Disclaimer: If you recognize it, it is not owned by me.
Assembly Point Gyrfalcon Four-Gamma
CJF White Aerie
"You lost how many?" Samantha Clees tried—and failed—not to stare at Rard Hoyt.
Rard had never been the picture of good health or martial prowess, but the man standing before her looked like a corpse that had spent a week in the water and then only slightly warmed over after being pulled out.
"Sixty-One Elementals, and thirty-seven mechs," Rard said. "All but seven of the Elementals are killed in action, or MIA presumed KIA. Two of the survivors are…unlikely to resume active duty. The MechWarriors at least were able to eject which is how I only lost nineteen of them."
"Great Father," Samantha murmured. The first reports had been bad enough. But the First Falcon Striker only had seventy-five Elementals and fifty-five mechs to start with. "How?"
Rard produced a data-chip.
Samantha gestured to her holo-projector. "Sit, Rard."
Rard did not sit so much as collapsed into the chair.
"When did you last sleep? Eat?"
"Sleep?" he asked, looking at her, finally, with red-rimmed eyes.
Samantha hit a stud. "James, could you scrounge us something to snack on?"
"At once," a voice replied.
The holoprojector flickered to life to show a landscape of harsh canyons. Only the color and the fact that she had already been briefed allowed Samantha Clees to recognize them as mountains of scrap metal.
"They told us we'd have to root them out," Rard said in a slow, dark tone. "That people had been scavenging for centuries. What they did not tell us was that the whole of it was filled with more passages than a burrock warren."
"The cowardly surats."
Rard's eyes flickered. "They told us where they would be. What kind of battle it would be. That the Boneyard had claimed more than its share of victims from those who failed to respect it."
The door to Samantha's quarters hissed open and her steward appeared with a tray of sandwiches and another with mugs of coffee and a small jug of cream and a tub of sugar. James nodded once and disappeared as quickly as he had come.
Samantha watched as Rard picked up half of a turkey-breast sandwich and tore off a bite. He chewed mechanically for a while before forcing himself to swallow. He did this twice more before setting the bulk of the sandwich aside, leaned forward, and swiped at the holo-projector.
"They told us where their main force would be. The approach to it was predictable, both in the path I chose, and how they contested it. Hit and run tactics unto an impossible network of tunnels and shafts. For the most part too low—impassible for Mechs, but not for battle armor…or conventional armor.
"The main force was here, on this ridge. To get at it we had to cross this valley. Assaulting from the north or south would give them plenty of time to reorient and use the whole of the boneyard, and this terrain the locals call the Waste…"
Samantha grimaced at the hellish landscape.
"What happened?"
"This."
Rard touched a control and the holo advanced. A trinary with a nova on point and Elemental stars working the flanks led. Additional mech trinaries following. Suddenly explosions rocked an Ice Ferret that had been well back from the front and on one flank. It survived, but the holo pulled in and Samantha could see the great rents in its armor, and an arm had been blasted free. It hobbled, dragging one leg behind it.
"They call it Demolisher," Rard said pedantically. "A tank with two heavy autocannons. 185mm bore. Very bad news if it gets you in its sights."
The holo advanced again. A Kit Fox turned towards where the gunfire had come from and loosed a single round from its gauss rifle. The chunk of ferrous-nickel slammed into the side of the scrap mountain and a white haze came spilling out to envelope the valley.
More fire lanced down out of the sides of the mountains, and from the ridge the Falcon mechs had been marching towards. Even more fire lanced out from the thick white fog, and—
The valley abruptly turned into Hell.
Samantha stared down at the roiling furnace enveloped the First Falcon Striker. The scene shifted slightly but steadily as least a dozen suits of battle armor burst as the pressure from their super-heated contents overwhelmed the suit's integrity. The head-assemblies of mechs exploded as their pilots ejected and Samantha watched as the heat cooked Warriors in mid-air, or a parasail caught in a thermal slammed its passenger into the side of a scrap-mountain.
Only it wasn't the scene shifting at all, she realized belatedly. The mountain of scrap, the one that the 'demolisher' had fired from, was tilting…
"How…" Samantha asked as the Falcons were swallowed by a tide of junk.
"Some of the bunkerage was intact," Rard said.
"Pardon?"
"The Boneyard. Its foundations were a Texas someone crashed onto the planet. The chief engineer on Blue Quest surmises that one of the coolant bunkers for the KF-drive, and perhaps as many as a half-dozen of its environmental bunkers, remained intact. Monika's gauss rifle either breached the helium tank directly, or it hit close enough that age, and pressure, and stress finished it off.
"The valley floor was thick with metals—aluminum, magnesium, iron… Enough of it was badly oxidized. It didn't need oxygen to begin burning, but the shock of so many mechs, or the cold from the helium, or the weapon strikes, or all of it breached oxygen bunkers, much of it forced out through narrow channels which drove the temperatures far higher."
"Mechs can stand the rigors of space."
"Where they experience what, five hundred degrees between light and shadow?" Rard asked. "Ours were exposed to a temperature variance of over three thousand. Armor shattered. Myomers were so brittle they snapped, or melted if they did not. Endo-steel cracked or splintered. Actuators froze solid.
"And that helium tank must have been a keystone for the entire mountain. Once its structural integrity was lost…"
"What did you do?" Samantha asked.
"They lost a third of their own under that heap of rubble," Rard said, watching as cataclysm swallowed his cluster once again. He looked up sharply and there was something very, very ugly in his expression. "We rooted them out, Galaxy Commander. It took almost a week, but we got every. Last. One. And those that survived—there had to be no more than a hundred or so—I had taken to a chamber, a large one, under another scrap heap with a little food and a little water and a chemical atmosphere scrubber. And then I collapsed the passages to it. I had holo-cameras with cables in deep-seated conduits, and had it on all the planetary broadcast channels and swore the same fate would befall any that raised a hand against Jade Falcon."
Twycross
There were a half-dozen men in the room clustered around a map table when Liz and I arrived.
We performed the usual courtesies and Liz pulled the two generals off to one side.
"Congratulations, Colonel," I said to the man in the oddball merc uniform. Sometimes it seems like the only colors mercs wear are black and red. His at least was red and black.
"Thank you, Colonel. As it turns out we didn't need you."
"Always nice to be unneeded," I agreed. "What happened?"
"Only one green cluster instead of three. They also had the Falcon Guards but Leftenant Allard-Liao shut them down good. You?"
"The resistance was lacking. We got caught up in a local mess. The Falcons destroyed the largest water purification plant on Antares."
"I thought the Clans avoided civilian targets?" a Kommandant—very short, he could not have been more than a meter and a half or so—interjected.
"They do, we've talked to enough of them now to know that. The destruction was a combination of military necessity, and their ability to replace such systems. Also, it was right on top of a Star League depot."
"Dear God," one of the generals murmured as conversation came to a halt.
"It's not that bad," I said with a shrug.
"Not that bad?" the same general demanded. "Look, Star League mechs might be an every-day sight to you, but—"
"They're more hindrance to the Falcons than help," I cut him off short. "The stuff in that depot isn't as good as their frontline equipment. We've captured some of it. It isn't even compatible with regular Mechs."
"What do you mean?" the Kommandant asked.
"Their Mechs are constructed with parts built into a modular harness. Actually, I think they're the end-state of the design tree started by the Dragoon and Mercury… When a part breaks, it's a pretty easy swap. Hand actuator, arm, leg, cockpit assembly, ribs, myomers, it's all the same thing. But it also lets them reconfigure entire weapon loads. Pull out an autocannon, swap in a laser. Pull the ammunition and swap in extra heatsinks."
"You mean instead of multiple variants of a base chassis, there may be only a single chassis and the variants we've seen are actually different…configurations of a modular weapon system?" the Kommandant asked.
"Yes," I said.
"Sorry," he said quickly. "Kommandant Victor Steiner-Davion."
"Colonel Roland Talbot," I shook his hand.
"These are Hauptmann Galen Cox, and Leftenant Kai Allard-Liao."
More handshaking.
"Why do you think a cache of Star League mechs won't benefit them?" Cox said.
"It will, just not in the near-term."
"Why not?"
"The short version? Logistics. All of their front-line equipment that we've seen so far—that you've seen so far—uses this modular system," I replied.
"Fact or supposition?" Victor asked.
"So far as we know, fact. General Steiner, uh, Felix Steiner shared his intel updates with us on Planting. What we captured in action there, saw in action on Ridderkirk, and the salvage that has so far been pulled out of the Great Gash, are identical on a per-system basis. I want a cross-sample that I can send on for material analysis."
"Why?" Cox asked.
"Because by running a molecular comparison it might be possible to group material as coming from different manufacturing sites. That can give us a start in giving us some idea of size and layout of their basis of support."
From the looks they exchanged they were thinking ahead, but not that far ahead. That's okay. That was what generals and politicians were for while the soldiers got on with fighting the war.
"Their front-line equipment really speeds up repairs and means they can reconfigure weapon packages, in the field, to optimize for the tactical situation at hand. But it appears limited to only their front-line forces. I'm not sure if it's a case of expense, that the tech is new and they haven't completely refitted, or that they haven't been studying their history. Personally, I'd think it's probably a combination of all three, the first two brought about by the last one, but that's a gut call."
"That's jumping to conclusions," Cox said.
"Maybe a little," I acknowledged. "But it's a dance that's been called repeatedly through history. In 1939 and the early forties, only Germany's front-line forces were fully motorized through their supply and service units, and much of their second-line and tertiary units were even more antiquated than those they were fighting.
"Ricky gave the Fat Man access to Royal-grade tech, but he only really got it distributed to his front-line troops—not even all of them—before kicking things off, and the supply/service units were barely upgraded at all."
"Ricky? The Fat Man?"
"Richard Cameron and Stephen Amaris," I said blandly, enjoying the wide-eyes Cox was giving me. Was that anything like the expression I had had when I found out that in that imperceptible period that is jumpspace Mary had gone from alive to dead for centuries?
"Back to my point though, the second-line material we've observed and taken, while advanced, does not use that modular tech. The supply base they were starting to put in on Planting, the Mech force we hit on Antares, the garrison cluster you engaged here… All of them used weapons, engines, material components well in advance of what we have available, but they were also components that were…recognizable; compatible with current war-technologies, battlemechs, armor, and the like.
"We've had some techs look at it, and there is no good way to take one of their modular components and fit it into a Mech not designed for it. You could rip a laser into its component parts and then rebuild it into a new laser—one without the modular harness—that would work in a standard mech. But nothing short of a complete rebuild will work, and retrofitting a standard mech to use modular components isn't possible, or at least not in a way that's practicable. On an individual custom-basis, sure. Enough to field a good quantity of material and keep it in repair in the field? No.
"Probably the only things universal to both equipment sets are hydrogen, mech coolant, and ammunition."
"I don't see how that would make a difference," Cox replied.
"Two logistical lines," Allard-Liao said, speaking for the first time. "One for the front-line, one for garrison." He nodded slowly, "It saves them from having to provide the mechs and armor, and those are very bulky in comparison, but while it is some ease on their logistical line, that's a pretty sizable load on their logistical pipeline, sir."
"But they won't have to ship in garrisons," Cox insisted.
"They'll still need to distribute the mechs, sir," Allard-Liao told Cox. "And they'll want to overhaul they mechs they captured. At the very least upgrade weapons and possibly cooling systems. That will take more time. And they will need to ship in all those parts for those upgrades, as well as techs and equipment to do the upgrades. In fact, it will probably take more techs to do those upgrades if they want them done in a reasonable amount of time, than they would normally assign to garrison, or even front-line units, to keep them in repair.
"And even if they scrape up techs from their available units, it will take them as long to move the personnel to actually use them as it would to ship the mechs in the first place. At the very least they will have to ship in toads or go without.
"We don't know how long their logistical pipeline is, of course, but it is likely to be very substantial to have made everyone miss them until they attacked."
Okay. That kid was damn impressive.
And Vic was not only letting him talk but was paying attention too. That kind of thing was damn rare from someone of his apparent age and experience, rank notwithstanding. Watching them was…like watching Amanda and Victor, actually. Amanda was the quiet one who made decisions and everyone looked at first. Victor went unnoticed, and while generally not as wordy as everything Allard-Liao had just spouted, also had that kind of deep insight.
"What will they do in the meantime?" Allard-Liao asked. "And a prize like that, the Falcons will have the increase the guards. Two understrength secondary clusters was enough when they were trying to present it as a prize that wasn't worth the effort of an all-out attack. Now that there is…"
"Very good, Leftenant," I said. "I heard about the Great Gash. Skill, and now analytical capability. Very good indeed."
"I was lucky."
"You were," I agreed. "But you made your own luck, and had the skill to carry through."
Antares
A lance of light split the heavens and despite knowing it was coming Elias Crichell flinched. He glanced at his comm to find the orbital picture of the plains south of the city of Alba.
Eli-
H-
W- -ere
The screen flickered, and once the dust thrown up by the orbital strike had dissipated the image was replaced by another, an ugly black scar marring the ground where the 'W' had once been seared into it.
Snarling in satisfaction he turned to the woman standing in front of him. "Explain to me why I should not have you shot!"
"I would issue a Trial of Grievance if you tried," Samantha Clees' smile held very little humor. And well it should, for if there was anyone having a worse week than Elias Crichell it was one Galaxy Commander Samantha Clees.
"You do not have the grounds."
"Summary execution by the Khan to mask the incompetence in our Clan's overall strategy is not grounds enough? I doubt the Clan Council would agree with you."
"Explain yourself!"
"I thought it self-evident," Samantha's smile turned into a smirk. "My galaxy was assigned to hit too many targets. I had not the resources to take both those planets assigned in the time allotted and adequately garrison Antares until a proper garrison could be put in."
"Then you should have asked Timur Malthus to alter the schedule."
"I did."
"You did not tell him you were sitting on an equipment set for an entire SLDF Corps!"
"Would you prefer I had taken the time to hand-deliver my concerns, or should I have arranged an HPG transmission and hope that our codes were secure against Clan Wolf?"
"The Wolves are on the other side of our invasion corridor!"
"The ilKhan has not limited those Clans in the homeworlds from leveling Trials of Possession for our resources. Nor has he cast any ban on the practice from those invading. Granted none yet has, but for so rich a prize that might well have changed. I made my objections known to the saKhan in as much detail as I dared with my recommended course of action and was overruled, and you, my Khan, made it very clear that Timur Malthus was our warlord."
Elias decided a change of subject was very much in order and gestured towards the water purifier in front of them. "Are all of these…disfigured thusly?"
"That we have so far recovered," Samantha said. "But just the support vehicles concerned with making water potable or its distribution."
"Destroy them."
"But—"
"Destroy them!" Elias thundered.
"That is wasteful," Samantha said bitingly.
Elias turned on her. "Melt them down for their base alloys then. I will not ask my Trothkin to use equipment that makes a mockery of who we are. Nor will I leave the Founder open to disdain, or our Clan to ridicule!"
"And the water situation?" Samantha asked.
"They have refilled their reservoirs," Elias replied. "And the replacement treatment plant is little more than a month away. Destroy them all."
"Very well."
"Give the freebirths one week to surrender these…tainted vehicles. After that, any time one is found, kill the person it is with and their entire family."
Samantha failed to reply, but as Elias started to speak again she gave a short, chopped-off nod.
"How much did they get away with?"
"Uncertain. Perhaps one brigade's worth of gear."
"I was told it was more."
"The equipment was unboxed. The depot is capable of reboxing a vehicle or mech, and rather quickly, but it still takes time and it can only process two at any one time. Witnesses agree that it was boxed equipment being moved and starport records indicate the presence of cargo vessels, not Mech transports. That puts a rather severe limit to what they could have taken."
"Yet witnesses did see boxed equipment moving."
"The depot obviously boxed some equipment for them. There is also another level that we found when we retook the facility that was not on the initial survey. It is now empty, but what its initial condition was we cannot say. The CAAN regimental set is gone, likely whoever unboxed the rest of the equipment left it alone. A large quantity of spare parts, armor plates, weapons and the like were also taken. They were still in their shipping containers and thus easy to move."
"And the rest?"
Samantha gave Beverly a look that wasn't, quite, an eyeroll and shrugged minutely. "The security seals on the depot were intact. The techs were still working through them without triggering the 'slag contents' function when my galaxy was forced to depart to hit our other targets."
"What does that—"
"My initial report is just that. An initial report." Samantha fell silent an arched an eyebrow, waiting for Beverly to start to reply before continuing. "They took everything when they pulled out. My people. Our techs. The equipment. Everything. And they completely wiped the base computer."
"So the inventory—"
"My techs have started a hand inventory while the scientists reprogram the computers," Samantha said shortly. "Until that has been completed everything, from the depot's sewage systems to the automated maintenance facility, is just so much inert alloy."
Elias grimaced.
"That said, a cursory inspection suggests more material is missing from stocks than could have reasonably been moved," Samantha went on. "Much of it was no doubt distributed to the locals, especially the infantry and logistical gear. It is possible that they also cached some of the more advanced gear somewhere, perhaps in deep water, to deny it to us."
Elias started to reply only to break off as his aide-de-camp stiffened, and took a step back before consulting her wrist-comp. "Beverley, what—"
"Trouble," she said succinctly.
"Where?"
"Winfield. Another raid like Bone Norman, this time using hover armor. The base facilities are wrecked, but casualties are very low."
"And the garrison?"
"Out chasing meteor showers," Beverly said sourly. "They never even made contact."
"Could it be locals stirring up trouble?" Elias asked.
"Possibly, but the raiders used vehicles that were more advanced than it seems likely the locals could support, they also deployed in higher numbers and were better coordinated than seems likely from bandits. Finally, they were lifted out on DropShips."
"If they were from off-planet, how did they get on-planet without being spotted?" Elias countered.
Beverly spread her hands. "The station commander did not equivocate or hesitate in contacting us to notify us of his failure. He cannot answer this question. But he does not believe the forces to be local and I believe him."
"Why?"
"Because one who is willing to admit their mistakes will not compound their error by lying in a way that he has to know we will be checking. Also, he is in the best position to know not only what resources the locals have and what they can do with them, but also to know what resources they might have."
"Both points are worthy of consideration," Elias said.
Beverly started to add more, but her wrist-comp buzzed a second time.
Elias watched as blood drained from her face. "What is it?" he demanded.
"Twycross, my Khan," Beverly said. "It… Our garrison on Twycross has been completely destroyed."
"And the Falcon Guards?"
"Excuse me, my Khan, I meant including the Falcon Guards."
Twycross
The world returned to a bright, if muddled, resolution. It was like standing in a holo-tank with poorly calibrated imagers.
Joanna blinked gummy eyes and the resolution resolved enough that she could just make out the Ghost standing over her.
"Ghugannrrk!"
The Ghost reached out with a hand and Joanna tried to jerk her head away, but she was thoroughly immobilized. The Ghost's hand reappeared holding a glass of water with a plastic straw that it held towards Joanna's cracked lips.
Joanna stared at the straw as though it were a particularly venomous viper before reluctantly placing her lips on the straw. The first sip was immediately absorbed into her mouth without ever reaching her throat. A second sip restored mobility to her tongue and a third trickled at last down her throat.
"Easy," the Ghost said, pulling the glass away.
"You are a hallucination."
The Ghost smiled at that. "Dr. Bassingford has you on some good meds…but not that good."
"A freebirth trick, then."
"To what end?"
Joanna snarled at that. "You cannot be who you appear."
"I am," the Ghost said.
"Prove it."
The Ghost started to reply, stopped, then its lips quirked and it chuckled. "What evidence would you have beyond that of your own senses?"
Joanna scowled. Bad enough to be trapped in a bed while the freebirth in front of her made mockery of her Clan without mocking her as well. "I am to be your prisoner, then?"
"For now you are Dr. Bassingford's prisoner. Beyond that…" the Ghost shrugged.
"Bondsref," Joanna said plainly.
"I am not the one responsible for your present condition. On the other hand, I am not sure that the one who is would know what to do with a Bondsman."
"Thus Bondsref," Joanna said.
"The last person we had make that request set an entire ICU unit, on a hospital ship, on fire. Killed a dozen people. Besides, you were lucky enough to survive and stubborn enough to save yourself. That is an uncommon combination. It would be wasteful to deprive the galaxy of it at this juncture.
"No, we will not be granting your bondsref. But if you do not wish to become a bondsman we will respect that decision. And so, our options are a POW camp or to return you to your Clan. We can do that honorably, yes? Quiaff?"
"Aff," Joanna ground out.
"Good."
The Ghost walked out of her eyesight and returned with a length of rubber tubing it tied around the crook of an elbow. It jabbed a needle into its arm and Joanna watched as the attached vial filled with blood. The Ghost untied the rubber, then removed the needle which it discarded into a bin marked for such. The capped vial went on a length of leather thong and Joanna fell still, not even daring to breathe, as the Ghost swept her hair aside and gently tied the thong around her neck so the vial fell between her breasts, before tucking it into the medical gown she was wearing.
"What am I supposed to do with this?" Joanna demanded.
"Whatever you wish," the Ghost said. "Here I stand, I can do no other. But you, Joanna, must be who you are, and do what that person must do." It nodded once and turned to leave.
"Wait!"
It stopped and looked at her.
"Why?" Joanna demanded.
"Why? Why not?" Joanna glowered and the Ghost tilted its head to one side. "Your bloodhouse?"
Joanna found she had strength enough to clench her hands into fists and grind her teeth. "Hazen."
The Ghost nodded, clearly unsurprised. "You have my brother's eyes. And we were both of us driven by an inner rage the way a fusion reactor drives a 'mech." It nodded once more and turned away, but its voice trailed mocking laughter in its wake. "I imagine we will meet again…daughter."
Twycross
We'd been quartered underground, and as a Colonel I rated quarters that were very nice indeed.
In some ways it reminded me of my youth. Oh, the walls and overhead had been prettied up which was a luxury beyond my parents' reach, and the cubage was insane for even someone of my rank in an environment that needed to be pressurized. But there was something about the weight of all that stone surrounding me…
I was fairly rattling around so I went for a walk. Like a lot of enclosed habitats there were some fairly open public spaces that the residences were wrapped around. In this case a park that rose in a circular column through a dozen levels, and choked with cascading greenery and flowers.
Walkways crisscrossed the chasm. Stairs gave access to different levels, while platforms thrust off from the paths made for observation decks or semi-private nooks. It was in one of these that I found a rather disturbed-looking leftenant.
I watched him watching the foliage as I palmed a small box from my tunic. A sliver of thumbnail opened it, and I waited until an electronic throb announced that the insect-sized surveillance remote had tucked itself away inside.
Some sound I made as I returned the box to my trouser pocket must have given me away for he turned.
"Sir!" he said bracing to an almost painfully-erect form of attention. "I didn't, I mean…"
"Relax," I said. "This isn't a formal affair. Or even a social call. Just two allied officers who happened to be in the same place at the same time."
"Sir, I…"
"Seriously. Relax," I murmured as I toed off my boots. There were a couple of stone—real stone, not pseudo-cast—benches and I went to one and sat down, crossing my legs lotus style and resting my hands on my knees. "First battle?"
"No," he said. Then, reluctantly, said: "Second."
"Different than the sims, isn't it? In there, you're just killing electrons."
"Not that different, Sir."
"It doesn't bother you that you buried a hundred men and women, or more, alive?" I asked.
"Not particularly."
I waited. It'd been far too long since I'd last seen someone working through the ethics of taking sentient life. Not the ethics found in books or lectured on by some professor who was missing an arm, but the deeply personal ethics of war.
"It's not that they died, or that I killed them. It is how I killed them. It seems…unclean."
"War is a nasty, dirty business," I said mildly. "The words are trite, because until you have an opportunity to know no words are sufficient. And after, well…afterwards, no words are necessary. All too often it comes down to two sides butchering each other until one says 'enough'…or there is no one left to say it."
"I could have warned them. Asked them to turn back."
"And if you had you'd deserve to be court-martialed and broken," I said flatly. "Fair fights are the business of holo-vids, and novelists, and people play-acting at war on Solaris."
He stiffened. "I—"
"Are you so good that you could have taken fifty mechs and a similar number of toads on by yourself?" I asked, pitching my voice so it was almost gentle. "Even assuming they held to their usual tactics, one-on-one gauntlet style?"
"No. No one is that good."
"So you're saying you should have risked the non-combatant in your cockpit, and a MASH unit, and the entire operational force instead?" I asked.
"We weren't operating in a vacuum. I could have gotten support."
"At the expense of the medical teams and pulling another regiment or two off the line."
He didn't reply.
"That wasn't another cluster of second-line garritroops. That was a Guards unit. You were facing the Falcon elite. That pass was the best place to hold them. If you hadn't stopped them there, well, you'd have never gotten more people up there before they got out into the open where they could function at their best."
I waited a tick, and when he didn't respond I asked: "Now, do you want to tell me what's really bothering you?"
He blinked owlishly at me.
"Oh, come on, you think I was born yesterday? I know all about the 'cult of the mech.' How you're all modern-day knights with hearts of gold and souls pure as snow."
"But you—"
"Started in the poor fucking infantry. Spare me, okay? What's really bothering you, Leftenant?"
"The men I killed…"
"Who we already agreed weren't the issue bothering you."
"Not them." He turned angrily and paced to the railing, staring down into the greenery below. "Before I went up into the pass I encountered an engineering team, what was left of it, and I ordered them into the pass to find the detonator."
He turned back to me. "They died pointlessly. I killed them for no good reason."
I nodded slowly. "So you already knew when you gave that order that you were going to take your mech up into the pass, blow its reactor, and detonate the explosives sympathetically?"
"Well…no—"
"Why not?"
He didn't reply, and after a moment I nodded. "Because you had a doctor, a non-combatant, riding in your cockpit with you?"
"Yes."
"And you didn't know that they were all dead when you did go in," I said. "For that matter, one of them might have found the detonator and blown the pass with you in it."
"I doubt—"
"Did you confirm that every member of that engineering team was dead or incapacitated?"
"No, but—"
"But what?" I cut him off. "I think we already established what would have happened if the Falcon Guards had gotten through the pass. We've established you hadn't decided to go into the pass when you sent the engineering team in. How else then were you going to stop them?"
"I don't know," he said. "But I should have."
I sat back and gave him a level look. "You have two problems, Leftenant."
"Excessive humility."
"Crippling self-doubt," I corrected. "In the middle of combat where all you can do is react, or faced with an intellectual problem to address, you're fine. But when you give yourself a chance to think you tie yourself into knots. Some self-criticism is necessary in an officer, but you take it to the point where you can no longer make a realistic, rational evaluation of your own performance."
"And the second?" he asked tonelessly.
"You're a mech-jock," I replied. "Your training, experience, it has all been in mech-operations."
"So?"
"So, a leftenant in another branch would be leading soldiers, commanding a section of tanks, a battery of artillery or the like. You'd have had training, practical training, in both leading men and ordering them to their deaths. But the junior-most officer in a lance doesn't need to worry about that because very often there is no one that you need to pass orders to. No one that you have to give commands to."
"Even the junior-most officer in a lance has duties that involve—"
"Not tactical orders," I said. "Overseeing techs or making sure your lance has enough coolant doesn't involve the kinds of orders that inevitably result in relieving another sentient of his or her life. They certainly don't involve you telling someone to go get themselves killed."
I held his gaze and after a long moment he nodded. "Maybe."
"You gave orders that were legal, militarily proper, ethically and morally correct, and resulted in the deaths of an engineering team. Maybe in whatever training academy you went to you learned that you might have to give orders like that. But they never taught you how to give those orders…or how to live with giving them."
He reached up to rub the back of his neck before letting his arm flop down. "What now?"
"Now it's on you," I said. "You have a choice. You can buckle down and soldier, or you can play-act at war. Or, I suppose, you can try to resign, though given the current situation I don't expect that'll go very far."
LC-1015814-18914715
There was nothing that said the contacts were WarShips.
The recon drones were really quite stupid, and, outside of the specific bands of their sensors, myopic as well.
There was little else they could be, however.
It was doubtful that anyone, even the Clans, would incorporate a lithium-fusion battery into a standard JumpShip. Actually, Nike was fairly certain doing so would require not so minor modifications to the drive core itself and that wasn't something anyone in the Inner Sphere seemed comfortable with.
Also, JumpShips tended to arrive at, and leave from, the same point in space.
The contacts didn't seem to be doing that, however. Instead…
Double-jump, burn in-system far enough to give themselves time to react before unfurling sails, then charge the drive core from the sails while taking a trickle-charge off their fusion plant to charge the LFB.
Peregrine agreed.
Spooky wasn't convinced that it was the best compromise between needing to get somewhere fast, and security against being jumped. The time spent burning would count against them.
Either way, it wasn't really their concern. Nike's HPG started warming up as five contacts made a Kearny-transfer to Somerset's zenith zone, a half hour after five contacts departed from Gotterdammerung. Even if their orders hadn't precluded it, they'd heavily taxed the Courses sent with them. Until they'd recharged there was little they could do but observe the universe around them.
Twycross
Victor sat, uncomfortably aware that everyone else in the room was conscious of him. He was the one who had proposed Twycross as a target. It was his plan that had allowed the Federated Commonwealth their first unambiguous victory. Dan Allard had seen to the execution, and others had ran their units, but as Colonel Talbot detailed the outcome of operations in the Jade Falcon OpsArea, he wondered how many of them were waiting for him to call the next move.
"What about your detachments on Devin and Colmar, Colonel?" he asked.
"Colmar hasn't been hit yet," Talbot said. "It's possible that it wasn't slated to be attacked yet, but it's equally likely that units tasked for that planet have been reassigned or had their shipping disrupted as a result of other operations.
"On Devin, Captain Olan withdrew the 42 Commando detachment on schedule. They were boosting out when the Birdies arrived. The Commando's transport was located well outside the Fuchida-limit and only slightly above the ecliptic. As such, they managed to evade the Birdies' notice and Olan decided to hang around and watch.
"We don't have the actual data yet. Part of our network piggybacks through ComStar-controlled HPG stations. Essentially we're coopting some of their bandwidth without asking permission, which puts a limit to how much data we can send without being detected.
"The broad outline however is that with the Commando's help, the local militia was able to pull the Birdies into one hell of an ambush. All we know beyond that is that the Birdies didn't take it well."
"You abandoned them to their doom, then?"
"General Milstein," Talbot said with a degree of patience that under other circumstances would have bordered on insulting, "Even at their fully authorized strength, which they did not have, the 42 Commando is not prepared, equipped, or trained for a stand-up fight. Not even one in terrain like the Boneyard. Certainly, not against the forces Clan Jade Falcon brought to bear. We used them, in this case, because they were what we had available, and because they could go through the motions of combat engineering and battlefield preparation. We extracted them when their potential future contribution became negligible rather than lose an asset to no gain."
He waited a tick before continuing. "We are consolidating our forces for preparation to move outside of the Jade Falcon zone."
"And now you abandon us as well?"
"General Milstein," Victor said rather more sharply than he'd really meant to. "Our friends have contributed greatly in throwing the Falcons into chaos. Certainly more so than we alone achieved. Continue, please, Colonel Talbot."
Talbot regarded him with a level look before giving a very slight bow from the neck. "As I said, we're pulling out. The Federated Commonwealth isn't the only Member-State being hit, and even if it were the Birdies aren't the only enemy you face."
"You still labor under the belief that the Star League exists?" Alvin Kimmel asked sarcastically.
"It seems to have worked for the Eridani Lighthorse," Talbot said tersely. "I'm leaving details like that to higher command. My orders are to disrupt forces targeting Member States and that's what I plan to do."
"How?" Victor asked. "Why?"
"The way I figure it, the Falcons are going to need some time to figure out what went wrong. We've cost them the better part of four clusters. Two of them were reserve formations, but the others were front-line units. We've also shot up a couple of bases, one with some really nice secondaries, and distributed material support to partisans on a number of worlds. It's going to take them time to fix all those problems, and we've seen some indication that the Birdies' logistical capacity, especially JumpShips, is stretched. Time to move on to new grounds."
"That makes sense," Victor admitted.
"Yep. And there's this warship group up at Anywhere," Talbot told him. "It looks like they've refitted with lithium-fusion batteries. If they're prepared to use sails to charge their drives and take a trickle-charge off their fusion plants for the batteries, and go double jumping, they could be here inside two weeks from today."
"Could you engage them with your own WarShips?" Colonel Allard asked.
"Our attack transports are just that, attack transports, despite having a compact drive core. If I massed them together, maybe, but it'd be expensive and it'd strand my ground units. That isn't going to happen."
"Do not tell me that you do not have any proper WarShips," Milstein said.
Victor wanted to throttle him but…regs were against it. Besides, in this case he had a point.
"Sorry, General, I'm not authorized to discuss that topic."
Talbot smirked, and Victor found himself wondering just how much of what he'd just been told Talbot was authorized to tell them…or at least not not-authorized.
"That's quite alright, Colonel," Victor found himself saying. "I assume you want to keep your operational plans secret?"
"At the moment, we're still finalizing plans. There are a few we'd like to discuss, get your feel for current political realities and the like, before we commit to any particular strategy. But on the whole, the fewer that know what precisely we're doing, the better."
"Understandable."
"Your Highness…"
Victor looked towards Dan Allard.
"I know you wanted to hold Twycross, but five WarShips is an awful lot of firepower."
"Agreed. And we can't know that they won't shoot up a planet. Colonel Talbot, can you shadow them?"
"No," he said. "If they arrive in a system we've deployed recon platforms in, all well and good. If not—and there are a lot of empty stars—we can't. And I won't pull my ships away from their current assignment. For one thing it'd only let us cover a few more systems, and they'd stand a good chance of being detected, isolated, and destroyed before my forces could consolidate. If you have any ideas, I'll run them past my naval commander, but otherwise I'm going to let her call the shots where the WarShips are concerned."
"Understood." Victor looked down at his hands for a long moment. "I think we have to leave."
"Concur," Kai said instantly.
"Your Highness—"
"If one of those WarShips arrives overhead in orbit, there's nothing we can do to oppose it," Victor said. "If they decide to sit up there and hammer us, we'd just have to take it…or sue for terms."
Milstein gave him a sour look.
Dan nodded slowly. "You have a point, Victor," he said deliberately. "But my thinking is Colonel Talbot was making a point at how quickly they could be here. Not necessarily that they will."
"Correct," I said. "It is… There are a number of reasons why that type of movement in contraindicated. Also, we have reason to believe—and no, I will not discuss how or why—that those WarShips are currently looking towards Zoetermeer, or perhaps towards guarding Antares. We have certainly encouraged them in those directions."
"Also," Dan continued, "their logistics, especially their JumpShips, are messed up. Even if they had the ground forces to take us, they might not have the lift to get them here. Not without messing up their situation further."
"You think we should stand on our gains?" Victor asked.
"I do."
Victor considered this and, after a moment, nodded. "You have a point, Colonel Allard. And abandoning the victory we had just won would certainly cut the morale benefits of our victory. So too the manufactories on Twycross are valuable to us. However, that having been said, I want to think about another target."
Now it was Dan Allard's turn to object. "Your Highness—"
"I know you aren't contracted for it, but we can fix that. I don't want to let what we've done here get to my head, and that's one of the reasons why you're in charge. To curb my youthful impetuousness," Victor grinned. "At the same time, if we have to leave then I want to do so in as productive a method as possible. And I want to explore the possibility of using Twycross as a jumping off base for further attacks."
"Let's be serious for a moment," Liz said. "Does anyone here think that you can stop cold a serious attempt on their part to take Twycross back?" No one spoke for a moment and she nodded. "So perhaps we should at least discuss where else you might be when they arrive in force."
DC 1415238518-914-16112820932112918
SLS Black Jack
Jackson, who had used his surname with decreasing frequency over the years, would have preferred meeting on his DropShip. Transports were all well and good, but deep inside the Fuchida limit of a star system (admittedly, one that merited no more than a catalog number) and he was uncomfortably reminded of Birkenhead exploding over Tamar. As the commanding officer of a squadron that included warships, transports, and his own ground combat task unit, he wasn't really given an option. Not until he had to deploy surface-side and could honorably hand off this float-around nonsense to someone who was both trained for it and better suited to it temperamentally.
Besides which, Black Jack, unlike his command dropship, had the reserve docking space for the visiting captains to be in attendance for this briefing. They could have attended electronically, but there was something about seeing flesh and blood… Also, there was the little matter of having this conference on a gravity deck which meant coffee in real mugs instead of drink bulbs.
"Alright," he said. "We have a lot of ground to cover ladies and gentlemen, so let's be about it."
Jackson activated the holo built into the conference table. "This is a projection of the Clan Op Zone. Thanks to our new friends we have a better idea of what's going on in a general sense than anyone in the Federated Commonwealth." He paused. "Is that name weird for everyone else too?"
"The last two months have been weird," Aaron Dusan said.
"That's your home you're talking about," Julius Chung observed.
"Sure," Dusan said, managing a brittle smile. "I'll just keep telling myself that."
"It remains to be seen just how much the Combine or this new FRR is aware of," Jackson said. "Generally, we think their central command authority probably has a pretty good idea of what's been taken, or at least cut off by more than forty light-years of depth."
"How was that assumption arrived at?"
"The former Ministry of Communications seems to be doing the will of whoever owns the planet," Jackson said. "More than thirty lightyears and you're beyond general range of jumpers, fifty is the limit of an HPG. It looks like this ComStar group has decided to split the difference."
"Fair enough."
"To date our operations have been over here, in the anti-spinward region being invaded by Clans Wolf and Jade Falcon. The spinward Clans, Ghost Bear and Smoke Jaguar have been left alone. We're supposed to change that up some. Command wants to concentrate our efforts, but we're being sent out to keep the other side honest."
He paused. "Colonel Dusan, we'll start with you—"
"General, no offense, but our condition sucks."
Jackson nodded. "I know, Aaron. But that's true whatever unit we assign. And yes, you're harder up than anyone else here, which is why I have a particular assignment for you."
Dusan leaned back and crossed his arms giving Jackson a skeptical look. "I'll hear you out, and follow orders, but…" he shook his head. "Okay, Sir, lay it out."
"From what we've managed to pick up from the Wolves and Falcons, the Clans are hitting worlds with resources, that are strategically important, or, and this is important, are being garrisoned by forces that they think will put up a good fight or have a good reputation."
Dusan and the others at the table nodded.
"We're pretty sure that they are skipping past worlds that don't have those things. At some point they'll go back and consolidate, but for now they're willing to let those worlds wither on the vine."
"Makes sense."
"We've all heard that we grabbed a bunch of material on Antares, though the details haven't been handed out. Or if they have, I haven't been on the list. Regardless, we've been authorized to 'dispose' of some of our more wretched equipment.
"We've scraped together the worst of our infantry gear, along with some other goodies, a couple dropships worth. We've also put together a list of planets we hope they haven't visited yet. You'll be dropping off supplies for local resistance movements. More importantly, we're hoping they may have taken one of these worlds by mistake."
Dusan frowned, then tapped a query into the comp-interface built into the table. "You think they might have left a garrison light enough that we can take it?"
"If possible," Jackson said. "Do you think you can do that?"
"If a garrison really is light, then maybe. You think they'd honor this batch-whatever and hand over their deposition if I ask?"
"I don't know," Jackson said levelly. "It sounds pretty far out there, but I'd have said the same thing about the last fifteen years if you'd asked me back when I was a raw lance commander."
"Use my judgment?" Dusan asked wryly.
"That's why we get paid the big bucks," Jackson agreed.
Dusan chuckled. "Okay. I'm not excited about this, General. But let me look at the list and the intel we have and I'll kick it around and come up with a tasking."
"Excellent. Julius," Jackson said. "You asked me about some of our attachments."
"I thought we were running heavy to gunslingers," Julius Chung said. "And I'm really concerned about the thinking that has Mercy with us."
"It isn't because we're anticipating a boat-load of casualties, I assure you," Jackson said dryly. "Nykvarm. Back during the colonial days there was an indigenous plague that threatened to wipe out the planetary population a couple of times. Lucky enough, it doesn't seem to survive off-planet. Unfortunately, it also mutates pretty freely. The Star League used to have a dedicated medical facility cranking out a yearly prophylactic. Odds are, that facility is gone."
"Is that known?" Julius asked.
"Nope," Jackson replied. "Might be there, might not. Might be working, might not. Tech hasn't survived well, but that might have, or—"
"It might not," Julius said dryly.
"There was some work-around the colony used. It's in Mercy's databanks which is where we found out about the disease in the first place. It might be that someone remembered and it's in use again. It might be the planet has been deserted for a couple centuries."
"You want us to check it out and have Mercy available just in case?"
Jackson leaned forward. "I'm going to be very clear about this. You are not to risk Mercy in any way. You'll have your ship, and I'm assigning a couple of other gunslingers to you. One of them will take point on this. They'll make first contact, and if there's any shooting to be done they'll be the ones doing it. Zero risk to Mercy."
"Understood, General. And agreed," Julius nodded.
"That leaves your division and my regiment," Muriko Takamori said.
"You're attached directly to my regiment. Sorry. I'll keep you under my direct command rather than subordinating you to a brigade commander, but—"
"That's fine. We've worked together before."
"We're heading to Schuyler. If any of our worlds are going to be heavily garrisoned it'll be that one. And the reason for it is that Schuyler has one of less than a literal handful of shipyards still capable of producing jumpships in the Inner Sphere."
Julius whistled softly. "Are you sure that you can afford to detach so many warships to me?"
"I don't plan on fighting a losing engagement in space. We'll jump in far enough out that if there's a significant warship presence we'll be able to avoid contact. And if necessary I'm willing to authorize nuclear ordnance to break up massed fighter strikes.
"And the reason I'm willing to do that, why I'm attacking Schuyler in the first place, is that Amanda Cameron wants a definitive message sent about our tolerance where things like using orbital fires to slaughter civilians are concerned."