The World Egg 01
Colchester
Crucis March
Federated Suns
16 February 3025
Seen one military base, seen them all. Natasha Kerensky walked through the base up to the second floor of a prefab. Guards were posted at regular intervals, enough that she didn't need an active armed escort. She did still have a guide though.
Natasha Kerensky had never been intimidated nor impressed meeting with any of the Inner's Sphere's ruling nobility or their generals. Fortunately such encounters were also rare unless she was shooting at them. Her uncompromising punk rock aesthetic compromised nowhere, not even in the middle of grand ballrooms and dining halls.
In the Clan homeworlds, she had continually been passed for bids simply because she was too good of a pilot. Natasha Kerensky was the only bloodnamed warrior to volunteer for this effort of infiltrating the Inner Sphere. The Clans saw the Inner Sphere ruled by their carrion lords as weak, degenerate, and corrupting. Ironic, she thought - now that she had come to live in the Inner Sphere for a decade, she could see just how much bigger yet oddly limited was the thinking of the Lords. In the Inner Sphere of a thousand worlds, they did not need to manufacture reasons to make war a constant and admirable state of being. In the homeworlds, she was being held back due to jealousy by her superiors. For all the martial advantages that their genetic selection and iron wombs may claim to give, Natasha could see now that the Clans never thought beyond the next few fights.
In the Inner Sphere, everybody was born through natural means, so she only had to deal with stupid archaic nonsense somehow that being a woman meant she was less of a warrior. But once inside a mech, nothing in the meat mattered except the will, the skill, and the ability to endure. She stared back evenly, noting the mild displeasure on Armstrong's relatively young face. She did come close to wiping out Stedman's company after all, she supposed. The Eridani Light Horse were good, but not that good.
Surprisingly, Natasha felt no anger at Barbara Mosley for… not being able to give as good as she gotten? Been got? Natasha sniffed. Mosley had made it clear that it was a battle of *systems*, and the ELH was fighting in a way that made simple tonnage less relevant. Only time would tell if that would hold true, as there were many out there who could scoff at the notion of a technological advantage.
"The right man at the right place is worth a hundred men out of position," she heard from a little lower beside her.
She looked down towards the young teenage boy in a ELH cadet dress uniform walking beside her. The boy held a smug 'That was what you were thinking of, right?' look on his face.
"Do you just randomly burst out aphorisms?" she asked with another disdainful sniff.
"Yes," was the simple reply.
Natasha abruptly felt that talking to this kid would be like talking to a brick wall. In those gray eyes there was the surety of a zealot and the confidence of the utterly ignorant.
Soon enough they were at the door to the brigade commander's office. "Cadet Devlin Stone! Presenting Captain Natasha Kerensky, as ordered, sir!"
"At ease." Nathan Armstrong gestured to a chair. "Please sit."
Natasha sat down while Cadet Stone stood off to the side in a parade rest. She faced Armstrong with all the calm reticence of… a stone, some might say.
After a while, the general sighed. "I would like to say that it's an honor, but we both would rather prefer if this whole thing didn't have happen."
Natasha made no response.
"Some believe that prisoners of war have a duty to escape, if not at least to make life more difficult for their captors. It would be… unproductive… for both the Light Horse and the Dragoons if you tried something pointless like that. Are we going to have that problem, Natasha Kerensky?"
Natasha replied "Not as for as long as you work to get us returned to Wolf's Dragoons as soon as possible."
"Very good. Thank you. Before we begin – you mentioned something about Mosley accepting the Black Widows Company as her bondmen. What does that mean?"
"Nothing," Natasha replied with cool confidence. "That is just the concussion talking. I may have completely forgotten about the word for 'guarantor'."
"Bonds as in bail, right? A bondsman is someone that acts as surety to the court that the prisoner will not escape. That sounds… likely."
Natasha nodded.
"Technically it should be Mosley that should be the bondsman, isn't that right?"
Natasha shrugged minutely. "Well if she were ever my bondswoman I would make sure to treat her nicely, you do not have to worry about that." That feeling of strong and sure death at the time now mystified her. There was nothing special about Barbara Mosley. She had for the moment felt that the whole universe turned around herself and agreed that if she ever had the best time to die, it would have been in that moment.
"Mmm." Armstrong leaned back on his chair. "Well, getting you back to the Dragoons might take some time. We know how far Wolf's Dragoons will go to make sure no one tries to take their people hostage again. This is not that situation.
"However, while the death of Anton Marik might say that even the main line of Great Houses are not safe from the Dragoons' revenge… look, the Draconis Combine and House Kurita are not going to care. This is why we are effectively insulating both House Davion and House Kurita from the equation. We will hand Dragoons POWs off to Jaime Wolf, personally, on our own ships and down to our own vehicles on the tarmac, on a neutral world.
"You have more to fear from the ISF trying to assassinate you to weaken the Dragoons. If they cannot have you, they will just kill you to deny you to their enemies. Their collective ego will not allow being made to look weak and dependent on mere mercenaries. This is no conjecture. This is an inevitability."
Armstrong then shook his head sadly. "You should have interacted with enough of their officers by now – anything they can't reconcile to their world-view that leads to their inevitable domination of the Inner Sphere, they will just reject. Individuals can have honor in the Combine, but the Combine itself is built on devouring anything in its reach. It knows neither mercy nor compunction."
"Is House Davion actually any better? Is any House any better?" Kerensky replied. "The business of the mercenary comes from their constant need to take worlds and avenge insults. The fact that House Kurita seeks to conquer on basis on strength alone is no different from the justifications of anyone else on supposed moral grounds."
Armstrong snapped his fingers and pointed at Devlin Stone.
The boy responded "Very few polities are known for having such a deep record of playing fuck-fuck games as House Kurita. You should really know better than to expect anything different to come out of mountains of prior evidence."
By the grimace on Armstrong's face, he had expected something different. Perhaps a trite slogan masquerading as wisdom or something.
"Fine. Be that as it may, it is not as if Colonel Wolf is unaware of this. Is that all you wanted to say?"
"No. Natasha Kerensky, are you really prepared to just sit for months in a jail cell? Your men could return to the Dragoons as soon as they are able, but you – we would prefer to actually keep you."
Natasha's eyes narrowed dangerously.
He quickly added "For at least three months. The SLDF initiated the Gunslinger program in the hidden yet frantic realization that their pilots were not actually better than the mechwarriors of House Kurita, and in fact in duels were at best able to maintain an even tie. We want that. We would like to run a Gunslinger Program of our own to crash-train our recruits to a high level of skill… and it just so happened that someone known for training up a random bunch of rejects into an elite fighting company fell into our hands. There is no better possibility for an opfor trainer in the entire Inner Sphere.
"We already know that the Wolf's Dragoons are training a Kuritan regiment that could fight flexibly in their way, the Ryuken.
"Natasha Kerensky, if you would give your sworn word not to try to break parole, it would be better for all of us if you didn't just waste weeks or months away in a jail cell writing your memoirs or something. We would pay you and your company by the same rates as the Dragoons during this time, and we would expedite getting your crew back home if you can give us those three months. We may be opponents here, but we are not exactly enemies."
Natasha furrowed her brows. The ELH were offering her a way out of the hell of being benched again. That was an interesting proposal, but it might look badly upon the Dragoons if it got back to House Kurita. Being paid of it also added the smell of treason. She shook and her head and prepared to refuse.
Nathan Armstrong clasped both palms together into a single fist and leaned on his elbows on the table. "Think of it this way – when, not if, WHEN the Combine finally betrays you and tries to strike at your dependents, there is a force that can appear just suddenly somewhere else to relieve the pressure. Don't count on Davion to swoop in past the border and play the hero, in the end Davion only plays to their own interests. We just have a deep personal grudge against the Draconis Combine. We believe that the fall of the Star League and the death of the Terran Hegemony can directly be blamed on House Kurita. House Kurita had always worked to destabilize the Star League as force that as much as it brought peace and progress to the rest of the Inner Sphere, stymied their ambitions to supremacy.
"When the Usurper took Terra, Minoru Kurita refused to allow the SLDF to use worlds as bases of operations to shorted the war. He refused personally a request by Colonel Bradley, of the 3rd Regimental Combat Team, for us to do so. We have a strong suspicion that it was a member of the ISF that tipped off the plans our 19th Striker Regiment, leading to the loss of that regiment that we mourn even today."
He glanced aside for a moment. "Stone?"
The boy coughed into his fist and recited:
"From the personal diary of Takiro Kurita, entry dated June 2751 -
My private audience with General Aleksandr Kerensky
did not turn out exactly as I had hoped. He refused to stop
his military maneuvers near Luthien. This displeases me
much, and so I have ordered as many ISF agents as can be
spared to infiltrate the Regular Army. We must have an
earlier warning the next time General Kerensky decides to
try to bully the Draconis Combine. Not only will he fail to get
his way, but his military exercises might have to be
postponed in favor of defending his very life.
Why so many people are so pleased to hear that he
has been appointed Regent and Protector is mystery. He is
a soldier. An excellent one, true, but a soldier nevertheless.
It is doubtful that he will stray too far from what Simon
Cameron would have wished. If he were truly as good as
everyone claims, he would take his power as Regent and
rule as First Lord until the boy Richard comes of age.
Even now, it seems that the young Cameron lacks the
inner authority to rule effectively-not ten years from now,
not twenty, not thirty years from now. We will have no choice
but to gut the Star League once and for all."
For a moment, Natasha Kerensky's eyes burned at the insults and the easy threat of ambush and assassination against The Great Father her namesake. From his second son, Andrey Kerensky's genetic legacy, did she get her bloodname.
Nathan Armstrong continued "We think that the Combine is a brittle society that pretends to strength – when faced with something that can outfight the way they spend lives on the battlefield, they will shatter. They are a drawn sword extended as far as it possibly can – any more and they will just expose their own throat to the enemy."
Natasha Kerensky treated his grandiose words with something akin to pity "And what are aiming to accomplish with three regiments? I respect that the Eridani Light Horse are excellent at war, but you are still just a Light Horse Regiment. No matter how much you want to wound House Kurita -"
"Five. We have the men and materiel to build up five regiments, right now. We can go as far as we can with only three Light Horse Regiments because we spend careful time training our men, but we don't exactly have a way to crash-train troops to a high level without removing troops from the operational tempo. As I said before, we have the means, what we don't have is a challenging enough OPFOR, and we are not insane like Kurita to go for live-fire training campaign like what they did with the Second Galedon on New Aberdeen."
Armstrong gestured to the map of the Inner Sphere, and its four large quadrants with the tail of House Liao below, which had roughly remained the same for half a millennium, half of humanity's history in space. "House Kurita is large and strong, but because of that they have shatterpoints. One of these days House Kurita is going to provoke us enough that we might just end up doing our own version of MacCarron's Long March on the way to Luthien."
A small smile graced Natasha Kerensky lips. Well then! If only she had known earlier that the Eridani Light Horse actually had the balls to be more than setpiece soldiers, seemingly moved without their own will by the House Lords they served. They liked to pretend to be the most studious of soldiers, more like actors in a play than warriors, holding respect and fealty to a flag they never really knew or experienced.
They were just castoffs of the Star League, not Children of Kerensky.
But if they were actually like this in the privacy of their own home, that was respectable. A warrior needed drive to live as much a mech needed the heat of born starfire within its fusion engine.
Armstrong continued "But of course, as you are a POW, being given access to live mechs and ammunition comes with some conditions."
"Tch. I understand." Natasha uncrossed her arms. "What else do you want? You will not attempt to get any information about the Dragoons from me, or the whole thing is off. Immediately I will stop the first time this happens."
"Please give some latitude to stupid soldiers and scuttlebutt, but we will be assigning minders for that exact purpose. You should not be bothered unnecessarily. As much as you might not care to trust these words, we of the Eridani Light Horse don't actually care about Wolf's Dragoon's inner workings or their mysterious source of supplies."
Stone, behind Kerensky, fluttered his fingers and made "woo-eee-wooo" noises.
Armstrong gave him a scathing glare. The boy stood back into attention "Apologies, sir!"
The general turned back to Kerensky and with a much put-upon tone added "We would like to have your lessons plans repeatable and testable, so as much as possible we would like to have it done that a child could understand them. So to fill out your company, we will be assigning you a lance of… almost literal children, to prove the methodology starting from practically nothing."
Natasha's eye narrowed again. That was close enough to sibko training that it was doable, and guaranteed a hassle.
Armstrong gestured with his left hand "You get Stone as your permanent adjutant while under ELH custody. We deeply apologize for the inconvenience."
The boy raised his hand, arm up straight and rigid as post, like a student eagerly asking to be called up "I am Combat Ready!"
Armstrong closed his eyes and took a deep breath. Then he opened them again, showing only the tiredness of command. "If nothing else, Natasha Kerensky, you are dismissed. You may confer with your troops and visit the medical section if you wish." He looked over Natasha's shoulder again and rubbed at bridge of his nose. "And Stone…? Go away and go adjute."
Devlin Stone thumped his right fist to his left chest in a Roman salute. "BY YOUR COMMAND!"
Natasha Kerensky leaned back and her expression buckled. Were the Eridani Light Horse actually like this? Is this actually their own great big secret?
-.
-.
Harrow's Sun
Draconis March
04 March 3025
While the Second Galedon were predicted to be landing on New Aberdeen, despite their relative proximity of a single Jump to Harrow's Sun from Misery, the Epsilon Regiment had delayed their assault by several days from simultaneous assault. This was enough time to affect some repairs to damages suffered by Charlie Battallion on New Aberdeen and to meet with the command staff to mull over what new tactics to expect from the Eridani Light Horse.
If the ELH were in a position to reinforce New Aberdeen, then of course they also have the time window to deliver forces to Harrow's Sun.
Epsilon Regiment was one of the Wolf's Dragoon's crack frontline regiments, and while the 4th Deneb was a fighter-heavy regiment supported by AFFS fighters on a moon base, the Dragoons carried with them two Overlord-class Dropships – the Hawken and the Ise, a Fortress-class – the Osu, and three Union-class DropShips – the Hebrides, the Sunniva, and the Mt. Suribachi, all on one Star Lord-class JumpShip. An Invader-class JumpShip with a two Titans and a Mule lent from the Dragoons' naval support contingent rounded out the force.
All combined with their ASF bays and strong armor and weaponry, this was a powerful force that could easily punch through or eliminate entirely wings of defensive fighters and land anywhere they wished. Despite the size of the force, this was a regimental scale raid aiming to destroy or salvage as much of the military infrastructure as possible to weaken the way for a later invasion by the Combine. At the very least, that AFFS aerospace base on Bane would need to be leveled utterly and their two wings of fighters eradicated.
Civilian jumpships nervously tried to look innocuous or hurried their charging under the shadow of this naked military power. DropShips on approach to the zenith jump point urgently declared their status as harmless non-combatants. They kept these messages on a loop.
Onboard the Star Lord-class JumpShip, Dragoons astrogation monitored all system traffic. Unlike the vastness of space and the random emergence points of JumpShips, it was easy to pinpoint a world and notice orbital activity around it. The interaction of light, radiation, and EM signatures revealed significant large masses in between the world of Harrow's Sun and its two moons Boon and Bane.
"There are ships around the planet, sir," the JumpShip Captain reported to Colonel Arthbutnot. "At first we thought they were more fighter-carrier dropships, but spectral analysis shows they're fully-loaded JumpShips. High possibility Star Lord and three Merchants. Someone did a jump into a pirate point."
"Impressive. But unnecessary!" replied Arthbutnot. "They already had a week's advantage over us, their carriers could have reached the world well before we arrived." He adjusted his eyeglasses and smiled toothily. "If the ponies did manage to bring more fighters, well then gentlemen and ladies- we have a good fight of it!"