Guided by the light of a (Red) Cameron Star
- Chapter 65 -[]
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"If regular LRMs are sometimes practically, 'To whom it may concern' in a big confused firefight when everyone is running around like crazy and shooting in all directions, one advantage of Semi-Guided LRMs is that they maintain their '****** that guy in particular' capability, even if he's doing a hundred kph and using his jumpjets. Watching a salvo of the things all simultaneously bank in mid air like a flock of birds because the mech they were fired at has relocated since they were launched is just downright spooky at first, but it sure is satisfying watching them go on to hit a moving target, assuming that you're not the target."
Col. Jimmy McEvedy-Jones, Marching through Lesnovo, Niops Free Press, 2905
Burying the dead, Lessons Learned[]
Capital City – Niops Association (Niops VII) – 2845
"Nah, to be honest I think she was happy at the prospect of not having me underfoot at home all the time" Franklin Hallis replied to Admiral Bremman's query as to whether his wife was annoyed at him returning from his post-deployment extended leave a few days earlier than planned. "When I first got back I was a novelty, but I guess she got used to not having me around all that time getting in the way" he added, grinning.
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Niops VII
"What did your kids think about it?" Brigadier-General Nellis asked.
"Pretty much the same, really happy to have me back at first but eventually I was the guy sitting on the couch in front of the holovid watching the news and stopping Judith playing her video games on it instead" Hallis told him. "I think I mostly just confused Zach by being around, he wasn't really very old when I set off and he's an actual kid now. I'm just grateful that Barb made sure to show him my picture regularly, as well as one of me and Frederick together, because otherwise he'd have been really bewildered when we walked in the door together."
"Yeah, in a few more years you'll look like identical twins" Bremman replied. "And eventually I guess he'll look like your father."
Hallis sighed. "Not looking forward to that, maybe outliving him I mean" he admitted. "Though I'm kinda hoping he loses his hair first because that would be hilarious" he added, grinning again. "My dad lost his so it's definitely on the cards."
General Romanov looked up from her noteputer. "Honestly, I thought you'd spend your entire leave in the sack making up for lost time with the missus" she told him, deadpan. "All those months in space not doing enough exercise wreck your cardiovascular fitness did it?"
Hallis thought up a few replies and eventually went for the one that would bite back the hardest. "Maybe I'm just getting old" he responded as Bremman and Nellis tried not to laugh.
"You're not old, I'm old enough to be your ****** mom" Romanov replied indignantly. It wasn't like he was one of those mayflies that were lucky to reach a hundred, Hallis had received the same gene-therapy as a kid as she had, though admittedly decades later.
"Those two statements are not actually mutually exclusive, Ma'am." Hallis replied sweetly.
Jenna Romanov narrowed her eyes at him. "I didn't miss you either." she said eventually, lousy kids got no respect, she thought to herself bitterly. "Anyhow, welcome back to work and don't go thinking that being away so long beating up on the Von Strang's and brutalizing some pirates means that I'm going to cut you any slack. I expect you to be back up to speed with everything going on as of yesterday and if you can't hit the ground running then I'm going to want to know the reason why."
"Yep, it's damn good to be back alright." Hallis remarked, smiling at his commanding officer.
Thanks to HPG communication the news of the success of the operation had gotten back to Niops months ahead of the 'returning heroes', as local media called them, although of course some of the news that made its way back hadn't been good for everyone. Casualties overall had been light, in particular the number of SLDF troops killed in action had been minimal and close to the figure predicted by the most optimistic projections, but minimal did not mean zero and to her credit General Romanov had visited the families of each soldier that had died to deliver the bad news personally when the notification Hallis had dispatched from the Apollo HPG arrived.
Bringing back the honored dead for burial on Niops VII, Franklin Hallis had then joined Romanov in attending each funeral as they were laid to rest, offering what words of comfort he could as the families of the bereaved were told of their bravery and loyal service. As ever, the words rang hollow to some, although his mention that the DNA of the fallen would get a chance to live on in future generations of Ironborn was usually welcomed by those of the Wolverine persuasion to whom he was still the Khan who had delivered them from bondage and genocide, 'Mechwarrior Moses' as Barbara sometimes called him wryly.
Hallis himself was more self-effacing than that always pointing out that he was only really following the instructions left to him by Khan McEvedy who was the one that really deserved the credit.
As for the funerals, making sure the honored dead were all deep in the ground before the victory parade the government wanted to hold took place was only right, even if the families had already had months by this point to adjust to the loss and mourn their loved one.
The parade through the capital past cheering crowds had been considerably more ostentatious and showier than Hallis would have liked, and the part towards the end where captured Rim Worlds Republic and Amaris Empire flags were thrown on the ground in front of him to walk across as he approached the High Associator to hand him the signed document of Karl Von Strang's surrender had seemed faintly ridiculous. At least Trish had fun repeatedly whispering 'Remember, Khan, thou art mortal' in his ear at every opportunity until he threatened to dismiss her as saKhan and give the job to Jax Benedict.
Benedict himself seemed to enjoy his own part in the parade, leading the contingent who had boarded the shipyard at Star's End and getting to field questions from the press afterwards. Showing off the big scar on his right arm where some pirate on the station had slashed him with a machete, the colonel wasn't really the greatest natural storyteller, but the brief firefight followed by some brutal hand-to-hand against some recalcitrant buccaneers unwilling to hand over some specialist equipment had raised his profile nicely.
Hallis had warned Benedict not to describe in as a graphic detail to the journalists as he had in his written report on the incident on what precisely happened to the head of the pirate that attacked him with the machete after he put the muzzle of his automatic combat-shotgun against it and pulled the trigger, but the sanitized version was still pretty gruesome. Not that pirate-slaver scum were going to elicit much sympathy for getting their skull and brains splattered all over a bulkhead.
Frankly they should have realized that the SLDF people were looking for an excuse to kill them and not given them a good one. Fortunately, or unfortunately, the vast majority of the Belt Pirates of Star's End knew when to pick their battles and meekly stood aside while Benedict got on with his work. In the end the biggest headache proved to be logistical, handling the seventeen thousand or so slaves liberated from the system and getting them to Icar along with their meager possessions took a lot longer than 'requisitioning' a few hundred tons of valuable shipyard equipment did.
None of the loot from Star's End, not that calling it 'loot' was encouraged, would be needed for the pressurized shipyard under construction, Camelot Command having provided everything needed for that, but some of the equipment might find its way into the second yard planned for later, the one that would be primarily geared towards civilian jumpship production.
The warship yard itself, tentatively being referred to as the Arsenale Nuovo because flaunting the depth of your education on Niops was the done thing even if it happened to be in the humanities not the sciences, was bigger and nonetheless paradoxically much smaller than Camelot Command had been. Bigger in the sense that, unlike the one at Camelot, the pressurized yard itself was large enough to fit any of the ships in the fleet inside, but smaller in that they didn't need to stuff the yard inside an asteroid also large enough to also hold a complete fleet base as well.
The asteroid holding the Arsenale Nuovo wouldn't rotate to create artificial gravity either, but in a system compact enough that you could just catch a DropShip back to Niops VII for the weekend dealing with the long-term effects of freefall on the human body was much less of an issue for the personnel working there than it would have been at Camelot.
An ovoid metallic asteroid several kilometers across on the long axis, at least the material dug, or occasionally blasted out to make space for the yard wasn't wasted as it was hauled off to one of the orbital foundries to be turned into useful products. Some of the yard itself was actually made of iron torn out of its heart and turned into steel pressure bulkheads, although a lot of the metal had been imported from the Illyrian Palatinate years before, back in the days when Niops was still in the process of expanding its own industries and the shipyard's construction hadn't been delayed yet.
Talking of metal, the head of the bronze statue of Stefan Amaris that was torn down and cut into pieces for hauling back to Niops now rested on a plinth in the city museum. The rest of the thing was intended to be melted down piece by piece to make medals from as required, a final act of the SLDF counting coup over the bastard.
Jenna Romanov checked the time. "Okay I'll start with the latest update coming out of the Skunkworks" she said, looking briefly down at her noteputer again. "They say it'll be a miracle if they can get Project Hittile to the stage that we'll have a production model of the new Starfire-based Follow-the-Leader LRM coming off the assembly lines within twenty years" she announced. "Even after they figure it out completely in technical terms we'll need to create a whole new sector of the electronics industry almost entirely from scratch to make the required microchips"
"Damn." Nellis responded glumly. "I can't say I really expected them to get it to work but I was certainly hoping" he said. "Did they provide an explanation dumbed down enough for me to understand what the problem is exactly?"
"Something to do with the chips in the Starfire using copper instead of aluminum somehow" Romanov replied. "If you really want to know the details you'll have to talk to one of the engineers, but from what I can make out it allows you to make them a lot smaller. The problem is we've only got the Starfires themselves, not the machinery used to make them, so we're starting from scratch having to invent, or rather reinvent, a whole new manufacturing process in order to replicate the wretched things."
"Sounds like it could end up an expensive boondoggle of a project to me then." Bremman observed. "Should we really be pouring funds into it that could be better employed elsewhere?"
"If by 'we' you mean the military then no, we can get a better bang for our buck much faster putting our money into other things, but in the broader sense these new chips could completely revolutionize computing" Romanov told him. "It might have been hyperbole, but the engineer I talked to was talking about a computer with the processing power of a Caspar AI that could fit on your desk" she continued. "If the civilian government want to put in the funds needed to develop that kind of technology themselves then I say good luck to them. I do fancy the idea of having a noteputer with enough processing horsepower to run a 3D battlemech simulator" she joked before becoming serious again. "It's not all bad news from the rocketeers at the Skunk Works though, they think they can provide us with something useful before you infants have to retire from the service, maybe even before I do."
"They got the new model Arrow IV to work?" Hallis asked hopefully, the current Star League era version had done sterling work on Von Strang's World and he knew they were working hard on a longer-ranged version when he set out the previous year. Dan Hammerick, long a proponent of bringing 'even more arty to the party', unsurprising given that he was a gunner, argued that the best bang for your buck for the SLDF in terms of new equipment would be setting up a production line for more Vali launched vehicles rather than tanks or mechs and the man's argument certainly held up to scrutiny. Even if the new model Arrow IV launchers and missiles might be too high-tech, not to mention too secret, to produce outside of Niops the vehicles themselves could be made on Alphard where labour was cheaper, or maybe even on Comstock which was also trying to develop its industrial sector.
If they did start producing new Vali launch vehicles there was one change to the original design of the vehicle itself that Hammerick strongly recommended, one that most everyone would agree with. The Vali was too damn slow, too slow to keep up with the Thor SPGs it usually operated with, although that could be readily solved by swapping out its ICE powerplant for a more powerful fuel-cell engine. That would raise the manufacturing cost per unit, but it would be well worth it in terms of capability and still be a lot cheaper than blowing the budget on fusion engines for everything.
A fuel-cell powered Vali chassis that fast with its all-terrain eight-wheel-drive might make a good basis for a useful future APC or even AIFV too, and if you could argue simplified logistics and cost-savings from long production runs it was easier to get the bean-counters at the treasury to sign off on spending.
"Well yes, but that's not what I meant, although it is related to that" Romanov responded confusingly. "Most of their efforts towards getting more range was based around lighter alloys and replacing the original rocket motors with ones based on those of the Improved SRM, but they also looked into making the guidance system lighter at the same time, even saving a few kilograms would help, but while messing about with the seeker head they realized they could make a smaller, less capable but still functional budget version they could stuff into an LRM."
Hallis raised his eyebrows. "TAG LRMs?" he said in surprise.
"Not exactly the fire-and-forget missiles of our dreams, but if you illuminate the target they'd kamikaze themselves straight into whatever was being painted like a swarm of mini Arrow IV's" Romanov told him. "Should work just as well on moving targets as stationary ones, just as long as you keep the TAG focused on the target anyway, but the real party piece would be having someone else paint the enemy mech while you indirect-fired the things from behind cover. They want to call them 'Semi-Guided' LRMs to differentiate then from a future Starfire-enhanced Follow-The-Leader system which would be actual self-guided munitions."
"Did anyone else already call that 'Tactical TAG Teaming' because if not I want credit" Nellis said quickly.
Hallis blinked. "A Dervish using those things would be a freaking nightmare if you paired it up with another mech, say a Wolverine II, mounting a TAG" he declared, running scenarios in his head. "Use the jump-jets to exploit cover and you could make the lives of enemy scouts relying on their speed utterly miserable for a start."
"Why a Wolverine II in particular?"
"It's a command mech with the same top speed and jump range as the Dervish so they'd operate well together as a team, and also my mind just automatically defaults to Wolverine." Hallis admitted with a chuckle, only half-in-jest. "More seriously, we were already looking to upgrading the ones we had, and with the replacement weapons and armor being lighter and more compact we'll easily find the mass and internal space to fit a TAG in there too."
"It's certainly a thought, although the team looking into it was thinking more in terms of it being a Winged Hussar doing the tagging for the Semi-Guided LRMs, like they will for the Arrow IV's, but having a medium lance able to TAG for itself would certainly be useful" Romanov concurred. "On that topic, the next generation Guardian and Beagle needed for the HSR-265 model aren't proving as tricky to develop as they feared it might be last year. Reducing the weight of both by half-a-ton or so does now look feasible so we won't have to sacrifice any current capability from the Winged Hussar to hang a TAG module on there as well."
"That's good." Hallis replied. "I'd hate to have to lose either the flamer or the machine-guns, the older HSR-250s we used against Von Strang did good work. A first-rate scout mech that can also deal with infantry as well is a real boon, the original Hussar was too much of a one-trick pony."
"The ones you unloaded on the militia once you got something better you mean." Nellis wryly observed.
Preparing for future outcomes to come[]
Romanov laughed. "You've got to be the only planetary militia in the galaxy that actually complains when someone hands them a bunch of SLDF Royals."
"Upgraded Royals, no less." Hallis concurred. "Second generation ER Large Lasers and more armour."
"Spoiled is what he is." Bremman piled in, grinning.
Nellis sighed. "All I'm saying is that you guys are getting your Super-Hussars, and awesome new missiles, and whatever, and all I get is your cast offs" he complained.
"The cast offs that make the Niops Association Militia the second-best equipped military this side of clan space you mean?" Romanov asked rhetorically.
"Tell you what, how about when you've finished re-fitting the next Stingray squadron that arrives from Westover you slide a few of your old Eagle heavies my way" Nellis suggested. "I know you're thinking about mothballing them because they're not great in atmo and you're all about air-support for ground troops."
"Not all of us," Bremman objected. "The fleet can always find a job for them in space."
"Only if you can get the pilots, you've already got more airframes than you have bodies to stick in the cockpit" Nellis pointed out. "By the time the Tax Break generation is available to recruit from you'll have F-90s coming out of your ears, even if Andurien Aerotech isn't exactly fulfilling delivery contracts as fast as you wanted."
"Eh, give the baby his bottle even if doesn't really need another feed." Hallis joked earning a nasty look from Nellis. Giving the other branches shit was a time-honored tradition but that didn't mean it was always well received. For that matter if it was always taken in good humor it wouldn't be nearly as much fun.
"I'll remind you that there were some of my people with you fighting Von Strang, Franklin." Nellis noted, tone indicating he was being deadly serious right now. "Just like there were a few that fought alongside the SLDF on Algenib." he continued, now looking to Romanov who had commanded that earlier operation when they put the Blood Rain down. "NAM isn't a part-time pretend military like some planets have, that's why the Association survived perfectly well before you people turned up, pirates that jumped in never got to jump out again to tell anyone about us."
"Okay, Craig, you've made your point." Hallis responded, holding up his hands. "For what it's worth Carmichael and your boys and girls with him acquitted themselves damn well considering he was the only one of them that had done it before for real, and that wasn't as a commanding officer" he continued, trying to placate the man. "Bolton and Tyson both said it was a tough fight at the end when Von Strang's regulars entered the fray and mentioned the NAM company doing good work as part of that in their after-action reports. Since they've both fought on the front lines when the Dracs and the FedSuns are throwing everything they have at each other I figure they've been in the shit enough to be a good judge of soldiering, so nobody is belittling your people, believe me."
Nellis crossed his arms and leaned back in his chair. "Just keep in mind that one day you might find it useful for the NAM to safely handle the defence of this system without any help" he suggested. "Eventually you'll have enough troops to use all your equipment, and the starlift available to move them, and being able to do so when you need to because my people have your backs will be a comfort."
"Yeah, I guess, but I'm not sure when that'll be because who knows when Jacob there's going to get all the dropships he wants" Hallis responded before turning to the man himself. "Incidentally the mercs were all impressed with the CargoMaster, Johnson even asked if it might be possible to buy one or two of them from us, I told him our licensing agreement with Federated-Boeing said we couldn't sell to anyone else but he might try and see if we'll bend the rules."
"If it wasn't for those ****** telescopes I'd have another couple of them already plus even more of the CargoKing in service" Bremman complained. "I've run some numbers and you'd be amazed how much time and money they'll save us in running costs in the long term based on how well the first batch are doing running cargo from here to Alphard and back. Just the salaries saved by needing fewer dockworkers at either end is significant, not to mention the robots aren't unionised and don't object to working in the middle of the night if the ship happens to land when most people are asleep."
"Don't know about all that, but the CargoMaster was damn good at unloading ammo and supplies I'll say that" Hallis replied. "You can practically reverse an empty Vali up to the loading ramp and get the robots to re-fill the magazines for you as long as the guy holding the remote control isn't a complete klutz. I actually was going to run an idea past the Skunk Works if they could maybe give them full LoaderMech functionality."
"What, so when you run out of ammo in your Archer or whatever just run to the nearest CargoMaster and it'll top you up automatically?" Romanov asked, intrigued.
Hallis nodded. "Could be useful" he replied. "I mean you wouldn't usually have your dropships that close to the action but sometimes, when it all hits the fan and you're pinned down near the LZ, speeding up the turnaround of getting a mech that's run dry back into the fight could turn the tide" he suggested. "Ammo loadermechs like the Patron were basically invented to do the same thing, a mech not actually in the fight because it's stood idle waiting for a forklift to bring it a crate of LRM's isn't contributing. You don't always have a spare J-27 around to help you out."
"The other thing that works for you there is that the CargoMaster has a hell of a lot more firepower than your average cargo-hauler and thinking about it now I'm wondering if we could maybe add a few tons of those new Semi-Guided LRMs to her ammunition loadout as well as that of the new Grant when we get them" Bremman suggested. "Mount a TAG or two as well so they can paint targets for themselves if necessary."
"No matter what they cost to fire off those Semi-Guided LRMs have got to be a bargain compared to having a dropship shot up." Hallis agreed. "How goes it with the Grant anyway?"
"The design is finalised, it's basically just a slightly upgraded Lee with the Arrow IV launchers fully integrated unlike on the one we kludged together for your command dropship, but we need cargo haulers more, especially civilian ones, so the CargoKing takes precedence for production. Not that we're turning them out as fast as we could, or should. ****** telescopes" he muttered darkly again.
"I swear Jacob, when Murray first ordered those put into production you looked like you were about this close to pulling a James McKenna, placing a battleship in orbit and blowing up islands until he changed his mind" Romanov said, laughing. Holding her thumb and index finger about a centimetre apart.
"It's a good job for all of you that making myself Director-General at gunpoint would involve dealing with so much politics I know I'd hate it, even if I got to make as many dropships and warships as I wanted" Bremman replied, shaking his head sadly. "Looks like even when the shipyard is finished I'll have to delay re-fitting Michigan, I already knew we've put so many miles on the three Tramps putting them through a full overhaul was necessary, along with a couple of the Star Lords, but now we've got a Monolith with a K-F drive that's starting to act glitchy as well. It's a good thing you brought back that extra Invader with you Franklin or we'd have to start thinking about not planting a flag on Addhara in the next couple of years even if it looks like it's mineral rich."
The part that really grated on Bremman was that according to the opinion polls High Associator Murray was nearly certain to be re-elected in the upcoming ballot. Incumbent advantage, along with minimal unemployment, rising wages and the feel-good factor of giving Karl Von Strang and his Amaris-loyalist lackeys a shellacking made it almost guaranteed that resources would continue to be directed towards scientific projects not the military.
"I thought having the repair bays on the Olympus stations running was going to solve our transportation issues?" Nellis queried.
Bremman shook his head. "Even though we made sure to build them with bays large enough to cope with an Invader, so we can keep those running easily enough, we've become reliant on the larger jumpships to be able to cope with the sheer level of demand for moving people and cargo. We're basically a victim of our own success, immigration and economic growth are so high I'm having to go ahead with that idea of bringing that old Leviathan back into service to run cargo between here and Alphard so I can free up the ships we've currently got on that route to running out of Islington and Kepler instead. The K-F drive on the Leviathan looks functional enough according to the engineers I had take a look at her, but I'm still going to want to jump her from the Zenith to the Nadir a couple of times with a skeleton crew aboard to make sure before we put her to work."
"Kepler you said? Why? I thought we were years away from beginning to tap all that oil"
"Light industry taking off on Copernicus is massively increasing demand for specialty plastics that we're currently having to import from the Free Worlds League, so because of that the Department for Trade and Industry is pushing for domestic production instead" Bremman explained. "That means they're up my ass to provide the shipping needed to build and operate a petrochemical industry on Kepler. They're already trying to recruit some drilling and refining experts from Tamarind hoping that they find some willing to emigrate."
"Tamarind?"
"Nine jumps from here in the Free Worlds League, industrialised world with substantial oil deposits under the deserts there, although most of the planet isn't nearly as arid as Kepler so the population is in the billions and the economy is diversified, not just resource extraction" Bremman replied. "To be honest I'd only heard of the place myself because there's also a shipyard there that produces Invader jumpships."
Romanov looked at them all askance. "Philistines" she berated them. "Some of the best artists in the whole Inner Sphere live on Tamarind, or at least they used to back in the good old days."
"I don't know much about art Ma'am" Hallis told her. "Not even to the point I know what I like. When it comes to décor and such mostly my wife handles that sort of thing."
"Way I heard it, you've had someone else handling your thing recently" Nellis responded, smirking.
"Grow up Craig" Bremman told him.
"Jesus Christ!" Hallis exclaimed. "How far did that stupid rumour spread?" he asked rhetorically. "For the record, just because that girl threw herself at me, and I use the word 'girl' accurately because she's barely into her twenties and young enough to be my granddaughter, it doesn't mean that I…"
"Caught her?" Romanov interjected, chuckling.
"She just got the wrong end of the stick is all" Hallis tried to explain. "It was suggested that she wouldn't be safe on Erin, or Paran, or even in the Lyran Commonwealth because people with a beef with Karl Von Strang might try and seek revenge on his mistress, in lieu of him or his actual family not being available, so I offered to transport her and her own immediate family back here to settle on one of our colonies. For some reason she got it into her head that I wanted to celebrate beating Von Strang by taking his mistress for myself as a trophy."
"How did she get that idea?"
"I guess it's just the kind of stuff that happens out there." Hallis replied, shrugging. "The whole region is piracy and slavery central, counting coup on your enemy by taking his woman for your own is an actual thing. It's not like she had much choice in the matter when Von Strang decided to make her his mistress either" he continued, before suddenly grinning. "If it hadn't been so damn awkward it would have been funny, especially the time when she tried to look sultry and seductive while the ship was charging her drive a couple of jumps out from Erin. The girl had no experience with freefall so the pose she was striking just looked ridiculous. For one thing long hair might look great hanging down over a girl's shoulders but sticking out in all directions it makes them look more like a feather duster."
Part of the problem was that excessively long journeys like the one back to Niops were just monotonous, tedious and frankly boring as hell. There were only so many old movies you could watch to try and keep yourself entertained so people sought out some distracting gossip and intrigue wherever they could and would blow the story up out of all proportion just to liven things up a little. Karl Von Strang's gorgeous mistress making an obvious play for the CO, who was the Khan no less making it all even spicier for those of a Wolverine persuasion, was simply grist for the rumour mill.
In truth there was nothing to it whatsoever, which didn't mean that Hallis didn't tell his wife all about it as soon as he got home, mostly because he had to before Frederick made jokes about it in front of her. Fortunately, Barbara believed him, which didn't stop her using it against him later of course because if life gives you ammunition to use against your husband, why let it rot in the Brian cache?
"So, was she disappointed or relieved when you managed to get the message across you didn't have lascivious designs upon her?" Nellis wanted to know.
"Relieved, not that she necessarily believed me at first." Hallis replied. "I mean, she's a good-looking girl, Von Strang basically had his pick of the lower classes for a bed-mate, so she might have had the notion she was as hot as it gets and hence irresistible."
Bremman smiled. "As hot as it gets on a planet with the combined population of a not particularly large town you mean" he said. "It's like Helen of Troy, she might have been the most beautiful woman in all the Greek world circa 1300BC but in population terms that's like being the prettiest girl in any city in the Inner Sphere, as in Helen might have been able to make it as a famous supermodel these days but probably not."
"You've clearly spent far too much time thinking about that" Romanov told him.
"Yeah well, everyone's always about the Trojan Horse, and Achilles fighting Hector, but nobody thinks about the demographics, or the logistics and economics for that matter" Bremman replied. "Sending a fleet of a thousand ships is a hell of a complex and expensive undertaking, nobody is going to do that just to get back some chick no matter how hot she is, but when you see where Troy is on the map and realise that they controlled the sea-trade coming in and out of the Black Sea and would have been taking a cut of the profits the Greeks looking for a casus belli to stomp them makes a lot more sense. It's all about the Newtons, or rather the drachmae" he said before turning back to Hallis. "You know you wouldn't exactly be the only guy in his late sixties looking to get a girl in her early twenties in the sack, and most of them didn't get the anti-agathics as a kid so she was probably right to be suspicious" he told him. "So did the Baroness Von Strang think you had designs on her too?" he asked curiously.
"If she did she didn't let on, most of my dealings with the woman involved trying to get her to control her sister-in-law who spent most of the journey either trying to maim people or else vamping them" Hallis told them, grimacing.
Romanov chuckled again. "Vamping? Not literally I hope?"
"Metaphorically, in that the Von Strang's aren't really vampires, although she did bite, or attempt to bite, several people when she wasn't trying to seduce them." Hallis replied. "She frightened the life out of poor Dave Robertson. We're well rid of her and the rest of that family, how the heck did we get Humphreys to agree to take them in?"
"As a fellow aristocrat, the only one we've really got in the Hegemony, he felt that noblesse oblige applied" Romanov explained. "Allowing them to go into exile on Islington also gives him the opportunity to raise his profile, he's been looking for the chance to become more of a player on the interstellar scene recently. He Offered to use his family contacts within the Free Worlds League to further improve relations and arrange new trade deals, although given how tense things always are between the Duchy of Andurien and Atreus I'm not sure if being seen as aligned to House Humphreys does us many favours with the Marik's" she continued, frowning. "So what happened with the mistress anyway?" she asked, not being averse to some decent gossip herself.
"In the end I found a way to get her off the ship I was on, transferred her and her folks over to Colonel Bolton's instead" Hallis told her. "Turns out that before she caught Von Strang's eye she had a job grading diamonds so I sort of pushed her towards Sam Tyson who was riding with the Rangers."
"Because Tyson would be heading back to his regular job on Galileo and he knows a lot of people in the diamond business who might find her work" Romanov correctly surmised.
"Yeah, he knows a lot about diamonds himself actually, guess it's just something you pick on by osmosis on Galileo or something, he helped us sort through the loot we took from Von Strang" Hallis replied. "I know it was in my written report anyway, but just to reiterate the point Tyson and his people are good, really good, I know he only had the one lance with him, and probably brought his best, but honestly they're wasted guarding a hole in the ground" he opined. "Bolton's Rangers too, although they'll need some time to reconstitute themselves, I gave them pick of the salvage to make up for the mechs they lost but they lost some good mechwarriors too that'll need replacing."
"Didn't try to hire some of Von Strang's people?" Nellis asked.
"The Guard Division, Von Strang's professionals, were all hard-core Amaris supporters. Dan Bolton and his people wouldn't piss on them if they were on fire" Hallis responded flatly. "Despite the people he lost Bolton still said it was the best job he ever had, good guys against the bad guys, no shades of grey."
"One benefit from the mercenaries basing themselves out of the Hegemony in the long term is that they'll likely recruit from among our citizens" Romanov suggested. "There's plenty of youngsters out there that are looking for the chance to get their hands on a battlemech, or fly an aerospace fighter, but aren't eligible to join their planetary militia because they're not a third generation native. They'll still identify as being from the Niops Hegemony though, which will strengthen our cultural ties with the Troublemakers, Rangers and Blackhearts."
"As long as we're the only game in town for them to get ferro-fibrous and double-heat-sinks I think we can guarantee the mercs ain't going nowhere" Hallis stated confidently. "They might still take short-term contracts with other people, thanks to having the best gear of any mercenary regiments in the Inner Sphere they'll be in high demand, but they'll soon start thinking of the Hegemony as home."
"They're SLDF, so the Niops Hegemony is their home." Romanov declared with conviction. "The last bastion of civilisation and freedom."
"And less radioactive than a lot of the original Hegemony." Nellis quipped. "You know, I won't be around to see it, maybe even Franklin won't even though he'll likely outlive the rest of us, but one day Niops is going to start thinking that we can throw ComStar out on its ass, raise the Cameron star over Terra and push the Great Houses back to their original borders."
"Only if we stop making telescopes and start making warships." Bremman muttered.
"Your point, Craig?" Romanov asked, ignoring the admiral.
"My point being that we'd better make sure that future generations don't start thinking that past performance is a guarantee of future outcomes, because if we ever tangle with one of the Successor States it won't be like beating up on Karl Von Strang" Nellis observed. "We can whup them a hundred times, just like they've been whupping themselves for decade after decade, and they'll still be there because they've got the manpower reserves to take the losses."
"Quantity has a quality all its own." Hallis agreed, nodding. "I can see Craig's point, you learn more from failure than success and pride comes before a fall, as they say."
Romanov thought about that. "So how exactly do you propose we mitigate against hubris?" she asked, mostly rhetorically.
"Dunno, get the Skunk Works to develop a Hubris Jammer? Conceit Countermeasures?" Nellis suggested, tongue firmly in cheek. "Hell, I'd wager they'd have a prototype working before we get the Starfire Mark 2500 into production" he joked.
"No bet, you'll be in the ground before I could collect" Hallis replied. "Although compared to developing a new fusion engine from the Steiner Stadium on Solaris a 'Hubris Jammer' doesn't seem that outlandish" he added, laughing.
"Oh yeah, right, you missed that while you were gone, Nathan Jones went through Farnstrom's notes and checked the math, he concluded that the thing might actually work" Romanov told him. "Engineering a working prototype is another matter though, and most of our people are far too busy on other projects right now to look into it, but apparently it's not nearly as nutty an idea as it sounds."
Franklin Hallis blinked and then stared at her looking for obvious signs she was yanking his chain. "You're shitting me?" he said eventually.
Chapter Notes[]
- Notes from the Author
- In canon Semi-Guided LRMs were developed by the Free Worlds League in the 3050s but they're a technology that the Clans could have likely developed themselves far, far earlier and might have if they didn't have the stench of artillery about them (even after they came out the Clans didn't copy them). Utilizing a TAG system like the Arrow IV, the Semi-Guided LRM locks onto a target that someone has painted (not necessarily the machine that launches them) and isn't nearly as likely to miss a moving target (they're a lot more expensive than regular LRM's though). Given that Niops is fond of the Arrow IV, and isn't following the same techical development path as the Clans, they're getting them two hundred years earlier than in canon.
Much like the Semi-Guided LRM the Light Fusion Engine could have been developed long before it actually was.
Battletech is often referred to as 'The future of the 1980s' and that is certainly true of microelectronics where twenty-first century and later computing lags behind our own timeline in terms of minaturisation. They eventually ended up with some very fast optical computers (hence AIs like the Caspars) but not small, really compact ones (the noteputer isn't even as good as our own Smart Phones). Now, I'm certainly not the first person to use this fanon explanation, but if they never made the transition to Copper Interconnects in chip design in the 1990s that might explain it somewhat. The Starfire Mark 2500 Headhunter using a revolutionary new kind of chip design that the Star League came up with in its final days (this being based on using copper instead of aluminum interconnects) is all me though!
Islington is a barony, the only system in the Niops Hegemony to have an aristocracy of its own (although it's a constitutional monarchy with an elected government really running things). House Humphreys of Islington is a cadet branch of House Humphreys of Andurien, distant cousins of the Duke of Andurien in the Free Worlds League.