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Beyond Hope
- Chapter 22 - A Thorough Housecleaning[]
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"...we all have our demons, driving us in the darkness. The thing that separates men from beasts, is that we don't have to obey those demons, we can through our will force them to obey US…"
-Tranh Truk Ngo 1st
Kowloonese Revolutionary
A letter from my grave
Bad Dreams[]
LCS Tharkad, Training Bulk
Pandora College of Military Sciences
Pandora System, Federated Commonwealth (Lyran State)
"...I just want to smell something besides myself again." Katherine felt paralyzing horror as she realized what her classmate was saying-what he was about to do.
"NO!!"
Katherine Morgan woke in a sweat, anchored in her bunk space on the LCS Tharkad's wreck.
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Tharkad Class Battlecruiser, LCS Tharkad
"Heya, Morgan, you okay??" Claire Van Oosten drawled in a thankfully light New Capetowner accent from the strap-bunk above hers.
"We're still inside?"
"Last I checked. ******, was it Simon again?"
"Yeah. He just wanted a fresh breath…"
"He opened his helmet in front of you. That's going to put the Zap on anyone. You talk to the Chief about it yet?"
"No, I told them I didn't see it." Katherine admitted, "Like a blind spot, I try to speak about it and what comes out isn't…what happened."
"You watched a bunkie commit suicide, Katty. Probably the first time you've seen it up close with your own eyes even, ja? It's not gonna be Lekker or Simba brews for a while yet heya? You'll find your words when you've digested."
"DId you?"
"Oy, I'm VERY good at burying that stuff, ask me Da, watched him cut in half by a combine and it took me two years to cry. I was too busy keeping mum and my brothers from fallin' apart. This is the first vacation since I was fourteen."
“You call this a vacation?” Katherine was surprised.
"It beats dirt-farming for trace minerals and scrubby Barley in the Lower Heights region of New Capetown, ya, it's a vacation, of sorts, depending on where you look and where you sit."
“I guess.” Katherine shook her head.
Her cellmate/bunkmate unbuckled and drifted down to eye level, "You know what every ship in the fleet has, even when the regs say no?"
“No?”
Claire held up a clear glastic bottle full of fluid. “A still…and I found it. Fancy a little bit of the oldest? This stuff burned blue when I checked, it's probably horror for strong, bein' over two centuries old…"
“Is it safe being that old?”
"Would it matter if it wasn't?" Claire asked, a gleam in her eye, "we're not exactly in the safest condition, wouldn't you say?"
A medical discharge would get me out of this without mom being able to say a thing…
“Let’s get drunk.”
Half an hour later they were singing badly, and to her utter shock and amazement, Katherine was having a good time.
Their 'party' included most of the deck by thirty minutes in.
Diegs just shook her head without busting it up.
Not even after the fourth off-key chorus of "Shona Drinker".
“As long as the boys don’t get ideas.” She smiled.
Failure is a temporary state existance[]
LCS Tharkad, Training Bulk
Jump Point
Pandora System, Federated Commonwealth (Lyran State)
"Sail is reefed?" Arthur asked.
"Sail is reefed."
"Engineer, drive state?"
"Core is charged and ready, Docking rings one through six show no faults, physical gang inspections show no failures, BITE systems are green."
"I guess it's on me then…Captain, Navigation Board is lit, Drive is ready, Sail is stowed, Navigation awaits your command."
“Take us where the timid fear to tread. Jump us.” Captain ordered
Arthur keyed the 'execute'. This was the fifteenth time in five days, he expected another failure or alert to light up.
/////// Discontinuity \\\\\\\\
The L1 point between Tharkad, and her moon, was outside the window.
"Holy shit, we did it." Arthur was stunned. "Hey, guys…We did it!!!"
“You expected another failure. Failure is a temporary state.”
"I admit I was expecting another failure, Ma'am." Arthur acknowledged, "We tried like hell to prevent it, but this time it all worked!!" He was smiling wide.
“We put in the work. Time to reap the rewards.”
“Liberty?”
“We are at Tharkad. The ship has just proven ready.”
Expenses of War[]
Private Quarters
Dropship
Federated Commonwealth (Lyran State)
The amazing thing for General Arbuthnot, AFFC Quartermaster, was that Elizabeth Ngo was still alive given the last four jumps her dry-heaves yielded blood.
"Drug me." She'd told the ship's doctor after the bout at Coventry. "Drug me insensate and put a vacuum line off my mouth, a command circuit is not something you delay...not even for an actual medical emergency. It takes too many resources out of operation that could be doing something else instead!"
They met with Lt. General Adam Steiner at the turnover at Inarcs, fresh from hounding the clanner-equipped Red Corsair, and now assigned to have a look at the oversize militia that Her Majesty was confiscating.
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Adam Steiner
"She's unconscious?" Adam asked.
"Drugged, the term is 'pharmaceutical coma', General. Duchess Ngo's TDS was a nightmare through the last eight jumps from Tharkad, and she finally badgered the doctors into putting her under."
"That bad is usually a bar to travel."
"I know, instead she's traveling by Command Circuit, which makes all the symptoms of that malady a thousand times worse for everyone around her."
"So…we're walking into…?"
"We have to catalog, secure and inventory somewhere north of six thousand active nuclear weapons and an unknown stockpile of components and parts. It's unknown, because the Duchess here, never bothered to inventory them fully-she calls them 'Industrial mining equipment'."
“Mein Gott! No wonder the Archon is doing this.”
"Oh, it gets better. She owns at least one warship we know about, besides the one Helena Drillson brought to Tharkad, we're supposed to secure that one, too." Kapitan Alice Wells noted, "Somehow…because my orders suggest there's more than one."
“We’re being told to do the impossible.”
"We could've USED backup chasing the Red Corsair." Adam mused, "Lots of backup…"
"Ja. I know. Seems the Duchess there-" Wells pointed, "-even tried to get Her Majesty's permission to deploy them before the current mess, but? not ready. I'll be fascinated to see what 'not ready' looks like, given what they dusted over Newtown Square."
“It’s a numbers game. They have more ships and our only answer is nukes if they do decide to use them. We can’t be sure we can get nukes through their screens.” Adam nodded.
From Inarcs, it's only one jump to Kowloon. The vessel their dropship met, had a killer whale rampant and two collars, and Adam spotted it first.
Insignia of the Kowloon Coast Guard
"They've welded rails on the spine…that's a missile boat."
"Improvised, scheisse… that is insanity, right there in front of us…"
"They gave it fighter cubicles…" Wells counted softly, then, "Twelve fighters, six small craft, shit for a maneuver drive and I bet those rails are also structural reinforcements…but it has drop collars."
Adam Steiner began to smile, "They're crazy." he said. "Crazier than the Clanners, I suspect!"
“They have to be.” Wells shook her head.
The dropship crew docked soft with the Collier, and a second dropship-this one carrying cargo, docked on the other collar.
//////Discontinuity\\\\\\
Elizabeth opened her eyes. "****** I feel terrible…" she said, after pulling the surgical vacuum inlet off her face and out of her mouth.
"She awakes." a stranger sat across from her restraint couch, General's ranks, stress around his eyes. Nameplate 'Steiner', accent was…Summer maybe?
"Okay, you're not with RepDep, you're also not with Wells, not LCN because that's AFFC ground forces, and your branch looks like…MechWarrior?"
"So far, so good, did they not tell you?"
"I was told I'd meet with a senior AFFC officer to go over transition orders for a huge chunk of my system's militia and police." she said, "her majesty did not tell me who."
"Adam Steiner."
"Holy shit, dude, how many changeovers did you have to catch?
"Twenty." he asserted. “Your private little navy has caused that much of a fuss.”
"Well, at least Her Majesty didn't send someone who can't find his ass with both hands and a telescope, but…okay, I'm waking up which means we're here."
"Yes we are. Your home system."
She undid her straps and winced, "huh, bruising this time,...light though…and I feel pretty nauseated still, but not as bad as the trip to Donegal in '54."
“We’re going to do our best to ****** this.”
"Then I think we need to park where the action is." Liz told him, she looked around, "huh no windows…are we orbiting Kowloon or Boojum?"
"The gas giant." he told her.
"Then that's where the action is…and I need to put on my work face. Tell me that Wells remembered to suit up?"
“This is a serious matter, so yes.”
"I know it's serious, that's why I'm being cooperative." Elizabeth said, "Where's your suit, MechWarrior? It's kinda cold outside what with there being no air between us and the surface. If you don't have one, I'll have Pham or Carwright send up a suit-fitter or a guest bag, your choice. I prefer the fitted suits-they're less of a pain once you're wearing one and they let you wear something resembling regular clothes on the outside."
"This…is you being cooperative?"
"The walk from the landing pad to the Station is outdoors." Liz explained, "Which means wearing a suit unless they finished the retractable concourses that we had to cut from the budget two years ago."
“All right if we’re going to do this we can’t come in too hard so I’ll take the fitted suit.”
"Always a tasteful choice, General Steiner." Elizabeth agreed, then she made a comm-call that was answered.
"It'll take a couple extra hours, but you'll appreciate the difference in comfort. Believe me, once you've gotten a fitted suit, the guest-baggies just suck."
It took around eight hours to get General Steiner, his staff, and the other AFFC personnel fitted and suited.
It would've taken LONGER, but Helena or Jane had forwarded their most recent physicals to the station, so most of the pre-fitting was already done, leaving only final adjustments.
"Why aren't you making these for everybody?"
"They're…expensive?" Elizabeth answered as she buddy-checked each of the senior officers in turn before they headed for the external lock. "I mean, each one is custom fitted to your body, and the layering is precise, it costs a lot to make them."
"How much?"
She mumbled a number.
"HOW much?" Arbuthnot urged.
"two and a half million Kroner per." Liz said, "that's with efficiencies of scale in play, you can buy fighters for less than the suits I just paid to equip your staff. The Navy budget's not got room for them to be general issue yet….and I do mean 'yet', I've been funding contractors looking at ways to get those prices down to where no Lyran soldier, Marine, or sailor has to go without one."
"Mein gott, I thought BATTLEARMOR was expensive."
"Battlesuits won't keep you alive in as many environments, or comfortable in them, and these have some assets that help-the piezoelectric layers convert motion to charge the charge-paks, the helmet's got full SS-1-I-21 integration with heads up display and multi-spectral enhancement, the faceplate has a variable lensing function that can act as a median power telescope, the catheters feed to a water and waste scavenging system so you can be on the float for days or even weeks without dying of dehydration, and with supplement packs the waste recycling can provide a sludge that's nutritious enough for long endurance ops like asteroid mining. Half the contractors I've got loans out to are either trying to reduce the cost of those systems, or figure out what really isn't needed for a Military application..and the cooling/thermal layers are good to sixty eight Kelvin on the low end, or three hundred degrees C on the high end before the suit starts breaking."
“Even the best fighter flight suits and the existing suits for the navy don’t go that far…”
"That's because the Navy doesn't wildcat in the kind of hairy places Rockjacks make their living." Liz observed, "So we're paying for research on how far to dumb them down to where they'll meet a general issue price point. So far not much luck."
“So why not invest in the existing suit manufacturers instead? A fighter flight suit costs a lot less and will still keep a person alive for a couple days.”
"Your words to the Estates General's budget office." Liz quipped as they stepped out onto Spider Moon's surface and walked to an open-topped Rover waiting by the pad. "I'm having to dumb it down because of two things; production bottlenecks, and getting the politicians to agree to what they think are 'fancy underoos'."
“Perhaps they’re trying to clue you in that you’re trying to reinvent the wheel.”
"I didn't invent it, I just have people who would like to make some money and they pay taxes." Liz chuckled, "as it is, hopefully there'll be enough need that we can produce copies of standard coolant suits and flight uniforms, otherwise it's trying to compete with outfits that ALSO pay me money for their tooling…which is why I don't own any of the suit makers."
"They warned me about you, but I didn't listen…" Arbuthnot commented. "You're always on aren't you?"
"Ich bin Lyraner. Of course I'm always on. You get some nice free samples and maybe someone will notice and want them for themselves, people who owe me money get to pay me back instead of risking default, and the world gets a little bit nicer..careful, watch your step on the running board…"
"So…how much of this do you own?" Adam asked.
"See that gas giant up there? All the mining stations and burrows that surround it pay me a licensing fee. I own the assets in the Star System, but I only own ONE set of businesses-everyone else is either home grown or owes me their seed money, which will eventually be paid back, including people that are competing with each other in the same business. The financial services side has to be utterly non partisan, or it won't work. Half a billion people pay taxes out here, I own maybe ten percent of the businesses they rely on to pay those taxes."
"You keep going back to taxes."
"I've spent most of this year working with Her Majesty's Auditor." Liz said, "chasing waste fraud and abuse. Taxes are on my mind even if I weren't a business owner."
"And your planetary income?"
"That's mostly Her Majesty's by default." Liz said, "Forty percent of Kowloon-the-Planet's GDP for the last twenty years has gone to the Commonwealth in the form of Tax-and-Tithe. My Assembly gets to write a budget with what's left after that, plus receipts from the mineral licensing and business taxes."
Adam stopped mid motion, "FORTY PERCENT??"
"The realm is at war." Elizabeth said, "it used to be higher."
"That can't be right! nobody has to pay that much!"
"I'd like to meet this 'nobody' person. I guarantee, Arc Royal pays more than we do-as a percentage of GDP, so does Inarcs, Coventry, Skye, Hesperus…" Liz settled into her seat, "I looked at the books, General. Kowloon's getting a deal. Our base tax rate's higher, but we pay less in the add-ons than the others do…or we did, anyway."
“Sommerset was only paying 20%...” Adam said.
“Well Summerset didn’t have a major tooling industry, nor shipyards, nor was it home to several shipping companies, nor did they have much industry besides agriculture…but…you did have a large military sector. With good training and equipment, and General-that's worth a lot of money annually. We can go over the match of Sommerset's GDP to what the Realm was absorbing in terms of human capital, real estate, licenses, fees, fines…and I bet added together through the province, it's going to add up to more than fifty percent of GDP-or would have, if the Clans hadn't invaded. Duties on shipping your agricultural products would probably show the biggest tap."
Arbuthnot muttered something over the channel as the open car rolled to the entry lock.
"Sir?" Liz asked.
"You're adding in the 'sundry' taxes-taxes on individuals and businesses, duties and fees from shipping and transport."
"Yep. I am." Liz said, "Because that's how my grandfather taught me to think of the topic-there's your official tax rate, then there's the taxation that's also taking place at both higher and lower levels. It all adds up to the coffers of the realm, minus the graft and occasional theft by officials, which is about ten percent of most worlds' outlay if you do it as an average. At fifteen percent, that's when Lohengrin goes door-knocking with the midnight abductions and interrogations. Because at THAT point, it's harming the realm."
"How much…" Adam began, "HOW Much did this cost you?"
"Initial outlay, or upkeep?" liz asked.
"Outlay."
"Great great, great, GREAT, great grandmother Sophie drained the coffers and had to get a loan. We paid off the loan the following century. With five percent interest per annum. Since that initial outlay, Kowloon's fiscal value as a holding, system wide? Is around a thousand times as much in terms of total GDP. we sank the cash into financing small start-ups and cutting regulations system-wide, and kept doing it for long enough that the upkeep is mostly handled."
"Your Navy?"
"Ten percent of system-wide GDP as of the last four years." Liz stated, "basically the resources of an industrial world for one year, when you add in and account for devaluation. This is going to be a painful loss, but it's survivable."
"That's…not that far out of line for the average, how are you managing it?" Adam asked.
"Efficiencies of scale." Liz said, "we have one armored vehicle chassis we use for everything, so the parts are swappable and training can be abbreviated, especially since it's getting built by multiple contractors who have to compete with each other on price and quality while still being required to make the things with interchangeable components. Every cubic centimeter and kilogram of shipping and storage is squeezed hard, so that errant shipments to the wrong unit don't result in techs needing to improvise. General equipment for the Coast Guard gets a similar treatment wherever we can do it. The basic idea goes back to an ancestor of mine who worked with Helena Cameron- 'if you can't afford to lose it, you can't afford to use it', so I pretty much don't authorize purchases of 'wonder weapons' for the Militia or the Coast Guard. Everything has to be as dual use as I can make it, and if I can't make it dual use, we have to be able to crank them out in quantity. Everything we DO buy, is built to be easy to produce-that is, can be banged out on spec from smaller shops or shat out in quantity by larger ones, so there's always enough spares to go around and enough maintenance gear to keep them running…and enough manufacturers going that losing a factory doesn't make it an orphan."
"Hence the Sabers. You stick with SB-27s because they're the single dirt-cheapest mass produced AeroSpace fighter in the Inner Sphere." Wells critiqued, "Do you even HAVE any heavy fighters? Mediums even?"
Liz shrugged, "Can't afford the upkeep so…no? I'd have LIKED to, but…that's another engine line to somehow pay for, airframe line, training, storage, what to do when, not if they get shot down or crash… as you pointed out, right up until Her Majesty put her foot down and grabbed The Coast Guard off me, I was paying for this stuff domestically. No deep coffers for super-advanced prototypes or expensive licenses on famed uberfighters. We dumped it into pilot training instead."
“Industry and logistics. Helena’s papers on the matter align quite well with your views.” Adam nodded. “The SLDF got away with what they did because they had the military industrial complex and tax base to do so. We were forced to make do thanks to the ravages of the Succession Wars.”
"Yup." Liz nodded. "A lot of Helena's ideas were being implemented by my ancestors prior to Grandfather's heart attack and the Regency. I ended up having to sell off most of his 'improvements' because we couldn't afford to keep them running. A thirty six 'mech battalion with thirty five individual, customized or foreign designs? Too hard to keep supplied. I've been wanting to work a deal to get something 'general use we can make lots of' instead."
"That burns my MechWarrior soul…but it's so sensible I can't argue the point." Adam admitted. “Even now I have entire battalions where I’m lucky to have more than one or two mechs that are even the same chassis, let alone variant.”
"Yeah, and now you know why I don't have a full battalion of 'mechs yet." Liz noted, "We can make the tanks, personnel carriers, artillery vehicles, command posts, engineering vehicles, and even a wheeled scout, but we can't manage to get licenses to local producers for anything 'mech like' that we can actually use in quantity, which makes upkeep a huge problem, and training, and all the rest."
"If you could do it, Duchess, let's say the magic license fairy granted you the manufacturing rights to sell off to your…subsidiaries…what would it look like?"
"Catapult's a good design. It's simple, reliable, and durable. Maybe a Catapult with Omni tech so we can fit it with cannons or PPCs from the vehicle lines in addition to the missiles. Something like that-something that is simple and durable and most of all, works, with a nice, deep aftermarket and lots of companies either making parts for it, or making refit kits, so that it's easy to stock spares for, and drill and training can be done without worrying about a multi-month turnaround on spares when someone breaks something."
"When, not 'if'?" Arbuthnot inquired.
"WHEN. If you're not breaking something in training, you're not training hard enough." Liz asserted. "My aviators pull multi-mach passes at below 100 meters, because they train to do that, and have since Anh Cu'ong's day in the 2770s. We lose a few pilot candidates every year during Tactical training, and the airframes get the hell beat out of them doing practice passes from suborbital hop to low-and-fast ground attack training, but the ones who make it through are pretty damn good pilots. I'd want my MechWarrior personnel to be pretty damn good pilots too-even if it means losing a few to fatal accidents during train-ups. One casualty in training saves-"
"-ten in the field, I've heard that one before." Adam said sourly. "That's theory, I've seen practical examples that say the wrong training is worse than none."
"Obviously I would need to hire the best trainers I can find, and the best devious bastards to devise how to use it." Liz allowed, "which is easier with aviation because Rockjacks are good at improvisation and they're awesome teachers, but I gots nothing but mercs for the 'mech arm, and Max Green's good, but he's one guy, and he's getting old. I'm scared he's going to want to retire soon."