Copeland Supply, Salvage, and Resale

by cliff.west

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

72. Chapter 72 12 Oct 3051

Chapter 72

By Cliff

Beta and Clean up: Not done

Reviewed by Hotpoint and Cannonshop

12 Oct 3051

Canopus

Robert was looking out over the drop port from the high mounted command center that was almost at the very top of the dropship called Bad Kitty, when he was told that he had a visitor coming over from the Hercules. Not for the first time, he had to think that the name for this ship matched the class, and mission of this type of warcraft. Robert thought that he was one of the few people on this mission that knew that this ship had been given the name of Bad Kitty from the time she was first christened.

Robert looked over at the clock mounted on the far wall, and he quickly did some mental math in his head. He had left the meeting room on the huge cargo dropship where they had been talking about selling the Blockade Runner a little over two hours ago. He even knew who was on the way over to see him without needing to be told. He rose from an extra seat on the bridge when the hatch opened, and a new person entered the room.

Robert had to fight to keep a true smile off of his face as the now haggard looking Virginia Hall now stood near the ship's hatch with her escort. Robert waved to her as a way to clear her to enter the nerve center of his mission. She gave him a slight head nod, and then he waved to her to come to the back of the bridge. Now they would mostly be out of the way of the duty crew walking about the command center. Robert was rewarded with another slight nod of Virginia's head, and she angled to one side of the room as she stepped deeper into the large open cabin at the top of the Lion class dropship.

She might or might not know that anything that was said or done on the bridge of this dropship was going to be recorded in visual and audio forms for anyone with the right access and proper codes to review at a later time. Everyone knew all about the "original" Black Boxes that were dayglow orange and not black, but most only thought about them when they made the news of being recovered after a disaster. This dropship had some major but hidden modifications to that system of crash recorders. SLIC had made sure of that little trick on the first day of her last refit before being turned over for Robert to use.

Robert now let a slight smile come to his face, and it was as fake as it could be. And both of these people would know it. "So, I take it that the meeting is over?" He had lost a bet when an ambulance had not been called after Robert left the Hercules with Jess.

Virginia forced herself to get her head back into the game of dealing with someone that was very good at the kind of games she played for a living. This day had turned out to have been way different than she had planned when she had been reviewing her notes over breakfast. She also had never been treated like a sports ball or anything like this before. She made a mental note to complain that something like this was never covered in any training she had undertaken.

"Do you like causing Chaos and starting crap storms on a truly epic scale?" Virginia raised an eyebrow like she was talking to a particular troublesome adolescent.

Robert gave his best innocent look that said butter would not melt in his mouth. "Who? Me? Would I do something like that? You must have me confused with someone else."

Virginia rolled her eyes and shakes her head in resignation at both the words and the attitude that Robert was showing her. But for the first time she understood why Duke Terry like this man. "Yes, and while I'm at it. Thank you for throwing me under the Atlas by the way." She gave a snort, but it was only half in jest.

Robert kept the smile on his face for a second longer, and then he let it slowly fall off his face inch by inch. But after another few seconds, and then he slowly let it come back to his face like a kid in a candy store. It was his way of paying the Wolf Net agent back for all of the little games she had no doubt played on others. It was time for her to walk in someone else's shoes for a few Kilometers, and Robert did not intend to let her off the hook anytime soon. At least not if he could help it.

#######

With his work face now once again set, Robert spoke. "Well? It was just my way of letting you know that my people are willing to support the Inner Sphere against the Clans. But doing it in some ways that you all back on Outreach might not have thought of. This sale has been in the works for a while from my people's end of things. Anything else will have to wait until I get back home before anything more can be said, much less done. Can you tell me much about the meeting, without breaking any laws that we both might regret?" He was not going to let anyone know that the meeting room had both audio and video bugs.

Virginia smoothed her plain jacket with her hands, and her face went very still. The only hint to her mental state was her tired looking eyes. She now realized that she had pushed a little too hard on that first meeting, and this was Robert's way of pushing right back. She had to mark this down as a few points in Robert's side of the scoreboard. In the HUMINT world most of the "winnings" was done on these types of boards and only a few times in blood spilled on the battlefield.

"I think that selling a warship, even a small one, is proof enough to show that you are trying to help the Inner Sphere. As to the meeting? The locals are working on a way to come up with the needed funds to buy your "little blockade runner". They are looking at having to spread the payments out over two years or maybe a little less if things break just right. I do have to wonder why you pulled the Barracuda class missiles off that old warship and replaced them with "normal" weapons. They were powerful long ranged anti-fighter weapons, which would have kept some threats at capital sized arm's reach. I know that the FedCom has put a few different types of Capital Missiles back into low rate production over the last year. I don't know if the Barracuda class weapons are one of them, but it should not be too much longer if they have not done so already. I'm sure that all it would take is someone putting an order in for some to push the Fedcom in to making them. It also kind of takes some of the "special" away from the warship. Don't you think?"

Robert was again surprised by this new information, and he had not even gone digging for it. "I will make note of this, but with only so many reload missiles that they carried as a normal war load. I think that it was thought. That having more but shorter ranged weapons would be better at keeping squadrons of fighters off the ship's back."

Robert was not going to give her a history class on how most of the SLDF WarShips were lost or how many of the House Lord vessels had been lost due to fighters and not to other WarShip class vessels. "Then you had those big Naval Autocannons that will keep dropships out of the picture, and they can do it from a distance on the cheap side of the budget line. And besides we had no idea that capital missiles were back into production again somewhere else in the Inner Sphere. I expected that the Naval Autocannon's ammunition would be easier to replace than capital missiles if they can work out some basic issues first. I think that all they would need, is to take one or two rounds out of the ship's ready magazine and turn them over to a decent sized machine shop. After a few days of work? You could have a full magazine's worth of them ready to go. That is not something that you can do with missiles the size of a small fighter."

Virginia was very still as she stood at the back of the command center of the dropship. She was quickly working through the information that she had just been given by Copeland. She was not that well versed in battles between Warships. She knew how to fight in a mech, and do so with some skill, but that was not her primary or even secondary job. She wanted to change the subject a little to better fit her needs. She could find out later if what he had just said was true. She also had made a note about how Robert had said "put missiles into production somewhere else." That was something that Wolf Net could use.

She forced her voice to stay level, like a golden nugget had not just fallen into her lap the size of a battlemech. "It would have been a little harder job than that. But MMM said that they have the Data from something called Athena Corp Division that will get them turning out new naval scale autocannon shells and with the right propellant, in a month or two. Now, will another Warship be brought onto the market? I would like to let my people know, with as much information as I can send them. Warships or the parts to maintain them, are not exactly growing on trees in the Inner Sphere in this day and age. It would be very much a sellers' market. If there was a seller in the first place, that might have items like that and available to be given homes to those in need of those machines."

#########

Robert let a loud snort slip out into the air. "I think that I might know where you can get some for free, if slightly used ComStar warship parts."

Robert had to bite his tongue a little harder to stop before he let too much out. Now he needed a good squirrel or another shiny object to distract her or his little slip was going to torpedo him. "I don't know if there is going to be any more warships for sale. I am just a merchant and not a navy commander of some kind."

Both of those statements were full on lies, at least they were when Robert had left the home system to make this run. He did know that there were at least four other corvettes being held as possible projects if this trade worked out. They had found or relocated most of them on or after his Pilgrimage run. He thought that they would be able to put at least that many back into some kind of limited service, at least working enough to get them to the Split system. After they were sold, then it would be up to the new owners to find a way to maintain them after purchasing.

The SLDF and Colonial Navy had recovered almost twice that many corvettes that currently were sitting in the cache sites around the New Circe star system. There also were a few other "small" warships that might be used in the same way that this old Vincent was about to do, besides being a source of spare parts for the current SLDF war fleet. It would just be the little matter of getting them to a buyer outside of the New Circe Star system.

Virginia did not show it, on the outside, that she caught the bits of information that Robert had let slip. She had noticed, and she was going to make sure that her people sent someone out to look around for that recent battle site between warships. Even if they didn't find anything physically, there were ways to get useful data. She also would pass a long that there may be another warship or even possibly a few warships that might be for sale from this group. She had not believed him when he tried to deflect her. It was just a gut feeling that she got.

If the five full and fielded Regiments of the Dragoons could have some warship support. Those were five regiments that were on top of the 7th Kommando, Home Guard, Black Widows, Fire Support Group, Orbital/aerospace operation group, Special Recon group, Support battalion and who could forget The Zeta's that all were under the Dragoon's flag. Now that would be something to add to the Dragoon's order of battle. Hmmmm Warships! When you really need to send a big hammer to somewhere in the Inner Sphere. When a Zeta sized FU is not enough to get the point across to someone with a thick skull. The Warships would be a nice upgrade in the FU department.

"Just let me know as soon as you can, so that I can get the funds lined up. Now if you do not mind Commodore." Virginia kept her face from moving too much.

Before she could continue, Robert tilted his head and hit her from out of left field like a wrecking ball the size of a small planet. "What is killing me to know? Is why the Clans are clearly disobeying Aleksandr Kerensky's General Order 137."

Virginia knew that this General Order was normally called the Hidden Hope Doctrine. She needed long seconds to come up with something to say, because from the look on Robert's face. He was waiting to hear what she had to say. "I have no idea, but I could send an RFI (request for information) to see what some of the others might think."

Robert kept his face still, but his eyes were bright. "If you want to. But I guess it's just a good thing that there's still a few Star League Loyalist around like us, to deal with a bunch of invading mutineers with a god complex."

She got her mental gears going just a little faster than a few minutes before. Yea, I have got to make sure he does not run into any Zeta's. They just might try to kill him, if he said something like that into the face of the wrong person. "I would like to talk about some business directly between the Wolf's Dragoons and your company."

Virginia was surprised at the lack of shock that should have flashed onto Robert's face at what she had been referencing. It was like she was just selling fruit on the side of a road and not dealing with the Wolf's Dragoons. That simple phrase should have opened the doors to the largest companies in the Inner Sphere as if by magic.

Robert only was stunned for a few seconds, and he hides it very well, before he tilted his head and then asked. "Really? What would the mighty Wolves want to do business with my people about?" He was afraid that he might know exactly what the Dragoons wanted some help with. The odds were great that it was something that Robert could not approve of or that his higher command would balk at providing. At least they would balk in the short term to medium term to provide what might be asked of the ex-scouts for the Clans.

Virginia was now smiling so big, that it made her look about a decade younger than her "real" age that was listed on the data files. "I understand that you have bought a few old tanks on your last run to this planet. Tanks that have been used by the Dragoons some time ago. Would you like to buy more of them? To be blunt, I am talking about the Bandit and Badger class of tanks."

She was not going to bring up the Hoplite that she knew that Robert had picked up some time ago from deeper within the FWL. That was a little bit of a sore point for some of the older fighters still alive within the Dragoons. It was just that Wolf Net never had the time or wanted to waste the effort to take it or the previous owner down. Now it was a moot point with the clans so close to Outreach and on the march to take Terra. At least Copeland had the good sense to have repainted the Hoplite into a color scheme that was not even close to a Dragoon or SLDF style. Images of it in combat on Ltzehoe had shown the color change, and it had shown that someone had done some updating to that one time lost Dragoon mech.

Robert felt his salesmen's face drop down into place like the setting of the sun. "I don't know. I will have to check my shopping list."

He did a slight turn and reached for a handy data pad to act as a prop against the Wolf Net Agent. He spent way more time "looking" for the data than he needed to play this game. He was about to bring up the mine sweeper game to kill some more time, but he changed his mind at the last second and moved to the next step in the game of intel. He just wanted to play some with "the all but spy in name" if not in deeds. She worked for clanners, and they were fair game for entertainment in this Wolverine's play book. It was almost ingrained at the genetic level for someone in the SLiE to do this against members of the other clans. You had to get your jollies when you could in Robert's current line of work.

"Ahhhhh! Here we go! Yes, we were asked to see if any more of those two types of tanks were available for purchase." Robert looked up from the screen that held bridge messages and not his shopping list.

"I take it that you have access to some of them?" Robert looked levelly at the Wolf Net spy, and he let the smile turn into a bland look that said he was not that impressed with the idea. But he knew in his mind. That if he could get a dozen tanks, that would make the ground forces very happy back on New Circe. Robert had only hoped to find the odd one or two battlefield salvage tanks without having to go all the way to Outreach to buy them in bulk. Currently a trip like that was out of the question for the Styx and Commodore Copeland.

Virginia had taken some time to get those tanks all of the way out here. The only thing working for her was that all of the ground vehicles had been shifted to the Home Guards and out of "front line" units some time ago. That unit was, barely, a reserve unit until those ground combat vehicles were needed to start bringing up a front line regiment back to full strength. Mainly it was more of a local defense force to protect the civilians with those to old, to young, disabled, or not good enough for a front-line Dragoon unit.

######

The Dragoons had over 40 different types of tanks in service with the line units before the start of the 4th SW. And temporarily moving them to the Home Guard freed up funds for the main combat forces. This shifting also let the support units get some control on the different types of tanks that the Dragoons used. The same thing was happening to the mech units, only tanks drew less attention than mechs in this universe. There also were many of those two types of tanks still in storage, and now they were coming off the lines of Blackwell at a high rate. All the while the Dragoons were working on "normalizing" the verity of the different mechs, aerospace fighters, and tanks in their units. That meant a lot of different moving pieces that let things fall through the cracks.

It was hoped that Blackwell would be able to sell the excess production to the units that the Dragoons felt were friendly to them. It had been known for a long time that anything connected to the Wolf's Dragoons tended to draw a premium price when it was sold on the open, grey, or full-on black markets. Now that Omni tech was on open display by the Clan forces, there was not any reason to keep their capabilities fully hidden. But now everyone wanted clan tech weapons, if they were going to be spending that kind of money Blackwell was asking per new tank.

The Wolf was not above doing what was needed to make his wolves a better fighting force. Selling the older tech and more or less beat to crap weapons to a more open market on Outreach had already been done. But the idea to do so on this side of the sphere had been her idea, or it was an idea that she claimed to own while she was off of Outreach. This was going to be the first test of her idea to be selling those two tank types on this side of the Inner Sphere in any real numbers. To be honest, she was more than a little nervous at the thought herself.

#######

"I have a full battalion, 36 tanks, which I have in a nearby warehouse that could use a new home. If the price is right, they can be yours? I do not have any other spare parts on hand to support them, but each one of them has a full set of Omni pods to outfit them in options that the Dragoons have used in the past. I am willing to sell them to your people, if we can agree to a fair price."

She was rewarded by a pair of eyebrows rising and an arm pointing to the hatch that led off of the bridge. That was the most real emotions that she had seen this man give up, besides the slip about a space battle with what he claimed were ComStar warships.

As Robert pointed, his voice was a little husky. "I think that we can work something out. Would you like to come to my office? Then we can get out of the way of these good people while we talk some of our own shop?"

#######

Robert had escorted Virginia down two full decks and into his working office in the Lion class dropship. They spent the next hour working on a price for a full mixed battalion of light and medium tanks. It was a hard sell, but soon millions of C-bills had to be transfer to the woman's accounts on this planet. A tentative deal was made on getting more of those types of tanks, but these would be fully upgraded with clan tech, and not the old and almost worn-out age of war tech ones that she currently had on hand. Robert was open to buying new built versions on an older tech base tanks, but he really wanted the highest tech level tanks that he could swing. Robert's orders had been to get more of these tanks. And so far, they had been old tech and…. well let's just call them well loved by the previous owners.

The last part, about the clan tech grade tanks that Robert had wanted, had been why they had taken so long to work out a deal between the two people. It would also take some time to get more tanks all the way out to this part of space, even with the increase in the number of support ships running between here and the war zone by independent shippers, Combine, FWL, and FedCom Flagged vessels.

As one of the SLiE gold coins needed to make the deal. Robert had to relent and pass over the location of where some slightly burned ComStar warship parts "might" be, to finally sweeten the deal. Only Robert knew that they would not find so much as a slab of armor plate where that battle had taken place a couple of years ago. Robert had held tightly to that useless information like it was a pair of pocket aces and not a pair of threes.

During these talks about how long it was going to take to get more tanks out this way, Virginia had made an offhand comment that the huge ComStar jumpship fleet was not supporting with the shipping of war fighting materials or supplies of any kind going to the front lines. She had no idea what they were doing, only that they were not currently working the shipping lanes. The loss of all of those drop collars was putting a huge bite on the numbers of ships moving around the Inner Sphere. To get around this, more and larger cargo dropships were being used to move spare parts, upgrade kits, new production weapons, and the other supplies that the combat units and the planets they were on needed close to the warfronts. They were fewer and very large eggs to be using where they might be lost to a sudden restarting of hostilities with the forces under the clan flags.

Virginia had no way to know that the SLiE could make clan grade weapons on their own. She only knew that they were trading Star League tech weapons, and that they had somehow come up with IER PPCs all on their own. Right now, Clan grade weapons were totally the cat's meow for all of the players within the Inner Sphere. There was no way that Wolf Net would think that Robert's people would be any different than those other players in this part of the galaxy. Robert had even been okay with paying the mark up that clan weapons were getting on the…gray market. Any clan grade weapon that Robert could get was one less that the factories on New Circe would have to make to fight the Cylons.

After the deal was done, and messages sent around the planet and in at least one case, off of the planet in a very expensive high priority HPG message to Outreach. The two of them were still in the briefing room on the Bad Kitty. That was when the spy asked about the resort that she had heard Robert's old Factor had bought on the other side of the planet. He corrected her that it was really only an odd long term renting from a set of new owners that he was working with. Ones that would be coming out this way in the future. It was a thin lie, but it was the cover story that was being peddled around as one more layer of the onion of lies.

The cover story was now activated, and Robert was not going to break it any second earlier than he had to. Robert told her the purchase was a test to see if it was the right way for his partners to diversify out of the salvage business and still make enough money to survive. Near as Robert could tell, Virginia had bought the cover story. The only question was going to be how long it was going to last and how fast she would help spread that story, even if she thought it might be a false one. Robert knew that the cover story business never lasted as long as one of the parties wanted it to. It had been that way, going all the way back to the Cold war on Terra when groups like MI6, CIA, and the KGB were playing their little games.

########

The rest of the stay on Canopus was filled with trucks and even the huge Galaport class transports moving to and from the three dropships that "belonged" to Robert Copeland. Massive amounts of supplies were bought on the local markets and then loaded on to the two cargo dropships. The only dropship that was not acting like an anthill under a magnifying glass was the one called Hobgoblin.

Robert even had reports that the Styx was filling up her own cargo spaces as she bought cargos that they had found just sitting at the jump point. They were coming right off of dropships that were in the area of the jump point and that had come from other star systems looking for buyers that gave them the best profits. After all, why have to deal with a couple of weeks round trip to the planet and back if you had a buyer so much closer.

There were a few other surprises along the way. Some were small and others were large, and some were so out of the blue that they were hard to believe. Something that fell into that later category was the results of the inventory and inspection that had been done for the Resort before the deal was out of the legal grace period required under MoC law. Copeland would be able to exploit this information only because he went with Lora's idea of going ahead and buying the Resort and not leasing it like he had first wanted to do.

######

While they had been checking out the land and doing things like making sure the property lines were correctly marked on the 4.1 million acres of land. This action had not given any surprises nor had the counting of improved buildings on the land. The insides of the main buildings proved to be not up to snuff according to the contract, and the previous owners would be getting almost 100k less than they had first planned. It was going to cost Robert's people more than that to fix the issues, but it was small potatoes. And besides what else was found on the land that was not on the sales sheets had more than made up for the extra cost of repairs to the core of the facility of some water and dry rot damage caused by a very minor mistake.

One of the oldest and most weather worn above ground large storage buildings had turned out to be built over an under-ground garage as some kind of camouflage. That garage had been supporting an underground mining operation that was not listed on the books of the MoC. With Robert now the legal owner of the land, which had an illegal mine that now also belonged to Robert. He was not that interested in running a mine, much less having to put the money aside to cover remediation of the workings of a mine. Robert would have to pay for the remediation of the areas of the mine that he was not going to see the profits from while it had been an illegal operation. That also was not something he was interested in doing.

But thanks to some contacts at the high levels within the MoC government, the hidden tunnels were kept off the public books. An investigation would be launched to find out who had been doing the illegal mining, but nothing would be immediately done to remediate the land. Any recovered money would be set aside for use on this land when Robert was okay for people to know about the tunnels under the resort. Lora had told them that Copeland was looking for a nice safe, mostly dry, and cool place to store some of his cargo out of any prying eyes or risk their loss due to attacks. That had sanded down the edges of the last issues, and Lora now had written permission to use those tunnels how she wished. Just as long as mining was not involved in that use.

They were still checking out all of the tunnels, and it would take a lot more hands, hours, safety equipment, and maps to complete. When they had time, people that wanted to do the work, and the ones that were safe about it. They would slowly map all of the underground areas hidden under that huge store house. So far, they had been finding some nice items just sitting in the tunnels and galleries right below the building. Right off the bat they had found some real Terex Schaeff made Corx mobile tunnel miners….four of them.

Those Corx's had not been operational, but they looked to be repairable. That is if the right parts for the 200ton machines could be found on the planet. Parts that also were missing from the support areas that was seemingly setup for them underground. Also getting something that size out of those tunnels was going to be tough and need some very heavy and specialized equipment. Doing that same job without anyone noticing what you are doing, was going to be even harder. Robert chocked it up to being another way to keep some of the families from getting to bored while they waited to be shipped out to the Lyssa. Lora was not with Robert when the three dropships left the planet to make their way to the jump point, she had too much to do at the Resort

#######

One of the last meetings that Robert had on the planet had been with the military leader of the whole MoC. They made arrangements for the "down payment" on the warship with Robert already, and now the locals just could not say no to his idea they could help with in using some of it. They had been very surprised when Robert wanted to trade a lot of the funds into buying a used 52,000ton Mammoth class dropship, and then have it filled with structural steel made on this planet. The dropship would be shipped to a jump point, and it would be heavily guarded until it was picked up by one of Copeland's jumpships.

When Robert had used the plural form of Jumpship, it had not raised a single eyebrow with the negotiation teams. If anything happened to that dropship or the cargo that she carried while it was waiting to be picked up by one of Copeland's jumpships? Then the MoC government was on the hook, and they would have to replace all of it out of their own pockets. That level of insurance was covered in the price of both the dropship and her cargo. That part of the contract was not even that rare in this time.

It would take at least six weeks to get that much steel ready to be loaded onto the huge dropship sitting at the main drop port of the planet. There just was not that much finished steel product that was not already needed or ordered to support work currently in construction or other operations on this planet.

We are not talking about just steal ingots for the cargo of that huge dropship. These purchases were of pipe steel of various sizes, I beams that were rated for light or medium loads, and a little plate steel mixed in for good measure. Whatever steel that was not needed immediately on New Circe could be stored so that the foundries on New Circe could get a little relief on the other supply needs. As soon as more steel was made on Canopus, it would be loaded onto the waiting dropship that now belong to Robert.

Canopus had been experiencing slow growth for some years, and a real boom time for the last solid three years. In simple terms more and more steel production areas were coming online every few months as older facilities were brought out of mothballs or completed extended refitting cycles to support the growing needs. As soon as they did, Robert's huge order was waiting to be filled, all without driving up the prices too much for the rest of the planet's jobs that need this type of steel. Oh, and there was money waiting to pay for the steel on delivery without as much as a day delay in that transaction.

Robert was happy that he was able to get a price of only .40 cents per kilogram on average for the steel that he ordered under that extended contract. That was at least a quarter of the lowest price that Robert had been able to find back on New Circe before he had left that system. When pressed by some of the members of the local leadership? Robert had said that he might take one more load of that type of cargo, but he was not going to sign a contract for that second load or any other loads after this one.

The local Government of the MoC was happy with the deal that Robert had drawn up. They had recouped many tens of millions of C-bills that they had put down as a down payment for the warship already. Not once did they think that Robert was going to stiff them on the deal. Well, not that often anyway.

######

The Mammoth class dropship had been confiscated for smuggling and acting as a slave trader about a year ago. Even though it had been working for one of the "smaller" Circuses that the MoC was so well known for. Still, it had been seized, and held for sale for about a quarter of the cost of a brand-new ship. Many within the MoC thought that it would soon be working again for that old Circus or one just like it moving along the space ways. It might even be the same one, but under a new name and "ownership" and still be a slaver's headquarters of some kind. Then it had been bought by Robert for full listed price, and then it was to be filled with locally made steel. That was a lot of money being dumped back into the local economy of this planet with a few strokes of a pen.

You might think that the MoC got the better part of the deal. They would get a warship and so being the first of the powers in the Inner Sphere to have one in operation. They were out a dropship that had not cost them a dime, besides the cost of the ground team that took it and the up keeping maintenance cost while it waited to be sold "to the right people". They had paid money to Copeland, but most of that money had or soon would be coming back into the MoC's economy to make the product to fill it. And the money was sitting in MoC flagged banks. Also, the MoC government would get the taxes on the income of the workers and half a dozen other ways. This whole feedback loop would cut the time needed to fully pay off the warship by many months.

The SLiE was out the funds needed to recover and then repair the small warship with parts that had been on hand or recovered from other ships of the same class that were sitting in cache sites. The SLiE was out maybe a few million C-Bills for 2 billion C-Bills worth of products that they needed to fight this war against the Cylons. You can be the judge on who got the mine and who got the shaft on that deal. It was going to be a learning curve for both sides to find out what this kind of thing was worth. It was not like someone back in the old Star league had pulled this kind of thing off in the past, and then left notes behind for some kind of guidance.

######

The local ComStar Demi-Precentor at the class A HPG on Canopus was very happy with her month. With huge amounts of money being diverted to rebuild or re-field so much of the Com Guards with new mechs or the updating of older machines to be more combat effective. Any new business was welcome that crosses her threshold, which could be charged as much as the market would bare to send a message to another star system. It was all just more money to do Blake's Will.

Still, she was shaking her head in wonder as she reads the latest reports on her office computer. She could see every day the effects of the booming local economy, and she had a few ideas on why this was so, and that information had been passed along to her supervisors as well. Now a local resort was sending a message, to be played on each planet of the Inner Sphere over a dozen times a day at "prime time" for the next three months of the message hitting that planet. That was going to make for a record for this reporting quarter going back to Terra from this station.

ComStar didn't own those entertainment stations on all of those planets, but they had gotten a cut of the deal for setting up the advertisements as well as the cost of the transmissions of the advert. The only thing that would have been more expensive, would have been a live conference with another House Lord's capital for a half hour. That last type of set up would have generated a lot of income, and it would have generated a lot of information that ROM or other parts of ComStar could use. An advert was cleaner in the Demi-Precentor's opinion, and that was an opinion that she carefully kept locked down in her own mind.

######

The Dragoon's spy was also happy with how things were going. She was still working on packing down a PA(L) suit in a box in one of her safe houses. Soon it would be added to a chartered cargo dropship taking the next load of Bear Slayers and Royal Flushes PPCs along with a load of other items made by MMM to Outreach. That PA(L) had been another of the side costs to agreeing to sell clan spec tanks and maybe other clan tech weapons to Robert the next time they meet. Robert would not be getting the friends and family price for those weapons, but he would be paying what the market would bare in this part of space. In other words, they would be very expensive.

Virginia had drawn up more detailed reports to be sent back home with the details of the deal that she had worked out with Commodore Copeland. She even asked what the Dragoons would be willing to trade for an old corvette class warship or maybe even a list of warship parts they could send her to sell to the locals. She did say in the message that the seller of the warship would also like some of the Clan Battle armor, just like the rest of the Inner Sphere. Along with all of the data, she sent along what was a rough transcript of her dealings with Copeland.

She also covers the odd feeling she got about them having more spare parts for warships or as he called it large ticket items. Before Robert had lifted off from the planet, she had sent the first sets of messages to Outreach at a priority rate. It would take a dozen messages to get all of the data in the coded messages sent out, but she had the money to do something like that even if she had to pay the ComStar's priority message rates. The raw data would be sent along with this battered armored suit just to make sure that no one had "adjusted" the FTL sent messages.

The messages were all encoded by three different and successive ways before they were sent back to Outreach on the ComStar run HPG. That was just how Wolf Net sent data, going all the way back to its founding in 3003, two years before the rest of the Dragoons showed up. She was betting that the raw data on the PA(L) alone would keep the deal alive and keep her in good favor with the power players back on Outreach. That did not count the information and location about a possible naval battle between Copeland and ComStar in the recent past.

Getting those coordinates in a refined form had been received at the cost of the name of a local supplier of small but high quality fusion engines she knew of. She later found out that Copeland had picked up all of the on-hand stock of small engines from her contact. That had been over a hundred of the local made knock offs of the Omni 10 and GE 15 class fusion engines. That manufacturing contact had been very happy with Virginia with the business that she had pushed their way. So not only had she made a local contact happy, and they would owe her a favor she could call in later, but Copeland was also happy with the deal.

She did not know how the information about the "Blockade Runner", a real warship, being sold by the same people who had just bought a Battalion of Bandit and Badger tanks was going to go over back on Outreach. Oh, and the news that she was "pretty sure" that they were going to bring at least one more Warship on the market. She also would need more of those types of tanks and other supplies. She had put a line in the report about if any extra clan battle armor could be sent out this way as a possible item to help her get the edge in bidding for a second warship as an afterthought. It was her job to send the data and note as many options as she could think of. What route was taken, was out of her hands and way above her pay grade.

She had no idea at the size of an anthill that she was about to kick over with those last two parts of her final report. Until then? She was going to be very happy and ignorant of the waves moving across the Inner Sphere that only grew in power with each message she sent back up the Wolf Net Chain that was decoded and passed along.

######

What Virginia did not know, was that the space battle connected between "someone" and "someone else" had already been known about by many within the higher parts of the Wolf's Dragoons command structure. Those leaders moved the confidence in these reports coming from Virginia up to a very high level when the location data was sent to them from the MoC. Her data matched the location on file for what Wolf Net had already found out near perfectly. A perfect match of data in the Intel business is strange enough to cause some issues in being truly believed.

This one space battle had caused a tidal wave of changes in the background of the Dragoons. Now it was more or less confirmed by a third report that had not even been told to look into that subject. It was like a diamond had fallen out of the sky and landed perfectly into your ring. When part of Wolf Net had followed up on the report of two fleets of ships moving around the edge of the Inner Sphere almost two years ago. They had followed along right behind one of those groups of warships by just a few months.

Thanks to the laws of light, even when the Wolf Net jumpships had missed the space battle. The Wolf Net ships could jump further away from that location and then wait for the light or the energy releases to reach them at the speed of light. It was not a lot of data to be gathered, but it gave them a very good idea of what happened. It also told them about when the battle had taken place in that star system. It would take many months or years of computer time and power to get much more useful information out of that raw data, but that was something that Wolf Net thought was worth that level of effort.

#######

One of the side effects of finding that very effectively picked over space battle site, had been a secret mission immediately launched to where Jaime had hidden his warships and the limited amounts of high-tech weapons, tooling, and other capital assets that they had left in the same place. Even before Virginia Hall had made her report, this had been done. The team had stealthily gone out there for two main reasons. They were to make sure everything was there, warship wise, and then to recover everything smaller than the warship's hulls that would fit in or on the pair of smaller cargo, passenger dropships and the jumpships supporting this mission.

Those small dropships were carried on three Star Lord class jumpships that the Dragoons were not using as they waited for things to settle out between the Clans and house lords. The Wolf would have preferred to have waited until the Clan invasion was decided before he had sent that mission out to his deep space cache area. But if two someone's were already using warships in battle against each other on the opposite side of the invasion corridors. Then he could not afford to wait in starting to do some of the early leg work on improving the ability of the Dragoons to stand up against an enemy that had warships to use against the Dragoons.

This mission was going to increase the total number of Lion and Confederate classes of dropships within the Dragoon's total order of battle from what they had before the Clans had shown up. That would cause some issues for the Dragoons that were still hiding their background at that time, but they had always had a few of those classes of ships that the public could see from the first day that they had arrived in the Inner Sphere. Those odd dropships had been slowly removed from Dragoon service as they broke down and there were not any of the specialized parts to repair them.

Now those numbers of rare dropships would again start to climb, and it was a concern by those that were watching the Dragoons. That would be until word made the rounds again about MMM not only building new Lion class dropships, but they were also offering major spare parts for their maintenance on the open market.

That news from MMM would lower the issues of those new dropships had caused after a few months of being headlines in the mercenary world. It was just assumed that the Dragoons had a deal to get those needed specialized spare parts and dropships before news made it around the rest of the Inner Sphere. Kind of like what they had done when the Wolfhound class battlemech was first seen in the Dragoon's colors.

After word was released to the whole Inner Sphere about the "true" background of the Dragoons, very few would look back at the increase in those two rare classes of dropships as being worth the time to check out. After all the Dragoons had come from the old SLDF. Soon only Intelligence people and the odd academics would care about the dates that these "new" dropships had shown up on Outreach.

######

Now with the rebuilding reaching a pace, at least in the number of personnel within the ranks of the Dragoons. They would now have more of the "right type" of dropships to help the Dragoons in any deployment they might need to undertake. The now "extra" older designed mech only transports were not sold off to anyone, no matter the offered funds rumored to have been thrown around. The Dragoons put any extra dropships in storage. This was mainly done "on the other side of the mountain" for any future growth of the Dragoons, or they could be used as combat replacements when The Wolf called them back to war.

Those scout and recovery teams also reported back to The Wolf, and the other leaders of the Dragoons. The headline of those reports was that none of the Dragoon warships were missing from this cache site. That had not gone over well with some of the leadership of the Dragoons, because they had no idea where the weapons that the warships had seen to be using could have come from for both sides of that "little" battle. So, where had those warships and the parts needed to keep them in battle conditions had come from?

Some other news about what The Wolf had ordered, had not been so well received by the lower-level support staff of the Dragoons on Outreach. It was that a huge number of Wolf's personnel had to be diverted to get those now recovered toolings, parts, supplies, and the support space stations back into use in a timely manner. Getting the Olympus class recharging station repaired without using outside support had been bad enough. But once those huge new assets had started adding to the Dragoons in some fashion, this grumbling came to a screeching halt.

At the same time, the first round of news about what was found on Cate's Hold had caused a second mission to be sent out to that hidden spot of space by the Dragoons high command. That team was to start the slow process needed to reactivate the warships many years earlier than the most optimistic plans had dictated for their return to Dragoon control. Besides the confirmation of a space battle with the possible IDs on the two combatants to think about. Then the news had reached them, which said someone had just sold a warship on the open market to one of the most minor political and military powers of the Inner Sphere. Now granted, it was only a corvette class warship, but it still was a major event for the whole Inner Sphere to have to deal with. That was the third strike, and so more effort was put towards this six pack of warships in getting to Outreach as fast as they could.

All of this was almost three years earlier than anyone on his staff had planned for. Jaime knew that this was going to cause some major issues down the road. But that was down the road, and he would have to deal with it then. That is what he would have to deal with once too many people outside of his people knew about those warships, and other large space assets that the Dragoons were slowly bringing back into operation for them to use. Both of those were somethings that the Great Houses had not been able to do for generations.

######

By the end of the month of finding out about the "pending" sale of the warship to the MoC. The Wolf's Dragoons would send another major group of techs and supplies out and they were to bring all of the warships to their new home on Outreach as fast as this new manpower and supplies could facilitate. The group of personnel on that herculean task was an undercover mission supplied by Wolf Net. As they moved through the Inner Sphere, they could not be directly or indirectly connected back to the Wolf's Dragoons by any of the Intel agencies of the Inner Sphere. They were just another supply mission going "somewhere" as far as other Intel agencies knew.

This new diversion of resources was going to have an impact on a few of the other long-term projects that the Dragoons needed done. But they had enough warships crew's, at least simulator trained, to get the warships moving in the right direction and work on any issues on the way to Outreach. The loss of the Hephaestus was again being deeply felt by the Dragoons in this deep space operation.

With the warning provided by Virginia Hall, the command group of the Dragoons had also looked at what kind of funds they could set aside if they could "find" another warship on the sale's market. The Dragoon fleet was currently made up of "only" six warships, 2 Heavy Cruisers, 1 Frigate, 2 Destroyers, and one lone Vincent Mk 42 Corvette. A second Vincent class warship could be very useful, even if it was just used as a source of very hard to find spare parts for the MK 42 that the Dragoons already had access to when the fleet finally arrives at Outreach. It could even be a nice training ship to spin up warship crews or train the growing number of Dragoon aerospace fighters in how to fight Warships of both the clan and Inner Sphere varieties.

The downside was that this last diversion of assets, manpower, and funds was not even going to interrupt the very much not wanted order to move to counter the expected Clan attack on Luthien. The Dragoons had…issues with the current leaders of the Combine, but they had been ordered to help them by Davion. And the Davions had helped the Dragoons when they had fled the Combine after the battle of Misery, and they now were under contract to that house doing the asking. All of Jaime's demands to be released to fight the clans had now come back to bite him on the back side. Leave it to The Fox to turn the tables on a Wolf.

######

Jaime looked at the order of battle that he was sending to Luthien. It was almost the kitchen sink of what the Dragoons could call on to do battle with. Zeta was staying behind on Outreach along with a few other still rebuilding teams, training units, and the Home Guard. But all five of the active Dragoon core combat Regiments and both Kell Regiments would be having to leave soon to start the long trip out to Luthien. That was not going to be a small movement of forces, and it was going to take every jumpship that the Wolves and Hounds could muster and just a few more supplied by the FedCom to carry the needed troopers and the huge amounts of supplies needed to support an operation of this size and complexity.

Jaime had only been able to fully upgrade Alpha and Beta Regiments and part of Gamma regiment with clan tech level weapons and mechs. Due to the special logistics and training needed to support Clan tech of any kind. It had been agreed to update the Dragoons in a fashion that was different than their last rounds of rebuilding had gone. The Dragoon support teams had learned a lot of lessons during that rebuilding, and this was their chance to not repeat any of those perceived mistakes. One key item was that Mechs or Fighters would be only fully upgraded or not with clan tech. Any main combat units would have a full Clan tech load out or not. Jaime and one or two others had wanted to just slap on any available clan tech weapons on whatever they had, and then move on to the next mech or fighter in line to repeat the work.

It had been the Dragoon support and repair units that had balked at this original plan. They had put forward that there was no way for the repair techs to know what mech was equipped with what modification when they came in for combat repairs under that idea. It also had not helped that only about a third of the techs were from Clan space with the rest raised as Dragoons, coming from war orphans, or being outright Inner Sphere trained techs filling out the support ranks. It would take them a few more years to get all of the techs up to speed on working with and maintaining clan tech standard combat equipment. That might have been different, if they still had access to the now long destroyed Hephaestus station. And just like that the old wounds caused by the Combine came back to bite the Dragoons.

They had said that Wolf's and the rest of the Dragoons staff's current plan would slow down the return of any battle-damaged unit back into battle. So, lance by lance the Dragoons were updated. The Dragoons were first updating their mechs, adding battle armor, and then working on their tank upgrades. It was starting with Alpha Regiment, and that regiments mech jocks were now all sporting Clan Omni mechs.

The only mechs that had not been switched out for Clan mechs was Jaime's Archer class mech. Many of the old Dragoon hands had not like giving up their old rides after becoming so used to them. The Wolf would have to step in and do private interviews, and soon only his command lance was still Inner Sphere or Star League era designs in that unit. After all, how often did The Wolf see combat anymore? And the psychological impact of seeing him walking around in that famous mech was worth a dozen heavy Omni mechs.

Only those older mechs were not the same that had seen combat in the 3rd SW or the other battles that the Dragoons mech jocks had survived. Thanks to the monetary support generated by the sale of all of the age of war PPCs, the huge mark up on the H-Class, and the Magna FireStars that the Dragoons were not using. This had allowed for all of the Dragoons mechs to be updated first with late Star League tech weapons. The secret sale of Nighthawks also had been a major help to the bottom line of the Dragoons. By the time that they were starting to update to Clan tech any mech, tank, and aerospace fighter that was not clan tech already. The mechs would have been called a Royal design or better to be used in the Dragoons. With only one planet to support them, it was taking time to even do the lowest level of upgrades. But the Dragoons were getting more and more powerful every week that they were not in combat.

If they had enough time and funds, every unit within the Dragoons would be updated to full clan tech. But those same repair staffs were drawing up plans to update some of the core designs used by the Dragoons with clan tech modifications instead of hand making each Clan Omnimech. The working names were kept quiet but a note of IIC was added to each design that the Dragoon support teams had come up with.

They were currently looking at the Archer, LAM, Annihilator, Falcon, Firefly, Hoplite, Imp, Shogun, the lighter Marauder and heavier Marauder II for making into this IIC update. These were based on plans that the Clans had come up with during or not long after Operation Klondike had been concluded. There also were ideas for plans called Gallowglas, Highlander and War Dog along with a double handful of others. There was only so many manhours that the staff had to work with, and they were maxed out.

Right now, the conventional combat units were focused on the only two clan grade Omni units that Blackwell could make in any large numbers. The 30ton tracked missions were filled with Badger Cs, but it was rounded out with other units to better fight together. After all, not every mission needed a 5-ton infantry bay that was found on the Badger Cs. And sometimes that mass could have been better used for weapons with more range and/or punch. The same situation was true of the 50-ton hover tank/APC called the Bandit C. The Dragoons just didn't have enough time or resources at this time to put other Clan tank designs they knew about into production on Outreach. Besides they had all of those other combat vehicles in storage that just needed updated Star League weapons to give them a new lease on their combat lives.

Any additional increases on the space asset front would have to wait until the Luthien situation was worked out. It was expected that around the beginning of June of 3052, the six warships that the Dragoons had originally been issued should be in the Outreach system. But they still would not be "combat ready" to go against the Clans or even against most Inner Sphere space-based assets. They also would be way too late to help in these next set of coming battles with The Clans, but they would be a lot closer to the growing infrastructure that the Dragoons were building in the Outreach star system. After all what good was it to have weapons, if you lacked the skill and parts to keep them going in more than one battle?

#######

Jaime gave a snort as he forced his mind back to the tools that he had in his hands and not what was as good as wishing upon a star or looking for a magic wand hidden under his desk. The Kell brothers had their First Regiment fully upgraded also with clan tech equal to the two Wolf regiments just not ALL in OmniMechs. The Kell's second regiment and the rest of Jaime's units had all of their PPC's changed out for Bear Slayer or Broadsword type weapons. The rest of their combat units were carrying as much late Star League equipment as they could fit into their hulls that made sense. Most of the updates were focused around improving and updating the heat management systems, then adding weapons firepower, and then crew safety was looked at near the bottom of the list. The other "caping" figure on getting updates done was time to do the work.

The only age of war tech weapons left on those machines were due to mission needs and pilots' personal preference in the use of machineguns or 5cm lasers. After all, not all pilots wanted a 5cm pulse laser in place of two normal 5cm lasers. That was only one example, and there were dozens of others that the techs, pilots, and commanders had to work out a conclusion that made the support, repair crews, pilots, and commanders all happy with the updating of their rides.

As Jaime looked at all of the units on his noteputer one more time, he hoped it was going to be enough combat firepower. He could only hope that the clan forces were blooded and attrited down enough to help him pull off a win against them. He was again thankful for the income generated by selling the extra Star League grade PPCs, the new Bear Slayers, the old spare parts, and the "extra" Nighthawk class battle armor. Jaime did not think that he would have been able to get as much done as he had, at least if he had not had access to that surprisingly deep well of funds. Before he had only been counting on the funds that he could have diverted from Blackwell to do the work.

Money could not fix everything, but it did help cover the overtime cost and buying the needed but hard to find materials on the open market. Now if he could just get away from having to hand build each and every one of those clan designed battle machines and their weapons he was about to risk in battle. They had almost used up all of the clan tech XL engines that Blackwell had been building up over the last decade under the noses of ComStar and the rest of the House Lords.

Jaime had to stop thinking about that, and he got back to coming up with a plan on how he was going to defend a planet that he didn't want to be on. Not for the hundredth time he wished that he could rely on his son, Mackenzie Wolf. But Jaime knows that the younger Wolf was not as good as he was at this level of planning and operations. Jaime knew that he was going to need to pull out all of his tricks to win the next battle. The battle that was going to be for the capital of the house lord who had killed so many of his people not so long ago.

12 Oct 3051

Helios Alpha

Planet Gemenon

Near the base of the Gramada Mountains

SGT Sink looked across the open area spread out before him. This team had broken into two parts after they had their morning meal. One group was still back with Eric and his infection inflamed leg. They were keeping an eye on him and the still locked heavy iron gate that separated this compound from the rest of the road network. Sink took this team right down the road on the bet that it would lead to what should be the main house or command center. That had turned out to be true, but they had also passed many buildings to both sides of the road and there were hints of more hidden buildings or structures deeper in the darkness provided by the tall trees.

Now Sink and his team were looking at a traffic loop made by the road. In the center of that loop was what had to have been a very costly fountain that was long dry. You could see a turn off of the traffic loop that looked to head to a huge garage, but the huge 5 story home was what Sink and his team were focused on. It was in a word…massive. It looked more like a high end hotel in some entertainment show and not a home for a single family.

Sink and the rest of the team were using the thick trees as cover while they surveyed the huge home. He puts down the field glasses and looked around to Mo that was behind a tree about 5 meters to his right. They were looking for any signs of trouble, signs of movement made by animals or human like. They also were looking for any signs of damage. So far, they could not see anything out of place or setting off any of their internal alarm bells. All of the windows were closed and the doors that they could see looked like they were secured. Sink looked around him and he got looks and signs back that said they had not seen anything out of place from the rest of the team.

Sink looked back around, and he did a chin lift towards Mark, and Mark looked back with a little head nod before stepping away from his tree and started to advance on the huge building. It would only take him a few more steps before he would be exposed to anyone watching from the building. Only the center area of the road loop was exposed to the sky and there was no way that Mark would get any closer to that hole in the cover than he had to.

#######

Mark held his rifle at the high ready as he used a wall that made up a guide rail going up a flight of off-white cut stone stairs wide enough to have driven a small car up as cover. He looked around before he started going up this next half of the stairs. At the quick step he went up the next 8 dirt and leaf covered stone steps. He stopped and used the stone corner to look at the door to the second level of this massive building, and then he quickly scanned the windows that he could see from this closer location. Nothing seemed to be off, and he slowly made his way up the last set of stone steps to the huge wood like double doors with very ornate carvings that should allow him access to this huge building.

Mark took a few deep breaths and slowly stood from the cover of the post and made his way up to the heavy door at the top of those last steps. They already know that there were only high mounted windows in the doorway, so only people in higher floors would be able to see him from this location. He didn't slam into the closed door like some entertainment show. This job needed to be done quietly and doing something like knocking on the door by slamming your backside into it was not quiet. He slowly put his back near against the side of the recessed door and waited some more. He knew that the rest of the team was watching him along with this part of the recovering and rescue team. His heart was about to beat out of his chest, but that was the only sound he heard.

After what seemed like an hour to Mark, but part of his brain knew that it was at most 15 seconds. From the tree line came first SGT Sink and about ten steps behind him came Mo out of the tree line at the wolf trot. They followed nearly in Mark's footsteps across the blacktop loop towards the stairs to the main door of this building.

When they had stopped moving across the blacktop road, Mo was at the bottom of the last set of steps. Mark reached down and tried the door…it was locked. That was not much of a surprise. Any door not locked to the outside world would have been opened already or a trap. Mark reached down and pulled out a special knife just for this kind of work. After pulling it out he waved to show what he was planning on doing to the rest of the team.

The two part thin metal of the cutting blade was a tight fit into the center door seal. Mark had a good idea of where the locking devices might be. And thanks to the years without power, alarms would not be an issue. With a hard hit to the butt of the weapon and it went in just far enough into the seal between the two door halves. With a quick look around to make sure it was safe, Mark activated the SLiE supplied weapon/tool. The hum was just audible to Mark, but he knew that it would not travel that far.

This was not the first door Mark had to open. If it had been? He would not have been the first person to cross the open ground. It took a few seconds for the Vibro blade to open the gap enough for the blade to start to be pulled down by gravity. Mark let the weight of the tool do the work and without so much as needing a sawing action to help it along. The tool was soon below the ornate metal around the door handles. This area should hold about 90 percent of the locking devices that Colonials used. Mark had no idea when he was cutting wood, metal or something else with the high tech knife. He had to lift up on the handle at a little of an angle to pull the working blade out of the door jam, when he had thought that he had cut the locks.

######

Mark put the tool back in his hip mounted holder and by the time that he looked back up, Mo was on the other side of the entry way. Mo gave Mark a nod and Mark gave a silent prayer, and then he slowly pulled on the handle on his half of the door. This was the hard part. He had to put enough pressure on the door to overcome any rust, but not too much that it would slam into any back up physical locking devices that the door might possess. Then there would be only the sound that rust on the hinges might make.

The door was tight and at the first sound of rust breaking free Mark stops pulling. He can feel Sink come up behind him, but he hears the soft hisss of penetrating oil being applied to the now kind of exposed hinges. Mark gave a slow twenty count to give the oil time to work. With the count done, Mark started to slowly pull again. The door seemed to be easier to move, but the sound came back, and he had to stop and let Sink put more oil on the slightly more exposed hinges.

The third time was the charm and while Sink kept the oil ready, and Mo covered Mark and Sink from any surprises coming out of the doorway. When Mo and Sink had moved up to the door, two more of the team had sprinted from the tree line to the stairs. When the door was open enough those two came charging up the last part of the stairs to be the first to enter the building. Mo, then Mark, and then Sink would enter behind the first pair. The rest of the forward team was there for back up if things went south on the entry team.

When nothing happened for a preset time, the rest of the outside team started tactical moving towards the newly opened doors. They would hold at those main doors until they were called up, one way or the other by the mission leader. This was not the first time that they had done this game, and it would not be the last. Well, it would not be the last as long as this one didn't turn out to be some kind of trap.

########

SGT Sink looks around the room. It was a stone wall room with not a low ceiling but not a high one either. This place was sitting in the bottom layer of a two story basement and what was sitting under 5 stories of luxury living above that. This room had started out as a huge ambrosia cellar and now it had a new use. It had taken them all day to sweep this one building of threats. It had not been a complete sweep, but it was done well enough to know that they were alone in the building. At least they were alone in the only ones with two legs.

Before the sun was down, Sink had sent a pair of his team back to the guard building. Without a way to communicate between the two teams over such a distance. He thought it was better to have everyone under one roof, so he had picked the larger roof to be under. Both buildings were very well made and besides some water damage in one of the 15 bathrooms in this building. Both were very serviceable as a place to call "home".

To keep light from being an issue, they had set up their camp on the first level of the basement. There were still windows, but they were few, smaller, and high up on the walls. They were nothing that his team could not take care of with their on-hand supplies and some things they had found. Blacking out windows was second nature by now.

########

They had spent all the next day looking around. This building had the feeling of a mausoleum or something along those lines and not a real home. Sink knew that they were going to need to be here for some time, so he moved his "command center" down one more "floor". While the rest of the team checked out the place for damage. Sink, Mo, Eric, and Mark started moving bottle after bottle into a storage room with a strong lock. The ambrosia cellar was huge, but it was made to "display" 10,000 bottles and it did not have that much real working space. There had been many empty spots, but not that many, and a few dozen bottles had been broken before SGT Sink's team had come down. They had been broken long enough that any liquid had dried up.

With the first level basement "blacked out" and the second level more like a mine than a "normal" home. The team had a lot of space that was dry, and with limited access to call home. Sink knew it would not take long before "items" from the home or general area would find their way down here to make life easier for his team. Sink had been drawn to the third floor library, and it was not just on the third floor. The bookshelves went all the way threw to the fifth floor but the area where the addict should be, was just open space with huge dark wood beams and thick looking tin panels. Sink had no idea what type of books these might be, but he knew that every book would be inventoried, packed down, and shipped back to New Circe.

That had been where they had found "the letter". It had been sitting but weighted down on the huge wooden desk in the library/office by a book and an empty cigar box. This had caused a search to be launched for anything else that might have been missed in the first few looks. A second note was quickly found in the bar area, but the sheet of paper had been exposed to more light in that location. The light coming in from a nearby window had faded the lettering into just a few oddly spaced lines. The letter in the library also was faded, but not nearly as bad.

The letter had been from the people that had lasted for months after the Cylons had attacked and destroyed the Colonial's way of life. It was not a detail list of what had happened to them, but it gave Sink an idea of what had happened to those that had lived here. Sink looked down at the letter on the relocated desk.

#######

Miss (unreadable),

If you are reading this? We stayed until the fuel ran out for the generator. (unreadable) took most of the security teams and anyone that had medical knowledge two days after the power grid went down. We can see smoke coming from The Refuge, and (unreadable). They felt that they should go and at least try and help. That was on the third day after the attack, and none of them have since returned to us. One of the maids thought that she heard weapons fire a few days after they left and coming from the general direction of The Refuge. I was able to talk the rest of the staff out of going to look for them after two weeks of waiting.

When we refilled the smallest generator with the last of the stored fuel for (unreadable)? I started making plans for wen we lost power. We filled the (unreadable) with as much food as we could that would not go bad along with some gear that we have been making for sleeping outside in the weather. On my orders, I had all of the fuel pulled from the rest of the transports that we will not be taking when we run out of power. That power loss happened last night, and I will be taking those that want to, down to T(unreadable).

(unreadable) is closer to the main roads and easier to reach from (unreadable), but I feel that T(unreadable) is safer and closer to your possible line of travel. We will wait there for you and your family. We will make sure to scout the areas, so that we can return to your home once we are together again. We will only take enough weapons and ammunition for those that know how to use the weapons without too much risk to the rest of us. I promise that (unreadable) will not be carrying so much as a frakking letter opener on this trip. I hope you don't mind, but I will need to take some of the gold cubits your father collected over the years. It is in case we need to do any trading between (unreadable) and (unreadable).

Signed (unreadable)?

########

SGT Sink put the letter down and absent mindedly flattened it one more time with the palms of his hands. He would make sure that a copy of this letter was put in with any papers that were found in the library/office and the small number of files that they had already found off in the kitchen. At the first reading of the short letter, it would not seem to have been worth that much to the current occupiers of this facility. But Sink and Mo were not your average readers.

This letter had said that they had small and larger generators for power to run at least the main building of this compound. All they would need to do, was to have someone check them out and have some fuel flown in. They also would have some transportation that was left behind. After over seven years of sitting around without anyone looking after them. They would need some work and fuel, no matter if any fuel was left behind are not. They would need the same skills to fix the power generators, and Sink knew some of his people had those needed skills.

The other useful items of information that the short note carried, was that they were going to maybe leave some weapons and ammunition behind. SGT Sink knew that none of them had been back to this building after whoever wrote the note had left and locked the doors behind them. The other item of note was that they had said. It was that they were taking some old gold cubits from a collection of some kind. All of that said, that there was at least one safe hiding in this building. And that was something that they were looking for. All they had to do was find it or hopefully many of them without the Cylons noticing them.

As he was thinking about were a hidden safe might be and not really looking at anything going on around him. So far, they had not found the safes when they had searched this building the first two times. Currently they were taking images of what was in every room of this building as data files to be sent back to New Circe. That work was being done by four of his team. And when they were done taking those images, then they would start moving items to a central area before it was shipped off planet. They had found a very small landing area with an equally small hangar hidden under thick trees not far away that should fit a Raptor without any issues. Now that would help in getting supplies in and cargos out for this whole local area.

They were keeping six members of his team just for security and guard detail in a rotating task for his team. They only had four people in this building, and the rest of his team was both mapping out the rest of the area behind that tall stone wall and searching any of the other buildings that they had found. They were not looking for things, but threats of all kinds. Most of the time they would mark down what the building might have been used for in their patrol notes. They had a lot of land to look over, but the map at the guard point near the gate gave them an idea of how many they should find as a minimum. Sink had made sure that everyone knew that there could be more out there, that were either too small or to out of the way as not to be noted at the guard shack at the main gate.

So far, they had found two garages, one with high end cars and the other with one work truck but a lot of open spaces that held very old oil stains. They also had found the grounds keeper's home and his work shed. They also had marked out some "spare homes". Were some people might have a spare room in their home. These people had whole homes set aside to do the same job. They had found some food that was still more or less still safe to eat. But they were still looking for the weapons storage areas, and anything that looked like it was used to hold old gold cubits or other things that held value before the Cylon's new war on the humans.

#######

They had been in this compound now for just about two weeks. Sink was trying to get his brain to go blank as he worked. He was the one packing down this huge library of all of its books. Finding a library with anything useable was very rare without having to go through a huge amount of decontamination, and decontamination and books did not mix. They had the first Raptor land on the landing pad two days ago. It was the first one that was assigned just to support his team and no other tasks as far as he knows. It was only supporting a crew of two on that craft, and it had taken most of his team to get the craft under cover of the slightly damage cover of the hidden hangar. But the Raptor crew had problems understanding the rules of living on a Cylon controlled planet. They could catch on about not using lights at night and a few other rules. All you had to do was hit them on the head hard enough and often enough for your directions to take root.

That issue was what he was thinking about, when he reached for another hand full of hard back books, but they would not come off the shelf when he pulled at them. He pulled harder and the three books in his hand would still not move. Now he looked to see what was going on. After three days of work, they had given up trying to inventory the books in this place. Sink reset his grip and pulled a little harder on the thick maybe leather covers. This time the books tilted back, but they still didn't come off the shelf. With most of the books packed down from this part of the shelf, he could see that the books were attached to something thick going back into the back wall of the shelving unit.

"What the Frakk?" Sink pushed the books back into place, and this time he heard a soft click off to his left and closer to where the main desk used to be. Now looking that way, Sink pulled the books at an angle again. He heard the click again and this time he saw part of the wall to wall shelving unit had moved out just a little. "Really, what the Frakk?"

Sink walked down the wall and pulled on the slightly open…something. He pulled his colonial issued handgun and after a steadying breath he opened the hidden door. Clearing a room alone is one of the big no-nos of close quarters combat, and Sink was going to be doing it any way. With the shelving unit/door now fully open, Sink slowly entered the room.

There were no windows in the newly exposed room. And the only light was coming into the library/office and then into this new room was from the long but very narrow windows near where the desk had been before it had been moved underground. This caused some odd shadows to be cast in the windowless room. But the light mounted on the side of the handgun came on with a little move of Sinks pointer finger. A blue/white beam of light was just widely focused enough to give Sink an idea of what he was seeing.

The hidden room had a small desk mounted against one wall, but on three of the walls were four weapons racks that took up the two longest walls and more racks to both sides of the desk. They were not filled with weapons, but there seemed to be at least a dozen long guns that looked to be mainly focused on military styles that very high end security people might be trained on how to use. There also seemed to be some hunting type weapons in the mix that could be seen from Sink's location. There also was some law enforcement style body armor on exposed shelves below the weapons racks. Sink ran the light deeper into the small room and his heart almost stopped when his light reflected off hard cold metal.

There was a metal door at the far end of the room, walls don't have seams and hinges. The color of the metal was a dead giveaway of what it was made of. Then there was a coat of arms of the Battlestar Atlantia from the 1st Cylon war standing out in high relief dead center and right at eye level. That would mean that the door was made out of the armored belt of a great battlestar. You were not going to just cut threw that stuff with a handheld torch.

Sink let the weapon drop from high ready to back in its holster. "Well, Frakk! Looks like I'm going to have to make contact with Ragnar. I hope that safe cracker is as good as they say. Or we are frakked sideways."

That had to be where the last owner kept the good stuff. Then Sink thought about the hidden door. "OHHH, Frakk me sideways! Now, we are going to have to get a portable DRADIS and scan every inch of this whole Frakking walled in compound."

########

Notes:

What is the ComStar Fleet doing? I don't know how ComStar got all of those units from across the whole Inner Sphere to Tukayyid in May if the clans came back in November. So, I came up with this idea.

Why is the Resort so large? The National parks of Katmai in Alaska is only 500k acres smaller, Denali is 600k larger, Gates of the Arctic Park is 400k larger, and Wrangell-St Elias park is 1.2million acres larger than what Copeland bought. There are a lot of planets with very low populations, so land would be very cheap.

Have you noticed some odd breaks in my posting? After looking up so much data on the Dragoons and reading "someone's" SI into battletech. I had to take a break and I did a draft of a SI centered on the Dragoons (like 250 pages worth and the wife and dogs were so not happy with me). It will be some time before that hits the net…if ever. I just have too much to do right now.

The Dragoons order of battle: The Dragoons are working up to what was seen in the Mercenary 3055 book, but not all the way there yet. Oh, has anyone else noticed that they don't have enough dropships in the Wolf's dragoon book and the Merc 3055? Before the 4th SW they had 12 Overlords, 13 Unions, 4 Fortresses, 2 Intruder, 6 Fury, 4 Leopard, 4 Leopard CV, 2 Gazelle, and 1 Triumph.

The dragoons had a lot of good intel when they first got to the Inner Sphere. So how did they get it. Maybe wolf net was working before the rest of them publicly showed up. It would explain how they knew to take all the Star League tech off the mechs and not bring the other space stations or warships with them.

Steel production. The US makes about 7.3 million tons per month and still imports 1.7 million tons a month. A Mammoth would hold about 37 ktons.

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