biggest divergence in their targeting was the literal distance between lens and muzzle, and both were aimed squarely at the missile mech’s cockpit. The particle beam bloomed insanely at that range, not so much a beam as a short-lived vortex of ball lightning that left melt and char across head, torso, and arm alike, and the laser beam kept working on what was left to finally chew through with fatal results.

Firing a PPC at that range put more wear-and-tear on the weapon than ten thousand normal cycles; if I tried it more than three or four more times, I’d be running a real risk of failure.

“-systems online. Ammunition storage compromised. Portside-”

The Crusader dropped, boneless as a marionette. “Heeeere’s Johnny!” I caroled.

“-laser destroyed. Autocannon: Winchester. Armor breach: Port arm. Armor breach: Port Torso. Armor low: Starboard leg. Armor low: Starboard arm.”

I could see the cluster of Night Heat mechs on the shoreline, mixed in with the lighter Dragoon ones, and I turned towards them, rolling the throttle up - and then back as my screwed-up brain, the missing torso section, and the mud and water around my legs conspired to turn a run into a drunken, reeling lurch. Walking worked better.

“Who wants to play the game?” I asked the empty cockpit. “It’s time to play the game!”

Was I a Texas? Being a Texas sounded awesome. Best armor, forget the cheesefest McKenna. Not a Texan, though. Fuck those pretentious ignorant jackasses. Alaska largest state, Hawaii only real nation.

“I am the game, you don’t wanna play me!” One or two of the gathered mechs was reacting, lifting their arms and sending laser beams - the tracers were Marik purple - in my direction. I lifted my remaining arm again and singled out the fucking Commando to receive the next dose of my own fire. “I am control, no way you can shake me!”

Lying filibusters didn’t deserve to be remembered, and neither did their legal fictions.

More of them were moving, firing. I was too dizzy to realize they were missing. I fired again, this time at the Griffin that was trying to turn and withdraw. “NO ESCAPING! That is not approved by the committee!”

The first Long Tom shell landed, cratering the well-churned mud of the battlefield in a fountain of dirt clods. Another landed squarely on top of the Night Heat Locust and smashed it entirely. Two more fell in the river, another in the forest beyond. I didn’t see where the last one landed.

PPC fire added itself to my world, burning through the air in front of me from one side. I guessed at the angle and turned towards it - and there was Kerensky again.

“Hey, hey, Tasha K! How many kids did you kill today?!” I demanded, and fired at her. I missed, of course. I probably would have even if the world hadn’t picked that exact moment to swim and diverge, everything doubling as my eyes stopped tracking together for a second.

Something about the Warhammer seemed surprised, but I wouldn’t’ve have been able to figure out what even if I’d cared. I fired again; one good thing about being down to half my weapons was that I still had most of my heat dispersion and could use everything all day.

When Kerensky dropped both PPCs and the longer-ranged half of her in-close battery in my direction and missed with all of it, that I noticed, if only to go what-the-fuck at.

More artillery shells landed, but I was focused in on Kerensky. “Black Widow! Natasha, shouldn’t your name be Romanoff? No, wait, Romanova.  Fucking gendered Russian bullshit.” I fired back, and this time I managed to land a hit, my own PPC blasting a gouge out of one of her upper arms while the laser traced a line of steam along the surface of the river. “Widowmaker, Widowmaker, Personne n'échappe à mon regard!”

Her second salvo was less synchronized, missiles roaring in and missing long, then the lasers slashing by without more than a blip on the armor monitor, then the PPC - she’d left one out, probably cooling down - scorched by as I flinched.

“Your mother was a test tube and your father was a knife!” An artillery shell landed between us; I fired through the spray, artificial lightning boring a flash-boiled hole in an instant while I left the trigger pressed down until the laser finished recharging to burn at her hip. “And your tits aren’t even as good as Friday’s!”

There were worse universes to end up in. I’m pretty sure I didn’t want to share a universe with Lazarus fucking Long. Fuck time travel anyway no not like that you dirty old man in space.

Christ, 90s X-men, you really poisoned that well, didn’t you?

This time, she managed to hit me with one of the PPCs. Right torso armor went from green with yellow speckles to solid yellow with a red blot. “Your Great Father was a fucking coward!!” I told the uncaring universe and dead pickups, and fired back, advancing even as she swerved, torso-twisting to keep me targeted, and made for the shoreline at a run.

I fired after her, missing in the change of angles, and started to turn to follow.

Then a malignant God booted me in the side of the head and I fell again, swearing and screaming in pain. I just barely managed to catch the fall before my cockpit went under, a good thing given that the overpressure had blown in the cracked panel.

I was pretty sure I was bleeding in a couple of places as I struggled back to my feet. Artillery shells were landing in the forest, now, rather than along the shoreline. The one that I’d just eaten the fringe of had fallen short. The only enemy mech in sight was Kerensky’s Warhammer, disappearing into the treeline.

I snap-fired one last lightning bolt at her, and by some dumb luck managed to hit the same arm I’d damaged earlier, blowing it the rest of the way off - and then she was gone.

I stood there and stared mindlessly until the artillery fell silent, too.

I was alive? How the fuck?

***

In the end, aside from the fact that eight people were dead, it seemed like nothing had really changed.

We were still holding onto the main continent, there was still a battlemech company under contract to House Marik ‘occupying’ the least significant of the others, and there was still an uneasy feeling to interactions with the Duke, our own employer’s representative.

The proverbial devil was in the details, though.

The Night Heat were a Regular rated unit, competent but in no way outstanding. Kerensky’s Independent Company of the Wolf Dragoons was a very different beast. They were already famous as hard-fighting elites, the roughest and toughest shock troops the Dragoons had. Their being here said very different things about Marik’s intentions for and on Fianna.

Ominous ones, combined with the fact that their Marik-paid contract was going through the same Duke I reported to. Next to that, even the fact that he’d added a rider to kill me personally was fairly minor news.

Obviously, I’d used up my last one-time-pad to send a copy of my cockpit recordings of the conversation between Kerensky and her opposite number. The file size and priority routing had been pricy, but under the circumstances I could only count it as money well spent.

I, and the rest of our pilots who’d been injured in that kerfluffle, were all goofing off under the gimlet eye of the formidable Doctor Enrico Tiber. He was one of the people we’d recruited back on Alpheratz - former head of Neurosurgery at Marisa Avellar Memorial Hospital, not the largest but the best regarded of the four hospitals serving the capital and largest city of the Outworlds’ capital. If he’d had more tact or a better beside manner, he’d probably have even kept the job, rather than finding himself displaced by a wealthier, better connected relative of the selfsame Avellars.

He’d even been pissed enough to look at completely off the wall options like, oh, running the medical department of a mercenary regiment. Definitely good luck for me, though I could have done with at least some information about what the ammo explosion feedback had done to my head.

But nope, not a bit of it. Just walk in, read the charts, maybe tell me to eat this or drink that or avoid the other, walk out. Definitely an example of expertise winning license.

Anyway, while I was more or less on bed rest, he’d said there was nothing wrong with my eyes or judgement, which meant that there was no escaping from the dreaded specter of paperwork. I had one of the lap desks the infirmary kept around for eating installed and covered in paper and dataslates - and the attachment that had latched herself onto my hand while I was unconscious sleeping off her worry in the other bed - when a knock at the door of my cel- er, room disgorged a rail-skinny basketball player in early middle age and a different camo jumpsuit from the one that had become the unit’s bulk-ordered default.

The unit patch was a silver crescent moon with three four-pointed stars, surrounded by black flames.

“Hello, Colonel,” he said quietly, in a voice that I had last heard arguing with Natasha Kerensky.

“Hello, Colonel,” I replied, and waved at one of the visitor’s chairs. “Have a seat.”

He limped over and did, his knees folding almost double to tuck his long legs and feet entirely under the seat. “I wanted… Three things, really. First, to thank you for the honors for Max and Yona,” he said quietly.

I’d arranged for the dead of both sides to be interred with all ceremony in one of Boende’s cemeteries. “If we can’t be gracious to the dead, who can we?” I asked, and sighed. “What a damned stupid mess.”

He scrubbed a hand through thinning hair with a hint of salt. “Heck of a way to make a living,” he agreed, then girded his figurative loins and met my eyes. “I also wanted to talk to you about ransoming Bellringer, my Hunchback, back.”

The cannon-bearing medium had taken nearly as ferocious a battering as it had dished out. I shook my head. “My crews have been looking at it, but they’re not optimistic. Probably the Hermes will fight again, but the others are scrap.”

He looked like he’d just heard of a death in the family, which if the Hunchback was ancestral wouldn’t be far off. “I would be willing to let it go, on terms, if you thought your techs were enough better than mine,” I added.

“What’s the price?” he asked, bracing himself.

“Your contract records,” I answered. “Paymaster, liason, the orders they gave, everything you can document about them and formal testimony of the rest.”

He started, then stared at me for a moment. “...You were listening in before you powered up,” he concluded.

“Not for that long,” I admitted, “but long enough.”

He sighed. “I’ll put them together,” he promised. “The real break was your doing, not mine, so the rest Comstar can just lump.”

I nodded. “We’ll have your Bellringer ready. You’ve got a recovery vehicle? Send it by Boende with the documentation and we’ll load it up. And I can’t do anything about Comstar, but I expect to be able to put in at least a small positive word with Steiner.”

He clearly didn’t expect that to go very far, but he nodded. “I’d appreciate it,” he said. “Galatea isn’t far, at least, even if getting a lift will be… a pain.”

A part of me wanted to wish him luck, but Toshi Hannah and another three dead kept my tongue between my teeth.

After a moment, he looked at me again. “The last thing… How in Blake’s name did you pull off that targeting spoof? It was like something out of a ghost story.”

I blinked at him. “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said, with absolute sincerity.

“...You hacked straight into our com lines and started raving like a madwoman and-” He cut off and leaned forward, looking concerned. “What’s wrong?”

“You heard that?!” I demanded; I could feel all the blood draining out of my face.

He blinked at me, then courteously refrained from laughing out loud no matter how obvious it was that he wanted to. “You hit the general broadcast,” he concluded.

I grumbled, then shook it off. “Yeah, OK, I screwed up the comms,” I said. “What was that about targeting?”

“The damndest thing I’ve ever seen,” he said. “We couldn’t lock on to you. Just… slid off, like there was nothing there as far as the computers were concerned. Like you were some kind of ghost. Even Kerensky was just shooting over dead sights.”

“...Well,” I said automatically, “I guess that explains why she didn’t slaughter me.” Why did that sound familiar, though?

“Mallory’s World,” mumbled a sleep-fuzzed voice, and Sophitia sat up, shrugging the sheet that the nurses had tucked her under, uniform and ruby-red hair and all, down into her lap. “Kell and… Yorigana Kurita?”

“Yorinaga,” I corrected automatically now that she’d prompted my memory.

Our guest shook his head and unfolded from his seat. “I guess that that’s the best answer I’m going to get,” he said, and extended his hand. “I hope next time we meet, the circumstances are better.”

I reached up and accepted the handshake. Each of his fingers could probably have wrapped all the way around my wrist without stopping. “That, I’ll drink to,” I said.

And out he went.

Sophitia got up and gave me a kiss just as warm as the one I’d woken up to. “Don’t scare me like that,” she said, which was also a repetition.

“I’ll try not to,” I said. Then, “And… there’s some things I wanted to talk to you about. Kind of churned to the surface by-”

There was another knock at the door. We looked at each other and started giggling.

“Come in!” I called, and was surprised to see that it wasn’t just one person, but Lu Clair, Io Sasagawa, Dimitri Raven, Ph.D. (Fusion dynamics), and Risha Shao, the same mechtech who, back during the boarding actions that had been our first taste of battle back in the Outworlds Alliance, had hotwired a battlemech machine gun to fire off of a spot-welded pintle using nothing but a pair of wires and her noteputer.

The other techs called her ‘Trigger’.

All of them looked very serious. “What’s wrong?” I asked.

“I was testing the black box on Number Two,” Trigger said. “And I found… well.”

She lifted the infamous noteputer and hit a button. I heard my own recorded voice start to play.

“I don’t have much time. Water’s leaking in and they’re hunting me and I should’ve written this someplace else but how the fuck do I explain ‘oh I had fucking visions’ because that makes sense. Forget it. Important part. I’ve checked some of this, most of this. Helm. Famous story, Star League military depot goes missing, Psycho McKurita glasses the place because he can’t steal everything, right? So what you need to do is-”

The click of the pause button was loud in the silent hospital room.

I sighed. “You’d better go get some chairs,” I said, “because this is going to be a long story."

...YOU FOOL IT’S ONLY MOONLIGHT...

[ECSNorway]

And the Fit is introduced to the Shan. Congratulations, you have the hottest (in more ways than one) mech-jock in the Inner Sphere for a personal rival.

I so very much want to see Tasha's debrief with Jamie now....

[Norgarth]

here's an omake from Acyl about Natasha's (and Wolfnet's) reaction
https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/posts/10990601/

[Valles]

This chapter brought to you no thanks to Deserts of Kharak and Final Fantasy XIV.
 

---

 
AND IF YOU TRY TO TAKE IT HOME...
 

Tell The World That We Tried
A Battletech Fanfiction, inspired by Fitzgerald’s CYOA at https://imgur.com/gallery/M41mI
By Valles

 
I didn’t pay any attention to my own voice coming out of the speakers; I knew more or less what I’d said - plus or minus the vagaries of phrasing and the fact that I’d been under enough neuroshock to count as concussed. Helm, New Dallas, a detour into the FedCom alliance, and on and on to other threats and opportunities in the wildest verbal ride I’d had in a while, much less said.
 
I was watching my people.
 
Dimitri Raven had heard the entire thing before, since he’d been there when his subordinate had found what I expected to be my last words; he was listening intently, taking notes without looking at the sheet of paper under his hand. I was pretty sure that he’d already decided that my insanity was worth taking seriously. By background, he was from the other side of the border in this very area - he’d lost his established position at a university on Stewart for some reason that I’d never gotten clear on, and spent the thirty years from 2986 to now knocking about as a fusion engine specialist. Younger-Me’s Fusion Reaction Dynamics 201 course at the University of Alpheratz had used a book he’d written before his exile as its textbook. In a rational universe, he’d have stayed as an academic rather than ending up running tech support for a mercenary outfit.
 
Trigger Shao - her real name was Risha, but nobody called her that -  had just been an Loggermech technician before she signed on with us, but she’d seen much more of the elephant than anybody in a support job ever should. The selfsame technician who’d found the file, she was squirming and jittering with eagerness, obviously taken by the potential vistas my ‘last speech’ had opened up.
 
Io Sasagawa, the oldest and most experienced combat commander we had, wasn’t rolling her eyes, but it was very clear that she thought she was being made the victim of a prank. That could be bad; whatever happened we’d need aerospace cover, and losing her would put a big hole in our squadrons.
 
Lira Suzuki, our tank commander, was… staring at me, looking pissed off. Oh-kaaay. Unlike Sasagawa, I did have other immediate options for her role - several of her company commanders were old merc hands, and at least one had run a tank battalion before - but I’d miss her. She, Rosenkreutz, and the recently late Toshi Hannah had been the very first three people from the unit I’d met.
 
Finally, sitting next to me with her hands cupped around one of mine, and looking almost like she was about to cry, the retired Champion of Solaris, Sophitia Braun. She was tall, and athletic, and utterly gorgeous from ruby-crowned head to ticklish toes.
 
I might have been in love. Possibly.
 
When the recording ended, Suzuki was the first to speak. “When, if ever, were you planning to tell us about this?”
 
“Thirty-twenty-three,” I said, which made her and the others blink. “All else equal, I am, or would be, expecting the FedSuns and Lyrans to sign a full treaty of alliance sometime in twenty-two, but I don’t know the exact date. That’d also give me more time to do research and convince myself I’m not crazy, which I admit I’ve wondered.”
 
Doctor Raven hmmed thoughtfully, tugging at the white hair that fluffed, Einstein-like, around his bald spot. “You said you’d checked Helm, in the recording?” he said.
 
“As far as I could remotely,” I said. “Helm, New Dallas, Axylus - all of those exist and match what I… Call it ‘remember’ of them. On Galatea I was able to pick up an Atlas of the Star League that had fairly high-detail maps of all member worlds. Depressing reading, but I was able to compare it to a modern map and the Vermillion River does exactly the act it should if I’m right.”
 
“The security chip is… plausible,” Doctor Raven said. “I’m not a civil engineer or geologist, but the cave system sounds like it could be, too.” He thought for a couple seconds, then added, “and, I’m fairly sure, you’re quite sane. I’ve taught enough lunatics to know, after all.”
 
Sasagawa let out all the breath and dudgeon she’d been holding onto in a rush. “You’re really not joking,” she said.
 
“I’m really not joking,” I said.
 
“She’s not crazy, either,” Sophitia said.
 
“Not just crazy,” I said before I could think better of it.
 
She put one finger to my lips. “Hush,” she said, and looked at Sasagawa. “Remember when they found the Star League bunker a couple of weeks ago?” she asked. “Ash knew what it was the instant she got a call about it.”
 
“...Huh, that would count, wouldn’t it?” I mused.
 
“Did you forget?” Suzuki asked, sounding horrified.
 
“Look,” I said defensively, “it’s been a really fucking shitty week, all right?”
 
“...Merde.” Sasagawa closed her eyes for a couple of seconds, then opened them. “All right. Pops-”
 
Doctor Raven straightened.
 
“-Can you vouch for your tech?”
 
He frowned at her with the full weight of his great-grandparently authority. “What do you mean, ‘vouch for’?” he asked, while Trigger looked offended.
 
“Guarantee that she’s not working as a spy or otherwise agent of one of a national government or other outside group,” was the flat reply.
 
He snorted. “She’s been here longer than I have,” he said, “but I’ve seen no sign of it and I’d be surprised.”
 
“Good,” she said, and let out a slow sigh. “That means I’m the only listener who knows at this point.”
 
Uh, what? “Uh, what?”
 
Sasagawa read the expressions everyone else in the room was wearing. “I was about ready to retire for real, so Outworlds Alliance Intelligence asked me to sign on with you and… Make sure that you stayed friendly to the Alliance.”
 
She sighed. “Unfortunately, certain political authorities had other plans and wouldn’t listen to the professionals.”
 
I nodded, my mouth running unmonitored while most of my attention span flailed like a panicked muppet. “Hence us getting run out of town. But now - if Helm pans out, or New Dallas - we’re talking literal fate-of-civilization shit.”
 
Sasagawa nodded, and when she looked up from the table in front of her to meet my eyes, her expression was agonized. “And if I take it home…”
 
“If we’re lucky, Davion invades,” I said flatly, both points of view snapping back together in my head as her torment acted like a bucket of cold water dumped over my figurative head. “Takes the core to New Avalon publicly and with fanfare, and everyone except him forgets where it came from. Twenty years down the line, he throws the Alliance some bones out of a sense of honor.
 
“More likely, Davion and Kurita run into each other on Alpheratz and burn the place to the ground fighting while Comstar sneaks in, destroys the core, and murders hope. Again.
 
“Bad luck, Kurita invades and enslaves the entire Alliance as collateral damage to taking the core to Luthien, where Comstar destroys it and makes the entire business pointless.
 
“Worst-case, Comstar glasses Alpheratz to be sure they killed the core.”
 
“Um,” Trigger burst out, “why are we assuming that ComStar - an organization created to preserve civilization - is going to want to suppress a Star League core at all?”
 
“Leaving aside visions,” I said, “because their cult is heavy on the notion that they’re chosen to be the one true resurrectors of civilization, that every other power is corrupt, and so on and so on. Also, the more technology that only they have access to, the more powerful they are. Especially if the core has HPG tech in it. Their endgame is Terra, untouched, having her will with three thousand helpless worlds that can barely remember how to make steam engines.”
 
Now at least half the table was looking at me like I was crazy.
 
There was silence for a second.
 
“Actually, that explains a lot,” Doctor Raven mused. “There’s… something of an open secret in academia that publishing too successfully can be more literally lethal than not publishing at all. Rumors, stories, friends of friends - mostly. I always counted myself lucky just to be blacklisted. The leading theory was that all of the Successor States were doing it… but the pattern was more consistent than would fit with it being different agencies, like it was one actor.
 
“Comstar would fit the scope of organization that would be needed.”
 
“...So, Steiner, then,” Sasagawa said.
 
“I don’t get it,” Trigger said, “Why jump straight to the Lyrans?”
 
“Who else?” I asked. “Marik’s security is run by SAFE - they can’t protect it. The Combine would turn it into Boot On Face Forever. Confederation would be marginal as a platform for curing Lostech - and make no mistake that that’s what we’re talking about here - and is run by a lunatic. Concordiat, ditto. Magistracy, only a little bigger than the Alliance. Comstar, hard no. That leaves the Lyrans or the FedRats… And after the whole Captain Gars fiasco…”
 
“I thought you said there wouldn’t be trouble with that,” Sophitia said, poking me in the cheek.
 
I tilted my head away. “I did. I still think that. Turning an incognito muckety-muck back over to his bodyguards was the right thing to do, even with him having got literally sat on in the process. He knows that and so do all his people. But it’d be awkward enough to make Steiner a better choice. Particularly the Steiner we’ve actually got.”
 
“I… wait, wait, stop, go back,” Suzuki burst out, and waved first at me and then at Sasagawa. “You’ve been lying to us and she’s a traitor and you were supposed to be better than this! You’re my Lady, but…”
 
For a couple of seconds, I could only stare at her, then I sighed. “Think of it in terms of opsec,” I said. “And add in the fact that I’m still not sure I’m not crazy. And I’ll panic about the Major later, when I’m alone. I was always sure we’d have spies. Right now I’m just relieved that we’re so far short of the worst-case.”
 
Sasagawa snorted.
 
“...Did you think that you couldn’t trust me?” Suzuki asked, looking down at her lap in a way that made me want to hug her and promise it would all be all right.
 
“I thought I could trust you, yes,” I said gently. “But the stakes were too high for me to count on ‘thought’, y’know?”
 
“She didn’t tell me, either,” Sophitia pointed out, then smiled reassuringly when I gave her a worried look.
 
“So, what. We just forget all this for another six years?” Suzuki asked bitterly.
 
“No,” I said. “My running my idiot mouth at Kerensky means we can’t do that. The Dragoons still have at least one report to make to their real masters before they’re cut off entirely, and what I said then is more than enough to blow them. Either the Friday reference or the crack about Alexander Kerensky would have been enough to worry them; both together will mean they know I know rather than just suspecting.”
 
I’d mentioned the Clans in that recording. All of them knew what that meant.
 
“...I remember how, on Far Traders, Pilot McAllis turned out to be an Outworlds Intelligence plant,” Trigger said slowly, naming a long-running Alpheratzi soap opera set aboard a deep periphery trade jumpship. “Is that an actual thing?”
 
“Usually not with outright agents,” Sasagawa said. “More often, OAI will simply pay the ship a retainer to… keep their eyes open.”
 
The tech was looking more enthusiastic, now, and the rest of us, me included, were giving her considering looks. “Keep going,” Sophitia encouraged.
 
“You said the… Clans, were about a thousand light years away, too. But far traders go out further than that, right?”
 
“There’s supposedly a trickle of trade and contact even today, yeah,” I agreed.
 
“...Wait,” Sasagawa said in tones of dawning realization.
 
“So, if we claim somehow that we got the knowledge from Outworlds Intelligence…” Trigger went on.
 
“Then the Dragoons don’t look any closer at us,” I finished.
 
“How do we tell them that without being too obvious about it?” Suzuki asked, still grumpy.
 
“We do make it obvious,” Trigger said.
 
“Sense is something you’re currently not making,” Suzuki said.
 
“They know that we know. It’ll make sense to them that we’re trying to not get a couple of regiments dropped in to wipe us out, or whatever, right?” Trigger said. “‘We heard from Outworlds Intelligence who heard via far traders’ won’t be anything they can check, but it’ll make sense to them.”
 
Sasagawa smiled. “...You’ve given me an idea on how to keep them too busy to worry about us.”
 

***

 
“By all accounts the jambalaya here is excellent,” I said, trying to seem less nervous than I was as the tall woman meeting me in the little Boende restaurant settled into the other chair in the little side room both of our security detachments had cleared side-by-side. “I was thinking of trying it myself.”
 
“Cut the bullshit,” Natasha Kerensky said, and sat down.
 
It was interesting to watch that process; it was obvious that her mood made her want to just flop dramatically… But she never took her eyes off of me, or let herself go off balance.
 
I couldn’t have told you exactly why, but I got the impression she was afraid.
 
I let myself smile a little wider. I didn’t have any illusions that her being frightened of me made me safer - she was very definitely the kind of person whose instinctive response to fear was to attack - but it made me feel better about my own worries. “Outworlds Alliance Intelligence has more respect for SAFE than your people do.”
 
That got a momentary flash of confusion, chained to shock, chained to chagrin. As the Inner Sphere’s intelligence services went, the Free Worlds League’s SAFE - not an acronym, they just spelled their name in BOMBASTIC ALL CAPS - were barely even the also-rans. Anybody with any real talent in intel work in the FWL eventually ended up doing internal security amidst the bucket of crabs rather than facing their talents outwards.
 
Getting coup’d by them was grounds for shame and humiliation, and Kerensky clearly wasn’t above feeling some sympathetic embarrassment on behalf of Wolfnet. “Fine,” she said eventually. “What are you planning to do about it?”
 
“Nothing,” I said. “That’s all over my pay grade, and I’ll be having enough flak aimed my way for going on a neuroshocked word-vomit in the first place.”
 
She snorted. “Fine,” she said again. “What else do you know?”
 
“What’s that information worth to you?” I asked.
 
“Your life,” she said.
 
“Be serious,” I chided.
 
“I’m sure you have something in mind. Spit it out.”
 
I hmm’d for a second. “One of the more interesting tidbits mentioned was ‘omnitechnology’.”
 
“You savar- RRRGH!” Kerensky started to say, bounding up out of her seat and starting to reach for me. “You cannot be serious!”
 
“More significant than we thought, then,” I mused out loud, calculating and emptying my mind to react when she came close enough.
 
She read the stillness and pulled back. A pity; breaking her neck would have made it hard to sleep, but solved many problems.
 
“...You’re still fishing,” she said.
 
“Just like you are,” I replied. “But seriously. Deliberately releasing information means I need to have something to show my superiors.”
 
She settled back into her seat, thinking hard for a moment. “I’ll need to talk to Colonel Wolf,” she said. “But… There should be SLDF caches in or near Outworlds space.”
 
“Worth it, in principle,” I said. “Assuming that none of them have been found and raided in the meantime.”
 
A quick grimace looked odd on her lovely, predatory face. “We’ll see,” she repeated, then paused as the inobtrusive muzak from the room’s hidden speaker system (no audio pickups, we’d checked) cut off with a blaring warning tone.
 
“Attention, attention,” the recording said. “A state of emergency is now in effect in Saint Cabrini and surrounding areas, because of: civil unrest.”
 
It started to repeat in French, but I stood up and stopped paying attention. “Obviously, I have a flight to catch,” I told Kerensky. “By all means, mail your boss, see if he likes that angle or has something else in mind. I’d love a way out of this crunch I’m in right now. We can set up a meet whenever you hear back.”
 
“Sure,” she said, sounding too distracted to be as sarcastic as she’d intended. “I will let you know.”
 
Your contractions are slipping, Tasha, I thought.
 
I headed out of the restaurant, collecting all of my bodyguards but the one who stayed put to settle with the management, and pulled out my comlink.
 
Whatever was happening in Saint Cabrini, the way she’d reacted told me she expected it to have something to do with her - which meant that somewhere in the muck, I could expect to find Jason MacLaine.
 

***

 
It turned out that the trouble started with a very clever reporter, who managed to piece together what the plan had been… and then scoop it right onto the nightly news.
 
The entire story was there, starting seemingly irrelevantly with the kerfluffle about the appointment of my sort-of-ally Wilhemina Codrescue as the head of Saint Cabrini’s police force. There’d been three candidates; one a very conventional bland middle-management type, who the Mayor and city government liked, another whose main qualification was doing whatever MacLaine told him to do, and Codrescue herself, a career police hardass from the poorest and most brutally violent of the massive city’s plentiful rough neighborhoods.
 
The Duke had pushed his candidate so openly, and so tactlessly, that the Mayor and Municipal Council had been moved to favor the option he liked least - and he’d publicly called Codrescue ‘gutter scum’ on at least one occasion before then.
 
As far as that went, it was all public knowledge. But the reporter had found copies of the secret communications where he reached out to the Free Worlds League and offered to defect… with all of Fianna in tow… as long as he had full autonomy to deal with his proles.
 
In as many words.
 
Whether sincerely or more likely just looking to stir trouble in the Commonwealth’s house, Marik had agreed. More letters laid out the plan - to bring in mercenaries associated with, publicly linked to, House Steiner… and then provoke them into some kind of action that would turn public opinion sufficiently against Tharkad for the planet as a whole to accept the change of allegiance. The astroturfing I’d noticed months before had been preparing the way for it, and the assassination MacLaine had ordered had come after he concluded that I was too calm and cautious to be led into the kind of actions he needed.
 
Once ‘Tharkad’s Dogs’ had ‘gone wild’, the Duke would ‘plea’ for help in ‘restoring order’... And the Black Widows would sweep in and smash them in Marik’s name, leading to a ‘grateful’ switch of allegiance…
 
At which point MacLaine would be free to start cracking down on all the myriad commoners who’d been so tasteless as to not worship and grovel before his will, but it’d be moot, because I’d be dead.
 
That was the plan. Instead, thanks to it all coming out, the people of Fianna were ripshit pissed at the fact that their lives had been the coin of their Duke’s treacherous game. The crowds weren’t yet actually rioting in the streets, but there were many signs and much shouting already, and a few burning effigies. A high priority HPG relay from Tharkad showed Fianna’s representative on the Commonwealth’s Estates General forgetting himself and swearing in shock, and there were ‘unsubstantiated reports’ of a Command Circuit being assembled.
 
Civilian economics dictated that space travel was divided between FTL JumpShips and the slower-than-light DropShips that they carried on external docking collars. ‘Combat jumpships’ - WarShips - had been a hybrid between the two, combining a dropship’s acceleration and armament and a jumpship’s, well, jump drive.
 
The thing was, a dropship was under no physical obligation to stay with the same jumpship; they could easily hitch a ride on whichever jumper was headed their way. Using the faster-still Hyperpulse Generator communication network that Comstar had salvaged from the wreck of the Star League, it was possible to assemble a pony express relay of jumpships, waiting for a particular dropship to arrive and be passed on, like a rider changing horses or a baton being passed. The fact that usually only governments had the power to compel such a thing - to command it - had given the practice the name of ‘Command Circuit’.
 
They weren’t common. Committing a dozen of the three-thousand or so jumpships still in existence to wait around like that was expensive on more levels than just the monetary. But with things blowing up, I had every expectation that the personal representative House Steiner had to have sent in response to my earlier reports was being rushed the rest of the way, delayed only by the need to go through docking and undocking in each system.
 
So, that was the good news. It was pretty certain that the cavalry was already riding to the rescue.
 
The bad news was that until that House Steiner rep could arrive and preempt Duke MacLaine’s orders, any deviation on our part would still be a full contract break. If His Grace The Asshole decided to make big trouble, I’d have a pretty fine line to walk.
 
As though summoned by the malignant will of Murphy himself, the full console on my desk bleeped and spat out a printed form - orders, with full recognition codes, to deploy my battlemechs and clear Le Rue Grand Ouest, the riverside street that fronted most of Saint Cabrini’s most expensive and respected cultural real estate, of all ‘rioters and subversives’ by any and all means necessary.
 
I picked up my phone and called down to the mechbays to let them know to get Crusher, Inc, Deus Volt, Alley Cat, Buzz Bomb, and Gnat of the Obnoxious woken up and ready to roll with tear gas loads - and after a split second’s waffling, to add my own Marauder No. 2 to the list. Thunderbolt 5S, Crusader 3R, Panther 9R, and both of our Wasps - aside from the Battlemasters, which were by now permanently assigned to the gas bunker and so out of reach, they were the only mechs we had with SRM launchers to deploy standard tear gas rounds.
 
And Setsuka Carter’s Atlas, but, as cute and pleasant as she was in ordinary life, if she hadn’t had mercenary work to direct and regulate her idea of ‘fun’, I suspected she’d have ended up a serial killer. I really did not want her in a position where the only restraint against firing into a crowd of thousands was her good judgement. She’d try, but the odds of her guessing right were all wrong for the stakes.
 
After that, an intercom announcement let everybody else know to go to alert status in case things broke loose, and sent the combat personnel to their mounts.
 
Against a real opponent, Number Two would not have been combat ready. Rebuilding the mech’s left torso and reattaching the blown-off arm was a procedure that would take a couple of months, and it had only been a week or two - but bolting an armor frame over the gaping wound could and had been done, since Battlemech compartmentalization meant that the rebuilding didn’t need to be done in situ. But the machine could still move as well as ever, and I owed it to the people we were… probably going to kill… to be there and bear witness to what was being done under my authority.
 
God, future of the eighties, go fuck yourself. I couldn’t wait to get to Helm and New Dallas, and hopefully retire, or at least go legit.
 
Anyway. The six of us on riot duty - quote, unquote - left the base behind and splashed into the shallows of the river rather than trying to make our way through the streets. Once we were out of reach of most things underfoot I used my com systems to make an urgent call.
 
“Codrescue. Go,” was the answer on the line.
 
“Blackwing here,” I said into my neurohelmet’s mike. “Has MacLaine warned you about his latest brainstorm?”
 
“Merde. No. What is it?”
 
I’d kept the printout with me; I read it out, then added, “Please tell me you have a way to keep this from being a massacre.”
 
There was a muted-phone-line silence on the other end for several seconds, before she came back. “No, nothing,” she said. “No water cannons, no irritants, no sonics. I can call up my off-duty people to try to clear the crowd that way, but that won’t meet the time limit. Blackwing, you can’t do this.”
 
She wasn’t speaking in a legal or practical sense and we both knew it.
 
“If I don’t, he’ll be able to screw all my people, and fucking Comstar will back him to the hilt. I’ve checked,” I said.
 
“Blackwing, there are tens of thousands of people there. If you fire into the crowd…”
 
“Panic will kill more people than the guns will,” I finished. “Look, I’ve brought my SRM mechs and we’ve got tear gas loaded. Literally the only idea I’ve got is to order people home and try a warning shot or two first, and that won’t be enough.”
 
“A cheap ‘mech loudspeaker won’t make you heard over that crowd in the first place. You’ll need a real public address system, and the only vertol-mounted one I have is downchecked because my fucking budget wasn’t enough to keep it up.”
 
“...Hang on a sec…” That didn’t sound right. A mental cue flippd up a display of the relevant page of the MAD-3R’s original manual, and, yeah. “I think that must be a Lostech thing,” I said. “‘Cause Number Two is a first run Marauder 3R, Second War vintage, and we only pulled her out of the original production wrapping last year. Max decibel rating on the external speakers, a hundred and forty.”
 
There was a sound of smacking flesh, clearly audible through the line even over the sloshing as we waded through the shoals between Camp Robichaux and the main river - a fist landing in the opposite palm, I’d bet. “Then I do have an answer for you. Let me get my people to dig up a sonic deterrence pattern. Can you generate infrasonics or ultrasonics?”
 
I checked. “Yes, but not by much for either.”
 
“We won’t need much. Stay on this line.”
 
“Will do. I’ll have mine send out the rest of our Marauders - and check the maxes on our other mechs.”
 
Technically, waiting for the additional units to come up was a delay that I would have to defend before the inevitable ‘I’m going to screw you just because I can’ contract court, but it was one I was pretty sure I could win - and anyway, it was an excuse to put off… that.
 
In the end, we had twenty three battlemechs lined up; eighteen almost even with the side of the grand avenue, separated from each other by a few hundred feet each, and five more - the five I’d originally intended to bring out - in deeper water behind. The Public Address systems build into the dozen or so Centurions couldn’t go quite as loud as the larger Marauders’, but the frequency range was actually larger.
 
Despite her complaining, Codrescue did have equipment on her TOE for doing what we were about to kludge up properly; we were getting our instructions from the specialists she’d had frantically trying to fix it, and they’d written the specs that our mechs’ battle computers had turned into a (potential) synchronized sonic assault.
 
“All right, everybody,” I said into my neurohelmet’s pickup, the letters PA glowing from my console. I hadn’t raised my voice, but I could hear it echo back through the almost-noiseproof mass of my cockpit, blurred by the differing travel time from the mechs to either side of me as their speakers repeated my words in lightspeed unison. The crowd flinched, practically every individual figure cringing under the impact of loudness, and the front edges receded from the railings that seperated road from steep narrow riverbank. “This is all a bit silly, don’t you think?”
 
I flipped into NEUROASSIST mode and took direct control of Marauder No. 2’s remaining arm for a moment, gesturing broadly up and down the great processional way. “Angry as you are, and angry as you’ve got a right to be, taking it out here won’t do any practical good. The man you want is hiding in his palace behind all his guards, he’s not even in Saint Cabrini. He knows, and you know, and I know that there’s a reckoning already on its way from Tharkad - and if we want something that matters to happen before then, it’s not going to be from a mob or a riot, it’s going to be your planetary legislature remembering they’ve got at least one collective pair and having him arrested.
 
“Being here-” another wave. “-is a waste of time. Go home. Write a letter to your representative, call their office. Let them know that you, their constituents, expect them to show a bit of backbone and a sense of justice. Have dinner with your family, and wait to see what happens - the wheels of justice grind more slowly than any of us would like, but they grind exceedingly fine, and they never stop to rest.
 
“Nothing decisive is going to happen today… And if, when it does happen, the guilty go free, you can decide what to do then, with a plan and careful thinking, not just a rush of emotion.
 
“Go home,” I repeated. “You’re blocking traffic, and emergency services can’t get through. Go home.”
 
The crowd hesitated, and I saw streams of people start feeding into the side streets and two subway stations when I zoomed in on them.
 
I turned my mike off and sighed in relief. We could wait until the crowd stopped thinning - if it did - and turn the sonics on then, but it looked like the worst was over.
 

***

 
“We have a problem,” were Codrescue’s first words to me when I picked up the phone.
 
I looked longingly at Sophitia and the candlelit dinner we’d been about to share. “Of course we do,” I sighed. “What is it?”
 
“We made arrests after the ‘demonstration’. Standard procedure, round up the most energetic troublemakers and give them a couple days in the drunk tank to cool down. We took so many we had to pass overflow to the long-term prison system… I just got word that all of them have already been run through ‘fair and legal trials’-” she sneered the words in a tone I was very happy wasn’t directed at me. “-and are scheduled for execution.”
 
“Jesus,” I said. “The entire city’ll explode.”
 
“It’s already started. I got a call on my private line from somebody claiming to be a representative of the Fianna Revolutionary Army, asking me to keep my people out of the way while he and his moved on Skellig Palace.”
 
“A tragedy of the worst kind,” I said, watching Sophitia put out the candles. “But I won’t have that luxury.”
 
“No. He’ll order you to save his worthless ass. My caller said his people had been supplied by Marik - including weapons.”
 
“I know I’m not in a safe line of work,” I said. “But thanks for the warning. I’ll get us moving, ready outside the city.”
 
“...Good luck, Blackwing.”
 
“You, too, Codrescue.”
 
My mood was grim enough that the sight of Sophitia changing into her piloting gear wasn’t even a proper distraction. “Bad news?” she asked me once I’d hung up.
 
“His Grace the Traitor is about to execute a bunch of the demonstrators from the day before yesterday,” I answered, making for my own cabinet and gear.
 
“Scheisse,” she said, literally the first time I’d hear her swear under any provocation.
 
“Yeah,” I agreed. “Worse, looks like Marik wasn’t ready to count on just outrage to get the mess they needed - they’ve armed a quote-unquote ‘Fianna Revolutionary Army’.”
 
“How much of an army is it?”
 

***

 
“Best estimate is six regiments of mechanized infantry, with a battalion of armed industrialmechs in support,” Sasagawa reported. “It’s a real backwoods crew, too - they’re mounted on hiluxes.”
 
“Toyota’s out of business,” I said automatically.
 
“What?”
 
“Manufacturer of the original Hilux pickup truck. Combine that with the cropdusters you chased off… That’s actually not a bad force for starting with nothing but small arms and civilian gear.”
 
“None of us up here have proper recon cameras-” Sasagawa and the rest of the air element were orbiting at fifteen thousand meters altitude, well above the reach of most AA systems “-but looking at the low passes, they’ve got manpack weapons hardmounted on the hiluxes.”
 
“If we get close enough, they could do some real damage,” I agreed. “I didn’t intend to, but I’ll keep it in mind.”
 
“You can’t expect to talk them into going home,” she said.
 
“I’ll try, but no,” I said. “But one great big soft target like that is perfect for Alevito’s people.” Lona Alevito - a thin, even boney woman with a nervous demeanor and a ballistics computer in her head - had ended up commanding our artillery battalion.
 
“...You’re probably right. That will be a mess.”
 
“If they don’t just shatter, we’ll deal,” I said. “But best of all if we can somehow spin it out until Tharkad’s rep gets here and makes the entire thing moot.”
 
“Are you really that sure that one is coming?”
 
“Yes,” I said. “I’m sure. I’m less certain about when, but there’s no chance at all of nothing happening. The more I can prolong things, the better the chances they’ll show up.”
 

***

 
“Why even care about the shape of the table?” asked the man on the other end of the small round table we’d flown in from one of Saint Cabrini’s cafes. He was middle aged, which probably meant early fifties on Fianna, and had shaved off what little silvering hair hadn’t fallen out of his bald spot. The muscles and overalls suggested that, in civilian life, he’d been a farmer, even with the spare tire softening his outline.
 
“I don’t,” I said. “But it prolongs things without anyone dying, meaning that there’s more chance for one or another of the several different sets of people with the authority to order His Lamentable Grace clapped in irons to either arrive or get their ovaries to drop.”
 
He snorted in amusement. “If I thought it would be that easy, I wouldn’t be here,” he said. “Anyway. For my sins, I’m the ‘general’ of our little insurgent group, the Just Word. Jean-Luc Nguesso.”
 
“Colonel Asha Blackwing,” I said. “Contracted garrison for Fianna. I hope I can convince you, though, that it’s the best chance you’ll get.”
 
“I’m surprised you’re willing to give up your secrets,” Nguesso said.
 
“None of this is anything you shouldn’t have known already,” I replied. “You don’t have any air defense, either airborne or triple-A. You’ve massed your forces in place for a set-piece battle. You don’t have any artillery for counter-battery. You do have mech forces, of a sort, but we both know what will happen if they end up committed, right? A bit of armor damage and at most one or two repairable losses on my side, and…”
 
His expression twitched. So that was how it was.
 
“If you were going to count on commando teams,” I said, “you’d have been better off not exposing the rest where I could find it. I do have air cover, armed for strafing, and my tech people know how to mix gasoline and styrofoam, and we have plenty of drop tanks to convert.”
 
A thousand years later and both of those had perpetuated themselves across the universe.
 
“It’s not proper Inferno gel, but the difference isn’t one that will matter to you. We have artillery to back that up, more, I think, than any of your Marik advisors or veterans will have seen in one place before.”
 
“We are not with Marik!” he snapped.
 
“No, you’re their catspaws,” I replied. “You didn’t get those SRM packs or twelve-sevens out of arsenals here on Fianna, or any other Lyran world. They supplied you to make sure they had enough opposition in place to make the mess their plan needed.”
 
“And because of that, you want to let Jumped-Up Jason bury all the shit he’s dived into? Let him-”
 
“Let him try,” I said - sneered, really, then grinned nastily. “Wanna know a secret?”
 
Nguesso started to swell up angrily, then paused and gave me a considering look. “It’s one MacLaine won’t like,” he said.
 
“He really won’t. When I took this contract, I was provided with three one-megabyte one-time-pads, to use to code high-priority and secret communications. I’ve used all of them reporting on that asshole… And the last one, right after I got back from Noveau Congo, was a copy of a short conversation between the two Marik-contracted merc commanders that we recorded after we cracked their comms. Discussing, as it happens, the fact that MacLaine himself had ordered them to kill me.” I smiled and spread my hands in a gallic shrug. “While I don’t doubt that pissing me off personally is something the your Central Command is willing to risk if they saw a profit in it, I don’t think that they’ll be pleased at his dicking around with a contracted garrison like that, even before anything else.”
 
“So… what, we just sit here? I call all our operations off and wait?” He was still disgusted, but coming around.
 
I sighed. “That depends,” I said. “I’d originally planned just that, yeah. But that was before I knew for sure that you had infiltrators, or had gotten a good enough look at your gear to be sure that you’d been supplied out of Marik armories.”
 
“We didn’t bring our trainers along, give me some credit,” he said.
 
“Training insurgents is one of the classic uses for spec ops teams,” I said. “And knowing for sure that there’s something like that on the planet has me thinking of all the other ways this situation could be escalated without either of us moving. We’ve already seen what they can do with strategic leaks - or lies.”
 
His expression flipped between exhaustion and angry scowl a couple of times, then he finally settled on the former and sighed. “I’ll need to talk to my people,” he said.
 
“I figured,” I said. “Same time tomorrow? I don’t think the Mariks’ll move in the first day.”
 
The next day, though, ended up being discussion about something else entirely, setting up for the day after.
 
“What is this fils de putain doing here?” Nguesso snarled as the holocom came online.
 
“Trying to save my son’s inheritance,” replied His Grace the Duke of Fianna, Jason Ngao MacLaine, from inside the tank. A couple shades paler than his opposite number and slimmer and less muscular, he was turned out in impeccable Tharkad fashion despite its unsuitability for the local climate. He sounded tired, and his eyes if not the rest of him looked it. “Sit down, General. I know when to quit - but that still leaves you with a problem.”
 
Nguesso sat. “I hope you don’t expect either of us to weep for you,” he said.
 
“Hardly. But my stupidity-” MacLaine’s voice was harsh, “-has let SAFE seed agents all through my palace. I, if no one else, know that I gave no orders to move against the demonstrations, or to give any special treatment one way or the other to those arrested during them. As long as there’s no evidence of conspiracy, Archon Katrina is unlikely to attaint my son - but Marik’s agents will plant that evidence if they can.”
 
“They’re after the biggest clusterfuck they can manufacture, a distraction and drain on the Commonwealth as a whole,” I said.
 
“What do you want from me, then?” Nguesso asked.
 
MacLaine waved at one side of his display, the side I was sitting towards. “Surrender to her,” he said.
 
I blinked. “Hey what?”
 
“Definitionally, you’re rebels,” MacLaine said bluntly. “I can’t change that, it’s by Tharkad’s rules. Probably, if you’re still in the field in two weeks, Archon Katrina’s representative will pardon you.”
 
“Two weeks?” I asked.
 
“The command circuit will finish tomorrow morning,” he said. “But I would be very surprised to see pardons handed out from a dropship in transit.”
 
Merry Christmas, I thought, since that would put the rep’s landing on December 26.
 
“So could you,” Nguesso said.
 
“Would you take it from me?” MacLaine asked rhetorically. “But in the long run, you’d be more likely to be attainted by my word than helped. If you surrendered to the Ducal Guard-”
 
All seven battlemechs and two infantry companies of it.
 
“-I could order you held awaiting trial, but as we just discussed, that would be no guarantee. Blackwing’s plan to simply stall would work on its own, but-”
 
“Every plan gets fucked up as soon as the enemy arrives,” I quoted. “That’s why he’s called the enemy.”
 
MacLaine had fought as a mechwarrior when he was younger. He smirked. “Quite. Marik’s input on the matter can’t be predicted. We’re all safer if this is settled.”
 
Nguesso snorted. “And how is surrendering to her different from that? We’d still be prisoners held in the same prisons.”
 
“Not,” MacLaine answered, “if she signs you on.”
 
I did a quick mental estimate of the payroll costs that would imply and winced.
 
“You’ve lost me,” the rebel general said, looking puzzled.
 
“There’s a clause in my contract that lets me recruit from captured enemy combatants. It’s meant for things like hiring mechwarriors away from other merc units that were just on the other side, and if I tried to recruit somebody who’d just been, say, a DCMS regular I’d need to talk pretty fast… But the language doesn’t specify. In this case, we could probably get away with it,” I explained, starting slowly as I turned the option over in my head.
 
“You didn’t look like you liked the idea,” he noted.
 
“I don’t like what it’s going to do to my budget,” I said. “But it solves most of our problems.”
 
“Or, at least, lets us delay them for two weeks,” he finished.
 
Nguesso thought for several seconds.
 
“Fine,” he said, and stood. “Let me go make the arrangements.”
 
He didn’t look at MacLaine on his way out of the tent.
 
“Camp Robichaux won’t have the space for all of his people,” MacLaine said to me, not acknowledging the snub. Honestly, I thought he’d expected something along those lines. “Give me a moment and I’ll set up a conference call to one of the Ducal Land Reserves where we can put together a camp.”
 
“Verified communications,” I said. “Go ahead.”
 
Anyway, he did that, and we brought Shipping Report and Cruel Sea down in a couple of nearby fallow fields to pick up the Word - which took several trips, given how many of them there were. One of Fianna’s longer-ranged interstellar exports was interstellar basic rations for the Commonwealth military - all one glorious German compound word that fell out of my head the instant I heard it.
 
The deal I worked out with Nguesso in the end didn’t pay his people the standard rates - his officers ended up getting about the basic infantry pay, and the ‘rank and file’ volunteers were getting by on about the same as agricultural day laborers, with the promise of upgrades to standard scales once the current contract was done. That was what most of them had already been making and, before the Special Inspector arrived and made the question moot, I’d expected to keep a regiment or so of them just based on that promise, including their ‘mechwarriors’.
 
Though not their rides; those would be going straight back to the agricultural and industrial concerns they’d been variously stolen and ‘stolen’ from.
 
The Inspector, though, once he’d clapped MacLaine in irons (to the tune of much applause and celebration), made it clear as his second priority that, as much as he understood and accepted the choices they’d made, the act of rebellion made them not welcome on Fianna for the foreseeable future.
 
So I had six regiments of infantry now, which was a thing. It made it awkward to ask for a meeting about negotiating permission for a raid over the border, but I didn’t let that stop me.
 

***

 
“Asha Blackwing, no middle name. Born Famindas, Alpheratz, Outworlds Alliance, on December 30th, 2995. Illegitimate child of the late Count of Guanahani, Sieg Rostig, and one of the prostitutes of the Sleek Tiger Gentleman’s Club.”
 
The man reading this off of the file in front of him in this quiet office in the back corners of Skellig Palace looked like nothing at all, a bland blank spot as uninteresting as the beige walls around us. Since I was pretty sure that he was the Lyran Intelligence Corps rep for the cleanup mission, that made sense.
 
“Under Alpheratz law, a ‘Gentleman’s Club’ and a ‘Bawdy House’ are legally distinct things,” I said. “The former is explicitly exempt from normal public indecency rules, allowing all forms of erotic dance, but any form of physical contact between staff and customers remains restricted on the premises.”
 
I gave him a smile that was neither pleasant nor meant to be. “I’m aware that this isn’t a common set of definitions, which is the only reason the two of us don’t have a very serious and very personal problem.”
 
He blinked at me. “I’ll add a note to the file,” he said, and scribbled something before he turned the page. “Schooling, average grades. Slight hit moving to higher education, but nothing significant. Surprising, given the notes about your lifestyle. Scholarship from the school for their freestyle martial arts team, not paid by your father.”
 
He paused and met my eyes again. “Since you’re here - how common is that, in the Outworlds?”
 
“Omniss philosophy is nominally pacifist,” I said, “but they make exceptions for immediate self-defense, and for the sort of martial arts styles that are primarily about spiritual self-cultivation. They disapprove of most competitive games, as well, which has ended up making martial arts competition essentially the national sport. Scholarships to fill collegiate teams are fairly common, yes.”
 
A longer note on the file. “Adding significance to your inclusion on a magazine listing of the ‘fifty most promising new drafts’, and the generous odds given for good performances on your part. Obviously, they didn’t know about the doping.”
 
I snorted. “I know for a fact that, out of more than seventy team members across all classes of competition at the University of Alpheratz, only two of us weren’t. There were separate slang terms for people who were actually trying to push it and for people who were just leveling the playing field - Candles and Lamps, like me.”
 
Another blink. “Following a considerable scandal when the appointed drug inspector attempted to extort sexual favors, you were expelled from both team and school, and spent several months indulging in high-risk lifestyles before inheriting the remains of your father’s mercenary unit, and a shipment of Second Succession War military hardware of Free Worlds League origin.”
 
Page turn. “Two successful combat engagements, one impromptu against a pirate band attempting to capture your equipment before it could be manned, and the other, more impressively, against the Third Sword of Light.”
 
I shrugged slightly. “I won’t claim that the Eridani Light Horse didn’t do most of the heavy lifting in that engagement, but we didn’t shame ourselves.”
 
“Something of an understatement. Following a thoroughly hushed incident in the aftermath of that-”
 
“If you don’t already know, you don’t need to,” I said.
 
For the first time, he looked annoyed. “It would be very helpful,” he hinted.
 
“It has nothing to do with the Lyran Commonwealth.” That was not, technically true - it revealed a couple of things that I thought Katrina Steiner would like to know - but the odds of them not getting filtered out on their way through LIC’s analysis machine were too low to risk the potential hassle of word getting back to Davion.
 
After a few seconds of hopeful waiting, he moved on. “After leaving Hoff, you moved to Galatea and finished recruiting to strength before taking the Fianna contract, and all it ended up involving.
 
“Also on Galatea, you purchased, personally, a number of research materials pertaining to Star League facilities and caches, as well as period maps of a number of worlds.
 
“Combined with your recent efforts to obtain short-term charter or lease contracts for both combat-deployment dropships for your existing ground and aerospace elements, multiple Mammoth-class cargo dropships, and jumpship support… And with your request to discuss a raiding subcontract with my superior…”
 
Despite the obvious insincerity of the respectful reference, he kept his face impressively straight as he closed the folder, laced his fingers over top of it, and leaned forward.
 
“What do you think you’ve figured out about Helm that no one else has?”
 

...YOUR HANDS WILL TURN TO BUTTER...

[Valles]

Oh, dammit, I forgot to update this here.
 

---

 
SALVATION SAT AND CROSSED HERSELF...
 

Tell The World That We Tried
A Battletech Fanfiction, inspired by Fitzgerald’s CYOA at https://imgur.com/gallery/M41mI
By Valles

 
When the console went off, I powered the tablet I’d been reading from down and hit the accept key in a hurry. It said more than enough about the call I was expecting that signing over the advance all five HPG stations needed for a real-time link across the two hundred light years to Tharkad had been the easy part.
 
Five minutes of time from someone the Archon of the Lyran Commonwealth both saw regularly and trusted absolutely was a lot harder to come by than simple money, at least when you had as much of the latter as I did these days.
 
Funny how strange that still felt.
 
I recognized the face that appeared on the screen in front of me, once Comstar’s damned comet was gone; I’d half expected to.
 
Female, attractive, blonde and blue eyed in the best ‘Aryan’ way… The classic Steiner look. That didn’t surprise.
 
The fact that I was speaking to a preteen girl, on the other hand, did.
 
“I am the Landgraefin von Bremen, Melissa Steiner. The Archon has asked me to collect your report on the-” her eyes flicked down, resting on whatever notes she’d taken ahead of time for too little of a space to actually be reading, but enough for a reminder. “-raid on Helm.”
 
Her intense determination to get the task she’d been trusted with exactly right was obvious.
 
So this was the girl who’d grow up to be the heart of the Federated Commonwealth…
 
I nodded. “The raid has been as successful as any of us hoped. We were able to locate the cache without difficulty and have recovered just under a thousand fusion-powered combat units of SLDF origin, a substantial store of infantry arms likewise, and one hundred and fifty thousand tons of assorted spares and supplies.”
 
Her eyes got really big, and she glanced off to one side of the pickup - stared nervously at whoever she was seeing for a couple of seconds - then took an obvious bracing breath and said, “Captain, inform Mother’s detail that she will need to take this call personally.”
 
Melissa looked back at me. “Are you able to hold?” she asked.
 
Involuntarily, I glanced at the charge ticker spooling up, and only barely managed not to wince. “I can hold,” I confirmed.
 
After about twenty seconds of staring at each other in silence, she said, “Umm…”
 
“Yes?” I asked.
 
“The doctors tell me I can’t use Neurohelmets,” she said. “That I’ll never be able to fight and protect the Commonwealth. But wouldn’t Star League helmets be able to read my mind anyway?”
 
I doubted it. “It depends on why you can’t use standard ones,” I said. “Some of the disorders that cause low compatibility can be overcome that way - and others can’t. And others don’t actually stop you from using one, but mean you get hurt a lot worse by things like ammo explosions. Those are already bad enough, trust me!” I added, with feeling.
 
“Oh,” she said, looking disappointed.
 
“None of that, though, means you won’t be able to fight,” I said. “If you wanted to have skills you’d have use for even after you were Archon, you could go into infantry, and aim for the same diplomatic protection classes your bodyguards have had - learn how their job works, so you can make it easier for them and take care of yourself if something goes wrong.
 
“If you wanted to make sure that all the mech-driving snobs in your nobility respected you anyway, you could go into armor service. Any mechwarrior that tells you they don’t respect a well-applied heavy or assault tank is either a liar or a rookie with a fifty-fifty chance of living long enough to learn better.
 
“And if you wanted to practice your people and leadership skills as well as fighting, you could go into dropship operations, and aim to serve on or command an Avenger or Achilles - assault dropships.”
 
She brightened, and I found myself smiling back, before a slender adult hand wearing three different glittery rings laid on her shoulder for a moment.
 
A blur of motion that the camera had trouble resolving followed, and then I was looking at a twenty-years-older version of Melissa’s face.
 
A very kind twenty years, good grief.
 
“Your highness,” I said, bowing my head.
 
“Colonel,” Katrina Steiner replied. “A thousand battlemechs?”
 
“Three hundred and fifty one, fifty-nine of them SLDF royals. A little under four hundred and seventy fusion tanks, and a hundred and seventy aerospace fighters, ratios ditto. And spares to run all of them for decades, or refit a substantial fraction of the LCAF, a hundred and fifty thousand tons in total,” I reported. “Additionally, we recovered data that seem to include functional guides to recreating Star League terraforming systems. A Loki operative attempted to divert those and several other high-urgency items to that organization’s private use; we estimate that all resulting damage will be recoverable, but the timescale is hard to predict at this point.”
 
She took that all on board in barely a second or two. “I haven’t been briefed. What share does your contract include?”
 
“One dozen ‘first option’ selections, provision of modern production combat units at a one-to-one ratio for royal units of equivalent type, role, and mass, and a one-to-three ratio for all others,” I said. “Plus the standard assessed-value finders fees for Lostech components and equipment.”
 
Another split-second of consideration, her eyes boring into my face. I tried not to sweat too much. “You’ve already optioned the terraforming data,” she said.
 
“Yes, Ma’am,” I confirmed.
 
“What price were you intending to set?”
 
“My plan was to offer you a partnership,” I said, forcibly ignoring the butterflies making an assault on my esophagus from below. “Combining assets - the files and other items, and House Steiner’s resources - to create a corporation capable of redeveloping and redeploying terraforming systems.”
 
This time she thought longer. “The ratios will need negotiation,” she said. “But in principle, we have an agreement.”
 
Katrina paused, eyes narrow, as a thought occurred to her. “You’re being deliberately cryptic about those ‘high urgency items’.”
 
“Yes, Ma’am,” I said. “My faith in ComStar’s neutrality and discreet integrity would fit on the bridge of the galaxy’s smallest violin.”
 
That actually got a thawing, a snort of amusement. “Wise, but for a short secure transmission, I’ll take the risk. Tell me.”
 
“The SLDF garrison of Helm didn’t have a copy of the Prometheus Database, but they tried to create the next best thing,” I said, rather than wasting time hedging. “A deliberately selected guide to recreating as much of the League’s - and Hegemony’s - technical capabilities as possible, in the assumption that most of those would be lost. The terraforming data is a printout from that library core.”
 
This time I got actual shock out of her. “Loki damaged that?”
 
“The original core media is recoverable, with proper techniques, and we had made full copies using backup cores stored in the cache,” I said. “The only reader included is probably not repairable, though we’ve preserved everything that was left. Cache codebreakers have gained us access to the agent’s logs, and the intention seems to have been to use the deadman switch that went off as leverage and blackmail rather than ever actually deploying it.”
 
“What model of reader and core?” she asked.
 
“The cores are listed as ‘Alexandria 7 compatible’,” I said. “The reader was an Apple Haruspex 3.”
 
Katrina took longer to think than I’d seen her do so far, then focused on me again. “You had the Fianna garrison?”
 
I nodded. “Yes, Ma’am.”
 
“All right. We’ll dissolve that-”
 
“No objections,” I added quietly.
 
“-and move you to Solaris officially. Garrison assistance, and training cadre to raise new regiments from the cached hardware.”
 
“As soon as possible, given the kind of attention we’ll be attracting,” I said.
 
“Exactly. Generalmajor Lewiston, from the 32nd, will provide a cryptographic pad for your full report.”
 
“Already written,” I confirmed.
 
“Good,” Katrina said. “I’ll be arriving by command circuit. We can discuss further details then.”
 
“Yes, Ma’am,” I agreed.
 
She gave me just a hint of a smile. “And in public, we’ll need to work on your etiquette.”
 
Etiquette? ...Oh. Craaaap.
 
“Yes, Your Highness,” I said.
 

***

 
Sophitia had had to talk me into the day’s trip, but not very hard. We’d spent the morning reasonably pleasantly ensconced in talking to one the dozens of private garages and specialist battlemech boutiques that were forever going into and out of business in Solaris City. She’d wanted to see about having Aspis and No. 2 refitted with some of the great mass of tech pulled from Mount Nagayan - and I’d suggested the so-called Steely Doll Custom Outfitters because they were one of the only custom shops that advertised their willingness to work on aerospace fighters and combat vehicles.
 
Finally, our Pumas would have sanely arranged missile launchers!
 
But there was only so much of that that we could draw things out for, and eventually we were, at her request, steering our security cavalcade - as ridiculous as it made me feel to ride through city streets in a ten ton APC, there was no denying I had more than enough personal enemies these days to warrant it - away from the broad mech-safe streets of Silesia and into narrower, slower ones. Despite the closer quarters, the area, if anything, became more affluent.
 
The narrow, wall-to-wall townhouses had elegant facades and neatly manicured front gardens (not British-garden lawns, garden-gardens - mostly in a kind of Japanese style), and even in the grim decay of early-thirty-first-century Solaris, it was obvious that their owners were doing well for themselves.
 
Eventually, three quarters of the way down one street, Sophitia leaned forward and asked the driver to stop.
 
“...Soph?” I asked quietly. Her expression, staring at the house we’d stopped in front of, was… alarming.
 
“...I wasn’t expecting Mama to be home,” she admitted; I realized that she was looking as much at the ostentatiously expensive sedan in front of the house as at the building itself.
 
“...Oh,” I said, feeling like an idiot for how long it had taken me to figure out what the problem and context were.
 
I reached up and squeezed her shoulder. “What do you want to do?” I asked softly.
 
She took a breath, a little ragged but not actually about to cry. “I think I have to go inside and see her,” she admitted.
 
From the way her face looked, I thought that that was a terrible idea, but I didn’t say so, since she’d pretty clearly made up her mind on the matter. “All right,” I said. “Let’s go, then.”
 
She gave me a startled look. “You don’t have to-”
 
“You’re shaking and closer to crying than I’ve ever seen you,” I said. “I am not leaving you to do this alone.”
 
We argued a little more, but eventually the two of us were walking up to the front door; I was a half step behind her, mostly so that she wouldn’t see the worried look I was still giving her. Needless to say, I was not filled with warm and fuzzy feelings about her happy homecoming.
 
The door opened only a few seconds after ringing the doorbell. Obviously, Mrs Braun had spotted the not-quite-actually-a-tank parked in front of her door.
 
She was about the same height as her daughter, with the same brilliant green eyes but black hair, the latter now graying. Less shapely, and even in her youth she’d have been heavier set; middle age had only emphasized that, though she was fit enough in the goes-to-the-gym-every-week way. The scar from the neurohelmet backlash that Sophitia had once mentioned as ending her mechwarrior career was easy to pick out, an old burn that covered her left eye in a star-shaped blotch from nose to ear, under a large patch, with her left arm covered by sleeve and glove in a way that whispered ‘prosthetic’ to me.
 
She blinked at us for a second, then focused on her daughter. “Sophitia! Where have you been, young lady? What were you thinking, running off in that ridiculous fashion? I know I raised you better than that.”
 
Well, I’d intended to try and be neutral about the woman, but that settled my initial impression as some fairly serious dislike. Watching Soph fold in on herself under that ‘oh so concerned’ tongue lashing made me want to kick the woman somewhere she wasn’t using, like her heart.
 
“Soph and I have become fairly close,” I said, to provide a distraction. “So, I thought I should meet her mother, you know?”
 
“...And you are?” Mrs Braun asked me.
 
“Asha Blackwing, your daughter’s girlfriend,” I answered brightly, trying to keep the number of teeth showing in my grin under control.
 
I watched her eyes rake up and down the length of me, taking in the leather jacket, the t-shirt silkscreened with the logo of my favorite restaurant on Fianna, the baggy jeans, the sneakers.
 
Her eyes narrowed and she turned back to Sophitia. “Young lady, what did I tell you about gold diggers? This pretending-to-love-girls phase is one thing, but you should know better than to give those sorts ways to take advantage of you.”
 
...Seriously?
 
Seriously?
 
While I was busy trying to decide whether to correct her or just laugh at her, Sophitia was actually getting angry. “Mama,” she said, “Colonel Blackwing owns my mercenary regiment! If anyone’s gold-digging, it’s me. Especially after-”
 
She cut herself off.
 
Her mother’s expression was a flare of chagrin, humiliation, and anger. I could feel Sophitia flinch a little next to me. The older woman’s face started to morph into a well-acted bit of grief. “Sophitia, you still think that of me? I’m your mother-”
 
I turned my back on her and leaned up so that I could whisper in Soph’s ear. “Let’s just go,” I suggested. “Maybe we can track down your dad?”
 
For a couple of seconds, I wasn’t sure what she was about to do, but eventually my girlfriend sighed. “You’re right,” she agreed, and hang the circumstances, I threw a hug around her as her eyes started to water.
 
“Goodbye, Mama.”
 
And we left.
 
Soph leaned forward to poke her head into the drivers’ compartment of the APC, then sat down and started crying on my shoulder.
 
“...I’m sorry,” I said, once she’d calmed down enough to register more than soothing noises.
 
“It’s not your fault,” she said, still sounding a little choked. “She just… Why? I never even really cared, I’d’ve given it to her, why lie and steal from me?”
 
Because she was an abusive, greedy, narcissistically selfish bitch, I thought to myself, but I hugged the girl that waste of a woman had hurt tighter and admitted, “...I wish I had something to say that’d make you feel better.”
 
“...I love you,” she whispered.
 
Oh.
 
Yeah, that I could do. “I love you, too,” I promised.
 

***

 
I caught the pickpocket’s hand by the wrist before her fingers could close and twisted. She yelped and recoiled away from the hold, instinctively curling to protect her elbow from the stress I was putting on it, and it was simplicity itself to collect her other arm and pin it while she wasn’t paying attention. “Let’s not,” I said pleasantly.
 
She looked over her shoulder at me, terrified eyes wide in a dusky face that had obviously not been getting enough to eat for a long time.
 
Next to me, Sophitia sighed. “We’re looking for Boxer Braun,” she told the girl I was holding, who might have been fifteen. Maybe. “Is he still around here?”
 
That gave our visitor an angle, and convinced her to stop struggling. “Yeah, he’s still got the back corner behind…” As she turned to look at Sophitia - she had to twist a bit, but I let her - I heard her voice go from calculating to awed. “...wait, you’re - the Invincible Sword?”
 
Soph winced. “Please don’t call me that,” she requested.
 
Given the starstruck awe, I felt safe letting go and stepping back. Aside from rubbing her wrist, the pickpocket didn’t even seem to notice. “Yes, Champion,” she said. “I, um… Let me show you, it’s this way.”
 
The slum we were in was dank and dirty, the streets between the dingy brick buildings scattered with trash. I was sure that it smelled as inoffensive as it did only because of the rain, which had picked up again.
 
Minakshi James - as our middle-school aged guide introduced herself - led us through the streets and into an alley, with only a few nervous looks at the security teams that had appeared the instant Soph wasn’t trying to coax some of the local color into talking to her. A wood and polymer crate behind a dumpster was still labeled CONTENTS FUSION HEAT SINK STANDARD (1), and a limp hand, rather dirty, lay poking out of the sheet hung across the open end.
 
Sophitia stopped dead, staring in horror. I stepped forward and checked it out, rain pattering off the poncho I’d thrown on instead of my jacket.
 
“Still breathing,” I reported, seeing the big man’s rag covered chest move. He’d been handsome, once, and if his box and clothes and person weren’t clean, they were closer to it than I’d expected from the situation and the grime worked into his fingers. A smell like cheap chicken ramen, and the literally pinprick dilation of his irises when I checked his eyes…
 
Soph had come closer while I looked her father over. “He’ll be fine,” I reported. “Just on a sadalaka dose.”
 
Sadalaka, named by its Bangladeshi discoverer for the white halo effect it introduced into a user’s vision right before consciousness went pif, was a widely spread street drug. The shrub it came from grew easily in a houseplant pot, and it wasn’t difficult to refine, so the price was usually pretty low. Younger-me had hated the aftertaste it left lingering on the tongue, but a lot of her ‘friends’ in the college set had been big fans.
 
“His lips are closed again, so he should wake up in a few minutes,” I added, standing and stepping back.
 
Under her umbrella, Sophitia looked sad again, but she laughed and pushed me away when I went to give her a hug. “You’re soaking wet,” she pointed out.
 
“So?” I teased.
 
Sophitia had just about talked herself into borrowing a couple of the troopers who were playing guard to get him into the APC when her father woke up on his own, starting in place and groping around for the empty water bottle that had been laying on the other side of his crate. I remembered that the final comedown from sadalaka tended to hit with a jolt of adrenaline and a desperate need for hydration.
 
He didn’t realize that he wasn’t alone until he’d drained the few drops that were in there and started looking around - then his expression flipped to delight. “Pumpkin?” he asked, and started to get up.
 
I got under his elbow so that when the lag time caught up and the dizziness hit, I could keep him on his feet. Fortunately, since Sophitia all but panicked when he started to fall again.
 
“Don’t worry, this is normal, too,” I reassured her.
 
“What do you mean normal!” she blurted.
 
“Always takes a couple minutes t’ stand after waking up off the Halo,” her father mumbled. “Shoulda remembered that…” He shifted a bit and squinted down at me. “...You a doctor?”
 
“On Alpheratz we always called it Shatterglow,” I said. “But I hated that manky aftertaste too much. I liked thionite better. Hi, I’m Asha, the new girlfriend.”
 
“...Could never afford that,” he said, probably about the drug, and then straightened, managing to keep on balance this time. I stepped away, and he held a hand out. “Sorry. Manners. Ramin Braun, drunken bum.”
 
In spite of the warning signs, I liked him. I shook. “Asha Blackwing, mercenary colonel. Is the sweetheart who’s about to hit me on the head allowed to buy you lunch like any other family member?”
 
Sophitia blushed. “Ash!” she protested.
 
He chuckled darkly. “I’d snort up any kind of bank account, but food I’ll just eat. I’d love to catch up… It’s good to see you again, Pumpkin.”
 
Sophitia wibbled for a moment, then pounced, throwing her arms around him in a hug. “Missed you, Papa,” she said.
 
“...Shit, what about your clothes?!” he blurted, though he didn’t let that stop him from returning the hug.
 
“We’ve got laundry at home,” I said.
 
“Clothes don’t matter,” she added fiercely, and despite the defeat, I could see him smiling.
 

***

 
By the standards of homeless vagrants, Boxer Braun - the nickname came from the punch-heavy style he’d used when Aspis was his rather than his daughter’s, as a young mechwarrior in Solaris’s arenas, rather than his current choice of shelters - was comfortable, even prosperous. He’d found a low-end mechwarrior’s gym that was willing to put up with his irregular scheduling ability and habit of turning up two or more sheets to the wind, so he had money coming in and access to showers, and the remnants of his younger self’s charisma had brokered a deal between his ‘boss’ and the local community, legal and otherwise - Boxer used the gym’s four ancient simulators to give basic lessons to local children, and the kids’ parents, including the resident ‘legitimate businessmen’, made sure that the gym didn’t have to worry about most of the endemic breakage and theft of the neighborhood.
 
Minakshi the pickpocket had known where to find him because she was one of the more talented and dedicated of those disciples, and while she and Sophitia were over by the dessert bar, I glanced across the table at him. “How much of teaching Soph was you, and how much was her mother?”
 
He swirled his coffee around. “Call it half and half?” he said. “Actually piloting, yeah, that was more me, but practice and discipline was Clarice’s part, and…”
 
“Soph wouldn’t be where she is without both,” I finished.
 
Boxer looked up and our eyes met; without either of us saying it, I could tell that he’d realized I was considering making him a job offer.
 
I didn’t follow up on it right away. “How good is the kid?” I asked instead.
 
“Right now? Not so much. Good reflexes, good instincts, but she needs practice. About what you’d expect at her age,” he said instantly. “Get her into a good stable, she’ll go places, but that’ll be ten years down the line.”
 
“Has she got her heart set on the games?”
 
He set his coffee cup down. “Thinking of signing her as a merc?”
 
“A long-lead-time investment,” I admitted. “Longer than I actually have plans for my people as a whole, probably. Things are up in the air at the moment. But whichever way they come down, we’ll have a use for mechwarriors, and - well, almost all the options will be better for her than here.”
 
“Almost?”
 
“One in a hundred chance we end up outlawed and blackballed because of somebody else’s framejob,” I said.
 
“...You’re banking on me having a conscience about my kids, huh?”
 
“You couldn’t have raised the daughter you did if you didn’t.”
 
He stared down at his coffee, and his expression was tormented enough to make me want to look away, though I didn’t. “You don’t know who you’re talkin’ to,” he said.
 
“A low-end has-been that hasn’t been in a real mech in fifteen years,” I answered. “And hasn’t been sober for more than a day at a time in twenty.”
 
Boxer Braun’s head snapped up, chapped lips skinning back from stained teeth. I smiled prettily. “Also, a top tier trainer that I can snatch up for cheap. We’ve got a couple of jump infantry vets who took what’d otherwise be retirement injuries on Helm and Fianna, I figure I’ll assign one as your secretary and have him make sure you’re sober during duty hours.”
 
He stared at me for a moment, the settled back in his seat. “Just duty hours?” he said.
 
“I’m hoping having something productive to do will help you stop self-destructing, but that’s the girlfriend thinking about the effects on your daughter. The Colonel isn’t your keeper.”
 
Neither of us had noticed Sophitia returning. She dropped her sundae bowl sloppily on the table and leaned down to throw her arms around his shoulders again. “Please, Papa?” she begged.
 
Faced with his daughter’s puppy dog eyes, he caved instantly.
 

***

 
The last Old Home Visit that Sophitia wanted to do now that we were in Solaris City ended up being the most trouble.
 
I’d been wrung out by a full day of wrangling stablemasters and all the other fucking bullshit that came with trying to accomplish things in Solaris VII’s fucked up moronic morass of extraterritoriality and feuding rivalries, so the only thing I’d had to say when she said she knew a place to get dinner nearby was, “Sure, sounds great.”
 
I managed to get led past both the unmarked exterior and the downstairs nightclub before I realized just where she’d taken me. I won’t even claim it was me being tired; I just didn’t consider the possibility until the door guy guarding the upstairs said, “Miss Braun, let me speak for everyone here when I say that it’s lovely to see you again. Welcome back to Valhalla.”
 
She actually dimpled at him. “Thank you, Roger. Do you know if Manuel is working tonight? I wasn’t in any shape to thank him properly the last time we spoke, and I wanted to be sure to do that.”
 
“I believe that he is,” Roger said, smiling more broadly than I thought was customary for him, before turning slightly apologetic. “It will take some time to clear your booth, I’m afraid-”
 
Reading between the lines, they’d reassigned it since she was offworld and not expected to return.
 
“-but tonight has been fairly slow, so we can seat you at the table immediately - or simply your lovely guest, if you’d rather speak with Manuel immediately.”
 
She looked a little torn, so I grinned. “I’ll be fine,” I told her.
 
Roger gestured calmly towards a staff door when Soph eventually nodded. “I believe you know the way,” he said, which I was pretty sure was a major gesture of trust and approval.
 
When she’d gone, he turned to me and gestured through the door, labeled Valgrind. “Right this way, Miss…?”
 
“Colonel Asha Blackwing,” I said, and I could see the relay click closed behind his eyes as he placed my name.
 
He bowed deeply and led the way.
 
...The Valhalla Club was a barn.
 
No, literally, it looked like an actual barn I remembered from Older-Me’s time in summer camp. I mean, I don’t imagine that actual Norse halls were that different in layout, but from what I knew about them I figured that the level of decoration went well beyond the splintery condition of the walls here.
 
Seriously, I didn’t want to lean against any of that. Fortunately the floors and furniture were to a - less thematic - standard. And one closer to what actual period craftsmen would have aimed for and achieved with their hand tools, aside from the lack of decorative hand-carving.
 
Also historically inaccurate were the uniforms of the waitstaff. Dirndl were German, not Scandinavian! And the real ones didn’t have that much cleavage, either, though obviously that irritated me less.
 
But still. It felt pretty farby.
 
The food, though, looked good. The largest single chunk I saw in the occupied table slots as I was led further and further down was ‘bar food’, well fried and starchy and appetizing, but I also saw everything from an Indian platter with naan to escargot and back. I was impressed by the Shieldhall’s kitchen if not their decor.
 
I was seated just one seat down from the end of the bench - with apologies from the staffer Roger had assigned to place me - and offered a drink and a chance to order.
 
Unsurprisingly, there was no mention of menus or prices; my request for the best local beer they had and a blooming onion to share were met with ready nods and a promise that they’d be right out.
 
The throne at the end of the long table was occupied, by a looming meat wall of a man, muscled like a dedicated gym rat and with the aggressive buzz cut of one, too. If he couldn’t have made two of me, I’d be shocked - but in contrast to the bruiser’s build and beetling Neanderthal brow, his eyes were sharp and intelligent. When he leaned forward, his accent was pure upper-class Steiner, close enough to the same I’d heard from the Steiner the previous week that I couldn’t tell the difference.
 
“It’s nice to meet you, Colonel Blackwing,” he said, extending a hand.
 
I met it and shook; fortunately, he wasn’t a knuckle-crusher, at least with a girl my size. I also put on my best sheepish smile. “Likewise, though I have to open with a confession.”
 
“Oh?” he asked curiously.
 
“I have no idea who you are,” I said, and explained as we both recovered our hands. “I don’t follow the games ordinarily, and, while I’ve had Valhalla’s precedence rules explained, I’ve been too busy since arriving on Solaris to hear any of the names.”
 
The flicker of irritation that crossed his face was gone fast enough that he probably thought he’d hidden it, but the laugh that followed seemed genuine enough. “That’s fair,” he allowed. “Gray Noton.”
 
I blinked, and covered the meta reaction with a carefully measured dose of truth. “Oh. In that case, I have heard of you, just without realizing you’d reached the title. Nice to meet you, too, Mister Noton, and congratulations.”
 
He seemed pleased. “Thank you,” he said. “It’s not easy to stay on top… Or to get ahead. Though you seem to have done well enough at that, yourself.”
 
“I was lucky enough to be the first person to put all the right pieces together, anyway,” I allowed. “After that, it was just a matter of getting cover for the drop, doing the raid, and running like we stole something.”
 
“If the cache had waited two centuries already, why bring in Steiner, rather than just gathering what you needed to capture it all for yourself?” Noton asked. He didn’t say or openly imply that that’s what he would have done, but I heard it anyway.
 
“First, since there were enough records to guess the cache’s contents to an order of magnitude, at least, I knew I’d need a lot more transport than I had. Hiring all of it on my own would have wiped out my cash reserves and left us more vulnerable than I’d like.
 
“Second, while I don’t say that Great Houses always remember those that do them favors, it’s usually worthwhile to do one a solid, and some of the things I want are better paid in that kind of coin than in battlemechs.”
 
My onion and beer - the latter turned out to be something unfamiliar, and at the expression I made on tasting it, Noton laughed. “It’s actually not made with Terran yeast,” he said. “The native equivalent isn’t much like yeast biologically, but it’ll still make alcohol, so…”
 
“Huh,” I said, and had another sip. “Yeah, okay, that’s interesting. Nice.”
 
“So, what do you need that takes political influence and a Solaris Champion?” he asked as I ate the first leaf of onion. “I mean, she might not be quite as good as I am, but Braun’s skills in a mech are a rare grade. Though I suppose depending how hard you found her appetites to deal with…”
 
There went any improvement in my mood. “‘Appetites’?” I asked, not without irony.
 
He picked up on the delicate ground, which wasn’t surprising. Noton wasn’t that sort of fool. “Not just her orientation,” he backpedaled. “But her habits in picking partners…” A pause while I stared at him in confusion. He shook his head. “It was quite the story when it came out. She’d been preying on hundreds of her fans, luring them in and taking shameless advantage of them.”
 
I couldn’t help it. I laughed. “I’m sorry, have you met her?” I asked incredulously.
 
“In passing. She manages facades with the best of them, I grant you-”
 
Sophitia’s voice interrupted us. “Or at least I managed to avoid spreading sewer-press gossip like a bored Hausfrau.”
 
There was an ugly light of triumph in Noton’s eye as he came to his feet. Soph was a tall woman, but his bulk made her look as petite as I was, and slimmer. “I don’t have to take that from someone only one step above a rapist, or the big-titted bimbo leading her around by the cunt.”
 
“And I don’t have to take that from a man one step lower than a cockroach,” she said, and then added, “and, while it would be funny to watch Ash break both your legs, I’d rather take out the garbage myself. Pick your Arena, Noton.”
 
He had an ugly smile; he’d obviously been hoping for just that kind of challenge. “The Coliseum,” he replied, and twisted the knife by adding, “Since you’re between agents, I’ll make the arrangements. Fill out your will, Braun.”
 
And he turned and stalked out, while Sophitia glared after him, eyes snapping like some kind of magic green fire.
 
“Sit down?” I suggested lightly. “I got you an onion.”
 
She looked down at our appetizer, and let out a startled little laugh before she sat down.
 
The gazes of the rest of the club’s patrons didn’t ease up much with Noton gone, but there was enough of a gap around our seats that no one could overhear when she leaned close and said, “Ash… what he said…”
 
I fed her an onion petal. “I wouldn’t have figured that groupies were your type, but the rest of it is either nonsense or old news.”
 
Sophitia huffed while she chewed, then swallowed and admitted, “It… could be fun. But Jessica was the one who really enjoyed… finding new partners. And being in control.”
 
The same ex that had ultimately published photos taken during those liaisons… After Soph demonstrated that she wasn’t controlled. It painted an ugly picture. “Ahhh,” I said.
 
“The way she put things gave some of the arena managers the excuses they were looking for to ban me,” she added. “The same ones were always complaining about what an anticlimax I was to watch, saying I needed to make things flashier.”
 
“People weren’t watching you?” I asked, looking her over mostly as a joke.
 
She hit me in the arm. “Not like that… Besides, it was always the media that cared how I looked outside the cockpit, not the managers. They wanted sparks and carnage, not one-hit-kills.”
 
“...Okay, I’m following that,” I said slowly.
 
“Playing with other fighters would have been… disrespectful,” she added, then sighed. “And right as all this was going on, before I could fight it all back… I found out that Mama had been, well, embezzling when she said she was managing things for me.”
 
I remembered, all the way back on Hoff, a mention that she’d been earning a quarter the standard ratios for a Solaris mechwarrior.
 
I gave her hand a squeeze. “I’m sorry,” I said, not for the first time.
 
Soph smiled at me. “You’ve got my Papa out of a gutter, Ash, and you actually did it with him going along with it. That’s more than I’d expect.”
 
I munched an onion petal. “Early days yet,” I said around it. “Don’t thank me until we know it’s working.”
 
“Even just getting him out of Solaris City will help,” she said, and ate some more onion while a waiter showed up with her own drink (looked like a Mai Tai?)... Then stopped and growled. “Rrrrgh… How dare he!”
 
“Umn?” I asked, sure I’d missed a logical connection somewhere.
 
“Noton. You’re the smartest person I know.”
 
“You badly underestimate Doctor Raven,” I said. After all, between me and the head tech, which of us had a doctorate to go with his sphere-wide rep and which of us hadn’t even managed to finish her degree? Well, technically older-me had, but that had taken an embarrassingly long time to manage. “And the lengths murderous assholes like that will go to to piss somebody off. Besides, I do have big tits, and ‘bimbo’ is the traditional slur that goes with that.”
 
Automatically, her eyes flicked down, and I laughed.
 
Soph hit me in the shoulder again. “You don’t have to be so smug about it,” she complained.
 
“I don’t have to, no…” I said, then blinked. “...Huh. I just realized.”
 
“Hmm?” she asked, tilting her head and smiling.
 
I pointed a finger at her nose and grinned. “You’re defending my honor,” I said.
 
She looked… bashful. “Is that bad?”
 
I’d never considered the possibility, really. At no point in any of my lives had I been in a position where the concept made much sense to me from either side, or where I’d ever have expected anyone to do so. Younger-me had grown up in a slum and evolved into a party girl, and older-me, well, enough said.
 
Thinking on it, though…
 
“No,” I said softly. “It’s not bad at all.”
 
“My pleasure, then.”
 

***

 
The next week and a half were busy enough that I didn’t have much time to worry about Noton or Sophitia’s fight with him. That was, for the most part, for the best. As much faith as I had in her abilities and skills, Gray Noton held the same high title, and in another world would have retained it for an unprecedented seven years. He was, bluntly, a dangerous motherfucker, and spending too much time remembering that fact would have seriously interfered with my sleep and equilibrium.
 
The downside of that inattention was that I forgot that he had a habit of cheating.
 
Sophitia called my com during one of my breaks. “Ash, there’s been a break in at the Steely Doll.”
 
“What’s been taken?” My first thought was that some intelligence agency had seen a chance to make off with some double heat sinks, which would be… annoying. And probably wouldn’t do much good, since from their perspective fitting one or two mechs with the things wasn’t a very significant value, and they wouldn’t have the tools or knowledge to reverse engineer the things properly.
 
“Nothing taken, but gasoline was poured into both of Aspis’s legs and set off; Mr. Stingray says it will take at least a week to replace everything that’s damaged, even if he pulls every worker he has off of his other projects. Three weeks if he doesn’t.”
 
Sophitia sounded devastated, which given how much Aspis was a part of her identity, didn’t surprise me much. More importantly, her match with Noton was at the end of the day, in about eight hours. But if I remembered right…
 
“Didn’t they say they had about three shifts left on Number Two?” I said. Once it had been shipped from Fianna, the Doll’s people had taken over Marauder No. 2’s rebuild with glee, given the chance to apply the only bits of advanced technology I had let stick to our fingers from Helm.
 
“Maybe? Why?” I’d managed to get her mind off of the disaster in favor of curiosity, at least.
 
“Sounds like all-hands-on-deck is three times as fast for them, and we’ve got a bit over one shift to go… I come down and we get you a profile set on it, and you’re back in business,” I explained.
 
The com line was silent for an alarmingly long time before she said, sounding choked, “...Thank you.”
 
Sometimes, things are a bigger deal for the people you do them for than they are for you.
 
“It won’t be as easy as adapting to one of our Dash-As, but I figure the weight advantage will make up for it,” I said. “I’ll call Stingray once we’re done and let him know to get started.”
 
“I can do that,” she said. “And better right away. I love you, Ash.”
 
“Love you, too, Soph. See you soon.” I shut down the com and found a pair of famously blue eyes studying me thoughtfully.
 
“Your partner’s mech was sabotaged?” Katrina Steiner concluded. She hadn’t taken long to find out about the upcoming match once she’d arrived in all her pomp and glory.
 
“Yes, Your Highness,” I said. “A break in with incendiaries ruined the leg myomers.”
 
“Do you have any suspects?” she asked.
 
I didn’t ask how she’d figured that out; I was halfway to thinking that between the two of us, she was the one with precog or some form of ESP. “I have no evidence,” I said.
 
She smiled. “Which is not the same thing.”
 
“Which is not the same thing,” I agreed. “I’ll be very surprised if it following the back trail didn’t lead to Gray Noton eventually. Hunting for an advantage; from what I know of the man it’d be like his style. Hopefully we can make it backfire on him.”
 
“I’ll look forward to seeing it,” she said, and made a little shooing gesture. “In the meantime, you have a mech to work on, don’t you?”
 
I stood and bowed. “Thank you, Your Highness.”
 

***

 
The Steiner Coliseum was full. Forty thousand souls filled the open stands under the orange light of the setting sun, and the roar and rumble of their voices as they waited was easily audible even here in the depths of the waiting mechbays.
 
Sophitia checked the feel of No. 2’s control grips under her hands. “Ready,” she said.
 
Even with her piloting gear providing a spectacular view, all I had the attention for was her face and my worries. I reached in and hit three different buttons on the upside-down cockpit console. “Guest Profile Active. Present guest identity.”
 
“Sophitia Braun,” she said.
 
“Guest identity confirmed. Primary passcode-” the computer’s monotone changed to an alarmingly vocaloid-ish singing. “Some legends are told…”
 
“Some turn to dust or to gold,” I finished.
 
“Primary passcode confirmed. Present secondary passcode.”
 
I freed a hand, kissed the tips of my first two fingers, and pressed them to Sophitia’s lips. “Break a leg,” I said, and scrambled back to the ground.
 
Behind me, there was a rush and whirr as the battlemech came to life, and the whine of the closing cockpit canopy.
 
I forced myself not to look back and hurried to the elevator.
 
A short ride and a shorter walk brought me to my booth. I settled into the prime seat and failed to Not Jitter through the announcements and other preliminaries.
 
“And now, to the north! In the sixty-ton RFL-3N Rifleman Legend-Killer! The defender, the reigning Champion of Solaris! Graaaaaay NO-ton!”
 
The named Rifleman stomped its way out of the far entrance, cannon arms already pointed, and the windows of the booth actually shivered slightly, rattling under the force of the cheers.
 
“Then! To the south! In the seventy-five ton Marauder Number Two! The challenger, the previous Champion of Solaris! The Invincible Sword, Sophitia BRRAAAAAUUUUNNN!”
 
I hadn’t thought that human throats could produce more noise than they had for Noton, but the crowd managed it as No. 2 thumped out of the gate below my feet and advanced slowly… then paused, and turned its back on Noton.
 
“Before the match begins, Braun has some words she’d like to say,” the announcer said, quieting the crowd… somewhat.
 
There was a click of changing audio channels, and I heard Sophitia’s voice coming from the kilometer-wide stadium’s immense public address system. “Thank you, everyone. Thank you, for your patience. But I’ve always been taught not to bring unfinished business into a match… and right now, there’s something I’ve been needing to do for a while, but never found the right moment… Or maybe I never found the courage. But now it’s too late to put it off any more, I have to know, before I can go forwards.”
 
The Coliseum’s booths had every luxury and convenience that could be imagined by their designers, and that included small dumbwaiters. The one for the booth I was in binged for attention and slid open, revealing a tiny square box on a white linen pillow.
 
A corner of my brain was aware that the Coliseum’s jumbotrons were showing a camera close up of my booth, of my face.
 
Most of my attention was on the ring, glittering diamonds fixed practically flush with a mirror-polished platinum band.
 
“Asha Blackwing,” Sophitia said, voice soft even through the thunder of the speakers. “Will you marry me?”
 

...AND CALLED THE DEVIL PARTNER...

[Bad Moon]

Boooooo public marriage proposals. Sophita you drama queen

[classicdrogn]

"Ask me again after you kick his ass." No thanks, we don't need an death flags today.

[Valles]

The answer is already written. Right now, I'm working on the scene that looks to have taken over the rest of the chapter, yeesh.

[Valles]

The big scene at the end kind of took over my hands and ran rampant, but I think it still serves at least two purposes.

---

NOW WISDOM BURNS UPON A SHELF...

Tell The World That We Tried
A Battletech Fanfiction, inspired by Fitzgerald’s CYOA at https://imgur.com/gallery/M41mI
By Valles

A corner of my brain was aware that the towering jumbotrons of the massive Steiner Coliseum were showing a camera close up of my booth, of my face.

Most of my attention was on the ring, glittering diamonds fixed practically flush with a mirror-polished platinum band, surrounded by the black velvet of its little box and the painfully white pillow it was sitting on.

“Asha Blackwing,” Sophitia said, voice soft even through the thunder of the speakers. “Will you marry me?”

I could see her through the booth windows and the cockpit glass of the battlemech standing under them, doll-sized and almost anonymous under the diving-helmet bulk of her neurohelmet… But I knew she could see me.

That was fortunate, since the knot in my throat would have made it completely impossible for me to reply with words.

I just nodded, and reached down to pick up the ring. It was cool against my finger as I slid it on… then kissed the stone setting flush with the band, and blew it out the window towards her.

The crowd went wild, forcibly reminding me that - to understate the point rather critically - we had an audience.

Sophitia turned Marauder No. 2 back towards the center of the arena and waited as the sands shifted and began to stream from the tops of the reinforced blast barriers that lifted from below and soon obscured the direct line of sight between her and Gray Noton, at the far end of the arena floor.

The hubbub of voices from the stands quieted, going from a dropship launch to the murmur of waves along a shore - as close as an excited crowd this size could ever get to dead silent.

The scream of an airhorn cut through the tension, uncannily familiar, and below, the Marauder - hastily repainted earlier in the day in brown, gold, and scarlet - lunged into motion.

For a moment, as Sophitia headed off to my right and then vanished in a turn behind one of the barriers, all I could do was worry, before the Colonel, the part of my brain that I’d spent two years and change fighting to train into a useful combat commander, stepped forward and tucked the emotions in a box in favor of evaluations.

One of the Coliseum’s weaknesses as an entertainment venue was that its layouts were fundamentally static; while the barriers I was seeing could be individually retracted to try and form different patterns, there were only so many of them and their locations were fixed. Dedicated or experienced mechwarriors could easily memorize the possible combinations - and Soph and Noton were nothing if not experienced.

Real strategy-heads, and mechwarriors themselves, liked that, because it removed the random element of stumbling over each other in Ishiyama’s nightmare caverns or the Factory’s ever-shifting refuse piles. For mechwarriors, and believers, that meant that they had at least a chance of thinking ahead, of getting inside their opponent’s plans and setting up a decisive stroke, but for more casual fans it meant a lot of maneuvering without much action, and longtime fans who lacked interest in the headgames found matches becoming repetitive.

The configuration of the day had a large open area at the very center of the arena, and two smaller ones closer to the active entrances, all of them with several entrances and twisting narrow alleys mazed between them.

The announcer had called Legend-Killer an RFL-3N, the standard, classic model of the Succession Wars. The 3N was badly overgunned, undercooled, and under-armored - it had four main guns, a pair of 50mm autocannon optimized for the anti-air work the Rifleman had originally been built for, and a pair of eight-centimeter large lasers, backed up by a shorter-ranged pair of five-centimeter lasers in fixed torso mounts. The stock version, though, had the heat dissipation capacity to power one of the main lasers at a time, and to either run at full speed or vent the heat buildup from its autocannons. Or to use the cannons and torso beams at a run, come to that.

That was enough of a weakness, but the worst news for the Rifleman was what all that did to armor protection. Seven and a half tons of ablatives was the level suitable for a light or low-end medium mech, not a heavy with a heavy’s mobility and ability to attract fire.

I knew, without needing to bother with the displays, that Marauder No. 2 had been refitted for my purposes, not for the Solaris arenas. The particle projection cannons that served as main guns were bigger and badder than the Rifleman’s large lasers, with a slightly longer range, but they had a minimum effective range, too, and while the GM Whirlwind autocannon it mounted did the same damage in one three-round cassette as the Rifleman’s Imperator Model As did in twelve, the overall output per burst was about the same… and Sophitia only had one of them to Noton’s two.

A stock Marauder also carried 5cm laser secondaries under the PPCs, but I’d gone for 3cm pulse lasers, instead, Star League weapons whose switchable anti-personnel mode would have been very valuable on an actual battlefield but was worthless in the Coliseum. Against heavy armor, their maximum effective range would only barely reach to the edge of the PPCs’ minimum.

The upside, though, was that the more reasonable weapon choice and extra fifteen tons of mass paid major defensive dividends. Even sticking to standard panels, Sophitia was carrying very close to twice the protection Noton was.

The final element of comparison was that the Rifleman’s design, with turretlike gun-barrels fixed directly to its ‘shoulders’, made it fairly weak in ‘hand to hand’ combat. While the Marauder wasn’t a specialist like Sophitia’s own Aspis was, with only reinforced cannon mountings rather than hands - much less a dedicated melee weapon - it was much better suited to that kind of brawling than the air-defense mech.

And, of course, that was Sophitia’s own specialty.

Unless Noton was a fool, or foolishly desperate, he wouldn’t be engaging at point-blank range where she could rush him. He just didn’t have the armor to trade fire squarely for more than one or two salvos, and getting under the minimum ranges of No. 2’s main weapons would put him in arm’s reach for a literal stomping.

While I was thinking and speculating, both of them were heading for the central clearing in the arena, picking entrances to peek out into the open field from - and trying to guess which their opponent would pick.

Sophitia dashed past one outward gap in the barriers at a run, torso twisted to face out into the field.

Noton had picked a closer and more obvious vantage point, and parked Legend-Killer just to one side of it, so that the mech’s legs and torso were hidden by the barrier’s protection but on arm - and both of its guns - could just peek out and fire.

The full width of the central clearing was just small enough for the 8cm laser’s focus elements to resolve their target, and even before the beam could start to melt the armor material Sophitia was throwing No. 2 into full reverse and twisting its torso into a mad kind of shimmy that tried to keep the energy weapon from landing on any given panel long enough to melt a layer. Even as she was doing that, the autocannon mounted below that laser was firing, a dozen lightweight cannon shells screaming across the distance, tracer panels built into the base of each round leaving a glowing trail through the air.

The angle Sophitia had chosen to place her torso at helped, as did the basic design of the Marauder. Standard armor composites tended to shatter like a ground car’s crumple zones when you hit them with a physical impact, including cannon shells, but an oblique enough angle could generate harmless ricochets - and the sloping fighter-jet lines of the Marauder’s torso were very oblique to threats dead ahead of the machine. Probably nearly half of the 50mm shells did no damage whatsoever as they poured off like rain - rain that stopped when the supplying ammunition cassette ran out.

The reverse of motion she’d thrown No. 2 into would carry her back into cover in only seconds, far too quickly for Noton to fire another salvo, and too quickly for me to have fired back effectively… But Sophitia identified the tiny fraction of Legend-Killer showing around cover, targeted, and fired in that tiny space of time. One PPC blast flash-welded a glowing crater of slag out of the barrier, less than a meter from the edge and the two Rifleman gun barrels that extended past it. The other streak of man-made lightning winged past the same distance outside those gun barrels, hitting nothing at all by less than the width of a hair compared to the distance between the two mechs. The first 105mm shell of her burst whanged off the top of the large laser housing, while the second two sailed safely over Noton’s head, and then both of them were gone, out of contact again.

In the viewing booth, I found myself frowning at the thermal sidebands. A stock Rifleman should have been using most of its heat capacity with even the little firing Noton had just done, but he was running as close to ice cold as an operating battlemech ever came. I was pretty sure that that meant he’d found some way to get ahold of enough freezers to refit Legend-Killer, just like Aspis and No 2 were in for. Unless he was a damned fool or he’d found a half-weight advanced engine, he wouldn’t have been able to add any more heatsinks, but doubling his capacity with the improved versions of the ones he did have would at least let him use all of his main guns at once.

That wouldn’t be good for Soph.

That was more or less how the next few encounters went - three more times Noton outguessed Sophitia, snapping a shot or two around a corner with a bare minimum of exposure and then hauling ass, and once she managed to outguess him, making Legend-Killer catch a full broadside as he rounded a corner.

That didn’t bring him down. Even a Rifleman’s limited armor could take a little pounding, and while the design wasn’t as suited to deflecting incoming fire as a Marauder’s, Noton was nearly as good at managing that as Sophitia was - and more familiar with his mount.

Though… The gore shots of the damaged plating on the jumbotrons - invisible to the two fighters thanks to their angles - looked wrong. Not like standard armor plating should, more like…

That was where. I’d seen it on some of the partially repaired mechs in the Helm Cache. That was what ferro-fibrous armor looked like after being hit.

Even with that upgrade, though, what that salvo did do was take away most of his margin for error. With the one or two shots that she’d managed to get back into him while he was sniping at her, the damage that salvo did to his armor, especially his main torso glacis, meant that the next time he took an equivalent amount of fire, it would punch through and start doing internal critical damage, knocking out vital components or weapons.

That, though, required him to make a mistake, and over the next ten minutes or so, he didn’t. I shut down the audio feed from the announcement staff. I did not need to hear them enthusing about what an ‘edge of the seat thrill’ this fight was. I was on the edge of my seat, all right - in fucking terror. Every time he got a shot in on Soph I felt like I could feel it landing against me, and the fear of what those consequences could bring was new and unpleasantly unfamiliar.

I didn’t need to worry this much on ordinary battlefields. The number of mechwarriors in a line unit who could even stay in shouting distance of either of them might have been an integer, but it was a small one. Give her even a little bit of support and she could take care of herself.

Better than I could, even with my apparent psychic bullshit.

But Gray fucking Noton was no random scrub. In another world, another timeline, he’d have ridden the same garbage battlemech Soph was fighting to hold on to the title of Champion of Solaris for seven years straight, a feat unmatched in centuries before or centuries after.

The bastard was proving it. He wasn’t any faster than she was, but somehow he always seemed to know where she planned to be, and managed to get himself there first, waiting for another cheap sniping shot. She was doing damage, too, now and again, but the rate of exchange was in his favor again.

Sophitia had to realized it, because she aborted her game of cat-and-mouse - and who was who, one wondered? - and made for a relatively secure corridor, one whose far end opened onto as much of an open sightline as she was going to get, and whose other gap was right up against the wall she’d entered from.

Then she stopped and waited for Noton to cross in front of her.

It was agonizing to watch, because from above I could see, as she couldn’t, the way Noton stopped just short of doing exactly what she wanted him to do… and then changed his mind. I’d wondered before, but now I was certain that Legend-Killer was modified in a way much more subtle than rumor had it. That maneuver made it clear that Noton had fitted the twin-barreled turret arms with mast cameras, letting him peek around the corner without ever exposing enough of the machine to make it a risk… or let his opponent notice.

I barely kept myself in my seat, rather than beating on the armorglass that fronted my box, as he took the long looping way around, circling all the way around the perimeter of the arena to finally come out behind No. 2’s unsuspecting back.

There was something arrogant, triumphant, about the Rifleman’s body language as it stepped around the last corner with every gun pointed and armed. He’d burned through seventeen ammo cassettes already, and he clearly meant to use up the last three.

Marauder No. 2 didn’t so much as twitch or shuffle its feet… But the instant the muzzle of Legend-Killer’s left-arm autocannon cleared the intervening wall, Sophitia had the mech’s own arms in motion, raising up, up, straight up…

And then the forearms kept going, tilting up relative to the upper arms so that they pointed straight back over their own shoulders.

Square at Noton.

It wasn’t the classic arm-flip that mechs like the Rifleman and Jagermech used, rotating their arm assemblies a hundred and eighty degrees on the shoulder joint. It wasn’t even something a ‘modern’ Marauder could have done; the shoulder and elbow assemblies had both been simplified to ease production during the long years of the Third Succession War, and the computer support to target that way had been a casualty of slowing clock speeds and smaller memory chips…

But No 2 was one of the very first hundred MAD-3Rs ever built, and it had all those bells and whistles included. Even if I’d have bet that Sophitia could have made it work without them.

Noton’s firing sequence started, the flaring brilliance of laser-tracers and the shooting stars of autocannon ones reaching out for No 2’s weak rear armor.

The first PPC bolt arrived, stuttered a half-second before the other to control the heat-bloom of the reactor scaling up to power it, and bored squarely into one of the holes opened by the earlier heavy salvo, burning, melting, ravaging the internal structures and machinery of Legend-Killer’s right torso. The 5cm laser winked out instantly, and the 8cm one and its matching autocannon on that side sprayed crazily and uselessly in randomized directions as the basic ground on which they depended was chainsawed out from under them.

The second PPC bolt hit the Rifleman in the other arm, actually boring up the narrow gap between the two weapons mounted there to just miss the breechblock that held them both - and the cannon’s magazine. Watching footage of it afterwards would show the way secondary arcing had actually jumped between gun barrel and particle bolt as the latter raced by, increasing fractions the intense charge of the beam grounding through the weapon and, through it, Legend-Killer’s internal structure.

More arcing found the breech, and the seven cannon shells still in its ready magazine, and touched them all off at once.

The autocannon blew up mid-burst, and took the entire arm with it.

In two shots, Noton had gone from capitalizing on a decisive advantage to losing the heaviest five-sixths of his entire arsenal, and for a second, even he could do nothing but reel in shock.

Sophitia had already started to turn towards him.

The angles meant that only one of the PPCs could bear; it hit near the hip of one leg as Legend-Killer belatedly lunged back into motion, scrambling around the corner again.

In moments, Sophitia was thundering down the same narrow slot that had recently been filled with weapon fire. I could see the faint stutter effect, the disconnect and failed timing that always started to creep in when I pushed No 2 up to EMERGENCY, running the hardware - literally running - at the very limits of what it could physically turn out, eighty, ninety kilometers-per-hour and well past what the Marauder was actually designed for.

It was a useful trick, though I was always careful to buy my maintenance crew a case or two of whatever the local brew was after doing it - and not to do it for too long, since that stutter could rapidly amplify out of control and send you to the ground in a sprawl that was at best embarrassing.

But that was me, and this was her. Soph rode the instability out with enviable grace, and as she turned the corner behind Noton in a spray of sand and skidding feet, I realized, belatedly, that she’d probably planned this out.

The distance between the position she’d been in, and the corner she was at now, was greater than the distance Noton had to cover to get out of his current corridor… in both directions.

Legend-Killer, with nowhere to go, staggered as the first salvo of autocannon fire raked across its pristine but oh-so-vulnerable rear armor, and went from that to stumbling wildly as particle beam bolts raked along its already damaged legs, almost directly underneath my booth. I could see the wild waving of severed myomer strands convulsing in the charged coronas of the PPC beams, the drunken lurching as Noton fought desperately to control his mount.

Sophitia fired again, and what was left of the Rifleman crashed to the ground, armless and with one leg a twisted, ruined wreck. The remaining leg kicked, levered against the sand.

No 2’s Whirlwind reloaded before the PPCs could cool back to firing temperature; the three 105mm shells raked brutally across the crippled mech, and I could see it shudder as the spinning wheels of the gyroscope came apart with the breach of their housing, one entire ring ejecting violently to bounce off the arena wall and carom over the barrier that formed the other side of the passage.

Legend-Killer’s last leg kicked again, shoving the torso face up and tilting it like it was trying to stand…

The ejection seat fired only a split second before the thunderbolts came, the wreck’s cockpit blowing apart in a ball of flame and letting the mechanism lift Noton himself free of his doomed partner.

The lightning consumed the rest, claiming the last armor and charring the remaining structural beams even as the reactor scrammed itself in a rush of heat-haze.

I slumped into my seat in relief.

The crowd went wild.

***

While Sophitia was training up for her big match, I had been neck deep in what felt like a hundred different major projects, and we only had time for a press conference and a single snatched night before I got pulled back into the morass.

First and highest priority, of course, negotiating with Katrina Steiner. She’d arrived in person a week ago, at the head of an awesome flotilla of dropships - four Overlords, two Achilles and four Avengers for the assault dropship contingent, and two Vengeance-class carriers. The Overlords were loaded with the prestigious 1st Royal Guards, and they and their Archon would be staying for at least a little while. The assault and carrier dropships would stay only long enough for another Achilles and Vengeance and five Avengers to arrive, before the entire cavalcade loaded up and escorted the duplicate cores to their final destinations - which I did not know, and didn’t expect to.

Speculating was easy - Tharkad and Hesperus, for two, plus probably at least one completely secret site. Possibly other industrial centers, as well. The big question was if they’d take them all to Tharkad and then parcel them out further, or run direct circuits...

Well, outside my wheelhouse.

What was my business was trying to keep on top of organizing and working up no less than three brand new battlemech regiments. The question of whether or not to hand out precious Star League gear to the two Lyran regiments already stationed on Solaris should have been a no-brainer, but one of those two was the 10th Skye Rangers, who were apparently notorious for considering themselves to be really Skye troops only seconded to the Lyran central government… unless it suited them to pretend otherwise. Worse, the 10th Skye were a substantially more elite outfit than the other local unit, the 32nd Lyran Guards. Upgrading the reliable Guards rather than the skilled Rangers would have opened substantial political trouble - so we were resurrecting the 9th Arcturan Guards and the 2nd Lyran Guards.

Who of course I’d never heard of.

Anyway. People for the 9th and 2nd were trickling in as shipping routes brought them from wherever they’d been assigned, and dropped into either the Royals from the Cache or the better ‘regular line’ mechs. All of the ones we’d seen so far were veterans, so much of their training was in working together in specific, and in learning their new rides’ strengths, weaknesses, and foibles.

And to do that, they needed to do exercises, actually getting out and stomping around the wilderness in opposition to my people, and to the other new unit forming.

See, I’d had an idea, and Generalmajor Lewiston, the commander of the 32nd, had gotten behind and pushed... Solaris had a lot of native owner-operator mechwarriors just lying around and not doing anything nationally productive besides earning tourist revenue. Few of them, though, were terribly patriotic, and the stable owners were still less so, which made recruiting from that pool of talent and hardware problematic.

The idea I’d had, was based on the realization that there had to be a system in place for maintaining and repairing the mechs of warriors who brought their own ancestral hardware to serve in Commonwealth line regiments. Lewiston had confirmed as much, so I had laid out what Older-Me remembered of the United States National Guard system, with some tweaks.

The way it worked out, the Solaris Gladiators would be specifically charged to defend Solaris against all invaders, to undergo regular military training, and to show up for testing and practice every couple of weeks to demonstrate that their skills weren’t slipping and to practice obeying orders…

And in return, they’d have access to the same spare-parts-and-repairs pipelines that line soldiers in ancestral mechs did, at the same prices that the Commonwealth military had paid to obtain the things in the first place. We’d had to include a few clauses organizing other repair work to get the larger stables to play ball, but in the end all the techs would be paid by the owners of the mechs they were working on, so it wouldn’t be costing the Commonwealth taxpayers anything beyond the part-time trickle for the mechwarriors.

It was all a bit more feudal levy than was usual in the Commonwealth - that tended to be more of a Federated Suns schtick - but it would almost certainly work.

Finally, of course, there were my people. We’d had a reserve of raw pilots, the former industrialmech operators who’d been the ‘mechwarriors’ for the Fiannese rebellion, and Solaris was a great place to recruit mechwarriors, including the dispossessed kind, so for once the problem was waiting on hardware, rather than people. So close to the Defiance plants on Hesperus and Furillo, most of what we were getting was being pulled from their lower-priority orders - though fortunately the contract dictated that the mechs we received be of the same weight-class as the Star League mechs that they were standing in for.

The state of battlemech production being what it was in this day and age, that would ordinarily have left us cooling our heels for at least a year, but with Tharkad’s authorization to pull certain  hard-to-make circuit boards from the Helm stash, they could double their production rate for at least a few years.

So instead it would take six months to raise our second mech regiment, but we’d have the first ready to roll relatively quickly. Most of what we were getting for lights were Locusts, equally split between -1V and -1S models, while the medium bracket leaned a little onto -1N Griffins over Scorpions and Chameleons.

I was pretty sure that that was just because there weren’t enough of the latter two to flog off on us, but that was alright. None of us were wild about the Scorpions, but the Chameleon was a solid performer, and so were the Zeuses and Stalkers we were getting for those bits of the assault bracket that weren’t being filled by every Banshee that Hesperus could roll out.

There’d been plenty of whining when we received our first of those, but I wasn’t on that page. Yeah, the Banshee was undergunned for a machine of its weight, but compared to our Centurions it seemed much less anemic - and much better armored. As fat troopers, we could get good value out of them.

In comparison to all of that, ordering new vehicles had been pretty simple, though the only ones that had started coming in were the Drillsons and Maxims from Skye - all the other factories were further out. Production of those was more limited by funds, in comparison to physical production ability - and crewing them was even easier. We might end up with a regiment or two fewer infantry by the time we were done, but frankly, I couldn’t regret that.

Their odds of surviving would be much higher.

The testing and exercises we’d done, serving as the Opposing Force for the 2nd and the 9th as they formed and started to work up, hilighted that in starkest terms. If that first series of exercises had been real, we’d have lost two thousand men to destroy barely more than a company of mechs.

We’d done the after action, and then I’d told their officers to put each and every man’s first round for the night on the company tab.

The morning after, I’d gone out and tracked down the best-regarded, most innovative workshop serving Solaris’s Class One arenas.

See, the gladiatorial games of Solaris divided their business into six classes - Class Six were utterly unlimited, everyone free to bring the best they had. Class Five was specific to assault mechs, Class Four to heavies, and so on down the line to Class One…

Which was specific to converted industrial exoskeletons. The closest thing the Inner Sphere of the day had to proper battle armor.

Eventually, a couple days after I got engaged, when the ink was drying on the final contract forming the Renaissance Development Group, Archon Katrina asked me about that.

“I’m told there’s a rumor that you’ve offered ten million cbills to the designer who can show you a way to let an infantry trooper beat a mech,” she said.

“The sum is right, but the other details, no,” I said. “I asked one of the local hotrod shops that specializes in exoskeletons to try and see if they could combine an NBC seal and enough armor to stop a mech-mounted machine gun, once, into one of those.”

She stopped and gave me a thoughtful look… Then looked up and told her bodyguard, “Johan, I need you to put the room into security lock, and step outside, please.”

He gave me a nervous look. “Your Highness, I cannot recommend that.”

I coughed slightly. “Hauptmann, does your working kit include handcuffs?”

Katrina frowned. “There is no need whatsoever to be so discourteous to one of my guests.”

He sighed. “Yes, Your Highness,” he said, and stepped out.

Katrina gave me a skeptical look. “Handcuffs?” she asked.

“With my hands bound, you’d almost certainly be able to evade me long enough for him to ride to the rescue,” I said.

That got an amused twitch out of the corner of her mouth, but she sat back down and - I solemnly swear I am not making this up - Gendo Posed at me. “You know a lot more than you should,” she said.

Ah.

This was that conversation. Well, I knew it had to be coming. “And Helm proves it,” I agreed. “The problem is that that fact immediately raises the question of how I know, and every answer I have is either a provable lie, or completely insane.”

She waited silently, which let me tell you was a lot more intimidating than it sounds.

I took a breath to settle myself, and started. “On the night of January first, thirty-fifteen, I had… Call it a vision, though subjectively it felt more like I was living someone else’s life in the space of one night. Including reading, and reading about, books describing real history, up to that point… and after. Showing, for instance, Mount Nagayan being discovered in the late thirty-twenties, by a completely different mercenary company. The limitations are… As far as I can tell, this was a one-off,” or if it wasn’t, the precondition might end up involving another visit to the far side of thionite’s LD80, and I’d very much rather not take that kind of risk again, “there are a lot of things that I didn’t ‘read’ the details of but have only heard about, and… Well. The usual fallibilities of human memory apply.”

“You’re not a devotee of the Church of Saint Cameron, are you?” Katrina asked.

I shook my head. “Never heard of them,” I said honestly.

“Among other things, they believe that certain members of the Cameron dynasty were divinely inspired, by visions of the future,” she said. “Their evidence, and other examples… I never gave them any credence, before. But Helm wins you…”

“The benefit of the doubt?” I suggested.

“That will do as a description. From the sound of it, though, if you’ve already changed things, your… visions… won’t update to account for that,” she concluded.

“I’m fairly sure,” I agreed. “Obviously, we can make deductions based on what they reveal, but the predictive ability is going to drop off fast - more likely, already has.”

A lifted eyebrow. “Fianna?” she speculated. “Or do you mean the cache itself and the consequences of its discovery?”

“Either could,” I said, “but I’m thinking of my fuckup running my mouth around Captain Kerensky.”

She waved a hand for me to go on.

“The Wolf Dragoons - not ‘Wolf’s Dragoons’ - are the scouting party for an invasion by the successor-culture to Kerensky’s army,” I said flatly. “And thanks to my concussed stupidity, they know they’ve been blown. The consequences of that…” I stopped, and sighed. “Okay. Background.

“When Kerensky deserted, he led his followers to a small cluster of habitable worlds about a thousand light-years coreward of the Inner Sphere, and then, being an old man, died inconveniently. The Pentagon Cluster promptly fell apart into a civil war even sharper and more vicious than the First Succession War, which eventually ended when the older of Kerensky’s two surviving sons, Nicholas Kerensky, fled the fighting and raised a force of eight hundred followers to eventually defeat and subdue every other faction.

“Nicholas Kerensky was insane. He completely reorganized the Cluster’s culture into a birth-origin caste-based system that makes New Capetown seem flexible, creating Laborer, Technician, Scientist, and Warrior castes…” I paused, a thought niggling. “...And… trader, I think? There are five. He liked fives, apparently.”

I shook it off. “Not important, not really. The entire goal of the organization was to glorify eternal bloodletting among the Warrior caste, ‘honorable battle’ without end, trying to create the perfect warrior. He organized the entire cluster into twenty Clans, setting things up so that each Clan was ruled by a Khan, elected by a quorum of-” eight hundred divided by twenty is… forty, times twenty… Oh, dammit, Asha, you’re a moron. “-the eight hundred ‘best’ warriors of the Clan, who are the only ones allowed to use surnames, ‘Bloodnames’. Twenty in each ‘bloodhouse’, taking the name of one of Nicky’s original followers. They’re also the only ones in the entire schmeer who are guaranteed to have their genes used when the Scientists cook up the next generation of warriors in artificial wombs - naturally born warriors are despised as ‘freeborn’ and are second-class at best.

“When a Bloodnamed warrior dies, the slot gets filled by a single-elimination tournament among nominees selected by the other living members of the bloodhouse from among every living warrior with genes from that house. To the death, most often. They do a lot of dueling to the death. It’s the expected response when they need to fill any position, or, escalating to entire combat formations, when one clan needs or wants something from another.

“If a Clan gets too weak, or offends someone too powerful, they can be purged or absorbed - there are eighteen right now, Clan Wolverine didn’t get entirely onboard Nicky’s abomination of a culture and were all but wiped out, and Clan Widowmaker got eaten later.”

“Wolf, Wolverine, and Widowmaker,” Katrina mused. “What are the others?”

“Umm,” I said, trying to remember. “Smoke Jaguar, Jade Falcon, Ghost Bear, Snow Raven, Steel Viper, Cloud Cobra, Star Adder, Nova Cat, Diamond Shark, Snow- No, I said them. Um. Fire Mandril. Blood Spirit. Hell’s Horses.”

I frowned, counting on my fingers.

“That’s enough to gather the theme,” Katrina said. I flushed at how amused she sounded. “So, Natasha Kerensky is a Bloodnamed descendent of Nicholas Kerensky?”

“Yes,” I said, then snapped my fingers. “Coyote, Goliath Scorpion, and Burrock. Nicky K had a younger brother, and I think that he ended up in Coyote. Anyway, the part that makes things really hard to predict is that the Clans have their own politics, and the big divide relevant to civilization is between Warden and Crusader factions. Roughly speaking, the Wardens think that when Alexander Kerensky talked about the obligation to someday return and protect the Inner sphere, he meant just that, and the Crusaders think that he was charging them to install their glorious perfection in the centers of power after putting all the ‘spheroid corruption’ to fire and sword.

“Sending the Dragoons to scout was a compromise between the factions, letting the Wardens delay the invasion the Crusaders were advocating for.”

Katrina thought fast, I had to give her that. She asked the next question directly: “How big a threat are the Clans?”

“Very,” I said. “Despite the best efforts of their leadership, they experienced a major technological renaissance during the century or so after Nicky K set up their system, and are well ahead of where the Star League was in weapon and material science fields. Energy weapons with five thirds the range of modern Spheroid production and fifty percent more damage output, missile launchers that weigh half as much, and so on. They also have access to every Warship that the SLDF took with them when they deserted. Their abomination of a social system also trains warrior children literally from the cradle, so as individual combatants they’re very capable.

“The good news, such as it is, is that deliberate erasure of records and knowledge that would conflict with Nicky K’s desired society was a feature from very early on, removing institutional knowledge, that their actual numbers are fairly small, and that their focus on dueling means that they deliberately attack targets with the smallest force they think will be practical, giving good opportunities to destroy them in detail and drastically increasing attrition even if they succeed.

“Under other circumstances, the Warden resistance to invasion would have finally failed around thirty-forty-five or so, leading to invasion in thirty-forty-eight.”

“But now the Crusaders know that they’ve been discovered,” Katrina said grimly.

I tilted one hand from side to side. “Uncertain. Clan Wolf’s rank and file are divided fairly evenly, but the high leadership that the Dragoons are reporting to, the Khan and his assistant, the saKhan, are firm Wardens, along with most of the Dragoons themselves. Original timeline, the Dragoons would have made their last report in a supply run in thirty-nineteen and been ordered to refuse all further contact and take measures to prepare the Inner Sphere for the invasion, whenever it came.”

She nodded slowly as she thought that over. “I see what you mean about uncertainties.”

I sighed. “Yeah. If Kerlin Ward keeps his mouth shut, we could have an extra ten years to prepare, plus whatever if any additional time we can gain by repairing or replacing the archive reader from Helm. If not…”

There was a longer-than-usual moment of silence while she thought. “What other threats can you tell me about?”

“However dirty you think Comstar is, the truth is worse,” I said. “They deliberately orchestrated the failure of the peace talks after the Second Succession War, and have done their very best to amplify and spread the Lostech phenomenon wherever possible. They also have a very substantial reserve of Star League hardware - call it five or six thousand combat units, split at the usual League rates between armor, mechs, and fighters - and… maybe forty mothballed warships, at asteroid bases at… Dammit, I don’t remember the numbers. Ross… 248? And Luyten something. 68-78, something double-barreled like that. Both less than fifteen lightyears from Terra… And a major shipyard in one of the moonlets around the gas giant in the Odessa system.”

Katrina Steiner went very still, as well she might, hearing that something like that was within the territory of her own nation. “Odessa? You’re certain.”

“As much as I can be without outside verification. They call it the Ruins of Gabriel,” I said. “Set up by the Terran Hegemony at the dawn of the Star League as a forward base in case they had to ‘subdue’ the Commonwealth. One of the five Hidden Worlds colonized for just that purpose. Two of them are dead, I think, but Comstar also has the last two. Heraklion, in the Free Worlds League, specializes in cybernetics, and one of the dead ones was a biowarfare research center. Dunno about the others.”

She took a deep, careful breath, and let it out again. “All right. Do you have anything internal?”

“If a viper bit Aldo Lestrade, the snake would die in toxic convulsions,” I said. “But you knew that. He’s organizing and generating a separatist movement in Skye entirely as a power play, and deliberately cultivating Frederick Steiner’s ambitions for the throne with an angle to use him as a puppet, ditto. His father’s death was by patricide, motivation ditto. But I have no way to give you the evidence you’d need to prove any of it.”

She closed her eyes. “And Frederick himself?”

“Genuinely one of the best military minds of his time. Under another name, and after a religious conversion that for once did positive things to his judgement and emotional health, a major influence for the better in the thirty-fifties and on. But politically naive, under Lestrade’s slimy-ass thumb, and deeply resentful of you personally.”

Blue eyes opened again and pinned me in place. “Give me a timeline.”

“Yes, Ma’am,” I said, and took a second to organize my thoughts. “Next scheduled event is… You’d try to organize a peace conference, end the succession wars by negotiation. Marik, Kurita, Liao, all basically answer ‘submit to us and give us your daughter’. Davion’s answer is more like, ‘Probably not, but maybe we can find common ground other places?’ That leads to an alliance treaty, signed… thirty-twenty-two. Eventually, Hanse Davion and Melissa are married to create a personal union between the Commonwealth and FedSuns - the Federated Commonwealth.”

Her lips thinned unhappily.

“All indications were that the actual marriage was a happy one,” I said, “despite the age gap.”

“Why not his heir? Morgan… Hasek-Davion?”

“I’m about to speculate, since the answer wasn’t recorded, but…” I said. “First, FedSuns law is more specific about inheritance than Lyran law, at least where the throne is concerned. Morgan is the son of an illegitimate line, and if Hanse ever does have a direct child, he’ll be passed over automatically. Second, at this point, New Avalon doesn’t really know where his loyalties lie. Because his father is basically a slightly less slimy version of Lestrade. By the time it could be confirmed that Morgan didn’t know about any of his father’s plotting, and wouldn’t have stood for it, the match was set.”

Katrina sighed. “All right. Treaty of alliance in thirty-twenty-two.”

“Once that was known, Comstar organized the Concord of Kapteyn - the other three Successor States, and themselves as a ‘neutral observer’ - to act as a counterbalance, and if possible destroy the Federated Commonwealth before it could finish forming. Rather than wait for them to strike on their own favored schedule, and lose the initiative, the FedCom started the Fourth Succession War on the day Hanse and Melissa were married.”

I had to pause and shake my head, unable to keep from smiling. “Hanse called the Capellan Confederation his wedding gift to Melissa. With Max Liao in the room.”

Katrina didn’t actually snicker, but I could tell she was at least a little amused.

“The war lasted… two or three years, I think. Moderately successful on the Commonwealth’s front with the Combine, about a tie on the Combine-FedSuns front, dead quiet on the League’s part, and… Probably the only reason there was anything left of the Capellans by the end of it is that the Suns reached the limits of their logistical chains and Comstar finally found an excuse to interdict. The Black Boxes let-”

I cut off and flinched slightly as Katrina sat bolt upright, staring at me intensely. “You know about those?”

“You - personally, I mean - found the first ones while you were incognito on the Periphery,” I said. “Omnidirectional broadcast devices that seem to work like radios in hyperspace. Slower signal propagation than HPGs and much less bandwidth, but useful for military command-and-control. At some point the Combine managed to tap them for a while, but I’m not sure when or how, especially since ComStar had no clue.”

She closed her eyes and swore for fifteen seconds straight, then opened them again and made herself say, “All right. Keep going.”

“The Interdiction meant that continuing the war wasn’t economically viable, and things settled into peace. Theodore Kurita and Comstar organized a deal where Comstar provided the Combine with downteched mechs from its stores, and the Combine granted Rasalhague independence, both because Comstar’s doctrine enshrines a perpetual centrifuge effect breaking the Sphere down into smaller and smaller feuding states, and because having a neutral Rasalhague created a buffer zone that saved the Combine having to garrison the full length of both borders.

“I… think that you nearly managed to talk the Rasalhagueians into joining the Commonwealth, before Duke Kelswa-” I literally could not remember his first name “-tried to just waltz in and take over like it was a done deal and offended the hell out of them. Some of the concessions made to try and salvage that kept him pretty much permanently pissed off until the thirty fifties.”

I frowned. “...I think that that was before thirty-thirty-nine. Might’ve been right after. Speaking of, that’s when Davion decided things were stable and prepared enough to take a stab at crippling the Combine the way the Capellans had been. The Combine managed to hang on long enough to bluff him into thinking they’d recovered more than they had and convince him to back off. You’d retired and handed things over to Melissa.”

Her lips thinned, but when I looked at her curiously, she just motioned to me to go on.

“At some point during all this, you found proof that Frederick Steiner was conspiring to take the throne, and gave him the choice between prison and a forlorn hope against the Commonwealth’s enemies - and he chose the latter. Unusually, the Combine imprisoned him rather than just killing him out of hand, and he was eventually traded to Comstar - leading to that religious conversion I mentioned. The next Primus, Myndo Waterly, is a militant, she favors scaling up the Com Guards and actually using their cached hardware over sticking with intelligence and soft power like Comstar has until now, so she appoints him as the head of the Com Guards.

“When the Clan invasion finally ends up happening, it’s bid down to four primary clans and two reserve, at three Galaxies each.”

I paused. “Umn. Clan military organization. A point is one battlemech, two fighters or tanks, five battle-armored infantry or I think twenty-five unarmored infantry. A star is five points, a nova is usually one star of mechs and one star of battle armor assigned to work together permanently - the troopers hanging on to the mechs to get around over long distances. A binary is two stars, or a trinary is three - supernova binary or trinary if it’s made up of novas. Cluster is… usually three to five binaries or trinaries, and might or might not have those from different arms. Galaxy is up to seven Clusters, and pretty much always combined arms at that level. Call it about seven hundred points per invading Clan? With Warship support.

“The primary invading clans are Smoke Jaguar and Jade Falcon, both hardcore Crusaders, Ghost Bear, who would switch allegiances from Crusader to Warden in the late thirty-fifties, and Wolf, as part of some kind of inter-clan political maneuvering. The reserve clans are Nova Cat and… Diamond Shark, I think.”

“Thirty-six regiments,” she said.

“With about a three-to-one ratio of superiority over what we’d call front-line troops,” I said.

She winced at the reminder.

“The invasion made it about two, three hundred light years into the Inner Sphere before Comstar realized that their primary objective was Terra and issued a challenge for a proxy battle… And stopped them, with the entire combined Com Guards under Frederick’s command.

“With Tamar, Rasalhague, and neighboring regions occupied, and a former Comstar Initiate on the throne of the Free Worlds League, a new Star League was organized as a defensive alliance, with First Lordship rotating periodically between each of the member states.”

She flinched instantly, and I nodded sadly. “In the event, it was the Liao that ended up abusing his position for the gain of just one nation, but it was inevitable that somebody would have. Davion died of a heart-attack somewhere during this period, and…”

I paused, mentally reviewed what I’d said, and pointed a finger at her. “Start getting cancer screenings, and stay on them. Well before thirty-nine.”

I couldn’t figure out what she was thinking behind the poker face. “Noted,” she said. “Keep going.”

“Your grandson, Victor Steiner-Davion, was a military man first, heavily involved in making the counteroffensive against the first Clan to be targeted go off effectively. Melissa served as his regent, until the oldest of his siblings, Katherine, assassinated her and seized power while he was unavailable. Katherine had more luck finding Commonwealth conservatives willing to listen to her, so she played on Lyran resentment of the FedSuns side of the union to create and take control of a secessionist movement. There was a fairly serious civil war, which ended with Katherine dead, Victor abdicating, and… One of their younger siblings in charge of the Federated Suns, I forget which, and the Commonwealth under… Adam? Steiner, I think? From Somerset.

“The counterattack against the Clans was deliberately designed to annihilate the most aggressive and brutal of the invading clans, the Smoke Jaguars, as an object lesson, by simultaneous assaults on their home and occupied territories. For what it was worth, it worked, and the political will for further invasions ended up broken.

“Once that had been done, the dissolution of the Second League and the perception of success meant that there was no more political will to finish off the rest of the Clan incursions… After the Com Guards stopped the initial waves of the invasion, there was a schism between secular and religious elements of Comstar; the former retaining Terra and the latter, under the name ‘Word of Blake’, going into exile in the Free Worlds League.

“When the Second League failed, the Word went fucking berserk, took Terra by surprise assault, and declared war on effectively everyone. They deployed every possible weapon against every educational and production facility they could reach - nukes, gas, bioweapons, even a yardship that they’d modified as an orbital bombardment specialist.”

“Just like the First Succession War all over again,” Katrina said.

“Just like.”

“Your distaste for Comstar makes sense in that context,” she admitted.

I sighed. “The Word was defeated, eventually, and things were starting to settle down again when… Something, agency and origin unknown, shut down all HPGs in the Inner Sphere. Just, they stopped working. Computer virus, jamming device, who knows. After that… just a morass of warring states and perpetual messes, up to at least thirty-one forty-five. I don’t know. I didn’t read those books.”

She closed her eyes and settled back in her seat, sighing. “Are you willing to talk to some of my specialists? Accept their help debriefing?”

I nodded, then, since she still wasn’t looking, said out loud, “Yes. Heimdall, preferably, but whoever you trust enough, including chemically assisted recall. The stakes are too high not to.”

Katrina - The Archon - opened her eyes and looked at me, inclining her head slightly. “Your service to the Commonwealth in this matter will be remembered,” she said formally, then shifted modes slightly, to something less overwhelming. “Do you have any good news for me? Additional caches due for discovery in the future?”

“Helm was the one I had the most information on,” I said, “That’s why I went straight for it. But yes, there are two others. A dead Hegemony world, called New Dallas, was discovered to have a data core in a militia bunker under its former capital, and a moon in the Aurigan Reach called... Axylus, I think.”

“The Aurigan Reach is…” Katrina said, obviously searching her memory for the referent.

“A minor Periphery state, roughly in the area between the Capellans, Taurians, and Canopians,” I said. “Axylus has a crashed Star League dropship on it that was part of a supply run to what I think was a League black research site. The Argo should have a map of that and similar sites, and access codes for its destination - and is a Behemoth-sized vessel with an onboard gravity carousel, ideal for long-term voyages and invasion support.”

She sat, abstracted, for several seconds, then nodded. “Then I believe I know what your next contract will be, after Solaris…”

She trailed off, then blinked and asked, “Before that, though, Colonel Blackwing… Why come to me, rather than one of the other Lords?”

I took a breath and let it out. “Because Janos Marik is an old man who’s ruled by his spleen, and his realm couldn’t find its ass with both hands and a compass to help. Because Takashi Kurita and Maximilian Liao are both the products of cultures that don’t deserve to survive even if I could trust them as don’t.

“I’d have gone to Davion if I couldn’t reach you, and not hesitated. Hanse Davion is just as much a ‘Successor Lord’ as the others, with all the militancy and acquisitiveness that implies, but he has a warlord’s virtues as well as their vices. He’d do.

“But he’d never think to stage a peace conference for the entire Sphere.”

Katrina looked at me thoughtfully for a few more seconds, then nodded decisively and stood up, extending a hand across the table. “Thank you - Asha. I think that I have several different missions for you that will go better if you’re… nominally a free agent, but once those are done, if you’re willing to undertake certain oaths… I believe that the Commonwealth could use a Duchess of your abilities.”

No pressure, Ash. I extended my hand and shook. “Oaths or not, if you’ve got a course to run, Ma’am, I can give you a willing horse.”

...WHO’LL KILL THE RAGING CANCER...

[Bad Moon]

I can see what you mean by Katty Steiner's convo running away from you. Good shit, but it does tend to dominate the chapter.

[Valles]

I can see what you mean by Katty Steiner's convo running away from you.  Good shit, but it does tend to dominate the chapter.

I was a little worried that it'd end up being Tedious Exposition, so I tried to keep Katrina herself reacting all through the speeeeeeech. Glad to hear it worked to keep interest up.

[Valles]

Na na na naa, na na na naa, heyyy hey-eyy, goodbye~
 

---

 
SEAL THE RIVER AT ITS MOUTH...
 

Tell The World That We Tried
A Battletech Fanfiction, inspired by Fitzgerald’s CYOA at https://imgur.com/gallery/M41mI
By Valles

 
Eleven days after my big talk with Archon Katrina, I got a phone call, one of Katrina’s personal LCAF minions asking me to ‘please hold for conference call’.
 
Flat on my back in a hospital bed with the third-worst hangover I’d ever had and a nasty tendency to go into seizures if I moved too quickly - such as falling over in one of my dizzy spells - all I could do was set the phone to AUDIO ONLY and wait.
 
“You all know each other by now,” Katrina’s voice opened the call.
 
I mumbled assent with the others. The voices were blurred, but I was pretty sure I recognized every mech regiment commander on Solaris.
 
“Ten minutes ago, LIC handed me a report that Wolf’s Dragoons have jumped into the Amity system, in full strength. They estimate, and I agree, that Marik has assigned the Dragoons to an objective raid to capture or destroy the Helm Cache.
 
“We, in turn, will have two objectives. The preservation of the Cache materiel, and the destruction of the Dragoons as a fighting force useful to the Free Worlds League. Give me your initial impressions.”
 
“We have the forces needed, but the cost will be astronomical,” was the comment from Oberst Kapoor, the head of the Gladiators. Unlike her men, she was regular LCAF and the oldest person on the call, but that was because she’d come up from the ranks after being born in Solaris City’s slums.
 
“The Dragoons aren’t bad, but most of what’s impressive about them is their size - and we’ll have them outnumbered,” argued Oberst Kohler, the 9th’s CO. He didn’t have time for me in any sense of the phrase, so I couldn’t say I knew him to speak of even with the exercise schedule our people were sharing.
 
“It would be unwise to wager the survival of the Cache on that,” Generalmajor Oberst - I could only imagine the confusion that that surname had caused while he was a colonel! - was a large, slow-speaking man, but when he did order the 2nd Winfield into motion in exercises I’d found that I tended to end up wondering what the hell had just happened. “We should begin dispersing and hiding its contents immediately.”
 
“Including offworld,” Kapoor said.
 
“There will be difficulty transporting a useful fraction in the time available, but yes,” Oberst agreed.
 
“There are about thirty artillery vehicles in the cache list,” I said, trying to ignore my stomach’s sudden rebellion. “Arrow missiles and tubes, and I know that we brought the ammo for the former, too. If we can get them into some kind of service in a week…”
 
“We have the force to stop them,” Lewiston said. “And with the amount of aero support we have, we can probably keep them from lifting again. But Wolf is an aggressive commander, not a fool. Will he stick his head in for us to bite off?”
 
“...I think I may have an idea,” said Generalmajor O’Rourke, the 10th Skye’s commander. Despite his regiment’s reputation, I’d found him easy to work with and not inclined to make difficulties.
 
“Oh?” Katrina prompted.
 

***

 
I wasn’t actually hungover, of course, though in a lot of ways it felt like it. As far as most people were concerned, I’d had a bad reaction to a painkiller taken after a fall in the mechbay. That was a little embarrassing, but slipping off of ladders and things was a well-known part of the business, so no one should question it.
 
What that story was covering was, of course, the downside of L-Stoff, the drug cocktail that LIC usually avoided using to amplify memory for interrogations or agent debriefings. Even standard length sessions - and mine hadn’t been, once they discovered that I could reel off the books and other material I’d seen verbatim - left the victim feeling thoroughly debauched for days. I wouldn’t be ready to fight again until a couple of days before we expected the Wolves to land, and this early in the process, I was stuck trying not to pout - or hurl - as Sophitia hauled me around in a wheelchair.
 
We were standing, or sitting, respectively, in the shade cast by one of the two Battlemasters we’d pulled and repainted out of their camo for this duty, their parade paint glittering back and throwing the blue sashes across their chests and angel moons on their left shoulders into vivid relief. To our right, the crowd waited in great ranks, held back by chest-high concrete barriers and the security troops on the far size. To our left, a pair of mechs from the next most senior regiment, the Solaris Gladiators, loomed over Oberst Kapoor. Her crisply perfect LCAF uniform was a dramatic contrast to the vivid flame-job on the Wolverine behind her and the four-tone dazzle pattern of the Orion on the far side of the cleared street.
 
Beyond her were the matched Black Knights of the 2nd Regiment of Winfield’s Guards, then the massive King Crabs of the 9th Arcturan, Zeuses from the 32nd Lyran Guards, the brilliant scarlet mismatch of Quickdraw and Ostroc from the 10th Skye Rangers, and only last the paired Griffins of the 1st Royal Guards.
 
The royal motorcade rolled by at a walking pace, flying cordons of dress-uniformed LCAF infantry on hoverbikes surrounding the leading lance of freakin’ Devastators, good grief. The sheer attention to detail that went into the protection detail’s maintenance was obvious in the sound of their passage - a well tuned fusion engine was always almost silent, but tank tracks squealed and rattled, metal sliding across heavy metal.
 
But not these. The only sound of their passage was a faint cruch-cruch-cruch as each individual link of track settled to the pavement and seated itself in a milimetric shifting of road grit. I wasn’t sure how they’d done it, but I knew it couldn’t have been easy.
 
The hover-limo sliding in their wake was if anything even quieter, only a hiss of air under its skirts and a faint whine of lift fans, and it looked substantially smaller - but I’d have been surprised if it wasn’t carrying at least as much armor despite its gracefully timeless lines.
 
As the Commonwealth flags fluttering from the limo’s two front corners came even with my wheelchair, I straightened as best I could and carefully lifted my arm into the salute I’d practiced with Sasagawa’s help. The Alliance Military Corps used a completely different gesture from either of the versions Older-me remembered, with the right arm horizontal in front of the chest, level with the heart, hand flat and palm down.
 
I could have learned the Commonwealth version, instead - it was pretty much the same as the SLDF and the now-long-gone United States had used, and it wasn’t like there weren’t plenty of LCAF types around to borrow - but despite the kerfluffle around my leaving, there were things about the Outworlds Alliance that were worth being proud of. I didn’t intend to forget my origin there, or to hide it.
 
The protocol types were clear; the salute started exactly when the front fender flags passed, and ended when the rear ones did. In the middle, I could clearly see Katrina Steiner in the armored limousine’s back seat, looking back out through the thing’s windows. They’d be the same polarizing sandwich composites as mech cockpits, of course, but deliberately designed to let the onlookers see their Archon in person.
 
That was important to the theater, both political and otherwise.
 
Katrina nodded to me, and then I lost sight of her as the limo slid onwards, dropping my own salute on schedule, only a few moments before I could see Kapoor render her own out of the corner of my eye.
 
In front of me, the rest of the guard company was rolling by, equally silent - a lance of brand new Sturmfeur assault tanks, basically heavy-duty equivalents of the classic LRM Carrier and only just into production, and then a lance of Von Luckner heavies.
 
Once they, and the last of the infantry, had passed, there was a whine and thump as the paired mechs of the Royal Guards advanced onto the road, turned sharply, and followed the procession, then more thudding of feet as the 10th Skye’s did the same.
 
The crowds, and their police cordon, stayed put as the rest of the assembled mechs started to filter away through safely cleared streets for the nearest ‘subway’ station.
 
I call it the subway, but what it really was was Solaris City’s answer to the real problem of moving the masses of battlemechs that were its main industry around, without stepping on anyone or blocking traffic. A series of passages, bored out of the rock and earth below the streets, so that mechs could be gotten between the arenas and various workshops without squishing something whose relatives might sue. There were entrances all over the damned city, and not a few in the suburbs and other various outskirts.
 
If I’d been feeling better, I’d have been satisfied with the way the day had gone, and helped Sophitia - or rather, the pair of infantry guys who picked me up from either side and just lifted me into the APC we’d come in - with managing the wheelchair. But as it was, all I could do was close my eyes and fight desperately to hang onto the excessive blandness that I’d had for breakfast.
 
Fortunately, someone shoved a bag into my hands before I finished failing.
 
I was distracted enough I barely even noticed the thunder the dropships lifting.
 

***

 
Solaris City was located in a floodplain valley around the namesake river, at a point where a number of different terrain types - plains upstream, intermittent swamps and lakes downstream, and just about every form of rugged in the uplands that hemmed the valley in from north and south. The city suburbs, including both Xolara proper and its usual attachments, sprawled up the hillsides and out to the east to the start of the real farmlands, while nothing but destitute Reaches lay west of the International District and its starport, along the lakesides.
 
Combined with the fact that the main warehouses where the Cache gear had ended up in Silesia, where they could be at least nominally better guarded, and it was obvious that the Dragoons would be landing somewhere east of Solaris City, upstream and on the north bank of the river, as the warehouses were.
 
That still left a considerable stretch of territory where the dropships could set down, including the smaller offchances that they’d choose to ford the Solaris River at some point, or to try an orbital drop. The lack of solid ground immediately west of the City meant that there was pretty much no chance of the Dragoons choosing to land in that direction - not and slog through first the swamp, then a city fight.
 
We had a plan for that, of course. With two weeks to prepare, there was no reason not to. But in the event, we didn’t need it; the Dragoons came down at the second of the five sites we’d estimated as most likely, having jumped into system only hours after the jumpships of the 1st Royals and 10th Skye had jumped out.
 
Sitting in No. 2’s powered-down cockpit, free of distractions and able to suck down both power and information from landline connections, I was able to follow the battle fairly closely. It wasn’t surprising that, having landed where we expected, the Dragoons followed more or less what we’d anticipated of them - they unloaded completely, pushed scout companies out in front, and started advancing, and without wasting any time about any of it.
 
On my display, the advance plotted in starts and jumps, company-icons vanishing from one position and ghosting into existence in another as the shakier infantrymen who’d been dispersed into attics and hidey-holes called in reports to the command bunker in South Silesia, letting the ratings there update the big board and matching database that was mirrored to me.
 
Out the window, soft-skinned hauler trucks and prime movers were warming up and starting to filter out of the laager, the imposing spikes of the Long Toms on their trailers waving dangerously as they got under way. They’d probably need all the time it would take the Dragoons to cover the ground to the city to reach their final firing station on the twisty hill-country lane-and-a-half roads.
 
When the Dragoon scouts hit the edge of Xolara East, they found the place empty. We hadn’t been able to start evacuating the district until after they’d jumped into the system, but with a bit of forewarning for planning, the seven days between jump point and planetside were enough to clear out all but the suicidally stubborn - and even most of them. The Commonwealth was more than willing to have such persons tossed over the shoulders of the infantry teams and carried off, if need be.
 
Anyway. Important part, the area was empty, and as the scout companies filtered in, we got our first good looks at the strength the Dragoons were bringing to the party. The sensor repeaters, and our own scout mechs, were able to get a more definite and more constant contact on them, and the full battalions advancing behind them.
 
Well.
 
I say ‘full’ battalions, but in point of fact, they were anything but. The Dragoons had done fairly well by their current contract with Marik, buying and salvaging mechs from their raids across the border into the Commonwealth, but only a couple years before they’d been betrayed while working for one of the Free Worlds League’s recurrent rebellions, and taken heavy losses. How heavy had been hard to figure out, and LIC only had good estimates of what they’d taken - enough to reconstitute an entire regiment, possibly one and a half given the ridiculous amount of support their factory station gave them.
 
That made the fact that the forces advancing on us seemed to be missing at least one mech from any given lance - and sometimes, were short entire lances - all the more significant. When the final count added up, despite the fact that they were still organized as five regiments… The Wolf Dragoons were down to less than three quarters of their nominal strength, short more than a regiment of mechs.
 
If they’d been any other unit, I’d have been licking my figurative chops, anticipating the results of being on the good end of a three-to-two advantage in frontline units - and that was just what they knew about. But despite Kohler’s confidence weeks before, and since then, I knew that the Dragoons had come by their reputation for hard fighting and hard survival honestly.
 
Still. There was nothing for it but to play the business out.
 
Sewers and water pipes weren’t lostech. Solaris City manufactured much of the piping used across the entire planet, in Montenegro district, and with a relatively modest donative to the city coffers, could easily make good any damage that might plausibly be done.
 
Such as, for instance, stuffing a fifty-centimeter culvert with military explosives, linked by over a hundred meters of wire to a clever but not all that nervy infantryman in a concrete-topped foxhole.
 
With the sonic insulation built into a Marauder’s cockpit, I couldn’t hear the distant crack as it went off, miles away, but the rising mushroom cloud was visible as a smudge down in the valley, and the icon of one of the Dragoon Riflemen winked out.
 
Seconds later, the entire advancing wavefront of Marik-purple dots stopped in place for nearly a full minute, and when they started moving forward, it was at a pace noticeably slower than before.
 
With that sluggish advance, it took several more minutes before the next mine went off, this time without generating a casualty. But that was all right. If we could take out their air defense mechs, all to the good. If not - having the possibility in their minds, gnawing on their nerves and constraining their choices was more than enough.
 
The mines weren’t set up very far in advance of the defensive line anyway. Before too long, the Dragoon advance reached into range of the tanks Suzuki had set up hull-down around the major road that was the most likely route. In the distance, the threaded lightning of PPC fire from the Pumas and several companies of Manticores was easy to make out, and the sparkle and strobe of the icons representing them on my display detailed the fire of other weapon systems, both inbound and outbound.
 
I stayed off the comm. Still barely twenty one, Suzuki was incredibly young to be holding a regimental command in a battle like this - and I was well aware of the hypocrisy there, thank you - but that was one reason among several that our armor regiment had drawn the posting it had. ‘Stand and hold’ was about as simple as combat orders got, after all, and my yammering from a distance wouldn’t help matters.
 
Watching the first couple of mechs to reach short range of the tank cordon just up and vanish as the handful of Demolishers we’d managed to get ahold of opened up reassured me, though, even though I knew that things could go very terribly wrong.
 
But not quite yet. The Dragoons pulled back, rather than press the first hard contact they’d had since landing, and on the maps I could see the firefly ranks of the other regiments swing wide and start to advance instead, looking to find out if they could flank around the fixed positions.
 
I doubted that they expected any success, which was fortunate given that Clair’s mechs were south of Suzuki’s people and the 32nd Guards were waiting to the north.
 
The question we hadn’t been able to answer ahead of time, the branching point in the plan, was whether Jaime Wolf would expand the line further to the sides, trying to find a flank to turn, or if he’d concentrate and try to punch through. The professional military consensus, IE, pretty much everybody but me, had expected that he’d go for the former, seeking to hook around and create a two-to-one fight somewhere without concentrating so much his people were tripping over each other.
 
I’d agreed happily that that would be the smart thing to do, but breaking the line would be more glorious and dramatic, and I wasn’t sure that the clan warrior lurking not far under the surface of the famous Colonel Wolf would be able to resist the drama of smashing through the opposition before him.
 
Still, it was easy enough to plan for both, so we had.
 
In the end, the old hands were right, and I was wrong. The last two regiments of Dragoons peeled out and swung around, trying to curl around the edges of the line they knew about… and found Winfield’s and the Arcturans waiting for them, as they would have been waiting to close in from the sides if Wolf had decided to go through.
 
There was a rhythm to large battlemech actions. Forces tended to clash intensely, then break apart again, both sides figuring that they had more to gain by rearming and applying new armor panels over the worst holes than by pushing their luck, and trying to find advantage by being done first and pressing in while the other was still fixing things. It was a less risky way of gaining advantage, repeated cyclically, than trying to attack without repairs.
 
But at this battle, there were still other cards to play, for both sides.
 
When the lull ended, it was with the Wolves coming in with a will, and Central Command Authority released the Gladiators to lunge forward out of their position in reserve behind Suzuki’s tanks, hurdling forwards, through and over the dug-in positions, and diving in amongst the central Dragoon regiment with a wild abandon that was very different from what I - or, we’d confirmed in practice runs, anybody else - had seen from a Lyran unit.
 
One of the standing orders for our people, regardless of regiment, had been to concentrate fire on any Riflemen or other air defense mechs in the Dragoon ranks, and almost as soon as the second full clash started, the code-word releasing our ASF forces for ground attack work came from the command bunker, streaks of motion rising from the LCAF compound, and my base on the far side of the city, and the spaceport all three.
 
“Joker, Pirate,” my radio - or the landline, rather - said, and I sat up straight.
 
“Joker, here,” I replied.
 
“We’ve sighted Zeta Battalion. They’re heading north, apparently Wolf’s committed them to try to turn the flank on the 9th. Take your force and intercept. You’ll have first priority on Ramrod.”
 
With two companies of random odds-and-ends from both the Winfields and the 9th, I’d need that.
 
“Understood, activate and proceed south to intercept Zeta Battalion. Pirate, we can delay them, but probably not for that long.”
 
“You underestimate yourself,” she replied. “But if it takes long enough we’ll pull an airstrike for you.”
 
Well, it was nice that somebody had faith, I guessed.
 
“Understood, we’re on our way. Joker, out,” I said, then flipped channels to the detachment channel. “All right, boys and girls, wake ‘em up. Wolf has sent Zeta Battalion to try and turn a flank, and we’re nominated to stop them.
 
I hit the switch. “Panzers on Russian soil, a thunder in the east,” the cockpit voice address Vocaloided.
 
“One million men at war,” I replied, hoping the robot’s random choice of song was a good omen, “the Soviet wrath unleashed.”
 
The displays lit up in a flash. “Reactor, Online,” the computer said. “Sensors, Online. Communications systems, Online. Weapon Systems, Online. All functioning systems, nominal.”
 
Marauder No. 2 lunged into motion as I threw the throttle all the way forwards. It would take several seconds for the two companies with me to process their orders, power up, and fall into formation, but from our vantage just over the last hill before the floodplain, we had at least a ten minute run…
 
At sixty-five kph, anyway. Which was the all-out best No. 2 could manage, and there were literally only two mechs in the rest of the team that couldn’t cruise at least that fast. (Fireflies, for the record.) They’d need to push up to their own max to catch up, but with a twenty-kph advantage over me, they wouldn’t have much trouble doing that. The limiting factor on our ability to get into position as needed would be my mobility, so I needed to move as efficiently as possible.
 
Which wasn’t ideal from the perspective of trying to organize and command, but you did the best you could with what you had.
 
It wasn’t ten minutes before we ran into Zeta, though. It was three, and they’d been running radio silent and passive only, delaying our ability to pick them up until we were - figuratively speaking - right on top of them.
 
The pointman of our little column copied his comlink to the artillery parks set up behind the lines onto our force channel. “Ramrod, this is Joker 20, adjust fire, over.”
 
The few mechs that hadn’t already passed me kicked their speed up and bolted by, ECM-equipped cover mechs tucking themselves in next to the TAG carriers just like we’d coached them to do in planning.
 
“Joker 20, this is Ramrod 7, adjust fire, over.”
 
The repetition of each stage of the process of calling for artillery support by both sides was a feature, not an annoyance. It made sure that both sides of the conversation were saying and hearing the same things.
 
“Grid Baker-X-ray 100, over.”
 
The military reference coordinate system for Solaris started with the Solaris City spaceport, so we were still very low in the sequence.
 
“Grid Baker-X-ray 100, over.”
 
The average building height out here in the surburbs was low, one and a half or two stories at most. When I turned the corner of the big-box store, I could see the heads and upper shoulders of Zeta Battalion a kilometer or two away, already turning towards us.
 
“Battlemechs, 23 assault, 10 medium, in the open, over.”
 
Despite the battle going on, they looked almost pristine, the only damage to their armor the distinctive vertical slashes of a strafing pass. Had Wolf held Zeta back completely until now? It’d explain why they’d made it all the way here, to the far end of the line, so quickly, despite being slowed by things like Atlases and Awesomes. They’d done the entire distance at a run, without stopping to fight anybody.
 
I didn’t see any of the Dragoons’ signature Annihilators, though. Small blessings.
 
“23 assault mechs and 10 medium mechs, in the open, out.”
 
Despite Zeta’s reputation as a purely assault-weight formation, they did field mechs that weren’t in the eighty-to-one-hundred ton bracket - a company of lighter, faster designs that could serve as scouting forces for the battalion’s main hitting power.
 
“Ranging Arrow X-ray in effect, total four, over.”
 
Of course, any of those ‘scouts’ were still heavier and harder-hitting than any mech in our force but mine, but the plan had been to just hang out, dancing outside their weapons’ effective range but close enough to observe the fall of artillery.
 
“Ranging Arrow X-ray in effect, total four, out.”
 
‘X-ray’ - a phonetic translation of the letter X, for high-eXplosive - was the basic ammunition type the SLDF had used for their Arrow IV launchers, which meant that we had found plenty of it in the Helm cache, and in turn that it was a good choice for the ranging shots the artillery battery would use to determine if they were hitting the right post-code.
 
“Shot, over.”
 
Naturally, that plan didn’t work out. A lot of assault mech designs carried long-range missiles, and Zeta was happy to demonstrate that, in the terrain we had, it was hard to stay in sight but out of range of those - and their escorts were spreading out and bounding forward, eager to either push us out of sight of their heavier friends or to mix it up directly.
 
Besides, several of our mechs, not counting me, had no speed advantage on the Dragoon mediums.
 
“Shot, out.”
 
The distance artillery shots could travel meant that, no matter how fast a shell or missile was going, flight time was going to be a real factor. Even though Ramrod’s batteries were set up a relatively short distance behind the lines, there was still a perceptible pause between the announcement that the shots had been fired and the five-second warning before they landed.
 
“Splash, over.”
 
Several of the Dragoon mediums were trying to concentrate their fire on a Phoenix Hawk from the 2nd. I lumbered into range of the nearest, drew a bead, and connected with one of the PPCs on the first salvo.
 
The Wolverine I was firing at - I guessed that the pilot was a Spheroid recruit rather than an original Dragoon that would have refused to accept the thing based on its name - recoiled and sprayed a burst of autocannon fire in my general direction - and then another.
 
“Splash, out.”
 
I fired again myself, right arm, then left, but focused on the Griffin next to him. Neither of the PPC bolts hit, but the mech turned towards me anyway, which was good.
 
My job was to tank the aggro, not to kill them.
 
A moment later, the four dark darts of the Arrow missiles themselves flashed in from our right and landed a block or so away from the main central body of the Zetas. The explosions shattered glass around me, and raised a great pall of dust and smoke into the air, and I could see one taller assault mech, closer to the blasts than the rest, stagger slightly.
 
“Direction twelve hundred, left seventy five, drop two hundred and fire for effect.”
 
Our artillery-whisperer’s voice was grimly satisfied as he read the direction out.
 
I put most of my attention on the slow swing of my targeting controls across the enemy lance, hitting the Wolverine and missing the Griffin again, and raking the autocannon burst that went with those blasts across the chest of the Dervish that had just turned the corner.
 
“Any TAGs, Joker 20?”
 
Despite the professionalism, I could tell that that question from the artillery director was one he wasn’t used to asking. Which was only to be expected; after all, until we’d pulled some from the Helm cache, the only Target Acquisition Gear sets in the Inner Sphere had been in Comstar’s hands, far out of the reach of the Lyran military.
 
“Count seven.”
 
On the other hand, one of the two criteria used to select mechs for this little raiding party I’d been put in charge of was that they had built-in TAG capability - and the other was the ECM gear that could disrupt Dragoon sensors to let them get into range.
 
And they did need to be closer than you’d think; while modern battlemechs had lost the ability, Star League hardware had been able to identify and disrupt simple laser guidance, forcing TAG systems to use synchronized multi-modal guidance that needed to be within a fixed distance to stay synchronized.
 
Overall, definitely a system with room for improvement, but also better than what anybody else had right now.
 
“Serving Arrow Hotel in effect, total fourteen. Serving Arrow X-ray in effect, total twenty-six, over.”
 
Each TAG set could guide in one Homing Arrow at a time, so there could only be that many in the air in each wave. Since we’d found twenty Arrow platforms, that left thirteen high explosive missiles coming down at the same time. Two waves of missiles would be… well, we’d see.
 
“Serving Arrow Hotel in effect, fourteen. Arrow X-ray, twenty-six, out.”
 
My tactical map display was getting all the data fed from the rest of the flying companies, of course. I could see the LRM carriers in Zeta’s remaining assault companies fall silent, and I was willing to bet money that the only reason they’d do that would be to synchronize their fire, focusing it on particular targets.
 
That wouldn’t do.
 
“Shot, over.”
 
Unfortunately, I didn’t have line of sight on them - the way the street plan was laid out, there was a row of houses between me and them, and the Marauder’s design had been created with the intent of aiming its PPCs at armor or the like in an open field, not firing over things. I probably could have lifted the arms up, but it was easier to...
 
“Shot, out.”
 
Heavy industrial buildings in the thirty-first century were built to stand up to mechs, often by mechs - thick, massive walls, reinforced roofs that could support the weight of a jump-jet mech landing on them, and the like. Homes, like the ones around me… Not so much.
 
I swerved left and swung one arm up in front of my cockpit, then just waded straight through the row of brick and wood-frame houses, letting masonry and ruined splinters cascade off. The state of their exteriors made me think they hadn’t been inhabited even before the district was evacuated.
 
“Splash, over.”
 
On the far side, I could see the first cluster of LRM mechs I was looking for - an Atlas, an Imp, and a pair of Awesomes, both -8T models with missile racks in their shoulders and 8cm lasers in their arms.
 
They reacted, as far as I could tell, instantly to my Kool Aid Man impression, lashing out at me with PPCs and lasers from the Imp and Awesomes. All four mechs flushed their missiles, but it was obvious even from the moment of launch that the LRMs weren’t tracking, just arching towards a fixed point like unguided rockets. I advanced under them, firing back at the three mechs whose energy weapons could reach me. The Atlas I ignored, though the way it was starting to lumber forward made it clear I couldn’t forever.
 
“Splash, out.”
 
The Atlas tried again with its missiles; the other three didn’t, and I jinked back into the houses to make it harder for them to try laying their guns by eye, taking out three in a long sideswipe and stepping out before firing back again. I didn’t hit a damned thing, of course - I didn’t really expect to, after missing two of my shots against them earlier - but then again, I didn’t need to, did I?
 
I was lining up to fire again when the first missile landed, off to my left yet again, then another out of sight somewhere ahead. More fell, like the climax of a fireworks display, and then two, towards the end of the first barrage, landed short enough to see directly. The first fell in a building behind the advancing Atlas, making the assault mech stagger forward one step as a spray of disintegrating shards of wood and plastic and masonry rained past it.
 
The second landed on the Imp, flashing in from above and knocking the walking stormtrooper helmet forward and clean off its feet with a smash. The Awesomes, standing literally next to the thing in the relatively tight confines of the street, flinched back from the blast but were definitely still combat capable.
 
I dropped my crosshairs onto the fallen Imp, the armor across its top surfaces both stripped away and exposed by the way it had fallen face down, and poured all three big guns into it. Moments later, my HUD carats winked out as the pilot or automatic systems put the reactor into crash shutdown.
 
In the split second between waves of missiles, I glanced at my map display. All but one of the hostile icons were flashing to indicate they were taking fire, and as I watched several winked out, including six of the mediums.
 
This was really closer to arriving artillery than I wanted to be, to be honest, but there was nothing I could do about it either way now.
 
I throttled up, in time with the Atlas breaking out into an all out run towards me and away from the place the artillery had already hit, and fired past the skull-faced monster at the Awesomes as they turned and waded through the same row of houses I’d already assaulted, either trying to find the mechs that had called fire on their medium-weight friends or just to get away themselves without having to show their rear armor to me.
 
More artillery missiles started arriving, and the Atlas cut loose with its autocannon and arm-mounted lasers, streams of Marik-purple tracer light and flashing shell illuminators visible outside my cockpit and missing entirely as I angled a little to the right, but held my fire. I didn’t want to ram a freakin’ Atlas, after all, and in just a moment, we’d pass each other and…
 
The Atlas driver realized what I was trying and tried to turn himself, twisting his machine at the waist to pull his back away from me… But at this range, I could make a ninety-degree swerve, No 2’s clawed feet ripping chunks from the pavement for traction, and get ahead of his turn, twisting myself to unload a full alpha strike into the rear armor that had already been ravaged by that artillery blast.
 
“Hold X-rays, repeat Hotels, over.”
 
The Atlas pilot didn’t stick around to see if I could repeat the salvo and finish him off; a blast panel on top of the skull-dome of its head went flipping away and an ejection seat rocketed into the air after it. I turned back south and checked my map again. The second wave of missiles had been noticeably more effective; the rest of the mediums were dark, and what looked at a glance like about four of the assaults had followed suit - besides the two I’d scavenged.
 
“Serving Arrow Hotel in effect, total fourteen, over.”
 
A Sling, a 25-ton light and one of our TAG carriers, hurdled the line of half-ruined houses on my right with screaming jump jets, followed by others. A glance confirmed that the Awesomes that had headed that way had succumbed to homing rounds, so I turned left as I advanced.
 
“Serving Arrow Hotel in effect, total fourteen, out.”
 
Closer to the center of the Zetas’ formation, where the High Explosive blasts had overlapped, there wasn’t much in the way of even visual cover left. I could easily see several wrecked assault mechs slumped in the cratered ground or between the shattered shells of homes, and the movements of a nearly stripped Battlemaster trying to pick itself back up attracted attention from more than just me.
 
“Shot, over.”
 
The crossfire of damage types ripped away at what protection it had left, and all but immobile, its pilot could do nothing to dodge. The Sling’s LRMs landed in the gaps and set off a massive orange fireball as the Battlemaster’s SRM ammo brewed up and blew half its torso apart.
 
“Shot, out.”
 
Another Awesome, this one the standard -8Q with three PPCs and basically nothing else, swung around to face us - and then paused visibly as it oriented on me. I said hello with a pair of lightning blasts of my own. That made the Dragoon pilot fire back, but he missed to both sides of me, even the center shot of the barrage going high.
 
“Splash, over.”
 
My second salvo ripped the last of the Awesome’s torso glacis away even with one of my PPCs missing; I moved on to another target and left it for the missile carriers. Out of the corner of my eye I could see the contrails starting to reach for it.
 
“Splash, out.”
 
A Zeus, its left arm and the autocannon mounted there hanging limp and useless, volunteered itself with a blaze of laser fire and roar of missiles at one of my lights. Aiming at a target faster and more agile than the Awesome even though it was the same weight, this time I missed with the cannon as well as one of the PPCs, but the shot that did hit amputated the crippled arm and made the mech stagger as its pilot tried to recover.
 
From off to one side, a pair of PPC bolts streaked by me. I ignored them; their owner was shooting at me rather than the vulnerable lights I was supposed to protect, that meant I didn’t need to do anything to adjust his behavior.
 
(Inside my skull, a not-so-tiny part of my mind screamed.)
 
I fired again, this time missing with the cannon and hitting with both PPCs, ripping open the rest of the Zeus’s torso and most of the matching armor. Behind it, and out of my peripheral vision, I could see the first wave of incoming seeker missiles arrive, a Stalker dropping like a string-cut puppet as a missile landed squarely on its cockpit from above and a Banshee reeling and starting to turn, raising its arms in a protective gesture as another slammed into its rear armor.
 
A third salvo into the Zeus dropped it, a cannon shell reflecting off of the now wrecked housing of its 8cm laser and piercing into the spinning gyroscope assembly.
 
Nine left, including, still, that Awesome I’d fired at earlier.
 
One pilot, smarter or at least less brave than his fellows, punched out, his Highlander crumpling behind him.
 
I picked one of the remaining two Battlemasters and opened up on it as the missiles came in again. This time, I had the angle to see five of the battered survivors fall under the seeking hammerblows. More beams than just mine reached out for the Battlemaster, and it took three steps into the rain of fire, its PPC reaching back and for the first time in the engagement managing to actually hit me before it succumbed to the fusillade.
 
Two left - and then, shortly, none, as first one, then the other, bailed out.
 
“Ramrod, Joker 20. End of mission. Thirty-three mechs destroyed. Thanks for the backscratchers, over.”
 
I slowed Marauder No. 2 to a halt and sighed, letting the tension flood out of my body as I reached for a water bottle.
 
“Pleasure doing business with you, Joker. End of mission, thirty-three mechs destroyed, out.”
 
I took a pull of the bottle and keyed up a medium-priority channel to command. “Pirate, Joker. Zeta Battalion destroyed.”
 
The line opened immediately, though at first just to the static hash a firing PPC made of a radio transmission. “-ker, Pirate. Losses?”
 
I was already looking at the displays. “Average State 9, one at 3. You were right and I was wrong, Boss. Where next?”
 
“Landing site Baker.” The signal vanished into static again, then came back. “They’ll be Charlie-Love-George-” Combat Loss Grouping, State 0, where all the armor ran out and it was run or die, “-by the time they break through Force Bruno, but they’re doing it and we’re not going to stop them. I didn’t think it was possible.”
 
“Understood,” I said, and opened an additional channel, letting Pirate hear when I gave the order. “Joker 13, I want you to detach your company and get eyes on Site Baker as soon as humanly possible. I’ll follow with the rest as we can.”
 
“Yessir, detach Company Two and head to Baker. Should we call fire when we get there?” When we’d set this scout wing up, the slower mechs had been dropped in with me in the first company, and the faster ones pushed over to the second.
 
“Joker 13, Pirate Actual. Report to me by direct line at that point.” Her voice was iron with authority and focus, despite the fact that I knew she was engaged in combat at that moment.
 
“...Understood!” the man’s voice sounded almost overwhelmed, but it was obvious he’d do it or die trying. “Joker 13, out.”
 
The subchannel closed, and Pirate went on, “That was a good thought.” Static. “Back them up. Pirate, out.”
 
And we were off to the races, me with half my attention on the strategic maps as we crashed through the remaining suburbs and out into the open farmlands. Company 2 was already almost out of sight ahead of us by the time we were free of the city, and I came very close to telling the rest of 1 to leave me behind, too.
 
But in the end, it wouldn’t have changed anything, so I didn’t.
 
There were a horrifying number of missing or red-ringed icons for the infantry teams, but it was obvious from the shape of the battle that they’d done their job while I was focused down on Zeta.
 
The plan had been for them to reveal themselves and start pouring shoulder-fired SRMs and other support weapons into the Dragoons at the same moment that the aero arm’s bombs and strafing attacks went in, and for the mechs to push simultaneously. The more different kinds of threats they had to deal with, the worse they’d be at dealing with any given one of them - and the more likely that even elites like the Wolf Dragoons would succumb to the simple panic of confusion. In the center of the battle front, Suzuki’s tanks would have added yet another point of stress to that list, and so would the lighter tube artillery set up behind the lines.
 
Once the Dragoons started to break in the center, or so the theory had went, the tanks would pull out of cover and start sweeping outwards to the sides, while Force Bruno emerged from where its mechs had been hunkered in the underground passages that Solaris City had extended all the way to the edge of the farmland - behind where the main battle line had been drawn - or sitting waiting in the Solaris River itself.
 
But, while the Dragoons were broken and running, the fact that the plan hadn’t worked completely was obvious in the infantry’s casualties, in the low armor state for the mechs of Force Anton, and in the fact that most of the tanks that should have been scuttling underfoot were instead right in their starting positions, ringed in the red or yellow of crippling and immobilizing combat damage. They weren’t dark, so the crews were alive and almost all of them would be repairable, but…
 
Bruno, obviously including Pirate herself, were square in the path of the retreating Dragoons, and reaping a toll on every mech that tried to pass them, but the number of mechs that just broke past them and kept going, even at the price of any kind of cohesion or organization, made it clear that they weren’t going to stop anything without actually killing it.
 
The Dragoon landing site was east and north of the battle site; they’d hooked around the hills to reach the city, and our course was the most direct possible beeline. With the shorter distance, it was possible that I’d beat most of them to the dropships…
 
And certain that the second company would.
 
I figured that that would be the end of my direct contributions to the battle, but before too much longer a call from one of Pirate’s bunker’d staff members had us angling to the east instead, moving into the path of the shattered deluge and taking occasional potshots at the faster-moving ones.
 
Soon enough, though, the key hallmarks of the particular company we’d been diverted to intercept, based on aero recon, were visible. Kerensky’s signature black Warhammer, badly battered but still ready to fight. Two Phoenix Hawks, one… odd-looking, and limping as it moved. A Stinger, miraculously untouched. A Cyclops that looked like it had already had enough for the day, thank you.
 
And two Archers, one of them missing an arm.
 
Best guess - all that was left of both the Black Widow Company and Wolf’s command element was right in front of me.
 
I upped the display zoom and took a closer look at the intact Archer, and didn’t find any Alpha Regiment markings. So I dropped the comlaser on the damaged one, and opened the channel.
 
“Hello, Colonel Wolf,” I said.
 
“...Blackwing, isn’t it?” he answered after a moment, the scratch ‘company’ around him spread out for battle.
 
“Speaking,” I confirmed. “If you’ll hold a moment, I’ve been asked to connect you to the top of our chain.” I knew that Pirate was already waiting for the call, after all.
 
“By all means,” he said, just as though his day wasn’t already one of the military disasters of at least the decade.
 
The way his mech twitched at the next voice he heard, though, made it clear that his cool wasn’t complete.
 
“Colonel Jaime, this is Archon Katrina Steiner. Your forces are badly damaged and in rout, and mine hold complete air superiority. Our artillery commands the positions of your dropships and all of their approaches. You cannot prevail, and you cannot escape. Regardless of your decisions now, your service to House Marik - or any other enemy of the Commonwealth - is ended.”
 
Wolf’s voice was full of realization; I could almost imagine him following the entire logic chain of just how - and how badly - he’d been set up. “You never left Solaris at all. The dropships were empty.” The dropships were empty, the mechs present the entire time. Landing sites calculated and planned for in advance, the battle site chosen with care and utterly malicious aforethought. Infantry, and armor, and artillery, and air support, all waiting and ready.
 
“Yes, Colonel. They were no more than a diversion, to convince you to move forward after our agents detected your arrival in Amity.” Despite the fact that she had to - had to - be feeling smug as hell, Katrina’s voice was gentle, sympathetic.
 
“You will not escape. You will not thwart House Marik’s enemies. You will not report again to Clan Wolf. All you can do, is decide what is left to your men.”
 
There were several seconds of silence as Wolf processed the revelation in that statement - that Katrina knew everything. “And what options have you left us, then?”
 
“You may choose to die, if that is your wish. You may choose to surrender into quiet retirement, subject to certain questions within the laws of war and guarantees that you remain retired. Or, if you prefer, you may wear two strands in the service of the Lyran Commonwealth. In fifteen years, those of your men who survive that service will be Lyran heroes, and acclaimed and rewarded as such.”
 
“Colonel Blackwing learned nothing at all from SAFE, did she,” Wolf said, his voice too certain to be a guess. Katrina had shown too many cards for the Free Worlds League’s intelligence service to have caught without completely turning someone in the Dragoons’ inner circle - and he would likely have known already if that happened.
 
“We have other sources,” Katrina agreed. But she also added, “In other circumstances, I would prefer to allow you to consider matters, and make your peace with them in your own time. But the battle remains in progress. I must have your answer, Colonel Jamie.”
 
“...You even know what a Bloodname is, don’t you.” A second, two, of more silence. “Very well, Archon. Your victory is complete.”
 
“NEG! Neg, dammit! ‘Those who break faith with the Unity shall go down to the darkness!’” Natasha Kerensky’s voice snarled - or sobbed. It was hard to tell which was more prominent, grief or rage, but either way it didn’t interfere with her aim. She turned and put her Warhammer’s full battery into Wolf’s Archer, dropping the already damaged machine in its tracks.
 
“Fuck!” I yelped, and opened fire on her, followed seconds later by the rest of my company.
 
Kerensky dodged, of course, but compared to what I’d seen from her on Fianna it seemed stilted, almost pro-forma. Like she wasn’t actually thinking about it, wasn’t working at it, just letting her instincts process the need automatically. With her Warhammer running hot from the alpha strike, she couldn’t use either of her PPCs safely - but the shorter-ranged battery lashed out at Wolf’s fallen mech again, ripping half the torso open.
 
One of the Dragoon mechs, the normal Phoenix Hawk, fired at her, moments before my own weapons could finish cycling again.
 
I had time to start wondering if the black mech would ever go down before the Cyclops that had been at the back of the Dragoon party finished swinging around and brought its 165mm to bear, and then, finally, under the hammer of those heavy shells, Kerensky fell.
 
“What the hell just happened?” Katrina was snapping as my focus widened away from the fight again.
 
“Kerensky wasn’t the surrendering kind,” I answered. “Colonel Wolf, are you there?”
 
“Captain William Cameron here, Colonel, Archon.” The Cyclops lifted an arm, almost waving. “My readouts show that the Colonel is still alive. I am his communications officer. With your permission, I will pass on the surrender order.”
 
“Please do, Captain. There have been enough lost for one day. And Kerensky?”
 
I zoomed in on the fallen Warhammer. “I doubt anyone could survive that,” I said.
 
Later, I would kick myself for that choice of words.
 

...TAKE THE WATER PRISONER...

[Bad Moon]

The first section had me real confused as I'm not hot on Solaris geography so I thought that Asha was off planet.

And I'll repeat what I said in SV.

Goddamit Asha.

What possible trouble could Natasha Kerensky get up to on the streets of Solaris?

Goddammit Asha.

[classicdrogn]

So on a scale of "bring a whistle and some pepper spray" to "turn around and grab your knees and count to ten," how well can Natasha Kerensky emulate Natasha Romanova after getting her ride shot out from under her?

[Valles]

So on a scale of "bring a whistle and some pepper spray" to "turn around and grab your knees and count to ten," how well can Natasha Kerensky emulate Natasha Romanova after getting her ride shot out from under her?

About two thirds of the way up, maybe half if, as she is, she's having a really bad day. It'll be a while before Natasha returns to the notice of the worlds rather than just running through the underworld, trying to survive.

The first section had me real confused as I'm not hot on Solaris geography so I thought that Asha was off planet.

And I'll repeat what I said in SV.

Goddamit Asha.

What possible trouble could Natasha Kerensky get up to on the streets of Solaris?

Goddammit Asha.

Honestly, most of the geography there was me making shit up. We really don't know much about the area around Solaris City - we have a general overview of the planet Solaris, and enough partly conflicting maps of the city proper to have an idea of its layout, but the terrain of the area? Nope. I was just running off the fact that apparently Solaris City was original founded around a battlemech testing facility, which made me think that they'd want to have lots of different kinds of terrain relatively close at hand. Hence, hills, swamps, plains, and outright mountains.

[Valles]

FILL THE SKIES WITH SCREAMS AND CRIES...

Tell The World That We Tried
A Battletech Fanfiction, inspired by Fitzgerald’s CYOA at https://imgur.com/gallery/M41mI
By Valles

I don’t remember much about the award ceremony itself. Bits and flashes, yes. The way the spotlight placement stabbed one of the highbeams right into my eyes during Katrina’s opening speech. Thinking how glad I was that I’d gone with the miniskirt option when we were throwing together the dress uniform design, because of the way it kept my legs cool. Being momentarily blinded by the reflection off the literal twenty-pound hammer of solid sterling silver handed to the major who’d ended up running the artillery park for the battle.

Tying the shimmering black eagle feather to the staff of our equally-hasty regimental flag, and feeling the hammer of my people’s cheers.

But honestly? Most of my attention was on not messing up, and stayed that way through most of the party afterwards. I’d been jittery and out of sorts all day, the hair on the back of my neck standing up perpetually.

Given that I ended up getting literal proof that that was necessary, and that with Older-Me’s habit of freezing and going blank when confronted too sharply picked a miserable time to remind me that it wasn’t entirely gone, I needed all that attention. And needed rescuing, though fortunately Sophitia was happy to volunteer.

Around the time I calculated we could finally make an early night of it, an Archonal Security Detail goon slipped by and whispered that My Presence Was Requested. Sophitia waved off my apologies and leaned against the wall next to the door guards, and I went through the frisk and inside to find Her Highness standing, not quite squared off, with a man I didn’t recognize.

Tall, underweight, great big beak of a nose, hair and beard alike uncut. He was dressed in a set of aggressively plain - actually, I think they may have been outright Plain Dress - slacks and white shirt, a bit large for him, and an open leather jacket with the double-breasted cut fashionable for Lyran mechwarriors, which was really too big for him. I thought he was probably somewhere in his forties.

I knew what he saw looking back - a pretty coed, short, grey eyes, black hair back in a ponytail, in the low boots, leggings, miniskirt, double-breasted jacket and duelist’s cape I’d settled on for the unit’s uniform. When I’d flat-refused to add enough gold braid for the designer’s taste, he’d turned around and suggested that the ‘general officer’ version reverse the basic color scheme. Sophitia’s happy agreement had doomed me to wear white with a black shirt, rather than the other way around.

When our eyes met, there was… I don’t even know how to describe it. A sense of mutual awareness, of measuring, and the threat of lethal violence held just slightly in the wings.

I realized, belatedly, that I’d fallen into a ready stance, feet spread, hands up - with the little cape tossed back over that elbow.

“It is you,” he said.

“The hell?” I asked.

Katrina turned so that she could look at both of us. “Asha Blackwing,” she said, gesturing first to me, then to him. “Morgan Kell.”

...oh.

I straightened, lowering my hands, and gave the right side a little tug to get the cape to fall right. “A pleasure to meet you, Colonel Kell,” I said.

“Likewise,” he said, and extended a hand to shake. “A pleasure, Generalmajor Blackwing.”

I accepted the handshake, of course. And, since I didn’t feel like explaining that I’d set up ranks I’d never expected to use as part of a Battlestar Galactica reference, or what Battlestar Galactica was, I didn’t correct him about the rank.

Even as obviously wrecked as he was, Kell was still stronger than I was just on the basis of sheer size, so it was fortunate that he wasn’t a knuckle-crusher. Not that I’d’ve expected him to be, from what I knew of the man.

Kell didn’t wait for Katrina to make whatever followup to the introductions she’d planned on. He leaned forward, expression desperate. “How do you stand it?” he asked.

I blinked at him. “Huh?”

He whirled away in frustration, pacing back towards the conference table that dominated the room. Off to the side, I could see Katrina giving him a look that mingled concern and irritation. “Knowing!” he said. He paused, rubbing his hands up and down the opposite upper arms for a moment like he was freezing cold, then turned back to see my expression still blank. “We’re not warriors any more,” he said. “What we can do, what we are. We push our souls out into the world and rip away life. No contest, no challenge, no justice. Just murder. Monsters.”

Well, that made more sense as a concern, at least. I glanced at Katrina out of the corner of my eye, but didn’t ask permission before I sat down, sighing. “Colonel Kell, war is murder,” I said.

“Not like this!” he snapped desperately, and started to go on, then stopped, closed his eyes, and instead said, “Not with the entire universe going to sand under my feet. Fairy tales turning real, reality turning fairy tale…”

I sighed again. “I don’t have an answer that will help you,” I admitted. “Because my world went crazy years before I ever set foot on Fianna. Finding out I had psychic powers on top of that wasn’t a big deal, after I’d already had to deal with that.”

“I haven’t briefed him yet,” Katrina said, “but I’m planning to.”

Morgan took a step forward. “Please. At least tell me how you dealt with that,” he - there was no other word for it - begged.

I thought for a second about how to put it. “I read a story once,” I started. “About a student who goes to a buddhist monastery seeking enlightenment. Before too long, he meets a monk carrying a yoke of water and asks him if he’s had any success in seeking enlightenment. Monk says he reached enlightenment two years ago. Excited, the student asks how he did it-”

“Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water,” Morgan said softly when I paused to remember the exact phrasing I was looking for. “After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.”

Ah, he knew that one. “Yeah,” I agreed. “I kept my mind on other things, practical and urgent and distracting ones, until the back of my brain could process things.”

Morgan Kell looked flatly terrified at the thought, but nodded. “I… suppose that that’s what I’ll have to try,” he said.

“I’m glad to hear that, Morgan,” Katrina broke in, making both of us look over at her. “Because I have a job for both of you.”

***

Eight months and a shedload of hyper jumps later, Hanse Davion looked around my little office aboard the Polar Express thoughtfully, taking in the mess of papers, noteputers, and two-week-old New Years 3019 decorations, then accepted the seat I offered him at the table I’d had set up. “And now,” he said, “come the parts of the contract negotiations you think would be better kept secret.”

Setting this meeting up was, of course, the job that Katrina had had for me. She’d had her minions manufacture a new identity for what was left of her old friend - you couldn’t top ‘Owning the real records’ for fake ID purposes - and had a different set cook up a batch of fake intelligence and signposts thereof that could justify my running to ‘sell’ directly to the First Prince himself.

I stayed standing, and gestured to the third of the four people in the compartment, who had waited until Hanse sat to follow suit. “Actually, this is for his benefit - and yours. Captain Gars, please permit me to properly introduce Commander Morgan Kell-”

Hanse’s bodyguard, standing ready next to the hatchway, stiffened. As well he might, given that Morgan had been going by Till Solih basically since his arrival on Solaris.

I kept talking as smoothly as I could. “-Ambassador Plenipotentiary of the Lyran Commonwealth.”

Hanse went still.

I picked up the manila envelope on my desk and handed it to the guard. “And, having performed that introduction and handed over his formal credentials, my role is done.”

I turned and bowed. “With your permission, your highness?”

A wave of his fingers sent me out, and for lack of anything more productive to do, I went to get a coffee.

As a Monarch class, Polar Express had started life as a second-tier passenger liner, the spacegoing, long-haul equivalent of a twenty-first century airliner. Even before being converted to hold several regiments of infantry she hadn’t been the first height of luxury, but the fact that her passengers were expected to live aboard for weeks or months - and were paying passengers, rather than animate military cargo - meant that she’d had to be at least comfortable to start with. My office was in what had been First Class, along with the rest of our permanent administrative stuff, using the left over cabins after most of her single-occupancy rooms had been converted to hold infantry squads.

I kind of missed Norway’s Greatest Son. She’d had less space for me to set up in, and there was no question that she’d been less practically useful, but she’d felt a bit more spiritually comfortable. And, of course, I’d become enough of a mechwarrior to prefer to have No. 2 close at hand rather than in bulk cargo…

Meh. We’d sold the Leopard months before; it had been too late before we left Solaris, much less now after landing on New Avalon.

The small ‘breakfast nook’ attached to First Class had become the Admin Country mess, but at this time of day I’d expected it to be empty.

Instead, I found Suzuki sitting at one of the tables - they had bucket seats on arms, and were supported by two rotating axles at their ends. Grounded on New Avalon, those arms emerged from the rear wall - the floor, when in transit. Even the heads were like that, which was miles more elegant than the workarounds I’d seen on other aerodyne dropships.

She looked up from pushing her last few natto beans around in the bowl she’d been staring at and nodded. “My Lady,” she said.

“Colonel,” I replied, and headed for the coffeemaker in its cabinet. “Coffee?”

She said yes and I got both our mugs, and a bowl of cereal with my fiancee’s face on it, and sat down across from her.

“There’s something on your mind,” I said, dosing mine from the tray I’d grabbed at the same time.

It wasn’t hard to guess, given her expression, and the fact that she was sitting out here rather than in her office or with her regiment.

“...I didn’t think I had any… kind feelings left for, for the Combine,” she said after a few moments’ struggle.

Ah. “But in the long run, an alliance between the Suns and Lyrans…”

“And with everything else we’ve already handed the Commonwealth,” she agreed. “...We’re going to destroy my home.”

I took a sip of my coffee. “What did you think of New Kyoto?” I asked. We’d bought a shipment of parts and the like from there while we were on Solaris, and she’d volunteered to lead the ‘mission’.

She stared at me for a couple of seconds. New Kyoto was a Lyran world in about the same area as Solaris, which had originally been set up by a cooperative of Japanese companies and citizen groups, with plenty of assistance from what had been left of the Japanese national government at that time. Which was plenty, given that that had only been in the twenty-third century.

New Kyoto’s planetary culture was a more direct, and in most ways purer, outgrowth of actual Japan than the Imperial Japan imitation the Combine used.

“Hen da yo,” Suzuki said - ‘it was weird’.

“Bad weird, good weird, uncanny valley weird, other?” I prompted, and had a biteful of scratchy wheat flakes and dessicated marshmallows.

“‘Uncanny valley?’” she asked.

“Psychological thing,” I said, and sketched a rising curve with my hands. “The more a depiction of a person looks like a person, the better people like it… To a point. And then, when it looks a lot like a person but some of the details are off, so your instincts say ‘This is a person, but they’re diseased somehow’ the appeal drops-” I dipped my hands “-before it goes back up when you’re finally looking at, well, people.”

“Oh,” she said, and looked down at the table. “...Consciously, if I look at… at the individual differences, most of them are good. Not the idols and porn shops, but having shops, and police that are there to give directions, not… But at the same time, that feels ‘uncanny valley’ in a way that Galatea or wherever don’t.”

I had some more cereal, mostly to try and hide the fact that I had no idea what to say.

“You’re thinking of New Kyoto as a model for the entire Combine, aren’t you?” she asked.

“Never invade someplace you don’t have a plan to rebuild. If we can pull it off,” I said. “That’s by no means guaranteed.”

Suzuki smiled, a little wanly. “In this life, what is?”

“Death and taxes are the traditional ones,” I said.

She thought for a bit. I had some more terrible cereal.

“What about the Kuritas?” she asked.

I shrugged. “Depends what we need to pull off the other.”

“...Then I guess it can’t be helped,” she said, and smiled in a way that frankly kind of scared me. I was about to hide in my coffee when a cleared throat interrupted.

One of Hanse’s uniformed bodyguards bowed. “His Highness requests the Commander’s presence,” he said, clipped FedSuns accent clear.

I glanced at Suzuki; she nodded, so I nodded back and stood up to follow the attack dog back to my own office.

Morgan was on his way out as I arrived; he didn’t answer my questioning look with anything so obvious as a thumbs up, but he seemed relieved enough for me to count the results as positive.

I didn’t realize that Hanse had started to wave me at the other guest chair until I was halfway to behind my desk. He looked puzzled when I froze for a second or two, then laughed. “Muscle memory,” I said, and kicked the desk chair free of its latches to move out from behind the thing. “Also, this is the most comfortable chair here.”

That made him laugh, too. “Privilege of owning the office.” The moment of levity was still dancing in his eyes when he added, “Though if you were looking for an even nicer office…”

I shook my head. “Under other circumstances, I wouldn’t hesitate,” I said. “But while that contract is sealed and secret - it is signed.”

“So, you’re not just loaning out cover to ‘Commander Solih’,” he concluded. “You’ve sworn to the Commonwealth outright.”

“I have,” I confirmed explicitly, for only the third time ever. “That said, Archon Katrina’s order sending us here was to act fully as mercenaries, up to and including authorization to take contract against the Commonwealth.”

That surprised him, as well it might. After a moment, his lips quirked up. “So if I sent you to Hesperus…?”

“I’d take two steps away from my landing site and end up right where I started,” I said, “but that’s because anything else would be stupid, not because of my oaths. Besides, while Her Highness didn’t share any of her plans with me-”

True, as far as it went. She hadn’t told me what she intended to keep or what she intended to change.

“-I’d be very surprised if she went to all this trouble to say something that’d make you decide Hesperus would be better off wrecked.”

Hanse laughed. “At that, you have a point,” he admitted. “No, what I’m thinking instead is… how do you feel about Tortuga?”

“Fuck ‘em with a rake,” I said promptly, and had the distinct pleasure of startling a laugh out of him.

“More precisely, then,” he said, once he had the sniggers under control, “how do you feel about a contract to occupy them?”

“That’s…” I started to say, then stopped. Started, stopped. Thinking the entire time. Remembering the idiocy of the Iraq invasion of another world entirely.

Eventually: “Just punching pirate tickets is… Not pointless, but the next best thing. Aspirin for a broken leg. Smash what’s there, you’ll have new bands operating out of the same region in a decade - more likely, in a year. Run a short term or unplanned occupation - go in without an idea of who or what kind of person we want to have in charge there in the end, and how we’re going to get them there, and the only difference is that we’ll get more people killed than just wiping out the current crop of scum.

“That said, Tortuga is a cesspool and actually cleaning it up would be doing everyone a favor,” I finished. “If you want us to take point on starting that process, we’re happy to. I’m confident that that’s one thing all my people can agree on.”

***

It wasn’t just my people who could all agree on the battle cry of ‘Fuck Tortuga’.

Five months more after landing on New Avalon, I looked around at the other commanders of the ballooned final mission. Morgan Kell, in disguise as Commander Till Solih of the unit’s second brigade. Armed Forces of the Federated Suns Major Boyden Wallace, our Liason Officer. Outworlds Alliance Military Corps Director Yuuki Riegel, who had the AMC wing that they’d sent to support the op. His opposite number, the Taurian Concordat’s Colonel Samuel Ostergaard, with the space-ops battalion they’d brought to the table.

I was pretty sure that I’d managed not to show how much that last name threw me for a loop. There was no doubt it was the same man, eerie vocal resemblance to Adam Jensen and all. Despite the disturbing vision of a potential future, he’d proved completely personable and quite a professional, with little of the anti-Davion sniping I’d have expected from a Taurian.

After all. Fuck Tortuga.

“That jump alarm was the Gloria Day,” I said, naming the last of the FedSuns Scout class jumpships that had brought our outrider forces to their targets. “I imagine that means Major Wallace has a report for us.”

The AFFS man’s sphinx-like poker face broke into a fierce grin. “They jumped out.”

Ostergaard’s satisfaction was less obvious, but his gloved hand closed into a fist on the conference table. “Good. Comptroller-” He was looking at me. “The Electra can be ready to jump inside the hour.”

Riegel nodded. “Truth and Reconciliation will be prepared at least as quickly.”

I glanced at Kell. “We’ll need more than that,” he said, “but not a lot more. Two hours should be plenty. We’ve all been waiting for this.”

“Then, gentlemen, we are go,” I said, and rapped sharply on the table. “Back to your people, get ready. We jump on the hour at 1600.” That was nearly three hours away, more than enough time. “Don’t hesitate to bring anything to me as it comes up; we have at least three days’ leeway, and I don’t want to risk an avoidable screwup for the sake of a few minutes.”

I was the youngest person in the room by at least fifteen years, but they all nodded.

Murphy didn’t. A snarl in the bola-carousel retraction gear on one of our Invaders added forty-five minutes to Kell’s estimate, but that possibility was why I’d set the schedule I did. It took a lot of swearing, a lot of sweating, and a work crew on the outside of the Sandringham’s hull pulling the cables in by hand while the dropship attached to their docking locks eased slowly in on RCS thrusters, but in the end we jumped on schedule.

As the interference and disorientation that accompanied every hyperspace jump faded, I struggled to read the spaceside tactical displays. If our intel estimates were wrong…

But the fact that we’d arrived safely at the planetary L1 jump point between Tortuga the star and its third planet, rather than dying in a puff of bad logic, argued that they weren’t.

Eventually, I got my eyes uncrossed enough to read the data I was looking for, and let the air rush out of my lungs in pure relief.

The pirates of the Tortuga Dominions had access to fifteen working jumpships, as far as any of the intelligence agencies of the three neighboring realms knew. Every time anyone had tried to raid their territory, the ships and the scum they carried had all fled, jumping into the formally un-surveyed system at the heart of their domain, whose cometary shell was so far in it shared space with the standard zenith and nadir points, making them too dangerous to use by the standards of the day and leaving only the so-called ‘pirate’ points open.

Sharing the jump point with our own nine ships were a Tramp, six Invaders, and seven Merchants, leaving only one Invader-class unaccounted for. Fourteen to nine might have been decent odds for the pirates, if not for the fact that all of their collars were empty, and ours were full of combat dropships more than capable of destroying any of them.

The standard laws of war prohibited that, of course. With less than twenty new jumpships built in any given year, and less than five thousand existing in the entire Inner Sphere, wrecking even one of the precious sinews of interstellar travel was a taboo on the level of eating one’s own children.

But there was damage, and there was damage. A skilled aerospace fighter pilot could put a hole in the liquid helium coolant tanks and piping that let the KF drive do its superconducting magic, and once the damage had been patched and the coolant replaced the ship would be none the worse for wear. A commando team using fragmenting rounds or medium-intensity lasers could spray fire all over a jumpship’s interior and crew without jeopardizing the hardware around them.

The Outworlds AMC fighters were in space within seconds of completing the jump, arrowing out towards the most active pirates with the three Carrier Leopards that had brought them hot on their heels. Slightly modified relatives of those dropships punched free of the Taurian jumpship almost as quickly, hundred-fifty-ton Tigress cutters bolting from their carry bays and swinging around to orient on different targets.

An echoing BANG vibrated through Polar Express’s bones as the dropship cut free of its own carrier and started to burn for a central position, ready to wait as a reserve. With several regiments of regular infantry aboard she was utter overkill for the job, but the best of several bad options - and on the screen, Cruel Sea, the Condor, separated from her jumpship and swung around towards the last pirate one.

Smaller icons were spawning by the dozen, the unit’s fighters following the Outworlds ones into the black and sorting into ranks as they readied to take on the tiny handful of fighters that the pirate Jumpships could have fit into their onboard bays - if they were able to scramble before the boarding teams arrived.

The combat chatter piped from the bridge made it seem unlikely. By the sound of it, most of the pirates were just sitting there. A handful of others were trying frantically to reel their sails in so they could maneuver, one more had apparently run its reactor all the way up, and a last had abandoned its sail entirely and was burning its slow way away.

Riegel’s voice came over the line. “Blackwing Actual, Nightmare Actual. Request permission for strike on the escapees, over.”

I could hear several of the crewmen around me draw in shocked breaths.

“Nightmare, Blackwing. Permission granted, over,” I said. I didn’t bother adding anything fatuous about shooting to disable - he and his people knew that, and had a better idea than me on how to do it.

“Thanks, we’ll trip ‘em up and tie a bow on for Ostergaard’s people. Nightmare, out.”

“Commander…” one of the techs said, obviously a spacer born and visibly disturbed.

“The AMC has a lot of experience crippling pirate jumpships without leaving them unrepairable,” I said, my voice tense mostly with the effort of speaking under two and a half gravities of full burn. “Trust that, and the fact that losing them is better for civilization than leaving them in the hands of pirates.”

Obviously, that didn’t comfort him. Equally obviously, he didn’t have a logical argument to change it. Neither fact did anything to reduce the tension as we watched the strike go in on the display. A soft sigh rippled around the compartment as a squadron flashed past the running jumpship, its icon going yellow in their wake. A second squadron, aimed at the slightly more distant one with the blazing radiators showing in the zoom window, veered away on overthrust as its icon went…

“Pink?” I asked, because it was, a vivid, screaming neon pink.

“Beginning jump,” the same technician who’d spoken out against trying to disable the thing said.

“They shouldn’t have charge for that yet,” I said instinctively, though I knew it was imbecilic.

“They don’t.”

In the zoom, the fleeing jumpship came apart, separating into a cloud of components that moved away from each other like the removed panels of a cross-section view, then started to rotate in opposing rings before they twisted in ways that looked like they had to be optical illusions and the screen went black, a little line of text at the top right reading INPUT OVERLOAD.

“Misjump,” someone said.

We got the first surrender offer right after that, and, with pre-authorization to guarantee the lives if not the freedom of pirates who surrendered, only ended up needing to storm about a quarter of the ships.

In a strategic sense, that meant it was all over but the shouting. With a grand total of one jumpship left to their name, the Tortuga Pirates’ ability to terrorize the periphery was reduced to nil. But there was no sense in leaving the operation half-done once we’d gone through all the trouble and expense of heading out here, flushing them, and having Davion funnel the massive bribe needed to get the jump point through Outworlds Alliance Intelligence.

Leaving the Nightmares and Taurians to keep the prize crews company and their prisoners honest, we headed for Tortuga III, and several days later, I leaned into my microphone and spoke, radio transmitters on our dropships rebroadcasting down out of orbit with enough intensity to blanket every receiver on the planet. “People of Tortuga, the life you knew is over. Whether you have lived in bondage, and now greet your liberation day, or you have stolen and murdered and now at last face justice, nothing from this moment forward will ever be the same.

“Those of you who call yourself ‘Brothers’ have a choice to make.” The noble, piratical caste of Tortugan society referred to themselves as the brotherhoods, anyway, and everyone else as slaves. Everyone else. “If you are wise, you will surrender, laying down your arms. You will be given a new name, and a new place in the Lyran Foreign Legion, there to serve in battle for fifteen years - and, at the end, to see the past wiped away. If you are not wise, you will face two brigades, and, behind them, a court sat by three judges - of the Outworlds Alliance, the Taurian Concordat, and the Federated Suns.

“I’m sure you can work out which set of odds is worse for you on your own,” I finished. “You have… Well. Until the first shots. Choose carefully.”

I let my thumb off the push-to-talk button and sat back in Marauder No. 2’s control couch - as much as I could ‘sit back’ when strapped to it in zero G.

Gravity - or acceleration, rather - came back as the time-clock ticked over and the formation started to de-orbit. Tied down in Polar Express’s cargo bay, there was even less to see than in a normal combat drop - the Monarch didn’t have the data hookups to feed sensor inputs to units in storage the way combat dropships could to units in their bays. I could only go over the reports from the four mechs right there - my No. 2, Sophitia’s Aspis, Reyes’ Deus Volt, and Rora Motochika’s Agincourt, the Archer that had replaced Setsuka Carter’s Atlas when we finally had a proper assault element to fit her into.

“Do you think the speech will work?” Sophitia asked over a private line.

“Not really,” I admitted. “But it’s worth a try.”

“For pirates?”

I laughed. “Nah, fuck’em. But even at these ratios we’ll lose people taking the fuckers out, and that I’d rather avoid.”

“Oh,” she said, sounding pleased. A few seconds passed. “Will you actually give them to the Legion?”

“Oh, yes,” I said. “I know what Archon Katrina’s planning to use the Legion for, after all. I don’t mind giving them those odds of surviving. Or, if they scuz up first, letting the Legion’s MPs handle it.”

The Wolf Dragoons had made their reputation on all-out assaults and pitched heavy fighting, and the Lyran Commonwealth could get a lot of mileage out of shock troops like that that didn’t need to be conserved as heavily as normal regulars. Pirates that took the offer I’d just sent wouldn’t quite be making a fool’s bargain, but the odds would definitely be against their managing to live out their full terms of service to take advantage of the Commonwealth-backed fresh start. I wouldn’t have bet on any given Dragoon making it, for that matter, and they were on the whole much better warriors.

A klaxon echoed through the cargo bay; an alert that we were on final approach and about to land. “Game faces on,” Sophitia said. “I love you.”

“Love you right back,” I said, and let the channel close.

Battletech’s tabletop rules had claimed that aerodyne, winged, dropships had multiple main drives and that handling them in vertical takeoff and landing ops was straightforward. Neither was true, especially for a civilian-origin ship like Polar Express. Military aerodynes had overbuilt reaction control systems that could flip and maneuver them quite quickly, and were incidentally capable of managing to hold the ship in a hover for a few seconds. Civilian ones? Not so much. We’d assigned the Monarch the best dropship handler we had, because what he needed to do to get it down in a zero-roll landing was spine-chilling.

The compass in my cockpit had started reading properly as we bored into the atmosphere; now it wheeled wildly, in time with my inner ear, as the pilot twisted Polar Express a hundred and eighty degrees, so that the five-thousand ton ship was coasting tail first, then flared nose-up and opened the main drive throttle all the way. Fusion thunder blotted out all other sound, and the fat man sitting on my chest was back as the pilot kept the ship balanced on a needle so that all the competing vectors of movement stayed within the narrow cone the main drive’s magnetic-gimballing mechanisms could cover, balancing the ship on her tail. It went on and on for a subjective eternity - then died with a clunk and a whine and the hissss of maneuvering jets trying to hold the ship from falling too fast, interrupted by the thump and jolt of the main wheels touching down.

More roaring started up; the clunks and whine had been the servo-actuated thrust reverser on the main drive overclosing on the bottom side and half-closing on the top. That wasn’t a designed function, but a bit of modification had made it possible, so that the thruster plume went on its uncontrolled way straight vertically up. This was, in general, useless - but with the rear main landing gear on the ground and a need to keep the nose from flopping down hard enough to break something, it let the pilot control the rate of tilt without overloading the RCS thrusters.

I sat there and tried to get my breathing and heart rate under control again while the ground outside cooled enough for unloading, assisted by the release of several tons of water aimed at the worst hotspots. Loading crews rushed out, undoing the tie-downs that webbed No. 2 in place like Gulliver, and the main doors that opened up onto the cargo bay started to lever open, letting in the blinding blaze of outside day.

I checked my strategic display. 1st and 8th Regiments, the battlemech ones, were already on the ground and unloading in a hurry. 2nd and 9th, the tanks, weren’t on the ground yet, much less unloading, but they wouldn’t be long. All told, things were going well, which made my neck itch.

The shoe dropped.

“Greetings to our - new Brothers, who have found this refuge of Tortuga,” came over the radio. “As others before, you’ve followed the signs and walked the path, an’ come recruitin’ for the one as holds your sword, an’ that challenge has its own precedents.”

It was a man’s voice, aged and speaking with utter formality despite the heavy accent. “Come to the challenge arena, an’ test your strength to claim the right as first among Brothers… If you can win. Or lose, an’ serve the strongest, as all must.

“Turn your back on the challenge, an’ be known as a coward, with every hand turned against you.”

“Pete, you fucking traitor,” snarled a different voice, a woman’s. Lady Death. “I told you we weren’t gonna do this shit!”

“It’s the Code, Trevaline. None of us are anything without it.”

Instinctively, I flipped my own channel open to reply. “All right,” I said. “I’ll play ball, ‘Brothers’.” I couldn’t keep the hint of a sneer out of my voice. “Where’s the arena?”

In the end, they sent a leader-car - not just a truck with a lightbar welded to the top, but an enormous double-decker bus thing in, and I swear I am not making this up, freakin’ pirate cosplay. A quick pinbeam conversation about what you’d call terms and conditions made it clear that by local custom, a challenger was expected to show up with the smaller of ‘everything they had’ and ‘what would fit’. An equally-quick exchange with Kell sent the 8th’s heavy battalion in with me, including our actual proper assault mech company of mostly Stalkers.

The slow walking tour of Raider’s Roost mostly left me sick to my stomach. I was no stranger to the signs of economic depression and urban decay; both of my lives had grown up in the middle of areas that were circling the drain, one urban and the other rural. Hoff had been a nowhere; Galatea was one giant trashy strip mall, and the Succession Wars had done Fianna’s Saint Cabrini no favors. Solaris was infamously an industrial slum outside the battlemech arenas, and so on.

Tortuga made them all seem like shining jewels of civilization. It reminded me of pictures I’d seen of Brazilian favelas or the Walled City of Kowloon, but without the dedicated sanitation services or building code enforcement. The city sprawled more, too, and was the worse for it - it made it easier to see what the place was like.

“Blake save us,” Motochika muttered; he was in the number two position in the column, in front of me and behind Sophitia. I could see him shuffle his steps a little to be sure he was stepping over a human corpse left to rot in the middle of the road.

I did the same - without zooming in to see how old the thing was. My nightmares didn’t need the details.

“Somebody should,” I agreed. “And I don’t see anybody but us getting nominated, do you?”

“...I’d been wondering about doing this at cost, Ma’am. I was wrong to,” he said.

I smiled. “Oh, we’ll do a bit better than that,” I said.

The ‘Circle of Brothers’ reminded me of Mad Max versus the Steiner Coliseum - seemingly assembled of slabs of scavenged dropship armor, it had physical stands, level with the cockpits of the mechs on the open oval of dirt, and protected only by vertical slabs of transparisteel, already battered and scarred. Despite how little I’d’ve liked to bet on their protection, the stands were mostly full.

I’ll give the place this, though - it was big. The Coliseum wouldn’t have had room for a company in its end-of-field dead zones, and the Circle’s end zones took a full battalion with only a little crowding, even when the second-lightest mechs present, after Sophitia’s Centurion, were the two Riflemen.

On our end, anyway.

Fourteen of the twenty-six mechs waiting opposite us were bugmechs, a motley and undistinguished mix of Wasps, Stingers, and Locusts. The ‘assault lance’ that was ready to answer our Stalkers had an Awesome, a Battlemaster, and a Banshee - and a sixty-five ton Thunderbolt to round them out.

One of the Stingers tried to shuffle behind a Clint, and an entire panel’s worth of armor fell off of its forearm with the movement.

Outworlds Alliance Intelligence, Taurian Ministry of Intelligence, and both of the Davion agencies - all of them were more or less in agreement that Trevaline’s two companies of ‘household’ troops represented about a quarter of the mech forces left in the Tortuga Dominions after the Dragoons had stormed through in the thirty-aughts.

A Stinger and a Wasp from Trevaline’s bunch circled the edges of the arena clockwise; a pair of our Flashmen did the same counterclockwise, the contrast in mass and power blatantly obvious as they passed each other.

Assured that no assassins with sniper rifles or other weapons laid in wait with access to the arena, the gruesomely decorated Banshee started to advance at the same moment that I urged No. 2 out of line.

“I’m Paula Trevaline, Dame Murdress Extraordinaire of the Tortuga Dominion!” her voice thundered out of the Banshee’s speakers, flanged and distorted by their poor repair and the way she was pushing them to their limits - and shouting into her mike. “I’m the queen of mean, the Lady Death herself! I’ve ripped my way back and forth across the entire Periphery, and no one - No! One! Can stop me! I’m the fastest, I’m the strongest, I’m the meanest! I’m gonna rip your head off and shit down your neck!”

I didn’t raise my voice in the slightest - but No. 2’s sound system was enough better that my broadcast was at least as loud as hers had been, and crystal clear.

“I am Asha, daughter of Clarice. I am a Blackwing, bred to peace.”

When I’d realized that the Johnite sect my mother had been raised in - not quite as pacifist as the Omniss, and without the Luddite bent, but just as determined - used that formulation, I wasn’t sure whether to let my inner Star Trek fan squee, or just to facepalm.

“I was the wedge that broke the lines of the Third Sword of Light on Hoff,” I went on. “I am the barrier that stopped the Juggernaut forever on Helm. I am the anvil that broke the Wolf Dragoons on Solaris. And if you could match any of those, you wouldn’t be hiding here, like a coward in a hole.”

I smiled contemptuously, and let it show in my voice. “But feel free to try.”

I didn’t expect to be able to provoke her into firing on me - the ‘etiquette’ of the challenge put that part of the initiative in her hands, expecting me to match her if she chose to fight dismounted - but apparently her temper was less controlled than I’d expected. PPC and autocannon fire alike erupted from the Banshee and hammered into No 2’s main glacis.

Immobile, it was easy to ride out the impact and gyro instability and return fire into her as she tried to accelerate into motion. Then I opened the throttle, swinging into motion and letting her follow-ups blaze uselessly by behind me.

Despite the boasting I’d done, and despite her depravity, Paula Trevaline was a skilled mechwarrior. On an even playing field she’d probably have roasted me - but fair fights were for suckers, and I liked to think I wasn’t that.

As it was? She could barely even see me, and as much as Banshees ran ice-cold, putting freezers into No. 2 meant that so did I - and I had a whole extra PPC to play with.

By the third or fourth exchange of fire - and the third or fourth time she’d missed me completely - the hints of desperation were starting to be obvious in the way her increasingly battered Banshee moved. One more failed assault, and the first proper breach my fire managed to open in her armor, seemed to decide her.

She swung around, aimed all ninety-five tons of her mech my way, and charged.

Given the size of the mech she was using, and the gruesome (and spikey) mods she’d had made to it, it was actually intimidating. I concentrated on getting out of the way, and didn’t bother firing until I was sure I’d done that.

That worked once.

The second time, she managed to get ahead of my ability to evade completely - so instead I went with shooting, opening up in a full alpha strike for the first time of the day and making myself stand my ground until right before she could trample me. An outstretched arm caught No. 2 in the side torso, making the mech stagger and rock around me, but I managed, just barely, to catch the feedback before it could finish knocking me down.

Trevaline skidded to a halt, turning as she fought to arrest her monster machine’s momentum, and I fired again, dropping a PPC but leaving the lasers in, and both of those smaller weapons tracked across the Banshee’s near leg - and its hip actuator.

I throttled up and started trying to extend the range again; that bit of damage would slow her and give me the advantage I’d need to keep away for the rest of the battle, and from the speaker-broadcast shriek of rage that accompanied the pair of shots that missed wildly ahead of me, Lady Death knew it.

I bent my course a little to the left, torso-twisted all the way over, and gave her both three main guns right back.

A blatted alarm called my attention to the pirate backfield, and the way the Battlemaster there was straightening and starting to advance. The other, smaller mechs around it were either staying put, though, or milling uncertainly.

So much for pirate honor.

Not that that was a surprise. Major Kaplan, the CO of the battalion Till had sent with me, already knew what to do if something like this happened, and she didn’t waste any time asking for approval. The assault company started to push forwards, Setsuka Carter’s bloodthirsty eagerness pushing the skull-faced mass of her Atlas forward into the vanguard, and the two accompanying companies of heavies swinging out on their wings.

One of the pirate Wasps turned and bolted for the now blocked entrance it and its fellows had entered through.

Trevaline turned, an autocannon burst reaching out at long range and chewing across the light’s rear armor, a moment before the fragmented explosion of a PPC hit sprayed from the dropship armor covering the wall next to it.

I fired at her again, for a wonder and for the first time that day hitting with all three main guns and making the towering Banshee stagger.

The Battlemaster - now that it was closer, I could see how it had been modified, it didn’t have the standard one-shoulder box launcher but bulkier housings on both sides of the cockpit - swung around to try and orient on me, then exploded in contrails, smaller and smokier and much more numerous than any proper missile launcher. I swerved hard, trying to evade, but they spread out so much - they were so inaccurate to start with, and utterly unguided - that they didn’t aim at me so much as saturate the area, leaving nothing to do but ride out the battering.

Rocket launchers? I wondered. Were those actually rocket launchers this early? Technically there was no reason why not, but…

While I was wondering that, every LRM carrier on my side of the backfield targeted that one mech and opened up, something like a thousand contrails rising up and then crashing down again like a curtain or a waterfall pouring over the Battlemaster and the poor stupid bastard piloting it.

I left the interference to his fate and tried to hit Trevaline again, and as though the universe was mocking me for my good fortune earlier, missed completely.

She twisted towards me, as though planning to fire back, then reconsidered and turned her guns on one of the pair of Riflemen mixed into the heavy battalion. I could only guess that she was determined to do some kind of damage before the inevitable caught up with her, but the mech she’d chosen to attack was by no means as fragile as the stock model. We’d modified all of our Riflemen by pulling the 8cm lasers in favor of 5cm ones that weighed a fifth as much, and turned the freed-up tonnage into a doubled magazine, increased thermal capacity, and literally as much armor as the chassis could sanely carry. A strike that would have left a stock RFL-3N hurting badly barely made our version blink, and its pilot didn’t hesitate to return fire.

His cannon fire crisscrossed with mine, stitching across the increasing ragged armor of Trevaline’s mech, and just as he’d been ordered to do he immediately tried to break contact, zigzagging behind the protective bulk of one of the Flashmen next to him.

A Clint in the pirate group started to advance, ignoring the way several of the mechs near it visibly shrank away as though afraid of being caught in the splash radius, then came apart as the Awesome turned all three beam cannons on its rear armor.

Lady Death was ordering her men to attack me, and clearly, most of them were having none of it. I fired at her again, finally sawing one of the Banshee’s arms off.

The other pirate mechs were still, aside from the Stinger that carefully raised both arms over its head like a bank robber being covered by the cops.

Trevaline tried to charge me again, quite reasonably judging that it had been her most successful tactic to date; I fired once more, and got an explosion from what was left of her autocannon ammunition.

One armed and half-senseless, she tried to pick herself back up, but I had all the time in the world to carefully settle the crosshairs on her almost motionless cockpit and wait for them to steady before firing.

***

With Lady Death, well, dead, it would be easy to write my part of the business in Tortuga as all being over but the shouting. It’d be wrong, but easy. There was a lot of shouting involved, and quite a few hangings.

Not all of them pirates, either. Some of the slaves took revenge more openly than we could look away from and still keep the rule of law and order as a thing, and that.. Had to be stamped out. And as much as my people were under orders and under discipline, there were slips of various levels of ugliness, and those needed to be stamped out publicly and with extreme prejudice to keep them from spreading. I counted myself lucky that, in his first life as a young Colonel of the Lyran Commonwealth Armed Forces named Morgan Kell, Till had had cause to learn to appreciate proper Military Police - and that he’d made sure we had them before we needed them. Without him, I’d’ve been playing catch up and things would have gotten uglier.

Keeping a lid on a boiling septic tank of a society wasn’t exactly the most fun thing I’d ever done in my life, to indulge in an understatement, but at least it did have the virtue of being something that would have a distinct ending, a light at the end of the tunnel coming when the mercenary unit that Hanse had found to take final responsibility for the place finished their existing contract and relocated. With both the Outworlds and the Taurians willing to agree to chip in, he’d offered a blatantly generous contract to the 15th Dracon Regiment, a two-battalion operation famous for investing major chunks of their income into the areas they were stationed in. Usually they did that via whoever the local officials were, but with that kind of institutional culture, and the long-standing reputation it gave them, they’d be about a thousand-fold improvement over what had passed in the past for Tortugan government.

With Taurian and Outworlds money in the contract, as well as Davion, they could also be counted as… well, less likely to double-cross one or two factions of their employers in favor of one or another of the others, and the duty-free import and export options would be an economic boon to the Taurians, in particular - who had a lot of heavy industry but not enough markets for the goods that that produced.

Match all that to scholarships for enterprising young Tortugans, or at least ones with cleanish records, and what in a less depressed economic condition would have been a modest reserve of investment money, and the prognosis was… no worse than the rest of the Periphery. That light at the end of the tunnel was one that everyone could feel had better than even odds of not being a train.

The conversation I was coming up on didn’t have that, though.

Ludovic Clair, now a Colonel, walked into my office casually - then checked and stiffened as he saw the look on my face.

I didn’t have any intention of threatening him, but I wasn’t looking forward to this and I knew it showed. I waved him towards the guest chair and tried not to feel too tired.

“What’s wrong, Boss?” he asked.

I took a breath to brace myself and said, “Lu, I’ve been going through the battalion and company reports, and we’ve got a problem.”

“What are we missing?”

“You can’t run a regiment like a battalion, Lu,” I said, and I could see the ‘oh, shit’ wash across his face. “Three battalion COs, nine company COs - all trying to report directly rather than chaining through each other the way they should, and they couldn’t track you down. Because you were trying to do everything in person rather than by com, and because you weren’t letting the Majors run their parts of it themselves.”

He swallowed. “I… gotta admit I’ve been having more trouble getting on top of things than I’d expected. But it’s been getting better.”

I couldn’t stop myself from sighing. “You are,” I agreed. “But if we’d been up against something more serious than a rabble in battlemechs, we’d’ve lost people because of that confusion. We can’t afford that.”

‘Oh shit’, his face said again. “So… What does that mean, Boss?” Lu was obviously bracing himself for the worst.

“I see… three options,” I said. “Option one; I write you a reference letter and you stick around here until the Drakons show. It’s pretty certain they’ll be raising a new battalion, as much as they’ll be getting paid. Option two; we move you back down to battalion command here. Or, option three, you and Till and I live in each other’s pockets from now until the next op. It shouldn’t be any bigger than this one, and no more likely to blow up… And if we can get everything working smooth, that’ll be that.”

“And if I don’t shape up,” Lu said grimly, “then it’s out.”

“Yeah,” I agreed.

He took a breath, held it, let it out again. “I didn’t get this far by backin’ down from challenges,” he said. “So, if you and Commander Solih will take me under wing, I’m ready to learn.”

I nodded. “OK,” I said. “We’ll do what we can.”

...AND BATHE IN FIERY ANSWERS...