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New Dawn in the Sun's - Chapter 9[]
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Getting Dress down by Mother[]
GalaPort
Galatea, Lyran Commonwealth
March 12th, 3016
With Janet off to collect her new charges, a group of doctors who were playing at being a mercenary unit the First Prince wanted badly on his payroll, Harry had been left somewhat at loose ends. His original plan to continue on to Solaris with examples of the light and rotary autocannons in the hold of a civilian liner having been put on hold due to a message from home. He was supposed to keep his Icarus II as a demonstrator while sending everyone else back home and wait for a rep to back him up during his negotiations with the Lyran businessmen he was scheduled to meet. During the journey here his time had been taken up by repairing the damage that the mechs had taken in their brief combat debut. Mostly fixing armor plating, but he and the rest of the techs had a devil of a time getting the Shadow Hawks arms back on. The Kingston Legionnaires had been a bit too accurate with their PPC fire and had wrecked the joints as well as amputating the arms.
Despite his best efforts he had failed to click with any of the other mech jocks. He was regarded as too much the over educated New Avalon fuckhead for them to accept him, although he did get some respect for his skills in a mech. Helping out with the techs hadn't done a damn thing to correct the other pilots first impressions of him, or help him clean up after his spectacular screw up in front of the First Prince. The other pilots might be regarded as march militia scum by others, but they held to their oaths all the harder because of that scorn. Harry had committed a cardinal sin in their eyes, performing less majesty, and even if they agreed with his opinion, they couldn't be seen agreeing with him because of that.
Harry had been grateful for the work that the techs had provided him, it kept him from stewing on his mistakes, and worrying about just who his father had dispatched to be his minder. He wasn't looking forward to that, especially the tongue lashing he was sure was coming. His parents, and their business partners, had trusted him enough to assign him a point position in the upcoming negotiations and he had thrown that trust away in a drunken fit. With the 'mechs work gone he had gone looking for more work to distract himself, thus neatly explaining what he was doing sitting on the shoulders of his Icarus II after having repainted the head again. Fortunately, his small staff had found a working bay to store the 'mech in while they all waited, mostly Harry thought to get him out of their hair.
"Moping again? I swear you boys. I didn't have nearly as much trouble with the girls." Brenda Brockton said from behind Harry, making him start.
"Mom!" Harry couldn't help the plaintive note which entered his voice as he kept himself from slipping off his perch and plunging to the unforgiving ferrocrete many meters below.
"Still seeking out high points to mope at I see."
"I was fixing the paint job." Harry tried to retain some of his dignity. He was well aware that it was a futile effort, but he tried anyway. Surprisingly his mother joined him at his perch, rather than pulling him back into the inactive bay.
"A good use of your time, I guess. Still, things have gotten complicated." Harry noted that his mother was frowning.
"Beyond my screw up on New Avalon?", he asked
"Well beyond that." Harry noted just how his mother's nose tightened in annoyance. "You damn near derailed Clara's husbands' career with that stunt, Harry. What were you thinking! I know I taught you better than that."
"It was supposed to be a low-key mixer, no higher nobility involved. So I thought I could relax for a bit…" Harry admitted. "We had just finished the first of the test runs, and turned over the prototypes to the AFFS evaluators. Nothing was announced yet so there was no reason for the First Prince to be there, I'd pulled security for dozens of those types of mixers and none of the upper-level nobles ever attended."
"Most of your service was under Ian, who hardly ever was on New Avalon. Hanse is a very different man, much more hands on politically, but I suppose I can understand what you were thinking. Still, try to keep your head about in the future? For me at least." Brenda found that Harry's explanation was actually understandable. He had evaluated the situation based on his past experience like she had taught him and come to a conclusion. It had been incorrect, but there had actually been some thought to his actions. Letting off some steam in a lower pressure environment before he headed to a place where he would need to be on his guard twenty-four eight was understandable. "Still things are worse than you know."
"Alright, hit me with it." Harry frowned at the nerves his unflappable mother was displaying.
"There are questions being asked back home about when you are going to settle down and get married." Brenda put it bluntly. "Between Hanse Davion's mourning, and your complete failure to date while you were off with the Guards…"
"That's not completely accurate." Harry started to object.
"Did you bring anyone home? No? Then you don't have room to talk. Your sisters at least would bring their current boyfriends home every now and again."
"Clara went to school on Brockton, and Mindy is a JumpShip captain with Brockton on her regular route." Harry's voice was defensive. "It's a little bit different from being stationed across the realm."
"It's the optics of it, Harry." Brenda couldn't help but sigh as she said that. "People are worried that you're going to remain a bachelor forever, like the First Prince, and then Hasek is going to put one of his cronies in charge."
"Why would they worry about that?" Harry asked in confusion. "Erics my heir, and even if something happens to him while he's in service Clara has a perfectly respectable husband."
"Your brother is a spoiled brat." Brenda said with a fair amount of venom in her voice. "He went out to party on Point Barrow and was pulled in by the local PB for a moral's violation. Then he refused the families help, but not our lawyer or money, in getting him out of his jam."
"Mina?" Harry asked mildly. The entire family was well aware of Eric's preferences, and for the most part didn't care. He was of their blood and they would love him anyway. The rest of the Inner Sphere? His proclivities could very well end up with Eric dead in a ditch beaten to death no matter what his social rank. Getting him cover so that he wasn't at risk of judicial murder on top of that would have been his mother's highest priority.
"Mina, an internship under Theresa, and a private home he could entertain who he liked in. Naturally Mina was a bridge too far for your brother, no matter how it would affect the rest of the family. Thank God your sisters are already married, although I suppose our wedding gift to Clara's husband didn't help the rumors."
"Mom, you and dad gave him an assault mech. Of course, people were going to talk."
"We needed to indicate our approval of the match," Brenda sniffed in disdain. "Some of the other Dukes were beginning to talk, not realizing that the young man was headed to New Avalon to take up a highly placed position in the ministry of agriculture. Who cared if he was a commoner. Did those cretins not realize just what a catch he was for your sister, and the rest of the family?"
"Assault 'Mech."
"Well yes, we also needed to get it out of the Garg's hanger before uncomfortable questions started being asked." Brenda shrugged lightly. "Strikers aren't the most well regarded, but Rogers second oldest was about to head off to Albion. If he didn't send her with it then questions would have been asked."
"Questions like why?"
"Exactly. We really don't want those questions asked, because the logical answer is exactly what we did." Brenda flashed a predatory smirk as she said that. "We're almost ready, but not yet. Anyway, while we mostly suppressed the news of the arrest… rumors got out, which is making our position weaker than is comfortable."
"I thought we had a relatively strong position? We certainly don't have any opposition at home, not real opposition at least. A few nutters who want a republic… but considering just how much time dad and you spend off world being business barons…"
"It's off world we need to worry about. Clara was supposed to be our in to the court, because your father almost has the pieces, he needs in place to finally get back at Corean. Unfortunately, while I agree with you about her husband, he didn't serve. That's disqualifying to the nobles who would be in charge of arbitrating the succession. Eric of course doesn't care about that, it's all about him at the moment."
"He's a teenager, give him time.", he told his Mother.
"Time is something we do not have." Brenda stated flatly. "Between our passing along of the MML system, and developing new types of autocannons, the crabs are already pulling on our legs. If that boy could just swallow his pride, send off a sample, and accept he was married on paper… we would have one less vulnerability. It's not like he would need to see the girl, it would just be a bit of paper."
"Not to mention it would let dad bank a favor with the Garg family when their famously sapphic inclined niece turned up married and pregnant." Harry agreed mildly.
"Right, which brings us to you and your shopping list. You knew about the MacEnroe Motors data we wanted, along with any machine tooling, from O'Leary…"
"Mountain Wolf is running deep in the red, I thought that an infusion of cash would be enough to get us what we want…"
"Was. Was running deep in the red. The Archon just dumped a shit ton of Kroner into their coffers. It was just announced today."
"They made the jump…" Harry couldn't help the reverence in his voice. For any company, or family, involved in the Militia Mech market the jump was the holy grail. Going from producing Militia Mechs to all up Battlemechs was often tried, but never succeeded, until now it seemed. "Shit. We're fucked, aren't we?"
"Not quite that bad… but almost. Defiance isn't going to be willing to help us, at least not with our tooling problems, but we might be able to get the plans for the Sentinel. They did shut down that line."
"We're about to let them revive it," Harry stated grimly. "They aren't going to want to let go of an exclusive. The Garg's have gotten that close?"
"They figured out how to modify Ajeet's plant to put out both types of engines, it runs slow but… they have production." Brenda confirmed. "What we don't have is a product that takes those engines."
"If you slow down the Striker…"
"NO." Brenda glanced over her shoulder to make damn sure that the hatch was still closed. "Starting out of the gate with an assault is just the sort of action which will have mercs showing up at all our plants. Assault mechs are prestige units, and having one be our first fully in house design would look like we're aiming for Corean. They would have to act before we were fully established."
"We do have some production on Brockton," Harry pointed out.
"Which everyone thinks is fueled by purchases in the Outworlds."
"Are people idiots? We've barely done any business with them since 2998 when they passed the heritability requirement for seeds into law." Harry scrunched up his brow in confusion. He had never understood just how the Alliance parliament had managed to get that law through. "Before then it made sense to ship our seeds out there and then take our local currency and convert it into engines… but without a product to ship."
"People see what they want to see, and we did it that way for a long time. We kept it up even after we managed to build our own engine and gyro tooling."
"Why don't we spin up those resources and put new lines in all of the factories?" That was something that Harry had never really understood. They could make the tooling, at least as far as he understood it, but they had refrained from putting it into their other factories off world.
"Several reasons, first the last time we did that the entire Tsamma plant was burned to the ground. The lines we built take five times the manpower to run one of our lines as it should. Then you get into our native electronics industry, which with machines we built can only fab chips with a five-to-ten-year lifespan in the quantities needed. Do you need me to go on?" Brenda very carefully didn't mention the engine plant Andrew was setting up on Basantapur, where they could take advantage of the existing electronics lines and trained manpower.
"So, we can sort of do it, but it would ruin our reputation and we'd be spending a lot of money for little gain."
"Exactly. If we can get examples of the tooling, we want…"
"Duplication?"
"That's the idea." Brenda pursed her lips and frowned as she tried to find a delicate way to tell her son. Finally, she gave up and just said it bluntly. "Between your brothers' antics, our precarious position socially, and the big moves that we want to make you're going to need to make a few sacrifices for the family. I know you wanted to find love, but the political realities don't give us the luxury of waiting. It isn't fair, I know, but we need you to do this."
"Positions of power and responsibility given to the nobility are contingent on the nobilities ability to make sacrifices commiserate with the power and responsibility they have been entrusted with." Harry repeated his mother's favorite truism. It was something she had drilled into her children, trying to make them understand her own position. Being the daughter of the Duke of Baxley, she had been sold to his father when she was just sixteen and his father had been pushing thirty. They had made a life together since then, but she never forgot her origins. The DeBrinion family hadn't had anything of value to offer the Brockton's, except for their daughter, while trying to save their world from a famine. That it had worked out only reinforced the truism Brenda had imparted on her children.
"I'm not happy about this, and neither is your father, but one way or the other you are coming home married to someone respectable. If the Doons family has a disreputable cousin…" Brenda trailed off and then shook her head. "Worst comes to worst after an heir is born, we can arraign something to let you get remarried."
"I understand." Harry couldn't help but close his eyes in frustration at the situation.
"Well, given where we are you will be glad to know you don't have to drive the demonstration unit all the time, I brought your mech with me. At the very least that should give you some respectability here in the Commonwealth, you know how they are about your 'mechs weight."