Tell The World That We Tried
- Chapter 10[]
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NOW WISDOM BURNS UPON A SHELF...
Dual between Champions[]
Steiner Coliseum - Solaris VII, Lyran Commonwealth, 3016
A corner of my brain was aware that the towering jumbotrons of the massive Steiner Coliseum were showing a camera close up of my booth, of my face.
Most of my attention was on the ring, glittering diamonds fixed practically flush with a mirror-polished platinum band, surrounded by the black velvet of its little box and the painfully white pillow it was sitting on.
<<<“Asha Blackwing,”>>> Sophitia said, voice soft even through the thunder of the speakers. <<<“Will you marry me?”>>>
I could see her through the booth windows and the cockpit glass of the BattleMech standing under them, doll-sized and almost anonymous under the diving-helmet bulk of her neurohelmet… But I knew she could see me.
That was fortunate, since the knot in my throat would have made it completely impossible for me to reply with words.
I just nodded, and reached down to pick up the ring. It was cool against my finger as I slid it on… then kissed the stone setting flush with the band, and blew it out the window towards her.
The crowd went wild, forcibly reminding me that - to understate the point rather critically - we had an audience.
Sophitia turned Marauder No. 2 back towards the center of the arena and waited as the sands shifted and began to stream from the tops of the reinforced blast barriers that lifted from below and soon obscured the direct line of sight between her and Gray Noton, at the far end of the arena floor.
The hubbub of voices from the stands quieted, going from a DropShip launch to the murmur of waves along a shore - as close as an excited crowd this size could ever get to dead silent.
The scream of an airhorn cut through the tension, uncannily familiar, and below, the Marauder - hastily repainted earlier in the day in brown, gold, and scarlet - lunged into motion.
For a moment, as Sophitia headed off to my right and then vanished in a turn behind one of the barriers, all I could do was worry, before the Colonel, the part of my brain that I’d spent two years and change fighting to train into a useful combat commander, stepped forward and tucked the emotions in a box in favor of evaluations.
One of the Coliseum’s weaknesses as an entertainment venue was that its layouts were fundamentally static; while the barriers I was seeing could be individually retracted to try and form different patterns, there were only so many of them and their locations were fixed. Dedicated or experienced mechwarriors could easily memorize the possible combinations - and Soph and Noton were nothing if not experienced.
Real strategy-heads, and mechwarriors themselves, liked that, because it removed the random element of stumbling over each other in Ishiyama’s nightmare caverns or the Factory’s ever-shifting refuse piles. For mechwarriors, and believers, that meant that they had at least a chance of thinking ahead, of getting inside their opponent’s plans and setting up a decisive stroke, but for more casual fans it meant a lot of maneuvering without much action, and longtime fans who lacked interest in the headgames found matches becoming repetitive.
The configuration of the day had a large open area at the very center of the arena, and two smaller ones closer to the active entrances, all of them with several entrances and twisting narrow alleys mazed between them.
The announcer had called Legend-Killer an RFL-3N, the standard, classic model of the Succession Wars. The 3N was badly overgunned, undercooled, and under-armored - it had four main guns, a pair of 50mm autocannon optimized for the anti-air work the Rifleman had originally been built for, and a pair of eight-centimeter large lasers, backed up by a shorter-ranged pair of five-centimeter lasers in fixed torso mounts. The stock version, though, had the heat dissipation capacity to power one of the main lasers at a time, and to either run at full speed or vent the heat buildup from its autocannons. Or to use the cannons and torso beams at a run, come to that.
That was enough of a weakness, but the worst news for the Rifleman was what all that did to armor protection. Seven and a half tons of ablatives was the level suitable for a light or low-end medium mech, not a heavy with a heavy’s mobility and ability to attract fire.
I knew, without needing to bother with the displays, that Marauder No. 2 had been refitted for my purposes, not for the Solaris arenas. The particle projection cannons that served as main guns were bigger and badder than the Rifleman’s large lasers, with a slightly longer range, but they had a minimum effective range, too, and while the GM Whirlwind autocannon it mounted did the same damage in one three-round cassette as the Rifleman’s Imperator Model As did in twelve, the overall output per burst was about the same… and Sophitia only had one of them to Noton’s two.
A stock Marauder also carried 5cm laser secondaries under the PPCs, but I’d gone for 3cm pulse lasers, instead, Star League weapons whose switchable anti-personnel mode would have been very valuable on an actual battlefield but was worthless in the Coliseum. Against heavy armor, their maximum effective range would only barely reach to the edge of the PPCs’ minimum.
The upside, though, was that the more reasonable weapon choice and extra fifteen tons of mass paid major defensive dividends. Even sticking to standard panels, Sophitia was carrying very close to twice the protection Noton was.
The final element of comparison was that the Rifleman’s design, with turretlike gun-barrels fixed directly to its ‘shoulders’, made it fairly weak in ‘hand to hand’ combat. While the Marauder wasn’t a specialist like Sophitia’s own Aspis was, with only reinforced cannon mountings rather than hands - much less a dedicated melee weapon - it was much better suited to that kind of brawling than the air-defense mech.
And, of course, that was Sophitia’s own specialty.
Unless Noton was a fool, or foolishly desperate, he wouldn’t be engaging at point-blank range where she could rush him. He just didn’t have the armor to trade fire squarely for more than one or two salvos, and getting under the minimum ranges of No. 2’s main weapons would put him in arm’s reach for a literal stomping.
While I was thinking and speculating, both of them were heading for the central clearing in the arena, picking entrances to peek out into the open field from - and trying to guess which their opponent would pick.
Sophitia dashed past one outward gap in the barriers at a run, torso twisted to face out into the field.
Noton had picked a closer and more obvious vantage point, and parked Legend-Killer just to one side of it, so that the mech’s legs and torso were hidden by the barrier’s protection but on arm - and both of its guns - could just peek out and fire.
The full width of the central clearing was just small enough for the 8cm laser’s focus elements to resolve their target, and even before the beam could start to melt the armor material Sophitia was throwing No. 2 into full reverse and twisting its torso into a mad kind of shimmy that tried to keep the energy weapon from landing on any given panel long enough to melt a layer. Even as she was doing that, the autocannon mounted below that laser was firing, a dozen lightweight cannon shells screaming across the distance, tracer panels built into the base of each round leaving a glowing trail through the air.
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Classic Marauder Heavy 'Mech
The angle Sophitia had chosen to place her torso at helped, as did the basic design of the Marauder. Standard armor composites tended to shatter like a ground car’s crumple zones when you hit them with a physical impact, including cannon shells, but an oblique enough angle could generate harmless ricochets - and the sloping fighter-jet lines of the Marauder’s torso were very oblique to threats dead ahead of the machine. Probably nearly half of the 50mm shells did no damage whatsoever as they poured off like rain - rain that stopped when the supplying ammunition cassette ran out.
The reverse of motion she’d thrown No. 2 into would carry her back into cover in only seconds, far too quickly for Noton to fire another salvo, and too quickly for me to have fired back effectively… But Sophitia identified the tiny fraction of Legend-Killer showing around cover, targeted, and fired in that tiny space of time. One PPC blast flash-welded a glowing crater of slag out of the barrier, less than a meter from the edge and the two Rifleman gun barrels that extended past it. The other streak of man-made lightning winged past the same distance outside those gun barrels, hitting nothing at all by less than the width of a hair compared to the distance between the two mechs. The first 105mm shell of her burst whanged off the top of the large laser housing, while the second two sailed safely over Noton’s head, and then both of them were gone, out of contact again.
In the viewing booth, I found myself frowning at the thermal sidebands. A stock Rifleman should have been using most of its heat capacity with even the little firing Noton had just done, but he was running as close to ice cold as an operating battlemech ever came. I was pretty sure that that meant he’d found some way to get ahold of enough freezers to refit Legend-Killer, just like Aspis and No 2 were in for. Unless he was a damned fool or he’d found a half-weight advanced engine, he wouldn’t have been able to add any more heatsinks, but doubling his capacity with the improved versions of the ones he did have would at least let him use all of his main guns at once.
Rifleman Heavy 'Mech
That wouldn’t be good for Soph.
That was more or less how the next few encounters went - three more times Noton outguessed Sophitia, snapping a shot or two around a corner with a bare minimum of exposure and then hauling ass, and once she managed to outguess him, making Legend-Killer catch a full broadside as he rounded a corner.
That didn’t bring him down. Even a Rifleman’s limited armor could take a little pounding, and while the design wasn’t as suited to deflecting incoming fire as a Marauder’s, Noton was nearly as good at managing that as Sophitia was - and more familiar with his mount.
Though… The gore shots of the damaged plating on the jumbotrons - invisible to the two fighters thanks to their angles - looked wrong. Not like standard armor plating should, more like…
That was where. I’d seen it on some of the partially repaired mechs in the Helm Cache. That was what ferro-fibrous armor looked like after being hit.
Even with that upgrade, though, what that salvo did do was take away most of his margin for error. With the one or two shots that she’d managed to get back into him while he was sniping at her, the damage that salvo did to his armor, especially his main torso glacis, meant that the next time he took an equivalent amount of fire, it would punch through and start doing internal critical damage, knocking out vital components or weapons.
That, though, required him to make a mistake, and over the next ten minutes or so, he didn’t. I shut down the audio feed from the announcement staff. I did not need to hear them enthusing about what an ‘edge of the seat thrill’ this fight was. I was on the edge of my seat, all right - in fucking terror. Every time he got a shot in on Soph I felt like I could feel it landing against me, and the fear of what those consequences could bring was new and unpleasantly unfamiliar.
I didn’t need to worry this much on ordinary battlefields. The number of Mechwarriors in a line unit who could even stay in shouting distance of either of them might have been an integer, but it was a small one. Give her even a little bit of support and she could take care of herself.
Better than I could, even with my apparent psychic bullshit.
But Gray fucking Noton was no random scrub. In another world, another timeline, he’d have ridden the same garbage Battlemech Soph was fighting to hold on to the title of Champion of Solaris for seven years straight, a feat unmatched in centuries before or centuries after.
The bastard was proving it. He wasn’t any faster than she was, but somehow he always seemed to know where she planned to be and managed to get himself there first. Waiting for another cheap sniping shot. She was doing damage, too, now and again, but the rate of exchange was in his favor again.
Sophitia had to realized it, because she aborted her game of cat-and-mouse - and who was who, one wondered? - and made for a relatively secure corridor, one whose far end opened onto as much of an open sightline as she was going to get, and whose other gap was right up against the wall she’d entered from.
Then she stopped and waited for Noton to cross in front of her.
It was agonizing to watch, because from above I could see, as she couldn’t, the way Noton stopped just short of doing exactly what she wanted him to do… and then changed his mind. I’d wondered before, but now I was certain that Legend-Killer was modified in a way much more subtle than rumor had it. That maneuver made it clear that Noton had fitted the twin-barreled turret arms with mast cameras, letting him peek around the corner without ever exposing enough of the machine to make it a risk… or let his opponent notice.
I barely kept myself in my seat, rather than beating on the armorglass that fronted my box, as he took the long looping way around, circling all the way around the perimeter of the arena to finally come out behind No. 2’s unsuspecting back.
There was something arrogant, triumphant, about the Rifleman’s body language as it stepped around the last corner with every gun pointed and armed. He’d burned through seventeen ammo cassettes already, and he clearly meant to use up the last three.
Marauder No. 2 didn’t so much as twitch or shuffle its feet… But the instant the muzzle of Legend-Killer’s left-arm autocannon cleared the intervening wall, Sophitia had the mech’s own arms in motion, raising up, up, straight up…
And then the forearms kept going, tilting up relative to the upper arms so that they pointed straight back over their own shoulders.
Square at Noton.
It wasn’t the classic arm-flip that mechs like the Rifleman and Jagermech used, rotating their arm assemblies a hundred and eighty degrees on the shoulder joint. It wasn’t even something a ‘modern’ Marauder could have done; the shoulder and elbow assemblies had both been simplified to ease production during the long years of the Third Succession War, and the computer support to target that way had been a casualty of slowing clock speeds and smaller memory chips…
But No 2 was one of the very first hundred MAD-3Rs ever built, and it had all those bells and whistles included. Even if I’d have bet that Sophitia could have made it work without them.
Noton’s firing sequence started, the flaring brilliance of laser-tracers and the shooting stars of autocannon ones reaching out for No 2’s weak rear armor.
The first PPC bolt arrived, stuttered a half-second before the other to control the heat-bloom of the reactor scaling up to power it, and bored squarely into one of the holes opened by the earlier heavy salvo, burning, melting, ravaging the internal structures and machinery of Legend-Killer’s right torso. The 5cm laser winked out instantly, and the 8cm one and its matching autocannon on that side sprayed crazily and uselessly in randomized directions as the basic ground on which they depended was chainsawed out from under them.
The second PPC bolt hit the Rifleman in the other arm, actually boring up the narrow gap between the two weapons mounted there to just miss the breechblock that held them both - and the cannon’s magazine. Watching footage of it afterwards would show the way secondary arcing had actually jumped between gun barrel and particle bolt as the latter raced by, increasing fractions the intense charge of the beam grounding through the weapon and, through it, Legend-Killer’s internal structure.
More arcing found the breech, and the seven cannon shells still in its ready magazine, and touched them all off at once.
The autocannon blew up mid-burst, and took the entire arm with it.
In two shots, Noton had gone from capitalizing on a decisive advantage to losing the heaviest five-sixths of his entire arsenal, and for a second, even he could do nothing but reel in shock.
Sophitia had already started to turn towards him.
The angles meant that only one of the PPCs could bear; it hit near the hip of one leg as Legend-Killer belatedly lunged back into motion, scrambling around the corner again.
In moments, Sophitia was thundering down the same narrow slot that had recently been filled with weapon fire. I could see the faint stutter effect, the disconnect and failed timing that always started to creep in when I pushed No 2 up to EMERGENCY, running the hardware - literally running - at the very limits of what it could physically turn out, eighty, ninety kilometers-per-hour and well past what the Marauder was actually designed for.
It was a useful trick, though I was always careful to buy my maintenance crew a case or two of whatever the local brew was after doing it - and not to do it for too long, since that stutter could rapidly amplify out of control and send you to the ground in a sprawl that was at best embarrassing.
But that was me, and this was her. Soph rode the instability out with enviable grace, and as she turned the corner behind Noton in a spray of sand and skidding feet, I realized, belatedly, that she’d probably planned this out.
The distance between the position she’d been in, and the corner she was at now, was greater than the distance Noton had to cover to get out of his current corridor… in both directions.
Legend-Killer, with nowhere to go, staggered as the first salvo of autocannon fire raked across its pristine but oh-so-vulnerable rear armor, and went from that to stumbling wildly as particle beam bolts raked along its already damaged legs, almost directly underneath my booth. I could see the wild waving of severed myomer strands convulsing in the charged coronas of the PPC beams, the drunken lurching as Noton fought desperately to control his mount.
Sophitia fired again, and what was left of the Rifleman crashed to the ground, armless and with one leg a twisted, ruined wreck. The remaining leg kicked, levered against the sand.
No 2’s Whirlwind reloaded before the PPCs could cool back to firing temperature; the three 105mm shells raked brutally across the crippled mech, and I could see it shudder as the spinning wheels of the gyroscope came apart with the breach of their housing, one entire ring ejecting violently to bounce off the arena wall and carom over the barrier that formed the other side of the passage.
Legend-Killer’s last leg kicked again, shoving the torso face up and tilting it like it was trying to stand…
The ejection seat fired only a split second before the thunderbolts came, the wreck’s cockpit blowing apart in a ball of flame and letting the mechanism lift Noton himself free of his doomed partner.
The lightning consumed the rest, claiming the last armor and charring the remaining structural beams even as the reactor scrammed itself in a rush of heat-haze.
I slumped into my seat in relief.
The crowd went wild.
Meeting the Archon[]
Solaris City - Solaris VII, Lyran Commonwealth, 3016
While Sophitia was training up for her big match, I had been neck deep in what felt like a hundred different major projects, and we only had time for a press conference and a single snatched night before I got pulled back into the morass.
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Achilles Class Assault DropShip
First and highest priority, of course, negotiating with Katrina Steiner. She’d arrived in person a week ago, at the head of an awesome flotilla of DropShips - four Overlords, two Achilles, and four Avengers for the assault dropship contingent, and two Vengeance-class carriers. The Overlords were loaded with the prestigious 1st Royal Guards, and they and their Archon would be staying for at least a little while. The assault and carrier DropShips would stay only long enough for another Achilles and Vengeance with five Avengers to arrive, before the entire cavalcade loaded up and escorted the duplicate cores to their final destinations - which I did not know, and didn’t expect to.
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Vengeance Fighter Carrier DropShip
Speculating was easy - Tharkad and Hesperus, for two, plus probably at least one completely secret site. Possibly other industrial centers, as well. The big question was if they’d take them all to Tharkad and then parcel them out further, or run direct circuits...
Well, outside my wheelhouse.
What was my business was trying to keep on top of organizing and working up no less than three brand new Battlemech regiments. The question of whether or not to hand out precious Star League gear to the two Lyran regiments already stationed on Solaris should have been a no-brainer, but one of those two was the 10th Skye Rangers, who were apparently notorious for considering themselves to be really Skye troops only seconded to the Lyran central government… unless it suited them to pretend otherwise. Worse, the 10th Skye were a substantially more elite outfit than the other local unit, the 32nd Lyran Guards. Upgrading the reliable Guards rather than the skilled Rangers would have opened substantial political trouble - so we were resurrecting the 9th Arcturan Guards and the 'Second Regiment of Winfield's Legion'.
Who of course I’d never heard of.
Anyway. People for the 9th & 2nd were trickling in as shipping routes brought them from wherever they’d been assigned, and dropped into either the Royals from the Cache or the better ‘regular line’ mechs. All of the ones we’d seen so far were veterans, so much of their training was in working together in specific, and in learning their new rides’ strengths, weaknesses, and foibles.
And to do that, they needed to do exercises, actually getting out and stomping around the wilderness in opposition to my people, and to the other new unit forming.
See, I’d had an idea, and General-Major Lewiston, the commander of the 32nd, had gotten behind and pushed... Solaris had a lot of native owner-operator Mechwarriors just lying around and not doing anything nationally productive besides earning tourist revenue. Few of them, though, were terribly patriotic, and the stable owners were still less so, which made recruiting from that pool of talent and hardware problematic.
The idea I’d had, was based on the realization that there had to be a system in place for maintaining and repairing the 'mechs of warriors who brought their own ancestral hardware to serve in Commonwealth line regiments. Lewiston had confirmed as much, so I had laid out what Older-Me remembered of the United States National Guard system, with some tweaks.
The way it worked out, the Solaris Gladiators would be specifically charged to defend Solaris against all invaders, to undergo regular military training, and to show up for testing and practice every couple of weeks to demonstrate that their skills weren’t slipping and to practice obeying orders…
And in return, they’d have access to the same spare-parts-and-repairs pipelines that line soldiers in ancestral mechs did, at the same prices that the Commonwealth military had paid to obtain the things in the first place. We’d had to include a few clauses organizing other repair work to get the larger stables to play ball, but in the end all the techs would be paid by the owners of the mechs they were working on, so it wouldn’t be costing the Commonwealth taxpayers anything beyond the part-time trickle for the Mechwarriors.
It was all a bit more feudal levy than was usual in the Commonwealth - that tended to be more of a Federated Suns schtick - but it would almost certainly work.
Finally, of course, there were my people. We’d had a reserve of raw pilots, the former IndustrialMech operators who’d been the ‘MechWarriors’ for the Fiannese rebellion, and Solaris was a great place to recruit Mechwarriors, including the dispossessed kind, so for once the problem was waiting on hardware, rather than people. So close to the Defiance plants on Hesperus and Furillo, most of what we were getting was being pulled from their lower-priority orders - though fortunately the contract dictated that the mechs we received be of the same weight-class as the Star League mechs that they were standing in for.
The state of Battlemech production being what it was in this day and age, that would ordinarily have left us cooling our heels for at least a year, but with Tharkad’s authorization to pull certain hard-to-make circuit boards from the Helm stash, they could double their production rate for at least a few years.
So instead it would take six months to raise our second mech regiment, but we’d have the first ready to roll relatively quickly. Most of what we were getting for lights were Locusts, equally split between -1V and -1S models, while the medium bracket leaned a little onto -1N Griffins over Scorpions and Chameleons.
I was pretty sure that that was just because there weren’t enough of the latter two to flog off on us, but that was alright. None of us were wild about the Scorpions, but the Chameleon was a solid performer, and so were the Zeuses and Stalkers we were getting for those bits of the assault bracket that weren’t being filled by every Banshee that Hesperus could roll out.
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Zeus Assault 'Mech
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Stalker Assault 'Mech
There’d been plenty of whining when we received our first of those, but I wasn’t on that page. Yeah, the Banshee was undergunned for a machine of its weight, but compared to our Centurions it seemed much less anemic - and much better armored. As fat troopers, we could get good value out of them.
In comparison to all of that, ordering new vehicles had been pretty simple, though the only ones that had started coming in were the Maxims Hover Transport from Skye and Hunters and Manticores from Hesperus - all the other factories were further out. Production of those was more limited by funds, in comparison to physical production ability - and crewing them was even easier. We might end up with a regiment or two fewer infantry by the time we were done, but frankly, I couldn’t regret that.
Their odds of surviving would be much higher.
The testing and exercises we’d done, serving as the Opposing Force for the 2nd and the 9th as they formed and started to work up, highlighted that in starkest terms. If that first series of exercises had been real, we’d have lost two thousand men to destroy barely more than a company of mechs.
We’d done the after action, and then I’d told their officers to put each and every man’s first round for the night on the company tab.
The morning after, I’d gone out and tracked down the best-regarded, most innovative workshop serving Solaris’s Class One arenas.
See, the gladiatorial games of Solaris divided their business into six classes - Class Six were utterly unlimited, everyone free to bring the best they had. Class Five was specific to assault mechs, Class Four to heavies, and so on down the line to Class One…
Which was specific to converted industrial exoskeletons. The closest thing the Inner Sphere of the day had to proper battle armor.
Eventually, a couple days after I got engaged, when the ink was drying on the final contract forming the Renaissance Development Group, Archon Katrina asked me about that.
“I’m told there’s a rumor that you’ve offered ten million C-bills to the designer who can show you a way to let an infantry trooper beat a mech,” she said.
“The sum is right, but the other details, no.” I said. “I asked one of the local hotrod shops that specializes in exoskeletons to try and see if they could combine an NBC seal and enough armor to stop a mech-mounted machine gun, once, into one of those.”
She stopped and gave me a thoughtful look… Then looked up and told her bodyguard, “Johan, I need you to put the room into security lock, and step outside, please.”
He gave me a nervous look. “Your Highness, I cannot recommend that.”
I coughed slightly. “Hauptmann, does your working kit include handcuffs?”
Katrina frowned. “There is no need whatsoever to be so discourteous to one of my guests.”
He sighed. “Yes, Your Highness,” he said, and stepped out.
Katrina gave me a skeptical look. “Handcuffs?” she asked.
“With my hands bound, you’d almost certainly be able to evade me long enough for him to ride to the rescue.” I said.
That got an amused twitch out of the corner of her mouth, but she sat back down and - I solemnly swear I am not making this up - Gendo Posed at me. “You know a lot more than you should,” she said.
Ah.
This was that conversation. Well, I knew it had to be coming. “And Helm proves it,” I agreed. “The problem is that that fact immediately raises the question of how I know, and every answer I have is either a provable lie, or completely insane.”
She waited silently, which let me tell you was a lot more intimidating than it sounds.
I took a breath to settle myself, and started. “On the night of January first, thirty-fifteen, I had… Call it a vision, though subjectively it felt more like I was living someone else’s life in the space of one night. Including reading, and reading about, books describing real history, up to that point… and after. Showing, for instance, Mount Nagayan being discovered in the late thirty-twenties, by a completely different mercenary company. The limitations are… As far as I can tell, this was a one-off,” or if it wasn’t, the precondition might end up involving another visit to the far side of thionite’s LD80, and I’d very much rather not take that kind of risk again, “there are a lot of things that I didn’t ‘read’ the details of but have only heard about, and… Well. The usual fallibilities of human memory apply.”
“You’re not a devotee of the Church of Saint Cameron, are you?” Katrina asked.
I shook my head. “Never heard of them.” I said honestly.
“Among other things, they believe that certain members of the Cameron dynasty were divinely inspired, by visions of the future,” she said. “Their evidence, and other examples… I never gave them any credence, before. But Helm wins you…”
“The benefit of the doubt?” I suggested.
“That will do as a description. From the sound of it, though, if you’ve already changed things, your… visions… won’t update to account for that,” she concluded.
“I’m fairly sure,” I agreed. “Obviously, we can make deductions based on what they reveal, but the predictive ability is going to drop off fast - more likely, already has.”
A lifted eyebrow. “Fianna?” she speculated. “Or do you mean the cache itself and the consequences of its discovery?”
“Either could,” I said, “but I’m thinking of my fuckup running my mouth around Captain Kerensky.”
She waved a hand for me to go on.
“The Wolf Dragoons - not ‘Wolf’s Dragoons’ - are the scouting party for an invasion by the successor-culture to Kerensky’s army,” I said flatly. “And thanks to my concussed stupidity, they know they’ve been blown. The consequences of that…” I stopped, and sighed. “Okay. Background.
“When Kerensky deserted, he led his followers to a small cluster of habitable worlds about a thousand light-years coreward of the Inner Sphere, and then, being an old man, died inconveniently. The Pentagon Cluster promptly fell apart into a civil war even sharper and more vicious than the First Succession War, which eventually ended when the older of Kerensky’s two surviving sons, Nicholas Kerensky, fled the fighting and raised a force of eight hundred followers to eventually defeat and subdue every other faction.
“Nicholas Kerensky was insane. He completely reorganized the Cluster’s culture into a birth-origin caste-based system that makes New Capetown seem flexible, creating Laborer, Technician, Scientist, and Warrior castes…” I paused, a thought niggling. “...And… trader, I think? There are five. He liked fives, apparently.”
I shook it off. “Not important, not really. The entire goal of the organization was to glorify eternal bloodletting among the Warrior caste, ‘honorable battle’ without end, trying to create the perfect warrior. He organized the entire cluster into twenty Clans, setting things up so that each Clan was ruled by a Khan, elected by a quorum of-” eight hundred divided by twenty is… forty, times twenty… Oh, dammit, Asha, you’re a moron. “-the eight hundred ‘best’ warriors of the Clan, who are the only ones allowed to use surnames, ‘Bloodnames’. Twenty in each ‘bloodhouse’, taking the name of one of Nicky’s original followers. They’re also the only ones in the entire schmeer who are guaranteed to have their genes used when the Scientists cook up the next generation of warriors in artificial wombs - naturally born warriors are despised as ‘freeborn’ and are second-class at best.
“When a Bloodnamed warrior dies, the slot gets filled by a single-elimination tournament among nominees selected by the other living members of the bloodhouse from among every living warrior with genes from that house. To the death, most often. They do a lot of dueling to the death. It’s the expected response when they need to fill any position, or, escalating to entire combat formations, when one clan needs or wants something from another.
“If a Clan gets too weak, or offends someone too powerful, they can be purged or absorbed - there are eighteen right now, Clan Wolverine didn’t get entirely onboard Nicky’s abomination of a culture and were all but wiped out, and Clan Widowmaker got eaten later.”
“Wolf, Wolverine, and Widowmaker,” Katrina mused. “What are the others?”
“Umm,” I said, trying to remember. “Smoke Jaguar, Jade Falcon, Ghost Bear, Snow Raven, Steel Viper, Cloud Cobra, Star Adder, Nova Cat, Diamond Shark, Snow- No, I said them. Um. Fire Mandrill. Blood Spirit. Hell’s Horses.”
I frowned, counting on my fingers.
“That’s enough to gather the theme,” Katrina said. I flushed at how amused she sounded. “So, Natasha Kerensky is a Bloodnamed descendant of Nicholas Kerensky?”
“Yes,” I said, then snapped my fingers. “Coyote, Goliath Scorpion, and Burrock. Nicky K had a younger brother, and I think that he ended up in Coyote. Anyway, the part that makes things really hard to predict is that the Clans have their own politics, and the big divide relevant to civilization is between Warden and Crusader factions. Roughly speaking, the Wardens think that when Alexander Kerensky talked about the obligation to someday return and protect the Inner sphere, he meant just that, and the Crusaders think that he was charging them to install their glorious perfection in the centers of power after putting all the ‘spheroid corruption’ to fire and sword.
“Sending the Dragoons to scout was a compromise between the factions, letting the Wardens delay the invasion the Crusaders were advocating for.”
Katrina thought fast, I had to give her that. She asked the next question directly: “How big a threat are the Clans?”
“Very,” I said. “Despite the best efforts of their leadership, they experienced a major technological renaissance during the century or so after Nicky K set up their system, and are well ahead of where the Star League was in weapon and material science fields. Energy weapons with five thirds the range of modern Spheroid production and fifty percent more damage output, missile launchers that weigh half as much, and so on. They also have access to every Warship that the SLDF took with them when they deserted. Their abomination of a social system also trains warrior children literally from the cradle, so as individual combatants they’re very capable.
“The good news, such as it is, is that deliberate erasure of records and knowledge that would conflict with Nicky K’s desired society was a feature from very early on, removing institutional knowledge, that their actual numbers are fairly small, and that their focus on dueling means that they deliberately attack targets with the smallest force they think will be practical, giving good opportunities to destroy them in detail and drastically increasing attrition even if they succeed.
“Under other circumstances, the Warden resistance to invasion would have finally failed around thirty-forty-five or so, leading to invasion in thirty-forty-eight.”
“But now the Crusaders know that they’ve been discovered,” Katrina said grimly.
I tilted one hand from side to side. “Uncertain. Clan Wolf’s rank and file are divided fairly evenly, but the high leadership that the Dragoons are reporting to, the Khan and his assistant, the saKhan, are firm Wardens, along with most of the Dragoons themselves. Original timeline, the Dragoons would have made their last report in a supply run in thirty-nineteen and been ordered to refuse all further contact and take measures to prepare the Inner Sphere for the invasion, whenever it came.”
She nodded slowly as she thought that over. “I see what you mean about uncertainties.”
I sighed. “Yeah. If Kerlin Ward keeps his mouth shut, we could have an extra ten years to prepare. Plus, whatever if any additional time we can gain by repairing or replacing the archive reader from Helm. If not…”
There was a longer-than-usual moment of silence while she thought. “What other threats can you tell me about?”
“However dirty you think Comstar is, the truth is worse,” I said. “They deliberately orchestrated the failure of the peace talks after the Second Succession War, and have done their very best to amplify and spread the Lostech phenomenon wherever possible. They also have a very substantial reserve of Star League hardware - call it five or six thousand combat units, split at the usual League rates between armor, mechs, and fighters - and… maybe forty mothballed Warships, at asteroid bases at… Dammit, I don’t remember the numbers. Ross… 248? And Luyten something. 68-78, something double-barreled like that. Both less than fifteen lightyears from Terra… And a major shipyard in one of the moonlets around the gas giant in the Odessa system.”
Katrina Steiner went very still. As well she might, hearing that something like that was within the territory of her own nation. “Odessa? You’re certain.”
“As much as I can be without outside verification. They call it the Ruins of Gabriel,” I said. “Set up by the Terran Hegemony at the dawn of the Star League as a forward base in case they had to ‘subdue’ the Commonwealth. One of the five Hidden Worlds colonized for just that purpose. Two of them are dead, I think, but Comstar also has the last two. Heraklion, in the Free Worlds League, specializes in cybernetics, and one of the dead ones was a biowarfare research center. Dunno about the others.”
She took a deep, careful breath, and let it out again. “All right. Do you have anything internal?”
“If a viper bit Aldo Lestrade, the snake would die in toxic convulsions,” I said. “But you knew that. He’s organizing and generating a separatist movement in Skye entirely as a power play, and deliberately cultivating Frederick Steiner’s ambitions for the throne with an angle to use him as a puppet, ditto. His father’s death was by patricide, motivation ditto. But I have no way to give you the evidence you’d need to prove any of it.”
She closed her eyes. “And Frederick himself?”
“Genuinely one of the best military minds of his time. Under another name, and after a religious conversion that for once did positive things to his judgement and emotional health, a major influence for the better in the thirty-fifties and on. But politically naive, under Lestrade’s slimy-ass thumb, and deeply resentful of you personally.”
Blue eyes opened again and pinned me in place. “Give me a timeline.”
“Yes, Ma’am,” I said, and took a second to organize my thoughts. “Next scheduled event is… You’d try to organize a peace conference, end the succession wars by negotiation. Marik, Kurita, Liao, all basically answer ‘submit to us and give us your daughter’. Davion’s answer is more like, ‘Probably not, but maybe we can find common ground other places?’ That leads to an alliance treaty, signed… thirty-twenty-two. Eventually, Hanse Davion and Melissa are married to create a personal union between the Commonwealth and FedSuns - the Federated Commonwealth.”
Her lips thinned unhappily.
“All indications were that the actual marriage was a happy one,” I said, “despite the age gap.”
“Why not his heir? Morgan… Hasek-Davion?”
“I’m about to speculate, since the answer wasn’t recorded, but…” I said. “First, FedSuns law is more specific about inheritance than Lyran law, at least where the throne is concerned. Morgan is the son of an illegitimate line, and if Hanse ever does have a direct child, he’ll be passed over automatically. Second, at this point, New Avalon doesn’t really know where his loyalties lie. Because his father is basically a slightly less slimy version of Lestrade. By the time it could be confirmed that Morgan didn’t know about any of his father’s plotting, and wouldn’t have stood for it, the match was set.”
Katrina sighed. “All right. Treaty of alliance in thirty-twenty-two.”
“Once that was known, Comstar organized the Concord of Kapteyn - the other three Successor States, and themselves as a ‘neutral observer’ - to act as a counterbalance, and if possible destroy the Federated Commonwealth before it could finish forming. Rather than wait for them to strike on their own favored schedule, and lose the initiative, the FedCom started the Fourth Succession War on the day Hanse and Melissa were married.”
I had to pause and shake my head, unable to keep from smiling. “Hanse called the Capellan Confederation his wedding gift to Melissa. With Max Liao in the room.”
Katrina didn’t actually snicker, but I could tell she was at least a little amused.
“The war lasted… two or three years, I think. Moderately successful on the Commonwealth’s front with the Combine, about a tie on the Combine-FedSuns front, dead quiet on the League’s part, and… Probably the only reason there was anything left of the Capellans by the end of it is that the Suns reached the limits of their logistical chains and Comstar finally found an excuse to interdict. The Black Boxes let-”
I cut off and flinched slightly as Katrina sat bolt upright, staring at me intensely. “You know about those?”
“You - personally, I mean - found the first ones while you were incognito on the Periphery,” I said. “Omnidirectional broadcast devices that seem to work like radios in hyperspace. Slower signal propagation than HPGs and much less bandwidth, but useful for military command-and-control. At some point the Combine managed to tap them for a while, but I’m not sure when or how, especially since ComStar had no clue.”
She closed her eyes and swore for fifteen seconds straight, then opened them again and made herself say, “All right. Keep going.”
“The Interdiction meant that continuing the war wasn’t economically viable, and things settled into peace. Theodore Kurita and Comstar organized a deal where Comstar provided the Combine with downteched mechs from its stores, and the Combine granted Rasalhague independence, both because Comstar’s doctrine enshrines a perpetual centrifuge effect breaking the Sphere down into smaller and smaller feuding states, and because having a neutral Rasalhague created a buffer zone that saved the Combine having to garrison the full length of both borders.
“I… think that you nearly managed to talk the Rasalhagueians into joining the Commonwealth, before Duke Kelswa-” I literally could not remember his first name “-tried to just waltz in and take over like it was a done deal and offended the hell out of them. Some of the concessions made to try and salvage that kept him pretty much permanently pissed off until the thirty fifties.”
I frowned. “...I think that that was before thirty-thirty-nine. Might’ve been right after. Speaking of, that’s when Davion decided things were stable and prepared enough to take a stab at crippling the Combine the way the Capellans had been. The Combine managed to hang on long enough to bluff him into thinking they’d recovered more than they had and convince him to back off. You’d retired and handed things over to Melissa.”
Her lips thinned, but when I looked at her curiously, she just motioned to me to go on.
“At some point during all this, you found proof that Frederick Steiner was conspiring to take the throne, and gave him the choice between prison and a forlorn hope against the Commonwealth’s enemies - and he chose the latter. Unusually, the Combine imprisoned him rather than just killing him out of hand, and he was eventually traded to Comstar - leading to that religious conversion I mentioned. The next Primus, Myndo Waterly, is a militant, she favors scaling up the Com Guards and actually using their cached hardware over sticking with intelligence and soft power like Comstar has until now, so she appoints him as the head of the Com Guards.
“When the Clan Invasion finally ends up happening, it’s bid down to four primary clans and two reserve, at three Galaxies each.”
I paused. “Umn. Clan military organization. A point is one Battlemech, two fighters or tanks, five battle-armored infantry or I think twenty-five unarmored infantry. A Star is five points, a nova is usually one star of mechs and one star of battle armor assigned to work together permanently - the troopers hanging on to the mechs to get around over long distances. A binary is two stars, or a trinary is three - supernova binary or trinary if it’s made up of novas. Cluster is… usually three to five binaries or trinaries, and might or might not have those from different arms. Galaxy is up to seven Clusters, and pretty much always combined arms at that level. Call it about seven hundred points per invading Clan? With Warship support.
“The primary invading clans are Smoke Jaguar and Jade Falcon, both hardcore Crusaders, Ghost Bear, who would switch allegiances from Crusader to Warden in the late thirty-fifties, and Wolf, as part of some kind of inter-clan political maneuvering. The reserve clans are Nova Cat and… Diamond Shark, I think.”
“Thirty-six regiments.” she said.
“With about a three-to-one ratio of superiority over what we’d call front-line troops.” I said.
She winced at the reminder.
“The invasion made it about two, three hundred light years into the Inner Sphere before Comstar realized that their primary objective was Terra and issued a challenge for a proxy battle… And stopped them, with the entire combined Com Guards under Frederick’s command.
“With Tamar, Rasalhague, and neighboring regions occupied, and a former Comstar Initiate on the throne of the Free Worlds League, a new Star League was organized as a defensive alliance, with First Lordship rotating periodically between each of the member states.”
She flinched instantly, and I nodded sadly. “In the event, it was the Liao that ended up abusing his position for the gain of just one nation, but it was inevitable that somebody would have. Davion died of a heart-attack somewhere during this period, and…”
I paused, mentally reviewed what I’d said, and pointed a finger at her. “Start getting cancer screenings, and stay on them. Well before thirty-nine.”
I couldn’t figure out what she was thinking behind the poker face. “Noted,” she said. “Keep going.”
“Your grandson, Victor Steiner-Davion, was a military man first, heavily involved in making the counteroffensive against the first Clan to be targeted go off effectively. Melissa served as his regent, until the oldest of his siblings, Katherine, assassinated her and seized power while he was unavailable. Katherine had more luck finding Commonwealth conservatives willing to listen to her, so she played on Lyran resentment of the FedSuns side of the union to create and take control of a secessionist movement. There was a fairly serious civil war, which ended with Katherine dead, Victor abdicating, and… One of their younger siblings in charge of the Federated Suns, I forget which, and the Commonwealth under… Adam? Steiner, I think? From Somerset.
“The counterattack against the Clans was deliberately designed to annihilate the most aggressive and brutal of the invading clans, the Smoke Jaguars, as an object lesson, by simultaneous assaults on their home and occupied territories. For what it was worth, it worked, and the political will for further invasions ended up broken.
“Once that had been done, the dissolution of the Second Star League and the perception of success meant that there was no more political will to finish off the rest of the Clan incursions… After the Com Guards stopped the initial waves of the invasion, there was a schism between secular and religious elements of Comstar; the former retaining Terra and the latter, under the name ‘Word of Blake’, going into exile in the Free Worlds League.
“When the Second Star League failed, the Word went fucking berserk, took Terra by surprise assault, and declared war on effectively everyone. They deployed every possible weapon against every educational and production facility they could reach - nukes, gas, bioweapons, even a yardship that they’d modified as an orbital bombardment specialist.”
“Just like the First Succession War all over again.” Katrina said.
“Just like.”
“Your distaste for Comstar makes sense in that context.” she admitted.
I sighed. “The Word was defeated, eventually, and things were starting to settle down again when… Something, agency and origin unknown, shut down all HPGs in the Inner Sphere. Just, they stopped working. Computer virus, jamming device, who knows. After that… just a morass of warring states and perpetual messes, up to at least thirty-one forty-five. I don’t know. I didn’t read those books.”
She closed her eyes and settled back in her seat, sighing. “Are you willing to talk to some of my specialists? Accept their help debriefing?”
I nodded, then, since she still wasn’t looking, said out loud, “Yes. Heimdall, preferably, but whoever you trust enough, including chemically assisted recall. The stakes are too high not too.”
Katrina - The Archon - opened her eyes and looked at me, inclining her head slightly. “Your service to the Commonwealth in this matter will be remembered.” she said formally, then shifted modes slightly, to something less overwhelming. “Do you have any good news for me? Additional caches due for discovery in the future?”
“Helm was the one I had the most information on,” I said, “That’s why I went straight for it. But yes, there are two others. A dead Hegemony world, called New Dallas, was discovered to have a data core in a militia bunker under its former capital, and a moon in the Aurigan Reach called... Axylus, I think.”
“The Aurigan Reach is…” Katrina said, obviously searching her memory for the referent.
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Argo Class DropShip
“A minor Periphery state, roughly in the area between the Capellans, Taurians, and Canopians.” I said. “Axylus has a crashed Star League dropship on it that was part of a supply run to what I think was a League black research site. The Argo should have a map of that and similar sites, and access codes for its destination - and is a Behemoth-sized vessel with an onboard gravity carousel, ideal for long-term voyages and invasion support.”
She sat, abstracted, for several seconds, then nodded. “Then I believe I know what your next contract will be, after Solaris…”
She trailed off, then blinked and asked, “Before that, though, Colonel Blackwing… Why come to me, rather than one of the other Lords?”
I took a breath and let it out. “Because Janos Marik is an old man who’s ruled by his spleen, and his realm couldn’t find its ass with both hands and a compass to help. Because Takashi Kurita and Maximilian Liao are both the products of cultures that don’t deserve to survive even if I could trust them as don’t.
“I’d have gone to Davion if I couldn’t reach you, and not hesitated. Hanse Davion is just as much a ‘Successor Lord’ as the others, with all the militancy and acquisitiveness that implies, but he has a warlord’s virtues as well as their vices. He’d do.
“But he’d never think to stage a peace conference for the entire Sphere.”
Katrina looked at me thoughtfully for a few more seconds, then nodded decisively and stood up, extending a hand across the table. “Thank you - Asha. I think that I have several different missions for you that will go better if you’re… nominally a free agent, but once those are done, if you’re willing to undertake certain oaths… I believe that the Commonwealth could use a Duchess of your abilities.”
No pressure, Ash. I extended my hand and shook. “Oaths or not, if you’ve got a course to run, Ma’am, I can give you a willing horse.”
...WHO’LL KILL THE RAGING CANCER...