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Chapter 17 - Time Enough For A Cat
- With Fox-Like Tread -[]
The Talk with the Prince[]
Palace of the First Prince
New Avalon, Federated Suns
June 2th, 3027
My head was still throbbing, a week after the attack. It was an old, heady pain- the pain of brain surgery, of new prosthetics, and of sensory organs being integrated into my consciousness. Aside from stealing a little bit of Sofia's innocence, the raid on our safe house by NAIS had cost us no small amount of material. Three dead battle armor operators, a pile of ammunition, the trust of the Avalon City council, and most importantly the willingness of the First Prince to have us run about unescorted.
Also, as almost an afterthought, my right eye. Since Dr. Szeny still had her unhealthy tendencies to work on me when I was otherwise unable to consent, I'd had a cybernetic replacement slotted in almost as soon as my blood levels were up to the point where I didn't need to stay on a drip. Outfitted with thermal, magnetic, and laser range finding capabilities, there was also a variable zoom factor and an IFF system plus tie-in to my DNI systems. Currently, it was all bandaged up, and to be perfectly honest I expected to keep it under wraps most of the time. Since the eyepatch was see-through to the thermal mode, I could just leave it idling in that and then switch it over to standard vision later if I needed it.
None of this made me feel better about walking into the den of the dragon alone, though. This wasn't one of the meetings with Uncle Hanse, the Army Guy, this was a meeting with the First Prince to explain what the fuck had happened in his city, next to his school, in an event that probably killed some of his people. I expected the full wrath of the Federated Suns to be on the table here.
Instead, I walked into a small, secured lounge, before blinking both eyes. There, seated on the couch, was Mike Saint-Claire of all people. Now, as much as I'd dealt with the guy as Emma's on-again-off-again boyfriend/shonen rival, seeing him in high formalwear with the crest of the Suns on it was not what I expected here.
"Mike?" I asked, raising an eyebrow. "What are you- no, I must be in the wrong room."
"Meeting with the First Prince, ten forty-five?" he asked, raising an eyebrow.
"Yes."
"This is the correct room, then," Mike said calmly. "Seems I'm just the preshow, today."
"I'll admit, I'm not sure how a lieutenant in the Davion Heavy Guards counts as a 'preshow' for what's liable to be the dressing-down of the decade, but I'll take the company."
That earned a small chuckle, before Mike shifted. "How bad was it?"
"Bad. They sent an unknown number of-" I caught myself before I said 'Tornadoes' and corrected "-light suits at us. Sneaky bastards, but under-armored and under-gunned."
"That was a bad time, then. Taking on a transport full of powered armor."
Something about that twinged me as odd. "There were two. It was a company-level press, but we only bagged one of the birds. Both Karnovs, if I saw right."
"No, there'd have to have been only one of them," Mike said. "The one you shot down."
I pursed my lips. "I know what I was fighting. Two transports, we bagged one and the other got its troops off."
"It's not that I don't believe you," Mike said cautiously, "but Marshal Felsner put me on this specifically. I already looked at what ground radar we had, and it said one Karnov, shot down by ground fire."
"One missing air bogey, and too many secrets," I muttered. "Fucking hell."
"At least you're not the team trying to figure out how the mystery suit's armor works. They're tearing their hair out."
I weighed my odds carefully. If Mike had access to the NAIS teams working on that, well, my suspicions were growing he wasn't just a Lieutenant in the Davion Heavy Guards. Finally, I sighed. "I've seen it before, in a bunch of theoretical Star League papers. It was mech-scale, though; not this."
"Send 'em if you've got 'em," Mike muttered. "This has been a clusterfuck and a half."
"At least most of us made it out."
"Quite."
As one of the doors entered, I saw Mike stiffen up, before standing to salute. I followed suit, pivoting until I saw Hanse Davion in full regalia as my hand came to my brow. Unfortunately, the implant infrastructure was still too fresh- brushing it wrong could send spikes of feedback, and clipping it with my hand raised in salute sent a spike of pain strong enough to take me off my feet. As I clattered down into the chairs- earning yet more migraine-inducing pain- I grit my teeth and tried very hard not to cry out.
"Damnit man, don't kill yourself!" Mike said, rushing over to help me up.
"I have to agree. There's a time and a place for ceremony, and it's not when you're half-dead," Hanse added.
"Sir, I would happily go three rounds with simulation munitions with you," I lied through my teeth, "and I am fine."
"Damnit, and we got off to a good start too," Mike grumbled. "Gallowglass, shove your pride for a minute. We've got shit to do."
I resisted the urge to say 'bite me', and just focused on getting my vision back to single-eye operational. "Yes, sir."
Staring at me, Hanse began. "The initial police report and scans of the situation are all intact and very clear-cut. Anonymous vehicles attacked, deploying troops, you responded with minimum force until personally injured, and then you intensified the engagement. Normally, I wouldn't be speaking to you about this, save for two reasons."
"The enemy power armor, and the fact you can't find the missing Karnov," I guessed.
"Close. The fact that whoever did this took down communications for the entire borough your apartment was in, which is next to NAIS and has redundancies through the NAIS backbone is the first reason," Hanse said. "NAIS is supposed to be impenetrable to this sort of sophisticated electronic attack, especially one propagated by wire."
Read: Hanse was mad someone pissed in his lawn. Understandable, really.
"The second reason," Mike said, frowning, "is that in policing the area, we recovered several sets of mostly-intact armor from the downed Karnov. Within three hours, before getting them onto NAIS property, there were two separate attempts to steal the transports with the suits, and one attempt to destroy them. Whoever attacked you was willing to attack me too- and that's not a good sign."
"It's the opinion of our head of intelligence, Count Allard, that you may know more than you're letting on," Hanse said. "You've made several technological contributions from your caches of LosTech, and frankly we still have reason to trust you. It's likely this might be part of any information you've gathered- and what you've said to Morgan confirms as such."
"Morgan?" I asked, raising my good eyebrow at Mike.
Hanse stifled a cough as Mike flushed. "Ah, that's right. We don't meet much, since I didn't take your classes," he said, putting on a pained smile. "Mike Saint-Claire was a nom de guerre I came up with to deflect attention while studying in NAIS. My actual name is Morgan Hasek-Davion, with sundry titles as needed."
"Hasek," I muttered. "So the Capellan March lordship? Explains why Emma kept complaining you liked to argue too much."
"Oh?"
"We spent some time in the Sian Commonality around the beginning and end of the Aurigan War, and in all likelihood your… uncle, I presume?... has told you about the Centrella and Humphreys plan to help with the war against the Confederation later. She has opinions on them, informed by firsthand experience with several citizens of the confederation."
The fact I was one of them was left carefully unsaid.
"I'll admit I have my biases," Mike- no, Morgan- said.
I shrugged at that. "Either way, yes, your Majesty," I directed to Hanse, "I do have some estimations on the technology and operators who attacked me. However, I implore you, that discussion needs to take place in a place of utmost security."
"We are in the Palace of the First Prince," Hanse said lightly. "We don't have much more security than that."
"Ideally, we'd be on a dropship, or in a room completely shielded with a Faraday cage with no electronics. Our enemy has total dominance in information warfare on us: any sort of recording system is something I must assume is getting collected by them at a later date."
Hanse looked to Morgan, who looked back to Hanse, before the First Prince made a small nod to his heir- the sort of "your call" gesture that everyone had to do sometimes. Morgan's returning head-bob was the 'afirm' type, and then the pair of them stood up, with me lagging a second behind. Digging around in a pocket, I just pulled out a sleeve of headache management pills, popping two as I followed Morgan.
It took ten minutes to get to the shielded room, but once we were there, I could feel two pairs of eyes boring into me. As everyone got comfortable, I blinked at the decanter of water on the table before pouring everyone a glass.
"So. First things first: this was a Comstar raid," I said without preamble. "The fuckers have been after me for a while, although I thought they'd have learned after Panzyr."
"A bold accusation," Hanse said lightly.
"Yeah, but I've got means, method, and motive," I shot back. "First things first, though: motive, with a technical aside."
"Better be a hell of a motive," Morgan said, raising an eyebrow.
"Three words: field-mobile HPG system."
I tried not to smirk too much as Hanse and Morgan started gaping at me. "I don't have one, but I do have proof the phone-fuckers do. The Star League facility I knocked over to get the Royal ERPPC we gave you had plenty of notes on it and a lot of other black box projects the Star League and Amaris' coup was engaged in, including Stealth Armor and the Nighthawk system for PA(L)."
"Back up a minute," Morgan said, holding up his hands. "Mobile HPG systems? Really?"
"Same tech as WarShip compact KF cores or something, I don't understand the physics," I said easily. "What I do know is its about seventeen tons, generally mounted on dedicated vehicles, and a lot nicer to use than the old fifty-ton mount for droppers or WarShips."
"Which doesn't, we'll note, explain the desire to kill you over this information," Hanse said dryly.
Do not commit lese majestie, Tam, don't fucking do it- "Your magesty, are you saying you don't want a perfectly secure end-to-end method to communicate with your field commanders across interstellar distances that doesn't involve them having to get a barely-encrypted radio blast from an HPG compound that's likely in enemy territory while you're knocking over, say, Dieron or Tikhonov?"
"I highly doubt they're that simple to build," Morgan said, raising an eyebrow.
"Yeah, they're liable to be a bitch to actually use, but if the-" can't say Sea Foxes slash Diamond Sharks slash whatever the fuck their name changed to this week "-Star League can keep one working in the middle of nowhere with a few boxes of scraps, then it is something to look into."
"Still not explaining the 'kill you' either," Hanse said, "and we're justifiably concerned about it."
"It's monopolize," I said, sighing. "ComStar sees themselves as inheritors of the Inner Sphere's advanced technology, and after Blake died they've been getting screwier and screwier about it. We handed the documentation we found off for the standard bounty on it, and then things went completely sideways." They clearly didn't buy it, but I didn't mind. I wasn't quite sure myself why there was so much hate for me in and amongst Comstar's upper echelons myself.
"The point, though, is proving that it's ComStar," I said, "and if you want proof, don't look at the suits or the tactics or anything else: look at the transports."
"The Karnovs?" Morgan asked.
"Made by none other than New Earth Trading Corporation, which has no known factories," I said. "Which isn't unusual, except for the fact they have to get product from somewhere, right?"
"This is a stretch, at best," Morgan complained.
"They'd need more warehouses than you could fit on Mars for their current rate of sales- something like two or three hundred units per year, for the last hundred years," I pressed. "That means production somewhere, and if New Earth doesn't have it, then it needs to exist on a planet outside the normal sphere of such. This means hidden systems, or systems hidden in plain sight- such as Earth. However! That's just conjuncture, so I'll bring out two more pieces of evidence."
Rolling his eyes, Morgan snorted at me. "He's yanking our chains."
"He's off base," Hanse corrected, "but this is one of those elementary questions we've been training agents on for years. Not the stupidest answer to hit our desk, either."
"Evidence one is going to be a bit tricky," I said, "because it depends on a fairly good radiospectographic department. Fortunately, NAIS has one. However, there's a little secret about structural steels: they pick up trace background atmospheric radiation. If you know what the background nuclear events profile you're looking for is, though, you can calculate where something was made. We're looking for an almost, but not quite, virgin planet here- two low-yield nuclear detonations approximately nine hundred and eighty years ago if its Earth, or none if its a Hidden System that's been deliberately erased from the maps."
Taking a small drink and a second to marshal my thoughts, I kept going. "The second major piece of material evidence is going to be through corpse examination. Much like metallurgy, we can tell a lot about people through their bones- and there's two critical details to note there. The first is that we know HPG compounds have internal water treatment facilities: most of the time because they're built so early in colonization, but oftentimes as a redundancy in case of local incompetence. This means that ComStar has their own custom water treatment chemical blend, which we can then do tissue analysis to compare our mystery corpses to the known water treatment blend. Now- this blend could be similar to local water treatment, save for point two- we can find what other chemicals are in the water such as nitrates, phosphates, and heavy metals; before comparing them to our skeletons to see where they couldn't be from."
Hanse, blinking, slowly put his head in his hand, before side-eying Morgan. "This is why I normally leave this nonsense to Quintus."
"No, no, I sort of understand it," Morgan said, tapping his chin. "This actually came up in a paper I did on WarShip salvage I did back in college. Cosmic radiation and Naval PPC strikes would build up certain radiological tell-tales in the armor scheme, which would then mean that when ships went in for armor repair they'd need to scrap the old armor entirely instead of re-cast it. They'd then fob the armor off to ASF pilots, who'd recast it anyway since the radiological defects weren't a major issue on the small-scale applications."
"Also, you can just scan the serial numbers in the airframe," I added. "NTC serials are a twenty-one digit code- but if this was something that was built on Terra they're re-selling, then it'd have a seventeen digit code in the old VIN number format."
"I am darkly curious how you learned that, now," Morgan grumbled.
"A five hour research hole while waiting for a JumpShip to recharge while I was dealing with a quartermaster who wanted to know why half our Mauser 960s we got from Artru had seventeen digit codes instead of a Star League standard twenty-seven digit code."
"Very understandable."
Coughing lightly, Hanse looked at us both. "Since you seem to have what appears to be a fairly credible line of investigation, Colonel Gallowglass, we will allow you to assist Lieutenant Hasek-Davion with his investigation. Whether or not this is actually ComStar or not, though, it is clear you are a target of some group that is willing and able to slip under our noses. To that end, your private security arrangements are clearly insufficient, and you will be staying in secured NAIS on-campus housing until you decide to leave New Avalon or take contract with the AFFS and may use one of the positions allocated for mercenary groups in planetary defense."
"I understand, and will comply. Will my troops need different lodging?"
"Not at present time."
"Thank you for your forbearance, then."
Hanse chuckled darkly. "Our forbearance comes at a cost. If you find a portable HPG like you claim to know exists, then we have dibs."
I let off a wan smile. "Your majesty, if I find a portable HPG, you don't need to worry about dibs, I'm going to come running for you to make sure there's nothing following me and you can keep the weird LosTech."
"Excellent."
Putting the Pieces Together[]
NAIS Main Campus
June 6th, 3027
"Good afternoon, class," I said as I leaned on my new cane, staring out at my students. Some were shocked, others looked pale, and I could understand why. I'd finally transitioned away from the 'it covers half your face as a feature!' bandages and instead over to an eyepatch. This meant everyone got to see the pale, scorched skin around where Szeny had done her eye socket reconstruction, which being honest did not look terribly good. "While the syllabus originally planned on this week being related to the operations needed to make a good FOB, I've decided to adjust the schedule since there's been a bit of missing time, and current events prove an… illuminating… example as to why LosTech is a dangerous game to play."
Fundamentally speaking, there were three kinds of LosTech: civil, military, and personal. Civil LosTech was the most common: old computers, dropship parts, crashed hulks, abandoned factories, et cetera ad nauseum. Civil LosTech was also the most valuable in my eyes, and was explained as such to the class. A LosTech water purification truck might not sound like much, but being able to roll a 50-ton water truck that would, no questions asked, be able to supply a battalion if you parked it next to a muddy hole in the ground was the sort of capability that could make or break a garrison deployment or long-term patrol base. Even better were computers: I still had a cracked copy of Excel 2650 I'd gotten from a Sea Fox in the stupidest Trial of Possession ever witnessed: drunken arm-wrestling while singing classic rock.
Military LosTech was weapons, mechs, operational guidebooks, and specialist vehicles or facilities. The big example here was Artru, and I took some perverse joy in getting to explain that I didn't have any insight into this one outside the documentation provided due to being, well, nuked. If this had been earlier in the semester, I'm sure some of them would have laughed at the thought, but going from Cat Professor to Eyepatch Cat Professor seemed to have moved me on the machismo scale from "married dork from the periphery" to "badass from the periphery" fairly snappily. Either way, mil-spec LosTech wasn't actually that profitable: if you found it firsthand, like Artru, you'd have massive liquidation/utilization issues. Getting value out of LosTech was hard enough as it was, and that was before people tried assassinating me over it.
No, I would not like to disclose what piece of LosTech got the assassins after me. Yes, my advice was to always go strapped, and when in doubt bring a platoon of infantry along as ablative meatshields in case of bar fights. Sure, paying for drinks could get expensive, but it also massively lowered your chances of getting shanked!
Lastly there was personal LosTech: stuff that was too small to be civil LosTech, but too rare to just be Weird Stuff. For this, I handed out my cracked Excel copy, as well as flicking my ears several times. Good prosthetics were very much LosTech in my opinion, and the NAIS medical teams- while good- were still half a century behind what I'd consider acceptable. Most people wouldn't blame them, but I was a Canopian and had medical standards north of the Inner Sphere's general willingness to get someone paralytic drunk before sticking a folded belt in their teeth as they broke out the hacksaws. One thing I was also careful to mention here were medications: quality control had nosedived throughout the Third Succession War, and pharmaceutical goods had suffered for it. None of the insulin I could buy here was within spec for my five diabetic staff members, and their paracetamol was still annoyingly unhelpful. My Canopian pain meds were five grams codeine to fifty five paracetamol: good at stopping spikes of pain or other issues dead without blitzing me into low earth orbit. My NAIS issued Federated Suns pain meds were a 50/50 split between twenty grams codeine and twenty grams paracetamol, which was just really fucking stupid. If I took one, that was it, check me out on the couch for the day so I could watch the pretty colors on the flat beige wall. Don't get me started about nootropics either, because Christ on a pogo stick, those might as well not exist here.
Either way, once the types of LosTech were explained, then came the precautions. Don't tell people shit, unless it could go into increasing your fees to work. Stay protected at all times: constant vigilance never went too far. Know what to keep and what to dump to market, as well as when and where to dump to market. Finally, know what was localized tech shortage versus 'true' LosTech, and play the gaps. While most merc companies weren't setting out to be traders by inclination, they were willing to have secured supplies (or were idiots) and oftentimes it was entirely worth it to liquidate secured supplies if there was a known chance to re-arm later. It wasn't the safest ploy, but I wouldn't call it 'risky' either and heaven knows I'd done it a few times myself.
All throughout class, though, I was doing some studying of my own. The new robotic eye was still in mag-scan mode, and I was slowly, painfully learning how to use it. The system didn't give me lines, it instead gave me a sort of glow- mostly analogous to the shape of the thing in question, with certain colors giving me hints to what it was made of. Iron and steel were one thing, while copper was another and BAR rated plates were a third. Fortunately, nobody noticed nor cared what it was up to as long as it was under the eyepatch I was wearing: today, a nice navy blue number.
Because yes, Mersies, I was obliged to be stylish with my medical accessories. Shut up.
Once class finished, I got my stuff together once more, and started heading to my new home: a small apartment with Mersies. Gone were most of our staff, our occasional friends crashed out on the couch at odd hours, and most of our space. Two bedrooms, a good and spacious bath, and a nice combined kitchen-dining area that open concept'd itself into the living room. It was about ninety square meters, but that really wasn't a problem since both Mersies and I had come to love each other crammed into a Leopard. No, the problem was simple.
"Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!" yelled my daughter as she scrambled around the apartment as fast as she could, which wasn't fast at all.
Back at the safe house, there was soundproofing. Here, there wasn't. I couldn't focus at all, which was a problem when I had papers to grade and worksheets to score. Worse, when I got in, Anne got out so she could go talk to Howler, do the shopping at the PX that was nominally the campus store and in reality a Standard Issue PX, Size Four. That meant I was on child duty.
"Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!"
Fun fact: Canopian permanent prosthetics were not conservative operations, and tended to do as much 'under the hood' upgrading as possible. This meant my eardrums had been pulled and completely replaced to help with the fact they were getting massively relocated. I had notable pitch sensitivity above and below human average and a noise detection floor about ten decibels lower than human standard too. I also had very good audiolocation, mostly because my ears were actually fairly good at sound funneling down my ear canals, so moving my ears did actually make a notable change in observed audio. I used it all the time for listening in on students, hearing Anne in crowded environs, and just adjusting myself to not hear annoying things like adds or construction noise.
"Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!"
So in short, I was in a special little circle of hell right now. After I nearly failed my third worksheet, I snapped, before picking up Sofia and putting her on my shoulders so I could write Anne a note before heading to the park. However, in my blind ignorance of the ways of children, I didn't realize that to Sofia my very large, very feline ears would make great handholds.
Then I was in blinding pain as Sofia grabbed my ears and yanked. Going down to my knees, it threw my daughter into the back of my head, earning a happy burble. I just let out a keening little cry, before working my hands up the sides of my skull to pry my daughter's hands off. I'll admit: I was crying. That was some of the most intense pain I'd ever been in, though! Sure it wasn't the big 'ol nuke or getting headcapped in my Stinger way back when, but it was close!
"Let's take you to the park," I muttered, getting a pair of child-sized shoes out and slowly working them onto Sofia, before putting a hat on her. It wasn't hard to get her moving once I said 'park' though, and soon enough we were over to the little park for the staff children and married students.
It wasn't very commonly known, but the AFFS liked officers to hold high degrees. Majors and up were expected to sit on Masters, and doctorates were a must if one wanted to go higher than regimental command. This in turn meant dependants and children, which meant that NAIS actually had a fairly good support structure for said children. On-site day care, parks, kitchens, and even adorable "New Avalon Institute of Sciences (Elementary)/(Secondary)" schools built into the campus that had all of the rigour the university was famous for. I would bet my foot on a high school diploma from the NAIS secondary school was worth more than most college diplomas,
When I got to the park, though, I quickly realized three things.
One: most of the people taking their kids to the park were women
Two: most of them were married to upper regimental leadership.
Three: I was interesting so they wanted to talk, and while they didn't have their husband's ranks, that didn't mean they couldn't pin me down with an iron fence of skirts and child-care bags. I was trapped, half physically and half by social convention, and unless Sofia decided now was the hour to practice eating grass and hitting people, I couldn't escape.
As the horrifying banality started to enfold me, I came to a startling realization: Hanse's decision to stash me away here may have had ulterior motives- scratch that, as one of the younger wives tried to touch my still-tender ears without permission. The fucker definitely knew this was gonna happen. This is what I get for trying to pin shit on the phone company before I have a Precentor ready to sing like a bird, damnit!