A man out of time, and almost out of time (SIOC)

by cliff.west

You all can thank, or curse, Chris O'Farrell for giving me this idea. An OC/SI gets ripped out of his home dimension when the Dragoons were testing a repair on one of their supporting jumpships. What will happen next, and will it change the whole Inner Sphere?

3. Chapter 3

Chapter 3

By Cliff

Fact Checked and Sanity Checked by Drakensis

Editor (that I at least sometimes listen to, so the screw ups are all mine) Drakensis

New Valencia

Federated Suns

OH, MY FUCKING GOD! What was in that bottle! What did that devil woman bring into my home! Okay well that did not go as planned. Drake yelled within his own mind before he passed out… again.

Drake was about to release his big plan to out himself that he knew that Blackwell was connected to the Wolf Dragoons. Only for Minuet to go and toss a big pocking monkey wrench into the plans from step one.

(Flashback)

Drake's head popped up from the screen and looks out the window of his shed towards the house. Minuet had set up a metal dinner triangle, like was seen in some cowboy movies, to use as a dinner bell and she would ring it when she wanted him to come in. She had quickly gotten tired of walking out to the Shed a few times a day to bring Drake in for mealtimes. Little did she know how much this action had helped Drake with his 'big' plan.

As soon as Drake entered the backdoor, he could see items that were spread out on what he called the bar or breakfast top on the edge of the kitchen. Some of the items on display looked familiar but looking back and forth between the bar top and Minuet, he was very clearly confused. "What is all of this?"

The undercover Wolf Net agent pointed to the collection of bottles and other items on the high table with a huge smirk on her face. "You have been complaining about wanting something called a margarita every few hours. So, make some and finally change your channel for both of our sanity."

Drake made a sour face; he didn't remember it quite that way. "Well, I haven't made one from scratch before, are you sure you got the right things?" He was tap dancing like a mug, and Drake thought that it was a good bet that Minuet knew this.

The man out of time saw the look she gave him and then went to his laptop. Besides the 'normal' books on Drake's system. He also had a few PDF survival guides that he liked to review from time to time before 'The Event'. They were mainly to help if you were lost in deserts of the Middle East, US southwest, and the like. They covered what wild plants that you could eat and what animals to avoid. In that same file was a bartender's guide that he had used at some of the parties that Crazy Woman 2 and he would need to attend as being part of the division's staff. That bartending guide was detailed enough that it could walk you through how to make replacement mixers for a huge list of drinks on the fly.

Before Drake clicked on the file, he looked over and noticed that this file had been last opened only two days ago. Only… he hadn't needed to open this file in some time, even before he had come to this planet and its attached universe. That little information just happened to tell him that she had been looking around his laptop when Drake was not around. This data also told him that she had not gotten that deep and to his hidden hard drive partition, or she would have used that heavy bottle for something other than to have him make a mixed drink.

With the file now open and the right data on display, Drake started looking at the items on the table. "Okay what do you have here?"

Minuet put her hand on her hips and closely watched Drake work around the over hip high table. While he checked every label, she started talking. "No one knew what a Margarita was so this is what we came up with."

Drake was into the project and just called over his shoulder. "How about you grab a blender and some ice for me."

The NCO had no idea what a food processor was, but it worked enough like a blender for them to get the job done. Whether it would be good for anything else later was a different story, chopping up ice cubes was not easy on a machine. The liquor bottle was in French, but Drake had a good eye and he free poured it into the chemical mess already loaded into the device and pressed the button. A test showed that 'the spike' seemed too fruity and light on octane for a good mixed drink. So, Drake doubled the load and hit the button to mix it in with the rest. There was no such thing as to strong a margarita.

Halfway through the first batch Drake had started playing music off his field CD player to drown out the holo show that neither of them was watching.

You know how it goes, one margarita, two margarita, floor! And I'm not talking about the dance floor.

Minuet seemed to like Drake's skill in the Two Step - that was the standard dance pattern for this planet. Then they had more drinks until the bottle was over halfway emptied into the ice and mix for the next batch of… magic.

(End Flash Back).

Things were a blank for him after that… until his head wanted to jump off his neck to run away when the sun came up. Next Drake, after fully waking up, noticed that there was a weight lying next to him in the bed, and having a good idea of what it might be he slowly turned to see Minuet without any clothes on sleeping beside him.

Drake slowly slipped his naked butt out of the bed, and only then did he notice all of the clothes tossed around the room. With a smirk he collected some fresh clothes out of a tall chest of drawers. "Yeah, I hooked up with a clan chick!" With a sudden jolt of pain, his smile faded from that thought. "Or at least, I think that I did."

He quietly went to the 'shower room' and washed himself of the funk made up of sweat and alcohol. It took twice as long to brush the taste out of his mouth from the night before. Still feeling like he had been hit by a tank, Drake made his way into the main living spaces of the home while not trying to wake Minuet. After so many years of Army life starting at a young age, he quickly worked out that this interaction had started in the cleared area turned last night's dance floor.

Not feeling like he was up to cleaning up this mess just yet, he looked at the kitchen and started to look for the culprit of why his head still wanted to launch to the jump point without needing the help of a dropship.

"Where. Is. IT?" He spoke in a soft voice.

Drake had to be careful not to move his head around too much or too fast. That could risk it feeling like his skull might fall off or give him the desire to rip his own ears off. Soon Drake had found the device of his pain. It was almost empty with maybe two fingers left at the bottom of the bottle. After taking a sniff, that showed that he was a glutton for punishment, and that almost made him want to run for the sink and void his stomach, he had to step back with the bottle at full arm's reach.

He tried to catalog what in the hell that woman brought into this house without risking another sip. It seemed that it was like a bad mix of Od El Toro tequila and a bottle of Highlands Whisky Red that had been at a party after graduating from SLC… Only it was mixed with some kind of fruit juice and kerosene to top it all off.

Drake made a face. "You are hereby called Devil Juice, by the power of this being my damn house."

Risking offending the alcohol abuse gods, Drake reached over and dumped the rest of the bottle down the sink's drain. He hoped the waste treatment facility was up to the task of cleaning that crap up or it was going to cause a major fish kill in the local river or ocean. He then put the now empty bottle on a shelf with a big red ink "No!" written on the label. Drake made a vow that he would never let a full bottle of that liquid death in his house ever again.

Drake activated the coffee maker and reached for a cup in the drying rack near the kitchen window. There was one thing that he would say about this planet, they had great coffee, and it was way better than anything that Uncle Sam gave him in the Chow Halls or in the MREs. To keep his stomach from trying to crawl out of his mouth after the third sip, Drake started eating some of the brown bread that was popular around here.

The hangover man was looking at a second set of mild pain pills in his hand wondering if it was worth a more upset stomach to keep his head attached to his neck. The sound of sliding feet on the tile brought Drake's head up to see who was trespassing.

Damn she is one hot-looking woman, even if she is a little green around the gills and had a major case of bed hair. Thinking that discretion is the better part of valor, Drake kept his mouth shut.

Minuet pulled her favorite cup used for coffee, and unlike Drake she used a locally made cup made of thick glass of some kind. Until the man from a different universe had come round the idea of a dedicated coffee cup was not known, much less ones made with funny sayings or images put onto their sides. After living with this man for weeks, she knew that Drake would not say anything to her until she broke the ice.

Today that was sooo a good thing in Minuet's book as she drank her morning wake up juice. She was not sure her head could handle spoken volume just yet. She was on her second cup of coffee when she started looking for that hell bottle when she saw it empty and with the words NO written in bold red ink. She could not agree more with this statement, with a slight smirk on her face, Minuet has second thoughts that maybe it was not that bad of a bottle after all.

After she finished some buttered brown bread and after about fifteen minutes in which neither of them had tossed up their cookies into the sink or needed to make a mad dash for the toilet, the woman used her chin to point to a book that Drake had been reading before she came into the kitchen.

"So lightweight, I thought after last night, you wouldn't need those things for a while." The look on her face was…solid or even frozen. She had known that Drake was drunker than she had been when she had made her move while dancing. But seeing a man reading a book about sex after a night of that type of activities struck a nerve in Minuet's psyche.

Drake looked over at what she was pointing at on the tabletop that also held his field laptop/entertainment system. It had been extremely painfully hard for Drake to rip the cover off of his gifted copy of Wolves on the Border. You could not just bring a book with a battlemech on the cover art into this house. So, he removed it and replaced the outer covers with one that was more adult themed in title and in the cover art.

"Oh, I was just taking some notes. I felt a little out of practice last night and wanted to improve on a few things." Drake had to give her a little grin that he hoped would get him a replay when he could fully remember what the hell happened last night. He had not blacked out from drinking since he was in his mid-twenties, and until this morning he had thought that he had outgrown such actions.

Minuet did not say anything for a few seconds and then she changed the subject to something she thought was safer than what had happened last night. "So did you finish your little computer skills test… Caveman?"

Drake kept his face from moving at this question. Okay so you want to go there do you, then so can I little, Miss Hot Pants, thought the man not of this universe.

"Sure, and before you brought that bottle of death home with you last night, I was going to show you. Just go hit the space bar on the house computer. The results should be posted by now." Yea Drake had the results from his last test days ago from the center of higher learning and he had been very careful not to let Minuet see them.

Reactive armor underwear activated, and full speed ahead! thought Drake as he fought very hard not to give the game away.

Drake was watching her move over the lip of the thick glazed porcelain coffee cup from another world that he used to hold his morning coffee. He had not taken another sip of the warm drink; he was using it as a prop as Minuet walked up to the screen mounted on the food cooler. When she tapped the screen with her fingertip a set of very hard to find snap shots started to flow onto the screen and change as she watched. They started with a horse, then mongoose, followed by a black bird, then a white bird, and what was close to an image of a polar bear as Drake could find.

Minuet must have been more hungover than Drake or she was in shock, because she did not say anything until the Wolverine, and the Black widow spider, had passed by to be replaced by a wolf image. Those images were as close as Drake could get of the image of the clans as he could find in the cover provided by his classes. He also didn't have the time to try to find all of the different clans in his books, not that he knew the total number of them in the first place.

"What the hell is that?" Her head snapped over to look at Drake, and Minuet's voice held a dangerous tone that she had never used in front of Drake before.

Drake would have thought that Minuet would have been the hot kind of angry, before blowing up kind of person. No, she was the type that went cold before I blowup kind of woman. Drake knew that this could be trouble from long years of experience with members of the opposite sex.

Drake put down his cup and looked at the woman. "Minuet, I am taking a chance that you are more than just my nurse and PT person in the larger scheme of things. I need to talk to Stanford Blake or Jaime Wolf, and I need to do it with the fewest people knowing about that meeting and what will be said the better." Drake was very thankful for that bootleg printed copy of most of the Wolf's Dragoon source book. Finding that one name had saved him a lot of digging around and reading that he needed to find other things 'with some pop'.

She was looking at Drake with wide eyes and then she pulled her house coat closer around her. With a toss of her head, the soy stormed off and called over her shoulder. "I have no idea what you're talking about!"

Now Drake could not help but smile at her back and he called out to her one more time. "So do you know of any nice places to eat on Strana Mechty?" Drake had wanted to say something like that since the early parts of his planning, and it was sooo much better than asking about the weather.

####

Not long later, Drake thought that he might have blown it, in more than one way when things had gotten quiet in the house. Drake sat watching the entertainment show about the latest rounds on the gaming world working up to the 'big' championship. He was already showered and in his 'house clothes' normal for this world, he was not expecting to be seen by even his neighbors anytime soon. He was not really paying any attention to the holo display but lost in deep thought about what his next plan might have to be.

If Drake could not get to Jaime Wolf quickly, he had to find another way to help. He was thinking that it was looking that he had just rolled boxcars with Minuet. There was a lot of blood about to be spilled, and Drake felt like all of it would be on his hands because he could not stop it in time. Just like the blood of Drake's friends that had died at his cookout.

He was absent mindedly tapping the file that he had printed out and his copy of everything that he remembers or had access to and could be useful for his short term objective. Those pages were neatly folded and in an envelope that he had repurposed. Drake's little stash of books ready to hand had a good bit of material about the Marik Civil War and that should be good enough for right now. That was going to be his opening starting point with his recovered book that Minuet had seen as back up on the kitchen tabletop.

SMACK. Drake had clothes slammed into his face -

"What the hell!"

- and before he could get the clothes away from his eyes Minuet was speaking in that tone, that he had not heard her used before today. "Get those on. You have a meeting."

When the clothes fell into Drake's lap, now he could see her, and Minuet was not wearing her 'nurses' outfit and her hair was pulled back. This was a bit more…tactical looking going from Minuet's head to her toes. The look was complete with some kind of pistol sitting low on her left hip in a flat black holster.

Drake kept his eyes on the woman as he rose and put on the light jacket that had been tossed to him over the cast on his left upper arm and the tossed pants were loose fitting enough to fit over his compression leggings and air cast on Drake's left thigh. The pants were not sweatpants, they looked a little more formal, but only just. He does notice that Minuet kept her left hand on the hip close to the weapon sitting there as Drake put on the layer of clothes. Minuet also kept her distance, and when possible, she kept some of the furniture between them. That was good field craft, especially after Drake had surprised her once already today. She was what the guys would have called Zone 5, fully defensive.

Just as he had finished with his slip-on shoes, three large men in durable clothes entered 'his' home from the garage without bothering with knocking. From the look in Minuet's face, they were expected. Drake looked over and he could see Minuet with a flat look on her face that kept Drake from getting a read on her. He thought that this must be what it looked like when she had her work face on, or he was a dead man… or both.

Now the five of them walked out of the house, threw the garage, and into a large hover van with only windows for the driver to use. As the door closed behind him, he noted that it was the perfect snatch truck, and now he got more nervous the longer that they drove. The people in the back could not see outside, but he could see three sets of eyes watching every little move that he made as they drove for what seemed like hours.

Yep, this sucks. Drake had to fight to keep from thinking that he was about to start a new life… as fertilizer.

The opening of the back door brought him awake with a start; Drake had not thought that he had fallen asleep along the drive. He didn't think that he had been drugged, at least without him noticing. Everything this morning that he had eaten or drank had been made by his own hands. Drake just thinks it was the military in him reaching up and grabbing him by the ears. If you were sitting still for more than a few minutes, your body kind of gets trained that it's time to stockpile on some sleep.

Oh crap, we're in the woods! Yep, I am going to die. So much for stopping the Clans, ComStar, the crazy Word of Blake, and stopping the Wolf's Dragoons from fucking up four ways from Sunday in this universe. These thoughts raced through Drake's brain so fast that he stumbled a little as he exited the van.

Drake looked around after his feet hit the ground and the rest emptied from the van behind him. He could feel blood moving to his legs and the tingle of the limbs waking up from time in a position they were not used to. I'm still not in cuffs, and I was not drugged. Huzzah! At least I wouldn't be going to die on my knees. Thought Drake. Now he could feel himself start to oscillate over his feet.

After having pulled Drake out of the van they allowed him to do a little stretching so that he didn't fall onto his face. The driver pointed down a trail going deeper into the woods without saying a word. No one that had been riding in the back of the van said a word, and Drake walked with three quiet knee breakers coming up behind him every step of the way.

After one more turn, in the wood covered trail, Drake could see bleachers that overlooked a large weapon's range. For some time now Drake and the rest could hear and feel the sound of something large slamming around the local area. He had been through enough Table 8's in his life to know what he was looking at after only a few seconds of clearing the wood line. Drake had to force himself to take his eyes off the Marauder moving below them, he was a fanboy after all of that design. Still, it was too far away for him to tell if it was an old MAD or a new and heavier MAD II model.

With a slight push forward, Drake was escorted to the only person in the bleacher area looking over the range. As he made his way over to the standing man, he could smell Minuet's perfume coming up from behind him when the breeze suddenly changed. Drake didn't take a look to see her, as he kept watching the mech and the other man. Then Drake saw the flash of the cannon mounted on top of the officer battle pod before he heard the crack of it firing passing through the air. Drake had no idea who was watching the mech run through the range on his own, but that alone pointed to this person being someone with some power behind them.

The autocannon fire gave the opening Drake thought that he could use as an effective ice breaker. "I always thought that you should have just put a large pulse laser in place of that autocannon they mounted on those things."

Franko did not let the surprise show on his face or to move his head at the comment made by this man. The Wolf Net agent quickly decided that he needs to fish a little and see what would happen. There was no way that this person should know what a pulse laser even was, much less have an idea that it should go onto the Marauder II going through final testing below him.

The head agent on this planet used a board voice to start his little fishing expedition. "They make too much heat, and the arm mounted PPCs are harder hitters anyway."

Drake let a little smile come to his face. He could tell by how still the man was, that he had scored a point with his opening statement and had thought to go fishing on what else Drake might let out. That is unless he was a trained sniper, those guys were freakishly still even when they were eating. "I don't know what you call them currently, 2nd or 3rd generation heatsinks, but Freezers is what I think they are called in the general population of Mechwarriors. If you have enough of those, they would fix that heat issue. I mean as long as you're not jump happy at the same time you put an alpha into some unfortunate soul."

The displaced man tried to block out everything so that he could see the reaction to his next statement. "So, 7th Kommandos or Wolf Net?"

Drake suddenly felt what he would have called a disturbance in the force, coming from those standing a little too close to him. Now he had to work very hard to keep from flinching or showing any outside indications that he knew his escorts all had just gone 'red alert' in the meeting.

Franko now turned and looked over at the other man and in a low voice. "I'm sorry, what did you say?" He knew how to play this type of game, but there was a hard limit on what he was willing to put up with.

"They told me that I was recovered when a jump core and a part of what they called a Cosmic String crossed paths out at the jump point. I'm betting the ship was part of the 7th or Wolf Net and you all were doing something that ComStar or the House Lords would not have liked." Drake was not going to say that he knew Blackwell and the Dragoons were connected at the hip this early in the meeting. At least he was not going to say that just yet, but it was an arrow in his quiver if he needed to do a snapshot.

"Okay Mr. Mendenhall, what do you think that you know?" Franko was surprised and he had thought that he was prepared to deal with this caveman. It would seem that Minuet and the rest of the team had greatly underestimated this man for a very long time.

Drake smiled and then lowered his chin looking at what he thought the CIA would have called a station chief back on his home world. He still did not look around to see if he was going to get a copper and lead headache in between heartbeats. "Minuet, that envelope that you took out of my jacket pocket before we left the house. Can you please pass it over to this gentleman? Oh, and do you think we can get some drinks sent out. I'm still recovering from a hell of a hangover from a bottle of poison that somehow found its way into my liquor cabinet. I think we all need to keep our head cleared so that nothing rash is done that we… well that I might not live to regret." The tone was light, but it didn't reach Drake's face that he was speaking in any form of jest.

###

Stanford Blake was looking down at a set of thumbnail images on his office computer that had come in from the latest data drop from his agents. They had to use the ComStar managed HPG to get information moved around the Inner Sphere to keep up with their cover story of being mercenaries for hire within the Inner Sphere. To keep them from reading to much of the Dragoon's mail, Wolf Net used image hiding software on top of detailed coding of the data. The trick was picking the right image from the pack and that matched the cover codename. That image would give him an idea about what the report was about. That in turn would lead to a code word unlocking a short text message hidden within that double image. A second code would split the double image and produce a full report or delete the whole mess if it was miss typed.

Blake had been working for a few hours already on these files, and he had already picked through the known important reports. Then his eyes went to a new image that showed a caveman looking into a crystal ball. It took him a few seconds to work on that one, but he only knew of one operation that was close to that image. If they sent a report this way it could be very important or nothing at all. Then again if it had not been time sensitive, they would have hand carried a report to him instead of risking the HPG.

When Stanford clicked on the image with a code, went through the long random string of a password, and then the last set of numbers, a ten-page document was pulled out from the image that had been hiding it. It did not take long for Blake to work out it was a report from the time of the Marik Civil war. That was a little odd, because Blake knew that Franko had not been around during that time in the Dragoon's operation. He had not made it to the Inner Sphere until 3020 when the Dragoons were already working for the Steiners.

Then Colonel Blake got to the part about how it was ComStar that had been the key player behind the idea of bleeding the Dragoons and then forcing them to make another resupply run. That was not a new idea, but it was one that had fallen out of favor in Wolf Net and the rest of the Dragoons years after the event. What Franko pointed out was that it had been ComStar that had gotten Chancellor Maximilian Liao to send the Dragoons to the FWL. Then ComStar had been working with Anton Marik to make sure the Dragoons were cut down. Franko was pointing to some information that Blake didn't remember but connected a few different dots no one else had found.

Then Blake's eyes got to the part about the former head of ROM being personally involved in killing of Joshua Wolf. He had no idea who Vesar Kristofur or Kristopher Kelly was, but he was damn well going to find out. That he was going to enjoy giving some of this information to one very deadly Dragoon Spider and then get the hell out of her way. But only after he had his own private talk with this person and drained every drop of data he could before the Black Widow got her… fangs into him. If he was a high-ranking member of ComStar? That was going to cause more than a few second and third order effects for the command staff of the Dragoons to deal with. He had an idea of what would happen if the rest of the colonels thought that ComStar had declared war on the rest of the Dragoons. The short answer was nothing good.

Blake looked away from the digital document to collect both his breath and his thoughts. After a few seconds he was starting to think that one Franko Demos was in for a promotion, if this was what he had been doing while at the same time managing the Caveman issue. The report style needed some work, but it was not bad work in form and the data was spotty in some areas that assumptions were drawn from. But it did have the punch that you would expect from a Wolf Net report. He went back to the report after taking a few notes to pass back to Franko, and then Blake felt a punch in the gut as he read the last lines of those ten pages.

"Sir, besides the head and footer of this report, it was all done by the Caveman with me watching over his shoulder. He wants to have a meeting with you and Papa Wolf. I think it might be worthwhile, that is, if this information about ComStar is proven to be correct by second sources. Also of note, he pointed out, without saying a word, about a dozen clan names to his watcher. I am awaiting your orders, but I will see what else I can pull out of him while I await a reply." It was signed by the glyph that belonged to Franko Demos.

The hallmark of good intelligence was something called cross queuing. It was that one source was just data, it didn't become intelligence until a second source could be found that at least closely matched the first report. It was the best way to keep from killing the wrong person or having your people taken out by mistake.

Maybe the Scorpions are right that mis-jumps can be an opportunity. Blake was frozen in his chair at this thought.

Blake didn't move for long minutes and then he re-reads the report from top to bottom one more time under a whole new light. Within an hour of opening this one minor report, the stage was set for the start of a major shift in the Dragoons. It started with Blake paying for the sending of a Wolf Net wide alert to find all of the persons that had been identified in this report. As soon as the messages were prepared, they would be grouped in batches of four to six to be given to someone to make their way to the ComStar compound or data center. The idea was that ComStar would not see Blake or anyone from the Dragoon staff to tip them off on who was sending or the affiliation of those receiving those messages starting to flow.

After most of the messengers had been sent over to the local HPG station to be put into the data flow of the Inner Sphere. Blake was getting put on Jaime's calendar with a special word and then he was driving over to his office before the amber alert had left this planet. Blake had no idea if his agents would find anything, but he would make sure every record from that time was reviewed at with at least one set of fresh eyes and in a direction given to have them cast about for any breadcrumbs that might have been missed. It was going to cost a lot of C-Bills to get this done, but it was going to be worth it. Even if the main target was a dry hole for information. Jaime, Nat, and a few thousand other Wolves would love to know that this piece of work was no longer among the breathing.

####

Drake now knew how many people it takes to make a 1,800 square foot home seem over crowded to a person of his generation with a military background. He had been assigned a three-bedroom home after the hospital for him and Minuet to use. Minuet was no longer staying in this dwelling, but her old room now held four new people as a sleeping space. Drake's office/classroom has three more people living there with a weapons rack, after they more or less took it apart looking to see if Drake might have hidden anything useful in the room.

The living room had two people sleeping in it, oh and Drake always had someone in his bedroom with him even when he was taking a number 2. Thank God he was used to having people in his hip pocket when he was taking a crap or shower or drug testing. Otherwise, he might have some… performance issues. Drake did make sure not to go into the shed after dropping off that report to what he found out later was the Wolf Net regional manager and the retyping of that same report along with what the locals called data mining. Even if they took that small outbuilding apart again they would not find any of Drake's books and what they knew about computers compared to even only a power user like the man out of time was laughable. He was just thankful for soft ground, fresh landscaping, and a set of privately owned NVGs purchased from a large hunting retail business.

As soon as Drake walked into the living room he received his first surprise of the day. Minuet was sitting in 'his' chair like she owned it. Before he could say anything, she broke the ice for them. "We always knew you were an early riser, but you could have at least cut the rest of the team a little slack every few days and stay in your room until at least the sun was up like any other civilized person."

When Drake didn't have a quick comeback, she kept talking and started lowering her feet off the arm rest of the high-backed chair. He had wanted to tell her it was his house, and they could lump it or leave it for all he cared about their comfort while they guarded him. Then Drake had remembered that it was not in fact his house, it was a home that belonged to Blackwell, and they belonged to the Dragoons just like the guest in this home.

"Let's have a talk, Drake." Minuet finished rising from his chair and pointed to it for him to take a seat. After getting his leg up so it would stop aching, and that took a few minutes and was the reason behind that he was an early riser. When Drake's leg was up, she was standing with her arms crossed. "So, how?"

With those two words, Drake found that he wanted to tell her a lot more than he had before. "I take it we are not alone with someone watching us on the cameras hidden around the house?"

She didn't say anything, but he took the meaning of the raised eyebrow she was giving him. "You know I spent a little over eleven years in armor and then I was moved to staff work. Well, I was not just some paper pusher on the staff. I was moved to Military intelligence from armor, and before you get wrapped up in the name. No, I am not like LOKI or SAFE or even Wolf Net. Think of it as more tactical to low level strategic intel work depending on the level of my assigned unit. I told you about Crazy Woman 2, my 3rd ex-wife?"

When she nodded her head yes, Drake kept talking. "She was what we call an S2X while I was the Division S2 NCOIC. She was normally focused on the counterintelligence mission for my unit both deployed and at our home garrison. I would like to think that both of us were very good at our assigned jobs. I just used what I had learned from my job and her. And then I used it against you all. We split up because she wanted another command, I was just looking forward to doing the rest of my twenty and then picking up a hobby in a low cost of living state for at least the next decade or so."

They spent the next few hours talking about Drake's past after he was out of tanks for the Big Green Machine. The pair of them didn't even notice that a member of the security team was making a second recording of what they were saying. The pair did not even stop talking when someone put some food in front of them. They talked right up until they were told by one of the team that they needed to leave the house for another meeting in an hour. That was just enough time for Drake to do his 3 Ss of s…toilet, shower, and shave and make it there close to being on time.

This time Drake was not put into the back of another blacked-out hover van for the trip to the meeting place, or even in a van for that matter. The group were taking a ride in a real hover sedan, and this was a first for Drake. He had seen them, but this was his first ride in one of the amazing machines.

The sedan was trailed by a small hover van with most of the team staying at Drake's place for some reason. After leaving the local part of the housing area, they became a convoy of four hover transports keeping pace with local traffic. The two front sedans were blockers or bullet magnets in case ComStar had found out what Franko had sent to the head of Wolf Net and possibly all the way to Jaime Wolf's hands. After all you're only being paranoid if people are not really out to get you.

####

Drake was not that surprised to be taken to the main offices of Blackwell instead of the mech and weapon's testing range. It was an open secret to people who played the game in this building that Wolf Net had to be hip-deep in Blackwell, if only to keep them from blowing the deals with the equipment that they sold only to the Wolves for more than a decade. Still, Drake didn't think that Wolf Net would take one of the top floors of the main building of the facility as the big dog's office.

Still the office was small and on one of the insides without a window to the outside world, so maybe it was not all that unexpected for a location of a Wolf Net watcher. For some reason, Drake was glad that Minuet was still with him for this meeting at his sides and not behind him possibly holding a gun chambered with a bullet with his name on it. Internally he was betting that they were divided on whether to yank her off the mission or keep her close to him. The man Drake now knew was (at least currently) called Franko Demos was standing looking at a painting on the side wall when he entered the room. Drake was betting that it was an original oil on canvas, but that was about all he knew about it. Yes, he was one of those people that learn all of his classical music and art from watching Buggs Bunny and the like.

Franko did a half-turn to see Drake out of the corner of his eye. "I sent that report you produced in that field office to my boss, and he acknowledges its receipt. I was expecting to have to wait for a few more days to maybe a few weeks to get even that much. It can take a while to get a report that far and back, much less have him read it and then send something back to a field team. By my math, it was in his hands for less than half a day before he sent that note back and another note to the whole of Wolf Net. We are to be on the lookout for the persons that you noted in that outline you gave me."

"Okay, so we are going to see the man?" He was fighting to keep from jumping up and down.

Franko snorted, "Not yet." Drake could not help but feel deflated for a quick second at this statement.

Drake's temper took over and if he didn't still have the cast on one leg, he would have put his foot into his mouth all the way to at least the knees. "Why the hell not! Look the Dragoons are going to be company stored by the Combine. You need to get them making." Drake throws his hands in the air and did air quotes. "At least second generation heatsinks as fast as you can!" In the game Drake had played, double heatsinks (DHS) were the largest combat modifier there was… at least outside of using Clan tech.

Franko had his game face on and this time it did not slip a millimeter. The information about the formal training of this man in 'the game' had made Franko want to be sure that he was ready for anything Drake might toss at him. Or so he had thought. For the second time in as many meetings, Drake 'the caveman' jumped the bet on Wolf Net. "Why and how do you know this facility can make those lost tech items?"

"Major," Drake made a guess of the rank, but no one corrected him, so he kept going. "The Dragoons are going to be company stored, and then they are going to be on the receiving end of the same treatment that the Light Horse had to deal with… but on a much… much larger scale than the Horses had to live through. Blackwell is the spare parts supplier for the Dragoons, so you should be able to make anything that the SLDF could put into the field back in the day."

Drake rocked back a little and let out a sigh. "Look, I understand that you're worried that you might lose something like with The Widow's Marauder that the Bounty Hunter was able to recover. There is a risk that others can find out about the old Star League tech you can use, not that the Bounty Hunter said a word about anything. But you need to get started now!"

The NCO from another world fought to get his vocal volume back under control. "Look, say if I'm wrong? Then they can be put back into storage for some later time. It is better to have them and not need them, than it is to need them and not have them. Don't you agree?" Inside Drake cringed at using that line. A line that he had often used when talking to younger troopers about always having a condom on you, when you went out clubbing.

Now Franko lets some emotion show on his face. "But how do you know this can be done here?" He was reinforcing his main question.

Drake reached into his jacket and pulled out a small paper backed book. He didn't need eyes in the back of his head to know someone had gone pale and started to sweat as she saw the cover of the book that Drake was passing over to the head of Wolf Net on at least this planet if not a whole sector of the FedSuns.

He could not help but smile as he thought about what must be going on in their heads at that second. It was really hard not to let the smile get even larger than it was already. "Major, I think that you might want to read this, but I would not let it out of your sight if I were you."

Before Drake could say more, Minuet found her tongue. "Ah, Drake. I don't think that Mr. Demos is into those kinds of books. Besides it's not appropriate in this day to hand something like that to someone… at work." Even a layman could tell that Minuet was floundering as she spoke.

Drake saw a confused look on the other man's face for the first time. So, he had to relent a little, and he pulled the cover back to show that the title printed there was different on the inside compared to the outside cover. "You know that we haven't had lunch yet. How about Minuet, the team, and I head down to the cafeteria that you have to have somewhere in a building like this. We can get some food and just hang out until you have a chance to read a little of it. Do you know if they have the semi-finals matches for last night on the company screens? We all missed them."

##

Franko was not technically classed as a speed-reader, but he could read and understand the words very fast and way faster than the average person. As soon as Drake and his escorts had left the room, he had picked up the book off his desk. Franko read the first fifty pages and then flipped to the first page and found that this was the second printing of this book from back in 1996. He had to do the math three times in his head before he could even come close to accepting the information in black and white sitting in his hands. Drakes' military ID had said 2020. From the front-page Franko went to the last few chapters and read about what the future might hold for the Dragoons. When he looked back up at the time display, he was almost shocked that two hours had passed.

The head of this part of Wolf Net could not take the time to read this whole work of 'fiction' in one sitting just yet, that would have to wait for a while longer. He reached over and made a call. Even a Wolf Net commander of his rank could not just walk into the CEO's office of Blackwell unannounced. "June does your boss have any free time on her calendar today? I need to see her, it's very important." He waited for a few seconds. "Okay, I will be right there."

It was a short walk to the inner ring of the building from Franko's office to the outer ring that held the executives of this company. The big boss woman for Blackwell was on this floor, and that was why Franko's office was here. The CEO's secretary waved for Franko to enter the office without him stopping for more than a half step.

Megan Foster looked up from her computer when the door opened between her office and the rest of the world. She was only the second CEO of Blackwell Heavy Industries since the Wolf's Dragoons had become the real owners of that one-time struggling company. The first CEO after that event had not been able to make the needed adjustments to the fact that he was not the boss anymore. Megan had no such issues just as long as her people got paid and the company was not going bankrupt, then she was a happy woman. So, when the most senior member of Wolf Net in this region of space asked to see you and that they had said that it was very important. She was going to clear her work calendar to find out what was wrong.

Unlike in the CEO's world, addressing someone by the first name was a liked form of address between peers but just addressing someone by their rank was preferred for the mercenaries. "Major, what can I do for you?"

Franko took a seat in front of the desk and quickly got his thoughts in order, or so he was really hoping. "Thank you for seeing me on such short notice Megan. I think we need to increase production of some key supplies." A CEO's time was very valuable, and it was never a good idea to waste her time by flowery words.

Megan put down her digital pencil and gave the spy a level look. With the Major using her first name it had changed the dynamics of the meeting. "Now Franko, that sounds ominous. Is it that bad?"

Franko sucks in his lower lip and decided that he just needed to be honest. "I really don't know, but how long would it take to start up mass production of second gen heatsinks? And yes, I hope that I'm overreacting."

Now Megan had a funny look on her face. "You want to startup Freezer production… now?"

When she didn't get a reply but only a level look from Franko, she gave him the data as she knew it. "It shouldn't be that much of a problem, the original line was set up to make them, and then we downteched them to make the more common type for the Dragoons and the few that we put on the open market to keep the auditors happy. I think that we can have the line start making them… maybe in a few weeks or so. I will have to divert part of the output of one of the small class orbital factories for some of the supplies, at least until ground side can be brought online to supply those items."

Now Franko smiled and he deflated a little into the nice chair. "That is good news. If I have to make a run to see The Boss, I want as many as we can make to take with me." Now he gave a shoulder shrug that only a part of him had thought that his next statement would happen. "I can always bring them back if he doesn't agree with me."

Megan moves to center herself on her computer and she went looking for some data that was just a fragment in her mind. "Hmm. That was what I thought. It says here that when the heatsink line was first rebuilt with the funds that the first contract from Davion gave to the Dragoons. It was set up for later generation production with some donated equipment from the Dragoons. They did a test run to make sure that everything was good to go for SLDF grade sinks, and we have a few hundred of them already in storage on the back lot. I would want to check them out first, but I bet that we could get most of them refurbished for you quickly. How long till you have to lift?"

Franko smiled and he felt like a huge weight had been lifted off of his shoulders that he didn't know was there. He was taking a risk that he was going to be countermanded by higher command, but in this case, he felt like it was worth the risk he was willing to take. He kept running the numbers in his head and going from five plus regiments to less than two of broken men and women. Losses of over 60% kept running through his head like it was some kind of storm, and that had only been the start and from only a battle on one planet. If this was not a joke of some kind? It made him feel like he wanted to throw up because he had a feeling that this was not a joke.

"That would be great, would you keep me informed of the total numbers at the end of each shift. And between you and me. You might want to see what would be needed to be done to get other items in that class of technology ready to be put in the supply chain for the guys at the pointy end of the stick. The new heatsinks will fall under 'clandestine support' for right now. As for when I have to leave. I have no idea, but I have an odd feeling that it will be short notice when it happens."

Uninhabited system

Federated Suns/Draconis Combine border.

End of June 3025

If asked, Drake would tell you that space travel sucks and it was so not like just taking a passenger liner across the country back on his homeworld. Drake was still in a leg cast for the whole trip, and it was not the air cast he had been given when he was released from the hospital. He should not have been surprised, it had only been four months and Drake had pushed too hard when he was not being watched by anyone with medical skills. In his other life, it had taken him almost two years before he could even take a walking PT test much less try to run for a pair of miles on a track.

They had been in space for two months and you would think that it would make Drake's life easier with a major broken bone that was taking its sweet ass time at healing. Oh wait! Then you have zero g and how it royally messes with your body. You know, like ripping out the calcium from your bones and other nasty things that it does to muscle mass. Oh, and let's not forget that NASA had an aircraft that helps with zero g training for space crews. Get this, the name of that aircraft was Vomit Comet, and it got this name from its crew for a very good reason. Now let that picture worm its way into your brain… for two months.

Drake was sitting in the turning gravity deck, most of the time on orders of what passed for a ship's doctor after reviewing all of the passengers' medical records. Due to his injury, he was able to spend more time there than anyone else and the space was very hard to come by for the dropship's crew and passengers with one person hogging the space. This might sound great, but that just meant Drake had feet in his face or head most of the time for those months of travelling between the stars.

The still medically questionable man felt his nose hair start to crinkle at the stench. "You know that one of the things I didn't remember reading about was about showers and other hygiene routines on dropships and jumpships." In a word? It was that it sucks, and Drake had been a tanker that lived with four others in the field for months. Note to self, need to invent scented wet wipes PDQ when the hell I get back on the ground! thought Drake as he fought down another gag at the smell.

With a snort he spoke aloud. "And to think I always wanted to fly in space. What a fool I was, and I don't think that my nose hairs will grow back after this abuse of smells."

A voice came from the owner of a soft ship's shoe covering the foot next to his chest. "I don't know why you're brooding so much lately Drake. It's not like you just found out that you're in a fictional universe made up by a pair of guys who spent too much time in their mother's basement," Franko snorted back at Drake's antics.

"Okay maybe I was a little down, but I'm not brooding. That kind of crap is for Jon Snow," Drake retorted back to a man that he had a strange feeling was starting to become his first friend in this universe.

###

A single day after Drake had dropped the book on Franko's desk, he had been brought back to the main compound of Blackwell in almost the same type of convoy as the first time he made the trip.

This time Drake was not brought to a nice office at the top of the tallest building in the local area. Nope, this time he was brought to a dark room 150m or more underground. If asked, Drake would have just said that it was a SWAG on how deep underground they were, but it was deep. Drake started to sweat under his arms as they waited in the elevator going down. He was thinking they were going to break out the thumb screws or Narco interrogation now that some of what he knew was out into the world.

Luckily, they didn't seem that they had any of that stuff at hand when he was brought to a concrete like walled room that looked like a police interrogation room in an old police show. Instead, Drake had four people just wanting to ask him question after question after rephrased question and then a rephrased and paraphrased question to be sure. He had not been caught flat footed, so he was able to address some of the issues that they had brought up and not others. It was not like Drake had a database downloaded into his brain when he had been ripped out of his back yard cookout.

The man out of time knew from Crazy Woman 2, that sometimes just the act of being asked questions sometimes connected the mental dots, and you would remember more than you thought. That didn't make it easy for a person with his temperament to keep getting asked the same thing over and over and over again. The next day Drake had turned over all of his battered TROs to the minders keeping him company at the house when they were gathered in the kitchen for the morning meal.

Drake had them all from updated 3050 going to the latest release until he had been ripped off his planet in 2020. When asked why he had so many books in a later interview, he had replied: "What can I say, I'm a weapons guy." And even if they were heavily stained, ripped, and folded from hard field use they should be helpful. He just wished that the IlKhan TRO had come out before he was snatched away from his old life.

MSG Mendenhall thought that him dumping all of those books on the white coat people distracted them from asking if he had any more books hidden away. Drake had no idea how right that guess had been.

Drake now had the rest of those other books hidden among his Star Wars minis, Twilight 2000 books, or in watertight bags knee deep under the rose beds. He so didn't want any of them reading his copy of Betrayal of Ideals this early in getting used to what he could bring to the table. Maybe later, and when he was not as worried that his new friends would put a bullet behind his right ear and forget about everything that he had told them about the possible future like it was just a morning fog.

##

Without letting the outside world know about his musings on the reactions to his second data dump Drake continued talking. "Yeah, but you need to badly take a shower and my leg itches like crazy. Are they here yet?"

This statement elicited a groan from Franko. It would seem that kids today were a lot like the ones from back home, at least when it came to traveling with their parents. So, every chance Drake got, and many times a day he would poke the bear… just for a little distraction from the plaster cast covering his whole leg. He would ask Franko if they were there yet even while eating their meals. This time the question had lost its power because they had been here for a week.

Word was sent to Franko by the leadership of the Dragoons to grab Drake and head to this star, a star that was rare in that it had no planets looping around it. It was a star that very few jumpships would use due to the risk of what would happen if their jump drive failed, something that was growing more and more common within the Inner Sphere. They were to meet someone from the leadership of the Dragoon's and that was all Drake was told after being given two hours to pack.

They had fallen back into silence as the hamster wheel put on a g loading to their bones and muscles that was just below Terra normal.

Drake got an elbow to the ribs that made him jerk hard enough that it felt like he had pulled his neck out. "Drake, you snore like a dropship launch. Get up, it's here."

####

One of the traits of a long serving soldier is that you can go from deep sleep to moving at speed within a few heartbeats between each event. The lights might not be on, but they would be moving at the quick step. Drake was just following Franko as they swam through the corridors of the Merchant-class jumpship in Zero G. The pair of them were ready to leave the jumpship much faster than the small craft crew was ready to take them to their meeting on the other ship. While the pair made their way from one huge ship to another floating in deep space, Franko was looking out a window into the deep black of space that just gave Drake heartburn every time he looked out the thing. That was something Drake could not do again after the first look, and he was fresh out of space sick bags.

"Hmmmmm that Gazelle is called Jeb Stuart, at least that is what is written on her sides. That ship is from the Support Battalion, and I even think that's Captain Piper's ship. I would bet that the scout jumpship is one of the 7th Kommando vessels." Franko did not even look over his shoulder at Drake. "Looks like Blake is pulling out all of the stops for this meeting."

As far as Drake had been told, he was meeting a VIP of the Dragoons. He was hoping for the Wolf, but Franko seemed to think it would be with Blake or someone close to him in rank or a combat line commander. As it turned out both of them were both right and both had been so very wrong.

It felt so good when Drake felt the kick of the main engine of the space bus under his… seat. He just wished that it had lasted longer before he was again having to deal with zero g space sickness again. But at least Mendenhall was able to grab another space sick bag from the buses' supply before he needed them… barely. After seeing that the meeting was going to be on a Scout-class jumpship, Drake knew that he was in for one suck of a briefing. The Scouts didn't have hamster wheels for gravity to keep the crew healthy while in space.

As soon as Drake was pushed through a hatch on the dropship attached to the Scout jumpship, he had other issues to deal with. One of the vehicle bays on the Gazelle class dropship had been converted to act as a meeting room. And thanks to Drake sneaking a peek at what remained of his Wolf's Dragoon book and some files that he gotten from Franko, he had an idea who was who in the Dragoons. He was supposed to be a member of that mercenary unit so it would be a break in his cover if he could not ID the key players within the unit. Drake made a mental note about how close Jaime Wolf looks like Sean Connery from the early 90's. It made his brain hurt about how this was possible.

As Drake looked around the room, he noticed something else. "Yep, each of the other people in this room was a Clanner." He had to mentally kick himself, as he remembered it was not until after the 4SW that Inner Sphere born people made it into the higher command slots within the Dragoons.

Drake knew that he was the prize or the key trinket for a Show and Tell on a huge scale with not only his life hanging in the balance but untold millions of others. Still the way that they had worked it out, Franko would be the one doing all of the talking, and Drake would only be there as proof and to answer any pointed questions that might come up.

That plan lasted right until Drake saw the panel of eight Dragoon officers strapped into chairs as they floated into the grease-stained room turned vehicle cargo bay. He was too busy working to get his straps just right in his Zero G chair to listen to what Franko was saying for many long minutes. It was another sign that Drake had not been on dropships before if he was having so much of a problem doing this common task.

Colonel Shostokovitch from Beta Regiment broke the ice: "So, this is the Caveman that has been supplying the information in all of that crap you have been forwarding for us to read the last couple of months."

Drake held his tongue and just raised his head from his straps to make eye contact with the speaker, thinking that maybe his inner Negan might have some fun, even if the man was massive. He had been briefing combat officers for a while, and Drake could not fix stupid. Okay he could fix stupid, but it was going to cause a lot of pain for the rock with lips that he was working on.

Oh wait! I'm not in the army anymore, thought Drake and a sly smirk came to his face. "Well, I'm the guy that is just trying to help you all out with the Combine problem. You know how a warrior-based culture can get about having to deal with outsiders or hired guns. It's all for the Dragon and it's only a war crime if someone uses the same tactics as them." Drake didn't realize that part of what he said could have been used Clan in place of the word Combine or Dragon until the words had slipped out of his mouth.

Drake got a snort from someone on the other side of Jaime, but he couldn't tell who, but it made him mad. "Look you know that Samsonov wants to have you all under his thumb, and he will do whatever it takes to meet that goal… and his honor be damned. He is going to let that creep Akuma run a major company store scam on you until you have to sell your mechs and souls to him and the Combine or starve in the streets. He will have members loyal to him in the Professional Soldiery Liaison officers inspecting all of the cargo heading to you guys so that the Dragon gets his cut even if you all paid for it. And if you don't think that he would not do everything else he can to screw with you doing his job. I want what you are drinking, or do you need a prescription or back alley hookup to get it?"

Colonel Ellman had been the Beta regiment commander until 3016, and now he was in charge of the Training Command that was pumping out fosters and Dragoon-raised mechwarriors to replace the losses of their fighters. He also looked like Charlton Heston from Planet of the Apes, but today he had a confused look on his face. "Who is this, Akuma? I don't think I have had to deal with this person."

Jaime looked a little surprised until his mental walls went back up to hide his inner thinking. "He was just assigned to us before we started heading this way." He turned and looked over at the head of Wolf Net. "Stanford, you keep your people well informed I see. Even if they were not in Combine space."

Blake didn't say anything for long seconds, and he was eye locked on Drake like he was watching a demon. "Sir, I did not have time to alert my people about this new position that we were forced to make. I barely had time to pull Jerry Akuma's updated file off our database before we started to burn out system."

"Yep, now I'm starting to get 'the look' from some of the officers around the room." Thought Drake. He was also wondering how they had gotten all of this leadership out from under ISF's eyes with the op tempo the Dragoons had been running against the FedSuns for the last few months. That tempo also just happened to be burning through the Dragoon's on hand stock of supplies at an alarming rate all without enough making it back to refill the supply bunkers and maintenance points.

Colonel Ellman looked first at Drake and then back to Franko, he still was unsure about Drake, and it showed in the words coming out of his mouth that had a tone like the strange man was a three-year-old saying it would rain on Sunday when it was only Monday. The Dragoon spoke, "Okay, how do we stop this?"

Franko jumped back into the fire to get the hard looks off of Drake, a good sign of leadership that was noticed by the NCO. "I was able to get three hundred SLDF grade double efficiency heatsinks rebuilt before I left. We had six hundred of them in storage, but they did not store as well as we had hoped when they were put in that warehouse and forgotten about. I think we can get about a hundred tons of them smuggled to Hephaestus each month, at least until this inspection that we have been warned about kicks in with full force and plugs any holes."

Franko's back went straighter in the chair. "I took it under my authority to convert the old heatsink production line of Blackwells to this product, and I was thinking that what we can't ship to you. We will put into proper storage this time until we can get them to your side of space." After some planning he was hoping that he could be greenlighted to sell a few on the Black Market. With a sell price of about 60k per ton, that could be very useful, if they could keep it quiet.

Colonel Shostokovitch looked like he had bitten into a lemon. "And what do we do about the games the Combine have been playing with us already and if this… person is right about what they are planning to do?"

"We have to follow our legal orders," came from Jaime's mouth and Drake lost his mind.

Drake let a very loud snort fall out and he rolled his eyes. He went full power senior NCO vs O1 without a filter between brain and mouth. "So, you have to follow your legal orders, do you?"

Jaime turned and his frown went into full '_I_ am the leader of five mech regiments and supporting elements and _you_ are not', but he didn't say a word.

Now, Drake had briefed more general grade officers than he could remember their names, but now even he had to admit. Jaime had the power to make you sweat with a single look. That didn't mean that this cowed him into silence… far from it.

So, what do you do? Do you back down under the power, or do you charge forward into the teeth of the glare? Well, I was a tanker in my early life so… more power Mr. Scott. All of this went through Drake's mind at the speed of thought. "So did Khan Ward give you legal orders or not?" Drake was looking right at Jaime when he had spoken in that level tone.

For the first time Jaime Wolf looked to have been spooked by what Drake had said.

Drake didn't risk looking around the room to see what the rest of the leaders might look like, but it was a good bet that it was a dying fish like look. He had a target, and he was mentally going… HULK SMASH!

The tone was level and he was not yelling.. yet. "You were told to prepare the Inner Sphere for the return of the Clans led by the Crusader faction. I was in the Blackwell factories, and it does not look that they are working on doing this task to me. In fact, you have been hitting the FedSuns and taking out weapons factories, support facilities, and R and D campuses left and right. You know like all of that data from Independence Weaponry you recovered and then let the Combine take off your hands so you could save face?"

Now Drake gave a slight head shake. "All of what you destroyed could be used to fight the Clans when they come with a flaming sword in their hands. And now the Combine is going to do to you what they did to the Light Horse, and a list of other units after the Star League fell. And now you look surprised by that fact of life smacking you in the face. Man, you clanners can't think at the strategic level for more than hour without hurting yourself. I bet you don't even plan out past six months, unless you're going on a long raid to break something!"

"Now, son! What do you think you know?" came from Colonel Ellman as he rose to the defense of not only his commander but his friend.

Before he could say more, a raised hand from Jaime Wolf stopped anymore from being said.

Normally that kind of tone would have sent Drake off like a carton of eggs in a microwave set on high. But now Drake was starting to understand why Jaime was loved by his soldiers.

Centering himself the NCO looked at the seated officers. "The Dragoon Compromise was an idea that the Clans came up with to scout the Inner Sphere. Now what are the Clans? They are a group that left the Inner Sphere led by Aleksandr Kerensky, his wife and two sons. After the Prinz Eugen mutiny he knew that they needed to stop soon. He found five worlds that were close to support humans. The General had too many fighters and not enough farmers and, when this fell apart, his sons made a second exodus."

Drake smiled. "Would you like me to go down the different laws and caste system? How about this? After being trained and sent to the Inner Sphere you had warships but found that no one else did, so hid them way. I already sent the report on what the FWL did to you all and why. I could go into more detail but that would just waste all of our time."

Wolf asked him the obvious question: "How do you know this?"

He gave Franko a suspicious look, but the Wolf Net agent shook his head. "If you've read my initial reports, the historical references we found in Drake's collection didn't match our own records of the early twenty-first century. We believe the reason is that he isn't from our timeline in the first place."

Shostokovitch snorted. "Science fiction."

"No sir. Science fact. Or at least, based on the facts that we have."

"But how," Ellman asked them, "Would someone from another timeline - another timeline and a thousand years removed! - know about the Clans?"

Drake laughed a little bitterly. "Because to me you're all just NPCs in a game!"

Everyone except Franko looked at him as if he'd gone crazy.

"Yeah, that's what my face looked like when I figured it out," he admitted. "But it's true. In my history, FASA Corporation marketed games, books, everything they could think of for a science fiction setting - fall of the Roman Empire in SPACE! With GIANT ROBOTS!" Drake lowered his voice, and saw that despite themselves the Dragoons fell for the old trick and leant forwards to hear him.

"One of the first merc units detailed in those books? Wolf Dragoons, a mysterious force that emerged from the periphery to fight for each Great House against the others, a twenty year odyssey that ended in betrayal. And later, when the writers decided to bring in the Clans, the distorted descendants of the SLDF, they backfilled that the Wolf Dragoons had been their spies -"

The men around the table bristled and Drake waved his hands. "Okay, their scouts, their recon. Call it what you will. A force that the Grand Council ordered to report so they could plan a war, and that Kerlin Ward ordered to slow-walk the entire thing so that the idea of an invasion was forgotten about. And then to stop reporting and prepare the Inner Sphere, because the Wardens have to win every vote but the Crusaders just need once…"

"You're nuts," Shostokovitch said with ironclad certainty.

"If he isn't then we're in a lot of trouble," Franko warned quietly. "And so far, he's been perfectly… eerily… accurate. Can we take the risk?"

"Quineg?" Drake snarked and saw that use of Clan vernacular hit hard on one or two faces.

###

The Wolf looked at Drake like he was trying to see into his very soul for long seconds before he spoke in a strong voice. "Mr. Mendenhall you have given us a lot to think about in a very short length of time. Would you please leave us to have a private meeting?"

And just like that, Drake was told that the kids need to leave the room so that the adults could have a real talk without younger ears being around. He was stuck floating in the corridor of that dropship for two hours with very little to occupy his mind.

It would have been longer, but he had decided to make his way to the small boat hatch. Thank God the Scout class jumpship is small, and it was not enough different from the Merchant-class that it didn't mess with my spatial awareness. Oh, and that this tub has only the one bathroom that I knew the location of on this spaceship, thought Drake as he waited within the privacy of his own mind.

Going to the bathroom in zero g is another thing that had never been talked about in books of any kind that Drake had read. It was kind of like all of those zombie movies that don't talk about running out of toilet paper or what they did when it ran out. That lack of reading was the reason that Drake's left butt cheek is now one huge purple hickey.

"Goddamn vacuum zero g toilet with a fixed setting and timers." Thought Drake as a shot of pain from that part of his body made it to his brain.

Drake was still near the hatch to the small craft hatch when he saw Franko floating towards him, and he did not look that happy. When Franko was close enough not to need to use his outside voice. "Well, they think you're nuts, and about half of them think it would be a good idea to just save the travel money and shove you out the nearest airlock."

"Oh great, and what was voted on?" He started to follow Franko and then he stopped and looked at the nearby hatch. It was one that should lead to death pressure, and Drake had a quick thought that maybe he was about to see what breathing vacuum was going to feel like.

Franko smiled at seeing where Drake was looking. "Wolf vetoed that idea… for now. We, my friend, are going back to New Valencia to await further orders."

Drake thinks Franko saw his face drop at this news. "Oh, don't worry too much, Drake. I gave him that copy of Wolves on the Border and said it came over with you. I told him it was for some light reading on the way back to the main Dragoon base on An Ting." Now Franko's smile came back that Drake had come to know as sincere. "Oh, and I made sure it had a different outer cover, that will mask the story and at the same time be a better fit for a man of his age. My boss might not agree with that statement when he finds out, but he will get over it. I mean, don't all men his age have some kind of irritable bowel syndrome or something like that?"

Yeah, you're good about getting my mind off of my own issues, at least most of the time, thought Drake.

He knew that you can only lead a horse to water, but you can't make them drink it. He just had a hard time believing that he was having this much of an issue breaking all of those plot issues the Dragoons worked under.

The man from a different universe just hoped that the book is a big enough hammer to get his story slammed into their collective heads… even if they each had to read the thing. The downside was that the more people who saw that book would increase the risk of ISF stealing it.

###

Colonel Ellman floated there inside the dropship Jeb Stuart, and he was a very worried man. He was looking for his boss and not finding him, even with the Gazelle not being that large of a dropship.

Jaime had not been seen for at least the last four days now, and the rest of the Colonels were starting to get worried about their leaders' absence from the public areas of the dropship. It had even been noted that he had started acting funny a few hours before they had jumped away from that meeting, so Jeremy had been elected to check on the old man, no matter where he might be. It should not have been that hard of a job to find one person this far from a planet much less a planet that held breathable atmosphere.

This dropship had been modified just slightly using drop-in/plug-in blocks to give each person a cabin in the empty combat bays. The leader of the Dragoons was in the one that was known to have the most privacy of all of those temporary cabins. That was something a person picked up after twenty years of working with the bloody things. Many of a fight had been fought among those of equal rank over who would get those types of cabins.

"Hey Jaime, are you in there?" He did not want to bang on the hatch first instead of raising his voice to get attention, Sir Newton was an ass. If no one replied to his hail, he would do just that, but right now he didn't want to draw that much attention to what he hoped was a non-issue.

He was a heartbeat away from that banging when the thin plastic hatch was pulled opened from the other side. "Unity, Jaime! You look like crap." Then the smell hit him like a brick to the head.

Ellman had only seen Jaime heavily drink one time in all of the years that he had known the man: when his wife, two of Jaime's kids, Joshua, and others had been killed by Anton Marik's people. Jeremy went on edge even more when he was waved to enter the converted bay/cabin. Colonel Ellman saw the four empty bottles attached to the side table to keep them from floating around before the door slides closed behind him.

"Okay Jaime, what is wrong?" Ellman was using the same tone that he would have used if he was helping a junior officer or one of his trainees work through some personal problems.

Jaime had a haunted look in his eyes that matched the huge dark bags under them. He slowly floated over to a chair fixed to the deck. "I was reading the book that Franko passed me." Jaime's eyes went over to the empty bottles spread out and floating around the cabin. "Oh, Unity! If its right?" The words had more than a little desperation in them.

Ellman had seen the book being passed over between the Wolf Net agent and the Dragoon's leader, but he was on the fence about this Drake person. He did not believe for a second that this Drake had come from a different universe and that he was just a character in a tabletop game. Right now, he was leaning towards a ROM spy or a crazy man wanting attention of some kind.

"You're not putting any weight in to this con job, are you!?" Ellman knew that he didn't have half the command skills of Jaime and if Jaime lost it how long would the Dragoons last. Then the rest of the council of colonels would look towards him to take over the leadership of the Dragoons, and he knew that was not going to be a good thing for the rest of them.

Jaime was still looking at the table with a lost look in bloodshot eyes. "There were only three people in the meeting with Khan Kerlin Ward. The Khan, Nat, and me. There is no way he could have found out what was said. And that book is given me some insights into a lot of what has been bugging me about this whole Combine contract I signed. It even had information about Marisha and me, along with the relationship that is developing with Tomiko."

Jaime stopped talking and his eyes turned glassy. "It has caused me to reflect on what was said and not what I heard more than a few times. It has also caused me to rethink more than a few things that I have been doing after taking the Combine's coin on this contract. I had thought that they were the most Clan-like of the Great Houses, maybe a little taste of home for all of us. Now I can see that they are not."

"So, what are you going to do?" If Jaime said that the black hole in the center of the galaxy was an apple, Ellman was willing to go with that idea. Jaime was just that kind of leader of troopers. You would just follow him to storm the gates to hell, because he had said that the devil had stolen his toothbrush. Now he was going to wait until Jaime told him how he was going to deal with this crazy story.

"I still don't know if this is totally true or some kind of game that is being played on us." Jaime's back straightened, and the older colonel could tell that he had come to some kind of conclusion in that second. "We will plan for that this is all for real, but not too deeply to poison the well with the Combine. I will keep an eye out to see if things that are predicted come to pass. If they do, as this book states? Then we protect our people, and the Combine can burn for all I care… if they cross us."

Jaime's eyes snapped over to the other Dragoon officer. "Ellman, we went down to only a single blasted regiment! All because I could not believe the Combine would do that to us one step at a time pushing us to do certain things! That book said that all of our mech forces were cut by sixty percent after one massive battle. Takashi wanted us disgraced in the eyes of the rest of the Inner Sphere so badly that we could only work for him. The one thing that Drake got right was that I was not planning long term to protect the Inner Sphere like I had been ordered. I think that I was just wanting to go out fighting, the way that a good clan warrior should die. I failed my Khan, the Dragoons, and I failed you. I WILL NOT LET IT HAPPEN!"

Jaime was almost panting for breath from yelling so hard and he was starting to waver on his feet as the massive hangover showed its effects. "How long until we can reach an HPG?"

Ellman looked down at his watch. "We jump again in about twenty hours. Then it's a six or eight day burn to the planet, unless you want to send something by radio - and you know the Inner Sphere has better codebreakers than the Clans do. How bad to you want to send a message out?"

Jaime made a sour face and rubbed the side of his head lost in thought for a few seconds. "Bad…but not that bad. I wish we would have brought our own HPGs."

This got Ellman to give a full-throated laugh. "I can just see it. Merc unit has its own Drum Sat system set up for passing messages across the whole Inner Sphere and offering discount prices."

Jaime could not help but laugh also, it felt good.

####

Note

Space Sickness: This is a real thing that cannot be tested for before Astronauts go into space. It gives you a varying degree of headaches, nausea, and vomiting that can impact missions.

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