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Chapter 3 - Fortunes of War[]
Konstantinople, Konstance
The Draconis Combine
August 16, 3024
Kit swore, first under her breath, then out loud, not caring if her profanities escaped through the open hatch of the Commando’s cockpit for anyone to hear. Her coveralls were soaked with sweat, and the seat was particularly and unpleasantly damp from the Commando’s waterlogged command chair. While the 'Mech’s pilot lay dead in the canal below, its cockpit had been left open to the previous night’s downpour. Which, aside from soaking the pilot’s seat, threatened to make it impossible for the mercenaries of Task Force Talon to use the 'Mech to accomplish their objective on Konstance.
Like many other border worlds, Konstance had changed rulers multiple times during the centuries of conflict between the Inner Sphere’s five dynastic Great Houses known as the Succession Wars. Until just a few months prior, Konstance had been part of House Steiner’s Lyran Commonwealth. Though the Third Succession War had mostly devolved into low intensity raiding in the last few years as the armies of all the Great Houses had reached exhaustion, a few planets were still occasionally conquered by one faction or another - mostly relatively insignificant worlds like Konstance, attacked more for the prestige of conquest than for any strategic reason. When Draconis Combine forces had landed on Konstance in March 3024, the small Lyran garrison on the world had put up only token resistance before abandoning the world - except for the small covert force that Task Force Talon had been contracted by the Lyran government to find and, if possible, extract.
Someone in the Steiner high command, the mercenaries were told, was apparently suspicious that the Combine might have set its sights on Konstance for reasons beyond bragging rights. The “stay-behind” force was tasked with operating out of the world’s inhospitable interior - largely abandoned because of the catastrophic damage done to Konstance’s environment by industrialization - and collect intelligence on what the Combine might be doing on the world. If the Kurita forces were reinforcing Konstance’s defenses or building a supply depot to turn the world into a staging area for future offensives into Steiner space, the Lyran command wanted to be forewarned.
Task Force Talon had loaded into the DropShip Rochlitz, an old Union-class DropShip hired by their employers and entered the Konstance system at a “pirate” point on a tramp JumpShip much closer to the planet than the normal zenith and nadir points used by peaceful traffic. They had landed on the world’s interior continent of Tiburia under cover of one of the planet’s frequent tropical storms, the most white-knuckle descent of Kit’s life, but it seemed to have served its purpose of concealing their arrival from the token Combine garrison. Setting down just outside the abandoned former capital of Konstantinople, where they had been briefed that the Steiner covert team would be hiding, the Talons had begun broadcasting an encrypted radio signal on a particular frequency provided by their Lyran military liaison. The broadcast was supposed to signal the LCAF stay-behind team to come out of their bolthole for extraction.
For 24 hours, they had received no response. At the end of their first day on Konstance, the captain of Rochlitz had informed Commander Diana Toszka of the Talons that they had one more day to complete their mission. After that, he and his ship were lifting off with or without them. The Combine would not remain oblivious to their presence forever.
Commander Toszka had deployed her 'Mechs to begin searching the city systematically, block by block. Half the mercs’ second day on Konstance had elapsed before Keely and Sterns had, by pure chance, come upon the Commando and its dead pilot. The same storm that had concealed the Talons’ arrival from the Combine garrison force had probably concealed it from the Lyran MechWarrior, although why he had not heard or chosen not to respond to their rendezvous signal was anyone’s guess. In any case the Lyran warrior had apparently missed his ticket off the enemy-held world by a matter of hours.br>
Without another lead to follow, the Talons had hoped that the Commando’s onboard computer memory banks might contain intelligence data that would be useful enough to their Lyran employers to satisfy their contract. Unfortunately, as Kit was discovering, the exposure to the elements had made recovering any data from the Commando’s cockpit nearly impossible.
“It’s no good.” Kit called. “The displays in here are as drowned as the poor guy in the canal. None of them will power on.”
Her handheld radio crackled and Sterns’ voice came through. “So what are our options?”
“We could pull the memory banks, take them back to the ship and hook them up to a display there to see what’s on them.” Pascoe suggested from the MRV, which he had driven closer ready to haul the Commando away as salvage.
“And what if it’s not what we’re looking for?” Sterns countered. “If we go back to the ship and then have to go back out and keep looking… we’re running out of time.”
Kit considered for a moment. “There is one other thing I could try,” she said. “I could pull the memory, then put it in one of your 'Mechs and try to read it that way.” She climbed out of the Commando’s cockpit and clambered nimbly down to the ground. “Pascoe, can you get me the splice kit?”
The older tech rummaged in the cab of the MRV, then threw her a small canvas sack. Kit caught it, clipped it to the belt of her coverall, then climbed back up the Commando’s back to its cockpit. After several minutes of fiddling under the console which held the joystick for controlling the 'Mech’s right arm and once nearly electrocuting herself, she managed to extract the drive the 'Mech used for storing navigation maps and recording combat data - what MechWarriors commonly called the “gun camera” data. If the Lyran pilot had scouted out anything the Combine was doing on the world besides maintaining ordinary garrison outposts before his untimely demise, the six inch long, featureless gray box Kit now held in her hands was what would tell the tale. If it was still readable.
“Alright,” Kit said, stuffing the drive in one of her coverall pockets, “who wants to do the honors?” In response, Sterns dropped the Vindicator down onto one knee. Kit jogged over to it while Pascoe maneuvered the MRV into position to hook the Commando onto the rig’s winch.
Kit clambered nimbly up the Vindicator’s leg and chest. A hatch in the side of the 'Mech’s neckless, helmet-like head popped open as she pulled herself onto its shoulder. She looked through the open hatch and held out the drive. “Swap this in for the memory bank you’ve got.”
Sterns turned to look at her as best he could inside his bulky MechWarrior’s neurohelmet. “What? Where do I…?”
Kit rolled her eyes. Another 'Mech jock who knows nothing about how his ride works. “On the Vindy it should actually be under the center console, almost between the foot pedals.”
Sterns flipped switches on either side wall of the cockpit, locking the Vindicator’s legs in place to ensure it wouldn’t topple with the the stabilizing guidance of his own equilibrium, then lifted the neurohelmet off his head and shoulders, revealing disheveled sandy brown hair and his heat-flushed, stubbled face. He twisted in his seat to set the neurohelmet on a set of hooks on the rear bulkhead of the cockpit, unfastened the safety harness that held him in his seat, took the drive from Kit’s outstretched hand, then bent forward at the waist and peered down towards the cockpit floor for several moments. “What exactly am I supposed to be looking for here?”
“Oh, herregud, just let me do it,” Kit said. Sterns turned and regarded her quizzically. “Get out already, I’m not sitting on your lap.” Sterns opened his mouth as if to reply, then thought better of it. Handing the memory bank back to her, he squeezed out of the hatch, then climbed over the domed top of the Vindicator’s head onto its other shoulder while Kit shimmied down into the cockpit.
Kit busied herself underneath the center cockpit console, cursing in three languages at the House Liao engineers who had chosen to position the slot for the memory bank in such a cramped and inconvenient place. They had apparently not envisioned this kind of swap being carried out without removing the command chair.
Outside she could hear the whine of the MRV’s winch as Pascoe hooked up the Commando. Kit raised her head to look through the Vindicator’s visor-like cockpit viewport. The Commando lay supine on the MRV’s flatbed deck like a cadaver on a slab. Pascoe stood by the rig’s cab. His voice came through the handheld laying on the Vindicator’s command couch: “I’m going to go ahead and haul this beauty to the DropShip.”
Kit picked up the radio and mopped her brow with her sleeve. “And how am I going to get back when I’m done here?”
“I’ll head back for you as soon as I’ve got the Commando safely secured,” Pascoe said. Kit sighed, flashed Pascoe a thumbs up through the viewport, then went back to work. She heard the MRV rumble off, then for several more minutes there was silence again except for the sound of her own whispered profanities.
Sterns’ voice came through the hatch once more. “Any idea how much longer this is going to take? I’m baking up here.”
Kit refused to be distracted from her task. “I’m splicing a different connector, yours and the one from the Commando aren’t compatible.”
The handheld crackled to life again. “Hey Sterns,” Keely said. “I’m picking up some weird magres readings.”
Sterns stretched through the hatch and grabbed the handheld off the seat. “What kind of weird?” he asked. “What about seismic?”
Kit heard the two MechWarriors’ exchange as if they were far away as she completed splicing the last wire. Finished! Above her Sterns looked down through the hatch, his face framed by the pollution-hazed desert sky. “Hey Söderlund, I need my seat back, we may have company.”
Kit looked up at him. “It will only take me a minute to see if the memory’s readable. This is the moment of truth.”
Sterns shook his head. “Then take a minute later, we-...”
The rest of his sentence was drowned out by the roar of missile exhaust and a cacophony of alarms inside the Vindicator’s cockpit. Sterns’ face disappeared from the hatch opening. Peering out of the 'Mech’s viewport, Kit saw Keely’s Hermes II staggering backwards, wreathed in smoke and flame.