Antares, SLDF Pre-Positioned Military Cache

I watched Dromedary—one of the down-time built Mammoth-class cargo droppers we had 'acquired' at…Planting?—Tamar? Somewhere, anyway—and brought along burn for space and tried not to cry.

Three lances to the company, plus a command lance for a battalion and a command company for the regiment, gave each regiment 132 mechs. Brigades were largely administrative in function, but call it a battalion-strength command group. Roughly 450 mechs and vehicles to the brigade, three of those plus another battalion-ish sized command and security group make up a division at right around 1400 mechs and vehicles.

But that was just the line gear. Each division usually had a regiment of attached artillery. Toss in ADA, Chemical troops (responsible for smoke screens as well as NBCR), Civic and Combat engineers, Medicos (and gear for everything from ambulances, to aid stations, to field hospitals), a Ground-Air Wing (162 airframes of all types, plus ground crews, and someone to run an airbase), a regiment (sometimes more) of tracked armor (or wheeled armor, or a regiment of both), a battalion of hover-armor for scouting and recon, depending on environment there might be an attached battalion(s) of specialized infantry (or armor, or mechs, or some or all of the above), E-war and Cyber-war troops, possibly (wet) Naval battalions, MPs, occasionally an attached Royal battalion (or regiment)…

And then add logistical elements for all of that. Trucks to move food for all of those soldiers. Trucks to move ammunition, spare parts, armor plates. Trucks to move water. Or to filter and purify water. Or filter and purify air. Trucks to…

There is a lot more 'stuff' both by cubage and by mass needed to keep those 1400 mechs and vehicles in the field than there are mechs and vehicles.

A lot.

The PrePo had it all.

Actually, it wasn't an PrePo at all. It wasn't even a Black Watch PrePo. It was just marked that way because it had a gear set in storage for us.

What it was, was remote storage for an alternate gear set for the entire fucking II Corps.

The base itself went down through more than seven hundred meters of bedrock.

Why the hell it had just been left here while the army starved for equipment only Kerensky knew. We could have really used the stuff on Terra, or on…

Fuck it. The list was too goddamn long.

There were mountains of stuff.

You want examples? Fine. There was a room filled with pipes. I mean, a huge room filled with huge pipes. I had thought it the water and sanitation grid of the modular field base for II Corps—picture a city reduced to easy-to-assemble pieces in clearly marked boxes and you're probably pretty close. Turns out I was wrong (that base was two levels down). All those pipes turned out to be spare artillery barrels.

Think about that for a moment. There were enough spare artillery tubes to construct a water and sanitation grid for a not small city.

There are smallish continents with less acreage than what the trucks alone covered. There are mountains that fail to measure up to the stacks of armor plates. The repair depot probably had more manufacturing capability than most planets these days. There are stars that have died for want of the hydrogen stored in the fuel bunkers.

Well…maybe not quite that much, but the ordnance alone probably out-massed Rio Lobos.

Point is… There was something like a million tons of just front-line combat equipment—never mind the supports, ordnance and the rest—and the turkeys…

I could understand why the turkeys had destroyed the water treatment plant now. First, the locals had apparently been using it as a fortress for their final defensive line thinking the turkeys wouldn't destroy it. Second, there was no way anyone, not even the SLDF's Corps of Engineers, could have gotten the gear out in an appreciable time with the facility still intact above it.

That didn't mean I could forgive them for destroying the treatment plant. Just that I understood why they had done it.

But they hadn't even finished clearing debris out of the way before sending someone down to catalog it. And instead of just pulling the logs which detailed every single item in the bloody inventory…the bastards had unboxed it.

Sigh.

It wasn't like we had a lot of prime movers, and most of our droppers sucked for general cargo. But trying to load a boxed Atlas into Murray was a lot easier than trying to stow an unboxed Atlas in Rio Lobos' cargo hold and we had those Mammoth-class trashhaulers that it seemed someone cooked up with the intent of moving the boxed combat gear of a brigade around in.

Unfortunately, unlike unboxing a mech or vehicle, reboxing just wasn't something meant to be done in the field. It's anticipated that you'd get to wherever it's meant to be, unbox and transport it as a functional unit from there. Reboxing—if you rebox at all instead of recycling the unit in place—is something done at a maintenance depot in anticipation of sending a junk unit back to the manufacturer for rebuilding or recycling. We had a maintenance depot. Hell, we had a whole logistical base! But it hadn't been designed with the intention of needing to rebox a complete corps set. For that matter, it hadn't been designed to rebox a regimental set (of which we had forty-eight before all those attachments, not to mention several thousand hectares of trucks). That wasn't to say it couldn't do the job, it could, it'd just take…let's leave it at 'a while' and move on.

The Black Watch cache hadn't been discovered and it was still boxed so it was already gone. So was the set for the 29th Marines. The CAAN gear was specialized and the turkeys appeared to have enough sense to know that unboxing it would be more of a headache than it was worth. The spares hadn't been opened, or most of the weapons. We were leaving the ordnance (mostly, we cleared out the quote-Special Weapon-unquote locker). The turkeys were welcome to three-century-old ordnance and we didn't have the room to take it all anyway.

I wasn't particularly happy about potentially unstable nuclear ordnance sharing the same ship as me, but that was Liz's call. So now my ride out was filled with potential catastrophes ranging from capital-grade warheads, to artillery shells, to 'engineering' munitions that the Blackhearts could use to remove key infrastructure or civic engineers use to move a smallish-but-scenic mountain three meters to the right to get that landscape just right.

The one good thing about the unboxed vehicle sets was it made finding the ROWPUs a snap. Actually, that right there might be why we never came back for these supplies. If the Engineers overbuilt the water treatment plant to ensure no one removed it for a good long time, it would have cranked out enough water for Alba to grow pretty damn quick. If it grew quickly enough, then by the time we were looking for gear it would have been unconscionable to remove the treatment plant, especially without a good way of replacing it.

Just dealing with the amount of gear present was a headache.

Since we were at it, we drained the base water tanks and the engineers were cooking up a system to burn any hydrogen left after we pulled out. Look, hydrogen is a slippery little thing. After almost three centuries I was surprised anything was left in the tanks but there was. A great deal in fact. So, we'd take what we could and then hydrogen-plus-oxygen-plus-fire-makes-everything-better-equals-water would help out the locals some.

I mean, anything to be a good neighbor.

Well, and it was that or it was use it to rig a surprise for the turkeys when they came back and we had three-centuries-old ordnance for that.

"No boom?" someone had asked when it was decided not to simply destroy it ourselves.

Liz had grinned. "Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow."

Blowing up stuff is fun and all, but a Corps set?

Outreach

Jaime Wolf looked up to find Stanford Blake looming over his desk. "I didn't hear you come in."

Sanford Blake smirked. "I wouldn't be in charge of your spies if I was in the habit of being announced every time I walked through a door."

Jaime raised an eyebrow because it was very unlike Blake to do just that. At least in Jaime's office. He gestured towards the chair opposite his desk. "What do you have for me?"

Blake made a gesture of his own and produced a solid block of clear armorplast, perhaps a third of a meter long, and half that square, which he set down on Jaime's desk before sitting himself.

It was the kind of thing an entomologist might use to preserve a particularly large specimen. But what was suspended inside of this block was no insect. Jaime regarded what was clearly a round for an autocannon levelly for some time before looking up at Stanford.

"What am I looking at?"

"That's what these new people are using to shoot at the old folks from back home. Don't ask me how I got it, you wouldn't want to know."

Jaime closed his mouth and glared a little. Then he started to open it again.

"And don't ask me how I got it here so fast. You really don't want to know. Just, uh, cover your eyes when you get my expense reports."

Jaime closed his mouth once more and gave his intelligence chief a baleful look before opening it again. He waited a moment, and when no objection came, asked: "Analysis?"

"They took three old systems—well, two merely old systems and something ancient—and bashed them together."

"Do I have to drag it out of you?"

"Sorry. I'm still trying to wrap my head around this," Blake replied. "Okay, first. They went to a semi-combustible casing."

Jaime frowned.

"It's old tech, like, twentieth-century old. They stopped using it seven or eight centuries back because of issues with then-new propellants. Basically, what happens is when that thing is fired, the casing itself burns up. The only thing left is that little plaque at the back end. It's a nifty trick, but it gives them the advantage of caseless ammunition that doesn't have any feed issues."

"I suppose that's one way to carry extra ammunition."

"And because they don't have to worry about removing cases there's no weak point for an ejector hatch. Those plaques are pretty small, it's probably easy to tuck them away."

"But if they are cut off from ammunition—"

"Yeah, here's the thing." Blake produced a small holoemitter and tapped it once. A low-angle grainy holo appeared over Jaime's desk of the inside of a mechbay. A Marauder was opened up exposing the feed for the back-mounted autocannon.

"Where—"

"Planting. It's not important." Blake's finger stabbed through the holo. "See this?"

"Two feed chutes?" Wolf asked.

"Some mechs use that as a way of removing spent casings back to the magazines where they can be pulled when the ammo bins are filled. It's really common on fighters."

"So…you think they can use regular ammunition if they have to?"

"I'll bet that they can carry a couple of different kinds of ammunition and feed them on an as-needed basis," Blake said. Then he shrugged. "The bit about being able to use regular ammunition if you've got some the right size, that's supposition, but it's probably pretty good supposition. Probably."

Jaime nodded again.

"Alright. Let's talk about the round. Open the block."

Jaime turned back to the clear block on his desk and found a seam that split it lengthwise into two, exposing the inside of the bisected autocannon round to view.

"From the outside, it looks like a pretty much standard depleted uranium penetrator. Open it up and there's—"

"What is this?" Jaime asked. There was a cavity inside the projectile. It wasn't very big as such things go, but normally there shouldn't have been one at all.

"The Star League came up with this cutesy little flak round that had a proximity fuse in it. Blew apart when it got close to something. The idea was to give a standard autocannon something that could function against fighters but without the expense of LB-X-series weapons, and also something that could be used in bigger and smaller autocannons."

Jaime nodded.

"This thing goes a step further. It's pre-stressed on the inside, and it's got a shaped cataclysmite charge. Not much, there's only a couple grams but with cataclysmite that's enough. If it's fused for proximity or airburst you get a cloud of splinters. If it doesn't blow, it'll hit probably just as hard as anything."

Jaime looked up then. "Spell it out for me, Stanford?"

"They've got a single type of ammunition that hits like AP ball or a cluster munition on the whim of the Warrior, that probably has a high feed rate—"

"Supposition again?"

"—better supposition that being able to use standard ammo," Blake said without pausing, "and still carry twice as much ammo per ton. They've got a single series of guns that can use this wonder ammo and can flex between more specialized rounds or remove spent normal round casings without exposing structural weaknesses."

"Neat trick." Jaime fitted the armorplast blocks back together. The logistical implications were staggering. "Why do I have a feeling you wanted to talk about more than just this?"

"Natasha dropped a message."

"Oh?"

"She's made contact and has arranged a rendezvous."

"Just that?"

"Just that. But, if I had to make a guess, they're coming here. Not right away, or even soon, but soon enough."

"I don't disagree. Why?"

"We're neutral. No where else for them to go, really. They tried to get in contact with the Feddies and that didn't work out. Who's left? ComStar? The Snakes? They'll come here first."

Jaime frowned slightly.

"What are you thinking, Boss?"

"Only that it would be a very inconvenient time for Hanse to agree to my request to put us on the line. And that I cannot withdraw my request without him asking questions."

"Questions he is no doubt already asking."

"There is that," Jaime agreed. "Have we heard any more from Tamar?"

"Melissa pretty much confirmed what had already been reported. The local Precentor used the HPG to EMP-spike a Potemkin-class troopship which was lost with all hands when the mag-bottles in its fusion reactors lost containment."

"What are they up to, Sanford?" Jaime asked.

"ComStar? Mostly it's just what it appears to be. Interstellar communications, enforcing contract law on mercenaries, some charitable works—humanitarian for the most part, disaster recovery and the like."

"And the rest? The one percent we're not seeing?"

"ROM's counterintelligence branch has always been very good."

"Are you telling me that you don't have a source?"

"I didn't say that."

"So you're telling me you do?" Jaime smiled.

"I didn't say that either." Sanford sat back in his chair. "It's the ages-old story where spies are concerned. If you use the information, you increase the chances of your spies being identified."

"At which point they can no longer pass you information."

"Or worse, from your standpoint, they can feed you information that the other teams wants you to have," Sanford said.

"But if you don't use the information, what good is it?" Jaime asked.

"There's that. And even if you don't use it actively, simply knowing will shape your responses." Sanford sighed. "And then there is the third side of the coin. A spy is a real person. Often with real family. And with very real consequences if he is found out. Do you know why revealing a spy is called 'burning' him?"

Jaime shook his head.

"There are two reasons. The first is that you direct your own analysts to burn anything developed from the agent. This prevents the enemy from inserting information they want you to have into your analysis."

"Makes sense."

"The second reason is back in the twentieth century the Soviets had a singular way of dealing with spies. They fed them into a lit crematorium feet first. Slowly."

"That's…" Jaime shook his head.

"Ghastly?" Sanford finished for him. "Barbaric? Hell, Jaime. Humans have been doing pretty barbaric stuff to each other for a long time. All of our advances have just given us more ways to be barbaric…and better ways to keep people alive so we can go right on being barbaric.

"And the hell of it is, even if you don't use a spy per se, it doesn't mean the other side might not decide someone is responsible for it anyway."

Jaime grimaced.

"That said, it is the general agreement of WolfNet that Myndo is bughouse nuts. Perhaps not to the same degree as Romano, but far more fanatical. She believes, Jaime. Believes hard. And she has a lot more power, and toys to play with, than Romano ever did. So yes, she's up to something. Up to what we don't know. It's possible that she doesn't know yet. Or rather, she may know what she was intending to do before this task force showed up. She may be trying to ride her original plans out, or in the process of reformulating."

"Lovely. What about the front?"

"The Gyrfalcon galaxy hit Antares and they pounded the planet's largest water purifier flat."

"They did what?" Jaime asked. Destroying civilian infrastructure was anathema to the Clans. It was both wasteful of resources and directly contradicted the Founder's edicts of separating civilians from warfare. Turtle Bay had been bad enough, but the Smoke Jaguars had always been heavy-handed on their civilian castes. If anyone was going to foment an atrocity it would be them. And even that Clan found Cordera Perez's actions repellent. But the Falcons destroying critical civilian infrastructure?

"The locals were using to anchor their final defensive line. Apparently the head bird decided it was easier to ship in a replacement plant from back home."

Jaime said nothing as he reached out and tapped a control and a holo-image of the invasion corridor hovered into existence above his desk. "A whole galaxy?"

"Save the First Strikers. They're up at Goat Path," Sanford said without consulting any notes.

"Still? What are they doing there?" Jaime reached out and plucked Goat Path. A side window shimmered displaying planetary data. "There's nothing there. They should have left weeks ago. Are they waiting for a garrison unit?"

"They are trying to find and exterminate the 'Malthus Crime Family.'"

"You're joking." Jaime stared through the holo at the head of his spy network.

"Actually, there is a 'Matthias' Crime Family. The planetary PD scrubbed their records and then torched the hardware. Someone clever has hit on the difference in names and has the cluster chasing false leads all over the place. It's pretty obvious that the Falcons don't have one trained investigator or intel officer between them or they'd have cleared out weeks ago."

"A dangerous game."

"Potentially a useful one. If enough of the Matthias family can dig deep enough they may have a surviving network that we can utilize in the future. In the meantime, there is a whole cluster—and its shipping—tied up that the Falcons can't use elsewhere."

"A choice between stranding a cluster or letting the JumpShips go unused. Which is more wasteful?" Jaime laughed. "Back to Antares. What is so valuable that the Falcons sent nearly a whole galaxy after it?"

"An SLDF storage facility, apparently."

"Apparently?"

"You remember what the records were like back when we were still trying to find a planet to set up shop," Sanford said.

"Best/worst?"

"From our perspective? An independent regiment combat supply point. Worst case…maybe a base library module or a cache with the combat gear of a regimental combat team."

"Like the one we supposedly 'found'?" Jamie asked wryly.

Sanford shrugged. "You asked. I find the idea of a field library more troubling. You know how much of the pre-Exodus SLDF records were lost before Klondike, or scrambled by the not-named's info-war attacks."

Jamie nodded slightly, "The data on the Outreach facilities was unusually intact. In some ways I'm surprised we did so well hanging on to the knowledge base considering how much smaller a population we had. And it wasn't as though the Great Father had assembled a purpose colonization fleet with the various specialties and equipment usually attached to such an endeavor."

"Actually," Sanford hesitated, then abruptly shook his head.

"What?"

"Never mind."

Jamie arched an eyebrow. "Do you really thing I won't wonder now?"

"No," Sanford said ruthfully. "And...hell with it, the bastards are collaborating through and through. The tech decline, Jamie. It isn't just coincidence on top of happenstance. There's a good chance, a really good chance, that it was purposeful."

"What?" Jamie asked. "Who wou—"

"Who do you think?" Sanford asked rhetorically.

"You never said... You never even hinted."

"No point," Sanford said. "I've got speculation on top of guess. A lot of stuff with reasonable, rational explanations but that taken all together look...questionable. And that's it. Nothing definitive. No hard evidence. No soft evidence. Nada.

"Anyway," he went on, moving the topic back towards where it had started, "a memory core would be about as bad as it could get. For all the recovered data has done for the Inner Sphere, it's basically coming from a backup 'general' data node for a support base. The kind of thing used for dependent schooling and the like. If the Turkeys got a hold of an intact corps- or worse, an army-level data core with the classified databunker still intact, they could have the locations and access protocols for any assets that were located in that area."

"That," Jamie said slowly, "is an ugly thought...and a rich prize. Any idea on what they actually found?"

"It's too early. I'm good, but not that good."

Jamie nodded slightly. "Take this," he tapped the ammo display block with two fingers, "over to logistics. Sit down with them and some reps from Blackwell and see if it's worthwhile to put into production. Cost/benefit analysis, tier package, total conversion at the high end. Figure out how much time it'd take to implement. The standard workup."

"Can do," Sanford agreed, making a note.

"Okay. What about the Wolves?"

Antares

"You're going to leave how much?"

It was hard to blame the guy for the look on his face. A Star League Defense Force Corps set was worth an insane amount of wealth given how far technology had backslide. Heck, even by the standards of the Star League it was nothing to scoff at, but the League had a tax base current-day economists were no longer capable of even dreaming of.

But it really should have been Liz dealing with the…mayor?

I repeated myself.

We didn't have the lift to move everything. And we didn't have the time to loft everything we could move.

The issue—surprise, surprise—was the boxes. The SLDF transport box wasn't just a fancy shipping crate. It was a regularly-shaped vessel in its own right that could be latched to other boxes. Rio Lobos could have fit a couple thousand in its hold, all bonded together, where they were the next best thing to a solid plug of alloy bonded to the frame of the ship. Without the boxes, each mech, track, and armchair had to be individually secured or the first-time Rio hit the gas they'd each be individually transformed into a multi-ton pinball.

"But the Falcons…"

"They'll be back, probably. We don't have the firepower to stop them if they want to try again, and we never intended to hold in the first place.

"Look, we're pulling out all the ROWPUs and generators. They're a nice, simple, robust design. Drop one hose in a water source, the other into the empty cistern, flip on the power. The generator is on the prime-mover, and it'll drink anything: petroleum distillates, hydrogen, moonshine…"

"That will help, certainly—"

Devin

Captain Ariana Olan steered the Armored Commando Expeditionary Vehicle with deft touches as she sped it through a computer-generated artificial terrain. The ACE was a hovercraft. Fast, maneuverable, well-armored and armed, with a vehicle-rated null signature system and chameleon light polarization shield that had just been cleared for release to the SAS and select Royal units a month before the coup.

Colonel MacPherson, commander of the First Devin Armored Battalion, rode shotgun, simultaneously looking around the cockpit in envy and trying not to gibber in terror as she sped through the twisting canyons of scrap at a speed better suited for an aerospace fighter. The ACE's normal crew rode jumpseats and tried not to let their irritation at being made little more than passengers show.

"Where is Li's team?"

"Grid 8375 is in Mountain 5."

A slightly oval-shaped patch began to flash red against the green of the simulated walls of rubble. Ariana touched the controls and the ACE veered towards a wall of solid trash that mag-scan and radar both said was impenetrable.

Instantly the ACE slowed as they entered a tunnel blasted through the scrap wide and tall enough to accept a Demolisher tank.

"I've been watching you work and still I am amazed."

"The easy we do immediately, Sir. The difficult requires high explosives."

It had really been the only way to get as far down as they had needed to go, and they weren't really certain which mountain they'd needed to examine in the first place. Under the circumstances it hadn't required much more to widen the tunnel enough for the locals to make use of.

An icon flashed and Ariana slowed still further, and then finally brought the ACE to a stop before shutting down the lift fans, and then finally killing the engine.

"Hope you have your boots on and your tetanus inoculations up to date," Ariana said.

"Is yours?"

"My last one was two hundred seventy years ago," Ariana said with a straight face.

"The Star League really did do everything better," MacPherson said dryly. "Just imagine. Immunizations that last longer than the average life expectancy."

Ariana chuckled as she hit the button to drop the gate. Time and the mountain of stuff had fortunately compressed the trash under foot. Also fortunately the locals had apparently only ever used the Scrapheap for metals disposal. There may well be hazardous materials, or general refuse, but they had encountered neither in quantity yet. Unfortunately, the blasting had torn much of it up. There was a reason the Commandos were creating armored fighting positions, not infantry.

The area was well-lit with work-lights and she followed the cabling from the first ACE forward to where Master Sergeant Li's team was working.

"What've we got?" Ariana asked.

Li patted a wide swath of metal he had excavated, about two meters wide and at least five or six long running generally back towards the vehicles. From the way scrap curled around its edges it was pretty clear that the metal plate was only a small portion of something much, much larger. In the center there was a crumpled sort of ridge that distorted the plate.

"What is this?" MacPherson asked.

"High pressure storage vessel," Li said, sounding remarkably satisfied.

"I'm not following. A high pressure storage vessel for what?"

"For a Texas-class battleship."

Ariana watched MacPherson turn very pale.

"This is a hydrogen bunker?" he asked in a voice that was remarkably steady if a trifle high.

"Coolant, actually," Li said. "Liquid helium for the jump-drive."

"And it's intact?" Ariana asked skeptically. "After three hundred years?"

"No, of course not," Li said. "Best guess it was vented in orbit, maybe as part of a coolant flush? I really can't tell and it isn't important. What's important is that there is surprisingly little deformation of the pressure chamber, and I can fix what there is."

"Fix it," Ariana said flatly.

"Blow a hole here," Lie explained. "We drop in the patch, fuse it, put in a second patch up here with a valve fitting, fuse that. Then it's simply a matter of pumping in the helium. Once it's in, the pressure will help keep the patches in place. It might leak a little, but it'll either hold long enough to matter or it won't matter at all."

"That's insane," Ariana said. "For one thing, even in space helium requires active cooling and—"

"The cryo-plant built into the bunker looks intact," Li said as he handed her an ultrasonic probe. "Won't know for sure until we get back there of course. But if it is, we just need to hook up the power. Solar, maybe, or a quieted ICE. Not fusion, don't want any betraying neutrino emissions, I don't care how unlikely that is."

"Well hot—cold—damn," Ariana said as she consulted the probe. She handed it back, thought about it for a while, and then pulled out a dataslate and flipped through maps before finding the one she wanted. "Okay, beyond that wall is a fighting position that should be what—two meters above the general debris level?"

"Probably more like four, Captain."

"Okay, four. Hmmm. This C-shaped ridge off to the…east? Thataway," she waved towards the left of the wall she had just pointed out. "Level it out some so the grade is easier to traverse. Then—"

"Ma'am, we're due to lift in less than twenty-four hours," Li said.

"I can extend—"

"You already have, Skipper. That's the hard limit unless we get in contact."

"Damnit. Okay. Call everyone in. We're going to need to arrange for our ride to offload one of its auxiliary helium bunkers. Warrants Carmichael and Long need to grade out that slope some so it's traversable. The other side is a little shallower than I like but it should work. I need Warrant Nguyen to grind up as much magnesium, aluminum and rusted steel as he can. We're going to need at least twenty or thirty tons of it. A few thousand would be better."

"We can continue to do that after you leave," MacPherson offered. "Provided," he continued dryly, "we know what it is you intend to have us do with it."

"I'm kind of curious about that too," Li commented. He looked up from his own dataslate, which was tied into the cables leading back to his team's ACE, and from there by relay to the grid that they had laid throughout the Scrapyard.

"It goes in this valley with all the cataclysmite we have left," Ariana said.

"And Carmichael's and Long's current projects?"

"Tell them to fuck whatever they're working on, if they can finish it in ten fine, but this takes priority."

"I'm not sure I'm following," MacPherson said.

Li gave him a sideways look. "I'm going to join my team and finish preparing that position, Captain. Colonel," he nodded once, and disappeared up the tunnel.

Ariana gave MacPherson a level look. "You do know that you and your men are unlikely to survive this."

MacPherson started to reply but she held up a hand.

"You have less than eighty tanks. If they come—they may not—they'll probably have fifty-five mechs, thirty fighters, and seventy-five armored infantry, or at least that is our best guess at what a generic 'cluster' looks like. All this is going to accomplish is make the fight harder for them. More costly. If you can stay in the tunnels it'll stop most of their air power from being able to hit you, but once the battle armor finds you in here—and it will—you'll die. It's that simple."

MacPherson nodded grimly.

"Okay. Everything we've done does one of two things. It either lets you sting and disengage. Or it lets you move from one position to another. If you can keep it going and if they don't figure out the network right away, then you'll probably get in a couple of kills before going down. Maybe more than a couple, but probably not much more than a double handful, if that."

MacPherson nodded again.

"This, if we can get it set up, won't do that. If they don't know what's coming and if you can get them to walk into this valley… If we get it completed in time and you can do those two things, this may give you one chance to kill a lot of mechs and infantry."

"How?"

"Most writers have Hell as a place of fire. But some, Dante in particular, have it a frozen wasteland. If we can get it set up in time, this will give them a taste of both."

LC-1015814-18914715

The effects of KF-transit are both well-known and easy to detect. Thus, surveillance of a hostile system came down to either having your surveillance assets in place before hostilities, or disguising your observation platform as something else.

The Star League Defense Force had done both, and with far more success than failure.

But TH-X1138 lacked the specialized spy ships. Some thought had been given to acquiring JumpShips—certainly given the state of the Inner Sphere it should not have been impossible to come up with a reason to hold them on-station for weeks if not longer. But this was set aside for it was…unlikely the Clans would allow a jump-capable ship, even one operated by a civilian crew, to remain in enemy hands.

And then there was the little problem that what surveillance assets might have been deployed centuries ago had long since been discovered, run out of power, failed for want of maintenance, had a close encounter with a comet/asteroid/ship/planet/moon/star, or any one of a dozen other fates.

In the end they'd had no choice but to jump in an observation ship, and had taken three steps to ensure that they would pass unnoticed. First, they used a ship with the best electronic warfare suite—one capable of turning the ship mounting it into a hole in space—available. Second, by jumping in at the ecliptic rather than the usual polar zone, or one of the more common pirate points, they decreased the chance anyone was looking in the wrong direction. Lastly, they jumped far enough out that it was unlikely anyone would detect a single ship making transit.

Of course, this also meant that single ship was too far out to see anyone else making a more customary transit, but that was what Newtonian space-drives and recon drones were for.

LC 2181523149147-1181319-315131611425
TH-X1138 assembly point

Muriko silently contemplated her escort. It was the first time she would meet the Cameron Heir wearing ceremonial dress rather than a formal uniform. If the Navy lieutenant with the aiguillette of a staff officer attached to the Office of the First Lord had any objection to the daisho it was not apparent.

They made their way to the grav wheel where Amanda had an office and the guards outside the hatch came to attention. Again if either saw a problem with her bringing blades into the presence of the…First Lord-presumptive?—Muriko rolled the title around in her mind before accepting it as good as any—they didn't make it known.

One guard touched a stud and announced her. A moment later the hatch slid open.

Muriko entered, and the hatch slid closed as she bowed.

She had anticipated Amanda and General Winters. A guard was no surprise. Nor was Victor's absence. Roland seldom talked about the twins, but she knew the brother found gravity a trying experience. But the Chief of Staff and General Jackson Amaris?

"Muriko—may I call you Muriko?" Amanda asked.

Muriko nodded once.

"I take it from your chosen dress that the Coordinator told you that you needed my permission to kill yourself?" The tone had a mildness that only served to underscore the bluntness of the words.

"To cleanse honor, hai."

"What honor needs cleaning?" Amanda asked. "You helped spill enough blood, both of your own and the enemy's to clean the honor of the Combine and Star League both."

"My actions were those of concern for the honor of the Draconis Combine, and the Dragon, this is true," Muriko said. "But it came at a cost to my own honor."

"For which the Dragon cast you out. Doing so placed you beyond the boundaries of honor as practiced by your birth-culture, if Roland explains it correctly."

"From a certain standpoint, one based on pragmatism and action, he is. However, that applied to my personnel, not to me personally."

"And the Coordinator did not do the same when he sent you back to me?" Amanda asked. She leaned forward before Muriko could reply. "If you want to kill yourself, if you think doing so will cleanse or purge your dishonor, there is very little I can do to stop you. I could take away your blades, confine you to quarters, but we both know that unless I handed you over to the medicos and had you placed on 24-hour suicide watch you would still be able to find a way to kill yourself.

"The sad fact of the matter that one who wishes to die can almost always find a way. But another fact that you should consider is that right now, the only person who can tell you the status of your own honor is yourself. You are, as of this moment, also the only one who can say what honor is—what it means—to Kurita no Takamori Muriko."

"You deny me then," Muriko said solemnly. She hadn't expected otherwise, really, but…

"No." Amanda said in a tense, but level, tone. "As I said, only you can define your own honor. I can't make that choice for you, and I won't take it from you."

Muriko gave her a wary look. Jackson's face was professionally blank—not nearly so good as that practiced by the Court of the Draconis Combine, but good enough for her to pretend. McCay looked resigned. Amanda look insufferably pleased with herself.

She waited. Waited. Jackson tapped his fingers lightly on the table. Amanda at last gave a little sigh that melted into a look of disgust that was swept away by a chuckle almost before Muriko had seen it.

"I also have a job that needs doing. One that you are…uniquely suited for," Amanda said. "So we're going to brief you and then… Well, then you have a decision to make." She smiled, "I'll trust you to make the honorable choice."

Antares

Elizabeth Hazen could only look at the line of military vehicles rumbling through the painting stations.

The RDU, remote drive unit, was usually one of the first things pulled when a vehicle or mech was transferred from storage. But despite being unboxed, the vehicles hadn't been activated, or maybe the Birdies understood how useful they were to a maintenance crew and left them in.

As it was, each piece of armor, each mech, every truck was fully under the remote control—at least where movement was concerned—of the base's central computer. One man could move an entire corps' worth of material if he was industrious and took his time. Or a crew of sufficient size could move it a great deal faster.

She could have rolled the entire set onto DropShips faster than the droppers could have landed and taken off…had she had anything like sufficient logistical assets to move five divisions' worth of material…or a way to stow unboxed assets in anything like the quantity that would have been needed.

Since she didn't have that level of logistical assets the RDUs would have been of purely nominal use, but she also had a logistical base's painting station. The intention was, no doubt, to put on a planet- or region-specific camo as the corps moved from storage to active-duty. But since she had it she figured she might as well use it, and the alterations she wanted were so minor a truck barely had to slow as it went through the painter.

She glanced towards a monitor showing Von Luckner and Burke tanks, both royal-variants, being boxed. "Fucking birds," she muttered.

"Ma'am?"

"Just thinking about all the equipment we'll have to leave behind because the Falcons unboxed it."

"They didn't."

Elizabeth turned from the computers. "Sergeant?"

"They didn't." He shrugged. "Not a lot to do, so I've been running through records. Looks like stuff was unboxed in 2772. Nobody wanted to remove the treatment plant and getting the gear out in boxes would have been as much a nightmare as we're looking at."

"So why was it left?"

"At a guess, it was ordered unboxed by someone on the corps staff, or maybe twelfth army, but with the 29th flipping, the destruction of two divisions and disbanding of a third during the periphery campaign, they didn't have the bodies."

"And the rest of the SLDF?"

"Probably didn't have the shipping to come all the way out here and then all the way back. That's just a guess, though. Anyway, as near as I can tell, the turkeys never entered the facility."

"And now we've shown them just where it is," Elizabeth said dryly. "Lovely."

"Looks that way. Sorry, Ma'am."

"Not your fault, Sergeant." She turned back to the monitor, the two tanks, now fully boxed, were being hauled away as two more rolled up.

"Want me to pull one out for you to look at?"

"Sure. Something we're handing to the locals if you have any in queue."

The sergeant who'd spoken raised a fist, thumb raised.

She left the control room as a truck turned right on leaving the dryer and parked rather than turn to the left and join the long line of gear heading back into the base. Elizabeth approached it from the rear, angling to come around the right side, and found herself face-to-face with a ghost.

The black lines stopped her breath. She reached out to touch, but pulled her hand back as if stung.

If she hadn't just watched this truck get painted she would have sworn it was 'Licia—little Lisa's—work. It had her curve on the 'W', and that little hook ending she never quite was able to get rid of.

Another truck pulled up. This one bearing her handiwork.

"Okay," she said under her breath lest anyone nearby hear her talking to herself. "Now I'm impressed. Still isn't as much fun as doing it yourself though."

Elizabeth looked around. The box of spray cans she'd acquired was still sitting next to the control room. She jogged over, retrieved one, and headed back. "Now, what can I do…"

She returned to the second truck: G-E…

Smirking she turned as a ROWPU parked.

The spray can dropped from nerveless fingers as what she was doing hit home.

How the fuck could have things gotten so bad that she'd give birth to this?

And that little Lisa—Alicia who had still cried every time she killed someone even after fourteen years of horror—helped?

Elizabeth Hazen was directly responsible for civilian deaths. It was one of the first lessons she'd learned, and one of the hardest to accept. She could do what she could to minimize those deaths. Try to keep those losses and destruction from ruining any families. But no matter what she did innocent lives would be lost, or destroyed, by her hand.

That didn't mean she had to like it.

And it didn't make her responsible for the fates of the 'hostages' Amaris and his bully boys trotted out to try and compel her to surrender.

But in the end, she did it anyway because that was the price of doing business. And her Oaths, to the First Lord, to the Star League, and above all to herself, gave her no choice but to take or destroy those lives.

But she never, not ever, deliberately targeted civilians or wholly civilian infrastructure. Collaborationists? Sure, but not people just trying to get by. Civilian power generators that supplies military bases? Also on the list. But every target on the list had a military component. Every. Single. One. There had been times, schools, or public parks, or… But they didn't have military value, no matter how much pressure it would have put on him.

Water treatment facilities? Granted, Terra wasn't as water-critical as some, but even there the coasts were heavily urbanized and even the oceans needed some treatment to pull out the salt to make it drinkable. Her attacks had strained the civilian infrastructure. Imposed rationing. But even Amaris wasn't stupid enough to force a hundred million people on his metaphorical doorstep to die of thirst.

True that she had also gone out of her way to never put him in that position.

But that still begged the question of how the hell could something she and 'Licia created be so callous as to destroy a facility that was solely responsible for the fresh water of nearly half a planet's population?

She lifted her communicator from her belt. "Mac."

It took an eternity for it to be routed to her chief of staff's comm and a connection to be established.

"Colonel?"

"I want you to contact Merlin. Tell him to forget dumping their data," she said briskly.

"But—"

"Tell him to grab what he needs for our use, then leave it."

"But the plan was to erase it, Ma'am. Are we going off script?"

"I want the entire battlefield scavenged," she pressed on. "Get some locals to do it if you need to, but I want all of our gear in our dropships, and all the birdies' gear in theirs."

"To what end?"

"I want you to dump it into the star."

"You want to what?"

"It's simple. Grab anything we can use, but then I want these Falcons to disappear. I want, when their fellows come looking, that they find nothing."

"It won't work. If nothing else the locals saw us."

"Yes, but they didn't really see us fight, did they? They saw all the birdies' mechs pull out. We'll give the dead a decent burial…into the star. And we'll keep the prisoners. I want nothing left."

"Ma'am. Even if we pull out all the mechs, there's still a battlefield saying we were here. It isn't the kind of thing you fix in a few days."

"I have an idea on how to handle that." She explained briefly.

Colmar

Joseph Cardigan rested his elbows on the arms of his chair and silently rested his chin on his pads of his thumbs as his forefingers gently rubbed the sides of his nose.

At one time his regiment had comprised of reinforced battalions of mechs and (hover) armor, a battalion of infantry (littoral, mechanized), two fighter groups, and a naval squadron (wet navy, as opposed to an exoatmospheric navy squadron), plus support elements and the logistics to move them all around. But he didn't have that. He was light on Mechs. Even lighter on armor. His infantry had been consolidated down into two understrength companies, and the less said about his aerospace squadrons the better.

On the upside, he had Doomwhales—the prototype bigger, nastier cousins of the CAAN Kraken-class DropShips. They were showing the hard use of the last fourteen years, but were generally in good shape, and he'd been able to fill many of the empty bays with additional food, fuel, ammo, and spare parts. And unlike the Krakens they were designed to function as underwater command and logistical bases once they'd landed.

And he had the Tarawas.

The CAAN regiments had asked the SLDF-Navy for a heavy artillery support unit. The SLDF-N had taken a look at the problem, designed two solutions, and the then-Black Watch Training and Development Command had gotten both to test.

The first, the bomb ketches Harvey and Moth, were essentially highly customized Mako-class corvettes. The Tarawa-class DropShips were the second. Spherical, designed to land in water—in fact, they could only fire their primary weapon when in water—and armed with a single cannon that was capable of engaging targets in low-orbit as well as delivering naval gunfire hundreds of miles inland—assuming the proper rocket-assisted ammunition was on hand.

Meanwhile, his reinforcements had left him over-strength on infantry and naval elements. The additional ADA batteries were potentially useful, but not incredibly so.

Joseph allowed himself one more moment of silent contemplation before he straightened in his chair. "Alright, General. I understand your position. I don't agree with it, but I do understand it. And honesty compels me to add that some of that disagreement may be because it cuts against my orders. On the other hand," he said in a lighter tone, "I like a good fight as much as the next Marine. Also beer, but that's for after the fight."

The holo of Hauptmann General Gilda Felra tilted her head slightly. "I suppose the Brigade could see to buying your regiment the first round."

Joseph raised a finger. "I'm not allowed to get it stuck in, General. If we can grind them up all well and good, and I'll cover your evac if we can't, and if they want to get wet and swim with the sharks, well, we'll just be chummy. But if you don't pull out in time I will have to leave you here."

"Fair enough," Gilda said.

"In that case, is Timbiqui Dark still in production in this fallen world, or has it become LosTech along with the Kearney-Fuchida JumpDrive, the recipe for Swedish meatballs, and the knowledge of how to properly prepare martinis?"

"You will be gladdened to know that Timbiqui Spirits continues to produce Timbiqui Dark to the original recipe," Gilda Felra said in a mock-serious tone.

"Well halleluiah! At long last a glimmer of light in the blackness that was my soul," Joseph grinned madly into the pickups. Then he wiped the smile from his face and got serious. "In that case, General. Let's talk particulars."