Copeland Supply, Salvage, and Resale

by cliff.west

This is a spinoff story. It takes place after "But a somehow a most melancholy" and" Hunted Tribes". Please read those before this bit of work. I will not be recovering those stories, but re-reading them will help you fallow this story. This fiction also will be slow on the combat action.

71. Chapter 71 5 Oct 3051

Chapter 71

By Cliff

Beta and Clean up: Not done

Reviewed by Hotpoint and Cannonshop

5 Oct 3051

Canopus

After traveling for five weeks and covering just over 126 light years, if they had traveled in a straightish line. But most jumpships didn't travel in a straight line as they avoided stars without habitations as a general rule. The Styx didn't travel in a straight line either, but no one knew that it was because she was killing time to hide her Colonial made jump engine. Thanks to so many trips and other data, the crew on the Styx knew how long it should take to go from Point A to Point B almost down to the half day. But they would not tell anyone else this, so that they could avoid any ambushes from people that wished to do them harm.

The M/V Styx jumped into the Zenith jump point of the Canopus star system. They were within a day of what they had sent in the message to the locals, which was reference for their estimated arrival time to this jump point in this star system. It did not take the Staff on the Styx long to notice that this planet and star system were also seeing a lot more traffic than they had seen here before. It was not surprising, not after what they had seen on the last two planets, that they had stopped at on this supply run. It seemed like a tipping point of some kind had been reached for the local economy, and the now same said economy was exploding.

This was the capital planet of the whole MoC, and it was also the largest of the major manufacturing worlds for this whole area of space, on both sides of the nearby boarder. This star system was also just happened to be sitting on the only trade lines going and coming from the FWL to this whole section of space and beyond. Still there was a lot more traffic and expanded orbital support here than the last time that the M/V Styx had made a port call to this part of human occupied space. It was more data to be gathered and sent back to SLIC.

By the time that the solar sail on the Styx had been fully deployed from the back of the modified Tramp class ship. Robert's dropship command had been cleared to launch, on a preplanned route, which the jump point traffic control had sent over for the dropships to take to the life-giving planet. It was something that should have taken at least a few hours to half a day to be received from the local traffic control department. But the Styx was being treated like she was carrying some very high end VIP transports.

After reviewing the traveling data that the Styx had been sent, only a fool would just trust any data that was sent to them by a person they had never met before. That is the way that you get safety briefings and higher insurance rates. After the data was reviewed by the jumpship and dropships navigators, to make sure there were not any obvious errors. Robert ordered all three of the dropships under his command to launch to the planet, as per their plan at a set time that was close to the provided flight plan and navigation data. While they reviewed the data it was noticed that there were half a dozen MoC flagged assault dropships around the jump point. There were double that number of what were flagged by the command centers on the three dropships and jumpship, as being gunboats moving around this one jump point.

The small craft were like the DragonStars that Copeland and his people had run into before, and it was little surprise that these were based on that old design. They were different enough that a few military focused people, within and outside the MoC had argue that it was justified to give them a new name. But the targeting computers on these dropships of Copeland's only showed them as possible DragonStars. So maybe it was that they were not different enough for the silicon brain to agree with the biomatter carried by the metal hulls. The only thing that both types of brains could agree on was that there were a lot of them at this jump point, and at the jump point on the other side of the star. Gravitational lensing effect was a very useful technique for people with powerful computers, good optics, and a mental bend that liked to do a little spying.

Jules was making sure to get as much raw and even computer processed data as he could, while Robert and all of the dropships were off on the planet closer to the star than he was. The Styx was not a spy ship, in the truest since of being a Star League age Spy Ship. She was all so much more than that. Enough more. That everyone in ComStar would have had to change their underwear, if they found out about what the Styx could do in her current configuration and crew manning. Well, that are they would start throwing around cans of instant sunshine.

If the SLiE could ever find some of the lost Pueblos class dropships or even some of the old Bug Eyes class spy/warship used by the original SLIC from before the Exodus. It would have been a nice boon for the SLDF after some refitting, but even without those very rare Intel gathering assets to call on for support. ComStar would lose any electronic counterintelligence war against the SLiE, even if the robes had access to both classes of ship. That was not counting the SLS Nike and her not so little additions she knew about to throw into that kind of game. The jury was still out on how ComStar would stand against the SLiE in the other core types of Intelligence warfare. So far, they had not proven that effective in large ship combat in "The Black."

######

The M/V Styx had not been inspected or even asked to pay any fees when she came to the capital system of the MoC. They had just sent the normal greetings and radio checks from the nearby recharge station/local traffic control after the traffic control had passed them the flight plan. The jumpship's crew had quickly settled into a pattern, but they would not drop their guard while they waited at the jump point for Robert and the other dropships to return. While they waited? The Styx sucked up every bit of data that they possibly could, all while they waited for Copeland to return to this jump point.

The Styx and her crew had a lot to keep an eye on at this jump point. There was a lot of traffic at this jump point and what the speed of light delay gave Styx from the other jump point thanks to gravitational lensing of the local star. They also could read the mail coming and going through the ComStar run HPG station. But the largest and most interesting boon that the Styx was about to collect on, was that they could see the rebuilt and now slowly expanding Diamond shipyard. That still growing business was in the same jump point as the Styx. That facility was not up to what it had been before the SLDF Navy had fired into it centuries ago, and then what the Star League government had done to it over the following years. That kind of damage would take a decade of focused attention to fix, and maybe not even then.

From the Styx's location, they could see three merchant class jumpships currently being built at the shipyard. And another jumpship hull of some kind had started being built on a 4th building slip. That one new hull was so new into construction, that you could not tell what it was going to be when complete. It was a good bet that it was going to be another merchant class jumpship that was being built, but right now it was just some metal floating in the same general area of a building slip. The Intel team were able to find out with their data mining, that the Diamond shipyard had launched a Merchant class jumpship a few months ago on the open local information network.

What also was drawing a lot of attention, and not just from Jules and his crew on the Styx? It was the other construction going on at this jump point. There was a very much longer slip being both repaired and working, along with another slip that was being worked on that was a little longer than the ones making the Merchants class jumpships. The longest of the two still repairing slips was almost twice the active length of the longest of the other active slips of the shipyard. All of the repairing slips were not as wide as could be used to build something like a "real" warship, but the largest was long enough to make any jumpship that the SLIC trained people on the Styx could think of.

Then there was the matched pair of recharge stations and Bastion defense station at each jump point. What they could not see, was the three other Bastions stations, and a dozen other bases that supported aerospace fighters, carrier dropships, and assault dropships that called this star system home. These were the defenses worthy of a capital world for an interstellar political unit. But new ones like these had not been seen since the start of the 3rd SW.

#######

The three dropships under Robert's command only had to wait in a holding pattern very high above the planet for room to be made for his three dropships to land at the main drop port on the planet. The three dropships were getting the royal treatment from the locals, while they sat in orbit, mostly it was in the form of a note that was posted to all units in orbit. It said that they were not to approach Robert's three craft any closer than 1,000 kilometers or they were at risk of being fired on by local defensive units. That note had not mentioned, what Robert's weapons would do to anyone that got that close to them in the first place.

It was a very low stress time for most of the crew on those three dropships, but not for all of them. Jess, Robert, and Lora were not able to just sit in their cabins on the five-day journey from the jump point to the planet and bank up some sleep for when they hit the ground. Instead, they were making contacts on the planet to move "the plan" along and they didn't have much time to waste sitting on their thumbs waiting. The speed of light transmission delays be damn.

Things were starting to slowly move forward, and they could not afford to just do things while on the jumpship or using the HPG on the planets. The Radio even in data burst mode had a major time lag and other communication issues. But it was one that everyone in the Inner Sphere was used to having to deal with, and any complaining about it would have drawn too much attention to them in a very bad way.

On the start of their last day in orbit a message was sent directly to Robert. It was not a long message, and it was not in any code that anyone on the Lion Class dropship called Bad Kitty could recognize. It was just transmitted to them like any other message that the local traffic control would have sent to them, only it had a very different header. That was why they had run it through the decoding routine. Robert had read the message half a dozen times, and that didn't change a single word between the readings. How dare it not do that?

The hard copy printout of the message still just said that Magestrix Emma Centrella wanted to have a meeting with Robert. It would be with one of her representatives, and "other interested parties" that were not listed in the message. But it was clearly stated, in diplomatic talk, that it would not be the Magestrix attending this meeting. But it would be with people that spoke for her, and that should be as rare as hen's teeth. So, Robert would not be meeting the woman herself, but she was going to be involved in whatever came of that meeting in some way. This was higher profile than anyone on a supply mission really wanted to be, but by now the times had changed. This level of a meeting now was required for Robert to do his job.

Robert had finally sent a message down to the city called Crimson, which said he was willing to have a meeting with the MoC leader or that leader's designated representatives. After that message was sent, his staff and hers could take care of the finer details for this meeting. Robert was more of a brute force and a face to face meeting kind of person, than he was having to do a lot of dancing around the finer points that setting up this meeting would require. Robert had a set list of rules for this mission and his staff knew them, along with the rules that had been set down by SLIC that were less widely known about by the rest of the crewmembers. There were two people on the dropships that loved doing this kind of thing, and it had been dropped into her and his laps to do this coordination. They had sat through the many training events to get them up to speed on all of the rules. That they had been selected for this mission and job of protocol was listed as their secondary duties was just good planning. It was surprising what you can learn from reading a few post mission debriefings.

The two different staffs worked out, that three full days after landing at a city called Crimson, there was to be a VIP meeting held on the Hercules. Just before the three dropships had started down toward the planet. Two new jumpships arrived in a star system that seemed to have new jumpships arriving at the jump points every day. Now having two medium sized jumpships arrive on the same day and at the same jump point was a rare event, but it still was not an unheard of event for this traffic control department to have to deal with.

#######

A message sent from the Styx had been sent to the local traffic control, which said that these two jumpships were known to them, even if they were a little late in getting here. That short message had smoothed out any issues for the two jumpships that had arrived like they had. It would seem that one of the two Invaders class jumpships had some minor jump engine issues, which had delayed both of them by over three weeks in getting to the capital world of the MoC.

Because those two jumpships had not been fitted with an HPG or TacFax systems. They had not been able to alert the convoy commander about the engine issues, or about how that event would affect their mission travel timeline. Oh, and they had been traveling in star systems that held no known population, much less a planet with enough people that it would have had access to a ComStar run HPG. Robert had decided that he was not going to start worrying about the two missing jumpships, at least not until after he had landed on the planet for a day or two. With the two jumpships now here. This relieved some of the stress of not seeing the beacons of the Heckle and or Jeckle at the expected location when the Styx had arrived here. For what anyone knew when the Styx had arrived, the ships had already found new homes and the IFF's had been changed.

As soon as the three dropships were down on the ground, and all of the digital paperwork was done to the local's satisfaction. Things were moving at a fast pace to get the dropships ready to relaunch if something when sideways in the near future. In this day and age even a capital planet could be raided, attacked, or invaded without notice. First the great fuel and power supply lines were remotely attached to the three dropships from the complex landing cradles they had landed on. This had proven to be a little harder to happen on the modified Leopard class carrier than the locals had expected.

It was nothing that a little elbow grease and the use of some colorful four letter words were needed to get the job done. The local's duty crew manning the newly repaired remote arms at the drop port only had been ready to handle a "normal" Leopard, and not a modified leopard CV. MIM would be told about this, but with so many different groups making Leopard class dropships over the last few hundred years. This was not an unheard-of issue for the drop port to have to handle. Just a few decades ago, the CC had started making Leopard class dropships with some new diameter couplings, and they were on the opposite side of the craft than had been the SLDF standard. So, it was not uncommon to have these kinds of issues, and the data was soon lost in the database shuffle. It was just another day that ended in Y.

#######

When the first passenger hatch had opened on Robert's dropships, the ground teams on the two of the three dropships went into action at the run with military high precision. Not all of the dropship's crewmembers were staying on the drop port or even in the nearby city when they were cleared to leave the dropships. Jess and Lora would be spending almost as much time in the air flying around the planet on a chartered craft, as they did on the ground in total. They were flying around to all of the different sites spread around the planet that the two of them had found in their data diving, which had been done on the trip from the jump point to the planet.

When the pair of women were back on the drop port for any extended length of time. It was at the end of Day Two or early on Day Three, if you were awake to greet them. That also was when the women were ready to brief the mission commander on what the pair of them had found in their globetrotting travels on this planet. The crew had no idea who was more jet lagged, the women, or the team that had been their escorts during their travels over this planet. At least the two women could sleep on the flights or in the hover cars.

This meeting was held on the Bad Kitty and in one of the extra rooms that would have supported the second infantry platoon that she was not currently carrying. This briefing room was the smallest of that type of room, which had been set up between the two main dropships. The Hobgoblin was just too small to have a dedicated room like this. That small size might have been the reason that Robert like this briefing room the most. Well, that it was small, and it had the best communication and weapons capabilities of the two primary contact dropships. You know the little things in life that make living easier and slightly less stressful for those moving through it.

Robert had to shake his head to get himself back to focusing on this mission, before Lora started to brief the small room. He was helped along to keep up with the briefing by a thick packet of advertising brochures that had been place near his seat. He started to flip threw a few of those brochures, when the woman started talking and going over things that he knew already. Then that changed, and Robert was back to focusing on the standing woman.

"Sir! We have cut down the list of resorts that fit our needs to those few businesses. Jess has checked them out, and I have checked out others that we removed from the list just to make sure we didn't miss a golden nugget. The ones that are left are the ones that we both independently selected." She stopped talking for a second, and she displayed a new slide that had four images to represent each of the four finalists. "We both think that the one near Astarte is the best fit for all mission requirements."

#########

The Canopus system and especially the habitable world had been a mineral rich world, which had few peers when it was first founded as a colony planet before the founding of the Star League. But over the centuries it had been systematically stripped mined of a lot of those mineral resources. Those resources were needed to feed the factories on this planet. Then it was used to feed a dozen other planets that also used them to feed their factory's appetites. This increased again when the Star League invaded them, and then later some of the House Lords joined in before the Exodus of the SLDF. Things had not gotten that much better when the House Lords had become more focused on each other than the small political groups on the edge of their space.

All of that had not been good for the planet and the continent of Salonika in particular. Many of the locals were surprised that things got only worse after the Star League fell, and soon they had declined below the worse days of the Star League backed exploitation of this system. By the time of the end of the 2nd Secession War, things had stopped sliding downward so fast. And in some cases? It had started to improve for the locals. But that was only because there were less factories that needed to be fed by those mines due to battle and other war damages. Kind of like lack of the needed spare parts for normal wear and tear. Then there was the issue of the mining equipment breaking down, and also not having a source of repair parts to fix them.

That had started to change a few times over the last hundred years for the planet. But nothing had been able to fix the core issues, and as always to soon the money would run out that was needed to repair the damage of past exploitation. Lately the local government had been investing more than just a little of the new funds supplied from the taxes and other revenues recovered due to the growing economic power of the MoC. Besides paying for rebuilding defenses, they were going into repairing the worst of the past damage done to the planet.

This new recovery plan had only just started a few years ago, and it would take many more years and huge buckets of money, if it was ever going to be completed this time. About the only thing that could be said, was that they were making progress in this current round of land and water reclamation. And the recovery effort was building on past progress along with the lessons learned from their way too many past failures. Why reinvent the wheel, just because you have a young looking face, and that thinks that you know better than the elders who had done that type of work for decades. New ideas are one thing, but only if they were new ideas and not just a bad idea reborn into a younger generation.

In 3030, the current Magestrix had ordered that any new or active mines would have to put funds into an escrow account or be closed down. The account would be of a size to be used to return the land to its original state when the mines had closed, or when the miners moved to a new vein of ores. That "original state" would be as declared by the Magestrix herself. The Magestrix had hoped that this would cut down on any fraud, because any missing funds would come out of her pocket to fix the land.

When Magestrix Emma Centrella came to power? She was just thankful that more ores were coming from off planet sources to feed the slowly growing number and sizes of the factories in operation on the planet. It was a matter of cost that was driving the change of the sources of supply. Still not all of the ores were coming from off planet, but as more jumpships were coming back online more ores could be landed instead of mined from the increasingly costly local ores.

Most of those fits and starts of recovery had been mainly focused on the continent of Salonika to work on areas that could be fixed the fastest. With the additional money now starting up another round of environmental cleaning of damage from during the Star League for land reclamation on the planet. It was also mixed in with the MoC's well known entertainment zones. All of these points were going to be coming into play with Robert's plan.

########

This small group in the Bad Kitty talked about each of the final four sites that the two women had reduced the long list to after a lot of mental sweat. Robert even asked about a few of the other sites seemingly at random. He wanted just to make sure that he had everything straight in his head and in his notes. After about half an hour, the whole room was back to their primary pick, and most in the room had agreed with the two women or didn't have a dog in this fight.

Robert sat back, and deeper into the overstuff chair, it was time for him to earn his pay. "Okay, it's only a short hop from the city of Crimson's main drop port to there. There are three larger sized traffic hubs on that continent alone. That property already has a small space port, and a small atmospheric craft handling field on it. Even if they are both a little weather beaten, both are not currently active or even ready for heavy use. The property has also restricted land based public access to anyone else on that continent, unless you use those small fields. Or have access to a large VTOL, or something along those lines. Also on the plus side is that we do not need to buy it, if we don't want to. Then there is the fact that this land is not open for public or private use, and it has not been open for the last five years. So, a long term lease can be put on the table, just so that the owners can pay the taxes on the land while they keep looking for a Mr. Money bags."

Robert stopped talking and he drummed his fingers on the desktop and gave the women a level look. He knew that he had thrown out a land mine with the last part, but he was the one on the blame line. "Are you sure, that this place can do what needs to be done. You know, to get it ready for our uses?"

Lora lifted her chin at what she felt was a rebuke to all of the hard work that she had done. "The property has had a soft opening, but they have had an issue overcoming the idea of people willing to pay to take a vacation to an old strip mine. They shut down after that single try and set it up for long term storage. They have some skill doing that kind of thing, thanks to how wars in the other parts of the Inner Sphere can affect the tourist trade at random times and out of the blue. This area was also where the newest round of recovery efforts was launched by the Local government after the facilities were put in long term storage."

Lora saw the look coming from Jess, and Lora got her tone back under control. "They can house, in comfort, between 500 and 750 people depending on the levels of amenities that are required by the clientele. It will cost about 5 million C-Bills a year in operations cost as it currently sits. That is without updating any of the current amenities or redesigning for larger or smaller rooms to adjust its occupancy amounts. From what I have found? It would cost us about 50 million to buy the place outright, and that would not count the cost of manning, maintaining, and supplying the resort."

"To lease the resort will still cost the 5 million a year for operations, but with an additional cost of 15 million a year in rent along with another 15 million more needing to be kept in a nonrefundable escrow account in a local bank. This is to cover any damages and the cost of reverting to "core state" of the resort after the terms of the lease are up. We also would not be able to "fully utilize" the property without getting preapproval by the lease holders. I think buying the Resort and doing what we need to, and then selling it or wrecking it to cover "our" tracks is the best plan. Jess was concerned about post mission security if we lease the property, and then there are the legal loopholes it will expose us to during operations that we are planning on."

Robert made a sour face, and he mentally kicked himself. He had not looked that closely at the raw and base numbers, and that was not normal for him. Now that Lora had rubbed his nose in the data. Robert had felt dumb and at the same time remembered that she had been a factor for years and had been in this type of business from birth. "So, if we run this operation for 3 years it would just be better all the way around to buy the land. I don't know if we will be here that long, but I could see 2 years without breaking a sweat."

Robert stopped talking and his mind bent the data every way that he could think of. He saw a few potholes, but nothing major. "Get with Jess and see if she knows the right format to make the accountants back home happyish. You know that there is no way of making them really happy. Do we know what all we will be getting for our money?"

Now Lora smiled a smile that made Robert want to facepalm, but she just spoke in a level tone. It was one of those tones' that teachers have used for centuries when dealing with certain types of students. "If we go for outright purchasing the property? We will need to have a full inventory done on the land and the facilities. If only to make sure that the property lines are correct, and we don't have any encroachment issues or being swindled by some of the locals. We know that this one property even has a few large Warehouses already on the land that are underutilized at the moment. We think that they had been originally used when the resort was being first built to protect the equipment and supplies. We think that they would be easily converted to other uses."

"What is the catch," asked Robert?

Lora was stunned for a full two seconds. "Why are we getting a deal, if we outright buy it? As you picked up on, the public rumor has it that she has some tax issues. But we found out that the owner just wants to pay off the loan and make a little extra on the back end. The other rumor has it, that they want to just wash their hands of the place. I think this is more of a tax write off for her, at least now that it will not be the golden goose she was first looking for. But this land is about to expire that tax break coverage unless the land finds a new owner. We can even use the already made advertisement sets for this property. I made sure that this caveat was in the draft contracts we sent. All we would need to do is replace the background music with the recall sound tracks."

Lora looked over to Jess, who only gave the other woman a slight head nod. "We would not even need to change the name of the place, if we don't want to. I think that we should keep it as is, and it is one less change to have to deal with. Think of it as an added layer of insolation between Copeland Supply Salvage and Resale and these families. This will cause us to deviate from the original plan approved by SLIC by more than a little bit. Now we can just use the old adverts to get people coming this way, and that would speed up the process and it saves us some capital along the way. Managing the reservation's desk this soon will be an issue, but it is nothing that cannot be handled with a little work. This resort has two hotel wings around a common core of the main facility. So, we can move anyone that is not part of the families to the side that is the farthest away from our people. If we have a large serge of families showing up? We will have an overflow area readymade to receive them without an issue."

Robert looked from Jess to Lora and then back to Jess, and he let his surprise show on his face. These were members of his people and not strangers to be protecting against, so he didn't use his work face to hide behind. Jess gave Robert a small nod of her head. That was all Robert needed to know that his mission's security and intelligence person was going on record about being on board with this idea as it had been briefed to him tonight.

Robert looked back to Lora and gave a smile. "Okay, then run with it as you want. More to the point. Jess and Lora, you both run with it. Get the word out to our people that they can come home. Lora, have you picked out an office yet?"

Lora had a sly smile pop onto her face, and she dropped her chin a little. "I have two, which I am looking at very closely. One I think is going to be at the Crimson's main drop port, but the main office should be at the Resort itself on the Salonika continent. Kimberly Jay is looking at "leaving" her post in a few weeks to take up a "new" career path. She still will be working with SAFE. But she is reporting that she is reaching burn out and needs a lower stress job for a while, and this is the perfect opportunity for this change of pace." What was not said, was that it was expected that SAFE would keep trying to work her. But also, that Kimberly and Jess had plans that were in place to help direct the Intel services of the FWL into what the SLiE wanted them to know.

##########

Robert had to smile, and they worked out a few more details for the rest of the meeting. One was setting up a bank account and moving enough funds into it for the operations of this Resort. The money should also cover some of the surprise expenses that might come up while he was out of contact with them. Jess had made sure that Lora knew to set up a special place for any teams of SLIC agents that more than likely would be on the way to Canopus already from New Circe.

If this Resort became a long term prospect, those SLIC teams were going to be a guarantee fact of life to have to deal with and provide at least some tacit support to. It was always better to have a plan than to have to come up with something on the fly. Working on the fly tended to lead to mistakes, and that was something that the SLiE could ill afford. They also were going to have to deal with intelligence agents from the other powers trying to get rooms at this resort in the near future. Only the general public would not know that Copeland was connected to this Resort. Anyone with enough money or connections would be able to find out who paid for this land in a timeline best measured in a few months instead of a few years.

Robert was both happy and surprised at the pace that this project was now moving. In the safety of his own mind. He had secretly thought that it would be between three and five months before they were ready to send the first contact message out to the rest of the Inner Sphere. The advertisements for local space would have gone out sooner, but not that much sooner than the ones for the rest of the Inner Sphere. Now this had all changed, and it was almost time to cast the first stone that might just start an Inner Sphere wide avalanche of a size that no one could even hazard a guess at no matter how hard they looked at this plan. Robert hesitated for only a few heartbeats before he gave the final clearance for that stone to be thrown.

########

Robert was in his office on the Mammoth class dropship an hour before his strange meeting was scheduled to start under the name of Magestrix Emma Centrella. The only thing that Robert knew was that it would not be the Magestrix herself coming to see him on "his" dropship. Robert had a live feed from one of the security cameras around the dropship pumped into this room as he waited. Robert still had no idea who he was going to be having a meeting with, much less knowing about what they might want to cover while "they" talked to him.

Both of those were issues, which he didn't like to have to deal with, at least not without doing a lot of prepping for it. Though he might not like having to deal with those types of issues, he could handle them. At worst, he could always have a second meeting to relook at any issues or have them come back to clarify any facts that might have been "forgotten" from the first meeting. He just thought that as a way of doing business, that this way of working was not as efficient as it should be. Jess was less inclined to remain in the dark, and all of her information requests sent to some of their local friends had come up dry as a bone. This lack of data had not made Jess a happy person, and she became more and more moody as the time of the meeting approached. The high of finding the "right" property to support the Resort idea had quickly worn off of her as the stress of the unknowable part of the meeting came crashing down around her ears.

Ten minutes before the meeting was to start, movement on a screen brought Robert's head towards the display. A single nondescript wheeled sedan had come to a stop outside of the dropship. It was not far from the unneeded flame warning line, which was still required on all drop ports for as long as there had been dropships. Now that line had turned into more than just a safety marker for the plasma throwing engines, but now it was also warning of possible weapons fire from the dropship if you were not a known friend. That kind of thing tends to happen when most of your whole race has been at war with each other almost every day for the last few hundred years.

The nondescript sedan had smoothly parked next to a large food truck that was serving his crews their hot meals today in something that they had called TexMex fusion. Robert had not enjoyed his serving of something called chorizo eggs with habanero jellybeans this morning. Having pain with his morning food was just not his thing. And who the frakk makes spicy hot candy to serve with your breakfast?

The woman that had exited the car was as nondescript as the sedan that had carried her to this location on the drop port. Your eyes almost wanted to move away and to look at something else that was not so dull. It was almost like your brain was hardwired to do this. Besides there were a lot of things happening on a drop port every second to draw your eye and mind.

Robert's eyes floated away from the image of the woman without him thinking about it for what might have been the third time after her exit from the transport. Then his eyes flew back to her like someone had just flashed him some bare skin during the heart of the winter on New Circe. He sent a quick and short digital message for Jess to get over to his briefing room, and not to spare the gas in getting her over to the Hercules. She was over on the Bad Kitty still working with Lora on setting up operations for the Resort and Recall project. Robert watched the plain woman get a drink from the food truck before walking over to a tall guard that protected the open cargo hatch into the Mammoth class dropship. Every step she made; Robert had to fight to keep his eyes focused on her.

When the woman entered the grounded cargo ship. Jess was just coming into view on the outside cameras of the Hercules. She was using some kind of single person two small wheeled transport that had a tiller like device running from the deck she was standing on to her hands. Robert had never seen the like of it before now. Robert had no idea if it was drawn from the ship's equipment lockers or rented from a local shop of some kind. He didn't care, as long as she hurried up and got to this meeting room.

Robert was still looking at the image of Jess flying across the ferocrete when there was a knock on the metal hatch to this room. Robert quickly did the math and he worked out how long he was going to have to delay this person until his backup made her appearance. He had a feeling that he was going to need a second set of eyes, ears, and brain when dealing with this person. This person was a spy, and a very good one at that, if Robert's feelings were right. He feared that he had just been promoted into the big leagues, and Robert didn't know if he was ready for that particular call up.

"Enter!" This was the one word command that Robert gave to the metal hatch in as board a tone as he could muster but loud enough to do the job. Then the plain looking and dressed woman entered the office and briefing room combination. She moved like a wraith out of some kind of novel made into flesh and clothes.

"Yep, Robert you are in the deep end now,' thought Robert.

Robert was forcing himself to keep his eyes locked onto the woman as she took every step into and threw the far part of the room. He now was very much aware of how much he wanted to look away from her. The feeling was even worse than it had been just watching her on the video feed. She was very forgettable, that is until you got a good look at her eyes. You could only see them when she returned your gaze, and they were sharp eyes. The word Spy was being screamed into the grey matter between Robert's ears like a school bus filled with half a hundred preschoolers on their way to visiting an ice cream shop.

If Robert had not spent years working with SLIC and a few decades of his own father's training? He would not know what to call her other than the right hand of the Grim Reaper. When she spoke for the first time? Her voice was clear, and it had an odd accent to Robert's ears. It still was not something that would stick out in your mind, and he would bet that you would forget about the accent she was using as soon as she was a few feet away from you. This was something that could only be done with training, lots of it, and very good training on top of all that. The training that it took to make this person, also was very expensive and with few successful graduates from that school.

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"Commodore Copeland! Thank you for agreeing to this meeting. I understand this is not something that you are used to having to deal with in your travels."

The woman pulled the light colored hood back off of her head to fully expose her hair and face for the first time. It revealed a face and hair that could only be remarkable as…..being forgettable. She was the perfect wallflower, and one part of Robert's mind wanted to make sure his wallet and sidearm were still in place when this woman left the room.

Robert rose from his chair, and he started to make mental notes on the woman as fast as he mentally could, and he fell back onto some very old training. "I always have time, when the leader of the MoC wants me to have a meeting with someone. I must say, you have me at a disadvantage about names. It would also seem that the rest of the attendees that I had planned to be at this meeting are a little late. Or are they just not coming today?" Robert had done both a little head twist and tilt to let the woman know that he was not fishing but making a statement.

Robert had not offered his hand to this woman, which was common practice on this planet. He only gave her a shallow bow, one that the woman had returned in perfect measure. It was something like a person from the Combine would know how to do almost from birth. It was the only slip that Robert could see in her trade craft, but still, it did not tell Robert much. So maybe it was not a slip after all. The returned bow could be an attempt to throw Robert or anyone else off of their game by thinking that they knew something hidden, that in fact was just another misdirection.

The woman took a seat, and she had a knowing smile on her face that did not reach her eyes. "My name is Virginia Hall, and I am the only one that is coming to this meeting from my side of things. I must say that it took some effort to convince the locals to set up this meeting for me. For such a small and unknown company without known high level connections to the local government, nor any other known government for that matter? There are some very powerful people on this planet who did not want to upset you in any way, shape, or form. In my line of work, Mr. Copeland? That is unusual….in the extreme."

Before Robert could say anything more, a slightly out of breath Jess entered the room behind the first woman that might or might not be really named Virginia Hall. Miss Hall, for her part, only turned to see the intruder. "Oh, now that your Intelligence officer is here. I think we can start, don't you?" Virginia turned back to face Robert with a very plain look on her face, but there was now a little sparkle in her plain brown eyes that did not bode well for Robert. One part of Robert's mind noted that Virginia was wearing contacts of some kind to hide her true eyes.

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"Commodore Copeland, I am about to tell you something that will be a surprise for you. In fact, it will be a surprise to most people on this side of the Inner Sphere." With a sly smile she continued talking. "You have been on my employer's watch list for some time now. I think that it was after the second attack on your people, which we were able to track back to a group that my employer also has a long list of issues with." She was referring to the attack that Robert had redirected to land on MMM instead of his own head.

She waved her hand in the air off to one side. "Now, some of that is speculation on my part. But as I think you both know, someone in my line of work is never told the whole story by those in leadership positions over us."

Jess looked around to both of them. Then she fired off the first set of questions that popped into her head. "So, who do you work for? And why are you here?"

Jess had thought that this woman might be MMM, MiM or a major player in the FWL's SAFE, but something in her mind said that she was way off point with those guesses. She just did not know how far off of the point that she might be, and that made her very nervous. Now this made Jess really frakking nervous, like the last bottle of grain spirits in Saul Tighs sights before he had known that he was a Cylon level of nervous.

Virginia gave a slight wave of her hand in the air like she was being bothered by a fly. "The first one is complicated. As for the second?... I work with one of the major buyers for the Bear Slayers type of improved ER PPC and the Royal Flush ER PPC, that MMM has been making as fast as they can."

Virginia stopped talking for maybe half a second. "And that is an odd name you selected for that amazing weapon; don't you think? It is well off of the "normal" naming convention that MMM has used for the last hundred years in their R and D departments. I was sent here from my old office in the FWL very suddenly. It was when the specs of those weapons were released to the public in the first wave of advertisements from the public relations and sales department of MMM." She was being careful with what she had said, and so far, she had not said one lie. It just happened that she was not telling the whole truth or letting out one bit of information that she didn't want to at this time. She was very well trained in this type of work.

Virginia gave a soft chuckle that sounded like music, and at the same time sounded downright flat to Robert and Jess's ears. It was just like as a will trained fake would sound to those that also had the right training to pick out those fakes. "When I was given my new orders. I had at first thought that maybe my boss had thought that I was the least useful person on the team, and that I could be taken off tasks for a few months without any major impact on the overall missions we were running. Then I started to do some checking on things." Checking about why you were doing something was almost as important as doing this type of mission in the first place. Knowing why, will let you catch that golden nugget that might otherwise slip through your Intel net.

She leaned forward to show emphasis on her next words. "And that was when I first found your name in some very odd places. I spent a lot of time looking into you and your company after the first alert and me getting new orders. It was not cheap and I was talked to….a few times about the funds I was spending looking into you, your company, and the actions you have been involved with going back to when you first showed up in this part of space."

Robert let his hand move under his desk, and he even felt a smile come to his face. It was a pure working look, and it was meant to be noticed as such. All so that the other person did not notice that one hand was now out of their view. "Oh?...And just what did you find out about me, Virginia Hall? I take it you found out that I was selling a few used old Star league weapons, some computers, and the odd jumpship or dropship. I wouldn't think what you did find, would be that different than what half a dozen other small companies like mine are doing on this edge of space. It is kind of how things work out here for the last few hundred years."

Virginia did not smile, and she slowly reached into a small leather folder that held a noteputor and some lose pages. It also just happened to be too small to carry any type of ranged weapons. Well outside of a small throwing knife made of a type of organic plastic and hair that was hidden between two pieces of the thin leather. It was there if she needed a little last ditch help. "Before I say more. I would like to ask you what you think about this."

She slides a folded sheet of paper over to Copeland, and she waited to see what was going to happen next. It was kind of like waiting for what was going to happen when a block of sodium meets a glass of water for the first time. You both wanted something to happen, and you also at the same time wanted not too much to happen. Yea, Catch 22 in its most bare form.

Robert raised an eyebrow as he reached over his desk for the paper with one hand. When he flipped open the sheet at the fold line, he notices that it held only a pair of good sized color images. Then his face becomes frozen as he "saw" the images for the first time. The top image, that took half the page, had an image that was a complex polygon shape that he knew as well as the numbers in gold that said 331. The lower image was dominated by an X made by four claws and the side profile of an animal few had seen this side of Earth, or the staff in a very large Zoo would know about. It was the image of a Wolverine, and it was exactly the same image that was used to mark a clan. Or more to the point, it was the image that marked Clan Wolverine as being separate from the rest of the Clans.

Virginia also kept her face still, but she had seen the slight reaction of Robert to those pair of simple images. She had thought that one out of any of maybe a thousand other people would have seen the little movement at the corner of Robert's eyes. She had thought that Robert would have to be good to do, what she thought he was doing in this part of the Inner Sphere. She had just won a major bet with herself, well actually two bets. One was that Robert knew these images, and he was very good at this kind of game that Virginia liked to play. She also knew that she needed to put another one of her cards on the table, or she might not live to exit this dropship.

She had noticed the hand drop out of sight earlier in the meeting, and she thought it might be aiming a weapon at her mid chest. This was called getting a Greedo for some reason in her line of work. Having a weapon covertly pointed at her was not something new for her to deal with. It was not that she liked it, but she could deal with the idea of the threat without it effecting her work. But only as long as she was not shot from under the tabletop.

With a level voice she played her next card in this high stakes game. "I am with Wolf Net, and as I am sure you know. We are the intelligence section for the Wolf's Dragoons Mercenary Command. And after the meeting with all of the leaders of the Great Houses, it was released first to them and then later to the whole Inner Sphere. That we had last been part of the clans over two decades ago." She was not going to go into a lot more detail about everything that the Dragoons have been doing for the clans. She might need those information cards for a later game with Copeland.

Robert kept his face very still and he passed over the now refolded page to Jess with a hand motion for her to come over and pick the page up. He was not wanting to stand up and possibly expose the needler pistol in his other hand. Jess had enough warning that something was up to not let the image visibly impact her. Her total lack of reaction also said a lot that could be useful for those that knew what to be looking for.

Jess looked back to Robert, and she re folded the page and then she casually passed it back to the other woman. This last action seemed to throw off Virginia a little in her game plan. She expected the images to be thrown face up on the desk, or maybe face down, and she would have to expose herself to attack when she reached for the page. Or it could be that the page would remain on that desk if an attack was not launched, acting as a kind of focal point for the rest of the meeting. Sometimes it is the little things that can distract you when they don't happen according to your well thought out plans. Handing the page back offered not one advantage to Copeland. Why would he give up any advantage at a time like this?

As the Wolf Net agent put the sheet of paper with the pair of images away from where she had pulled them out of her package of surprises. She needed to buy a little time, and she decides that she might need to rehash some data. "If you have been doing any data mining about the current situation in the Inner Sphere? Then you would know that the Wolf's Dragoon's were sent to the Inner Sphere as a scouting force for the clans. You also would quickly find out that Colonel Wolf has decided that we are supporting the Inner Sphere in the fights against the Clans."

Robert could not help but rock back into his high back chair, but his pistol didn't move a millimeter. His mind was racing, and he felt that he needed to buy some time of his own to think about his next few moves. None of his counter plans had covered dealing with a spy from the scouting forces of the Clans. Or maybe he should think of them as the ex-scouting forces for the Clans now. "We have been gone for some time after our last trip this way, and we have not had that much free time to catch up on all of the news from that far away."

Now Virginia had on a slight smile knowing that the man was still recovering from her actions, and she was back on her own game. "In January of 3051 leaders from all of the Major Houses were gathered on Outreach. In those meetings they were told about the true history of the Dragoons and what happened after the SLDF had left on The Exodus from this part of space."

She had no idea how much was covered in those meetings, and she was not going to go into those details that she knew. "Now the whole clan front has been quiet for almost a year. There was a battle, in space. And it was reported that a lone FRR fighter crashed into the flagship killing what they called the ilKhan. This forced the invading clans to have to go back to their part of space to elect a new leader. But when they will return, and they will return. That is of little doubt, only the time of their return is in question. I will not bother with covering the betting pool about the time of their return to our part of the Inner Sphere. That might take some of the fun out of it, but if you want to toss in a few C-Bills of your own into the pot. I'm sure that I can get you some good odds."

Jess leaned forward and let her face come to a point, like she had bitten into a lemon. "So, they were able to stop this invasion? They just didn't pull back because of the lack of supplies or something. That does not seem possible, with our last news pull we got out of ComStar we were able to read." Jess was not going to let this woman know that, what was left of Clan Wolverine knew about this information she was giving them for months now.

Virginia let her nose wrinkle and she decided to give a little history lesson. She thought that she might need to do this any way, just not this early. As far as she knew. They had only been back in contact with the Inner Sphere for maybe two months. She knew that there were only two ways that information could be passed across the stars. That was with using HPGs or Courier jumpships. Well, there was something that the FedCom had, but that was a little different. Short ranged but different than a "normal" HPG that was used by ComStar.

"Oh, the Clans did not have it all their way in this invasion. At first the Clans had surprise on their side. And they were "only" going against second or even third line troops when they attacked the Combine, Commonwealth and the FRR. It took some time to get better troops and better equipment in their way, and in enough numbers to really start bleeding them. It took time, and a lot of blood was spilled before those other forces could be diverted to this new front. The clans were stopped dead in their tracks on Wolcott by the Combine, and Twycross was a blood bath for the Jade Falcons thanks to the FedCom and the weapons tech they were packing. It also helped that the Falcons were making a few…..missteps that the FedCom was able to capitalize on."

Robert raised one eyebrow, now that his heart rate was back to close to normal after seeing those two images. "So, the Dragoons fought the clans?" So far, this woman had not told him one thing that SLIC had not told him from before they had left New Circe. Robert wanted to see if he could find out something new. Sometimes you have to roll a hard six, and he was ready to throw those dice in this meeting.

Virginia did a throwing away motion with her right hand again. "Oh, no! We have been focused on rebuilding after the 4th SW and our other wars we have been fighting. Then we also had to get, at least limited amounts of clan tech into production on Outreach along with all of the repairs that needed to be done. We also have been helping some of our closest friends with some training, and we have even given them a few clan tech weapons to work on leveling the playing field with the Clan forces. We could not give them as many clan level weapons as they wanted. We can't even give our own people all of the clan tech weapons they wanted."

Virginia had to adjust herself in the chair. "But that was why I'm out here. We cannot make enough of those high-tech weapons for us and our closest friends, much less the whole Inner Sphere. We have refit or rebuilt the small production lines on Outreach, but we still are having to make do with using too many late Star League weapons for our warrior's taste. You can fight The Clans that way, but you are going to lose a lot of good people doing it. The Bear Killers and the H class ER PPCs that you have been selling have added something new into that mix."

A soft chuckle came from the spy that sounded genuine to the other two people in the room. "I bet more than a few Clanners were surprised when they ran their heads into the teeth of one of those weapons. I bet they were expecting age of war grade PPCs or maybe older generations of ER PPCs if they were unlucky. Instead, they ran face first into some H class weapons or your Bear Killers PPC mounted on mechs with the updated heatsinks to use them effectively. They still are not as good as those Clan grade weapons of that same type, but it had to have hurt some feelings when they reviewed those battleROMs after the battles that they won."

She let a sly grin come to her face, that this time reached her eyes. "I know that I shipped dozens of both types of PPCs to Outreach after coming out here. I would have been sending more, but MMM limits me to buying only a dozen of each in any given month. I would like to buy more, but MMM and the MoC do not want one group to have all of the production that they are turning out. If any of a given production run is not sold to the "normal" buyers? I have to wait for the MoC government to see if they want to buy them. IF they don't have the funds? Thanks to being close to them, then I will get a call and I can drop in and buy the few remaining weapons." This agreement was more of an open secret, but not public knowledge.

She was quite proud of her work and network that she had set up in such a short amount of time on this end of human occupied space. "Even the Confederation has been getting a few updated weapons each month. They don't have the hard cash to do the purchasing like the rest of the big boys of the Inner Sphere. So, they are eating the shipping cost, and they are sending out refined ores that MMM needs. They are being sold at the local market value of those raw ores. They are selling the ores and then buying whatever weapons tech they can get their hands on."

The look on Virginia's face now turned a little ugly, but the twinkle in the eyes was still there. "They had some luck, at first with selling some of their Ravens with the bulky ECM system they first put in them. But that market has fallen off after the first few were sold thanks to "real" ECM systems coming on the open market from a few different manufactures. They are moving mostly 1X and 2X versions of the Raven now. Now from what I understand, the 2X is not a bad light scout mech, if you don't mind the older tech of her weapons and other support systems. Ramilie's Raiders were able to pick up a fully equipped 3L "from somewhere". And they seem to be okay, if not overjoyed with having it on their books. So far only one or two Raven 3L's without the high tech ECM and NARC systems being removed are being sold for cash to some of the transit mercenary units. Then the Cappies use those funds to buy weapons directly from MMM."

She let a frown come to her face. "There is little chance of that I will get more than that first allotment of weapons, not with the deep pockets that the FedCom and DC representatives have access to trump my "friends". They have been more or less sleeping outside the main office of MMM when they learned that more of these Roya Flush or IER PPCs would be coming out. Now with these new weapons and the ones you have been selling to "other" parties in this area? You have measurably increased the capabilities of Inner Sphere forces in this year of peace."

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Virginia Hall was a spy and Wolf Net was not known for leaking, at least when it didn't want to leak certain information. The leaders of Wolf Net knew that if you didn't know something, then you could not let it leak to someone that was a risk to the Dragoons. She had no idea that Blackwell had been turning out Bear Slayers or as they called them, the Broadsword class Enhanced ER PPC as fast as they could. The ones that she was taking the time in sending back to Outreach were being "traded" to other groups and not being used by the Dragoons themselves outside of random tests. This sleight of hand would conceal the true numbers of IER PPCs that were being fitted to the mechs and other combat vehicles belonging to the Wolf's Dragoons. The Wolf's Dragoons will not pay a "license fee" for those improved ER PPCs to MMM much less to someone like Robert Copeland. It was a work of legal fiction calling them Broadswords, but court cases across the Inner Sphere had been won on a lot less.

She also didn't know about some of the issues that some of the older hands of the Dragoons had, when they were told that they were not only going to make No Named Clan designed weapons. And they were going to be fitting those weapons to "their" mechs. It was only by calling them "Golden Age" weapons, which the Great Father had used made them finally think that they were okay and not demanding a circle of some kind. All of the "normal" and early generation ER PPCs were being sold to anyone with enough C-Bills to buy one. But in reality, most of the ER PPCs were going to the FedCom to fill their front line regiments.

Not all of them, but most that the MIIO/LIC knew about. After all, even the FedCom had to keep other people, like certain March lords, and the odd large or popular Mercenary unit happy. And right now, there were fewer things that could do that as well as what the government had. Like a metric crap ton of spare parts for old tech PPCs, some early generation ER PPCs, or the real golden coin of a "real" H class ER PPC. The others would come around for one of the few Broadswords or Bear Slayer class IER PPCs that could be found on the grey or black markets on that side of space.

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Robert was starting to sweat a little. If he needed to, he could call in his own warships to pull his ships out of this deep hole it looked like that he had fallen into. But that would mean leaving all of the Families to their fate. "So, what does that mean for us?"

Robert had spoken very softly and in a flat tone. Also, if he needed to. He would shoot this woman and dump her body in the flame trench ten seconds before this dropship fired up her main engines to leave the planet. He knew down to the hour how long it would take for his three dropships to get back to the jump point at the fastest pace of the slowest one of his vessels. If all else failed? He would give the order to blow the engines, and then nothing would be left of this mission but a few balls of cooling gas on the planet or jump point. It would leave a lot of questions, but very few people would be around to answer them.

The Wolf Net spy did not say anything for a few long seconds. She was playing a game with this Commander, but she knew that it was a dangerous game to play against this man. "Commodore Copeland, I am not from the Clans. I was adopted as an orphan, schooled, and then secretly trained by them. When I decided what I wanted to do with my life? I was vigorously tested by some not so nice people. I was then moved off planet to do "my work" at a young age. I do not have some of the issues that the few remaining older generation of Dragoons might have with "your people". That is…..as long as you are willing to work with and not against my people."

Robert could see something was left unsaid by the younger woman. He was looking at every word she both had said and didn't say before asking a question. "And how will we do that?"

Robert felt that he did not have to say what the Clan or any "normal" clanner would do if they found out about who Copeland worked for and what his genes looked like. He had seen to many reports from the Dark Caste that alluded to what would happen if the clans found out about "them" and it was not pretty.

Virginia folded her hands in her lap, and she covered her leather covered noteputer carrier. "The official reports that had been and will be filed in the near future about Copeland Supply, Salvage, and Resale. These will say that you were most likely the survivors of a lost group from the SLDF. And that you most likely came from the time of the SLDF Exodus, or you could have been a Colony that has been forgotten about after the SLDF left with the General. Not one word will be written down about the Minnesota tribe, Clan Wolverine, or anything like that in connection to you. The funny part is that for many years, there were groups that thought that the Dragoons were from the likes of your group." She gave the man a little smile that said, "I love the irony in that, don't you?"

Virginia gave herself a little head shake to get back on topic, and she was thankful that she had not let the chuckle slip her lips. "That was what has been written into the reports, before I came on station any way. I see no reason that I should put any of my own, call them off the wall ideas, in those follow-on reports I will have to write. I don't know what "The Wolf" thinks, but I would be surprised if he has not connected all the dots himself about you."

Robert smiled. "It is an interesting story that you have weaved out of the ether. But even if it was even close to being the truth, why?" He was mentally moving around his own game pieces, and Robert thought that he was far from checkmate.

Virginia let an odd little smile come to her face. "It was because of your actions out here Commodore Copeland. What you did for the Bivouac system, Duke Terry, MMM, the MoC, and the others you have done business with along the way. Oh, by the way. Colonel Victor Crutchely sends his regards, and his thanks from what I understand was some good parts you sent them. I was told that he has a standing offer of some free drinks for you when you next bump into each other. I think you turned his whole unit around with your gift and…. discretion."

Robert drew a blank on who she was last talking about for a few seconds. Then he remembered about that ambush on Zanthe III, and the warning a brave scout pilot gave his people that had cost him his life. Crutchely of Crutchely's Crackers had been given a raw deal thanks to ComStar, and they had lost a whole scout lance in the process. That had been about a third of their total mech force at the time. But the merc unit had hidden the three surviving scout pilots, even if they didn't have any mechs for them to pilot at the time. Robert had "gifted" them three H Class ER PPCs to try to make up for the loss of mechs and the single pilot in sending the alert out. He had found out later that they had been able to recover two of the scout mechs, and the FWL had given them a scout light mech to "help" smooth things over for the raw deal. Then they had been given most of a wrecked attack small craft for parts as a bonus to keep their mouths shut.

Robert decides to use this name to divert the Wolf Net agent and hoped she would go down another tangent. "That is nice of him. How are they doing?"

Virginia expected that Copeland would stop her when she was working on this idea, but she had not expected it to happen at this point in the game. She had thought it would be about Duke Terry or Cate's hold. Still, she had this information at hand. "They are doing well, really they are doing better than most merc units of that size. They are currently at a short regiment in strength and still slowly growing. They picked up a garrison contract on the other side of FWL space and are out on the border on that side of the FedCom. They had been doing some training and countered a few pirate raids in the area. With the new peace between the FedCom and the FWL? It does not look like they will run into a typical Lyran scout lances or steel wall of battle aimed at them. I think they will jump ship and pick up something in the old Davion Outback at the end of next year. The Crackers have a nice reputation of working with locals. They also are good at pinning the ears back on any pirate that sticks their noses into places a house lord or contract holder does not want it. Then again, the Confederation is also looking at them, but the word on the street says that it's only to try to company store them. The Cappies want to get their mechs and tech support."

She tilted her head to her right. "But back to my line of thinking. What you just asked, is why I think the Dragoons can work with you. Then there was that whole business of Cate's Hold. Your people finding that navy support base, which was the key, to getting the idea that your people were connected to the old SLDF somehow in the main reports. Then there was the fact of you "trading" those two suits of what you claim is old ComStar battle armor just a few weeks ago at the MMM facility on Dunianshire. You know that the Inner Sphere has been trying to field Battle Armor of all types to at least elite units? That will give MMM a nice first step into that market. Still, did you really trade two of them for some workmechs?"

Robert nodded his head in agreement, but his face was as still as a mountain. "We heard about the two suit types that the FedCom has put into action, and the two suit types that ComStar uses in their dark operations. We also saw the report about the Gray Death Legion using FedCom prototypes early in their part of the war. There also were reports that everyone was working on something to counter the Clan 1ton armor suits. Thanks to everyone working together, they are calling it something like the Inner Sphere Standard Suit."

He had almost said Elemental battle armor, which was information that was not well known to the rest of the Inner Sphere. It would also have shown that his people knew more about the Clan's equipment than they should, if they were a "lost Star League Colony". He decided to try to throw another shoe in the agent's mental gears. "And yes, we did. And not "just" some workmechs, but also because they lost a lot of people in an attack on a few safe houses connected to an attack on one of my people. We had just showed MMM what they could do, when we helped them take out those ComStar safe houses. I think we got a good deal for the battle scarred suits. I take it that you disagree with this logic."

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Virginia was a very well trained Wolf Net operator, and she did not give anything away about the information about "Two" types of suits that ComStar had in operation. The information about Copeland's use of captured battle armor suits of unknown manufacture to help defend the Bivouac system had been released or leaked to the rest of the Inner Sphere many months ago. Very few had understood what those suits might be, but the information had said that they had been very successful in counter boarding or dropship assaults in deep space.

Then there was this new information about them helping MMM take out some ComStar safe houses. She would have to make sure someone spent some time checking out this story. Wolf Net needed to find out what were the facts, rumors, and the wild ass guesses. After they were collected, then they would have to sort them out and then pass them along to Outreach.

The Tornado (the Dragoons had no idea what the owners called it) class of seemingly light powered armor had been a rude shock to the Wolf's Dragoons. And it had forced Jamie Wolf to increase production of clan battle armor by 10 percent. They even were still looking at ways to increase production numbers in the short term by making lower tech suits to fill the gap or just to issue to Non Elemental sized Dragoons.

The 7Th Kommando had broken into their own supply of Nighthawk type of suits, and they did a full inventory to make sure that none were missing. Thankfully none were missing or not physically accounted for. By now Wolf Net was looked on as always being the bearer of bad news, and that looked to not going to be changing in the near future if what Copeland had said was true.

The small shops on New Valencia and Outreach that had been making spare parts and added the odd new suit for the Kommandos, had been the first to be expanded by Jaime when the news of the Bivouac actions reached him. Now a new suit was being created out of those two small buildings every few days for new operators or just as backups for any future needs. There was no way to make them more quickly, at least not without needing their own dropship load of money. Still MIIO and LIC had come looking to the Dragoons after it was released about their past. They had "only" at first wanted to see what the Clans might have in the SF world. Slowly they had opened their own files for the Dragoons to read in return for this access.

During this "information" exchange between the three Intel groups. The Dragoons found out that it had been the Gray Death hitting it big one more time, and they had been the ones to find some old Nighthawk suits on Karbala. The Gray Death had "turned" those few suits over to the government, after some arm twisting on an epic scale. Those few suits were to be the keystone for battle armor production in this part of the Inner Sphere. Still MIIO and LIC were offering a huge number of C-bills for any extra working armored stealth battle suit that the Dragoons might be willing to part with.

You know, it was a trade just between friends. And then we won't start hunting down Wolf Net agents across half of the Inner Sphere. That is if we are friends.

Rumor had it that The Wolf was selling each of the first ten Nighthawk suits for the equal cost of a Griffin in ex Combine or FWL made LAM parts. Those parts would be used to get the rest of the scouting LAMs that had survived all of the battles the Dragoons had endured back into service. Those ten were not all of the battle suits that the Dragoons had sold to those groups, and all of those "extra" funds had gone right back into help paying for the increase in production of more "real" battle armor for the Dragoons. HMMMM self-licking ice-cream cone…well almost as long as the Nighthawks still remained a rare item.

########

Virginia had her working face back on, like she was just talking to any of her other contacts. "Yes, and now you have given this technology to the MoC for a few workmechs and to pay off a blood debt. And that is not the only tech increase you kicked off in your trading adventures. Besides those early tries of battle armor, the FedCom has what they are calling Gray Death Standard and Scout versions of power armor that are starting into low rate production with their own standard version of Battle armor. The FWL and just about everyone else is making a common BA, that you are right about them being called the Inner Sphere Standard Battle Armor. They are still in very small numbers, but that will change."

She already had sent out her first two reports on those two traded suits back to Outreach days before Robert had landed on this planet. His ship was fast, but HPG messages were a lot faster. She was making mental notes to make a third report to go back to Outreach, if not trying to get one of those two suits sent back to Outreach. You never know what the technical intelligence teams back on Outreach might be able to pull out of a hunk of recovered metal. Virginia knew it was going to cost her budget a huge hit, but by now she had a lot of credit with her big bosses over on Outreach to cover something like this. That is as long as she attached words like "captured from ComStar in battle" to the reason she had paid so much for it. That was as good as writing a blank check as you can get within the Wolf's Dragoons much less Wolf Net.

"Oh crap! What fool would think a few workmechs was worth two PA(L)s. Now that is going to turn heads back home! I have got to make sure that I cover the blood debt he felt for MMM. That will go over very well with the higher ups." Virginia was careful not to let these thoughts color her face or changer body language in any way. She also had to remember that this man was no fool. He did what he did, for a reason. She made a mental note to see what advantages giving those two suits to MMM would give Copeland.

Robert had to let a smile come to his face. "So, what is the next step in your little plan Miss Hall?" Robert thought that it was time to "jump" the bid. He also used her last name for a reason. If she was a "real" clanner, that would cause some kind of reaction out of her.

Virginia was now on guard, there was something in Robert's tone that was not what she was expecting. The use of her last name went right over her head, but she thought that there was a reason that Copeland had just used it. He was too good not to make a change without some kind of reason. She only waited for a few seconds, and then she reached into her folder one more time.

She passed over an off yellow business card with neat handwriting on one side. "I have given you a lot to think about Commodore. When you are ready to talk some more? Contact me. Then we can use a little less cloak and dagger."

As soon as Robert had the business card in his hand. Virginia Hall rose from her chair, and she had walked out of the room. She had not offered her hand or said anything else as she walked towards the metal hatch at the back of the office. She wanted to put some distance between her and this crew for the near term. It was not unheard of that a potential HUMINT source might decide to remove a new controller before the hooks were set into them that deeply. Knowing when the threat was near to that point was a hard won skill that many other controllers had not lived to pass along to a younger generation of Controllers, and it was not just a Wolf Net issue.

While this man was on his mental heals? It was the perfect time to make an exit from the room and let things cool down a little. It was all well and good to "strike while the iron was hot." But that was only in tri-vids. If something happened to her? Then her back up team of handpicked mercenaries would try to pull her out of the dropship before she had bled out all over the decks. If that failed, they were to recover her body. They also could send a special message to a digital drop box, if all else failed in the attempted recovery.

It was not hidden from the higher level members of the local government that she worked for the Wolf Dragoons. Her cover said something else that revolved around her working for a weapons manufacture in the FedCom. She had known that she had been as good as pulled from field work in her near future. At least that would happen, after this mission was shown to be so important to the rest of the Dragoons. She would be returning to Outreach for a few years after this one mission was over, if she lived through it. She may never be an active field member of Wolf Net ever again, but the Dragoons had a lot of needs that someone with her proven skill set could fill. Such was the life of a long term Wolf Net agent when their shelf life had expired, but the Dragoons hated waste.

Robert watched the woman leave, and he did not say a word as the hatch closed behind the Wolf Net agent. When the hatch was closed and a strong ECM field was activated, Robert pulled the holdout needler pistol from under the table and put it into his desktop with a thud. This one meeting was going to cause some issues for Robert and his missions. Before Robert could say anything, Jess had a hand scanner out of a mostly hidden side pocket. She started waving it around the room. She was looking for bugs, and she kept going over the room until Robert had seen that she had hit the same spot on four different passes and ordered her to stop and take a seat.

Jess and Robert spent the next few hours reviewing all of the plans that might have been even vaguely related to this issue. In the end they decided to stick with the core plan, they would just be moving up some parts of it. The only major difference in the plans that they were working with, would be the addition of this woman, when the idea of the Blockade Runner was to be brought up to some key players on this planet.

Robert had recorded the whole meeting and it, along with Jess's written reports, were going to be passed up the line as quick as they safely could. Robert was betting that not only SLIC was in for some sleepless nights. Thanks to the notice sent by the Lyssa to the TacFax on the Styx. Jess's written reports and his transcripts would be sent out as soon as the dropships re-docked onto the jumpship at the zenith jump point. They still could not risk sending the data via radio to the Styx, and then have the staff send the data out on the TaxFac any earlier.

#########

Two days later things were moving along so fast, that the people in the know were running only on caffeine and excitement. Robert had just sent a few messages out to the head of MMM, the MoC defense commander, the person who had sent the "meeting request" that had turned out to be such a headache, and the Wolf's Dragoons representative for an emergency meeting. He had removed Colonel Newton Ramilie from the list at the last second. Robert didn't think that this was going to be in his wheelhouse. Colonel Ramilie also might cause more issues than he could help with, and if the locals wanted to bring him in on a later date. Well, that was their call, and they would have to deal with any security risk he might add to the pot.

This meeting just happened to be on the same day that Lora had sent out the first MoC and Inner Sphere wide advertisement about the Resort. Robert and his people were not going to have the time to take this slowly with what the Wolf Net agent had dropped on them. The risk was too high and there were too many unknowns that Robert was having to deal with. So, the sooner he got this meeting done the better. If this meeting turned out to be a flop, it was going to cause some major downstream changes for Copeland and the SLiE.

Those advertisements were going to be like throwing a stone into the water with ripples spreading out to touch all shores of the Inner Sphere that would first start at each Class A HPG station. The planets closest to Canopus would be the first ones to get commercials for their "enjoyment" every few hours. Robert wonders how long it would be before people just started hitting the mute button on their entertainment devices when that theme song started to play in their homes. This would barely give Lora enough time to train up the slowly growing support team at the Resort. Right now, it was a two person team (management team), besides her. Both of the new people were members of one of the Families that happened to be on the planet that Kimberly Jay and Lora had made contact with a few years ago. There was not enough time to be subtle about pulling their people into the staging area of the Resort.

Robert had to shake his head slightly, to get his mind back into this meeting. Jess also would not be in this meeting. She had too many other issues to work on, now that they were supporting more pressing issues for one of Robert's other key missions. The meeting was going to be held on the Hercules, again, and that had caused some issues for the people that were invited. Why go to a cargo dropship to talk about military matters? That was odd for the leaders of the Inner Sphere to do something like that.

If they didn't want to come? Then that was going to be their loss. Robert was thinking that whoever decided not to come to this meeting would forever be kicking themselves, when it was finally released about what was talked about in this meeting. Robert had used the same "routing data" on the messages that had allowed a Wolf Net agent onto one of his dropships to get the attention of some high ranking locals. Robert was having some fun at giving the locals a dose of their clandestine messages about meetings.

#########

Robert meets the small group at the main hatch of the dropship freshly showered and shaved for this very important meeting. He even was not in a space crewmen's single piece jumpsuit. He had broken out a dress suit that he had picked up in the Colonial City State before he had launched on this run just for occasions like this. They made small talk as the group of nine makes their way to the briefing room about halfway up the huge dropship. As the group of locals took their seats and ordered drinks before the meeting got into full swing. Robert took a seat at "his" end of the table and looked around the room to gauge how the meeting might go. Everyone on that list of invites had shown up or sent someone in their name. As they had walked to this room, Robert had made sure that there would not be any late comers to interrupt what he had planned.

When Robert felt that the time was right, and that was when the others had retaken their seats with drinks in hand. Robert started to review some notes that had been left on the tabletop near each of the chairs. Soon other eyes went to those pages in front of them after seeing this cue from the strange leader of this group. Robert had to fight to keep a smile down as he saw them starting to look at those pages.

Those top sheets only were about the recent sell of the two Invader class jumpships that Robert had just completed. One had gone to a mercenary unit looking for an upgrade in the number of drop collars they had access to. The other one had gone to another cargo transport company, which had just moved its headquarters from a planet in the FWL to the MoC. This was so that it could better support the growing local markets. Both ships would start working for their new owners by the end of the week. And just like that, a years' worth of jumpships from a major shipyard in the Inner Sphere had just been added to the space lines of the MoC. Even with only one staying in the local area full time, it was going to be an improvement for all of the local space lanes.

Robert put his salesmen's face back on, and he started the meeting in full force. "I would like to think you all for coming over today. As I said in the message about this meeting. My company has a large ticket item that we are looking to trade. It is the largest and most important single moveable item that my company has ever been "known" to put on the market."

The representative for the MoC government looked back at Robert, and then she tapped the now closed folder with two soft taps. "I thought you had sold those two jumpships before this meeting? I'm pretty sure that you were already looking at solid offers for them, when you sent the message out." The confused look had lasted only a few seconds, before her face froze. Her eyes went a little glass eyed as she reviewed the words that Robert had just said instead of talking.

Robert could not help but let a real smile come to his face as he noticed the look on her face. It even made it all of the way to his eyes in a flash. The woman was catching onto what she thought he had meant. "You are correct, about the two jumpships, but that is not the reason I called for this meeting with you all."

Virginia was looking around the room without moving her body more than a few millimeters. Her face was like a stone wall, and it gave nothing away to even Robert's trained eye. Robert had not given her a reply message about her offer to join forces of a sorts to fight off the Clan invasion of the Inner Sphere. Without that message, she had no idea why she was here, and she didn't like not knowing what was going on around her. Being in the dark was something that she had never liked. To keep her mind busy, and to keep her from looking around like a kid in a candy store. She had to fall back on some old training from an almost forgotten teacher.

Virginia forced her head down and she quickly flipped through the pages in the folder that had been placed in front of her, just like the rest of the room. When she got almost to the end of those cheap plastic sheets filled with text and the rare images, she gasped aloud. Virginia had no idea that she had been the first one in the room to make it that deep into the briefing. She was a trained Wolf Net agent. She could absorb raw data at a better than average rate, and it showed in her getting that deep into the files so fast.

Robert still had a smile on his face when Virginia had let out her gasp that drew almost every other eye in the room towards her. With the eyes of the room starting to look towards Virginia. Robert hit the button on the desk near his seat, and an image was displayed on the wall behind him. Robert had wished that he had been able to get a hologram projector installed on this ship, but he had been overruled by Admiral Xi and her staff.

Hologram projectors were not unknown to the power players within the Inner Sphere, but they were very rare to be seen on something as small as a military dropship much less on a supposedly civilian cargo carrying dropship. The Hercules was a Mammoth class dropship, and it was the largest dropship that could land on a planet, but it still was "just" a civilian cargo dropship. Now all of the eyes in the room were drawn to the huge image on the wall behind Robert, and not the Wolf Net Agent sitting beside them.

"The high end item that I have been charged with…..is to sell this." Robert points over his right shoulder.

Now the image started to rotate, and it gives different views of the ship for the people in the room to view. With the return of the Clans and their use of Warships? This has inspired the review of the limited information about the warships of the old Star League that was available for the public and even some of the militaries of the house lords. They were still working on separating fact from fiction or just plain old propaganda, which is still being circulated for hundreds of years after the last warship had been destroyed.

"I know that some of you will think that this is a MK 39 Vincent class scout warship. And she is… kind of. Only she never served with the SLDF Navy, in any capacity that we could find. We think that she was made by the Capellans to quickly expand their fleet early in the 1st SW. After that? The sellers are not sure, and they will not be held libel over any assumptions that anyone else makes about what her history might be."

Robert was on a roll, and he put out a light pin to point out some specific areas of the slowly spinning image of the warship. "If you look closely? You will notice that she is a little different than is listed on the public references you might have reviewed. Her capital missile launchers have been removed, is one of the key differences. In place of the capital missile launchers and the magazine to feed them. They all have been replaced by some anti-missile systems, and a few other anti-fighter weapons. The latter is done by adding some 5cm pulse lasers, and some LRM racks to her offensive weapons load out. She also had some of her cargo bays modified. That has reduced them, but it still has space for over 90,000 tons of cargo within her hull. If you go to the last page in the folder? Now you will see the full stats on the ship as we know them."

##########

You could have heard a pin drop or a flee fart in the room, and still Robert had that smile on his face. "I will ask that these folders do not leave this room." Robert added the last part off the fly. He wanted these people to know that this was not just a free look, and then take as much information as they wanted without leaving something of value behind.

The head of the military arm of the MoC about came out of her chair now that her brain had come out of vapor lock. "You have a Warship!" Of all the things she had been thinking that she was going to be exposed to? A warship had not been on that list.

Robert held his hands up to defend himself from the verbal assault. "First! We have been calling her a Blockade Runner and not a Warship. She is so weak in armor and weapons, that taking one of them into battle does not seem like a good idea to the "seller". Well, if you had a full squadron of them going into battle with dropship and fighter support? Now that might make them more dangerous to something other than the crewmembers. Now she is a great way of getting a Behemoth worth of a load of cargo threw some defenses, or she can carry them under enough weapons to make the defenders keep their distance if they had been expecting only to see dropships. Oh, and she is operational and complete with her power plants, jump drive, but ammunition and spare parts are a bit more limited." It was not up to him to tell this group all of the pros and cons of this ship design or that an aerospace fighter with a nuk could quickly end its usefulness. Robert's job was to get their attention and sell the blasted thing.

The government representative now had her mouth off of the floor, but her voice was low and husky sounding. That was a big difference after the other woman's loud screech that must have been heard in the corridor outside of this room. "You are selling this?…How much?"

She knew that only the Clans and maybe ComStar, if the latest reports were true, had warships at their command. All of the major houses were dumping as much money as they could, and maybe a little more, into getting their own Warships back into operation and or production. She had just seen a report on a transport corvette that the FedCom was working on. It seemed like every few days a new news report would break on to the airwaves about those warship programs in the other of the Great and not so Great Houses of the Inner Sphere.

Robert let his smile fall and in a flat tone colored his voice as he spoke. He was now throwing a turd into the punchbowl. "2 billion…..in C-bills."

The room was deathly quiet, and then it exploded in sound like a bomb in an underground tunnel. Even the Dragoon's representative was on her feet, even if she was not saying a word. Her bulging eyes and body language were yelling right along with the rest of the people in the room. Robert was quite pleased with the response he was able to get out of this group. He just wished that Jess or Jules was in the room today, they would have loved seeing the faces being made before his eyes. He doubted that a recording would do their reaction any true justice. It was some seconds before the volume had dropped low enough for normal conversation to continue. It was the second highest leader of the MoC government, who was the first one to speak in a normal voice.

"Commander….er Commodore. The MoC has been living in a boom time for the last handful of years. But coming up with 2 billion much less that number of C-Bills on short notice? We just cannot do something like that. It does not matter how much we both want and could use this….object." She shot a look over to the head of the military, with a look that said, "do not even try". She was the one that would have to find the funds and deal with the other political sharks. The Military had at her level, had to deal with that also, but not like the number 2 in the government did every day and most nights that you counted.

Robert still had the salesmen smile on his face as he addressed the oldest woman in the room. "This is not a short-term notice, madam. And I understand, maybe better than you know, about having to deal with tight budgets in the time of war. The MoC and FWL are making money as the suppliers for the war effort to fight these Clans. What my partners were looking at is more along the lines of the deal we made with MMM about what was found on Cate's Hold. You know after my people found how large that hidden base really was."

Robert had just hinted, that he knew more about what was missing from Cate's Hold than anyone else in this room. That could mean that this ship had been there or the means to repair it had been removed by his people before that huge base had been sold. There was no proof of these mental strings that the minds of these people were equally mentally pulling. Rumors and second guessing were the past times of overactive minds.

The representative from MMM looked at a spot on the wall, as two sets of hostile eyes looked her way with flames seeming to leak out of them. One part of MMM's representative's mind was very happy that the company security had held so well. Besides Magestrix Emma Centrella had been in the loop from almost day one of that…..issue. So, MMM was covered five ways from Sunday. And if the people in this room didn't like it? Then they could lump it. MMM had not publicly lied about how they had gotten the recovered half stripped base, but they had not told anyone about how much it had cost them or who knew about the details. That was all covered under the MoC's State Secrets act.

Details of what was there or might have been there until a few months before the base fell under new management were not open for discussion. Most had thought that MMM had paid or hired the group from Copeland to find the base in the first place. Who would give up a find, like what had been found inside that mountain on Cate's Hold for any price outside of a major noble title? That was something so far out of the norm for their times. That it would have screamed "look at me, I am different!" loud enough, for all of human space to look at Copeland and his company like they were unicorns farting candy rainbows the size of gas giants.

After what seemed like an hour to most of the people in the room. The MMM representatives decided to fill in the blanks that Robert had just hinted about. "We worked out a minimum payment plan with Copeland and his superiors. As we made more money and covered our outstanding bills and accounts payable. We would put in larger amounts of funds into accounts until the agreed total amount was reached. The total cost of the base on Cate's hold is something that is listed as a MoC secret and can only be released by direct approval of Magestrix Emma Centrella herself." The representative of MMM lifted her nose up a little like she smelled a fart. It was her way of saying to the rest of the room to... buzz off.

Robert now let his smile fall. "Yes, that was exactly what my boss was thinking when she came up with this idea." Robert wanted to make sure that it was known that "he" did not have access to a Warship. Since this was in the MoC, it was better if the last "owner" had been a woman. Otherwise, it might be a quick way to wake up with the case of the deads.

The head of the MoC military had an odd look on her face and she looked around the room before quickly again facing Robert. "Okayyyyy? I can get that. But then why did you want one of the purchase factors for the Wolf's Dragoons to be at this meeting." She had just stopped herself from just saying mercenary or maybe even spy. Still that little breach was a risk to the Wolf Net agent and to the key leaders within the MoC.

Robert still had his salesmen's face on, but he lit it slip a little to let the people in this room know that he was having some fun. "Well, they could help you come up with the funds. Or they might want the warship for themselves if you guys don't want it. I wanted to put the warship on an open, if somewhat more restricted market. My boss vetoed this idea, and so here we are. If you do not want it? Then I have been cleared to start looking for other buyers from a list that I will not be showing you. Now that concludes the meeting that I had planned. Please fill free to discuss this among yourselves for as long as you like while you are in this room. The delivery and other details that are not negotiable are on the last few pages. The guard at the hatch will collect the files when you leave this room, please to not break the trust that I am giving you all. I will be on the bridge of the Bad Kitty for most of the rest of today, if you would like to address any questions towards me."

Bedlam followed before the metal hatch had closed behind Robert. The pair of guards in the corridor shared a set of evil grins with the convoy commander as the sound proofing in the room was tested and found slightly wanting under this stress test.

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Notes:

The Diamond shipyard: 4 slips that can make Merchant Class, 1 slip under repair/rebuilding (star lord or tramp capable), 1 slip under repair/rebuilding (ex-warship) but now Monolith/Leviathan capable. Other slips are wrecked and will need many, many more years to rebuild.

MC vs MoC. I was asked to use MoC in place of MC due to some confusion. If no issues I will keep with MoC.

Col Victor Crutchely: He is commander of the merc unit Crutchely's Crackers as seen in chap 35.

Chapter length. I had to cut it hear even if it leaves you kind of in a cliff hanger, but 50 page post suck to manage. As it is, I keep about 100 pages working at one time and that is outside of notes, skeleton, and muscle movements pages. Hobbies can be so tiring.

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