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Chapter 37 - Time Enough For A Cat -
- Victoria II 6: Judgement in the Clouds -[]
Another thing added to the To-Do List[]
Dropship Argo - Cargo Bay Control
Victoria II, Capellan Confederation
January 14th, 3029
Perspective of Loadmaster Bob Mitchel-on-Syne
Sighing carefully, I watched another rookie stevedore hooking the endless containers of shit to the chain hoist. Argo was full to the damn brim with supplies, but she couldn't enter the atmosphere herself. Everyone knew it, from the General on down to the deck-scrubbers. Issue was, nobody had stretched their brains on what that meant yet. Sure, we were a great big flying depot in the sky, but that depot had its own issues and considerations to look into.
Consideration the first, for example: getting supplies off the depot. Back in the Auregian Campaign, this had been done by a single Leopard. Very, very inefficient. However, right now, we had advanced to- wait until you hear it- a Leopard, and a Union.
The reason, as I was seeing right now, was hideous. Of our three docking collars, only two had good connections to the holds. The third, where Argo connected to jumpers, didn't have a very solid connection to the cargo areas, but instead had a great thoroughfare to the rear grav decks and related medical facilities. Therefore, we'd have a Union come on up to our portside clamp, lock in, and we'd load it full of war material, then cycle it to our starboard clamp and load the men. Meanwhile, our dorsal clamp would have the Leopard clamped on, discharging wounded back to the grav areas for medical treatment. Once that Union was empty, it'd cycle to our portside and start unloading damaged metal, while our starboard side was locked in with the Union to start transferring down critical need supplies.
Supplies which, painfully, we might not have had the time to unbury yet. Which is a good segue to consideration the second: supplies versus repairs.
Argo had, for her sins, twelve now-empty Mech bays to use as workshops and seven hundred and twenty Battle Armor workshop cradles. Every single one of these was now full, with four damaged units in line waiting to go- and worse, still had mechs and armor waiting to deploy that needed cubicle time to go from cold storage to field ready. Even running triple shifts wasn't enough: we'd frequently have to push cold mechs into Unions to warm them up, then shuffle them out of the Unions and back into the cargo bay so they could be paired with their combat pilots and re-deployed on the correct droppers!
Thank God for Kamea's Overlord here: her techs might not have been as enthusiastic as ours, but those extra thirty-six mech bays meant we weren't underwater on the mechs and vics we needed to keep activating. We could just shovel shit into it directly with the Small Craft bays, just opening doors and using tow chains to transfer the goods in what the ship's ATC called "the ballsiest shit he'd seen his entire life" and what I called some enhanced yeeting.
Speaking of chain hoists, the rookie had finally gotten the container secure, banged on it twice, and it slowly got hoisted towards the waiting Leopard. Kamea's Long Tom boys had been working hard: that there was a sixty ton container of shells and powder for 'em to keep their guns running. The first few we'd handled had been delicate, gentle affairs: those shells were expensive, and worse, able to turn us all along with a good hunk of the ship into scrap metal.
Then we'd accidentally had third shift drop a Manticore on one, and discovered that the Auregians knew exactly how important this stuff was. Those containers weren't idiot-proof, but they'd done a damn good job at trying to make them that way with cellular wet storage and an entire container of BAR-10 wrapping the goodies inside the intermodal shell. Now I didn't feel bad about the new kid handling it at all, especially since he'd managed to get it into the Leopard without any major issues.
"Loadmaster to the CIC, Loadmaster to the CIC," the intercom called out, earning a groan. I hated going to the CIC. I really did. Balls-deep in Officer Country, and half of the people there were too young to drink, it felt like. Worse was dealing with The General. He was a good employer, but I hated dealing with him in person. Those eyes tended to see things mine didn't, and he'd hear a pin drop through a void bulkhead- and his name from the other end of the ship.
"Wallace, you've got the controls!" I snapped, handing the responsibility off. Wallace just gave me a double-click back on his comms set, and I moved straight for the airlock to the rest of the ship. We might not have been working in the void, but we did tend to run at a significantly lower pressure to reduce gas loss from when we had damaged docking collars leaking atmo. Once I was through, I popped up the faceplate on my EXO-3 and started walking with a purpose. The boss could meet me in my work clothes, or not at all.
Ten minutes of walking later, and I was in the CIC, blinking. Of all the things I expected to see on the big holotable, our Ouija Board wasn't one of them. It took a lot of computational pull to track the location of every powered exoskeleton, forklift, chain hoist, and detached intermodal container in the ship, but I'd fought to the knife to get the ability to run this.
"I'd tell you to take a seat, Loadmaster Mitchell-On-Syne, but I'm afraid the chairs aren't PA(L) rated," the General said. "I'm here about an issue."
"Lay it on me," I replied, looking things over. First shift was getting into the swing of things, and over in the mech bays a pair of heavies had just finished warmup and were getting batched to go out on the next Union that would be coming in ten.
"We need to get the White Horse Regiment prepped for battle in the next twenty-four hours," the General said, ear flicking, "And when I checked the unloading schedule, they were penciled in to be nearly two hundred hours out."
I frowned, before pulling up my wrist-pad to check my copy of the Ouija Board.
"Don't bother," the General said, reading my intent clearly. "Adjunct, get this man a pad, I want to see the work."
Dataslate in hand from the adjunct, I pulled down one armored glove to start tapping it. "Alright, sir, so I've got an important question."
"Yes?"
"Do you care if we disrupt our current operations cycle to get you your regiment, or do we need to keep the unloading going apace and get your regiment?"
"Walk me through the interruptions version first."
I shrugged. "Alright then. First things first, we stop medical transfers entirely. The BA we can roll into the cradles as easy as pie, and then they'll be out of the way in three hours. Load 'em up through the dorsal trunk no issues. The armor's gonna be harder: we'll need to call in a Union to serve as a holding pen for all the shit we've got to move to get to 'em, call that four hours. Then I can call the mechbays, cancel repairs, and get all your shit warming up. Should take about… twelve hours for the mechs, forty-eight for the vics. Those will load as normal. You want ASF cover?"
"Nope, keep those in patrol."
"Then yeah, total time, seventy-ish hours. Call it ninety if you want me to keep unloading everything that's currently in direct queue and 'only' do normal fast-tracking."
Steepling his fingers on the table, the General looked over the Ouiji board.
"Alright, people, time to overview and brainstorm. Adjunct: you have the table, get us a layout."
A very metropolitan adjunct stepped up, their uniform shifting. It was a new one, I noted blandly, and hoped I'd not get stuffed into the damn thing anytime soon.
"Alright, everyone. Currently speaking, our advance on Barns is currently held up by sieging through Bougainvillea. Right now, the Black Horse Armored Regiment and the 103rd Aurigian Foot are holding the beachhead into the city, with 5th ADG and 6th ADG providing encirclement and security to our lines. Supporting assets are the 51st Separate Artillery Regiment and the entire 1st Auregian Hussars from the Auregians, and the 23rd and 27th Luxen Ducal Air Guards are providing cover for our droppers. Currently our Conventional Fighter Group is down to about a wing and a half effectives, and is undergoing reorganization. On the ground, our only uncommitted forces are the Red Horse Battle Armor Regiment and the 4th through 1st ADG . Currently, our plan is to break Bougainvillea and proceed to Barns, the planetary capital."
Tapping the map to bring up the battle display, the adjunct frowned visibly. "While we have the forces to make a press through Bougainvillea, casualties would be high, and our current projections for taking Barns will require the entire ADG. Casualty avoidant tactics have kept our forces in fighting shape, but ammunition demands are adding up and heavy demolitions munitions are running out."
At this point, the General stepped in. "Our current plan is to use the Pale Horse to bypass Bougainvillea, however this depends on getting the Pale Horse operational- without disrupting casualty avoidance measures up here. To this end, we open the floor for discussion."
A few of the staffers started talking, drawing up theoretical battalion deployment plans, but I stopped. There was something I was missing here- and then I got it. My holdup wasn't getting the vehicles and mechs out, it was getting them activated. I'd already used other spacecraft to warm them up before- that'd mean I'd need to just do it again. The issue was getting a spacecraft with sufficient scale, though. It wasn't common knowledge, but we actually bussed the Argo's techs around to help prop up a lot of other ships since Kamea's MekTech corps was greener than grass. We'd need to make it one stop, or we'd spend so much time on the bussing that we'd never get the work done.
"General," I asked, tapping my chin. "What's the status of the Auregian Overlord-class we've got on station?"
"We can use it, and Kamea's already given permission for cold landings. Nothing hot, though."
"I don't need the landing, sir. I need the bays," I grinned. "Take the mechs off the Argo, put them in bays on the Overlord. From there, either drop in the Overlord or transfer them from the Overlord to the Unions."
"I'd have done that already if we didn't have a tech shortage," one of the staffers I didn't recognize piped up. "We can barely run the bays here, much less the ones on another ship."
"We don't have a tech shortage, though, we've got a tech missassignment," I countered. "Look, we've been dropping units with their full tech compliment, right?"
"Correct."
"And we're recovering their mechs to be fixed up on the Argo, with Argo's techs, right?"
That just got me a slow head-nod.
"So what we do is we go to, say, 4th ADG," I said, spitballing, "and steal all their techs. They're bound to have a fair number for the APCs; scoop them up and have them work on the mechs."
The room went silent, and I looked over the officers. Then I looked harder. Their faces were clean to a T, shaved bare of any facial hair with a precision that went past 'military' and into 'fanatical' like it was a ritual for success. Most of them had normal hair colors, but the ones with dyes didn't show any slop in it; even at the base of their same-color or divergent cat ears. None of them wore gloves, but none of them had scars either to decorate around their uniform chronos and round-cut pedicures. Not a single crowsfoot signaled to me camaraderie in the lot of them.
It was at that moment it finally struck me. They were young; and I was not.
I'd been a military longshoreman most of my life. Run the forklift and the hoist, check the pulley, tie down puking techs and keep the ship together. I'd been made bo'sun after that, and promoted to petty officer of the cargo deck a few times. My gray hairs weren't exceptional there; they were expected. The old men like me who'd been doing this for a handful of decades knew and saw everything on the ships they sailed with.
Did any of my workers wear their lives on their faces like I did? In pale lines and faint wrinkles from never being kissed by the light of a star without some bulkheads between it and I? Or did the array of exo faces hide more of the same?
"It might work," the General said, muttering. "It'll definitely slow down the tech debt we're in. The ADG will pitch a fit, though."
"Didn't the Conventional Fighter airwings get torn up too?" someone else called out. "That's got to be some free techs!"
"Black Horse isn't using theirs much either right now with so much of the battalion out their rides! We'll be fine!"
"Heck, we can even borrow some of the Malik workers!"
"No we can't, those guys are the Doctor's people! If we try, she'll turn us inside out!"
Right, this was getting to be a bit much. "OI!" I shouted at the top of my lungs, bringing everything back down to a reasonable volume. "Quit yapping about shit, and start looking it up! We'll get the free techs first, then we poach. Once they're in the spaceport, they'll just ride up on a medivac flight. Someone space-side, you get the Overlord in here, and then that'll be that!"
Behind me, the General coughed. "Ahem."
Aw, shit.
"Unless you plan to sign on for combat operations, Loadmaster Mitchel-on-Syne, I suggest you leave those directions to me. In the meantime, however, I believe you may need to return to station?"
My gut warred with my head; one wanted to leave, the other wanted to stay. Something wasn't quite right. "In a minute, sir. There's something we're forgetting."
"Such as?"
I tapped my fingers together, before looking at the adjunct. "Can you get the Ouija Board back up?"
A few clicks later, and I was looking at the internal map of the cargo bays. Ammunition, stored vehicles, consumables, spare parts, spare armor, spare oxygen, spare water-
-wait shit back up a step.
"Found the problem," I muttered, gulping.
"What is it?"
"Argo was designed as a civil transport. All well and good; nothing to be ashamed of. However, that means she's got a civil transport internal hold," I explained, before I ran my finger over the Ouija Board. Specifically, a circle over the thin, wide, compartment-spanning layer of oxygen canisters right next to the ammunition. "An internal transport hold without proper blast compartmentalization."
The dawning moment of realization that dawned on everyone when I revealed that we had the better part of ten thousand remaining tons of ammunition shoved cheek by jowl up against our food and oxygen was not a pucker moment. Pucker moments were for shit happening you might survive.
"I'm gonna need to fix that," I said, the understatement of the year working its way out. "And you might want to find whoever packed this thing full, and shoot them on general principle."
"It's going on the to-do list," the General muttered. "Someone get a Mule on the list of ships to dock too, I want as much of that ordnance planetside and distributed as I can get it. Loadmaster, get down there and get this fixed."
"Got it. One question, though?" I asked
"Sure."
"Can I take the first swing at the clown who loaded us up?"
The General raised an eyebrow, fingers tapping on his chair. "Only if you can tell me how you missed this."
"Pretty easily, since I got hired on by Black Horse and transferred over here when your first loadmaster from the Suns got sick," I replied. "At that point, you were loaded full enough nothing rattled, and whatever kinda sick your last guy got killed him. I've got rough notes, but no detailed packing plans. Good thing all your containers are RFID tagged."
"Understandable, then. Go get to work, and make sure to stop by the records office later. We'll likely need to get that testimony down for when we check for criminal negligence on the last guy's part."
With a nod, I left. Ten steps out of the room, and I was breaking into a run, calling every foreman I had and getting them ready to start the mother of all loading scrambles. We had a bomb to defuse, and more importantly I had some fakers to catch. It took a lot of longshoremen to make a bomb this big waiting for someone to cook it off, and I wanted to make damn sure that none of the builders were here now. After all, the only difference between ammunition and expanding vapor was one misplaced cigarette break.
New Job, New Pay Rate[]
Dropship Argo
Central Mech Bay
Victoria, Capellan Confederation
January 15th, 3029
Perspective of Lt. Gen. Tam Gallowglass
Looking over my Cyclops, I took off the habitual eyepatch I kept on for fashion's sake and started cycling through eye modes that would be the least distracting to have on in combat. Behind me, my adjunct was just whistling.
"Damn nice mech," they said appreciatively.
"Don't I know it," I replied with a grin. Soon, it'd be time to deploy. Soon I'd leave my comfy ship, with its helpful attendants… and piles of paperwork that'd try to follow me down the well. "Hey. Adjunct?"
"Yes?"
"You want to come with? This thing's got a backseater to help run the B-2000, and you'd be getting a hell of a pay bump for combat time."
"I'd be getting Mechwarrior pay?"
"For the time, yeah. Mechwarrior pay at officer differential plus combat multiplier."
"Sure!" my adjunct cheered. "What do I need to do?"
"You need to draw a cooling suit from stores, and I need to get you a callsign for the computer," I muttered. "Either way, once you've got your new kit, come back here and I'll teach you how to mount up. And be quick! We need to be in the Cyclops in an hour, when transfers start!"
"Yessir!"
As they ran off, I chuckled and opened a connection to my mech and thus the battle computer in it from my handheld dataslate. Let's see… add new user, then their unit ID number… all the forms look right, good. Callsign? It'd be a bit impenetrable, but I had a good feeling about this one.
When Penrhyn figured it out, I hoped they liked it.
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