Chapter 1[]
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Frederick Steiner and the Man Who Knew Too Little[]
Book 1
“Artillery adds dignity to what would otherwise be a vulgar brawl.”
- Frederick the Great
Curitiba, Summer
Federation of Skye, Lyran Commonwealth
13 June 3007
Two years and countless shocks later, Frederick Steiner was back on Summer. He was in transit and shouldn’t really have stopped on the world, but social calls to one’s contacts, patrons and allies were expected of an officer in the Lyran Commonwealth Armed Forces. Too much perhaps, a treacherous part of him agreed with Katrina.
Even a stopped clock can be right twice a day, he thought.
Perhaps the greatest Archon the Commonwealth will ever know, Max’s voice whispered in his mind.
Frederick had never quite forgotten the man. How could he, when he was reminded of his predictions every time Katrina or his infant nephew Ryan so much as came up in conversation? But he’d had little chance to follow up on any of those thoughts. Only recently, with Uncle Alessandro dethroned, had he the opportunity to leave Tharkad and investigate further.
Not that he’d done so personally. The ‘ancient wisdom’ of House Steiner was to hire an expert (and watch them carefully), so he’d sent an HPG message asking a friend on Summer to have a private investigator draw up a detailed profile on Mustermann. He hadn’t gone to Aldo though. Frederick hadn’t seen Ernesto Lestrade’s dead body himself but he had seen the two autopsies… and they’d differed, exactly as the mental patient had predicted.
That… might not be Aldo’s fault. He hated to think the young man was involved. Hated it.
But there was always the whisper about how much Aldo had wanted to be favored over his elder siblings… both of them dead in the attack two years ago. How very much he had wanted it…
Frederick Steiner knew what it was like to be held as second-best, knew the sweetness of being the heir at last when Katrina was gone, and Uncle Alessandro had started to groom him as the next Archon.
And he felt the bitterness of losing that.
When he looked in the mirror and saw the same look he’d seen on young Aldo’s face… that was when his doubts told him that just because he hated the idea, it didn’t make the idea wrong.
The investigator had done a good job, Frederick thought. It was on his lap as he sat in the driver’s seat of the staff-car he’d requisitioned after arriving on Summer and he leafed through it. Medical records. Police records of trying to list him to anyone dead on the planet for fifty years… Max estimated his age as forty-four when he was found by search and rescue in Curitiba. Forty-six now - honestly, the thirty-five year old Frederick had guessed that there was more than one decade between their ages. The social security applications to provide him a legal identity. Citizenship applications - denied. He had resident status, a menial job and was apparently scraping together some savings. Frederick winced at the sight of the weekly income - he’d spent more than that on a single meal (admittedly, when covering for several guests).
There was a more recent photo - Max had lost weight and grown a beard. The lack of hair up top was male-pattern baldness, not the result of a razor. No evidence of trying to hide it with a comb-over or similar, although the rest of his hair was long enough.
Frederick checked his watch and then glanced at his wing mirror. He’d parked on Max’s route home from work, and he was reportedly about as regular as a metronome. This time, unlike the last two occasions, he saw the object of his interest approaching with a small bag of groceries in one hand. Lowering the passenger window on his car, Frederick closed the folder, turned on the inside light and waited until the man was level with it.
“Mustermann.”
The older man paused and then stooped to look into the groundcar. “Can I… oh, you’re that soldier? Erick?”
Frederick nodded and put the folder into the back seat. “Get in. We need to talk.”
“...I’m in the shit, aren’t I?” Max said in a resigned voice. But he obediently opened the door and climbed into the passenger seat.
“That remains to be seen.” He looked at the groceries and frowned. Cheap. What he could see of them looked cheap and frankly unappetizing. “You’re going to eat that?”
“I was going to cook them first.”
“I will buy you dinner.” It sounded like he was pitying the older man, and Frederick feared for a moment he would take offense.
However, Max simply looked at him for a moment and then shrugged. “Okay. Kind of random for you to turn up and offer me dinner, but what the hell.”
Frederick put the car into gear and pulled away. He was actually getting hungry himself, now that he thought about it. “I’d rather talk privately though, so it’ll be a takeaway. You know any?”
“I don’t make a habit of it - they’re more expensive than cooking for myself.”
“You’re not that poor.”
Max’s eyes flicked back towards the folder. “I’m saving what I can.”
“What for?”
“To move somewhere I can get a better job. If I’m bringing enough to be charged income tax and keep that up for five years, I qualify for citizenship.”
“There aren’t any jobs in Curitiba?” Frederick asked in surprise. It was the planetary capital.
“Tax brackets are lower elsewhere, as are the costs of living. And I don’t have the skill set for anything much around here.”
Frederick nodded in understanding. He saw the lights of some shops and slowed, pulling over when he saw that among them were takeaways. “Fish and chips?”
“Fine.”
Parked, Frederick opened his wallet and passed Max twenty kroner. “Get me a fish and fries, plus whatever you want. My face is a little too well known.” And now that he thought about it, military fatigues would probably leave him standing out.
Max frowned at the note and then accepted it. He left the groceries behind him, and Frederick moved them to the backseat while he waited. The frozen pizza sticking out looked about as edible as a plate. Pulling it out, he noticed the price was only twenty pfennigs. He couldn’t remember ever having bought anything that cheap. Shaking his head, he put it back in the bag.
The smell of hot, fried potato and battered fish healed the damage to his appetite and Max sat down and put two of the paper-wrapped meals on the dashboard and then opened the third.
“Three?” Frederick asked curiously.
“I am abusing your generosity,” Max told him cheerfully and offered him the change - fifteen kroner in notes and a handful of coins as well. “And we might want seconds.”
“Keep it.” Frederick pulled out into the traffic. “In the interests of honesty, Erick is only part of my name.”
“I assumed as much. Most people have a family name.”
“Frederick Steiner.”
“...”
Glancing sideways, he saw Max’s jaw was slack. The other man recovered before any of the fries he’d been chewing fell out, fortunately. “I see. Kind of glad you decided against asking about yourself back then. You almost smacked me as it was.”
“I did not.”
“I said almost.”
“You said my sister was - is - going to die. In three or four years.”
“That is fair,” Max admitted as the car pulled up outside the small house he rented the ground floor of. The owner lived upstairs, supplementing her own meagre income with Max’s rent and – judging by the smell - some borderline legal intoxicants grown in the garden.
Once inside, they resumed eating the fish and chips at the small table. At least here there was something Frederick could adjust to - company-grade officer’s base quarters weren’t really larger, and if the room’s decoration was poor, it was also tidy and clean. Half the table had been stacked with notebooks that Max had moved aside onto his bed before they ate - they were clearly organized.
“You know,” he asked Max, “That a lot of what you predicted has happened.”
“I don’t follow the news a lot, but even I can’t miss a change of Archon.”
“And I checked both the autopsies of Ernesto Lestrade.”
Max put his fork down. “Before we go further, let me point out that slandering the duke of the world I live on would be… problematic for me.”
“Legally?”
“If a couple of Free Skye yobs decide I’m ‘too Germanic’ and ‘accidentally’ beat me to death, they’ll get a few years of three warm meals and a bed. I, on the other hand, will be dead. The stakes are a bit higher for me than for them.”
Frederick frowned. “Do you think that’s really likely?”
“I don’t know. I don’t fit in here, not very well. And slums like this don’t really welcome outsiders. I doubt I’m of interest to anyone important, but for that reason I’d be easily silenced if I did come to the interest of someone with influence. My point is,” he continued, words coming out faster and faster, “I’m not refusing to talk, but I want you to understand that depending on what you do with what I say… you’re a Steiner. That doesn’t make you safe, but it still means you’re safer than I am.”
“...I’m beginning to believe that you’re really not from around here. If you help me,” Frederick explained, “You’re one of my people. Which doesn’t make you perfectly safe, but it does mean I am obligated to consider your safety.”
The older man eyed him and then shrugged. “The thing about unspoken accords is sometimes you don’t realize that you don’t actually have an accord.”
Frederick grunted. “Alright. I acknowledge that you’re taking a risk. As am I. Did what you remember include Archon Margaret Olsen?”
Max smiled. “Ja. It did. And I take your point, as a Steiner who is consulting a… call me a soothsayer… you would lose any political credibility.”
The soldier sat back slightly, happy that he was understood. The seventh Archon of the Lyran Commonwealth had been a Steiner only by marriage and she had also been obsessed with the supernatural. Some of her decisions had been based on divination, others were fed to her by self-proclaimed mystics acting for powerful men and women at her court. Many of them had been poor decisions, and just over five hundred years on, the repercussions of the civil war fought to unseat her were still unfolding. Aldo Lestrade, for example, was directly descended from a Lestrade who had supported Robert Steiner in overthrowing Margaret Olsen.
“Alright.” Max put some of the fish into his mouth, chewed and swallowed. “What do you want to know?”
“Tell me how my sister dies.” He felt his fists clench at the thought of Donna dying.
The other man’s blue eyes met his. “What I know is that she was with Winfield’s Brigade… sorry, it would be the Winfield Guards at the time.”
Frederick nodded in understanding. Two elite regiments of raiders, formed by his uncle. “She wasn’t assigned to them before she took medical leave, but I could see her getting a post with a more prestigious unit. She’s a hell of a pilot.”
“Huh. I honestly didn’t know she was a pilot,” Max admitted. “The entry on her said she was part of their second battalion.”
“Aerospace lances are notionally attached to ‘Mech companies. It’s supposed to improve co-operation.” He let his tone say what he felt about how that worked in the field, but it did help with logistics since that was the ratio of fighter bays to ‘Mech bays in most dropships.
“I see. They were fighting on Sevren in 3011. As I understand it. There was an intelligence failure and the Second Winfield Guards regiment got mouse-trapped - encircled by heavier ‘Mechs with tank support, bombed by aerospace fighters. The DCMS cut them apart - the first regiment was hit hard as well. The Guards pulled off-world with only two battalions of ‘Mechs, which is when they were reorganized into Winfield’s Brigade.”
“We lost Sevren?” Frederick asked, aghast. The world didn’t matter for itself but it was one of only two secure jump-routes to Tamar, which was intensely important. The Draconis Combine had slowly pushed the border between the Lyran Commonwealth back over the course of the Succession Wars, despite occasional reverses. The capital of the Tamar Pact, one of the three interstellar realms that had merged to form the Commonwealth, would be a political nightmare to lose. “I thought you said Katrina was one of the greatest Archon’s in history.”
“That doesn’t mean she had a perfect record. Sevren was retaken in 3024. Six years later, the Lyran Commonwealth controlled Radstadt and Utrecht.”
Frederick actually had to think for a moment before he could place those worlds. Then his eyebrows rose. “That’s impressive.” The two worlds had been border worlds in the days of the Star League - and on the Draconian side of that border. These days they were fairly deep inside the Combine. “Hard to believe, but impressive.”
“Your cousin had three major accomplishments in her reign - to simplify what’s probably a much more detailed account than I know. She reformed the LCAF to the point that it could defeat the DCMS on a grand scale. She forged a close alliance with the Federated Suns…”
“It was a two front war?” That made the accomplishment - well, not unimpressive. But even so, more believable.
Max shook his head. “The AFFC was primarily fighting the Capellans. Operation Gotterdammerung was a Lyran victory.” He paused. “You were part of it, but not a large part. She couldn’t trust you.”
No question who ‘she’ was. Or why. Frederick bared his teeth. “I take it that pushing the border back was the third victory.”
Max nodded.
“So she reigned twenty years, at least.”
“Katrina Steiner abdicated in early 3039 and died around a year later - cancer.”
Frederick paused. That… it wasn’t like hearing that Donna would die… but it wasn’t as easy to accept Katrina’s death as he’d supposed it would be. “With your help I could…” He trailed off. Max clearly admired Katrina.
The older man chewed on a fry, waiting.
I could do better. I have his foreknowledge, however he got it. It would be hard to hide, people might think I was another Olsen. But if she could do it, I could. I could crush the Combine, make the Commonwealth strong again.
“I never became Archon, in the future you read about?”
Max shook his head. “Nope. There were two attempts I know to make you Archon. In 3029, Aldo Lestrade tried to assassinate Katrina Steiner. In 3052, ComStar’s Primus tried to overthrow her daughter. Both of them wanted you to be their puppet ruler.”
The taste in his mouth was disgust. “I could take the throne with an army! I wouldn’t use an assassin!”
“You weren’t consulted.” The older man shrugged. “But since you had been very much in Aldo’s pocket, the first attempt was the last straw for Katrina. You accepted the chance to attack a DCMS stockpile that was fueling a counterattack on the Isle of Skye - and when your command was cornered you exchanged yourself for their escape. Officially, Colonel Frederick Steiner was executed by General Theodore Kurita the same day.”
“I was still a colonel!” After more than twenty years this would be the last promotion he had?!
“Why would she have entrusted someone openly seeking to usurp her with more power?” asked Max.
Frederick had no answer for that.
“You weren’t actually killed - Theodore changed his mind at the last second, or so he claimed. Maybe he botched the shot. You took a bullet to the head, destroying your right eye. A few years later, ComStar had something he wanted; and they needed an experienced military officer, so he handed you over to the Primus.”
“What did ComStar want a soldier for?”
“They were building up an army of their own. And, to give you full credit, as the head of the ComGuards, you proved yourself a military commander of the first rank. With a new name and a new face, you commanded - and won - the largest battle since the Liberation of Terra. And when Primus Myndo Waterly offered you the Archon’s throne, you shot her.” Max put his cutlery down. “You outlived your cousin by more than forty years, your legacy was… complicated, but perhaps larger than hers. But no, you never became Archon.”
“I could be Archon.”
The other man said nothing, just picked up his cutlery and started eating again.
“I could!” He sounded plaintive, even to his own ears.
“I’m not disagreeing.”
“But you wouldn’t help me,” Frederick accused.
Max sighed. “To quote - probably not word for word - a book that may not even exist in this universe… Lots of people covet the Emperor’s throne. How many covet his desk?”
“I don’t understand.”
“Do you want to spend the rest of your life - and you could live another seventy years, you were over a hundred when you died in that history - on Tharkad. Arguing with the Estates-General. Sweet-talking nobles and businessmen. Negotiating, compromising. Drowning in ink and paper?” The older man shook his head. “Look me in the eye and tell me that that’s who you want to be.”
Frederick hesitated. “That’s not…”
The man across the table from him sat and ate. Waiting.
Irritated, the younger man jabbed his fork into the fish and cut a large section of it away, stuffing his face with it. He thought as he chewed.
“Maybe… maybe you have a point,” Frederick admitted grudgingly after he’d swallowed. “I’ll think about it.”
“I’m more than happy to try to find a way to save your sister,” Max offered in a conciliatory manner. “And I can certainly think of some opportunities that would benefit House Steiner and the Lyran Commonwealth, if you can exploit them.”
Frederick lifted his water glass and extended it over the table. Max clinked his own against it.
“I’ll appoint you as my secretary,” the colonel offered. “As a noble, I’m allowed a civilian staff even in my military duties. I don’t really admire the rule, but I can use it. It pays, and it’ll get you off Summer.”
“Sounds good to me.” The balding man sipped from his glass. “So your sister… what does she fly?”
“Lucifer.”
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Lucifer Medium Aerospace Fighter
Max began coughing violently, almost dropping his glass.
“What?”
“That ****** deathtrap? No wonder she died!” the man exclaimed between coughs, red-faced. He hammered his hand against his chest. “Lockheed/CBM haven’t put an ejection seat on it after five hundred years of operational history, which makes them mass-murderers in my book.”
Frederick rubbed the scar over his right eye. “She said you just have to be good enough not to need it.” Which sounded stupid even to him, but he wasn’t an aerospace pilot.
Wyatt City, Wyatt
Federation of Skye, Lyran Commonwealth
21 July 3007
Max Mustermann - he was deeply annoyed that his real name was among the things he did not remember from before whatever had happened on Summer two years ago - had come across a number of things he disliked about the 31st century. Skye Basketball wasn’t the highest on the list, but it was on that list.
“You just don’t like losing,” Frederick chuckled from behind his desk, looking disgustingly happy about yesterday’s match.
At least I’m amusing, the civilian thought as he shot his superior a dire look and shuffled over to the desk where he worked. His everything hurt right now. It would probably help him keep weight off, and not participating in the regiment’s sporting events would have cemented him as an outsider but playing a mutant mix of boxing and basketball the previous day was a painful experience right now.
The military base that the Seventh Lyran Regulars were assigned was new to them, but by no means new. Stationed for decades on Loric, at the far end of the border of the Free Worlds League, they’d been redeployed for an indefinite period to show that the Archon was not ignoring Skye’s security concerns. The move hadn’t done much for morale, and the loss of their colonel to a financial audit hadn’t helped much.
As the new colonel, Frederick wanted to give the troops something else to think about - as well as instill a spirit of aggression in them. That was what he’d explained to the officers in the meetings Max had sat in on, anyway.
The sporting gear to get every mechwarrior, most of the techs and a smattering of other supporting personnel kitted out to play had been paid for out of Frederick’s pocket. Max knew that, because keeping track of his employer’s personal finances was now part of his job.
Just Frederick’s personal finances, thank god, he thought as he checked the numbers on receipts stacked at the desk. Both the finances of his corporate holdings, his income from the Steiner family’s collective trust funds or - worst of all - the ducal revenue of Duran were handled by other people on other planets. Being the personal secretary of the man who reigned over an entire planet was not an easy job, particularly when you had few of the experiences typically asked for on adverts for positions at this level. Max typed up a summary and batched it with the other documents to be forwarded to the Wyatt HPG station for low priority transmission back to Frederick’s accountants.
It had taken him about twenty minutes to get that done but when he looked up, Frederick’s mood had shifted. “Is something wrong?”
“The Quartermaster Corps have redirected the shipment of replacement ‘Mechs we were supposed to get,” the younger man snarled. “They’re apparently needed more urgently elsewhere.”
Max paused in thought. “We’re a company and a half under-strength, aren’t we?”
“Ninety active ‘Mechs once my Zeus is counted,” agreed Frederick bitterly. “What do they want me to do, disband a battalion and pretend we’re Capellans?!”
Leaning back in his chair, Max contemplated the ceiling for a moment. “And if we had those ‘Mechs, we have the Mechwarriors for them?”
“Finding dispossessed Mechwarriors isn’t a problem at the best of times.”
“I figured, but the only stupid question is one that you don’t ask.”
Frederick nodded. “True. Trust me though, I could add enough ‘Mechs to the roster to bring us to full strength plus battalion command lances and a regimental command company and we still wouldn’t be close to hurting for qualified mechwarriors. Why? Do you know of a tree that ‘Mechs grow on?”
“No… but I might know a hole where some are buried.” Max rubbed at his eyes. He could remember words well enough, but images were harder - and right now he needed a map. “Do you have a map of the old Terran Hegemony around?”
“It’s not the kind of thing I keep on my desk but I can probably get one.” Frederick stood up and walked over. “Are you talking about a Star League cache?”
“No… I might be able find one of those but not conveniently nearby,” Max admitted. “But I think we’re within a jump or two of something a bit older. About sixty years from now, an expedition hired by… a Kurita? Ja, Uncle Chandy.”
“Chandy? Really?”
“Chandrasekhar Kurita - he’s just a boy right now, but he was one of the sharpest minds they produced this century. But anyway, they dug up a Terran Hegemony militia base on a world depopulated by the Mariks during the First Succession War. The militia itself had been destroyed twice over, first fighting Amaris and then the Mariks and their active equipment was gone. But there was a sealed boneyard dating back to just before the Star League, where they’d retired equipment that was considered too old to use.”
“But what the Star League considered obsolete might be comparable to what we can build today,” Frederick exclaimed. “That’s brilliant!”
“I don’t know what the condition is,” warned Max. “This could be first generation ‘Mechs, even more primitive that what you’re used to - and it’s unlikely they’re ready for immediate use. But…”
“Better than no ‘Mechs at all!” the colonel exclaimed. “What world is this?”
“New Dallas.”
He watched as Frederick frowned and walked to a filing cabinet that Max didn’t have security clearance to open. “I don’t know it. Depopulated, you said?”
“Ja - the terraforming broke down and there was a nuclear bombardment. ComStar had some sort of outpost there at one point - digging out the dead cities was a punishment detail, I think. It’s hot in the literal sense, but I’m not sure how much radiation would be a problem after more than two centuries. “
“Not so much, depending on what was used. And, as you say, it was - would have been - explored sixty years from now?”
Max nodded. “It’s not something I’ve ever had to consider before.”
Frederick snorted. “But you can find it.”
“Again, I’ve never tried. If my information is correct, then perhaps. Maps and information about New Dallas would be useful, but how to get that without tipping people off that it’s of interest is new to us.”
“That’s easy enough.” Frederick opened a drawer and started thumbing through the folders inside. “Aha, here it is.” He removed one, locked the cabinet conscientiously and then brought the folder to his desk. “Raiding is within my authority and knowing uninhabited systems that can be used to hit worlds is useful for that. And if we might need to set down somewhere, it helps to know the options.”
Max pushed his chair back and stood, wincing as his legs reminded him of yesterday’s abuse. “Is it classified?”
“Somewhat. No one will know if I show you something from it… Here, New Dallas.”
Accepting the one sheet map, Max examined it. Yes, this looked familiar. Three continents, two connected by an isthmus, one of those with an inland sea at its heart. “This is the world I’m thinking of,” he confirmed. “Most of the major cities were here.” He tapped the lake, then moved his finger across the map. “And the militia base in question was here: Caddo City. The boneyard was an underground bunker - the entire city was subterranean at first, before the planet was fully terraformed.”
“A militia base should be easy enough to recognise. Military infrastructure is fairly recognisable.”
Max nodded. “I think the entrance was built over by… a barracks. And I don’t want to get you too excited, but the other major find in it was a Hegemony intelligence datacore. Specifically, one they used as a back-up for their files on foreign development on early BattleMechs. The data led to a number of companies redeveloping earlier designs that were within their reach. I don’t know if the core alone would be enough for that, but…”
“Why didn’t you mention this first?!”
“You’ve been a little busy setting up the basketball games and settling in,” the older man replied reasonably. “And mostly we’ve been talking about what you can expect in the next ten years or so - anything after that was subject to change.” 'And I’m not telling you about the Helm Cache until I have a better idea if I can trust you, Frederick. Getting me off Summer is fine, but I don’t think you’ve given up on replacing Katrina yet. That wouldn’t just invalidate my foreknowledge, it might leave someone like Aldo Lestrade pulling your strings. He’s not the only schemer around.