The Death of Robotnik 1
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The Starport area could contain up to twelve dropships in two half-circular rows. It had the strange feeling of an amphitheater, and the first row was occupied by six DropShips and two occluded behind right beside the main elevator.
Only one DropShip could ever launch from the underground starport at a time, but the above-ground landing area could accommodate three. This was very inefficient, but given as this inclined tunnel was the most vulnerable way into the facility, the ELH officers thought it was reasonable for the sake of defensibility.
As they approached the rear of the starport, Posseli spoke up "Doctor Robotnik. I have two questions."
"Shoot."
"The first… well, I noticed that despite all the claims of these Super Urbanmechs being a unified and economical choice for colony defense… they do have some expensive technology in them, don't they? Extra-Light Engines, Double Heat Sinks, Ferro-Fibrous armor, ECM suites, artillery, and so on. Surely they can't be as cheap as that. Why give Urbanmechs so much advanced technology when they would be just fine with more mass-production components?"
"Isn't it obvious? They are Royal Super Urbanmechs, and this is clearly a Royal Operation. It's pure Terran Hegemony gear here."
"I have… three questions now," Posseli sighed. "But let me ask the second question first. You said you designed and produced the Urbanite-series of Ultra Light Mechs. That implies that there is a factory here that is capable of producing BattleMechs. Is this actually the case?"
"Yes. Of course there is."
Major Stimson grit his teeth and palmed his face. He groaned. "I don't want to have to fight off the entire Taurian Concordat for this. It's too close to the border. Any Davion interests planting down here sounds like the start of an invasion-"
He slowly drew his palm down his face until he sagged. "But destroying it just to deny it from those who would abuse it, that makes us no better than the barbarians who trashed the Inner Sphere through the Succession Wars."
"Technology is just technology. Lostech isn't magic. As long as you know the principles behind them, nothing is ever really lost. Machines aren't as important as people."
"If more people thought like that, we wouldn't be employed anymore for objective raiding. Somehow… I don't know… it might just be worth it," said Major Stimson.
Posseli agreed, and then continued "Onto my final question, then - what the hells is OPERATION SEEDCORN that needs all of this? What would be so important that the Star League kits itself out for some ultra long duration colony effort? Even if it's Urbanmechs, being so completely self-sufficient means they're going way out of reach from the Inner Sphere. Pure Terran Hegemony tech and personnel, this is some super secret stuff. What's out there?"
"I can't tell you that. Not right now. And then after knowing it… you're going to wish you didn't know."
"Ominous!" quipped Allwine.
Robotnik's walker just laughed again. "BWA HA HA HA."
Posseli raised his hands. "Okay. Okay. Fair enough. Could we just return to our original concern - what's actually inside those dropships?"
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The holorobot displayed six egg-shaped craft. At 121 meters tall, they were only 30% taller than the common Union DropShip but due to the volume square-cube law, could contain as much as three Unions.
"The SLDF left them behind because they were not worth taking compared to other ships. This means they also took with them the personnel transports and heavy cargo dropships. A thousand tons left over in a civilianized Dictator is barely anything."
Posseli nodded. "Understood. Figuring in the necessary cargo for a colonization effort - life support, supplies, terraforming equipment, maybe a modular factory… I can understand that there's a lot that would not be directly useful for a war."
"You know that Dictator-class DropShips have four levels, right? Three for a company of mechs, one for cargo, all stacked on top of each other. This is how that looks-"
The holorobot projected a view of the internals of the modified Dictator. "One hundred forty-for Mechs is a regiment, plus thirty-six times four of specialized variants, that's a clean two regiments. They fit neatly inside six Bigwigs."
The view turned into two rows of egg-shaped DropShips each with the two bottom decks highlighted in red.
"Then I told you that I filled two of the Bigwig cargo holds with Sub-Capital Lasers. At two hundred fifty tons each, that's eight SL/3. Too heavy to mount in Superheavy Support Vehicles, but each of them packs 85% of the firepower of a full-size Light Naval Laser at 75% the range and 35% the mass."
The dropships updated:
\ BIGWIG 1: Red Egg - CARGO FULL
\ BIGWIG 2: Orange Egg - CARGO FULL
\ BIGWIG 3: Yellow Egg - CARGO 50%
\ BIGWIG 4: Green Egg - CARGO 50%
\ BIGWIG 5: Blue Egg - CARGO EMPTY
\ BIGWIG 6: Indigo Egg - CARGO EMPTY
"Do we need eight of them though?" Posseli asked.
"You need at least six to be sure of being able to pop a Union in a single volley. Hanse Davion would give you a literal blank check for the chance to reverse-engineer any real WarShip-grade weaponry. One to disassemble, and another for backup in the inevitability that NAIS gets sabotaged."
"Wow, this alone would make this whole thing worth it," remarked Allwine. "I agree - Hanse Davion would pay out whatever we wanted just for this technology." Then he squinted suspiciously at Robotnik. "But does this technology actually… need… any reverse engineering?
"Heavy Sub-Capital Naval Laser is limited to transatmospheric ranges. Light Sub-Capital Naval Laser is light enough to have its aiming systems suitable for orbital bombardment. Do we really need to open that can of worms?"
The man winced.
"Heavy Sub-Capital Lasers are big enough that people ought not to think of turning Leopards into Pocket Warships too early. If they think these are the actual Light versions, they would be more focused on trying to upscale them. "
Major Stimson gave Robotnik's walker an odd look.
"What?"
"Doing everything with a mind towards the future… are you actually… no." He shook his head. "Later." He exhaled. "Okay. That's two DropShips removed from the list. What's the difference?"
"So the difference is that the third level is a Vehicle Bay with twelve cubicles. A normal combined-arms Command variant of the Dictator carries *eighteen vehicles*. These have twelve. I didn't tell you before that nine of the twelve bays are all Heavy Vehicle Bays, capable of accepting and repairing Combat Vehicles up to one hundred tons. And the three remaining vehicle bays each in all six of these DropShips in front of you… are Super-Heavy Vehicle Bays. Each capable of accepting up to *two hundred tons* of mobile machinery."
Robotnik's mustache quivered as the walker faced them. "And they are *full*."
Posselli's eyebrows raised. "Superheavy vehicles? No one makes those anymore. Unless they're industrial vehicles? I don't think the SLDF would need any more super trucks or mining vehicles either."
"Well it can't be that or else Doctor Robotnik here wouldn't be trailing off for drama so much," Stimson said with a twisted grin. "Get on with it, Doctor."
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The holo shifted to a large squat vehicle towing a trailer.
"This is the O-66 "Oppie" Oppenheimer Hazardous Material Recovery Vehicle (HMRV). It's a hundred fifty tons and was widely used in the First Succession Wars to clean up the fallout from nuclear, biological, and chemical attacks. Produced in large numbers on Caph when it was still part of the Terran Hegemony, the factory of Brown-Corning, Limited was destroyed by Draconis Combine raiders when they thought it was a BattleMech manufacturing facility.
"It comes in three parts-
"The first, the HRMV tractor unit, the actual "Oppie" is completely environmentally sealed unit with components like minesweeper, bulldozer, a backhoe, and twenty tons of sealed liquid storage. It has four manipulator arms, two sprayers, and four searchlights to assist in salvage operations. It has Paramedic equipment and a five-man personnel bay with hazard gear. I suppose it could also be used as an infantry bay if needed.
"The other part is the Oppie Salvage Rig, which is also with two Lift Hoist, searchlights, and a backhoe. It's also a hundred fifty tons, with a handling capacity of two hundred.
"The most interesting part is the DeConAid trailer. They're environmentally sealed MASH units with *eleven* operating theaters. They also have sprayers mounted externally in omnidirectional turrets.
"Of the eighteen Superheavy Bays, three full sets of Oppie rigs - therefore nine 150-ton units - occupy those bays. All of them specced for cleaning and terraforming of tainted worlds."
"I can see how a colony effort would find those very useful," remarked Posseli. "This is the kind of lostech that the military don't care about but would actually do more to help the Inner Sphere."
"I don't know, the ability to handle nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons of mass destruction would be very valuable too. Just because we don't expect to get hit with WMDs doesn't mean it wouldn't be good to be prepared to deal with it," added Allwine.
Major Stimson only nodded. This made perfect sense for Operation SEEDCORN.
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The rotating image then shifted to a U-shaped vehicle with a crane.
"This is the Wayland Mobile Base. Produced for Hegemony Armed Forces starting 2541, it is a one hundred fifty ton support vehicle designed for the recovery and repair of combat units on the field. Unlike the JI-50 sixty-ton Field Repair Unit that the Davions use, the Wayland Mobile Base is capable of repairing anything that is a combat unit. Mechs, tanks, ASF. It has the tooling to handle the repair of Extra Light Fusion Engines and Endo Steel frames. It can deploy a Mobile Field Base to handle multiple units at once. It can travel at a reasonable speed of fifty-four kph. As far as I know, no Wayland Mobile Bases survived the First Succession Wars."
Engineer Posseli rushed at the holo-robot again. "I remember this! Eridani Light Horse used to have them until they were destroyed in the raid in the Periphery, forcing the Light Horse to consider finding work back in the Inner Sphere." He turned sharply towards Robotnik "How many of them do we get?"
"Three."
His lips turned down. That left six more mysterious Superheavy vehicles. "Well… that's better than nothing, I suppose. I'm going to have to petition that Davion doesn't get ANY of them. We need them too much. One for each Regiment sounds about right."
"But the only way we can get any more of them is if we allow someone else to reverse-engineer them and then manufacture them," said Allwine.
"Yeah, also - we have enough Mechs for *five* regiments now," reminded Stimson.
"Ugh. You're right. It's hard trying to get rid of the zero-sum thinking of these Succession Wars. The Eridani Light Horse isn't in the heavy industry business." Then Posseli blinked. "But… could we?"
He turned towards the walker "Doctor Robotnik, once we're back in Davion space - your genius could do more than all the hardware we could bring. Davion has their Doctor Banzai, just say what you want and you'll have the entire ELH Engineering Corps backing you all the way."
Major Winston looked pained.
Robotnik's walker raised its palms. "That is unfortunately out of the question. I won't survive the journey."
"Yeah… I didn't know how to properly bring this up, but Robotnik - you sent those messages with an intro like 'if you're viewing this holo, then that means I am dead'. I really didn't expect to see you still alive, but I suppose it's a miracle enough. It's not like a man can properly predict the day of his death." Major Winston waved towards the Robotnik walker's spherical body. "Is that some life support pod or something?"
"Or something. Yes. Definitely."
Posseli looked despondent, but as someone also getting along in the years he could understand. Sometimes the best you could do was just to accept and prepare for the inevitable end. "So what's left for us?"
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The holo changed to an oval-shaped chassis.
"Of the six remaining Superheavy Bays - four are actually dedicated to a hundred-ton Hovervehicle and the Submersible Drones they carry.
"The Subnautical Drone Command Craft and the Subnautical Drone Carry Vehicle are each a hundred tons. The Nautical Drone command hovercraft has full satellite uplink and advanced underwater comm systems. It has four drone control systems with a range of around eighty kilometers. It can carry either one twenty-ton Sub-Drone or a 20-ton VTOL.
"The Nautical Drone Carry Vehicle carries four Drones, cargo, and can itself be piloted or controlled remotely. Both of them perform
as blue water hovercraft with nothing particularly interesting or lostech in them other than their communication and control systems.
"No, what's more interesting is the Subnautical Expedition Drone."
The view expanded into an egg-shaped craft. "By itself, the Sub Drones are twenty tons with manipulators, sensors, and a larger arm for exploring and collecting samples. It has a crush depth of about two kilometers. All of this equipment leaves enough room for 4 tons of cargo. Orrr… you could put a five-shot Artemis-enabled Long-Range Torpedo or six-shot SRT system in there. The sea was never expected to be safe."
Posseli frowned slightly. "That… makes sense too. The SLDF wouldn't need those to retake Terra…? Would they?"
"SLDF CAAN Regiments would have their own better amphibious and submersible assets," said Allwine.
"But as I am DOCTOR ROBOTNIK, NIK OF ALL THAT IS BOTROB, I present to you-!" And the view flickered to show an egg-shaped craft with a propeller on top "The Aeronatical Drone Attack Craft! The EGG-FLYER!"
The Drone carried a single LRM-5 and a Medium Laser and a 2-ton Booby Trap in the torso. "But Robotnik, you might ask? Why have a 20-ton drone when you could just buy a Locust? It's not that much faster than a Locust," his voice went all tinny then back to bombastic normal- "Because it should cost half a Locust to produce and *of course* you can stick a Drone Command Unit in an Urbanmech.
"You can stick a Drone Command Unit in an Urbanmech LAM!
"My UltraLight Urbanite-Mechs benefit from cover so it's fine for them to be piloted. But close air support? You could just drop these in a second wave straight from orbit in a ballute system and activate the moment the Command Control Unit enters range. Heck, I'd say you can even *seed* planets ahead of time with them and activate the system when it's time to attack.
"Mechs are ton for ton the most efficient combat platform to transport across interstellar distance. But what if you didn't need to move between different planets? Dependents in wherever the Eridani Light Horse throws up a semi-permanent base wouldn't be left reliant on field military assets.
"Do I have AeroSpace Drones? The answer is also YES.
"The SLDF relied on drone technology for defense which bit them in the ass when Amaris took control over the SDS network. But these drones are entirely remote controlled. One-is-to-three for vehicle-based Remote Drone Control systems and one-to-one for Mech-based Drone Command Consoles. People have loyalty. Drones are disposable. People are not. I have the technology."
Everyone stared at him in silence.
Then after a while, Posseli shook his head sadly. "Truly, it is a tragedy."
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"So that's two remaining Superheavy Bays," Captain Allwine noticed. "What do you have that can top this, Doctor Robotnik?"
"Those are just the SLDF Ground Mobile HPG trucks, nothing fancy."
"Why must you try to break my miiinnnddd?!" Engineer Posseli hissed.
Major Stimson chortled.
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Mobile HPGs that were not owned by ComStar might be of immense strategic importance to the Inner Sphere... but these were 50-ton machines in a superheavy command vehicle. The SLDF didn't bring them along because they had plenty of their own mobile HPGs already. There was no thinking of denying HPG technology to, say, the Taurian Concordat because the Taurian Concordat already had their own HPG installations. No one had any time to worry about anyone trying to reverse-engineer HPG tech - in fact, given how much the Terran Hegemony was aflame, perhaps they considered it an inevitability. They could not have predicted Comstar or just how effective Terran Hegemony blackboxing was.
But the Eridani Light Horse had no direct need for a mobile HPG, and these were technical staff and battalion-level commanders, so other than wondering at this pinnacle of lostech, this did not concern the group at all.
"But this is big news, sir!" said Posseli. "It could change everything!"
"Yeah, but how relevant is it to us right now?" replied Stimson.
"We could send an HPG message to Colchester that the mission was a success?"
"Woop te do. We can send mail for free."
Allwine nodded. "This sounds like a 'someone else's problem' thing. No need to get excited about what we're not smart enough to handle."
If Hanse Davion would be willing to pay them whatever they wanted for Capital Laser technology, a working mobile HPG could buy them a world.
Unfortunately having a world instead of just basing rights would bring them closer to being Davion vassals, so any equivalent price tag was a mess for high command to figure out.
There was more loot to unpack.
By comparison, the Heavy Vehicles were not as ground-breaking. For the remaining nine bays in each ship, Doctor Robotnik had loaded them with:
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\ Bay 1: 4x Urbanite Mechs (total 60 tons)
\ Bay 2: 4x Urbanite Mechs (total 60 tons)
\ Bay 3: empty
\ Bay 4: Cortez Series N Exploration Tank (75 tons)
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"We don't exactly need this, but a hazardous environment exploration vehicle might come in handy someday," said Posseli.
"Oh you *will* need them. There's a lot of abandoned, dead, radiated, or toxic worlds that you will need to investigate at some point."
"Doubly ominous!" said Alllwine.
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\ Bay 5: Pollux ADA Heavy Tank (75 tons)
\ Bay 6: Pollux ADA Heavy Tank (75 tons)
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"Actually, this answers the weird feeling I had that this colony didn't have enough air defense to it. Super Urbanmech PPCs and ER Large Lasers aren't ideal for AA work," said Stimson.
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\ Bay 7: Mobile Army Surgical and Bioscience Laboratory and Hospital (75 tons)
\ Bay 8: Mobile Geophysical Laboratory (75 tons)
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"More things that would have been very useful in the exploration of alien worlds," noted Posseli. "We are always in critical need of medical facilities, and something that can handle biowarfare without toting a Superheavy Vehicle would be most useful. And I suppose the other vehicle can be used for monitoring space."
"That is what they're made for, yes. They can also send and receive interplanetary communications or from Jump Points to Jump Ships. They pack an impracticably big a Fusion Engine not for speed but to pump up those signals."
Posseli wondered if they needed six of them though. Four seemed plenty. A standard Vehicle Bay could fit four 15-ton UltraLight mechs or two 20-ton Drone Flyers just fine, with enough securing lines to treat the empty bays as cargo bays.
And somehow-
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\ Bay 9: Alacorn Mk VI (95 tons)
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"Bullshit," breathed Posseli.
Stimson grinned. "SDLF Alacorns with triple Gauss Rifles? That is super suspicious, Doctor."
Robotnik waved it aside. "They were here for maintenance and were in a disassembled state with missing components. I only finished putting them back together."
Stimson pointed with both fingers. "Six Alacorn VIs that just happened to be too broken up to bring along, suuure they were."
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By this time they had reached past the first row of DropShips to expose the seventh DropShip.
It was black and red. It had a wide flared mustache. Not even a painted-on mustache, but actual metal protruding off the hull. It had two comm dishes side by side that looked like big oval eyes.
The holo robot updated the list.
\ BIGWIG 7: V̶i̶o̶l̶e̶t̶ Violent Egg - BEWARE THE DEATH EGG AND ITS RAW FURY
"You know… as much as I didn't expect this, actually I think I was hoping for this," said Posseli. The engineer rubbed at his chin and nodded. "I certainly can't begrudge you your own personal DropShip. I am only concerned if those modifications would interfere with its atmospheric profile."
"Dropships are eggs and eggs don't have wings anyway," responded Allwine. "It should fly just fine." He turned towards Robotnik. "What wonders lie within, doctor? I'm ready to be awed some more. I have been practicing my 'shocked' face."
"Well what do *you* think it is?"
With a hushed tone, Posseli answered "It's the mobile factory, isn't it? That's the only thing that could top all of this. And it's the one thing that makes this whole operation work."
"Let's see if you're right!"
Robotnik's walker pointed to the lockers near the main door of the DropShip.
"But first you all need to put on these Radiation Suits."
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