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Tell The World That We Tried [Battletech] [CYOA]
RE: Tell The World That We Tried [Battletech] [CYOA]
#26
BLACKWING MILITARY SOLUTIONS AND SERVICES
Mercenary Review Board Summary (January 3019)
Experience Rating: Regular
Reliability Rating: Reliable
JumpShip Support: Full
DropShip Support: High
Technical Support: Full
BattleMech Assets: 2 regiments
Armor Assets: 2 regiments
Infantry Assets: 4 regiments, mechanized
Aerospace Assets: 2 regiments

Since their formation in 3015 out of their founder’s inheritance, the Blackwings have grown explosively thanks to cunning negotiation of shares and salvage. Despite the youth of the unit and the low average age of its officers, the Blackwings have displayed noteworthy professionalism, restraint, and attention to employer interests while on garrison contract, and operated with distinction at recent Battle of Solaris.

The Blackwings have full DropShip and JumpShip transport for all ground and logistical assets, but only 55% of their aerospace contingent.

Detailed Assets
JS Great Western, Star Lord Class (Note: Former Wolf’s Dragoons JumpShip)
JS Sandringham, Invader Class (Note: Former Wolf’s Dragoons JumpShip)
JS Westrover, Invader Class (Note: Former Wolf’s Dragoons JumpShip)
JS Hasenpfeffer, Invader Class
JS Rockall, Merchant Class
JS Warren Zevon, Merchant Class (Note: Former pirate JumpShip Bloodspiller)
JS Traveler, Merchant Class

DS Phoenix, Overlord Class (Note: Former Wolf’s Dragoons DropShip)
DS Ise, Overlord Class (Note: Former Wolf’s Dragoons DropShip)
DS Hecate, Overlord Class (Note: Former Wolf’s Dragoons DropShip)
DS Luanda, Fortress Class (Note: Former Wolf’s Dragoons DropShip)
DS Loch Lomond, Fortress Class (Note: Former Wolf’s Dragoons DropShip)
DS Otsu, Fortress Class (Note: Former Wolf’s Dragoons DropShip)
DS Wexford, Fortress Class (Note: Former Wolf’s Dragoons DropShip)
DS El-Ahrairah, Union Class
DS Montresor, Union Class
DS Davos Seaworth, Union Class
DS Stolen Will, Union Class
DS Mount Suribachi, Union Class (Note: Former Wolf’s Dragoons DropShip)
DS Shipping Report, Triumph Class
DS Johannesburg, Triumph Class
DS Volva, Triumph Class
DS Grendel, Triumph CV Class
DS Fafnir, Triumph CV Class
DS Cruel Sea, Condor Class
DS Nicaragua, Aqueduct Class (Note: Cargo conversion)
DS Polar Express, Monarch Class (Note: Troopship conversion)

1st Brigade (CO: Commander Asha Blackwing)
1st Regiment (Battlemech; CO: Colonel Ludovic Clair)
1 Assault company, 1 Heavy company, 4 Medium companies, 3 Light companies
2nd Regiment (Armor; CO: Colonel Lira Suzuki)
1 Assault company, 3 Heavy companies, 3 Medium companies, 4 Light companies
3rd Regiment (Aerospace; CO: Colonel Io Sasagawa)
1 Attack squadron, 6 Superiority squadrons, 3 Interceptor squadrons
4th Regiment (Mechanized Infantry)
5th Regiment (Mechanized Infantry)
Independent Battalion Anton (Artillery)
12 Long Tom, 6 Sniper
Independent Battalion Bruno (Jump Infantry)

2nd Brigade (CO: Commander Till Solih)
8th Regiment (Battlemech; CO: Colonel Sexton Cade)
1 Assault company, 2 Heavy companies, 3 Medium companies, 3 Light companies
9th Regiment (Armor; CO: Colonel Ildiko Mondragon)
2 Assault companies, 2 Heavy companies, 3 Medium companies, 4 Light companies
10th Regiment (Aerospace; CO: Colonel Tamman Cruz)
1 Attack squadron, 7 Superiority squadrons, 2 Interceptor squadrons
6th Regiment (Mechanized Infantry)
7th Regiment (Mechanized Infantry)
Independent Battalion Dora (Artillery)
12 Long Tom, 6 Sniper
Independent Battalion Clara (Jump Infantry)
Reply
RE: Tell The World That We Tried [Battletech] [CYOA]
#27
Geez, Asha's really rocketing to the top isn't she?

I mean, make no mistake she's no Wolf's Dragoons, but there are strategically important border planets that she can raid with an outfit like that. And sure, she hardly started with nothing, but to go from an under strength, non-infantry assets heavy and very green brigade to a Regular rated binary combined arms division with a really good reputation is very impressive.

Yes, she's had a few lucky breaks, yes it's likely that her rate of advance is going to slow simply because she's now a national level and Lyran Commonwealth asset. But it's not as if she didn't work for it.
Reply
RE: Tell The World That We Tried [Battletech] [CYOA]
#28
nice. Fuck Tortuga indeed. 8)

Several other pirate strongholds are gonna be feeling nervous for the next while.
Reply
RE: Tell The World That We Tried [Battletech] [CYOA]
#29
NOW JESUS WAS AN ONLY SON...

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

On reflection, the most astonishing thing about the Tortuga operation was how quickly we got hustled out after the shooting stopped. Two weeks after Trevaline was dead, infantry regiments meant to relieve and replace us were landing - which, given that the Tortuga Dominion was literally four jumps and at least as many weeks from anywhere remotely civilized, meant that they’d been in motion long before AFFS command would have had any idea how the operation turned out.

Still, they’d apparently been right about that call, and we packed up and headed on our way to Mentasta, a planet I’d never heard of in any other context. Looking it up in an atlas, though, was… suggestive.

It was one jump from St. Ives.

That planet, meanwhile, was the number four mech producer in the Capellan Confederation as well as the largest source that state’s light and medium aerospace fighters. And a regional capital. And a military training academy. And the personal seat of one of the most stable, and thus most capable, living members of the Liao family.

It seemed… Unlikely that we’d be brought into the area without at least some chance of taking a crack at it, and reading up on previous campaigns there made me dread the job.

The larger and more populous of St. Ives two continents, Liaoning, had in some ancient epoch been the site of a truly colossal volcanic trap eruption. More than eighty percent of the area of a landmass larger than Earth’s Eurasia was covered in a single mass of basalt up to half a kilometer thick. The rock underlying that hard-weathering volcanic stone varied… but much of it, even most of it, had been well-aged limestone, already riddled with caves and sinkholes, which the fresh lava had filled in before it cooled.

When the patient work of water resumed and eroded the rest of the limestone, it had left behind immense, almost-dry cavern systems, with dozens of chambers large enough to hold entire cities, their roofs supported by the basalt columns left where the long-ago sinkholes had been filled.

The settlers of St. Ives had reinforced the most stable caves and filled them with their world’s industry, leaving the surface to parks and residences; invading the place meant going into the caves to root out the garrisons and claim the factories… or spending years, even decades on a constant watch for sallies and raids while you tried and probably failed to locate and block every entrance so you could starve them or choke the flow of materials to the factories enough to put an end to parts and replacements.

Requesting records of the Federated Suns’ fights on the world from the garrisons we passed on our way to station illuminated just how hard a job rooting them out would be. The good news, such as it was, had edges of its own - all of the factories had at least one and usually several access points and passages large enough to admit battlemechs, and the need to keep using them themselves meant that the Liao defenders had never collapsed any of those.

Davion Military Intelligence thought that it had never been planned or prepared for, possibly to short-circuit any cases of Excessive Initiative and partly because the deadfall traps, shooting galleries, and so on were thought to be more than enough protection.

If the latter was the Capellan Confederation Armed Forces’ logic, they’d proven right to date. The factories had never fallen, even when invaders ran rampant on the surface above.

“...If they do send us down there, this is gonna be really gruesome,” I mumbled.

Sophitia, curled up as the large spoon, made an irritated noise, and grumbled something to the effect of ‘aren’t you going to sleep?’ in German.

“I said I was gonna finish this report, didn’t I?” I replied, trying to focus so I could do that and stop keeping her up.

She huffed against my neck and gathered her English again. “What’s ‘down there’?”

“The big military targets on Saint Ives are underground. Imagine having to fight through a version of Ishiyama as long as Solaris City is across, but with entire regiments stuffed into it.”

“...Ah,” she said. The warren of twists, traps, and switchbacks known as Ishiyama, the Draconis Combine sponsored entry on the rolls of Solaris’s Class Six gladiatorial arenas, was notoriously a nightmare for the fighters condemned to suffer there. I knew that Soph had fought there more often than most, and done very well, but she’d spoken of the place with loathing. “And the arena control teams aren’t even pretending to be neutral.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “The FedRats have tried before, and every time they’ve found out the hard way over again that they had to go real slow, testing every meter of ground for traps, mines, and hidden firing ports. Which meant that the defenders could cycle fresh mechs in against them whenever they wanted, and make a push if they thought they had a shot at generating some attrition. Slow, painful, and bloody the whole way.”

She was silent for several seconds, then said, “If I write down the idea I just got, will you turn the light out and go to sleep?”

Well, I sure didn’t have any real ideas. “Yeah?” I said, and my back cooled down, exposed again to the air, as she rolled away towards her own computer pad.

I saved my place in my reading and set it in the rack built into my side’s little table, turned that light out, and rolled over to watch Sophitia write. Not that it took long; even with her hunt-and-peck typing style she had it down in only a few more seconds, letting her repeat the ritual.

“I love you,” I told her in the dark.

“Sleep, you sap,” she replied, but there was a laugh in her voice.

We did.

***

We were somewhere around Belaire when the drugs started to take hold…

OK, not really.

We were in the Belaire system, waiting through the charge time at the Nadir point, but there were no actual drugs involved. This detail’s important to note, because several of the techs involved in the project were wearing poorly concealed ‘What are the higher ups smoking?’ expressions as we watched the first Banshee to finish its refit straighten and step carefully out of its cubicle and onto the main handling deck.

All of the original guns were gone, the PPC and head laser had had medium lasers wired in place, and the armor was visibly bulked up by the additions made - and the new hardpoints on the forearms. The pilot walked forward into the carefully cleared and safed space, reached down, and picked up the gear meant to go into those hardpoints.

Watching from up in the traffic control booth that overlooked the deck, I could hear one of the techs monitoring the evolution say, “Looks like the Battlemaster code did its job. We’ve got a good lock-in.”

“Wait until it starts swinging,” another skeptic replied.

And the mech did start swinging; it had to. We needed to know how the stresses and strains and timing worked in this configuration to be able to program the simulators with it. There wasn’t room for a live fire test of any grade, and walking and running revisions would mean needing to send it along with the next supply runs, but the simple stand-and-swing we did have room for would be enough to get started on the process.

For a while, things seemed to be going well.

Then, with a screech of tearing metal and a colossal bang, twelve tons of fast moving metal smashed into the floor a mechlength away from the Banshee, bounced once in a spray of shattered fragments, and skidded the rest of the way to the edge of the loading bay to slam into the wall right under the monitor stand.

Once the swearing had died down, along with my heartrate, I turned to Doctor Raven and said, “Reinforce the mounts?”

He hmphed and chewed on his mustache for a moment. “I still think we could work out a better way of mounting them than this, but the perfect is the enemy of the good. We’ll do the math and figure out how much we need.”

A pause, then he warned me, “It’ll compromise the armor, some.”

I shrugged. “Needs must prevail when the devil drives. I want them to be swappable, given how much fire we’ll need them to take.”

He nodded. “I’d say remove the lasers, since they won’t be doing any good, but…”

“The pilots’d rebel if we tried,” I agreed. The row that’d been had over pulling the PPCs had been epic already. “The tanks went better?”

Another nod. “We worked out a modular way of doing it, given how many different launcher types we had, but that was doable. No problems.”

That mod was for our SturmFeur assault tanks. The standard Sturmfeur had a couple of infantry-clearing machine guns and two twenty-tube LRM launchers - one set up for indirect fire only, fixed forward from the rear hull, and the other in a turret that gave it both direct and indirect options. We’d pulled the turret LRMs and put in eighteen tubes of SRMs, in various combinations depending on the actual launchers we had available.

If we’d planned to leave them like that, that’d be setting ourselves up for a logistical nightmare, of course, but we weren’t and wouldn’t - once this campaign was over, or if we had a long enough break and the word was that it wasn’t St. Ives, we’d pull them and put the LRMs back in.

And if there wasn’t a break, well, we wouldn’t be able to use them as durable LRM support the way they were originally designed, but they still wouldn’t be bad tanks. Eighteen short-range missiles was a shedload of pain to back up the remaining long-range ones with.

Raven went on, “The evaluation we’ve been doing on the Stalkers, on the other hand, not so much. We can pull the LRM rack easy enough, and add the armor, but putting heat sinks in will be a lot more involved. We could probably put another SRM pack in, but-”

“We’ve already run through most of the spares on the Sturmfeurs,” I finished, and shrugged. “OK, we’ll run those stock, then.”

He checked something off on his pad, then glanced out the windows at the efforts to clean up after the mishap - the crews had emerged from the hiding places they’d picked while the Banshee was moving around. “Probably for the best,” he said. “Anything else?”

“Not that I can think of right now,” I admitted. “I’ve got a meeting with Doctor Tiber, but that shouldn’t be anything for you.”

That got a snort of amusement. “Right. I’ll go down and get back to work then,” he said, and did just that.

***

“Is this another Come to Jesus talk, like Clair got?” Io Sasagawa asked, coming into my office and seeing my face.

I sighed. “No? Maybe, sort of? You won’t think it’s good news, but you’re not fired or anything.”

She knew me well enough by now to not bother asking permission to sit down in front of my desk - the same chair Hanse Davion had used, now that I thought of it. “Don’t talk around it, then,” she said.

I tapped the folder of printout sitting on my desk. “Doctor Tiber brought this to me,” I said. “It’s - well, it’s ninety percent medicalese I can’t follow, cardiac vesication this and arterial decay that, but the upside is…”

I could see her knuckles, laced in her lap, go white, and her jaw tense. “I’m grounded?” she asked.

“Against my better judgement, no,” I said. “Long story short, he was saying six months of Lightning ops before ‘notable risk’ of something happening in flight… and adding another six months to that for every half-G of maximum acceleration you took off of them.”

She didn’t meet my eyes, looking away to the side. It was weird seeing a woman who could have been my mother look that teenager-guilty.

“What we will be doing is transferring your bird to Callisto,” I went on, “and moving you into one of the Chippewas.”

The stock Lyran Chippewa heavy attack fighter was a deathtrap on account of its terminal undersupply of armor, and badly undercooled besides. The Federated Suns’ standardized refit of the platform pulled two of its four 8cm lasers in favor of their weight in armor, and solved both problems in one pass.

Passing her ancestral fighter down to her daughter and moving her into the better protected heavy would make it harder for the enemy to kill my fighter CO, and - since the Chippewa was that mentioned half-a-G slower at both half and full burn - extend her flying career that little bit more.

Sasagawa thought that over, then nodded. “Thank you,” she said.

“Don’t thank me too fast,” I said. “I told him to schedule you for a monthly recheck, and he will have full authority to ground you on the spot if one of them comes up ugly. We can afford to have you running things from a desk on the Grendel more than we can afford you having a heart attack in the middle of an operation.”

“I’m fifty-nine years old,” she admitted. “This isn’t a surprise, it’s just… I’d hoped I’d have longer.”

“Don’t we all?”

***

I like cold weather, but Mentasta was ridiculous. The average temperature at the equator was about -2 C, and the place only had what liquid water it did thanks to the geothermal cycle pushed by tidal forces. Like Sol’s Europa, it was a gas giant moon trapped between its primary and other major satellites. Tidelocked to the planet, its local day was a brutal thirteen standard ones, which pushed the native life into microseasons of noontime summer and the brutal frost and snows of midnight. The oxygen cycle ran on antifreeze as much as sunlight - algal blooms tinted the snows green-black during the day and died off again at night, providing the literal breathing space that Earth and most other worlds got from their oceans.

The local population lived in arcologies and domes, massive, insulated structures built from materials that were at least resistant to the collosal freeze-thaw cycle, and the Armed Forces of the Federated Suns had their own tower block on the outskirts of the artificial mountain range that served as the world’s capital city.

At the heart of that block, grim faced men with foxhead badges on their uniforms didn’t quite go so far as to strip-search me before waving admittance to the vault-doored room beyond.

I was the last to arrive, and I looked around at the other four permitted into the obvious security safe zone. Marshal Corrida Larcher, commanding the Davion Assault Guards Regimental Combat Team. Colonel Todd Revons, ditto the 1st FedSuns Armored Cavalry, who were just a mech regiment. Commander Till Solih, AKA Morgan Kell in a funny hat, who ran the unit’s second brigade while I handled the first.

And one more man, also wearing the fox-face of Davion Military Intelligence to go with his Colonel’s rank, who I hadn’t met. Nametag said Kaidanevsky.

Instinctively, I checked the wall clock behind him. I wasn’t actually late, so I just went to the last empty place at the table and sat down.

“Ladies, Gentleman,” Kaidanevsky said, “This will be your primary operational briefing for the upcoming offensive operation. I am obligated to remind you all that all of the information covered here is covered under relevant secrecy codes and subject to the full penalty of law. Please sign the relevant forms now.”

I didn’t have a reference for how common that kind of thing was, but from the expressions of the other three COs, the answer was ‘not very’. In their various ways, they all looked like they scented something big in the wind.

I looked down and started reading the legalese. When I had signed and looked up, they were all looking at me. I guess that made sense; Larcher and Revons would be familiar with these forms, and Solih would only need to compare them to the ones his native LCAF used, so I was the only one who’d need to read through properly.

Kaidanevsky collected the forms and put them in a folder, then turned on the overhead projector - exactly the same kind that Younger-Me remembered from his childhood - and clicked the room lights down to Dim.

I couldn’t keep from letting out a sigh of relieved tension.

Marshal Larcher was grimmer. “St. Ives,” she said.

“The planet of St. Ives is a Capellan Confederation regional capital world, currently home to the full strength of the 1st St. Ives Lancers and one battalion of the 2nd; a second battalion of that unit is currently en route and will be in place by the time we land,” Kaidanevsky said. “Additional forces include three aerospace wings, eight battalions of armor, and an estimated fifty regiments-”

Revons drew his breath in between his teeth.

“-of exceedingly low quality infantry. The full details will be available, but twenty of those infantry regiments have been issued no more than ten percent of their weapons as of our last report.”

I looked down and made a note on the pad of scratch paper provided.

“Primary strategic targets on St. Ives are subterranean,” Kaidanevsky went on, adding an overlay sheet onto his map and then using a laser pointer to hilight features. “All of them were constructed in improved natural caverns, and the approaches are limited to say the least. Two battlemech-sized tunnels control access to the Ceres Metals facility, which produces Blackjack and Vindicator battlemechs. Four lead to HildCo’s Victor plant. Three, and a vertical access shaft, lead to the Warhammer and Longbow lines at Starcorps’ reserve. Mujika and Tengo Aerospace share a facility, here, with only a single access point available to us, which produces Thrush and Transit aerospace fighters.

“Subterranean heavy rail lines link all four production sites, permitting defending forces to be repositioned at least as quickly as any breakthroughs can be exploited, and all of the access tunnels have been fully developed with defensive choke points, firing loops, and traps.

“Based on shipping patterns and historical data, we believe that the plants can maintain full production without resupply from the surface for two standard months, or provide spares and repair services for at least three years.”

In other words, we’d have to take the place the hard way rather than by starving it.

“The General Staff’s plan for this operation calls for a two-phase assault, with battlemech assets making a ground landing, roughly here-” the pointer circled, “-to secure the spaceport.”

***

The lead time getting the FedSuns Armored Cav on station had been long enough for them to bring their own jumpships, but the Assault Guards had been rushed into place with a haste that Marshal Larcher couldn’t hide her unease with. Concentrating five hundred battlemechs into just thirteen Overlord-class dropships was more eggs in fewer baskets than she was comfortable with, and the fact that both AFFS formations’ infantry assets would be riding into a combat zone in just four Monarch-class civilian people-haulers had her all but in hives.

I tried to be understanding, no matter how much I wanted to scream at her that this idiocy was why her country was so short on jump carriage.

The upside of those ‘reckless risks’, though, was that thirteen Overlords, plus four Fortresses, plus five Monarchs, plus ten Triumphs, plus three Triumph CVs in two configurations made for a total of thirty-five collars worth of jumpship needed. My share of the captures at Tortuga meant that the unit had twenty-seven of those already… And the Armored Cav had arrived at Mentasta docked to a Star Lord of their own, six more collars. We’d only needed to pull one more Merchant-class from the AFFS pool to be completely ready to roll.

I was sure that there’d been a lot of kvetching and bureaucratic battle done over pulling together the Overlords and other heavies needed, but fortunately, that wasn’t my - or any of ours - problem.

Our problems? Bah. Grammar.

Speaking of problems, the first one was getting to the ground in one piece. My campaign to get that job put under Sasagawa’s authority had been interrupted by the word that our Go Date had been moved up to right goddamn now. When the Capellan fighters defending St. Ives sprang their attack - right at the point of maximum stress and risk during reentry, of course, to maximize their chances of bringing down one or more dropships - they did it without the good word making one person, any person, the air boss.

Without that central control, our own fighters were meeting the Capellan attack in three separate independent formations. I’d worried, all the way up to the moment itself, that that lack of coordination would be deadly. Opening a tiny gap in a dropship’s armor in orbit or low atmosphere was an annoyance; opening that same gap when the demons of friction and velocity were clawing madly for any vulnerability they could find could easily be fatal.

For the FedSuns dropship Tariana du Lac, carrying my own 8th Regiment’s 2nd Battalion, it was fatal.

On my screen the Overlord burst apart in a flower of flaming shards, incongruously like a fireworks display. The mixed squadron of Capellan Lightning and Transit fighters that had killed it arrowed past - then started to evade frantically a moment too late as the broad flying wing shapes of Chippewa attack fighters stooped down on them from above and unloaded their own firepower through the outraged upper atmosphere of St. Ives.

Further away, the Thrush lightfighters that had drawn the bulk of our own fighter cover away were paying the price, even their prodigious speed unable to escape the enormous energy advantage incumbed in a de-orbiting craft, and the crossfire from the dropships’ guns and the few squadrons that had stayed behind on close escort was rapidly melting away the attackers they’d bought an opening for.

Under and around me, the Hecate pitched and heeled, and the crushing pressure of g-forces intensified - then eased sharply. Alarmed, I flipped the camera feeds to our immediate area, and saw the mixed squadron of attack and heavy fighters arc around as the maneuver denied them their targets - and then the controlled roll the dropship’s pilot had put her into tracked the thrust line of her big fusion drives across their course.

The energy and intensity required to push a ninety-seven hundred ton spacecraft up to two and a half standard gravities was enormous. Spaceport landing pads were cermacrete, as enduring as diamond, because nothing else would stand up to the heat involved in a dropship landing. As the fighters crossed directly ‘behind’ the rolling Overlord, our pilot blipped that monster drive for less than a second, and two of the Capellan fighters simply evaporated.

Another lost control, tumbled, and ripped apart as aerodynamic forces exceeded even the generous limits of thirty-first century armor and structure. Another still, one of the two Transgressor heavies with their batteries of lasers, evaded in the wrong direction and fell into a crossfire of destruction from the Hecate’s own guns; it was still mostly in one piece as it winged over and started to spin the tens of thousands of meters to earth, and the pilot might yet save the ship, but it was out of the fight.

The last two Capellans got away from that engagement, breaking off as slowing ships breached down into thicker air. I tried to hang onto my lunch, and to my stomach, as the Hecate rolled back into line and onto profile, now well down and ahead of the rest of the slowing force. The giant on my chest came back as the drive came back up, making up for its silent time before the ground equaled out the difference in a hurry.

Fortunately, we made it.

Unfortunately, the next wave of very angry Capellan gentlemen were waiting for us.

My command company was the last off the dropship, so we had two companies formed up and ready when the first tanks of the Capellan column crested the low berm that separated the spaceport proper from the reserves of farmland surrounding it. They were a heavy company, Bulldogs and Manticores and one Pike, of all things, boring straight in at us in the vain hope of catching a break and hitting us while we were disorganized.

Which was, of course, why we’d unloaded a company at a time and had them move away and get ready, rather than milling around our grounded ride in a mass.

That frontal assault was also meant to give cover to the lance of other vehicles racing through the smallish grove of trees a few hundred meters to the east of us, but with said trees rapidly burning to ash after the Hecate’s drive had set them to the torch, it was easy enough to pick them out. One turreted Von Luckner… and three boxy tracked vehicles easily recognizable as SRM carriers.

The Von Luckner, with its 165mm autocannon, would be bad enough if it managed to get in close. The missile carriers...

My turn at the doors and ramp came; I pushed the throttle open and bolted out of the waiting bay in at least as much of a hurry as anybody else, and said over the local line, “Clubs, you have the main element, Jokers form on me for the flankers.”

Flankers?” asked one voice. The name escaped me, but he was the commander of the second company of the line force off Hecate, and he obviously had no idea what I was talking about.

Don’t take too long, Boss, but we’ll handle it,” said the woman who had the first company.

I glanced off to my left and saw Sophitia’s Aspis leap from the top of the ramp next to mine, feather its jets, and touch down gently rather than slamming as it should have after that stunt.

She was such bullshit.

SRM carriers weren’t un-armored, but they were far from well-protected, and they matched that with a battery of missiles that was hard to call anything but godawful. Our converted SturmFeurs had eighteen tubes; an SRM carrier had sixty, which was enough to cripple or mission kill a heavy mech in one salvo or make a light evaporate entirely.

So, I picked one of them and let loose, ignoring the Von Luckner. The autocannon burst raked across the flat side of the launcher box that dominated the top of the vehicle’s hull; the PPC that hit smashed a glowing crater out of the hull’s bow glacis armor.

‘Very Angry’ or not, the SRM carrier’s crew weren’t inclined to stick around for the followup to that. The vehicle skidded to a halt on locked treads, and, zoomed in, I saw a humanoid figure bail out the top of it even before it had stopped moving. A burning forest wasn’t a terribly safe place to be, but it was better than being inside one of Quikscam’s Finest when it was already taking fire.

I zoomed back out as the last two members of the carrier’s crew followed suit, just in time to catch the muzzle flash from the Fortress grounded a couple kilometers further east, its integrated 240mm howitzer already in action. I couldn’t see which ship it was, or what it was firing at, but that was all right. The amount of cover fire we had would only increase as the artillery batteries in the Fortresses’ armor bays unloaded, and unless the Capellans had stationed their entire defending force at the spaceport, we had the numbers to do the job even without that.

Long range missiles hissed overhead, launched from the fire support mechs of my command company - Reyes’ Crusader, the Lorin twins’ Dervish and Trebuchet, and Hamilton’s Dragon - and fell around one of the other carrier tracks. Less bright or less quick thinking than the crew of the first one, nobody bailed out of it, and a moment later it brewed up as Sophitia’s laser punched through the ragged remnants of its armor and set off the chain reaction of missile ammo.

The last SRM carrier picked the nearest target - that being me - and fired on the move, its low-slung profile seeming to vanish in a cloud of sparks and great banks of smoke. I could see the moment when the missiles left their automatic launch profile and the primitive circuits of their thermal seeker heads tried to acquire the inevitable furnace of an operating battlemech… and failed. If they’d seen me, they would have turned as a body and the cloud of them would have started to bunch up. Instead, the differences in their manufacture and spin began to spread them apart in a random cloud, an area saturation effect rather than an aimed salvo.

I stomped on the brakes and swerved to get out of as much of that as I could; even if targeting systems couldn’t see me, untargeted fire addressed To Whom It May Concern could get delivered just as easily as ever.

It worked, more or less. Only three out of that storm of missiles actually hit, drumming against Marauder No. 2’s previously-pristine armor.

I fired back, and by some miracle, managed to both PPCs into the same armor frame. The beams smashed straight through the crawler’s bow armor and flashed the entire magazine alight at once. The explosion was impressive.

The Von Luckner had a go next, not at me but at Sophitia. I could see the last shell of its cannon burst reflect off of Aspis’s shield in a spray of shattering armor fragments, but she had hit the jump jets at the same moment and twisted over its missiles with an ease that I knew was deceptive.

Such bullshit.

Large lasers fired, Davion gold, raking across the heavy tank’s bow and turret, and the paired flashes of Kohler’s Warhammer adding its bit. I set my own crosshairs - then paused as the hatches popped open and human figures started to dive out, one, two…

The last three didn’t make it out of the way before the LRM barrage, already launched, came down. I grimaced and cut the magnification, then glanced around to see how the rest of the area was faring. The other two companies aboard the Hecate were making good practice of the swarm of Vedettes that had come to back the heavy tanks up, but those same beefy tanks were still holding.

“OK, Jokers, swing left and pile in,” I said, and ignored my own advice by flashing the strategic display up. Several flying companies were already en route to support the one Fortress being attacked by a mech battalion, and two more companies were headed to back up the Overlord being hit the same way. Another six dropships - two Fortresses and four Overlords - had been hit by a tank battalion each, and were doing various levels of fine. Which, even accounting for the need to leave bodyguard companies for the landed dropships, meant that we had several battalions worth of troops free to move in support.

And they’d have plenty of time to do it, since we’d loaded the biggest and nastiest companies the Assault Guards - already famously one of the biggest and nastiest formations in the Inner Sphere - onto the Fortresses. I wasn’t prepared to say that a determined battalion of lighter mechs, or even tanks, couldn’t beat an elite assault company, but they’d take time to do so, time the number of potential reinforcements flying around wouldn’t give them.

A thought brought up the carats that indicated the other command companies; Revons was with the relief column moving towards the mech-embattled Fortress, Solih and Larcher were unengaged. Good enough, they’d pick up the slack while I was stuck fighting.

I closed the map just in time to see a Vedette taking aim at me - and to feel the shudder and banging as the burst of 80mm fire hit. I started evading properly again, and fired back, only hitting with one PPC this time. The tank had already taken damage, so that one shot was enough to blow away the armored skirts protecting one side’s tracks and carry on to fuse the road wheels, immobilizing the thing for good.

I stayed on target, and the crew stayed aboard. It was the wrong choice for them; the days when I had serious trouble hitting a stationary target were long gone, and two PPC blasts were enough to rip the tank’s entire turret off.

A scavenged kill off of a Manticore that hadn’t gotten the hint after somebody else in the scrum ripped it up, and that was all the company or so that was left of our greeting party wanted; they bugged out in a hurry, and since most of the survivors were Vedettes and faster than anything but my command company’s scout lance - of Locusts - we let them.

I checked the map again; the only tank/Overlord action still going was the one closest to me, and by the display both sides were at about fifty percent casualties. I opened a comline. “Silvereye, Joker. Think your people at Site 8 would like a couple companies of backup? We’re clear at 9, over.”

Joker, Silvereye,” Marshal Larcher’s voice replied. “It would be over by the time you got there. Don’t bother, we’ve got Tinker and Dealer unloaded to support them, over.

“Phase two it is, then, over,” I said.

Affirmative. Silvereye actual, out.”

Phase Two was the one where everybody shuffled around to deal with the fact that modern Inner Sphere deployment doctrine, with its separate command lances and companies for built-in reserve and leadership bodyguard duties, had grown past the straightforward ‘battalion equals three companies’ logic that the Overlord was designed for. I took my command company and the 1st Company, 2nd Battalion, 1st Regiment over to Site 10, the Ise, leaving 1/2/1 there and picking up all of 3rd Battalion… and headed with them to rendezvous with the company or so of elite FedSuns infantry that had unloaded from the Fortress-class Loch Lomond.

Those guys were the ones that the entire show was riding on. We didn’t necessarily need to have access to the flight control computers and radars of the spaceport, this was a military operation with the rough-field trained pilots that implied…

But it’d be easier, safer, better to have the spaceport’s own systems to guide the aerodynes in, rather than just keeping them from jamming us. Blowing the emitters up would work as a backup plan, but better to take control of them.

And for that we needed the infantry. Battlemechs, after all, wouldn’t fit indoors.

Getting the infantry to that destination would require escorting them, for a couple of reasons. First, while the Capellan regiments that had tried to hit us while we were disorganized from landing had been beaten off and handled roughly, they were still out there and could easily pounce on a column of relatively light armored personnel carriers. Second, the reason we’d landed outside the spaceport reservation was that it was copiously equipped with defensive turrets both anti-air and anti-surface, which would do much the same job.

The turrets started locking on as soon as we crested the dike. None of them fired right away; the spaceport’s defenses were designed to concentrate everything on protecting the repair and control facilities, rather than the pads and aprons and hangars around the edges. It wasn’t unreasonable; if there had been an outer perimeter we’d just have landed outside its reach and then concentrated to punch through.

As it was…

“All right,” I said over the line to the rest of the waiting column, “Are you getting the feed?”

Most of the people on that channel were just getting it for informational purposes. But the three or four pilots driving mechs that had been with us the entire time - that is, mechs pulled from the Free Worlds League shipment sent out before the technological crash that followed the Second Succession War.

The modern production we’d been sent from Defiance after Helm was easier to keep running at spec, but those specifications were enough cruder that they could only barely count as the same machines as in an earlier age. The Archers and Flashmen got attention tones to let their pilots know I’d picked up hostile targets. The Marauder and couple of Centurions integrated No. 2’s full sensor feed into their own…

Which meant that shortly, I could hear one of them reading off, “Gold, Club One-Seven, adjust fire, over…

I tuned that out and concentrated on keeping my movements more or less random. This was less dangerous than it seemed; the range I could usefully observe fall of shot at was substantially more than the anti-ground reach of any weapon the turrets were likely to mount.

Of course, if we were wrong about that, and there were class-two autocannon mounts there, they’d be completely dependent on computer support to hit an evading target at what was already extreme range.

A semi-relevant digression: Standard Armor composites are mechanically weird. They’re a lot more resistant to single big kinetic hits than the game rules make them seem, but they get that ability thanks to polymer layers in between the anti-energy ablatives that act sort of like non-Newtonian fluids under impact - that is, when you hit them, they bleed off the energy of that hit by temporarily crystalizing. So, to make a hole, you either need to whack them so hard that they can’t take all the energy and either shatter or rip from their mountings (like a gauss rifle), or you need to hit them a lot of times in rapid succession.

And thus, burst-fire autocannon, which do just that. And why old-fashioned single-shot tank guns had become obsolete. And, for that matter, one of the factors that originally drove the adoption of the Itano Circus model for missile launchers.

The obvious complication, though, is that cannons have recoil, and the bigger and more powerful the autocannon, the harder it gets to correct that recoil mid-burst. Single-shot firing modes were technologically possible, as I understood it, and every now and again some bright spark dusted them off again, but even the most robust mechanical system designed to slam around multi-hundred-kilo magazine blocs got cranky when you started messing with the weight it expected - and too light could be as bad as too heavy.

So, those combined were why lighter autocannons had longer effective ranges, and why larger ones didn’t just step their fire down.

Digression over - it turned out that the Capellans had put batteries of 60mm autocannon into their turrets, and the tracers were reaching out to say hi. Accounting for that possibility was why I was doing this myself, rather than leaving it to somebody less senior and more expendable. At this range, the defenders needed digital assistance to hit at this range, assistance that Phantom Mech’s bullshit made completely unavailable.

I suspected that the delay between my appearance and the first fire was accounted by the time needed for someone to realize what was happening and send minions running to the turrets themselves to take manual control; on remote, the emplacements wouldn’t have been able to see me at all.

They had to know that that was a mistake, even before the shells started landing. I spared a mental salute for their courage, and a note for No. 2’s computer to take down to make sure they were buried with honors.

The first artillery shells were small flashes, the batteries sighting in with the Assault Guards’ 155mm Thumpers. They missed, for the most part.

I kept dodging. If I stopped, one of the Capellan gunners would lay in on his iron sights and that would sting. No. 2’s armor could take that, for a little while, but I’d rather not, and so would my techs.

Some of the next artillery salvo didn’t miss… And apparently the gunners decided that that was close enough.

Watching thirty Long Tom shells go off at nearly the same instant was impressive, even across the broad front of the near wall of the spaceport’s inner compound. The 240mm shells tore great gaping holes in the wall, shattered the targeted turrets completely, and made a damned good go of smashing through the massive cermacrete pillars that had been built to lift the turrets over the wall and give them a clear field of fire.

Somebody on the open line whistled.

“All right,” I said. “Over the crest. Manchester Four-Eight-” The column’s scout company was drawn from the Armored Cav, “-push ahead and find the next shell.”

What was left of the walls and the design of the spaceport’s central compound would mean that any turrets after this would have much closer ranges to work at, and so there wouldn’t be enough advantage to doing it myself.

The other reason was that, if the defenders were going to make a counterpush, they’d do it as soon as they realized that using artillery against the fixed defenses would let us through those with minimal losses.

My own estimate was that they wouldn’t, they’d pull back underground and probably collapse that tunnel entrance behind them, but that was because I could cheat by using outside context knowledge. Candace Liao had known better than to throw good money after bad under far more coercive conditions than this, and intel was about as certain as they could be that she was on world right now. Which meant that she was running the defense, the CapCon and Liaos being what they were.

I was… half right.

We didn’t see the mechs again, that day. It was fairly obvious that they’d be the first things pulled out, especially once the strike force that we did see showed up, fast hovercraft screaming across the tarmac, LRMs leading the way and falling around the mechs of that flank. It was easy to draw the line of their course and see that they were aiming for the APCs.

“Formation, swing right and engage hovercraft,” I ordered. “Left flank, mind the rearguard. Madrid, keep your heads down.”

Sophitia, being Sophitia, fired first, Aspis’s Star League 8cm laser reaching out and ripping straight through the tinfoil protecting a Capellan Harasser, making the vehicle spill off of its cushion of air and go skidding as her shot destroyed pressure skirt and the engine driving its fans alike.

Additional shots crisscrossed the open pavement, and I took a moment to draw a bead on a racing Saracen and opened up myself. Both of the PPC shots missed, not a surprise at that range and with his speed, but I managed to get the autocannon on target, the first shell caroming off the pavement in front of it and smashing a section of hard rubberized skirt a third the length of the tank free. It pinwheeled up for a moment, then hesitated and was sucked right down on top of the Saracen’s hull, vacuumed into place across several of the fan intakes.

That edge of the hull dipped, the entire machine’s course hooking madly as straight-line inertia, the driver’s controls, and the sparking friction of metal on cermacrete all fought to direct it where they wanted, and I gauged the movement as my guns cooled and the racheting bangs of the loading system pulled another three 105 rounds and the cassette that held them from the main magazine and slammed them into place by the breech.

Thirty-first century combat vehicles, even the kind that ran on internal combustion engines, had power-to-weight ratios that would have been outright fantasy a thousand years before. They had to, to have the spare power to feed battlefield energy weapons. Even though most of the ‘heat sinks’ the Battletech tabletop game had demanded of them were actually capacitors like gauss rifles used, at least in armor mounts, the energy to feed them had to come from somewhere, and in not all that long at all. The standard cycle time between shots was ten seconds, though a well or poorly designed mount and system could do better or worse.

All of which is a fancy way of saying that the Saracen’s driver, once he’d shaken the debris away from his intakes, had the oomph at his fingertips to proceed on his way with a plenum chamber that basically didn’t exist any more, just more slowly.

But he needed to ground and shut the fans down to do that, and I was waiting. Saracens were enough tougher than Harassers that all three big guns didn’t hard-kill the thing, but I could see in the scope that at least two of the fans were wrecked, and the crew didn’t waste any time waiting to see if I was paying attention for the next volley. I saw the hatches pop, and moved on.

Moved to a J. Edgar Hover, much closer than I liked the look of. I reversed, swung around to track it - fired the AC as it reloaded, shells screaming by ahead of the thing. The bobble in its course was the driver visibly requisitioning an immediate change of underthings, which led to a frantic evasion even as its turret swung around to spray a wild fan of green light and missiles in my vague direction.

My second shot, from the left-hand PPC, missed, also ahead of the speeding hovertank, but much closer. If he hadn’t been dodging like his life depended on it (it did), I’d have had him.

The crew clearly knew that. The driver was putting everything, and I mean everything, he could into his evasive maneuvers, and the commander and gunner weren’t even trying to shoot back.

The third shot missed behind them, and I gave in and vented. “Fuck!

Fortunately for everybody involved, the crew I’d been shooting at had had enough for the day, thank you kindly, and as soon as they were out of weapons range they straightened out and hauled ass.

I looked around. A few of the hovers had broken through the line of firing battlemechs and taken passing potshots at the APCs. One of those was broken and burning, but I could see human figures taking shelter in the lee of the wreck. I risked a couple seconds looking at my map, and then made a call. “Goldenplate, Joker Actual, how many vehicles have we seen and how many confirmed destroyed, over?”

The Assault Guards’ staff headquarters section, still safely aboard one of their assigned Overlords, had enough people to do the beancounting and literally this in their job description.

Estimate two hundred to two-forty sighted, Joker. Confirmed kills eighty or so, mission kills about the same.” A second’s pause and hesitation, before the intel chick added, “The hovers you’re seeing are probably the only ones of those left, plus maybe another battalion of slow movers, over.

I watched Aspis reach out and give a Condor’s fan intakes a good whack with the tip of its sword, making the thing spin out, then waited and joined the crossfire that reduced it to wreckage. “Odds that what we’re seeing is the whole rearguard, what wouldn’t be any good in the tunnels, over?”

Pretty good,” the staffer said, her voice obviously wondering how to phrase ‘don’t get cocky’ to someone this many ranks above her.

“So now’s when they start getting creative,” I concluded before she could find the right words. “Thanks, that’s what I needed. Joker, out.”

***

They didn’t get creative. Aside from the fact that there were, y’know, actual bullets flying around, the rest of the assault on the spaceport went almost glass-smooth. It was eerie, like an exercise where the proctors had forgotten to throw any curveballs. We took the second and third rings of turrets out the hard way, rolled the infantry in…

And found nothing but a couple battalions of very edgy conscripts. Even just the infantry that had come down on the Fortresses would have been enough, even if they didn’t have battlemechs standing by right outside the buildings ready to pour machine gun fire into strong points.

Give them this, the poor bastards tried anyway. Given that it was the CapCon, I wondered how ‘safe’ the Maskirovka was keeping their families, but that might have been unfair. They broke under fire, they couldn’t shoot for shit, and there was at least one strong point that got blown up by one of its own grenades, but they tried. By the time their survivors were disarmed and taken prisoner, all sign of the heavy forces were completely gone, vanished into the tunnels that led between spaceport and factories.

Quick just-asking-questions interrogations of the pitiably green ‘soldiers’ confirmed that we’d taken out basically half the tanks on the planet, and that the 1st St. Ives Lancers had had a rough day indeed but still had most of their mechs at walking wounded status at worst.

All in all, a better first day than expected!

Night landings weren’t the greatest conditions to bring dropships down in, but they were manageable, especially with the spaceport’s sensor support and field lighting. By dawn, we had all of the armor and infantry regiments on the ground, and recon overflight by ASF had cleared most of our route to the area over the HildCo site, and by noon, we had an armor regiment dug in and settled around each of the known major entrances.

There was no point attempting to be subtle with an opponent who not only knew the ground, but had it wired for sight and sound besides.

The Assault Guards were providing most of the weight for our push - along with my modified units. I wasn’t sure why the FedSuns Armored Cavalry’s Colonel Revons had joined me and Marshall Larcher to stand by and watch while the first assault went in, but I suspect he thought the concept Sophitia had come up with was wild enough to fall into ‘I gotta see this’ territory.

The way he was shaking his head certainly supported that theory. “I cannot believe that I am actually seeing this,” he said.

Larcher’s expression was at least as skeptical. “You really think that this will work,” she said.

“We have a full simulator setup,” I said, “and so far, signs from that point to ‘yes’. We’ve checked every assumption, been conservative, and… Yeah, I think it’ll work. Certainly it works in the programmers’ knockoff of Ishiyama, at least.”

In front of us, the Banshee that would be going into the hole first reached tensed and heaved the twelve-ton slab of pure armor plating up in front of itself with both hands, covered from ankles to head as it advanced. The Assault Guards Atlas in second place shuffled to the side and tucked in, completely covered - from directly ahead - by the fire-shadow of that mobile barrier.

“You do realize what’ll happen if anybody gets around that shield, right?” Revons said.

“Depends how close they are,” I said. “At range, well, if it’s something like an L-ambush, they either run for their lives or die. If it’s in close, a threat just stepping in and around the shield… They’re in arm’s reach of a Banshee. The shields are ejectable, we based the mount off the Battlemaster’s PPC.”

Larcher looked more thoughtful. “...And in the tunnels, anything they face will be either ahead of them, or in arm’s reach.”

“Barring branching,” I agreed. “Now, they’ll still need support to have any damage done, but that’s manageable… And we can replace and repair the shields a lot more easily than, say, a torso section. It won’t make this easy, but I think it’ll give us a chance.”

And in front of us, the first mech lumbered down into the earth of St. Ives.
...AND LOVE HIS ONLY CONCEPT...
Reply
RE: Tell The World That We Tried [Battletech] [CYOA]
#30
Has Sophita made an honest woman of Asha yet, or is she still using her for her sweet bird mech dance moves?
Reply
RE: Tell The World That We Tried [Battletech] [CYOA]
#31
Asha and Sophita have deliberately delayed their marriage as of yet. For one, they need to find a planet that actually supports homosexual marriages.
Reply
RE: Tell The World That We Tried [Battletech] [CYOA]
#32
(10-30-2018, 12:31 AM)hazard Wrote: Asha and Sophita have deliberately delayed their marriage as of yet. For one, they need to find a planet that actually supports homosexual marriages.

That shouldn't exactly be hard, although it would be amusingly ironic if St Ives does and they stop in mid-invasion to grab a local pastor for the wedding....
Sucrose Octanitrate.

Proof positive that with sufficient motivation, you can make anything explode.
Reply
RE: Tell The World That We Tried [Battletech] [CYOA]
#33
(10-30-2018, 08:17 AM)ECSNorway Wrote: That shouldn't exactly be hard, although it would be amusingly ironic if St Ives does and they stop in mid-invasion to grab a local pastor for the wedding....

Hell of a place for a honeymoon.

But no, I'm planning the marriage to be one of the things that happens in the last chapter, which at this rate is looking like it'll be in 3021 or so, and back in Lyran space.
Reply
RE: Tell The World That We Tried [Battletech] [CYOA]
#34
(11-07-2018, 11:58 AM)Valles Wrote:
(10-30-2018, 08:17 AM)ECSNorway Wrote: That shouldn't exactly be hard, although it would be amusingly ironic if St Ives does and they stop in mid-invasion to grab a local pastor for the wedding....

Hell of a place for a honeymoon.

But no, I'm planning the marriage to be one of the things that happens in the last chapter, which at this rate is looking like it'll be in 3021 or so, and back in Lyran space.

"And now I pronounce you married.  You may kiss each-"

"INNER SPHERE BARBARIANS, CALL YOUR NAME, FAMILY, AND UNIT DESIGNATION"

"...well that's new."

"And you thought it was silly to have the ceremony under our mechs."
Reply
RE: Tell The World That We Tried [Battletech] [CYOA]
#35
Rails? What rails?



NOW STRANGERS CRY IN FOREIGN TONGUES


Tell The World That We Tried
A Battletech Fanfiction, inspired by Fitzgerald’s CYOA at https://imgur.com/gallery/M41mI
By Valles
I pushed play on the recorder again.

The two Banshees at the front of the knot of mechs filled almost the entire width of the corridor, and they weren’t taking fire. They’d start, if we tried to push them in a rush, but both sides of the rat’s war had found the hard way that trying to take out the shield mechs cost more in ammunition and heat scales than it gained in damage to the shields. The close confines of the tunnel, and the limited ventilation, meant that dozens of fusion reactors running in a tight space already had the air at sauna heat or more.

The extra readouts running in the margins of the video made that clear, black box data pulled from the records of one of the mechs that had been present.

One Banshee stepped forward; the other stepped back. Then the second stepped right, fitting itself in behind its cohort.

Ten meters behind them was the recovery vehicle, stacked with spare shields, and another five behind that and over in the ‘clear’ lane, a Von Luckner heavy tank. It vanished in smoke contrails from its missile launchers, pouring fire down the narrow gap the displaced Banshee had opened up. The cloud bank immediately filled the visual display, lit from within by headlights and the muzzle flash of its autocannon.

More missiles and muzzle blast zipped over the top of the tank’s turret, the Atlas behind it unleashing an equal fusillade down the line as the Victor that had been facing them didn’t quite manage to get out of the way in time.

The way the next bit was supposed to work was for the tank to reverse out of the firing line and back into the shadow of the Banshees, and for the Atlas to sidestep at the same time. That would get their armor out of the way and clear a line of sight for the Demolisher and Stalker pair behind them. Originally, it would have been a Sturmfeur and a Stalker, but the automatic transfer belts that pulled missiles from the magazines to the turret launchers had turned out to not deal well with the slightly chunkier dimensions of the SRMs, and they’d been withdrawn until we could find some better way of dealing with the resulting jams.

Instead, the Stalker’s lasers and SRMs ripped great rents and chunks out of the Atlas’s rear armor, most of the plating evaporating under the assault and visible structural damage apparent in all sectors.

I paused the video.

“You see?” Setsuka Carter said, glaring up at Minakshi James with a malice much more serious than her 4’ 9” frame should have been able to back up. But, on the other hand, she was one of the relatively few owner-operator pilots I had, meaning that the Atlas was hers, even paid off from the debts that had tied her in when I recruited her and her brother on Hoff, years before.

Minakshi, the Stalker driver, wasn’t a terribly tall girl herself, only an inch or so taller than me, and she’d been a street rat on Solaris before signing on. She was still in her teens and gangly with it, though she’d be gorgeous once her body finished filling out. She glared straight back, but stayed quiet.

I sighed. “All right. Formal ruling, command judgement… No fault error in the course of operations.”

Minakshi brightened. Setsuka fumed. I kept talking. “As such, the unit bears all repair costs. Since we’re on campaign, the Assault Guards were willing to play ball with spares, and the tech department says you’ll be back in action in three days.”

Setsuka turned her mismatched eyes on me, looking startled. “You’ll cover my repairs?” she said.

A thought occurred to me, and I leaned forward. “The crews haven’t been charging you before now, have they?” I asked. If somebody was running that kind of protection racket in my unit, I was going to have to make a very explicit example. I’d specifically set things up to forbid that kind of bullshit.

“Al and I have been doing our own,” she admitted after a moment.

I shook my head incredulously, but her Confection hadn’t taken more than armor damage until now, so I supposed it must be possible. Even if I didn’t really see how. “Well, if you prefer to do it that way, fine. But yes, you can draw parts, tools, and other technical labor from the unit pools as needed as long as you’re signed.”

“...Oh,” she said.

Minakshi rolled her eyes, and before she could add anything that would re-escalate the situation, I said, “All right, both of you go get some sleep. We’re back into it in the morning.”

***

The tunnels of St. Ives were rightly infamous. The one that Setsuka and Minakshi had been fighting in was eleven kilometers long, in total, with a deadfall, or pit trap, or side-accessed shooting gallery for crossfires, or turret nest, or vault door…

That got away from me. Point is, there was an obstacle every couple of hundred meters. I think the longest distance we saw without something to slow us down was three hundred and seventy eight; the shortest was only ten. Not counting the cases where several hassles were set up right on top of each other.

The only virtue from our end was that, since this was also a major access route for supplies going into the factory and its attached small city, it had to be relatively straight, without enough in the way of twists and switchbacks to interfere with the trains whose rails we were stomping over.

That lack of virtue included the opposition. The St. Ives Lancers were ton for ton lighter than any of our units, though not by a whole lot for everyone but the Assault Guards, but they were more skilled than my people were, and when we’d untangled all the wreckage it did turned out that most of the losses the Capellans had taken at the spaceport had been fast hovercraft that would’ve been slaughtered in the tunnels. Their heavy units, like the Demolishers and so on, hadn’t even made it to that battlefield… So we’d been seeing them ever since.

Between the shield-Banshees and the numbers advantage, our losses pushing in through the tunnels were a lot lower than what other Davion units had seen making tries to take St. Ives in the past - which is to say, we’d only lost about one company to the lance worth of hard kills we’d confirmed, as opposed to two or three.

I hadn’t been living in my cockpit the way Revons was, or in a set-up command center like Larcher, so I was pretty sure that I was the only one of the main command team to be getting any sleep to speak of. Which was kind of backwards, given that I was the youngest by at least five years, but there you go.

With several times as many people and mechs as the defenders, we were keeping the pressure and operations on around the clock, in the hopeful theory that it would pile enough fatigue on the Capellan troops for them to start making useful mistakes. In practice, it seemed to be about canceling out the stress-level advantages they reaped from actually knowing the ground and where all the traps were.

Traps like the one I got the call about at the next best thing to four in the local morning.

The bastards have caved it in!

I was, just barely, still awake enough to ask useful questions rather than just going ‘huh?’. “Which tunnel? How big is the fall? Did we lose anyone?”

That calmed the voice on the other end down. “Sorry, Ma’am. Brasscap Actual here-” Somewhere in the Assault Guards, by his callsign, though offhand I didn’t know which battalion. “And these fucking Capellan assholes just dropped what looks like a two hundred meter long chunk of the south tunnel on top of three companies of our people. And two of their own mechs, too.

“Fuck,” I said, and scrubbed a hand over my face. A one-to-eighteen exchange rate was worth doing that, for the Capellans, but what it said about their fanaticism… “All right. That’s probably too big to clear the normal way, but have the engineers take a look at going up and over the top of the fall.”

The Capellans had standardized their drop-blocks at the same height as the tunnel, which meant that there had to be a cavity at least that high above it. We’d need to shoot out the retraction mechanisms, but that was easy - and the amount of mass involved meant we’d likely have time.

“In the meantime, I’m going to go re-emphasize no pursuit into uncleared zones to people. Again,” I finished.

We both signed off and I started to make the calls I needed. This was going to fuck our loss ratios.

***

The next alarm found me already in the cockpit. Unfortunately, it found me in the form of a sudden shockwave whumping through my gut and chest.

I waited a hard-counted ten seconds before I gave in and decided that no one was going to call me. I glanced at the secondary displays - I hated the compressed panorama readout that the SLDF had decided was ‘optimal’, but Marauder No. 2’s cockpit had enough multi-function screens to dedicate three to cameras showing right, left, and rear views with a lot less distortion.

The mushroom cloud was easy to find. “King, Joker Actual,” I said. “I’m seeing a major detonation at what looks like the eastern camp gate. What do you know?”

Joker, King, everything’s still confused over there but it looks like a truck bomb, mixed concussion and incendiary-

Another detonation, more distant, was easily audible first over the com line, then a second time with my own ears.

Fuck! West gate, too,” the operator in the command post said.

“Full alert, all gates, all camps, now,” I said. “Call me on this channel if you have details. Joker, out.”

I didn’t pay attention as the rest of the command company formed around me, not until I heard Malin Reyes mutter, “They want us looking at the gates.

Reyes was the oldest person in the unit, and he’d been a mercenary mechwarrior since he was seventeen. He’d fought for every Successor State, against every other Successor State, and that wealth of experience, the insight it gave him, was why I kept him in my command element. I kept organizing our response to the truck bombs… And then at the end of it, I added, “...And remaining perimeter and watch stations, check your sectors. If this is all of it, it was a waste of their time and they have to know that. Joker, out.”

Good thought, Boss,” Reyes said.

I grinned unconsciously. “Says the man who knows he put it in my head. Thanks.”

‘Swhat you pay me fo-” Reyes started to reply, before a priority channel from the dropship Ise cut across the transmission.

“-erfucker! Pirate jump, we missed it!

I didn’t bother complaining about the poor com protocols. “We have new company in system?” I asked.

Three Invaders, one Merchant, seven Unions, two Leopards, two Intruders, at the lunar pirate point and burning at two-point-five. ETA at orbit, three hours and a bit,” the voice on the Ise had calmed down enough to give real data.

Most Capellan regiments ran with only two battalions, so that was about bang-on right.

“Good work, that means we’ve caught them in time to be ready,” I said.

***

Once again, defending fighters rose from St. Ives and closed in on descending dropships. This time, though, rather than running the gauntlet, most of the ships broke off back for orbit - and left a scatter of falling sparks in their wake - and two remaining dropships.

Watching from the ground, I could still hear Sasagawa giving orders. “Spades, take the pods. Swords, kill those Intruders. Bronzefin, you’re on overwatch.

That left the unit’s fighters hunting for the drop pods and the mechs inside them, and the AFFS regulars going after the Capellan fighters to keep them from interfering. I could watch the two waves of icons, one rising, one falling, come together, and see the lights start to wink out.

I could also hear the startled swearing and the way confusion set in, if not the reason why, as the dropships in the landing wave started trying to escape back to orbit… And, a moment later, the way the ships in orbit dove again for the ground.

Sasagawa called me: “Joker, the drop pods are decoys, repeat, decoys. The mechs must still be on board the dropships, and we’re out of position. We’ll try and get some but we won’t get them all.

“Understood,” I said, already doing the math and coming out with an estimate that there had to be a hidden fifth tunnel, a sally port, at whatever the landing’s target point was. “I won’t joggle your elbow. Joker, out.”

I wasn’t going to joggle her elbow. “Ise, this is Joker Actual. I need an updated landing site.”

Thirty kilometers east of Site Eight, plus uncertainty. Sir, if they maneuver they could throw that off by at least that much distance.

Inconvenient. “Basically right on top of us. Got it.”

The need to stay organized to fight meant that we couldn’t really blanket the landing zone, but setting up both free battalions ten or so minutes apart meant that even if the entire reserve of defenders sallied, they’d be able to combine quickly enough for a fighting retreat.

I was confident that that would be enough, but I never expected it to be needed. I was sure there was a sally port, but I didn’t think that Candace Liao would take the risk.

Yeah, uh, I was wrong.

They popped out just as the dropships pushed their cargoes out the door and it started raining mechs.

We found out a bit later that there’d been a forward deployment chamber, enough to hold a full regiment, not far under the surface, with dozens of easily collapsed access ramps to let them flush its entire contents out onto the surface quickly.

The last strategic thought I had time for was, “King, Joker. Relay to AFFS command and Hangman. Emphasize. We have one regiment confirmed on the surface. They’ve left the cupboard bare. Joker out.”

After that, the next impression was the command company’s Rifleman cutting loose at the falling mechs overhead, trying to take out the jump harnesses supporting this mech or that. I started to track my PPCs up to try the same thing, but a Vindicator touched down ahead of me and I switched targets to that.

The autocannon missed, but the beams didn’t, and from the way they ripped deep into its torso I knew it was one of the so-called ‘Avenging Angel’ variants, which traded half their armor for another twenty kph of top speed. I could see the goal there, the Vindicator was slower than most mechs its weight, but the decision to take all the needed weight out of armor rather than scaling back the weapon loadout a bit was… questionable.

As I demonstrated by firing again, this time missing with both beams but raking the autocannon across the missile-carrying side of my target’s torso. A secondary detonation tossed the weak-side arm free and left it staggering madly, unable to steady long enough to bring the PPC in the remaining limb to bear in my direction.

A salvo of LRMs from somewhere behind me meant it didn’t get the chance; internal compartmentation had saved the Vindicator’s reactor and gyroscope from the ammo detonation, but with the armor and structural members that would have interdict them sheared away, the missile warheads were able to punch straight through the remaining bulkhead. The medium dropped like the proverbial marionette, and I turned to try and find the next target.

...Which found me, instead. The Quickdraw’s pilot was either a very quick thinker or he’d been listening to rumors and planning ahead of time; by the time I saw him he was only a split second from slamming into me in a well-aimed shoulder charge.

I’d come a long way as a pilot since 3015. Four years of practice and experience had me up to the standard expected of a basic mechwarrior graduate - I’d even qualified to be rated Regular.

But I wasn’t that good. Marauder No. 2 went down hard, flailing its clubbed gun arms in a way that would have been comical under most other circumstances, and I tasted blood as the impact of landing made me bite my tongue. Trying to clear my head, I looked up at the Capellan machine as it trained all its weapons straight back down at me - at this range, even the missiles would probably hit.

I picked one leg up off the ground, drew it back for a kick. The Quickdraw fired, the thunder of missile impacts and the poison-green blaze of laser fire glaring off their smoke filled my senses. Alarms wailed, but my own armor held.

The kick didn’t work; my target danced back out of reach, and the I could see the EST. HEAT bar my HUD threw next to it tick back down towards safe levels that would let the pilot fire again.

A blur of motion, a flash of plasma flame, and the distinctive modified silhouette of Aspis touched down behind the Quickdraw and took one leaping stride on the momentum of its jump jet leap - and used that speed and impulse to drive its sword straight in through the heavier mech’s rear armor plating. I could see the tip of the weapon emerge from the weak point of one of the missile launcher housings, impaled straight through the Quickdraw’s entire body, then withdraw again.

The last of the three mechs to land on my command company, a Wasp, was long gone by the time I got No. 2 back to its feet, and…

They’re retreating?” Sophitia asked over a private channel.

...The rest of the Capellans were following.

“They’ve got what they were after; they’ve linked up without getting chewed up in detail.” I checked the logs of the artillery fire missions; they’d been firing since practically the first sighting of the 1st St Ives, good. “We’ll bleed them some more, but odds are they’ve won this round.”

***

All told, the Capellans showed a net gain of about two battalions out of the operation, including the command lances and so on folded into their numbers. Despite that, all of us on world were still sure that we had everything we needed to take St. Ives away from the Confederation for the first time in the planet’s history. They’d traded most of the dropships and about half of their defensive depth before the main garrisons could get back into position.

Our orders to do just that staying unchanged wouldn’t have surprised anyone. Nor, given that the five regiments of McCarron’s Armored Cavalry - the Capellans’ de-facto central reserve for all that they were technically a mercenary outfit - were only a few jumps away, at Menke, would orders to withdraw entirely.

Ceasefire in place, and orders to secure and set up a real-time HPG channel between St. Ives and Tikonov of all places…

Since the protocols specified for the signal linkage were in the clear, I was pretty sure that the only serving military who weren’t awake and watching avidly were the ones on guard and watch duty - and that they were listening to audio-only.

As the second-most-senior officer on the planet, I had… a better viewpoint, while Marshall Larcher watched from her command post.

On the big screen that dominated the little conference room, Hanse Davion inclined his head. “Let me open by offering my personal condolences, Celestial Wisdom. While I cannot apologise for the fortunes and dictates of war, I know the cost and pain of a lost parent, and regret your loss on those terms.

Seated, alone, at the table that faced that screen, Candace Liao returned the not-quite-a-bow, managing not to dislodge the elaborate headdress that went with her ornate robes in the process.

Padme Amidala, eat your freakin’ heart out.

“We thank you for your courtesy, Your Highness,” she said, with barely any hidden venom. I was impressed by her acting skills. “I wonder, in turn, if His Grace the Duke of New Syrtis is expected to recover from his injuries? The Capellan people have always found him to be an honorable foe, at least.”

His doctors expect him to regain sufficient function for day to day life, but that the full duties of his office would prove challenging, going forwards. His title and post have already passed to his son’s hands,” Hanse replied.

One of the Capellan officers standing along the opposite wall from me, facing across Candace’s table and the central line between it and Hanse’s display, wasn’t able to conceal his disappointment.

Which was fair, since the entire exchange was full of so much bullshit I could feel the flies teleporting in to buzz around it. The dispatches that had finally caught up with us while the realtime link was being set up had explained, among other things, why we’d been rushed out the door so quickly: MIIO’s internal security operations had caught wind that Michael Hasek-Davion was planning to personally meet with Candace’s father, Maximilian Liao.

In other words, that the noble responsible for defending the entire Capellan border of the Federated Suns, probably the third most powerful man in that state, was in secret negotiations with the leader of the hostile realm he faced.

That Michael had no fondness for his liege lord was no surprise to anyone, which was why he hadn’t been told of Hanse’s plans for the operation I’d become part of… and why the first reports of our and other units arrivals had caught both sides of that secret meeting by surprise.

The Capellan Red Lancers and FedSuns 6th New Syrtis Fusiliers had been able to get their principals out of that room in between massacring each other, but neither unit would be combat effective again any time soon, and the fact that Candace was in this conversation as the Chancellor of the Capellan Confederation was ample proof that her father had not survived his wounds.

“And so, even this campaign of yours is not without costs to date, Your Highness,” Candace said, “and make no mistake, many more to come. Tikonov and Necromo have fallen, and the coats of the Northwind Highlanders turned. But Ares, and St. Ives, and Grand Base remain in question, and Archibald McCarron is yet in the field.”

They are,” Hanse Davion agreed equably, then warned, “But, though war is never certain, the answers to those ‘questions’ that are likely is apparent. Do not think my realm unprepared to bear the costs they require.

Candace inclined her head in agreement. “And so the time is come to… discuss terms.”

On the big screen, I could see Hanse’s eyes light up and widen slightly, his nostrils flare as he took a quick breath. “I would be willing to consider such a thing, in principle,” he said.

“So.” Candace Liao closed her eyes, then opened them again and met his gaze squarely. “The fundamental principle by which We must measure Our decision is that a peace or surrender which reduce the Capellan people, their spirit and culture, to no more than a ground upon which the image of the Federated Suns is stamped, would be just as much an extinction as the most grudging military conquest… And more certain.”

I am prepared to guarantee the good treatment and health of the Capellan people,” Hanse said, “and to avoid interference in voluntary matters of custom, but my own oaths and obligations to the subjects of the Federated Suns require me to guarantee them certain freedoms in excess of existing Capellan custom. Those oaths apply regardless of the the duration said subjects have been under my care, and given the long and tragic history between our nations, I would be remiss to leave open future conflicts.

He paused, then softened that veiled promise of conquest. “It is my hope, however, that a more detailed examination of the particular points will reveal common ground.

“My hope, as well,” Candace Liao all but whispered.

***

I found out later - from the gorgeous Nordic horse’s mouth, as it happened - that Katrina Steiner’s message had hinted at the possibility of an alliance, if the Federated Suns’ relatively young and untested ruler could prove as much a peer to her, personally, as his state was to the Lyran Commonwealth.

‘Impress me,’ had been the exact words, the challenge, that Morgan Kell had relayed to Hanse Davion.

Hanse had reacted by pulling two thirds of the Federated Suns’ Overlords and Triumphs to the Capellan March, and using their greater carrying capacity to shock two or three times as many regular units as would have otherwise been possible forward into carefully selected targets in Capellan territory. Backed up by heavier mercenary formations with their own starlift, he’d been able to concentrate overwhelming force without quite exceeding what his logistics could bear.

Homestead and Holloway, taken by the Screaming Eagles Mercenary Brigade to open the approaches to Grand Base, weren’t really worthy of mention; only one of them had had even a company’s worth of garrison, and aside from their position there was nothing significant about them.

Tikonov, the single largest industrial center in the entire Confederation, had been well protected beforehand, but under the onslaught of the three regiments of the Vegan Rangers, two brigades of the Deneb Light Cavalry, and the 5th and Heavy Davion Guards RCTs, the entire place had been pretty much rolled over.

The Deneb Light Cavalry was a long-standing combined arms division within the Armed Forces of the Federated Suns that used an organization surprisingly close to what I’d ended up with - and I suspected that if I could pull it off, I’d be imitating them and adding an additional armor regiment to the one each of mechs, fighters, and armor that the unit had per brigade. The ‘Regimental Combat Team’ model, on the other hand, I didn’t think was super functional - a third armor regiment for each battlemech one was excessive for the transport hassles it brought, and their ideas about how to combat load the five regiments of infantry gave me hives.

The AFFS had been fighting to, dreaming of taking Tikonov for decades at least, and Hanse taking personal command of that operation wouldn’t be doing his internal prestige any harm no matter how strategically risky it was. The two or three regiments the Capellan Confederation Armed Forces had been able to scrape up to try and retake the place had been hilariously outnumbered.

For centuries the other states of the Inner Sphere had known that the jumpship yard at Capella could not, did not, account for all of that state’s jumpship production, but the other source of ships, the elusive ‘Site B’, was a mystery to anyone outside the CapCon. The context that Older-Me had first read Necromo’s name in, a warship yard, convinced Lyran Intelligence that it must have been Site B, and I guessed they must have told Davion during Solih’s negotiations with him. Certainly the 7th Crucis Lancers RCT had confirmed it, when they took the place.

At last report, McCarron’s Armored Cavalry, which provided five of the eight mercenary regiments that had been the CapCon’s main strategic reserve, were still fighting at the time of that first conversation - after taking sixty percent losses against the Wild Geese, the four regiments of the Illician Lancers, and the 3rd Ceti Hussars RCT. Their pulling it out wasn’t likely, with the odds up to three to one against.

Ares was famous for the warfare conventions signed there, but in this day and age it was a company planet for the Inner Sphere’s most prolific and widespread purveyor of extremely budget military hardware, Quikscell Corporation. Between line defenders and corporate security, the three mercenary regiments of the Fighting Urukhai had ample opportunity to live up to their name, and were making a damned good go of it.

Grand Base, the number two battlemech production site in the CapCon, was the home of the picked elites of Warrior House Fujita and the Capellan Death Commandoes, who managed a full regiment on the books between them. They hadn’t even tried to make an open fight of it against the 1st Davion Guards RCT, Dioscuri, and Team Banzai, but the ongoing cycle of stealth strikes and commando raids made it impossible to call the planet ‘secure’.

The Capellan Confederation had been riding the ragged edge of disaster for a long time, long enough for pretty much everyone both in the state and out of it to forget how narrow their margins were. Both of their major neighbors were hostile and badly outnumbered them, their production capacity in any given field could only barely keep up with losses… They’d used mercenaries as their primary response forces, for gods’ sakes!

But those mercenaries were McCarron’s Armored Cavalry, who were getting their asses kicked, and the Northwind Highlanders, whose beloved ancestral homeworld was and had been and was almost certain to remain in FedSuns hands. I wondered how long the Suns had planned on the ability to just offer it as a landhold to claim their loyalty; quite possibly decades.

Without them, the closest thing the Confederation had had to a fireman brigade was the elite bodyguard regiment of the Red Lancers… Who had been ripped to shreds against Michael Hasek-Davion’s handpicked New Syrtis RCT… and Hampton’s Hessens, a mercenary unit whose biggest skill was avoiding potentially risky fights. If they’d showed up for the attempt to retake Tikonov, the odds might have been only bad for the Confederation forces, rather than suicidal.

Not that the CapCon had had a choice but to try. Without Tikonov, or any two of the other targets aimed at by the AFFS, the weakest of the six Successor States went from ‘hanging on by its bleeding fingernails’ to ‘tumbling past the event horizon’.

Losing Tikonov, Necromo, and at least one of the others… Candace Liao would have needed a miracle to save her state in the long run, and she was too realistic to believe in those. If she’d tried, the FedSuns and Free Worlds League would have just sniped out the rest of the Confederation’s valuable, productive worlds and then gotten around to the more marginal ones as time and logistics permitted - probably fighting each other in brand new battlegrounds in the process, with all the cost to the Capellans living there that implied.

Her sister Romano, who in another world would have succeeded their father as Chancellor, was… less rational on many subjects. Fortunately for everyone else, one of those subjects had been the belief that simply ordering their younger brother Tormano to take his battlemech company and ‘suppress the resistance to her just rule’ would help her do that here, too.

He’d taken his company to the meeting hall of the Prefectorate, the body that formally selected the next Chancellor from among its numbers… And climbed out of his mech and spoken in favor of his oldest sister, Candace.

Tormano Liao was another realist.

With her sister in chains and formal title as Chancellor, Candace had turned her attention to what she could do for her nation… which in the end, was choose who the conquest actually came from, and get the best terms she could.

The fine details of the surrender of the Capellan Confederation and its incorporation as the Marik March of the Federated Suns were still in progress when the unit lifted for our new garrison postings, and they were still in progress when we started landing at our garrison stations. Honestly, the entire process was complicated enough that the final negotiations wouldn’t be sorted for years.

But the broad strokes, the key points, were settled. The Capellans immediately dismantled their thought-control police and associated courts, along with the vast slave-labor battalions of the ‘Servitors of the State’. All Capellan nobility and military swore allegiance to the Federated Suns, and would have a timeline for correcting the overcentralization of control that had been the Confederation’s greatest internal weakness. All former Capellan subjects would be gradually introduced to the rights and freedoms required under more liberal FedSuns laws over the course of ten years, starting with the freedoms of speech and press.

In return, there would be no general occupation, no reprisals or large scale reparations. Internal tariffs would maintain Capellan industry until it could recover enough to compete with those of the wider Federated Suns, and current owners and staff, and the Capellan nobility, would continue in their positions, subject to monitoring and performance checks.

Which was totally different from Capellan political loyalty monitoring, just ask either side.

Anyway. The working language of the Marik March would stay as Chinese, and the legal recognition of castes other than the Servitors would continue even if their membership was no longer government-assigned.

The Federated Suns’ High Council, comprised of representatives from every planet in the nation, had suffered a long slow decline to its current status as a nominal body without even a rubber-stamp function, every scrap of power stolen by Davions past for both good reasons and more personally greedy ones. The CapCon’s House of Scions, and the Prefectorate that it selected from its own ranks, meant that ironically the totalitarian state had a greater degree of political input from those outside the ruling family. Candace’s biggest political victory in the negotiations was in convincing Hanse to split the High Council into separate March-level that could act as checks on March Lords, and appoint two members each to a ‘Council of Marches’ that would do the same for the First Prince’s throne and governmental Privy Council.

For… fairly obvious reasons, the former CCAF’s units would be stationed outside the Marik March for at least a generation, so the AFFS would provide the units to protect and secure the new borders and interior sites. Initially this was being done with whatever was available, including my people, but in the long run the area would be staffed by either new-formed units or ones that had never done much fighting against the CapCon - and hopefully keep the chances of incidents down that way.

Not to zero, of course. There was already at least one regiment near the Marik border that had sworn an eternal crusade to reclaim the true State from perfidious Davion and the traitors who had spread their legs to it. A corner of my mind was a bit suspicious at the geographical distribution of the ones that hadn’t been squashed right away and were being permitted to draw off ‘deserters’ and recruit their fellow fanatics from more placid areas to join them - they were all right up against the Marik border.

I wondered if Marik was in on it and was being ‘gifted’ those worlds as part of a border settlement, but enh, not my problem.

Blackwing Military Solutions and Services had been contracted until April of 3020; with the preliminary surrender signing happening in October of the year before that, we still had a whole six months left for Hanse to make use of us. The fact that he was pleased with our performance on St. Ives and Tortuga could be read in the fact that the fast-cycle destination he’d whipped us out to via our dropships and AFFS and Capellan jumpships was exactly the area that Katrina wanted us to be in.

We’d been assigned to ‘accept’ and garrison pretty much the entire rimward border of the CapCon - the spaces that lay up against Taurian and Aurigan territory. Anchored on one side by long-time FedSuns space, and on the other by the RCT facing the breakaway True Capella, we put a mech battalion, armor battalion, and ASF wing each on Rollis, Corodiz, Larsha and Ward, and about a third of that on Yuris, Zanzibar, Muridox, Pojos, and Hurik.

And yes, for any super canon purists in my crossdimensional audience, the Aurigan Reach did exist. Currently under the rule of High Lord Tamati Arano II, but I’d checked and his daughter was named Kamea. She was a couple of years younger than me, but from what I remembered, that was about right, too.

I didn’t anticipate any real trouble, at least until the end of the Davion contract. The surrender was a done deal, after all.

***

The Taurian and Aurigan borders of Capellan space weren’t heavily garrisoned to start with. With twelve regiments, the Taurian Defense Forces could have rolled over the border worlds easily enough, but they were already committed, either against the border with the hated Davion Nemesis or to anti-pirate operations against the raiders that swarmed in the unorganized space around their state. The Aurigans could barely muster two, scattered between their noble houses from the two battalions of the Aranos all the way down to individual owner-knights, but without any expectation of invasion they did a better job backing off the pirates.

Facing them, the CapCon had had basically one regiment. One regiment, and the threat of McCarron. That was all they’d needed, given the circumstances and the difference between what was a Great House and what… wasn’t.

The mercenary forces that provided two thirds of that were cake to deal with. Some of them weren’t any too fond of the FedSuns or House Davion, but they were used to weighing odds and hadn’t raised any fuss before they pulled out on their way to Galatea and their next contract. The last battalion were CCAF line troops, the second battalion of Kamakura’s Hussars, stationed on Ward as more of less the central node for the entire Aurigan border.

Communications with the Hussars had been distinctly… curt. They weren’t in the slightest bit happy to see us, which under the circumstances I had to admit was fair.

Ward’s only continent reminded me of what I’d read about Earth’s Japan - long, narrow, mostly mountainous, built by volcanic activity over a subduction zone. It was temperate and most of the livable flat-ish ground was on high plateaus, but Ward was a warm planet whose shallow oceans made it seem even more so. Setting up a base camp around our grounded dropships was easier than the… complications… of sharing billet space with the Hussars, and the weather was nice enough that it wasn’t a hardship.

The big day of the handover dawned gloomy, though, overcast and misting down an even coating of what was too light to be called rain and too heavy to be called fog. At the center of the Hussars’ base, a flagpole carried the colors of their regiment and of the Capellan Confederation, with a parade ground in front of it and a raised stage set up behind.

I, and Sophitia as my aide, and the seconds of my other companies, would be on that stage, facing the battalion and company commanders from the Hussars. A huge holoprojector was balanced, less precariously than it looked, right at the edge of the stage centered between us, while neat rows of a selection of our men - most of the Hussar mechwarriors, and a cross section of my own infantry and armor crews - waited below us.

Under the circumstances, we were all wearing rain gear over our dress uniforms, trenchcoats for the CCAF and ponchos for my people.

Don’t look at me in that tone of voice; I like ponchos.

Starting time was based on Sian local time at the Forbidden City; for us, late afternoon. For them, in a reference I doubted anyone else on Ward got, 11:11 in the morning.

Major Nathaniel Hopkins was one of the Inner Sphere’s characteristic weird background fusions; his hair was carrot-red and didn’t mismatch his name, but his features were pure Oriental. If he’d been taller, he’d’ve been lanky. Instead, not even able to look over the top of my head, he just seemed stringy.

Not to mention hungover; his eyes were sunken and bloodshot, and reddened in the aftermath of both heavy grieving and heavy drinking.

He was a good speaker, despite all that; I’d read the planned speech ahead of time, and I could easily follow along despite the incompatible accent and the fact that most of my attention was concentrated on vainly trying to exert my formidable psychic powers to convince the rain to hold off just long enough for us to get everyone inside.

The hair on the back of my neck stood up a second or two before he went off script. The wrapup of his speech was supposed to be an expression of his confidence in his people’s ability to meet the new challenges of a changing world, carrying forward the honor and legacy of the Capellan Confederation as et cetera, et cetera, blah blah blah.

Instead he was expressing his confidence in his people’s ability to stand up for their nation when even the Chancellor had betrayed them, and carry forward the battle against the eternal enemy-

I turned towards him in time to see the gun come out, one of the CCAF’s standard issue Ceres Arms 3mm laser pistols. He started to raise it, his eyes fixing on me as the sights came up to fit into his gaze.

I stepped in and reached out, slapping one hand against the side of the barrel and swatting it out of line, and aimed the other hand at his wrist going the other way. The emerald flash of the tracer beam went wild off to my right as taking it away dragged his finger off of the ready trigger.

I heard Sophitia’s voice cry out in pain behind me.

Hungover, sleep deprived, or whatever else, Hopkins was still blinking and trying to catch up when I caught the gun in a firing grip of my own and took two steps straight back. “Sophitia?” I called.

“She’ll live, probably,” Reyes replied instead. The icewater trickling down my neck and into the center of my chest froze solid. “MEDIC!” he called.

Hopkins’ face started to twist into a snarl, and he came up on the balls of his feet, starting to lean forward to move. Good enough for me, under the circumstances. I shot him in the face, then turned to cover the rest of his officers on the stage as the body fell.

Most of them were shocked and wide-eyed. The only one who’d gone for his own weapon froze in place and very slowly took his empty hand out of his coat.

“Major Mamba?” I called over my shoulder. “Disarm them.”

The commander of my infantry contingent said, “Yes, Ma’am,” and soon his bulky form crossed into my vision, carefully staying to one side of my firing line and working his way across to the Capellan officers, who by this point had their hands raised. Only after he had all of their weapons - and had stepped away too far for them to rush easily - did I let myself glance to the side at the ranks of men on the parade ground.

There were two or three knots where individual Capellan soldiers were being pinned by their fellows, and about twice as many where I suspected that had happened and the resisters had either had the fight go out of them or been taken over by my people. Along the front edges of the formation I could see where some of them had disarmed themselves, setting their weapons neatly on the ground and then stepping away.

“We’ve got it,” I heard Rex Lincoln, the armor battalion CO, say from just behind me. From the tone of his voice, he probably thought I was about to shoot them all and that I needed to be calmed down. It was like he was trying to talk me off a ledge.

I safed the laser. “Good,” I said, and shoved it in his hands as I went to check on Sophitia.

The wild shot had hit her in the side of the stomach, just below her ribs. Reyes and the medic team that had rushed up from their place on the parade ground were still working, and I could see that her breathing was shallow at best, but Sophitia was still conscious. She looked up at the sight of me and tried to smile around her gritted teeth, giving a thumbs up to try and reassure me she was all right.

Obviously, I wasn’t buying it.

Somewhere out of sight, in the direction I was pretty sure was the base hospital, a siren started up.

One of the medics, noticing where his patient was looking and what she was doing, glanced up from his work long enough to give me a nod of his own. “We’ve got this,” he said, which did a lot more to reassure me than her gesture had.

I took a ragged breath, checked the time, and headed to the microphone stand. “Obviously, I’m not going to give the formal speech I had planned under these circumstances,” I said. “If for no other reason than that we don’t have time. Instead, I’m going to hit these two hilights - first, the Capellan Confederation has been on a precipice for a long time, always at risk of tumbling over into the precipice of final collapse and war across every city and every planet. Today, joining the Federated Suns, you are farther from that threat to your homes and people. Your margins are wider by all that the Federated Suns can marshall, your reserves are deeper by the entire strength of the AFFS.

“Second, your own new station has been confirmed. You’ll be part of the force marshalling on the world of Crossing, because the spirit that drives…” I waved at the dead body cooling in the strengthening rain, “that makes you a risk that neither side can afford to leave in Capellan space at this time. In time, as you prove your loyalty or at least good sense, you’ll return home, but for now, House Liao requires you to serve by freeing other forces rather than directly.”

With a click and a hum that probably no one else was close enough to hear, the big holoprojector in front of me turned on, a ghostly image of the Celestial Court on Sian rising into the air above it. I went silent, and watched with all the others.

Four men and two women waited in front of the great dias that supported the Celestial Throne, facing each other across the lush red carpet, and two more men faced down the pathway from the foot of the dias. Seven wore different sets of robes, but I recognized some if not all of the iconography - even if context hadn’t made the identities of the heads of the Warrior Houses obvious. The last, one of the two by the dias and the youngest present, wore the uniform of the Capellan Confederation Armed Forces, in its most formal dress incarnation.

Senior Colonel by twenty-three; Tormano Liao was doing as well for himself as anybody with his family name could be expected to, these days.

Eight new people, wearing the sunburst-shouldered dress uniform of the AFFS, walked up the carpet and peeled out in turn to take their places interspersed with the heads of the Warrior Houses. One of them I recognized as Marshal Larcher, making it easy to guess - if I hadn’t already known - that the others were the heads of the other RCTs of the Davion Brigade of Guards.

Candace Liao entered next, walking up the center of the carpet towards the throne - her throne. In the ornate, draping ropes of the Chancellor, she seemed slight and burdened but awesomely dignified. The image quality was more than good enough to read her expression - if she wasn’t nearly as placidly calm as she looked, I was seriously impressed by her acting skills.

I put the odds at seven out of eight on ‘acting’.’

There was a quiet sound, like a hiss of drawn breath underlying the rush and patter of the rain, from the Capellan side of the parade ground as, rather than ascending to the throne, Candace stopped on the bottom step of the dias - one step above her brother and the seniormost of the Warrior House heads.

She stopped in place, waiting.

Finally, Hanse Davion walked up the carpet. He wasn’t a large man, but in the same striking dress uniform as his Guard commanders he started to seem that way, a tendency accentuated by the great cloak of cloth-of-gold that streamed back from his shoulders and swept along the floor in best Formal Monarch style, trimmed in the glittering fur of some creature I didn’t recognize but was pretty sure wasn’t actually Terran ermine. The crown on his head glittered too madly in the lights to be sure what metal it was made of, a simple pointed circlet in design but positively crusted with gems.

As he passed each of his own Guard commanders, they went to one knee, heads bowed, and when he reached the first step of the dias - Candace Liao stepped out of the way.

He climbed past her, to the top of the dias, standing before the Celestial Throne itself, then turned with a sweep of his arm that swung the long cloak out of the way.

For a moment, he and Candace studied each other, her looking up and him looking down.

Finally, she bowed her head and said, “In these last centuries much blood has been tragically spilled for the right to claim at last the throne of the Star League, seeking to settle the competing claims of the five Great Houses of the Inner Sphere. Now, in the final court of monarchs, one such claim has been decided. Hanse Davion, First Prince of the Federated Suns, the Capellan Confederation lies defeated at your feet. What would you wish of us?”

“Candace Mei-Ling Liao, Our will is that Capella’s people should grow wealthy and content upon their own worlds, that they should swear brotherhood and allegiance with those New Syrtis, and Robinson, and New Avalon, to together shoulder the burdens of the war that is long come upon us all - and in the end, to together taste the sweet fruits of peace.”

It was the first time I’d ever heard Hanse Davion use the royal plural. He went on, “If there are any reservations in your hearts at this course, let them be spoken now.”

“Your Highness,” Candace replied, lifting her eyes to meet his. “Each of Our - my - ancestors to sit on the throne behind you has done so in consultation with the wisdom and will of the noble houses who represented and cared for his people. Much is made of the freedoms enjoyed by the people of the Federated Suns, but in the passage of time less and less has been heard from the voices of your High Council. Shall the House of Scions, too, go slowly silent, and with it, the Capellan people?”

“No nation or institution wrought by mortal hand or mind is flawless,” Hanse said, after a moment of dramatically appropriate consideration. “And the flames of war have not had the courtesy to wait for the wisdom and deliberations of the High Council, spread as it is across the great distances of space. This truth is among the quiet shames of the Federated Suns, that those voices have, indeed, meant less than in brighter ages now past.

“Therefore, We swear to you this day, in Our own name and for all of Our House to follow, that the members of the High Council shall be divided into the Councils of Robinson, of New Avalon, and of New Syrtis, which may know their homes and members, and act with celerity, and appoint from their own numbers representatives to the new High Council, together vested with the power to bind and to loose Ourselves and Our heirs. In joining Our people, those who have in the past sat in the House of Scions shall meet again as the Council of Sian, with representatives of their own.”

Candace Liao took one breath, deep enough to be caught by the cameras… and knelt. “Your Highness, my heart has no further fears. I, Candace Mei-Ling Liao, head of House Liao, do hereby surrender and forswear any and all rights held by my family to the title of First Lord of the Star League, and pledge the eternal allegiance of myself, and my kin, and all our works to the service of House Davion, to serve at their will and at their pleasure, in whatever capacity we be required and subject to all the penalties and disgrace of oathbreakers before the eyes of men and Providence.”

Hanse Davion looked down at her for a moment, as Tormano Liao and the heads of the Warrior Houses knelt in turn, a ripple starting next to the dias and marching away from it each in turn.

He sat on the Celestial Throne, and said, “Rise, Candace Liao. We, Hanse Adrian Davion, head of House Davion, accept your oath, and swear in return to ward you from harm and care for your interests as your liege lords. Your enemies shall be Our enemies, your children shall be Our children, and while you keep faith, Our sword will ever guard you - as it shall chastise should that faith be broken. Rise, Candace Liao, Duchess of the League March.”

...AND DIRTY UP THE DOORSTEP...
Reply
RE: Tell The World That We Tried [Battletech] [CYOA]
#36
'Impress me,' she says, 'Impress me.'
Where'd I put the Bujold...
Simon: Do you know all those old folk tales where the count tries to get rid of his only daughter's unsuitable suitor by giving him three impossible tasks?
Ekaterin: Yes.
Simon: Don't ever try that with Miles. Just... don't.
Katrina, please be careful how you challenge Hanse. Please, if only for everyone else's sake.
(11-15-2018, 09:38 PM)Valles Wrote: Not that the CapCon had had a choice but to try. Without Tikonov, or any two of the other targets aimed at by the AFFS, the weakest of the six Successor States went from ‘hanging on by its bleeding fingernails’ to ‘tumbling past the event horizon’.
I'm pretty sure you meant this to be a five.

An excellent and enjoyable... dissolving of an interstellar state? Two actually, if we kinda count the Tortugans. Way to make that reputation Asha!
-Now available with copious trivia!
Reply
RE: Tell The World That We Tried [Battletech] [CYOA]
#37
(11-15-2018, 11:41 PM)nocarename Wrote: 'Impress me,' she says, 'Impress me.'
Where'd I put the Bujold...
Simon: Do you know all those old folk tales where the count tries to get rid of his only daughter's unsuitable suitor by giving him three impossible tasks?
Ekaterin: Yes.
Simon: Don't ever try that with Miles. Just... don't.
Katrina, please be careful how you challenge Hanse. Please, if only for everyone else's sake.
(11-15-2018, 09:38 PM)Valles Wrote: Not that the CapCon had had a choice but to try. Without Tikonov, or any two of the other targets aimed at by the AFFS, the weakest of the six Successor States went from ‘hanging on by its bleeding fingernails’ to ‘tumbling past the event horizon’.
I'm pretty sure you meant this to be a five.

An excellent and enjoyable... dissolving of an interstellar state? Two actually, if we kinda count the Tortugans. Way to make that reputation Asha!
Federated Suns, Draconis Combine, Free Worlds League, Lyran Commonwealth, Capellan Confederation, and Asha counts ComStar as #6.
Reply
RE: Tell The World That We Tried [Battletech] [CYOA]
#38
Ah. Fair 'nough.
-Now available with copious trivia!
Reply
RE: Tell The World That We Tried [Battletech] [CYOA]
#39
Sophita gonna get herself an Iron Womb to have Asha's babies, Blackwing Bloodname confirmed.
Reply
RE: Tell The World That We Tried [Battletech] [CYOA]
#40
I find it interesting that the CapCon folded so quickly here. They've lost probably less than they actually did in OTL (with Candace not taking the entire St Ives prefecture into secession), but without Max's determination and fire to hold things together...

Davion really had a lot less in the way of resources to do it with than OTL, too. Eight less years of training and prep for massive-scale operations... lack of having effectively complete control of the Maskirovka... No LyrCom troops involving themselves on the far side of the Terran Corridor...

On the other hand, the Combine is taken utterly by surprise by this. It's probably over by the time Takashi even know that it's started. So that's a lot of border pressure Hanse doesn't have to worry about.
Sucrose Octanitrate.

Proof positive that with sufficient motivation, you can make anything explode.
Reply
RE: Tell The World That We Tried [Battletech] [CYOA]
#41
The Capellans also didn't have the canonical few years between the end of the 3SW and the start of the 4SW to recover from their losses.

And rather than the wide, sweeping moves of the Operation Rat, here the AFFS simply piled units onto a handful of worlds - fewer units, many fewer worlds (almost all within 1 jump of the Federated Suns) so much shorter supply lines. Of course all those worlds happened to be very important.

Throw in losing Maximilian - whatever his failings he was both energetic and decisive - and instead needing to resolve a succession crisis between Candace and Romano would have delayed responses but the CCAF depends on shuffling troops to deal with successive problems. Face them with too many problems at once and they just can't respond.

And while Max had his grand goals and then looked for facts to support them, ignoring those that didn't, Candace is a realist.
Reply
RE: Tell The World That We Tried [Battletech] [CYOA]
#42
Max also had Comstar backing the Concord of Kapteyn already starting to be put together, which meant he could count on a secureish border with the League. Candace doesn't have that bulwark.
Sucrose Octanitrate.

Proof positive that with sufficient motivation, you can make anything explode.
Reply
RE: Tell The World That We Tried [Battletech] [CYOA]
#43
woooOOOooo...!

I love the canon train! I love the whooshing sound it makes as it goes rushing by! Oh, and then off the side of a cliff, as the now-burning bridge you'd already crossed collapses under its weight. Some amazing fireworks in here, and while it did take me a while to get caught back up on these (counting your fic, Acyl's and now MageOhki's as part of a loose cluster) it was definitely worth the attention.
--
‎noli esse culus
Reply
RE: Tell The World That We Tried [Battletech] [CYOA]
#44
AND I FOR ONE, AND YOU FOR TWO…

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


Wise people, experienced people, said that it was impossible to run a regiment from the side of somebody else’s hospital bed.

To which I said: watch me.

It helped that I had a lot less ‘running’ to do than I’d become used to; with only a cross-section third of a brigade ‘in reach’ to need my direct input on, I was at about a quarter of the workload I’d had to live with recently. It also helped that my people were… understanding about the circumstances, and making an effort to keep the inevitable troubles and complications from reaching me.

I wasn’t sure whether it was out of affection or fear that I’d resort to draconian measures to get myself back on watch quicker, but either way I’d take it.

Sophitia herself wouldn’t, of course. She tried to chase me away whenever she was awake and feeling energetic enough to be self-sacrificing, but I was happy to blithely ignore that.

With that distraction on my mind, I didn’t spare as much attention as usual to the complications of the garrison work, or to the RCT next door being called away to put out a fire on Victoria. I know I dealt with them - I later got a nice framed commendation from Davion high command saying how pleased they were with my work, which I’m pretty sure means I at least didn’t make anything worse while I was fretting - but all my memories of that period are of that hospital room.

Even the pleasant one, where Doctor Tiber was finally willing to confirm that the injury hadn’t interfered with her ability to have children.

“I was… worried,” Sophitia admitted after Doctor Tiber left us alone again. “I know it’s a little weird, but I’ve always wanted children.”

“It wouldn’t have stopped us,” I pointed out, but I squeezed her hand, too. “It’d just mean you’d be Daddy.”

What?” she asked, giving me an appalled look.

I laughed. “Well, if you couldn’t carry our kids, that’d mean that I would, right?”

In the back of my head, older-me paused awkwardly and went ‘...um.’ I ignored the ambivalence and went on, “And definitionally, that’d make me the mother and you-”

She reached up and hit me on the arm. “Also the mother,” she said, then made an odd face. “Wait, you want kids?”

I sighed and settled back into the chair I’d pushed into place. “Yeah,” I said. “I think I do. I miss my, Older-Me’s, niece. I do regret that they won’t have a chance to know any of the grandparents on my side-” all four of them, ahem, “-but… I want to see them grow up, I want to put part of the future into the future, and make sure it’s happy.”

Sophitia lay back against her pillow. “I’d thought that you’d have trouble with the idea of finding an actual father for the kids.”

“You know I’m better adapted than that,” I said. “Besides. Turkey basters are a thing.” I gestured to mime what probably wasn’t how the procedure would actually work, and she hit me on the arm again, laughing through her appalled expression. “But no, seriously, I’ve checked and Canopian fertility clinics can splice two eggs.”

The Magistracy of Canopus was one of the ‘big three’ Periphery states, with the Taurian Concordat and my own native Outworlds Alliance. The Magistracy lacked the OWA’s slow circling of the economic drain and/or top-grade military training, but it also lacked the extensive Taurian heavy industry and military complex.

What it did have, besides a matriarchal culture that had always struck older-me as some game writer with no fucking clue what feminism actually entailed just mirroring things as a Cautionary Tale, and younger-me thought was a medium-kinky myth…

That got away from me.

Point is, the Magistracy had the best and most complete medical establishment left in known space. Running on a master-apprentice system and carefully handmade everything, true, but they could pull off eighty to ninety percent of what the Star League’s best doctors had been capable of. Combining two otherwise normal reproductive DNA chains manually was well within their range, and from there it was artificial insemination techniques that had been well established during Older-me’s lifetime.

She stared at me from where she was laying back against her pillow. “They can do that?”

“Well, yeah,” I said. “They can. Probably even without us needing to go there; frozen ova can stay viable, so we could ship them if we wanted to as don’t.”

“That is so strange.”

“It’s just biology,” I said.

Sophitia giggled. “Not that. Hearing you switch from archaism to scientific jargon and back in the same sentence.”

My expression expanded her giggles to an outright laugh. “Anyway,” I said. “Once we’re done with this contract, we’ve, y’know, talked about settling down someplace. What do you think would be nice for where?”

“Someplace on a hill, looking over a forest,” she said. “A big house with wings that spread out, and decorative gardens to go with enough yard for - for our children to play in. Not out in the wilderness, but… a ways from any city. Enough that people didn’t come by too often. A few servants, so we could know them. A cook, a housekeeper, a nurse to help with the children, a groundskeeper. A medium-sized family, six or seven children… What’s that look for?”

“I’d have called ‘medium sized’ two or three,” I said weakly, then shook it off. “More seriously, I… can live with that. As long as we’re not wrecking your health with a kid every year, anyway.”

“Separating children too widely isn’t good for them, though,” she said, had an obvious thought - I suspected something about switching off, which I would need to think about - then visibly decided not to mention it and instead said, “What were you thinking of for settling down?”

“I… hmm,” I said, thinking and willing to let her change the subject back. “Well, if we’re talking just our fantasies here, I want a castle.”

“What?” she laughed.

“A castle! Not, y’know, one of the ridiculous mech-scale fortresses like on Tharkad or New Avalon, or a fairy-tale confection, but-”

I wasn’t sure how to explain David MaCaulay’s books to someone who hadn’t read them. “-um, a keep the size of an actual house, with walls and so on around it. Stone outside, and cozy wood and carpet and fireplaces inside. At a clifftop, looking over a fjord, so we can look down at the snow and waves and know that we can stay safe and comfy inside where it’s warm.”

“Oh, now I see,” she teased. “This entire fantasy is about cuddling.”

“There’s nothing wrong with that,” I said, gathering my dignity around me like a comfy blanket.

***

The permanent garrison that arrived to replace us on Ward ended up amounting to a battalion of combat tracks, two regiments of mechanized infantry, and a monster aerodyne dropship of a type I didn’t recognize and Older-Me had never heard mentioned in the Battletech game. Rather than at the spaceport, that landed in the open ocean on a calm day, and floated a quartet of wet-navy destroyers out of massive holds obviously designed for just that purpose.

A polite handshake and one last Comstar-certified receipt, and our contract with Davion was over on March 20, 3020.

Three days later, we were lifted and on our way to join the rest of the unit at Ward’s zenith point - furthest from Davion’s centers of power in our area, Ward was the last of our assigned garrisons to be handed over, so we really were free.

Free to jump to the Kimi system, though given our mission and the fact that we had Helm and its publicly known results - the spare parts, the mechs, the big, obvious, hard-to-hide stuff - in our past… and given that Kimi II and III were ruled by the theocratic New Salvationist Order who outright worshipped the SLDF and forbade any nonbelievers from setting foot in the old bases in their system on pain of death-for-heresy…

Yeah, I wasn’t sure how that would turn out but most of the options weren’t good. We spent the entire charge period just hanging at their zenith point and watching the scopes to see if they’d send anything out at us - which they didn’t. Or peep a word of communication, for that matter.

After that, it was Wyeth’s Glory, which did have a planet that had been inhabited, once, and which could now set off Geiger counters all the way out to the jump points.

The jump points in the system of Cluff’s Stand were close enough in that we could have sent at least some of our droppers in-system for a couple days of leave, but a police state megapolis offered enough opportunity for trouble that I was perfectly willing to substitute a couple of days of goofing off aboard ship.

Besides, the next jump after that was Alloway.

Alloway had a world-continent with a band of three small, separated oceans filling the low basin that ringed the equator. South of them, several high, jagged mountain ranges crushed the moisture from any air that tried to blow south to water that hemisphere. North of them, an uplifted highland covered pretty much that entire hemisphere, too high for more than token amounts of rain around the edges. In the middle, steamy jungles crowded from water’s edge to treeline.

Most of the population either lived in smallish towns hacked out of the jungle by the shorelines, or smallish towns in the southern foothills, or smallish towns in the high northern scrublands. But there were enough people there to build their own boats and bush planes, and to have tourists - and resort towns to take them.

We’d put together a lottery system - random selection from a decreasing pool of options, less a small percentage of ‘reward tickets’ - to determine who’d get the leave time, and made a deal with one of the three local nations for a reservation in the southern deserts to set up a groundside base on while those of our dropships that carried ASFs got to work on charting all the moons the first four of the system’s eight gas giants.

Turns out that, while Axylus was a real moon with a real name registered on charts since the Star League, there was, locally… some doubt as to exactly which of the dozen-plus candidates it applied to, even in Allowayan textbooks and charts. So, we had to send ships or fighters out to do a mapping job thorough enough to find a crashed dropship two hundred meters long, which was… time consuming. The possibility we’d have to do so had been accounted for; LIC had packed us the photographic gear we needed, and we’d dug it out of the piles of stuff aboard the Nicaragua, our Aqueduct, while we were en route, so that wasn’t a problem, but the pictures still needed to be taken and examined, then potential anomalies checked with lower overflights.

We found her on the third of June.

Going down with a full two-regiment landing to cover the two battalions of space-rated infantry turned out to be a complete waste of time. There was a small pirate base built up around the crashed Argo, with walls twice as tall as a battlemech made from chunks of laser-cut stone. Apparently that was a standard pirate technique, or something.

The radar towers and turret network I remembered from the computer game weren’t present; we were at least five years early, and Grim Sibyl was not the name associated with local piracy, so I suspected that they were things she’d installed after taking over from…

Well, from whoever had bugged out at the first sign of what we were bringing in on their heads.

I ducked No. 2 through the gate (about where there’d been a breach in the walls in the game, no points for guessing a connection there) and out into the claustrophobic courtyard. The height of the walls, and the looming bulk of the Argo, closed the space in, and it was already filled with pressure tents and ‘temporary’ housing even before adding some of our battlemechs and hostile-environment rovers. I slowed to a (dismounted) walking pace and kept an eye on the ground monitors as I maneuvered into a parking space, then powered down.

Swapping my neurohelmet for a pressure helmet to go with the suit I was wearing - I’d have needed to keep ironclad control over my heat levels if there’d been any kind of shooting while I was in transit, for lack of cooling jacket - I triple checked all of its seals before I cracked the cockpit.

Five seconds, ten, and the idiot lights along the bottom edge of my vision stayed green. I swung carefully out onto the latter and climbed down. In Axylus’s low gravity, I might even have jumped, but that would have been reckless and stupid. The pebbles on the ground here were sharp and jagged, not weather-worn, and could easily puncture a suit.

I walked up the shallow ramp, past a pair of saluting and thoroughly superfluous suited guards, and into the command post that had been set up to explore the wreck. The pirates had kept the compartment pressurized, and the passages linking it to several other areas and buildings in the tangled mess of their ‘base’, but the shipwrights we’d brought along from Skye’s Shipil yards had taken one look at the mess, turned grey, and ordered the entire thing depressurized before a blowout killed several different someones.

Doctor (and no one who valued their life should forget it) Jozefina Lenox was the head of that team, and the woman who’d asked me to come by in person. Despite how difficult and sullen she’d been in the preceding year, with nothing to do but run the engineering department aboard an Aqueduct-class bulk carrier, now she was animated and energetic, if not cheerful.

‘Outraged’ was more like it.

“If I thought we’d have time I’d be encouraging you to chase down that pack of loathsome jackals to bring them to justice,” was how she greeted me, and waved a banana-sized component under my faceplated nose. “Do you see this?”

I studied the whatsit for a moment. “Yeeeesss,” I said, “some kind of plasma regulator, right?”

She blinked. “I didn’t expect you to know that,” she admitted.

“I’ve been studying to finish my degree,” I said. “Fusion Power Engineering.”

“Huh,” she said. “Well, aye, this is from one of the reaction control motors. Star League special, twice the tolerances and capacity of anything made today. Those pigs were using it as a door prop.”

I looked around the compartment. The trash and refuse had been picked up, but the darker stains that I hoped weren’t blood were still there, partially overlapped with a lighter blotch that had probably been vomit. “I can buy that,” I said. “So, what does the total come down to?”

“Anybody that lifted this ship as-is would have to be a mad genius or a desperate idiot,” she said, and waved for me to follow her. I followed her up one ladder and into a long, slightly sloped passageway that had been an elevator shaft and was now more or less a hallway.

The shape of the hull would have accounted for that sloping, but not for the way the entire length was visibly wavy. Lenox waved illustratively towards the bow. “When she fell over,” she said, “the entire hull flexed, and half of the joins in the main structural beams parted.”

“You’re certain she did fall, rather than crashing this way?”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “We’ve found the blast scarring and the scree slope where the rock outcrop they brought her down on collapsed. I’d’ve liked to shake her pilot’s hand. They deleted the landing gear when they converted her from a Behemoth, he must have set her down too light to jostle a feather.”

I felt like a parrot, but… “None of the information I saw said anything about ‘conversions’,” I prompted.

“Mmm. I don’t think the actual hull was literally a conversion,” she said, “though we could easy enough at Shipil. But the bow and stern sections are fairly obvious reuse of the existing design. It’s fair clear they just cut out a couple of the cargo decks and slapped that carousel in their place to start. Though I don’t see why they’d bother.”

“Don’t think of her as a cargo dropper,” I told her. “Think of her as a mobile space station, a base for other craft to operate from. Resupply, basic repair work, a hospital… and Rec areas for the entire lot.”

“Seems a waste,” she said.

I shrugged, harder than it sounds in a pressure suit. “That’s the Star League for you,” I said.

We’d been walking as we talked, and we finally came to a ladder leading up to a hole in the ‘ceiling’ that had been intended to be elevator doors out into…

At the top I stopped and gaped, looking around the vast dark cavern my helmet light could only hint at illuminating.

“I’ll be goddamned,” I said.

Overhead, I could see the Argo’s spine, a triangular truss strung with cables and piping that must have run the whole length of the ship. I could see it, because the entire bow section was one giant open space, interrupted only by that and the lesser spokes that rayed out to link it to the walls. I was reminded of pictures I’d seen of Zeppelins under construction, but in person the effect was awesome in the most somber sense of the word.

Doctor Lenox waited until I managed to tear my eyes away from the sight before she said, “It’s not the most practical way they could’ve laid out the cargo bay, but I almost wonder if they weren’t trying to hit people with… that. All my people have reacted the same way to the first time they see it.”

I puffed my cheeks out with a huff of air. My breath left a momentary spot of fog on the faceplate. “Well, good for them if it was. Wow.”

We stood looking up at the man-made cavern for a minute, then Lenox shook herself and took out a tightbeam light to point along the spine. “Anyway. I wanted to show you this, in particular.”

As the light swept slowly along the Argo’s keel, at first I had no idea what she was trying to point out - and then I saw it. “The entire truss buckled?” I asked.

“Not… quite,” she said. “The welds holding the structural members together parted as it flexed, but the cabling and pipe runs held together a bit better. Of course, since then the bloody pigs have been strip mining those same cables, but there’s still enough there for us to eventually get the lot fixed. That’s the good news; the bad is that it’ll be at least six months work. I know I wasn’t told it all, but what I did hear’s enough that I figure you don’t want to wait that long.”

“There’s good reasons our mutual boss lady would rather not delay things any longer than we must,” I said. “But depending what you found and have been drawing out mentioning in the computers, I’ll probably end up leaving your crew in place with one of the Invaders and a battalion or two of security.”

“...You’d do that?” Lenox said, looking startled through the reflections off her faceplate.

“We might be after bigger game still, but the Argo’s not a small prize,” I said reassuringly. “I just need to know how many different places we need to be at once before I decide what we can afford to save for you.”

Through the clear bowl of her visor, I could see her take a breath and let it out, before she reached into a pocket and pulled out a small round spool with two plugs sticking out of one side - she stuck one jack in a port in her own suit, and then handed the thing over, wire trailing out of it as it unwound, for me to fit into the matching port on the back of my own forearm.

A click from the helmet speakers and an idiot line confirmed that our radios were off.

“That good, then?” I said, once we were in private.

“We’ve found a complete, SLDF-use map of the entire Periphery Military Region, including full Tier Five classification. Every base, listening post, and research station in the Outworlds, Concordat, Magistracy, and Rim Worlds Republic, as well as unorganized territory.”

Her voice was odd, caught between flat and reverent.

I let my breath out carefully. It was a relief and a triumph to know that that much of expectation had panned out, and that map would have paid for our trip even if nothing else had been involved. “Excellent,” I said.

“In the area included in our prep files, we have four sites that don’t show up in the LIC database of known LosTech finds,” she said. “One in this system, on one of the moons of the ninth planet, marked as Intelligence Command. Artru and Castle Nautilus, purpose redacted and at the highest classification levels. One in Kimi, Quartermaster Command. And one more, same as Nautilus but in deep space near the Capellan border.”

“In, what, one sixteenth of the known Periphery of the day?” I said.

“I doubt all four sites will pan out,” she said, fighting to ward off the universe’s malignant punishment of overconfidence, “But… yes.”

Both of us could do that math; she didn’t ask why I whistled. “All right,” I said. “Obviously, we’re gonna need to refine things as time goes by, but for now, here’s the plan…”

***

The first two steps were the easiest. Doctor Lenox already needed to generate an estimate of how much time it would take to get the Argo back into flying condition, just as part of the project. Add up the individual tasks, add a percentage for inefficiency and unforeseen contingencies… Straightforward enough.

The other thing was sending a dropship or three to check out the coordinates for the other site in the Alloway system. What we found there was a gas giant just big enough to have not frozen, despite being further out than Sol’s Kuiper Belt from a smaller star, with one big moon whose surface never got above about minus two-hundred-ten Celsius. Not a great place to live, but the database coordinates led us to several centuries-old debris fields, scattered across the ice, that had probably been fighters or small shuttles before meeting their fate, and an unmarked pressure dome of the same vintage, still bearing the holes that some unknown agent’s weapons fire had ripped open.

Cutting graves in rock-solid nitrogen ice wasn’t trivial, but my people didn’t even ask before they started collecting the bodies where they’d fallen and putting together a graveyard. One of the old Fiannan hands turned out to be a fully frocked priest who consecrated the space. I was proud of them, and later I’d be sure to tell them so.

As was, I was shadowing the techs as they went through the ghosted dome. We’d seen the antennas, set in the ice outside and long weathered by micrometeorite impacts, stretching out for several kilometers, but careful examination and sampling where a rockslide had broken one showed that it was basically just a cooled germanium wire in a protective casing. Nothing that even a modern shipyard couldn’t turn out in job lots, at need.

The real mystery, and its explanation, was inside the dome.

I was, not least to my own surprise, the first to figure out what we were looking at. “Son of a fucking bitch,” I said. “It’s a DFM.”

“A what?” Lu Clair asked, his expression as puzzled as his voice.

Doctor Raven looked up at the map being projected on the wall, studied it for a few seconds, then said, thoughtfully, “...Huh.”

“A Direct Field Monitor,” I said. “Um… Despite what a lot of people think, fusion engines don’t actually get most of their power balance from atomic fusion as such. They only run purely on smashing atoms together for a second or so when they’re starting up. After that, they’re using the fusing plasma and its containment fields to generate and stabilize a nano-scale hyperspace aperture, smaller compared to an HPG punchthrough than that is compared to a jumpship’s KF drive. And, since hyperspace is more energy dense than normal space, that generates power. Kearny and Fuchida got famous for discovering that application - they never expected anyone to succeed in turning their work into an FTL drive.

“There’s a few different ways of monitoring that reaction - radiation sensors, magfield monitoring, and other indirect ones are most common these days, because they’re technically simple and good enough. Big municipal reactors, that need to be relatively precise to match their output to grid-load, are about the only place you still see DFMs these days. They can directly pick up KF fluctuations. But the actual pickup heads are tiny, maybe a few millimeters. One this size would be…”

“Able to see eighteen light years,” Raven said. “That’s the ratio in the math. In practice I’d believe anything between ten and twenty, probably closest to fifteen. Signal gain would be a problem, even so. If I weren’t looking at this in a Star League listening post, I’d say that jump flares would still be too faint to pick up at that range… And if they turn out to have been able to detect HPG transmissions, I’ll convert to Cameronism, because the Star League was run by witches.”

I blew a breath out and shook my head. “I’m really tempted to just blow off Artru entirely,” I said.

***

We didn’t, of course. No matter how big the prizes we’d found in Alloway were, they weren’t what we’d come here for. The Star League’s habit of concentrating big databases - like university libraries - into single mega-drives rather than the cloud arrays that had been ‘in vogue’ in the 21st century came with the need to index and read those drives, those memory cores, and the specialized hardware to do that.

Because future of the Eighties, go fuck yourself, those cores and their readers weren’t solid state. They had moving parts, including the extremely sensitive, sophisticated, fiddly reader-heads. Which inevitably wore out, usually long before everything else in the mechanism. In headier days, they’d been the most common spare part… but also the most needed.

The entire resources of a Successor State could club together and come up with maybe three or four partially-functional heads… And a certain now-dead fool hadn’t realized how hard it would be to replace the mechanism shattered by his eraser-sized ‘warning charge’. Which is one of the reasons that stripping data out of the core was taking so long - the ‘marginal’ reader heads had a much lower bandwidth than the fully functional ones.

Maybe some company on Terra could have built new components, but, given ComStar… that had certain obvious difficulties. For all I knew, LIC was trying to pull it off anyway, but none of us wanted to count on it.

Anyway. Most of the things that were major problems and obstacles in the computer game didn’t really register for us. Showing up with one heavy lance and a single mad genius for tech support was a different thing from showing up with a regiment or three and several dozen hand-picked specialists. Knowing SLDF security procedures made it a lot easier to get the code pass right on the first try, and as much as everybody involved was holding their breath, we managed it.

What we found inside was… Well, at one point, Castle Nautilus had been home to at least a division of SLDF troops and a research staff nearly as large. Almost all of the military hardware was gone - the four mechs Kamea and Yang had pulled from the base in the game came out of only five Royals we found, the last being a 7H Wolverine - and the staff quarters had clearly been shut down in a bit of a hurry. Personal items were gone, but a lot of the fittings hadn’t been cleared out.

Logs, safely stored in the base command center, showed that the order to evacuate to more secure ‘concentration points’ had arrived on December 30, 2766, literally three days after Stefan Amaris shot First Lord Richard Cameron and openly seized power in the Terran Hegemony.

Yyyeaaahh.

Anyway, it turns out that the other half of Castle Nautilus’s purpose, besides the semi-public one of being a base for operations in the officially-not-occupied Taurian Concordiat, was research. The Terran Hegemony had decided to bet a big chunk of its defenses on the Space Defense System concept, integrated networks combining ground stations, fighter craft, dropships, base stations, and even jump-capable Warships… All of them automated. Only the ground stations had any actual human beings involved at all; the space-side units in the system were completely robotic.

This naturally gave the Hegemony a very strong interest in perpetually improving the stability and effectiveness of their expert systems, particularly after what were reported as tragic and embarrassing IFF issues with the early M-2 drone dropships.

Which, it turns out, was a coverup. When my cyber people found the library core that had been abandoned in place, with all the research data still locked up and encrypted aboard it, they pulled every single file and archive off into their own drives, safely separate and physically unable to communicate with any other computer before they tried to open them.

This was a good idea for obvious reasons, given what else had happened in the game, but when they got to the key archive, the M-2 project, we found out why it had been abandoned.

The Locura code wasn’t a virus; it was the complete stored code, the ‘mind’, of an M-2. Commentary and supplementary files explained the sudden abandonment that would have puzzled Doctor Murad. The Hegemony’s cyberneticists had abandoned the M-2 code because they finally got the thing to talk to them rather than just running amok, and, uh, Harlan Ellison? Eat your heart out.

After I read the logs of that conversation, I went and found Sophitia to hug for an hour or two.

Anyway. That did a lot to explain why the later marks of the M-series were, well, dumber. Not that the M-2 was actually all that bright, by human standards, but the decision to start over from the ground up with a new software architecture and a serious time crunch to get the enormously expensive SDS hardware working somewhere in spitting distance of ‘on time’ meant that they had to concentrate on the basic functions and hope to make up the difference with either human input via the ground stations or later software patches.

And Nautilus, safely well away from pretty much anything in those days, was where those patches were to be developed. In its heyday, the Castle had been the home of the Hegemony’s most skilled and trusted AI and robotics researchers, and the library core we’d come for, and its reader, had been put in place to hold their work and reference materials. It held literally everything that the Terran Hegemony had known about artificial intelligence and expert systems, along with a wide range of less-involved study material for SLDF officers and troopers working on their own degrees.

Most of the K-F Theory files were identical to the ones we’d pulled from Helm, which I supposed told us where Major Keller had started in trying to gather his database - the standard SLDF ‘self-improvement for promotion-seekers’ library.

Best of all, there’d been a few crates of spare electronics left in place, including a pack of extra reader heads for the library. All in all, everything was coming up roses.

Naturally shit had to go wrong.

We started speeding our work up at the arrival of nine jumpships at Artru’s nadir jump point, but the nature and scale of the problem didn’t come clear until the resulting dropship wave was close enough to identify, and communicate with.

One Overlord, eleven Unions, eighteen Leopards. We knew what that count meant, and the incoming transmission just confirmed it.

The full-video showed two women and five men, all seated in a row at the same table, richly dressed and with heraldic banners hung from the wall behind them.

House Arano’s cormorant was front and center, over a round-faced man somewhere in his middle years. “Mercenary commander,” he said, “I am Tamati Arano the Second, High Lord of the Aurigan Coalition and Protector of Coromodir. In deference to the current transmission lag and the scale of what I require of you, I will be brief. You are engaged in salvage operations which violate Aurigan sovereignty, and this will not be tolerated. If and only if you and your troops are prepared to lift from Artru and withdraw from the system will your acts to this time be let pass. If not… Then we shall see you shattered on the field of battle, and your survivors brought to trial under our laws as raiders without flag. You have until my force’s arrival in orbit to comply.

Not what I’d hoped to hear, but one of the things I had a script prepared for.

I took a deep breath to brace myself, then hit record. “Your Highness, I am Commander Asha Blackwing, of Blackwing Military Solutions and Services. We are operating under sealed contract for Comstar Escrow Account-” I read off the number, “-verifiable via that organization. Our employer currently wishes to remain anonymous for other operational reasons, but I am advised that reparation negotiations will be extended when those constraints relax.

“I am also advised that collection of all mobile materiel is a primary contract objective, up to and including verified Combat Insurance policies adequate to replace my entire force. Given that, and my responsibility to the lives of my men, I must advise you of my intention to interdict via aerospace fighter any landings within one thousand kilometers of Castle Nautilus. Your Highness, we didn’t come here to do any damage to the Aurigan Coalition or its people. I beg you, do not escalate this matter further; it would serve no one’s interests.”

Four days from landing to the Aurigan jumpships showing up. Four and a half more until they were in communication range.

Thirty seven hours after that, without a peep to us directly but with LIC codebreakers turning up a very enlightening conversation between the Aurigan force and Artru’s HPG station, I sat in No. 2’s cockpit, watching those thirty dropships race across the display in their low orbit, safely out of weapon’s range for the four wings of fighters Io Sasagawa had taken up to meet them.

I was regretting leaving two wings on Axylus; at the time I’d been more concerned about fending off any pokes from the Free World’s League, Magistracy, or excessively ambitious Capellan splinters, but I hadn’t considered that the Aurigans might push things to an actual fight. There were good strategic reasons they shouldn’t - the two regiments or so they were bringing in represented just under half of the mechs they had, and almost all of their combat dropships and aerospace fighters - but I’d just been assuming that what I remembered as a ‘hero faction’ wouldn’t cause problems.

Yes, I’m well aware that that was idiotic.

With only four wings on our side, rather than the full two regiments, trying to interdict the landing during reentry would be bloody as hell, and certainly less than completely successful against that many targets and that many escorts.

If the Aurigans stayed in orbit, or started de-orbiting before or after the window that would bring them down inside the exclusion zone I’d declared, Sasagawa’s people would just pace them on their way down, steering a parallel course just close enough to make it obvious they were being monitored.

If they came in in it… Well, we weren’t bluffing.

I had no idea what Arano - and more to the point, the other lords who’d come with him at the heads of their own household contingents - was thinking. Which way the votes in their council would go.

On the screen, the ‘warning window’ was a swatch of yellow that the dropships’ projected course ran through, with a much thinner red band that would imply a direct on-our-heads combat drop. I realized I was running one thumbnail nervously up and down the side of that index finger, waiting to see which way they’d break.

The course line brightened, started to flash, and… bent. Downwards.

I let all the breath huff out of my lungs in relief, slumping back against my pilot’s seat.

Is it really good that they’re coming down all in one piece?” Sophitia asked over a private channel.

“It is,” I said. “Because now they have to march here.”

Castle Nautilus was in a mountainous region, old, weathered hills that had been eroded to a tangled mess, choked in snow and ice and the occasional birthing glacier. Even for battlemechs, with their fusion powerplants and ability to handle bad ground, the thousand kilometer distance from the landing site that course would produce would be more like twice that on the ground - assuming they didn’t have any proper assault mechs along, thirty-two or so hours of actual travel time. Including the fact that the Aurigans would need to sleep, that was probably closer to four days than to two.

“If they’re willing to walk into a fight dead tired, they could be here in three days,” I went on. “And at this rate, we’ll be done and ready to lift about then. More likely, since they’ve already soft-sold things, they won’t push it that hard… And you bet your sweet bippy that we’ll push the breakdown more than we have been. Not talking to us lets them save face by not, umn, capitulating, and not risk pissing me off by blustering. So I’d say? This means that we won’t have a battle.”

Thank fucking god.

And if you’re wrong?” she asked. “If we get delayed?

“The way the ridges run, there’re two layers of passes that they’ll have to go through to reach the Castle,” I said. “That’s why I had the infantry set watchposts and run landlines over them. If we needed a lot of time, we’d probably set up to move into place just past whatever of the first set of passes they picked. Pin ‘em just for a little bit, so they bunch up in the pass, and then use the watch points as forward observers. Drop the artillery on ‘em while they’re all forced together, maybe get some avalanches if they pick the wrong pass.

“The watchpoints are through the entire ridges rather than just on the passes because we don’t really know how many jumping mechs they have, or in what weight. There might well be enough of them to put together a real flanking force. It’d be risky for them, dividing like that when we’ve got them outnumbered, but their making an outright attack is risky in the first place. So who the fuck knows.

“Anyway, if that happens obviously we leave just enough dealing with the main force and then turn and smash them in detail, assuming that the artillery doesn’t get them first while they’re still on the mountains.

“Also assuming that the amount of time we still need doesn’t let us just pull back and slow them with light harassments, I mean. That’d be better if possible; cheaper, safer.”

Is that why they’re doing it?” Something in Sophitia’s voice nagged at my mind.

“Mostly the ‘safer’. If our files are right, we’re seeing every combat dropship the Aurigans have. This is their entire intersellar-mobile force, and two regiments - they only have three or four at all. If they lose what we’ve seen, if we take it out, they can’t even hold off the pirates any more, let alone make the Taurians or Canopians think twice about grabbing their tax base. It’d be stupid of them to risk it.”

A thought struck me. “You’re not usually this interested in planning,” I observed, trying not to smile.

Sophitia’s giggle over the line made me lose that fight. “You’re cute when you lecture,” she claimed.

“...Crap, I’m sorry,” I said. “I know it’s rude-”

Enh-enh! Stop! No apologising! I said it was cute and I meant it. And knowing you’re in charge, and that you have things handled, is kind of comforting.

I started to think that ‘handled’ was putting it a bit strongly, then stopped and started running down the list of contingencies and options.

“...Huh,” I said, staring at nothing in particular.

This time Sophitia just outright laughed at me. “You hadn’t noticed you weren’t faking it any more?

“No,” I said. “I really hadn’t.”

***

World shaking personal revelations aside, the tactical situation didn’t see any change over the following couple of days. The Aurigans marched closer, with all the caution that would have been appropriate if I’d planned to ambush them, and tech teams worked the clock round by shifts to break down anything and everything the SLDF hadn’t already taken for loading aboard the Nicaragua.

I thought about calling Lord Arano and telling him that we were leaving, but in the end, didn’t. Frankly, it wouldn’t have made a difference to anything. A short note, and the maps Nautilus had held of its own corridors and spaces and the surrounding tunnels, we left in a spare packing crate outside the main entrance. His people should be able to get some value out of the base itself, and the maps included a geological workup that showed some ore seams that weren’t being worked, so hopefully he’d get some benefit out of the affair.

Six days to the jump point and we were off. A codeworded letter from what I presumed to be survey agents Lyran Intelligence had put into the area said that the Kimi site, the SLDF Quartermaster Command one, was already open and known to the locals, so we diverted to the final rendezvous.

August 3020 found the unit all together again, floating in the absolute black of interstellar space.

It was easy to think, and fairly accurate to say, that jump points were so far out that there wasn’t any real effective difference for the jumpship spacers. If the local star was nothing but an arc-welding spark in the far distance, barely able to cast a shadow on the neutrino collecting ‘fabric’ of the jump sail, the human eye couldn’t tell the difference between where we were and the shadowed side of the ship. Certainly the interior spaces shouldn’t have felt any different; they were the same metal everything, familiar and a little alarming to the claustrophobes.

Somebody, or a council of somebodies, had turned down the lights. Not all the way, but to ‘cloudy day’ levels rather than the normal Just Indoors. The ground troops and fighter pilots went along in their normal routine of simulator work and physical training, but the card games were quieter, the movie nights were less raucous… and everybody, but everybody, spent at least some of their off time filing into one or another of the observation decks available, turning the lights out, and just… watching the stars.

It felt different.

A few people were uneasy at the emptiness, the tracklessness, and I was sure that if we lingered for too long then that proportion would grow into a real problem. The subconscious expectation of exposure and agoraphobia would drive up stress levels, cause fights.

But at first, there was only the silent awe of it, of a perfect gallery seat to a splendor that even the most low-tech planet’s moon and aurorae started to wash out.

Even the ship crews had marked out an hour or two to sit and watch the stars, and they had a hell of a lot of work to do.

It had been well over two hundred years. Finding the base or whatever that had been marked on that map was no trivial task. We were at the specified coordinates - but centuries of drift, and the sheer vastness of the void, meant that the actual volume of space where our target could be was enormous.

Infrared was the first thing to try. Dropships had fairly decent scanners for that part of the spectrum; it was good for picking up incoming drive plumes. Against the chill of interstellar space, the heat signature of even an idling fusion engine would have been obvious - and also unlikely, given atomic hydrogen’s habit of escaping any and every attempt at confining it. Even the most advanced tanks for it leaked madly, and aside from a truly vast tank farm, two centuries of operation would have run through whatever supply was provided anyway.

But no, everything was cold.

The second thing we tried was transmitting and trying to get a response. Even the blackest of black sites should’ve responded to the codes we sent with ‘bugger off, you’re not authorized’, if there’d been a charged battery attached to a radio.

As expected, bupkis.

That left doing it the proverbial hard way.

Each of our twenty dropships had a slightly different radar set and capability, a different range at which they could be expected to pick something up in active mode. But those ranges were known, calculable, and we had twelve thousand tons of spare hydrogen aboard the Nicaragua and enough navigational computers to cover many sins.

So, after those first few days, every dropper punched off and started to do a slowly spiraling expansion, sweeping empty space looking for… anything.

Two weeks later, we found it. All hundred and forty-five meters and hundred and twenty thousand tons of it. And it found us, too. Stolen Will’s nose armor had nearly boiled through when the naval lasers fired, and the damaged Union would need to be watched carefully until we were home, or at least someplace where we could do real repairs. I’d given the helmsman a six-month bonus for getting the dropper back out of weapons range mostly intact, and been happy to have the chance.

We hadn’t been able to see any heat from a reactor, because that had been cold - but that didn’t mean that the drifting warship’s capacitors didn’t have a charge, enough of one for a few shots from its main weapons and to wake its reactor again.

The images and signatures we’d been able to get without approaching too closely, where we could be targeted, had our warbooks saying that we were looking at a Baron-class destroyer. Context, where and how we’d found it, its activity and complete indifference to any security codes we sent, made it obvious that that was wrong.

I heard one of the space ops troopers packed into the carry can whistle. “Regardez donc…” he breathed.

I shifted, the borrowed Stinger’s already cramped cockpit made tinier by my spacesuit. It was one of the quartet of mechs we’d captured years ago and a lifetime away, just starting out in the Outworlds and facing pirates intent on hijacking. They’d modified it with reaction control thrusters like an aerospace fighter’s, and for this mission, we’d bolted on external reaction mass tanks along with the carry can across the shoulders. If the situation had been less serious, I’d’ve been making Gundam jokes and enjoying everyone else’s confusion.

“It’s an M-4, all right,” I said, concentrating on thinking and feeling like an inoffensive piece of space debris. We’d tested that our sensors still couldn’t see me in a ‘spacemech’, and that carrying the cargo can extended the same effect over it. There was every reason to think that an AI, with no natural eyes to depend on, would be completely blind to my presence until the marines started cutting their way in, if then.

There was also every reason to think that if that guess was wrong, it’d erase us all with no more thought than a killbot’s version of an orgasm.

The fact that, unlike the later M-5s, this ship was a conversion, with its original name still painted on the hull, just drove that point home. Mech-sized lettering reading DD 566 SLS Locura was not a comforting sight.

Parallax and helpful position indicators from the cloud of dropships watching nervously from a safe distance told me exactly how much distance remained to touchdown on the effectively motionless warship’s hull. That was good; I might or might not have been able to get away with using my own sensors in active mode, and I had absolutely no intention of testing the question.

I tapped the forward jets as the estimated-range counter ticked down, bleeding off closing speed. There was no need to hurry; we had days of oxygen reserve, hooked from tanks in the can to our suits, and plenty of water. The plumbing connections wouldn’t be any fun to use, but that wouldn’t kill us.

The big targeting scanner arrays, massive radars capable of cooking a man at twice the distance we were at, swept over us. That wasn’t, necessarily, an indicator that we were suspected or spotted. Now that it was awake, that it knew there was something around that it might have a chance to K҉̵̧͞I͏͟͝͠L̴͘L̷̡̛͟͠, the AI was swiping its look-and-see beams randomly around itself, hoping to catch something sneaking up on it just like we were. The timing was almost certainly pure coincidence.

I froze in my seat and stopped breathing anyway, with a helplessly unconscious little whining noise in the back of my throat. Somewhere to the right of my head, a breaker threw itself with a heavy KLIK, the Stinger’s radar receivers safing themselves rather than burn out like they were staring into the sun.

After an instant or two that felt like only four or five eternities, the monster scan-beam swept away again. I took a ragged breath, turned my head, and looked up to flip the breaker back on so I my ride could see its guiding lights again. It only took three tries.

At a hundred and fifty meters out from the hull, a relatively long burst from the RCS thrusters brought the closing rate down to a meter a second or so. Another burst at a hundred had us at half that, then a third at thirty down to a crawl that made those last few meters take nearly ten minutes.

I spent that time trying to get our crosswise motion down; there wasn’t much in the way of drift, but there was some, and with only visual indicators and starlight scopes, and the fact that space ops were not something I was exactly experienced at, eliminating them was a real fight. The final moment of truth, when I brought the waldo rig that controlled the Stinger’s arms alive and reached out to ‘catch’ its weight and movement with the limpet magnets that had been strapped to its palms, came with a bit of a screech of metal through the mech’s bones as the last motion dragged one hand a dozen or so centimeters across the hull.

I froze, holding my breath again. Oddly, maybe, this time my mind was filled with the memory of Sophitia kissing me goodbye before I climbed into the Stinger for this mission; despite the good-natured catcalls from the bay crew and also-boarding marines, tears had been building and pooling around her eyes, unable to fall in zero gravity.

You’ll be married, dumbass, part of me said to the rest. You need to stop doing this shit.

Yeah, I agreed, I do.

Ten or fifteen seconds of frozen fear, and nothing happened. We were not smote by the fist of an angry warship or other god-facsimile. I let my breath out in a huff, fogging my faceplace for a second before its fans cleared it again, and started to ‘walk’ hand over hand along the M-4’s hull, carefully heading for the airlock closest to where Nautilus’s files showed the AI’s computer core should be.

“All right, guys, this is your stop. Everybody outta the bus,” I said over the intercom to the transport can.

Thanks for the lift, Nutcracker,” Orlov, the platoon’s CO, said, “Give us a second to set the bread crumbs and we’ll be on our way.

“My dance card’s clear,” I replied, knowing that both of us were fighting to sound much calmer than we were. “I can wait all day.”

Probably not that long,” he said, and I could hear the thunk of a hatch unseating both over the line and transmitted through the Stinger’s bones as the cargo can unlocked to let him and his men out.

The ‘bread crumbs’ were a set of specialized transmitters - I hadn’t caught the details - that would let the sections of wire they’d leave behind them pass signals through closed blast doors and pressure hatches, keeping them linked to me, outside their entry lock, and via outbound tightbeam and indiscriminate broadcast back, to everyone waiting aboard the dropship fleet.

The tension of listening in on that line as they made their way through the corridors was a little like being in combat myself, the stakes and investment of it, and a little like watching a horror movie, the second guessing and so on.

I’d never liked horror movies.

This one was a bit of a slow burn, too; comments passed on a large splotch of what was probably long-aged blood at one point, a flicker of motion that turned out to be a hammer, abandoned spinning in the middle of a compartment god knows how many years ago. Once, and only once, early on, a blast door triggered with somebody under it, leading to an explosion of shouting and swearing as he tried to dive out of the way, his buddies tried to drag or knock him out of the way, and they all piled up safely halfway down the corridor by the time the thing slammed home.

In another context, it’d’ve been hilarious, but with the door closed and sealing off half the team, no bread crumb set, and all the swearing, I had no idea what was going on and nearly had a panic attack.

After that, they made sure to use the manual overrides on every door they went through, and things went much smoother.

Fortunately, there was no singing as they reached the computer center and started disconnecting things. I don’t think I could have taken a rendition of ‘Daisy, Daisy’ right then.

Doctor Lenox?” Orlov said, as that wrapped up, relaying through me to the Argo. “I think we have a full-ship diagnostic screen here. Umm… P-R-I-A-R-M, primary armament, maybe? Showing disabled, smaller tag ‘Tert OK’. S-E-C-arm, the same. Radar, active. Re-mass, three percent. Jump, disabled. Lots of other stuff.

‘Ave you got a command line?

Yes, Ma’am.

Yesssss,” she hissed softly, not caring that she was still on the line, then said, “Right then. Type in Jump T-S-T an’ tell me what it says on the second-to-last line of what it spits out at you.

C-R space H-D, semicolon, P-R space H-D, semicolon, H-E-L, the ‘e’ is lowercase, semicolon O-K, and then it goes to the next line.

Her whoop of triumph about blew out her microphone, and made me flinch and jump as it blasted out of my earpieces.

“Doctor?” I said. “I take it that that’s good news.”

C-R, control run, P-R, power run, H-D, hardware disconnect. He, Helium, L, low. They disconnected all the wires to the jump drive, and at least some of its coolant’s boiled off since then, but the important thing is, all the self-tests on the drive itself are showing it’s all right. She might not be ready to jump now, but she will be someday. If we drain a little sip from each of the jumpships, we can probably even get her ready to go ourselves.

“...Ah,” I said. “All right. Let’s get started on disconnecting all the wires to the weapons, so we can get your crews aboard to confirm that, shall we?”
…AIN’T GOT THE TIME FOR OUTSIDE…
Reply
RE: Tell The World That We Tried [Battletech] [CYOA]
#45
JUST KEEP YOUR INJURED LOOKS TO YOU

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

The private station around the equally private subway was all stone and tile, and the small train was at rest. With nothing to interfere with it, the sound of my former second in command getting knocked flat on his ass echoed loudly off the live surfaces.

Watching her face past the dark-haired woman rubbing her knuckles, I was pretty sure that if it hadn’t been beneath Katrina Steiner’s Archonal dignity, she’d have been giggling up a storm. Under the ‘Oh, I’ve just been punched’ shock and what I was pretty sure was a dash of arousal, Morgan Kell looked sheepish. “I suppose I deserved that, Salome,” he admitted.

“Damn straight you did,” his attacker replied, and offered him a hand back to his feet - and used it to pull him straight into a desperately tight hug. A moment later, the man who’d been standing next to Salome Ward when our train arrived - with the family resemblance, he couldn’t have been anyone but Patrick Kell - threw his own arms around both of them.

Standing a little behind where the two of them had been, Katrina Steiner caught my eye and motioned me towards what was probably the elevator to the surface. Once the doors were closed, I asked impulsively, “You’re not staying for the reunion?”

She gave me a considering look for a few moments, then shook her head, smiling slightly. “I’m on duty at the moment, so I’ll leave them to immediate family only. I can renew acquaintances later, when Melissa is out of her lessons. She’s taken her conversation with you to heart.”

I blinked. “With me?” I said, puzzled and not hiding it.

“She’s as interested in dropships as most children her age are in mechs,” Katrina said. “Her room is full of model kits and she’s memorized the stat sheets of what’s probably every design still flying and half the ones that aren’t.” She was very much the fond mother at the moment, rather than The Archon. The elevator doors opened and she stepped out; I followed, and couldn’t help glancing at the cordon of bodyguards falling in around us. Their principle kept talking. “Now that your Argo is flying again she’ll want to know all about it.”

I raised an eyebrow. “I’d assumed she’d be included in the salvage recovery list.”

“No,” she said. “A single hull like that is more valuable to you than to the Commonwealth as a whole.”

I glanced at the guards, and didn’t mention the Locura. She went on, “Besides, she’ll need time in a yard to be fully flightworthy again, and I’ll have them evaluate the design for whether or not we want to convert some of Logistical Command’s Behemoths.”

I nodded. “I’m not sure myself,” I admitted. “But if Melissa is checked out on vac suits, we could probably set up a tour.” Twelve-thirteen was old enough for that, I thought. “Argo’s safe enough overall, we did a lot of work on the trip, but she’s, y’know. Well-managed construction site safe. We’ve only had one blowout over three months, but… we’ve had one blowout.”

Katrina winced slightly. “I’ll send up a site team from her detail, but probably not. She is trained for suit operation, she insisted even if it hadn’t been a reasonable measure, but I have a harder time justifying it for the Archon’s sole heir than I do for my daughter.”

“I understand,” I said, as we turned a corner and came to a door flanked by two more guards. “Maybe after the refit’s complete, then.”

“That’s more workable,” she said. Ahead of us, one guard held down a control on the far side of the door, and the other opened it.

It was a conference room, in the same rich-materials-spartan-lines style as the rest of the palace I’d seen, with a table like an interrupted ring set with nine seats, with nametags. Selvin Kelswa and Simon Johnson and Edward Regis I recognized at least by reputation - respectively the Duke of Tamar, head of Lyran Intelligence, and the uniformed head of the Lyran Commonwealth Armed Forces. Marie Lestrade-Aten, an elderly woman with piercing eyes, I didn’t know anything to speak of about, but the double-barreled family name said ‘Skye’, even if the nametag hadn’t confirmed her as that state’s Duchess.

The three more occupied nametags said Internal Policies, Foreign Affairs, and Chancellor of the peoples (A man and two women, respectively, all in the ‘distinguished’ age bracket), none of whom I recognized in the slightest. Katrina walked to the empty slot with her name on it, and Lestrade-Aten waved me to the unlabeled seat next to her. “Sit down, girl,” the Duchess said.

“Yes, Ma’am,” I said, and since none of the others had risen when Katrina entered, did as I was bid.

The eight most powerful people in the Lyran Commonwealth looked at me as a collective body for a moment, and then General Regis leaned forward. “Give us your impression of the Federated Suns’ strategy in its conquest of the Capellan Confederation,” he said. “How it worked, and where it failed?”

I took a breath in, let it out, buying myself time to think. “First,” I said, “understand that most of what I’m about to say comes from an interview with Davion himself between the cease-fire and the final surrender and annexation. Operational security meant that I received very little in the way of strategic briefing before the assaults began, and of course during the campaign itself most of my attention was only on St. Ives. Getting the overview from him, then, introduces both bias from FedSuns interests and hindsight.

“That said, what actually happened was not the planned outcome. The initial phase began after my meeting with the First Prince in January 3019, and that was logistical. He began concentrating the AFFS’s high-capacity dropships along the Capellan front by relay transfer, and dusted off contingencies for taking major targets in the one-jump cordon from the border. The plan from that stage and all the way up until actual operations started was to use each of the attack operations as cover for the others, forcing the Confederation to pick which worlds to defend first.

“Tikonov, Ares, and Necromo were primary targets, whose capture was considered integral to the overall success of the operation. St. Ives and Grand Base were considered optional objectives, whose capture would have been valuable and would be worked towards sincerely but which were primarily included as a way of increasing pressure on potential Capellan counterattackers. Menke was also a spoiler attack, specifically aimed at paralyzing McCarron’s Armored Cavalry from either relieving one of the primary or secondary targets or conducting a deep raiding operation that would force an AFFS response.

“At the eleventh hour-”

“Pardon, what?” the Chancellor - Clarice Ruckers, according to her nameplate - asked, leaning forward slightly.

“Sorry,” I said automatically. “The very last moment; in this case, probably no more than a week in advance of the first wave jumping. Prince Davion received confirmation, which he credited to tips from LIC for directing existing inquiries-” I nodded to Simon Johnson “-that the Duke of New Syrtis would be meeting in person with Maximilian Liao.”

“Did…” Kelswa started to ask, then paused and changed what he’d been intending to say to, “Did the Duke have the authority to negotiate in that fashion?”

“Not absent some pressing crisis,” I said, “and not without telling New Avalon about the meeting. Once he had confirmation of the meeting, Davion advanced the operational schedule and tightened the secrecy measures around the operation, trying to arrange for the first wave to coincide with the meeting.”

“Ahhhh,” Johnson said, sitting back in his seat and smiling.

‘Malalai Maathai’ was the name on the Internal Affairs minister’s nameplate. She frowned behind her veil. “Could you unpack that for non-specialists?” she said.

“Davion correctly predicted that both Liao and Duke Hasek-Davion-”

Kelswa snapped his fingers and muttered, “that was it.”

I ignored the byplay. “-would bring substantial bodyguard units to their meeting; a full-strength elite regiment, the Red Lancers, and an equally elite Regimental Combat Team, the 6th New Syrtis Fusiliers, respectively. Liao’s reaction to the apparent betrayal of a major offensive his conspirator hadn’t warned him of was predictably furious, and the resulting battle left both men hospitalized in the crossfire.”

Maathai nodded. “Continue,” she said.

“By the time Liao had died, his children had finished the abortive… disagreement… about which of them would succeed him.”

“Candace Liao,” Johnson said.

“Before her father’s death, Candace had held personal fief on St. Ives, and was active in commanding the defense there. The fifty-regiment figure often quoted for the Capellan Confederation Armed Forces was at least ten regiments ahead of the reality to start with, and many of the forty she did have were at least one-third understrength, leaving her without the resources to effectively relieve any of the operational targets. Combine that with having lost Tikonov, Ares, and Necromo, and the high probability of further reinforcements arriving on St. Ives, Menke and Grand Base, and the fact that she would have lost at least half of her state’s production capability with those worlds…”

I shrugged. “Maximilian Liao would have done something desperate, possibly brilliant, and probably insane. But Candace Liao decided that negotiating with Davion was wiser than betting on a miracle, and the Fox was able to find concessions that they could both agree on.”

Katrina nodded. “So, in summary?” she prompted.

“Davion planned for an ambitious but not unprecedented campaign, then drew an inside straight with it,” I said. “In the long run, this will multiply the Federated Suns’ strength, not add to it - they’ve added two new jumpship production sites, which will go a long way towards getting their transportation capability in line with the rest of the military. But if they’re ready for any kind of significant foreign adventure sooner than the thirty-fifties, I’ll be shocked. They’ve got too much digesting to do.”

“Necromo was a jumpship yard, not just a dropship yard?” Maathai asked.

“The First Prince confirmed it himself,” I said, “and it was all over the rumor mill by the time we left St. Ives.”

A series of glances made its way around the other people at the table, one I didn’t have enough context to interpret. Katrina was smiling slightly.

“How would you describe Davion’s odds of keeping his new territories?” Lestrade-Aten asked.

“Overall, excellent,” I said. “As long as he keeps Candace and Tormano Liao on-side and cooperative, and he does have the tools and the brains to do so, the odds of a successful Confederation-wide rebellion are low. By permitting the Pure Capella and True Capella splinters to form and stabilize in low-value territory, he’s drawn off extremists and provided an object lesson to any Capellans who’d otherwise be on the fence that things could be much worse.”

Among the massive dump of news stories that we’d found at the end of the three-month journey through uninhabited red dwarf after red dwarf was the Free Worlds League’s crushing conquest of the two rebellious Capellan factions, and the human interest stories that highlighted how gentle Davion rule was in comparison.

I voiced the thought that woke: “I’d give better than even odds that Davion deliberately arranged at least some of the news coverage on their fate to highlight the lesson.”

Ruckers, who as an elected representative herself probably had the best direct appreciation for deliberate messaging of that sort, smiled.

“That will, of course, not in any way prevent smaller rebellions and lesser forms of civil unrest from flaring up, driven by individual personalities and so on. Capellan space will require disproportionately heavy garrison attention at least until the recruitment-age cohort fills with citizens who don’t remember living outside Davion rule, and will remain relatively restive for considerably longer than that.

“Those smaller rebellions will be well-supported by outside agencies; both the Combine and the League will be eager to divert at least some of the FedSuns’ attention from its borders with them. I don’t know enough about ComStar’s internal politics to judge whether they’ll merely offer preferential coordination and money laundering to support those, or if they’ll move more openly to disrupt the success of a state with the potential to end the Succession Wars. The Taurians are unlikely to stick their necks out in the same way as the larger powers, but they already sell military hardware onto the mercenary market, so I’d expect the main actors’ agents to buy there and pass on to the rebels.”

I paused and considered for a few moments. “A lot of things will depend on just how the conversion between Capellan and Federated Suns political systems go - the transition from authoritarian to permissive. I don’t know enough about the details or fields involved to make a judgement there. A really botched job would be about the only thing that could actually threaten Davion control over Capellan space, which tells us where ComStar ROM will be concentrating its efforts if nothing else.”

Another glance went around the room, and Lestrade-Aten sat back and went ‘Hmmm’.

From there, we talked in turn about my opinions of the Free Worlds League-

“I have to admit that I don’t know a lot about the internal situation in the League,” I said. “But I do know that it’s more complex as a reality on the ground than in the Combine. Predicting any actual details of what will happen in the League in the immediate future will need more details about the current situation and personalities than I have. That said, the clear historical precedent is for infighting, civil strife, that kind of thing. The League’s citizens and leadership know that that’s their weakness just as well as we do, and Atreus has been trying to centralize and stabilize things for centuries at least.

“The shock and fear of the Capellan Confederation just falling like that will add a great deal of urgency to that dynamic, as will the differences between the Confederation’s strength and the AFFS’s idea of ‘proper border protection’. Atreus’s ideal will be to use that fear to sell the provinces on additional central powers, then to negotiate a secure and stable peace on their new border so that they can concentrate their strength against… us.”

I could see Ruckers visibly take note of the beat of hesitation where I had to remind myself I was part of the Lyran Commonwealth, now.

“Both Combine ISF and Comstar ROM will want to reinforce the central government’s ability to act, because they want the League to help act to counterbalance the Federated Suns. The decision from our side will be whether we try to fight that goal by stirring up the provinces and trying to spark another civil war, or if we try to use diplomatic means to lessen border tensions, and…” I trailed off and shrugged. “Like I said, I don’t know enough to offer an informed opinion right now.”

-the Draconis Combine-

“They are fucked in a way orthogonally opposite from anything that could be considered ‘fun’.”

Half the room either smirked or snickered outright.

“While Director Johnson-” I nodded to him, “-would have a better idea of how much of that they know from our side, they have to have a fair appreciation of just how much trouble they’re in from Davion’s angle. Even if they can get the League to keep the League March tied down, the Federated Suns having two productive ‘interior’ Marches rather than just one makes the Combine’s position ultimately unsustainable thanks to the forces freed up for offensive action in the Draconis March.

“The smart thing to do in their position would be to sue for peace, make whatever concessions they have to to secure ten to thirty years, and then turn all of their energies to infrastructure and economic rebuilding. Their production base is so underdeveloped that they have the most to gain of any of the Successor States, even relative to the Federated Suns, so it would be to their relative advantage.”

I paused. “Well, OK,” I said, parenthetically, “the smartest thing to do for them would be to go for a negotiated surrender while they’ve got a bargaining position. But the conservatism of their political establishment and the cult of aggression in their political mythology mean that they can’t bring themselves to do either of those.

“What they’ll do instead…” I trailed off, thinking. “Honestly, there’s no telling. It will be desperate, violent, and built on a high-risk, high-reward paradigm because they won’t be able to stop themselves from trying to win, but there are too many options to predict what the result will be in any kind of detail. They probably won’t reach for the weapons of mass destruction until the knives finish coming out, but other than that, I’ve got no idea.”

-and ComStar-

“The outer layers of Comstar, the ones that actually perform socially beneficial functions, are for the most part genuinely committed to… call them ‘good works’. Like any large and even partially meritocratic organization, though, there’s a tendency for one of the selection pressures narrowing the higher ranks to be the desire for power. Crosspollinate that with a doctrine that emphasizes their noble role as the true holders of civilization and knowledge-” I tried not to sneer, and failed, “-and the doctrinal mutation that only Comstar should hold knowledge of any kind is very possibly inevitable. Combine that with the fact that Comstar’s survival and power outside of Sol are completely dependent on a particular facet of technological superiority, and the first priority of the First Circuit is making as certain as possible that they’re the only ones with access to the Star League’s technology.”

Maathai shook her head disbelievingly, but I could see Regis and Johnson looking grimly thoughtful.

“That being the case, if they know about the memory cores, they’ll regard them as the greatest possible existential threat. They will spare no expense or effort to locate every copy, and balk at no atrocity to destroy them. NAIS, and any similar research institution we attempt to establish, will be only barely less important.

“The good news, for us, is that Comstar has spent most of the last couple of centuries drawn down to a fraction of its possible strength as part of a strategy that might be called security by obscurity. Their military forces are completely unblooded and would barely manage to be rated green by outside standards, and while their intel arm does have action elements, they’re very limited in numbers compared to the reach of their signals intelligence service.”

“Signals intelligence?” Ruckers asked, glancing at Johnson.

I nodded to him, also. “It’s not my field of expertise, but my baseline assumption would be that any signal sent by any HPG, anywhere, that could be theoretically cracked, has been. From the very beginning of the HPG network. Terran Hegemony Intelligence, to start with, but Comstar since the start of the Succession Wars.”

“That explains your prediction that ROM will be working to undermine Davion government of the League March,” Duchess Lestrade-Aten said. “And if they’re aware of the library cores from Helm, Artru, and New Dallas we can expect to see their hand as well.”

“It’s likely,” Katrina said, and inclined her head in a slight bow of apology in my direction. “I pressed her for one too many details during our live conversation after she returned from Helm. The transmission was coded, and we’ve deprecated the cipher used, but Simon, Edward, and I have been proceeding in the assumption that that information is compromised, including setting up decoy compartments that imply considerably less completeness in the Helm Library Core than was actually the case.”

Ruckers and Lestrade-Aten both looked… irritated. The latter asked me, “What sort of action against us do you expect from Comstar?”

I held up a hand and folded out a finger. “First, rabblerousing and instigation of insurgents, in the same mold as Davion will be seeing both in the League March and elsewhere.”

A second finger. “Second, League and Combine operations against us can expect ‘fortunate coincidences’ to fall their way wherever HPG messages or deniable electronic intelligence are concerned.”

Another. “Third, perhaps not immediately but once it becomes clear that those measures aren’t having the desired effects, then they will funnel military assets to the League and Combine, either directly or via false ‘SLDF caches’, to shore them up against us and perpetuate the balance of power that lets Comstar exercise such influence.”

The fourth. “And finally, if or when it becomes necessary for either us or the Federated Suns to move offensively against one of the other two states, Comstar will either find or manufacture an excuse for a full Interdiction. We must be prepared.”


-and, finally, the unification of the Magistracy of Canopus, Taurian Concordat, and Aurigan Coalition into a tightly woven defense-and-trade pact.

“...Iiiii must have missed that while I was in transit,” I said, gobsmacked.

The man behind the Foreign Affairs nameplate, Ragnar Lomin, hadn’t said anything up until now, just listening, and he didn’t say anything now. But he did snicker.

“Um,” I said, thinking. “It makes sense,” I said after a few moments. “I imagine that part of the Periphery is feeling pretty lonely after the CapCon’s fall and, well, my raid. The Taurians have plenty of heavy industry but not the population or tax base to really support it, and both of the others are - were? - only barely making it as interstellar concerns. And the additional military reserves to draw from would be valuable to all of them.”

“McCarron’s survivors went to Herotitus to rebuild, rather than Galatea,” Regis said, “and the Aurigans were able to hire them. Multiple landholds, apparently. We’re not sure how that deal connected to the Aurigans expanding their holdings right up to the Magistracy’s border, or where what’s clearly an SLDF Regimental Combat Team came from, but they seem to have managed it essentially peacefully.”

“Kimi, would be my guess,” I said. “One thing or another made them nervous enough to pull out the hardware they’d be praying to, either before or after they - signed on with the Aurigans?”

Lomin nodded.

“So, yeah,” I said. “Twelve Taurian, ten Canopian, and that’d make, umn, eight Aurigan regiments - mech regiments, call it? And I know that Detroit is probably able to make them as many basic combat vehicles as they want. Combine that with a great big question mark around Taurian nuclear doctrine and they should actually be fairly secure. Good for them.”

“How do you expect this development to affect our own dealings with Davion?” Katrina asked.

“Honestly, I don’t think it will matter,” I said, then amended, “Or at least, not on its own. Thirty regiments is enough to be difficult to conquer and to put a decisive end to piracy in the area, but not enough to stop an all-up offensive like we saw against the CapCon, and both sides know it. This new coalition would have to be suicidal to progress past saber-rattling and they wouldn’t be worth the price of invading. The risk factor there, for both sides, is the chance that ComStar will invent something and divert Davion’s attention away from the main fronts, where we’d rather have it.”

“Moving on to longer-ranged threats, all of us have been briefed on the Clans of Kerensky,” General Regis said. “How would you stop them?”

“...Tricky question,” I said. “Umn… The first thing I’d do would be put together a specific force for fighting Clan-style trials. The odds of them keeping their rules after they’ve been used against them are low, but a, a super-elite regiment or three would be relatively cheap and useful in other roles as well, and they can be mixed with any of the escalated options.

“The second thing would be to advance LIC agents through the Deep Periphery trade routes, with orders both to gather intelligence and look for opportunities to increase infighting and instability in Clan space. This would have a good chance of delaying and weakening the eventual invasion, but if discovered would provoke it instead, so we’d want to set up a communication line to evaluate those disruption chances before going ahead - despite how long the loop would be.

“The next cheapest option, tactically, would be to redevelop nuclear anti-shipping and anti-fighter tactics, and forward-deploy the tools to apply them. Keeping those operations outside the Ares Conventions’ fifty-thousand kilometer limit from inhabited worlds would make the diplomatic fallout a little easier. This would, implicitly, represent an open commitment to maximum force on both sides of the conflict, which would need careful consideration at the highest levels-” I nodded to Katrina, and then swept an including hand across the rest of the table, “-even if the stakes already involved national survival and potential enslavement of billions.

“The option that I’d recommend as Plan A would be to commit to developing the LCAF to a state capable of fighting the Clans and winning. With the correct doctrine and tactics, the technology in the Helm Library Core comes close enough to parity with that used by the Clans for success, and the Commonwealth has a massive advantage in population and tax base. Given sufficient development and preparation time, I believe that a force capable of rivaling the Star League Defense Force is achievable; the standard needed to reduce the Clans to a solved problem is far smaller than that.”

Maathai was wincing. What the Lyran Commonwealth called ‘internal policies’ included taxation and the treasury, and I could see her imagining the expense.

I gave her something halfway between a nod and a seated bow. “The price tag will be astronomical,” I admitted, “but it will work.”

“How ‘astronomical’?” Regis asked. “How many regiments would you recommend?”

“Hmm… Seventeen Clans, between four and ten Galaxies each, averaged by bidding idiocy and the need for reserves to four each is sixty-eight total… I’d recommend ninety each of battlemechs and aerospace fighters, and one-thirty-five or so of armor, as the starting number. It should not be regarded as conservative in the first place; if we assume that the Clans bid themselves down to say, seven invading Clans, forty, forty, and sixty might work. I’d be reluctant to, myself.”

Kelswa whistled. “And that’s for only one front,” he said.

“For only that front,” I agreed. “Call the absolute minimum sixty, sixty, and ninety if we include both League and Combine borders at current garrison levels.”

“You don’t feel that the Federated Suns’ Regimental Combat Team model is ideal, then?” Regis said.

“I think that it undervalues artillery and aerospace cover,” I said, “and over commits to both armored and infantry assets. Doing so makes it better as an occupation force, but in direct combat it’s wasteful of the lives of its infantry and of the jumpships required to move it. RCTs have a role, but it’s a role that doesn’t involve moving them anywhere.”

“What would you call ideal, then?” he asked.

“A five-regiment combined arms brigade, containing one standard aerospace regiment, one standard battlemech regiment, a four-battalion armor regiment, a regiment of battle-armored infantry with organic transport vehicles, and a support regiment consisting of one thirty-six unit battalion of artillery vehicles, one standard battalion of scout units to call fire for them, and a dedicated command battalion for the entire formation,” I said. I’d done a lot of thinking about it. “Plus medical, logistical, and repair elements, probably attached to the support regiment.”

He nodded, and looked at Katrina.

She glanced around the table, then told me, “Thank you, Commander Blackwing. That will be all we need to ask you today. Sargent Roland will have a file for you on your way out; I’d like you to go through it and get back to me with your recommendations for letters patent for your subordinates who were involved on Helm and Artru.”

“I’ll do that, Your Highness,” I said, standing and saluting - Outworlds style, palm flat and parallel to the forearm, both in front of the chest - before accepting the implicit command and getting out. I wasn’t sure what a ‘letter patent’ was, but I could figure it out.

***

Landholds. Katrina was talking about landholds.

Feudal systems, even simplified and partial ones like the Commonwealth’s, had obligations going both up and down, and both legal and implicit. One of the obligations sitting on Katrina Steiner’s shoulders, at the very top of the pyramid, was to make sure that exceptional service was rewarded - by wealth and by status alike.

The file she’d handed me was a list of worlds, and fairly exhaustive information about them, all across the Lyran Periphery. Economics, local personalities, institutions and traditions… I’d spent the better part of a week buried in the files from proverbial dawn to figurative dusk, with my own personnel files spread all around me the entire time.

I’d turned it in, and the next day had my marching orders - to have all of the named officers ready for a full Court appearance five days hence, suitable clothiers for dress uniforms appended. Most of the list had saved enough to cover their own needs, and I paid for the rest, so we were all there, as directed.

It’s one thing to read that the Archon’s throne is flanked by a pair of battlemechs. It’s another to be there and realize that the room still looked big in comparison to them. After the Argo’s main cargo bay, it was the second largest enclosed space I’d ever seen - and this one wasn’t some spartan productive space. The floor was seamless glass-smooth marble set with polished bronze seals six feet across every dozen or so feet up the literal red carpet from entrance to throne; the ceiling was easily a hundred feet up and vaulted in best medieval cathedral fashion. Along the walls, great banners hung in hundreds, each bearing more seals - from the numbers, I suspected that the wall banners were for individual worlds, and the floor seals for shires and provinces.

The entire wall behind the throne was dominated by a colossal Lyran flag - and the ceremonial Griffins weren’t painted in the usual blue-with-vertical-white-stripe of the Royal Guards, but in gloss black with an angled slash of blue across their torsos.

My colors.

The ceremony to invest each new noble with their fief and swear them to their responsibilities was surprisingly short, perhaps five minutes or so even with traditional call and response and timed waits for objections, but Katrina had instructed me to pick a planet for every officer from Major on up, less myself and Morgan Kell, and I had thirty-eight Majors and thirteen Colonels on that list.

She did each of them individually, which already had me in awe of her stamina when she called a recess for lunch after the last of my battalion COs had been ennobled and gifted an average of a company of mechs, a battalion of armor, and a squadron of fighters each. I wasn’t sure I could have given full attention to each person, but I had a good enough vantage point to see that she was, and that she was making a real impact on each of them. I was impressed.

The call to break for lunch cued dozen of doors, recessed in apparently decorative alcoves along the walls, to open and let through a positive army of liveried staff. In less than a minute they’d unloaded chairs and tables alike from rolling handcarts, and wheeled entire buffets into place to fill them.

“Not much like a prom, is it?” Sophitia teased in an undertone, and I snickered.

“Not much like at all,” I admitted cheerfully. As injokes went, it was pretty weak, but it reminded both of us of our very first date, back on Hoff, and that was good for both our moods.

Naturally, somebody intercepted us on our way from the buffets to the table one of the servers had discreetly pointed out as ours. Less predictably, it wasn’t a social climber or political animal. Despite the attention some barber had made to get his dark hair and goatee into perfect order, and the tailoring of his black-frogged scarlet jacket and bloused black pants, he managed to look somehow indefinably scruffy, and in this context, the use of a silk sash with matching katana and wakizashi for a belt was more than a little scandalous.

The man in the wheelchair he was pushing, on the other hand, I’d met. “Colonel Wolf,” I said, bowing around my loaded plate.

“Captain Snord,” Sophitia echoed, and I glanced to the side, first startled at the identification and then distracted by how good she looked in black. She noticed and gave me the ‘pay attention, dummy’ elbow.

Snord and Wolf were both smirking, but the latter said, “Apparently we’ve been assigned to join you.”

I was a little surprised, but a quick glance around showed that the Major Ward and the Kells were at Katrina’s table. “I don’t mind,” I said. “It’s over this way, or so I’m told.”

It was indeed that way; all four of the place settings had appropriate nametags, and Wolf’s was missing the usual chair.

We got all of our plates set down and took our seats, and then all four of us stared in awkward silence.

Wolf broke the deadlock by turning to Snord and saying, “So, any news on Rhonda?”

The younger man smiled. “Apparently her big news was that she’s walking again. Just a couple steps, but she wasn’t leaning on anything.”

“Good!” Wolf said. “It’d be a waste to have her benched this young.” Despite the potential resonance with his own dismemberment, he looked and sounded entirely positive.

“Your daughter was hurt?” Sophitia asked Snord. “What happened?”

Snord’s face clouded over, then he sighed. “She got in a fight with a real jackass. He coldcocked her then kept going. So I figured we had better odds here than back in the old country.”

From what I’d heard of Rhonda Snord, the odds of her rubbing a trueborn the wrong way in any Clan context were pretty good. “Given what I’ve heard of both,” I said, and managed not to look too amused at the way both men focused with instant intensity, “that was probably the right call. Though, how did you manage to end up, well-” I gestured around the throne room, “-here? I was in the room when the Archon got the news about you two staying connected, and I hadn’t thought she got that angry.”

Snord smirked. “I got lucky, and found the right six apology presents.”

Six presents? I gave him a puzzled look, before the data point of how calm Katrina and her cabinet had been about finding the Locura connected with the memory of how many warships the Wolf Dragoons had been issued to support their mission. I laughed without restraint, and ignored the way heads turned. “That’d do it,” I said cheerfully.

Snord gave me a nervous look; I’d been told in both lifetimes that I had an unnerving cackle, so I just smiled at him. “So, what’s she got your people doing, now that you’re back?” I asked.

“The regiment I got handed to take to the Combine are working for the Foreign Legion,” he said, motioning at Wolf. “The old hands, well, we were attached to Lostech hunting detachments, but we all got called back to base points in the last month or so.”

I would bet I knew why; the cybertech people were convinced that the Argo’s nav database held SLDF site data for more than just the Periphery district. Something about ease of coding versus security that I didn’t follow in detail, but if they were right then there was a lot more data just waiting to be decoded. Veteran relic-hunters like Snord’s original company would be valuable adjuncts to any mission to take advantage of that.

“I promised to take good care of his little lambs,” Wolf said. “I never thought I’d end my days as a den master, but it’s more rewarding than I expected.”

“We’ll just have to hope they’re ready for Natasha,” Snord said.

“Um?” Sophitia said around her latest mouthful of lunch. She swallowed, and said, “I thought that she’d, well, been held in prison?” There hadn’t been many ‘irreconcilables’ among the Wolf Dragoons taken at Solaris, but Kerensky had made the list, with a vengeance.

“The Combine sent a deep raid early in the year,” Wolf said. His reaction to the mention of the woman whose fire had crippled him was subdued; they’d been close friends before that, and he seemed to find it more a matter of regret and loss than anger. “They hit the prison she’d been sent to and took any prisoner with military skills, then dropped the rest on the planet the moon was orbiting. I’m told she’s serving in the Legion of Vega, now.”

Well, that was less than ideal. I puffed my cheeks out with a huff of air. “Well,” I said, “it could be worse. At least she’s in the Legion of Vega rather than a unit they actually supply and support.”

“You didn’t see her at her best,” Wolf said in Kerensky’s defense.

“I know,” I agreed. “I mean that statement in the liveliest respect for her skills as a combatant and as a trainer. If you’d said they put her at Sun Zhang, I’d be much more concerned.”

Wolf raised an eyebrow. “You think that Natasha would be more effective off the battlefield?”

“The public story about her independent company with you is that they were put together primarily from expendable discipline cases,” I said. “Is that wrong?”

“No,” he admitted, clearly wondering where I was going with it.

“Were they better than the rest of your people before she got her hands on them?”

“No, but her training techniques relied on being in the field,” Wolf said.

I was skeptical about that, but- “Sun Zhang isn’t exactly shy about putting their cadets in harm’s way. Anyway, though, you see my reasoning.”

“Yeah,” Snord agreed. “But, hey, mind if I ask a question?”

“Go ahead.”

“You really think Aleksander Kerensky was, well…” He trailed off, unable to repeat the term ‘coward’ of that man.

I let out a breath, puffing my cheeks out in the process. “No, not really,” I said. “I just… He wasn’t equal to the needs of his position, and the Star League paid the price for it.”

Most of the rest of the courtly lunch hour was taken up explaining that, and when the discreet army of servants appeared at our elbows to clear things away, I’d only gotten through about three quarters of what I’d picked out.

“Thank you, Commander Blackwing,” Wolf said as everyone started to stand. “I won’t claim I agree with you on every subject, but I’m at least comforted that you’re intelligently wrong. Whether or not the way you’ve upset the status quo is for the best, I’m glad to know you haven’t done it casually or frivolously.”

“No one ever gets to know history’s judgement in their own lifetime,” I said. “But we have to do the best we can with what we’re given. After that, all we can do is tell the world that we tried.”

Soon we were back into the waiting ranks again, this time with anticipation hovering heavy in the air. Sending battalion commanders to nowhere worlds like Trell I, with the forces to hold them, was a message about the scale of the debt Katrina felt was owed. But if Majors were being granted entire planets, no matter how poor, the list of more senior names would be assigned to real prizes, and everyone in the audience knew it.

Katrina listed off the commanders of the support departments first. Doctor Tiber, who’d run medical, she sent to Incukalns, and Doctor Raven from maintenance went to Aur. Lona Alevito, my head artillery commander. she sent to Chahar. Other names, increasingly directly involved in the fighting, followed, to worlds I recognized like Son Hoa, Circinus (which had apparently been conquered in the last couple of years?), and Kwangjong-ni.

Io Sasagawa was the last of the regimental COs, and as she stood up from swearing allegiance in return for title to the one-time capital of the Rim Worlds Republic, Apollo.

“Asha Blackwing of Alpheratz, stand forward,” Katrina’s voice rang out of the throne room’s speaker system as her eyes landed on me.

I took a quick little breath to brace myself and walked forward, sweeping my cape - the uniform called for just a dueling cape, but the tailors had insisted on lengthening it to only an inch or so short of the floor - out to one side and going to one knee before the throne. “As you command, Your Highness,” I said, and heard the sound system pick up my voice just as well as hers.

There was a moment of silence; I felt sweat trickle down my neck, raised by the tension and the heat of the spotlights.

“Lyrans,” Katrina Steiner said, “Look at this woman. You have heard the noble deeds that I have rewarded already this day. You have seen the hands that wrought them paid in the coins of wealth and glory for their worth and value to our state and people. You have counted the future in worlds made habitable once more, in rivers made to run pure, and in the ruin of our enemies. You know that their titles are value given for value received, in absolute equilibrium

“And yet,” she said softly, and paused to let it ring in the air.

“And yet, these things were not done by my and beginning, nor yet by their own. They were done by hers. It will tempt some to decry her for acting under a mercenary’s star, to say that what she commanded was so merely for pay, and I say that that is not so. She was not so poor or desperate before that day on Helm; she could all so easily have claimed everything that world held for herself alone.

“She did not. Rather than think only of profit, she chose to bring it to the Lyran people… and ask all but nothing in return.”

That was flattery. Katrina had channeled all of the Helm Core’s civilian applications through the Renaissance Development Corporation, and my 45% share of even the early trickle of licensing fees from Alarion was enormous.

Katrina plowed on. “How great a repayment is called for for such a debt?”

With no visual or auditory cue whatsoever, but perfect dramatic timing, the lights in the great hall dimmed.

“Rise and turn, Asha Blackwing,” Katrina ordered, and I did, my eyes drawn upward to a holographic map hovering in mid-air above the glittering crowd. The projector system had been installed when the Star League was new, notable enough even in that day to be called out in the tourist descriptions. The latest editions said that it was supposed to be nonfunctional, but…

Every star in the Lyran Commonwealth was visible, Skye, Tamar, and Donegal all showing in different shades of blue. The former Circinus worlds were the same shade as the rest of Donegal…

Until they, and a great swathe along the outer edge of the Commonwealth all the way to Trellshire along the Combine border, changed shades.

“For centuries, the citizens of the Lyran Periphery have been neglected,” Katrina Steiner said from behind me, her voice solemn with regret - and resolve. I started to turn, and her hand on my shoulder kept me in place. “Always, Donegal and Tamar, and the Commonwealth as a whole, have felt their resources and protection were needed more urgently, and elsewhere, and entire worlds have languished, destitute, for want of the investment and security to set them fully on their feet.

“Fortunately for us all, sometimes, two problems can solve each other.

“Asha Blackwing, will you swear true and eternal allegiance to the people, constitution, and crown of the Lyran Commonwealth?”

I glanced down at the nobles in the audience, and Sophitia’s face at the front of the crowd - then looked back up at the map showing the state itself. “I do so swear,” I said, as clearly and firmly as I could.

“Will you swear for the rest of your mortal days to care for and guard the people of these worlds shown before you?”

Jesus X Christ on a crutch. “I do so swear,” I repeated.

“Will you swear to give them justice, and safety, and every wisdom and opportunity?”

“I do so swear.”

“Will you swear to stand forever between these, your people, and any who would do them harm?”

“I do so swear,” I said one last time, and Katrina stepped forward next to me and took my right wrist to raise it over our heads like a boxing referee announcing the champion.

“Then, my lords and ladies of the Commonwealth, I give you Asha Blackwing, Warden of the Rift Approaches!”

***

“Soph, did you know she was going to do that?”

“Of course. I helped plan it.”

“I hate you.”

“Love you too, darling.”

***

There was, needless to say, a colossal amount of work to be done. The ‘Rift Approaches’ that Katrina had called into being weren’t just a sinecure or a publicity stunt. She was dead serious about creating a fourth member state for the Commonwealth out of the worlds that had been taken from the Rim Worlds Republic at the dawn of the Succession Wars, even if only to have a dedicated defensive cordon against a potential Clan invasion.

That meant creating an entire provincial bureaucracy and judiciary from basically whole cloth. It meant negotiating with ComStar for the HPG stations to coordinate all of that. It meant a vast amount of studying to learn the details of all of my new worlds, and of all the threats facing them. Dozens of smaller merc units were already in place as garrisons, and I had to gain an understanding of them and of the new detachments my subordinates - my nobles - were bringing with them as they headed to their worlds.

Fortunately I didn’t have to worry about finding the hardware; Katrina hadn’t been speaking generically. While I was off in Davion space, she and the LCAF had dispatched two expeditions, the first a covert commando team carried on a Scout-class jumpship and sensor-packed Leopard to find and disable the ComStar satellites that monitored the dead world of New Dallas, and the second a major expedition that had descended on the place and wholesale scooped up nearly a dozen regiments of ‘primitive’ battlemechs and four times as many combat vehicles of the same vintage.

First-generation Terran Hegemony Mackies were cripplingly inferior to any modern battlemech more than a third their size, but they and their contemporaries were more than enough to see off pirates - and free more modern forces for other duties. In my case, organizing them into strike forces to hunt down the pirates’ home bases to burn them out.

Katrina had also already picked out where my capital would be; Finmark had been one of the Rim Worlds Republic’s main shipbuilding centers, and while the warship yards had been wrecked by nuclear fire, there was at least a starting point in the asteroid mining infrastructure that had been abandoned, along with any surviving relics. The planet itself was in the depths of a nuclear winter even centuries later, and she’d selected it as a good candidate for a pilot and demonstration project for Renaissance’s terraforming tech, learning experience and publicity stunt in one.

The first scouting and relief teams had moved in even before I’d left Solaris, surveying the damage and providing medical care and supplies for the fifteen thousand or so hunter-gatherers that were the surviving descendents of what had once been a population of millions.

There were a thousand and one things still to do even before I left Tharkad, but there was one big one to take care of first.

***

We lost all control over how it would happen the instant we handed Katrina her invitation.

Neither Sophitia or I were exactly in love with spectacle for its own sake. She’d held out for a formal ceremony in a proper church on a civilized planet with nobody shooting at us, but she still hadn’t wanted to invite anyone outside the unit. Inviting my new boss had seemed like both an appropriate formality and a nice gesture.

Katrina Steiner, as a person, took that invitation in the spirit it was intended, but The Archon had other agendas besides merely spending a bit of time with allies and potential friends, and all of them were hard to argue with. She wanted to reinforce the political reality and power of the Rift Approaches and the other member states’ support and commitment to it; that meant that we needed an Occasion that would command attention, and that Katrina and Lestrade-Aten and Kelswa needed to attend in all their splendor.

Their presence, in turn, made the event a social occasion, and an invitation to it proof of or coin among the assembled glitterati of Tharkad and every world close enough to reach us in time. Invitations were worth favors to whoever could offer them - and, sitting at the elbow of the grandmaster of the Tharkad Social Scene as she worked that advantage ruthlessly, I kept my ears open and my big mouth shut.

For I thank Old Yale, and I thank the Lord… a corner of my mind sang, trying to distract the rest of me from the Big Moment that was looming increasingly large in the immediate future. ...And-I-also-thank-my-father-who-is-Chairman-of-the-Board!

The music carrying through the door in front of me - and through the stonework underfoot, because that was a big organ - changed, and I took a careful breath and stepped forward as the smiling churchmen (I had no idea what their job was properly called, but they worked here full-time, at least) swung the twenty foot tall doors open wide, the intricate carvings and painting and gilding worked into every inch of them, just like the entire rest of the headache-inducingly overpacked building, glittering and flashing as they moved

The nave ahead of me seemed bigger than it was, and it was more than big enough to start with. Light reading of the tourist bumpf about the Cathedral of Saint Arandelle of the Immaculate Snows included the statistics of the interior spaces, and while the nave was longer than the Archon’s throne room, it was also only a little over half as wide, and had a slightly lower ceiling. It was a smaller space, and further constrained by the fact that the nave proper was divided from its side-aisles by a full-length colonnade, rather than being fully arched like the throne room.

But the resulting narrowness increased the impression of height, fooling the eye and stretching proportions upwards, especially without any battlemechs around to give scale. The side-aisles had full-height roofs, and it seemed their entire walls were vast expanses of impossibly intricate stained glass, with only enough actual stonework to frame them. The kaleidoscope shading those windows threw onto the floor and packed in-guests was obvious.

As much as most worlds’ customs disapproved of same-sex marriages, there was still a clear expectation that the party that asked for the marriage would ‘be the groom’. The fabric my own billowing cloud of white had been made of had seemed slightly off to me in ordinary light, but under the jewel-toned scatter of the cathedral’s windows, it seemed to blaze with impossible purity out of the corners of my eyes. I chalked up another reminder about the wisdom of listening to experts, and concentrated on one, not hyperventilating, and two, keeping my steps at the pace we’d worked out as best.

The stunned look I could see Sophitia giving me as I got close enough for either of us to make out facial features made the incredible amount of faffing around we’d done in the previous days worth it, and the years of waiting, and even the damned corset. I tried to keep my own reaction to an appropriately demure smile, and failed miserably.

Hiding the other reaction to the contrast of her new blue-and-white LCAF dress uniform with her unbound ruby-red hair was easier.

I knew who else was by that altar, all of them but the officiating priest personally, and of course I knew the plan for the day backwards and forwards, but looking back at my actual memories of the moment, I could only tell you how they stood or what they were wearing from the benefit of pictures I’ve seen since.

At the time, all I saw was her.

I didn’t register the passage of time, either, all my concentration on just drinking in the sight of her face, grinning just as much as I was with her eyes glittering emerald just so. The priest’s voice was a drone like a gnat, unregistered until she said, “I do.”

That meant it was time, and I dragged up just enough concentration to listen.

“Do you, Asha Blackwing, take this woman to be your wife from this day forward?” the priest asked. “To join with you and share all that is to come for better or for worse, until the day that death alone parts you?”

I took a deep breath.

“I do.”
...WE’LL TELL THE WORLD THAT WE TRIED.
Reply
RE: Tell The World That We Tried [Battletech] [CYOA]
#46
Great story Valles.
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RE: Tell The World That We Tried [Battletech] [CYOA]
#47
That's... a pretty big reward. I mean, that's going from a powerful unlanded mercenary commander to on the shortlist of military succession.

And that's leaving aside the sheer wealth that is having several dozen planets under your control. Sure, the planets are barely exploited, really, and will take much investment to get going, but once they do? Asha's unlikely to see it, but the Rift Approaches aren't exactly likely to be any poorer than the rest of the Commonwealth.
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RE: Tell The World That We Tried [Battletech] [CYOA]
#48
Also realize that she is both the trip wire and the first bullwark against the clans in that position, especially when she hunts down the pirates and takes their periphery worlds ad her own.
Wolf wins every fight but the one where he dies, fangs locked around the throat of his opponent. 
Currently writing BROBd

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RE: Tell The World That We Tried [Battletech] [CYOA]
#49
 
 
 
 
 



And yep. 'Tripwire and attrition zone' is exactly what Katrina is asking Asha to be.
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RE: Tell The World That We Tried [Battletech] [CYOA]
#50
(02-07-2019, 09:32 AM)Valles Wrote: And yep. 'Tripwire and attrition zone' is exactly what Katrina is asking Asha to be.

Is it a bad thing that I have those maps memorized?
Wolf wins every fight but the one where he dies, fangs locked around the throat of his opponent. 
Currently writing BROBd

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