Battletech: The Ghost Who Walks (Battletech Isekai)

[Imperator Pax]

Scrap Series: Industry
Number 2 in Series (technically there is teaser already up for Number 1 and number 1 is set to occur after the battle of Dieron finishes and there is another one in planning that takes place in between)

Pseudo / Semi canon​

--
Arcturan Arms was as its named suggested an arms manufacturer on Arcturus. Inventive. They had made among other things the Mardsen II MBT that surprisingly the Canopians on Luxen had still had in inventory. It had suffered financial problems, and existed as a subsidiary of Arcturus based MacEnroe, the problem was that MacEnroe simply did not have the financial capital or political clout to break out into the market.

It kept its head above water, but it was a middle of the pack Lyran Company who's industrial performance did not do well to distinguish it from others in that bracket. In another successor state maybe it would have been different, but as a consequence of the Commonwealth being the largest economy by GDP in the Inner Sphere MacEnroe was forgettable. It was not a house hold name. It might have once been but that had been in a much earlier era of human prosperity.

The problem was the Davion Pound was weaker than the Lyran Kroner... the C-Bill was weaker than the Lyran Kroner so that made business complicated. It had dragged this out to assemble the capital involved, and then on top of that there was the political posturing on the side of things.

Arcturus was technically three jumps from the Combine border. Eight from Dieron, not exactly a short trip. It was more than a dozen jumps from the coreward periphery fifteen from Buttehold and further still from the von strang's world. Never mind going the opposite direction towards the rimward periphery...

In theory outside of the combine threat the world should be fairly safe, and it was the combine who was seemingly the real threat. The document that established the groundwork of the Federated Commonwealth had been signed.. and thus the investment into Arcturan had been smoothed over somewhat compared to the potential headaches that such an acquisition into a defense contractor might have otherwise run into. So as a result what had begun in 3018 through proxies and intermediaries had taken a couple of years and then time to run through company inventories and contend with other minutiae before the first new production Marsden II MBTs began to roll off the assembly lines.

It took another eighteen months after that before the first Crossbows since the 26th​ century to roll off, built using VLAR 300 series engines, and a combined Dalban avionics and communications package along with a host of rebalanced weapons. Magna produced Mk2 medium lasers and a Hellstar PPC replaced older designs and integrated a new parts commonality with other machines... what made the crossbow design interesting still was that its missile racks in the 6B was in many ways a direct precursor to the mounting system that would evolve into Mercury a few centuries later, and thus a distant ancestor of the Blackwell industry OmniVehicles... which was the next Arcturan project that they had licensed to produce.

... with Natasha Kerensky's consent of sorts after that whole business in the rimward periphery. The Wolf Captain hadn't seemed especially enthused about merchant things... but the Wolf Dragoons had signed off on it. That was the next project as Arcuturan arms looked forward to in the later end of the decade increasing its production of vital war materiel.


The Azami technician departed having left them with the final report of where they sat with the latest tanks.

As it happened sharing a border ... well for worlds directly on the combine border and those nearby there was big business to be made in the defense industry once you had the ball rolling. Long term prospects of investment were looking good. If they could get the Federated Commonwealth off the ground then Arcturan arms could expand further.

Not that he was involved in day to day operations, but the Azami were sure they could get a Dervish line operational... and there salvaged Hegemony machinery that would eventually go to bringing Archer production online. There were Commando talks, but those would be strictly export. They'd licensed GM's 180 fusion engine, used in the Black Jack, for a Marsden II version with Large Laser, and there was planned test of an upgraded Marsden II with a prototype LBX autocannon also produced by GM.

All of that was in part why Gene was expecting that there were going to be questions, and as long as the Duke of Arcturus was prepared for the truth well ... he should be prepared to face the reality that the bulk of the starting capital on the venture to buy out Arcturan Arms had come from the Davion bounty for killing the Galedon Regulars DropShips during the Elidere Campaign.

The expansions of material, and advantageous licensing processes were built up on the legacy of the Elidere Campaign... but LosTech prospecting could also be credited as well. On the other hand he rather doubted the Duke of Arcturus would make that sort of small talk. The truth was the Lyran establishment hadn't tended to make military related small talk.

... it seemed like after you had a reputation for mulching Combine Regiments and slaughtering pirates with LosTech mechs that Social Generals no longer wanted to talk to you if they could avoid it and especially didn't want to talk shop. Most Lyran gentleman joined the LCAF as a gentleman's club of aspirant mechwarriors ... and well... for the Arcturus yeomanry, if to borrow a Davion term, military service to the Commonwealth was often about a loyalty to House Steiner than their more local politicians so they tended to be the more professional soldiers...

... and it was those professional soldiers utilizing the Marsden II tanks, and other products that were now on the market, because the Combine was a close and belligerent neighbor.

Sensing his probable worries Septim started to reassure him that most likely that Doctor Abner would monopolize the Duke's attention. The years after Dieron had been busy... the times and the Inner Sphere were changing. Their stop over here was really part time after all, in part due to things Abner had brought back from his latest expedition into the periphery

--
Notes: This is a short scrap, largely brain storming stuff I did Monday. So one of the things that I am still weighing is Rasalhague at this point, particularly the questions related to what happens in that neck of space due other factors. The Rasalhague are going to rebel, and while peeling off an entire military district is unlikely the combine is very likely to lose a lot of worlds from that RMD if they weren't careful. So in this scrap, it assumes Orestes is still in Combine hands even though by the time the Aurigan crisis is resolved rasalhague may actually be in existence in the main timeline, but here it is assumed to not be.

If it is though, then by that point there would be significantly more breathing room for Arcuturus in ~3026 or perhaps the Rasalhague are in the process of rebellion concurrently to the Aurigan Civil War wrapping up. In either case, it would likely behoove the Lyrans to insure that the Combine cannot attempt a reconquest of any separtist RMD worlds effectively... and of course that assumes that that the Azami likewise do not rebel in general in the 3020s either. If the Combine starts sloughing provinces to internal rebellion domino effect is possible

 

[Imperator Pax]

Dieron Part 6​

Morning came entirely too quickly. His body was flagging, and with good reason history would inevitably record that the invasion of Dieron and Davion efforts more broadly would be part of the final stage of the third succession war. For Kerston it was a sign that his age was catching up with him... short duration fights in a battlemech were one thing. Commanding the Eridani might be possible for another few years... but how many grand set battles like this would he be able to manage.

The simple truth was he was getting old. While this wasn't likely to be his last major campaign he was cognizant that the Light Horse needed to prepare for him handing over the reins. With early morning now upon them he could tell from long experience that today would decide things, he could feel it in his cut... and with that instinctual recognition the Brevet General began reaching out to the Eridani constituent commands to find out what the Draconis Combine had in store for them.

There was movement across the entire front. Some of it was probably obfuscation, but which pieces wree feints and which were actual attacks, or movements to reposition to support an attack were hard to say from the feeds within his BattleMaster.

Very quickly though he was interrupted by a notice of Davion Command, or at least the Mercenary Liaison was patching in. A youthful face appeared. A stark contrast from the Eridani's usual Davion Liaison the countess of Kestrel had been pushed forward from her initial position as liaison to Shepherd's company to administering the larger command and control of mercenary forces on behalf of her superior the Duchess of Victoria, Field Marshall Yvvone Davion.

Her report had a point, the amount of artillery, the shell expenditures, going out more reflected the habits of the first succession war than most battles of the third, and yet the Combine continued to throw men at the prepared defensive formations.

It was a grisly result, and reminder of what had happened in history after the Star League had first collapsed. The difference though was that the Combine was not on the offensive their attacks weren't being mounted on shocked and disoriented commanders who were trying to piece together why things had gone wrong... as had been the historical explanation for the failures of tactics and operational and strategic response in the closing years of the 28th​ century. The combine infantry were also not assaulting civilian population centers to traumatize them or to prevent their governments from simply deleting combine positions from orbit as might have been the case during the height of the age of war centuries before. Instead the fights going on, as morning light crossed over Dieron's rolling hills were out in the open... what wasn't ... served as little more than choke points for clusters of infantry to be caught up together as they tried to advance.

He'd seen this before in the other states... where often enough Lyran social generals would botch an advance, or where the Capellans simply demanded the advance continue... and of the two it was more likely this was the later. The Sword of Light expecting virtue to carry where firepower was lacking.

--

Gene flipped through the maps. Dozens of fusion powered Harasser tanks were swarming around his position which concealed any heat returns his VLAR 300 would have put out. Anyone going on fusion returns if they did pick it up might well assume so many mixed fusion returns from both the harasser and the heavy vehicles further to the rear was one of their Recon Groups.

It was true that the Harassers ran off the same Fusion Engine as Davion Stingers... and invading Davion forces had deployed a number of those as it was. Not that it mattered the entire purpose of this leap frogging was to insure that both 'mechs and armor were supporting one another, and that their advance was screened by, and in turn screened for the Infantry.

The coordination of which was lacking between the branches ... almost as if the DCMS commanders were afraid one of the other branches were going to upstage them. Actually, if their comms intercepts were accurate that was exactly the problem with individual hostile Militia Infantry regiments launching unsupported attacks without the support of one another... or if it wasn't that it was because nearby infantry regiments weren't being tasked to the same objective, though that could at least have been on the basis of needed to attempt to suppress by numbers an enemy that rather uncooperatively kept shelling anything larger than a company level position with battery of thumpers.

... of course that policy had already seen Lex remark that they were burning through a lot of shells for the guns. He knew part of that was legitimate concern for their logistics, but he also knew that there were apparently questions from officers of the Crucis March contingent wanting to ask her questions about what the fuck was going on here.

It wasn't that Robinson's people, the DMM officers didn't want to be in the loop, but Elidere was one of the worlds that was their responsibility. The Scotts Cuirassiers, the highland armor and infantry units, were moving to assist MacIntyre's current point in the salient, which meant they were back on schedule at least. The holographic display panned eastward across a relatively wide depression between the hills and further until it showed him the telemetry from orbit of Sorenson's batch of Rasalhague units.

They'd finally broken through the pop up infantry contact, which was good.

As the view, and the pan across the landscape, went wider he could see the highlighted fusion signatures start to tally from both sides. It looked as if the Combine had made up their mind... the infantry attacks had almost certainly been designed to give the Mech units time to reorient and redeploy... and if the combine had planned it that way it had certainly tied up their thumpers from shooting at their redeploying units in favor of the regiments of foot.

It sucked to be the PBI but at least it made a certain sense in immoral mathematics.

Magunauc 1-1 pinged his Marauder from three mikes out signaling they were moving to link up. Sam Houston's original Azami complement was understrength relative to 1-2 and 1-3 stationed aboard the DropShips registered Crockett and Boone. The armor and mech Inf combined arms unit closing in meant the Sam Houston was in bound with more supplies.. but the lack of a radio call meant that the Sam Houston's beacon broadcast as it had crossed one of the planet's innumerable and otherwise generic mountain ranges had failed to elicit an SLDF or Hegemony handshake.

They'd try again in a couple hours.

It was possible that Fortress Dieron was running intentionally radio silent due to the hostilities... that was indeed the most likely explanation. They kept hoping for a handshake and invitation to access the facility rather than just trying to navigate to an access point by map data from N001 because they didn't want to risk tripping automated defenses... defenses they wanted to potentially use against the Combine.

Still with no progress on that front it was time to maneuver and turn this flank.

He reached over and signaled his receipt of 1-1's maneuvers, changed channels to call up the three lances, batteries in red leg parlance, of thumpers, who were about to use up more shells. If this was a longer campaign... one of weeks, never mind months the Combine would likely have ascertained that they were using the aerodynes to transport ammunition from safe areas back at their original landing sites.

They might have some suspicions at this point but with air supremacy achieved, Combine air support having been rendered if not non existent than no one currently trying to contest their short duration hops there was little the Snakes could do about it. They just needed to maintain that in order to maintain this operational tempo.

He keyed another internal company channel, "Septim standby."

"Roger that boss."

He navigated the screens, before linking the holosuite projections to the Merlin, "Orbital telemetry confirms Combine redeployment," It wasn't as bad as it could have been, but it went a long way to explain what they'd been doing. "You need to clear that sector, I wouldn't be surprised if they don't attempt another banzai charge if they think it'll give their mechs an edge.."

"Roger." There was a pause, "Any sign of that other battalion?"

"No," It seemed like the Davion intelligence continued to have been accurate, "It does seem that they're off world."

"That's too bad." The Lyran replied sarcastically. "I'll relay that to Bard after they finish rearming his wolverine."

He wondered if the other brevet Colonel had been thinking they'd be able to bag themselves an actual Kurita on this trip, but he didn't say that and the connection ended.
--
Notes: So notice for the Pirate Wars, particularly the late periphery wars section, the Aurigan sourcebook canonizes Katinka's SLDF facility being hit by a RimJob mass driver. (Well not specifically Rimworld but it was either them or the Taurians and I suspect the former) that is going to be something that comes up

 

[Imperator Pax]

Dieron Part 7​

The battery's guns were arguably doing more damage to the infantry than everyone else combined. In this situation twelve artillery pieces firing from beyond visual range into infantry you knew was out in the open was a messy, bloody prospect. It was a necessary millennium old reality of warfare though. It was much faster for 155mm air bursting shells to wipe entire grid squares of infantry than it was for mechs, or tanks.

It did not change that the appearance of mechs ... and tanks spewing incendiary weapons was enough to start a panicked route of infantrymen who had been under intermittent artillery barrages for hours. Even discounting the logistics after a certain point continuous shelling lost effectiveness, he knew that. "With crack flanking maneuver," He muttered, "I'm an uhlan alles uber striking terror into regiment of foot."

The synchronization, his tie into the command software shifted. There was a pulse across the communications software as the Dalban regulated an encrypted message through the Fury tanks of Hammer.

He wasn't holding his breath that they'd get a response this time. He watched as the SLDF communications gear broadcast its hailing signature... and then to see if the encrypted signal received a response from anything in what most people just dismissed as one of the continents mountain ranges on a planet with lots of those to begin. When there was nothing, which was what he'd come to expect after trying every six hours, he moved on to higher ground to observe the fight ahead as the command vehicles fed him data from across the advance... he picked one area and marked where he needed to be and set off pushing his Marauder forward into a sprint.

The overflights of Combine Positions were being validated out by the sensor returns. The Combine looked to be interested in committing decisively to an open battle... which might have suggested that unlike with the fighting on Elidere where the duke had beamed out a message and been hoping against hope for reinforcements... if the DCMS had sent out a message presumably the answer was they were on their own.

Part of that was probably that Dieron was a provincial capital, and that there were no BattleMech Regiments or the lift capacity to move reinforcements, especially if the Davion attack on Altair had drawn in any reserves the combine already had had... It was also just as plausible that the Sword of Light chose to commit to the fight solely for the sake of honorable deaths in battle. Gene watched the comms equipment readout... but now he was looking beyond the regiments of foot militia. The infantry were something to delegate to sub units within the advance, to be bottled up and wiped out as necessary, but otherwise kept contained and isolated so that they could assist the other arms of battle.

... even if that was, or had been as meat shields, and ablative armor.

The image fluttered opening on the holographic display. "It doesn't look like they're going to cooperate with the plan." Alexandria Cunningham observed.

"No." The original plan hadn't been set in stone, but they had hoped to pin the Combine in place for the Eridani to launch their own assault.. but battle plans didn't survive contact with the enemy and all that. .. but it would have been nice to pin the enemy in place to leave other units room to maneuver, even more so if they could encircle and wipe out major force combatants and then swing through turning the whole flank. "Hold on." He muttered and tapped the keys in front of him his eyes shifting under the data influx. "Yeah," She started to say something to that, "They've reduced the forces around San Martin." He tapped the controls in front of him after muttering the observation.

"Commander Shepherd-"

The fusion signatures he was detecting were a company of mechs from the Fifth Sword of Light, but at this resolution he couldn't tell which battalion they were.

His Marauder's Dalban started cataloging mass and signals throwing up war book identifications that ran from light mechs through to the single Assault eighty five tonner that was putting out too much signals for the mech's health. Most of the enemy force though weighted in as mediums or heavy Battlemechs a stark contrast to the expected Sun Zhang light mech cadres they'd been expecting to punch through and engage. It could have meant that this independent company had been thrown in front of them while, he assumed, the Kuritan's attempted to use the fast swarm of fresh meat to launch a suicidal banzai charge against the Guards, or the Light Horse closer to the capital of San Martin.

Or they could have been doing something else entirely.

"One-Two, One-Three break left of my position along the salient." He received a perfunctory acknowledgement of the order and a pair of jenner 7As from the One Two Tactical Group's mech lance zipped past his marauder churning through the dusty red sands. Following after them were a mix of Harasser, and Saracen LRM hovers who had been earning their name screening his flanks on the infantry. Machines that if they could pull this off, he expected he'd be able to replace wholesale with Bandits, but first they had to get through this.

The other machines of the combined arms units followed.

The good news was that their intelligence appeared valid. The entirety of Fifth Sword of Light wasn't present. Intelligence had said One battalion was off world, and we was glad that that was still the apparent case.

Of course that meant that if they did win the Regiment would survive, but it meant they would have to fight one less battalion of enemy mechs. Normal Azami doctrine was oriented towards lighter, and where possible less ammunition dependent raiding and strike forces, but that had its limitations... and of course here that role was largely already being filled by the Eridani Light Horse.
--
Alexandria Cunningham didn't like being sidelined. She had graduated from Sakhara Academy, and while her tour of service was in the office of the Prince's Champion that was actually step up from the arrangements her parents had made. Her star had risen further with Prince Hanse's ascension, as he had been quick to name his, distant, aunt as his champion elevating her beyond 'merely' the ranks of the Military Intelligence directors... but that did present other hurdles to her present position.

She watched the Azami lance move the pair of heavier mechs following after their light star league era Jenners. To go harass the Combine; pecking at them with large lasers. There had been concerns that Shepherd might have been romantically entangled with his Azami XO but she didn't see it... or if they were they were vastly more discrete about it than Chang and the Lyran Alexander were ... but even that seemed more of a friends with benefits arrangement typical of military liaisons. It wasn't her concern.

Still with no real experience in a line command ... having gone straight to staff work she was perpetually on the back foot in terms of unit interactions... which was annoying in the extreme. It didn't help that the find of the Brian Cache on Robinson had warranted diverting Shepherd off world to the Davion Capital... and then of course the mild insanity that had been Northwind. A mystery that they still couldn't adequately explain.

One of the Field Marshal's staff had ridiculously asserted that Shepherd as a Terran native may well have himself been a highlander... something about a check pattern that felt entirely to far a reach... there had been talk about the Highland Formation, but those were definitively terran mechs in long term storage. Even if that were the case it didn't explain how Shepherd had been able to turn one of the most significant ethnic minorities in the Combine against House Kurita.

The sensors within the command center of the DropShip flickered passing on as Star League tanks, the Fury tanks from Bristol, relayed data about the Sword of Light Mech Company. She paused to insure that the prince's champion knew that it was about to begin. This was the moment they'd been waiting for. This was the principle secondary objective beyond the primary of taking Dieron from the combine... especially if there were Terran caches still on this world... but those were a tertiary priority if the Combine hadn't unearthed them then they could focus on holding the world.

Yvonne Davion's face appeared, and there was a pause as her brows knit. "Are we inside the Combine's communication's network?"

"By all indications, yes." It wasn't that the trick hadn't been done to the Combine before... somehow it had been done on Elidere IV, but there had been no explanation... save the assumption that given the number of losses inflicted on the combine that a machine had probably been captured intact. No such capture had been reported.

"Interesting." The duchess of Victoria replied. "Time to close?"

"The lead combine company appears to be the standard Fire, Recon and Command lances given their position relative the salient, no more than fifteen or twenty minutes." And that was assuming that the Sword of Light didn't charge on the advancing 'mech company and its supporting armor.

 

[Imperator Pax]

Dieron Part 8​

Gene wasn't immune to fatigue. Right now he was listening to snippets from a dozen conversations occurring near simultaneously. He'd been letting the software handle much of the work. The truth was his dialect of Japanese was... painfully archaic compared to modern Combine Japanese which did occasionally give him a headache... though there were interspaced bits of Russian, English and Swedish slang thrown into communication chatter which added to that.

The radio intercepts had thus far been more or less the expected sort of posturing and battle rhetoric. Nothing really actionable. "We are Samurai!" The pronouncement brought a banzai cheer from the ranks of combine mechwarriors more than a dozen strong, a company and it seemed an expanded command element... probably family retainers or other personnel that was his best guess given the mechs had been late arrivals. If his intercepts of their IFF was right a forty something year old DCMS Major was in charge.

Gene grunted, rolling his eyes, before keying the comms to the unit at large, a series of holographic projections manifested, "That one is mine," He ordered into the mike highlighting the offending Combine Mechwarrior's heavy battlemech in the battalion wide tactical network through his Marauder.

He received a series of affirmatives, before a brogue voice cut in accompanied by a flag unnecessarily the DMM icon, "So how long are you going to need, cause," The Volunteers commanding officer, Bard Cameron, cut off in a fit of static, before his image reasserted, "Yeah we're taking intermittent LRM contacts."

"Can you identify their position?"

"Nothing, just the general direction of fire." He would have killed, probably literally, for an effective ground based tracking radar but with all of the countermeasures going out there was too much interference. "We're scouring the hills for light mechs or vehicles that might be spotting for them, but nothing so far."

Gene paused, he assumed that the Sword of Light should have had some supporting assets, and ... they were attacking as individual battalions which... they should have been maneuvering as whole battalions given the infantry cover... or at least it would have made more sense, "Weight of throw?"

"I'd guess ground based hover vehicles. Fives and tens, but" The image shuddered, "Definitely not LRM carriers, but we're getting pecked at and its starting to cause trouble for the lighter mechs." He understood that, the Stingers probably weren't the best to have brought in. "I don't think they're grasshoppers at least."

Gene nodded, and prepared to finish orienting troops into position before an overhead observation plane spotted a bigger problem. "Bard, Break contact and pull back." He didn't get an immediate response, he switched channels to the Service Company ordering them to bring trailers up, and then cycled through the roster for the fastest vehicles they had in situation with the intention to send them as couriers to physically bard to drop back from where he was in advanced contact.

The holographic display of the planet's geography as it spread out through the broad shallow river valley that fed down into the great lake that was really a freshwater inland sea given its size presented them something of a tactical and operation buffer zone to one side.

"Commander?" An Azami Tech asked within the Daimyo HQ vehicle, "We're moving the devastator now." The trailer containing the hundred ton assault mech needed to be moved to as close to the hill he had highlighted in the mech display.

He acknowledged but was already running up how quickly artillery could be brought on line... the thought of how limited their stockpiles of chaparral... the arrow IVs were but the vehicles that had been pulled out of a brian cache intended to fight the combine. He'd need machines to lase targets for missile bound artillery strikes as well... that meant he needed to remain in the Marauder until the last possible transfer time... switch machines climb up the rest of the hill and hope the topographic readouts were right and then expend as much of the machine's forty gauss rounds as he could before the enemy could rush in.

It was a pity the devastator hadn't been built with command and control in mind. The Atlas was too generalist for his taste. He somewhat regretted at the moment handing over the Ought 10 King Crabs from the Northwind find... but he had had no idea they'd be in this position. He flipped a switch to tag his movement to the illuminated waypoint and turned the Marauder to move while keeping the nose of the machine oriented towards the horizon where the enemy were coming from... if he was right then Bard was being peppered Sun Zhang cadets being fed at him piece meal and that there was probably a battalion of sword of light behind them as well...

... which just raised the question of whether or not the intelligence was wrong. Was the the whole regiment here? Or had the Combine simply consolidated more of their forces?

The Combine Commander may have assumed that if he smashed them and turned and rolled up the flank he'd be able to sweep through the DMM and then face the Eridani or the Davion Guards in an encirclement... which only made combine was going deep throat on the whole elan vitale concept.... or in its Japanese counterpart 'Kokutai'.

It was probably that. The Combine expected to start a rout... and that just wasn't going to let that happen. He reached up and flipped the toggle, and punched in a key series, and waited for their ASF detachment to move to standby.

Seven minutes later he was starting the boot sequence on the Devestator, and then moving it up the rise to the crest of the hill moving the master arm switch to on, and transferring power to the Gauss rifle capacitors... while still trying to field questions from the countess of Kestrel on what was about to happen, and why he'd pulled Bard back into the main formation.

The Marauder had been left on standby... if he had time, if he could expend his ammunition and do enough damage he'd swap back to the command mech... but that wasn't a sure thing. The Marauder's targeting data fed 'mr samurai's position as the man's parade paint heavy mech as it crossed nine hundred meters.

He ran the ballistic calculations, and started plotting the spread and displacement of the other mechs in the hostile company including the lead mech's wing man and the other lance mates. He let a breath as they continued to come on. The reticle resolved and went green. The sixty ton mech's head dissolved in slow motion in the video feed, but also in a strange dual perception of the mind machine interface, but he was already adjusting the left gauss rifle onto a catapult k2 and preparing to let fly as the laser designator of his targeting system formed two dots from the returns.

Without the Marauder's dalban he could no longer manage regiment wide command structures down to individual tank and infantry platoons. The last orders to finalize positions and prepare support ppcs, and inferno loaded srms ahead to break any following action would be the last orders those units had received. The tanks needed to be prepared to fire from protected positions and then move back if anything came through.

With more time, with more warning, he'd have tried to maneuver fury and alacorns to enfilade the oncoming attack before directing the 'mechs to attack... but this banzai charge had been screened at first as a probing action rather than what was looking like a human wave assault... in hindsight that made sense doctrinally.

This was obvious a prepared counter attack as opposed to a probe. A counter attack after their own meeting of the DCMS infantry earlier this morning. If he needed to swarm his position with reinforcements they had hovercraft of their own.

The Sword of Light Company pressed their attack heedless to the damage being done to their command lance. They were committed and wouldn't break the attack until they'd sustained losses that rendered them combat ineffective... well he could oblige them on that.

His data feeds piped live gun footage from the Devastator back to the Davion HQ all the while.

 

[Imperator Pax]

Dieron Part 9​

Field Marshal Yvonne Davion watched the data feed. These were the weapons of a lost age. Shepherd's complete unfathomable, his inability to understand how they had managed to lose 'these' these 'gauss rifle' things aside... they were weapons which in the hands of Terran pilots or terran tankers apparently for that matter ... well they compared similarly in damage output, though with ranges favorable to PPCs, to assault auto cannons.

The Gunslinger did prefer his Marauder, but it was also faster... and as they had observed it encompassed a more effective command and control suite. Classified and passed by courier only Bukaroo Banzai, her nephew and sovereign's personal scientist, had made certain comments about the Terrans. She had not readily digested the full scope of what he meant, maybe she never would, but something akin to understanding existed watching the damage be doled out.

The question remained, almost always lurking there in the back of her mind, what the combine had done. If the snake had somehow provoked the mongoose to come tearing out of its den, or whatever other analogy one wanted to make. It wasn't a priority at the moment. It like the news footage that had come in, were just extra information, that didn't impact the present battle.

That being said... the poetic quips were a little concerning especially if they were accurate reflections of how he viewed the situation. Alexandria had been correct to note the amount of ammunition though fretting about it wasn't going to do them much good. If they had as it appeared largely cleared the chaff from the Combine front then they were no in the stage of battle where decisive force would be brought to bear, and it would be here that they could see what the Combine had in their hand so to speak.

"What about Colonel Cameron?" She asked turning to the Guards officer two rows down, and didn't like the answer, especially since he'd been ordered to disengage and consolidate.

--
"Its time to switch to whisky, we've been drinking beer all night." The hoppers obediently fed alloyed depleted uranium kinetic penetrators, and set them in between the charging rails of his gauss rifle's 'breech'. There was a pulse of dust as the mass of metal accelerated down range at hypersonic velocity. An in this case small hard object moving several times the speed of sound, met a large bipedal warmachine head on.

The K2 skidded down in a lopsided manner its front glass shattered as the machine rolled to a stop on its side.


The radio crackled giving him the bad news that Bard had found that other Combine Mech Battalion, that it was the sword of light that was coming down. He reached up to flip the controls as the left the left Gauss roared tearing into the side torso of a humanoid walking war machine. Gene hissed in incandescent fury against his harness, "MacIntyre." He ordered into the throat mike, the other lieutenant colonel's image flickered into his cockpit, "go pull the volunteers out of that mess, and then put your Thugs and Highlanders wherever they can do the most good." He ignored comments about the cadets earning their spurs from the older highlanders in the channel.

The other gauss rifle snarled and he adjusted the left to delimb another mech sending it crashing into the ground as it attempted to pick up speed. The Combine wasn't, couldn't rely on non smart thermals effectively. There were too many other heat sources, and while his VLAR was running the capacitors were highly heat effective. A VLAR 300 could be powering anything from a 100 hundred Assault 'mech down to any number of sixty ton machines that filled the Comine ranks.



The display greened. Hoppers dropped rounds as they cleared under five hundred meters. The gauss rifles fired. A Dragon's fusion signature died as a couple hundred pounds of tungsten alloy ripped in and out front to back. Twenty three rounds left, eventually became twenty three rounds expended and returns on his machine's sensors confirmed contact further north as the battalions other companies continued to throttle up the engines intended to commit to what would be the decisive battle of the campaign.

Not realizing that they were already too late as the last of their lead company dissolved at just over three hundred meters to the bloom of man made lightning of his PPCs converging on the machine's head. He registered Chang's Marauder steadily trundling forward , and not the only relatively slow mech pushing up. A Fury flash cabled a text update by lasercom of the archers starting to pour fire into the advance element that had been harassing Bard and hold his attention while the Sword of Light came along. Grasshoppers and Quickdraws among them.


He took a breath as his display updated, and he ran the math, before he ordered Bardiche to swing into reinforce the position the DMM troops were supposed to be vacating. "Anyone able to tell me what the Eridani are doing?"

"Still contacting infantry, and armor. Dug in support PPCs, and inferno missiles, to the east they haven't been able to break through and reach the capital." A voice answered from the command vehicle. That suggested but didn't conclusively prove that the Combine had divided between conventional assets and Mech forces after this morning, if they hadn't already had that underway with something like this kind of attack in mind.

He swapped channels, "MacIntyre, divide that battalion and drive them towards the lake when I signal."

"Whats signal would that be colonel?"

He hit the mike's transmit key, and started cueing their aviation assets with orders to the DroSTs to prepare to dust off and potentially put their small craft in the air. He watched the battalions as they continued to advance on his broader arrangement of forces. This was going to get very messy very quickly and do so from west to east. Most likely the combine had expected that first company to hold their attention, while the DMM had been held in place or potentially even pushed by the Sun Zhang cadre, that was even now trying to push into close quarters where mech combat was often the most lethal in normal engagements. ... but what he suspected, and what his own Azami officers had reached consensus on, was that this was a combine trial by fire for its green troops as disposable meat shields to soak ammunition ahead of a more elite, or really one of THE elite units of the DCMS to launch a concerted attack.

The devastator registered the boosting fusion signatures of the aerodyne dropships, small craft and ASF as they started preparations. He didn't much longer to watch as his computer informed him that he was less than half of his combat load as the other mechs began to resolve into extended ranges against their counter measures. Seventeen rounds was going to go fast.

If they could pull this off it would cement a Davion victory at Dieron, because the combine in committing to a decisive battle were facing not just a large mech force, but also one with better equipment.

"What are we doing?"

Bard's voice was a distraction he didn't need, "Colonel Cameron I am pulling you from the rotation, and redeploying you to screen the pivot we will execute towards San Martin." He ignored the protest that the enemy was right in front of them. That it was true didn't change things, he had wanted to pull the combine units further forward, and spread them out originally... that had been the entire reason to pull the Volunteers back.

In terms of average overland speed the DMM troops would be faster to redeploy along the line, after that even accounting for the presence of cache machines in what constituted the battalion was, Bardiche with Claymore being the slowest Mech Battalion in relative terms. He pulled the trigger, and watched as the gauss rifle tore a leg off of an advancing mech even as the conversation played out.

An argument they were still carrying on when the computer warned him he had ten rounds remaining and still a full company pushing forward but he didn't care about that third company so much as the nearer remains of the second. The gauss rifle continued on down the lances and then draining the capacitors to the gauss rifle as his PPCs began to flash.

"Bard I am switching machines, standby." He ordered as a machine died to man made lightning, and he took the assault mech a step backwards, and down the hillside and walked it back to the crouched form of his Marauder. He looked at the Azami techs. "Get it loaded, and bug out, we won't use it again today." He ordered stepping of the ladder to make for the dust and mud caked 75 tonner machine, before starting a full on sprint to the machine. Start from Standby and bringing the Marauder to full power took ninety seconds to make sure the ER PPCs were live, and that the Thompson gun was good to go. He blinked through the message from testing and evaluation command. The 120mm hopper told him he had ammunition in the chamber. The VLAR 300 pushed the machine into a sprint of its own even as heard the 185mm chemjet thunder from an assault auto cannon.

It signaled that the enemy were now in close quarters with Chang's screening force, as more AC/20s opened up all along the line. The familiar connection through the MMI to the Dalban's mass of data was reassuring. He could perceive the whole battlefield spiritually process the presence of Chang's Marauder, or Beau Dervish their brawlers, or missile boats respectively.

The Kazakh river was just north of them to the east lay the planetary capital. He stared at the holographic display, a blinking indicator in what ordinarily would have been his peripheral vision. A handshake from a Terran Hegemony Command.

He blinked hard. Not now, he thought.

When the Snakes were dead. The Machine crested the hill and his ER PPCs opened up even as his sensors processed the PPC visual returns to the west towards the lake where in closer order a lance of Pillagers with assault auto cannons were wading into battle. If any of the combine had gone to thermals he knew his 75 must have looked like a small sun from the waste heat of the extended range model Hellstars.

--

"Good god."

She ignored the outburst watching the holographic displays, the multitude of feeds. She had known that the Duke of Errai had been impatient at the prospect of potentially being able to bring back the Thug BattleMech. That didn't excuse the man's behavior, but given what the Highland battalion's supposedly green troopers were doing with those and the Highlander's totem mech she could understand. The recent Northwind Graduates had taken up a position on a low promontory the highest 'hill' near a bend in one of the tributaries feeding into the lake.

As the heat of battle mounted comms discipline fell away as streams of insults, and incoherent war cries echoed between competing mechs, and their pilots shouting at each other.

"Field Marshal, the Colonel's Marauder is online we're receiving telemetry now." Telemetry might have been a stretch the initial boot of camera footage showed assault mechs as the seventy five tonner banked out from behind cover, ran up to and then proceeded punch while firing a PPC into the cockpit of a mech in Sword of Light colors.

They watched the cockpit dissolve as the Marauder was joined by two hundred ton Marauder II BattleMechs and tasking orders started to post to air units to the command board within the Davion Operations center even as highlanders screamed rallying battle cries as they continued to maul Kuritan units in the open.

 

[Imperator Pax]

Dieron Part 10​

He felt the restraints of the cockpit do their job pressing into his chest, arresting his forward momentum, but the gravity was already reasserting itself anyway, and he leaned back into the couch right hand adjusting the stick. The mech's limb moved, and his reticle tracked looking for his next target.


PPC fire rained from Hegemony era Thugs kept cool by their DHS standing on the heights to their west. Gene took a breath as Chang finished polishing off another Combine Dragon. He wasn't going to argue about who got kill tallies or anything like this. If anything his priority right now was coordinating his light mech assets and getting them moving. The Combine companies were acting like they were independent units rather than a whole battalion moving in concert. That made them harder to predict but if his feeds were right then they could be enveloped and overwhelmed.


... and not getting sucked into an engagement where their units with ammunition loads would be reduced. The entire point of shock mechs like the AC 20 armed Marauder II were to provide enough close range firepower that they could effectively delete charging light mechs and that would allow more mixed armament units built off the same frame to focus on more distant threats. Chang and her wingmen though had to be running low on Ammo by this point in the exchange which would put a greater emphasis on more energy weapon equipped frames.


Case and point a Marauder II 'Stormhammer' sallied forward to bring its eight medium lasers into yet another K2. Both mechs being too close to use their PPCs. The resulting burst from the multitude of Magna mark 2s illuminating his thermals. Once this was over he expected that there would be a requested and lengthy debrief with Blackwell over the performance of the stock II, and the alternate armament configurations... but they had to win first.


He punched up a command line into the management software as battlefield air directors prepared for their attack run. MacIntyre was to the bring the weight of the Highlander formation into a combined arms attack after the CAS broke up the Combine units. Even now Hegemony communication protocols aboard Fury and Highlander talking systems were pushing to coordinate firing solutions across air and ground units.


A fury coming online over the hill about eight hundred meters behind him painted a mech to his left. The data fed to his Marauder's Dalban which he promptly serviced with his own medium lasers. An attack that severed the already exposed myomer bundle of the right left sending it crashing to the ground. On the one hand it spared the mech from absolutely being slathered as Highland Curssaisers with inferno SRMs opened up on its lance mates.


"In bound fires. 60 seconds commander."


He nodded at the notification.


--
Normally his prophetic talents were unclear, symbolic animal images that alluded to fighting but it wasn't as if he was seeing card hands, or lotto numbers. So it wasn't like he was in any position to predict that things were about to go crazy. Septim had been mostly focused navigating his unit portion of units through the nav points.


The boss had said start pulling back rather than go chasing after small ephemeral contacts. Not that he didn't get where Bard was coming from but even with a VLAR 300 pushing his Merlin Cavalry model to a faster speed that didn't mean everyone else could... and of course there was also the fact that outside of his first shots he rarely got the chance to carefully line up his reticles.


People tended to shoot back at his Merlin... like the bastards were doing now.


A couple warning lights illuminated in his cockpit showing armor bleed throughs into an arm actuator that while not going to break the bank would mean repair time. It wasn't as serious as the damage Beau's Dervish had taken on Luxen... never mind Schiffer buying the farm, but he was wary of the damage after the beating his machine had taken on Ander's Moon. "Dumb pig head," He snarled to himself, "you should have fucking taken the option for a Highlander. Its an Assault Mech," he cursed, before lining up the large laser on the closing Dragon, "Hey asshole, here's something for." His muttering in German was cut off as he jerked the trigger when the the alarms in his cockpit started signaling in bound air warnings. Then the Merlin's TTS system whited out, which wasn't good, and was worse was it was hitting across the others.


"Inbound artillery coming in." Someone in his radio announced.


He didn't recognize the call but that wasn't really a surprise... so many new people in the company, so many Davion allies to keep track of. He had no idea who made the announcement, "Artillery?" He questioned. He hadn't heard any calls going out. Admittedly the boss had been liberally calling for fire missions on large combine troop formations as they stuck their heads up, and there was supposed to be air to ground fire coming... and then he saw a missile streaking down into a cluster of Combine ground vehicles and infantry. There was an explosion of dust, and hit the frequency to squelch onto the DropShips , "Who cleared the Chapparals to fire?" He had been told that the Azami had a handful of TAG equipped units that were being kept behind clusters of frontline mech and actual fighting vehicles.

Somebody was going to be in serious trouble if those LosTech artillery units had fired without authorization the boss had been really clear about how they only had so many of those missiles for each launcher. He pushed the machine forward all the same already scanning for enemies while he waited for an answer...

There didn't look like Combine had much left though, he was panning for any active returns but so far the whole neighboring hill, where he'd been taking pot shots at, was a smoking ruin.
--


She felt rather than really heard the explosions. Alexandria Cunningham watched the displays as they reloaded. The surveillance aircraft had cleared wide of the attack run as it moved but she hadn't expected cruise missiles strikes to follow. It wasn't unheard of for there to be lapses in communication in high intensity fights like this. It was actually in the text books at Sakhara that some times calls for fire failed to be passed along in the heat of the moment, but also that technical problems meant in bound calls sometimes failed to reach higher echelon control.


"Lady Alexandria we are reading resolved telemetry. BDA pending," The officer paused, and really more to himself than to anyone, "but that looks positive."


Gray white Rapiers their star burst roundels visible as they banked hard to circle the area they had just come over with their PPCs. In a minute the pair of ASF dove their AC 20s churning into the side of a combine CP that had been moved forward as the attack had progressed. The daimyo not dissimilar to the one that serviced Shepherd's Company exploded.


Gray White marks on the holographic display glittered into a right angle, an L with other units massing to launch into the angry disorganized red icons. The DMM troops were in Davion Gold and heading east, having been ordered to join the Eridani.


"Can they sustain this?"


"We're in close quarters now ma'am I don't expect this will last another thirty minutes." If that, the Guards officer that was her liaison and advisor of sorts, to the Prince's Champion's own separate command post. "With the Snakes fixed in place this is a battle of annihilation."


It wasn't a battle anymore it was a slaughter. Sakhara had been established by SLDF officers, and approved to train SLDF officers. It trained cadets for all combat arms, and while there was a combined arms component no one had ever tried to have them direct or even participate in using what was for all intents and purposes a light regimental combat team in this manner.


The Prince's Champion's image appeared. She remained in civilian attire than the uniform of the Davion Guards that her mother the previous Duchess of Victoria had been laid to rest in, but it didn't matter. She didn't need to be in the uniform of the AFFS to radiate composure and command. "Its such a pity we don't get to watch all of this regiment be destroyed."


"Yes ma'am." She agreed.


A small smile tugged at her lady's face. "Wrap this up quickly Alexandria we need to press on San Martin we're getting communication intercepts the Combine seems to be about to try something stupid, and desperate. The guards are going to need the manpower to prevent them from burning the town, or the like."


She nodded sharply, not quite a curtsey but the function of a noble retainer.


She turned to the mech display as other machines opened fire. Masses of LRMs were raining into pinned down Combine mechs. Lord Aaron hadn't been permitted to participate in the attack here... it would have been unacceptable, and risky at the best of times, but the DMM were acquitting themselves well, even though they were being moved to other tasks. It was the highlander cadets though she was paying attention to.


All of them remained in the colors of Northwind's Terran Hegemony era Militia. They were Gray White machines with tartan badging. That had actually been an argument in itself as the original plan had been to repaint the battalion in arid mountainous SLDF camo, apparently, akin to what most of the force had been given. Even now she was watching a lance of Star League era Thugs open up with their SRMs which was proving another unpleasant surprise.


The noose was closed.

The demonstration of the Hegemony built mechs did have one downside. The Duke of Errai had been pushy in his demands... which was no real surprise given his planet's reputation, with additional Thugs recovered she really expected a repeat once the battle was won here... especially given their involvement on the ridgeline.

 

[Imperator Pax]

Battle of Dieron Part 11
(Spring 3018)​

He watched the first machine slam into another bug mech. Hanzo heard Chang as she whooped wholeheartedly again temporarily deafening him over the radio.


"Ha." Her Atlas was out of AC 20 ammo, which as she had opined 'sucked', and had forced her to watch her distance but well, as she commented over the radio, locust pilots were a special kind of mechwarrior. She might have felt bad about throwing the Combine Cadet if the little bastard hadn't floored it and ran up and kicked her mech, but no he had so she'd picked his little bug mech and thrown him one of his friends.


He turned his machine and opened fire spraying inferno munitions at the disoriented mechs. They were long past the possibility of reciprocal dueling as had largely determined Ander's Moon so he felt no issue attacking the Sun Zhang Cadre trying to reinforce the Combine forces. He keyed the Assault mech via las comm, "Bubbles, we're preparing to separate."


"yeah yeah Hanzo I have this."


He nodded silently facing the camera.


He didn't question that. There was a dragoon mech lance under her command but he and Bahar were supposed to facilitate the pass through of the DMM troops through the line and that he meant he needed to retire from the engagement.


The general idea was fairly simple, but it was complex in execution. Their coordinating role would be to route troops from the March Militia through the nav points to insure they didn't bunch up. That way the combine couldn't hit them with artillery, or less likely air strikes. It was also to insure they didn't block other advancing units from the rear, which would include medical personnel as well as resupply.


What the Combine Commander was doing was not honorable, but brazen foolhardiness. Hanzo recognized that it was obviously more appealing to fight beyond the boundaries of a city... indeed the Ares conventions called for avoiding fighting in built up urban areas where possible, but the Combine Commander leading the force opposing them had spread his forces too far out and wasted the lives of the men underneath throwing them away.
--
Gene felt the tug on his mental connection to the machine even as he posted updated orders and data requests. The truth was a more pressing concern in terms of time table... and he wasn't going to be able to ignore.


He pressed a key to swap channels. "Bahar I need a second opinion, the way we have two options, mount a conventional Air Assault, or turn use Elidere's advance to target strategy." he wasn't sure who all was listening but her Mongoose was unpacking the subteranean rail network map pack.


Either way they were going to be forced into an Urban knife fight from the way things were looking... they would need time to load and off load... and of course there was the potential of any remaining combine reserves in the west. Davion thinking was the Combine leadership was spread out, that most likely the Dieron Military District Leadership were probably in Tatsuyama in the north west but that they could be isolated and dug out later. San Martin was the real prize anyway... a prize that the Combine might well be attempting to Nero rather than allow it to fall into Davion hands, and they needed to put a stop to that ASAP.


He wasn't' expect a hasty liaison with one of the pilots the Azami had vouched for. The Griffin Pilot was out of breath and unhappy, but he was fully prepared to take her at her word that the ISF was going to try and burn the city down because that was the general consensus of other sources. The question was still how to get to San Martin as quickly and with as coherent a force as possible. On the other hand the next words out of his mouth weren't exactly the best, "We won't let them torch the city," He assure the Griffin pilot, even though he had no way to be sure that they could actually stop the Kuritans from massacring the populace... but they would damned sure try.


He wasn't surprised when Kiyone volunteered or really... to be more accurate demanded to go along. Fine, that was fine. He qued up a mental command dialogue through the machine... and watched as the data unfurled into a holographic display.
--
They had planned for a quick campaign, and for the potential necessity of needing to withdraw. They had not planned for this kind of speed. They had expected thirty forty days potentially of conflict against the Combine. Engaging and potentially having to rebel combine forces from either the north west or from further east across the desert. They also had not planned for the tempo of operations thus far to consume the volume of shells.

The footage of combat was starting to falter. There were estimated to likely be tiny pockets of battlemechs scattered across the planet... but nothing that couldn't be mopped up. It was no longer the primary concern. The planets defenders were shattered... and without meaningful losses to the Guards, or really for that matter their forces as a whole.


In no small part because once the final forces had met there had been the strike ahead of the aircraft coming. She had an incomplete picture of how that had unfolded. She had attempted to parse through the data traffic... but Yvonne wasn't sure it was all there. There were no gaps in transmissions in the time frame, which of course was an anomalous, but perhaps, just perhaps there had been the plan to mass the strike going out with the combine close air support... but if that had been the plan it hadn't been included into the briefings.


The other detail was the steady disappearance of units from the tactical traffic. There were advantages to allowing Mercenary, or even regional commands tactical flexibility in operations. Yvonne knew that organic response times were often the key to defeating Capellan forces in the field. Capellan commanders rarely had the authority or inclination to initiate tactical maneuvers or show initiative without orders due to the Capellan political structure. They rarely could coordinate between service arms not because they were incompetent but because it required running requests up the chain of command in ways that took time.


"Mister Alexander." She greeted the Lyran Heavy Mech pilot as his image solidified. The man's dirty blonde hair was caked with sweat, all the more noticeable for his lost tech neurohelmet. In the background his Merlin was deployed near several alacorn tripple barreled tanks. Further beyond were the lighter single barreled gauss rifle tanks from beneath Bristol.


"The boss, said something about the snakes trying to pull a Nero... I think that means they plan to try burn the city."


She nodded. That wasn't honestly surprising. There were already tentative reports from the forward most Guards Scouts suggesting that ISF personnel were trying to rally citizens into last ditch fight attempts. Dieron had been chosen for a variety of reasons including that such tactics were less likely to succeed. Dieron had been a Hegemony World, and perhaps memories of that had inculcated a different set of ideals that protected the population from the Combine's usual body politic. Attempting to convince untrained citizens to potentially charge infantry with human wave tactics and improvised weapons was unlikely to be successful here.


Unsuccessful in the sense that the population was unlikely to even countenance such an attempt at resistance regardless of the exhortations of the ISF. Not that such attempts were usually all that successful against professional troops anyway.


She had some idea what was going on, part of the units that were being pulled from the rotation were the so called 'omni vehicles' made by Blackwell Industries. The Bandits, hovercraft, were being refitted but that was only a partial explanation. "Yeah, the boss said something about urban assault." Was all the Lyran would... or could admit to. He had no explanation for how they would be launching an urban assault, and her staff's conventional wisdom suggested to cross the intervening distance this was simply a preparatory measure before the march.


Yvonne Davion wasn't sure that was the case at all. Her eyes swept the holographic globe dominated the overlord's command deck.


--
Gene looked at the thermal signatures as the mag tube slowed


These tubes had been intended for rapid redployment of materiel ... for defending troops... and a quick check of his clock told him that in about sixty second the Highland Curaisser infantry bailing out the hover craft were going to deploy from the entryways deep inside the planetary capital's urban administration and behind the ISF's principle innermost urban barricade. Not that that wasn't anything really more serious than lightly armored infantry behind sand bags and machine guns... most of the heavier equipment around their communications gear... which would be their first target.


Once they visually confirmed that there was enough room to start sending hovercraft through they'd send the Bandits into the combine rear echelon and then he and the 'mech company would follow suit.


"Whatever the combine does our priority is civilian safety, secure the urban chokepoints, anchor the MSR the sooner we can link with Davion Guards Infantry," From their RCT, "the sooner we can secure overwhelming material advantage."


His intention was to deploy the Curassier into the urban center take the city's administration hub, the news stations and the university preferably without the Combine getting a distress call out. Ideally be fully deployed before they realized they were here.


He had optical telemetry and sensor returns being piped in from the Terran era surveillance equipment but that was incomplete.


"Breaching."


"GO GO GO." Shouted a platoon sergeant.


Daylight flooded the underground and acoustic signatures though not so much the actual sound followed as highlander infantry breached up and out of the subterranean. The space to clear a bandit to confirmed, and the first of the hovercraft accelerated up and out and then into the streets of San Martin. A second followed and within fifteen minutes Hanzo was pushing his bigger bug mech left while Bahar followed with her Mongoose.


One of the Pillager -D from the Reunification War would have been handy here in this kind of scenario, but they hadn't had time to pull one from the Company's reserves.

 

[Imperator Pax]

Dieron Part 12​

"He did what?"


The officer squirmed within the bowels of the Overlord. The Command Post had grown quiet again as attention shifted. The heavy combat ... the fight between Mechs had largely ended for the Invasion of Dieron. There would be mop ups but that wasn't really the issue right now.


Part of it was really more a question of how he had gotten from point A, their lines in the west, to behind Combine lines in the east. If this was some trashy unrealistic holovid blockbuster the answer would have been a quick trip into orbit and then from the orbitals reinsertion ... and that had died off really as practical during the 1st​ succession war.


The speed with which the forces had vanished from Davion lines, and then appeared in the city precluded overland travel, and they had appeared in the city which should have prompted them being shot at by whatever anti aircraft assets the combine had left.


The Davion Guards, specifically the Heavy Guards had been brought along for a milieu of reasons to this action, just as a regiment of the Avalon Hussars RCT with the Blue Stars were engaged on Altair. The objective of holding it was not a critical priority but it would be an emblazon to the whole campaign, but that would depend on their success since Dieron wouldn't be able to scramble reinforcements or relief forces to the attack.


"The air wing is rearming as we speak."


Just ASF this time. There was no sense sending dropships and combat small craft and even the ASF were going to be limited in what they could strafe effectively... but it didn't' matter because of the detail of the attack from within. Highland troopers were currently deployed in a combined arms bridgehead that opened the way into San Martin for the Davion Heavy Guards.


The Guards were taking full advantage of that beach head. Their infantry and their tanks moving forward to reinforce thin control of vital roadways and flood the city. Even now Davion intelligence officers were rushing forward to broadcast calls for the population to welcome them as liberators... a message that Colonel Shepherd had already delivered from his Marauder. The Command BattleMech had tapped into the local voice of the dragon 'official' combine news service as well as sending one of his officers... one of his combine native officers the girl piloting the Griffin and a detachment of Highland Infantry to the ComStar enclave to inform the Order that Dieron was now a world of the Federated Suns.


... there had been a slight protest apparently, but from the communications back and forth had culminated with BattleRom footage being handed to Precentor Dieron of what Shepherd's Company had done to the Sword of Light several hours earlier.


There was another detail she had to contend with. They were ahead of schedule... they were so far ahead of schedule compared to how they had expected this invasion to go.


They had the Sword of Light's particulars .... including where their missing battalion was... and who was commanding the unit. They knew where the heir of the Draconis Combine was. They in theory could could once the HPG compound was secure make a real time call out and attempt to capitalize on that information. It wouldn't avenge Ian, but it was step in the right direction... but even with the information that would mean an expensive HPG call to New Avalon and Hanse having to weigh whether to roll the dice on such a move.


It would have to be Hanse's decision, and regardless of what decision the First Prince made there would be detractors on both sides of the isle within the court.


For now though they had a battle to finish. They needed to finish securing the rest of the planet.


--
Gene watched kilted troopers herd confused civilians and Combine officials into separate groups. There was no way they were going to be able to get through this with their numbers. They were really just getting the ball rolling while they waited for more Davion Infantry to arrive on the backs of trucks into the capital. More infantry to scour the city and establish their own watch posts.


The Combine had wanted to fight a scorched earth policy, but the local ISF had never expected that the Sword of Light even down a battalion, with 2nd​ being off world, would be annihilated in open battle ... never mind in the space of a few hours of maneuver and then forty odd minutes of closing engagement to crush both 1st​ and 3rd​.


Not that anyone could have planned for slamming cruise missiles into clusters of the regiment's force as they had massed for a head on assault... but the ISF had thought that they could rally the populace for a last ditch resistance of the city... which had over estimated popular support for the dragon, and also the ISF had been mostly focusing its militia troops to the outskirts against the Heavy Guards. There had been interior defenses but nothing intended to stop more than unarmed peasants not well not highlanders full of piss and vinegar never mind the mechs that had followed once the breaches were open.


There were apparently Davion MI liaisons trying to rally anti combine resistance groups on the planet. He didn't exactly grasp who they had been backing, but he wasn't exactly surprised by spooks in shades showing up in the first waves of Heavy Guard vehicles at the University of Dieron to 'assist and advise'. The original plan had probably been running on a script that assumed... well he hoped the davion's hadn't been banking on a popular uprising in their favor... but that the Guards would be taking the city while the mercs were handling the fighting in the western countryside.


Frankly that the Eridani had themselves a numerical advantage on the Combine force initially opposing them then while potentially costly Kerston could have probably carried the day. The difference was the DMM addition. The Davions had probably planned that there needed to be some regular troops among the mix, for PR reasons as well as others.


He flipped the switches on his right side. "Bubbles I need a sitrep."


The Atlas's connection to his Marauder attenuated for a moment and then the image solidified. "Nothing going on here, we're still processing all of the dragon bits." Salvage from the Sword of Light, "But we haven't lucked out there is a lot of scrap metal but those big missiles are a lot less discerning than pretty little headshots."


"Our objective was the enemy's destruction... but we should see if we can't find any operational intelligence to pass along." He replied. They had been in high tempo operations for the better part of two days, not counting the ride in or the burn from the JumpShips. They needed to get everything locked down so they could stand down.


Maintaining this tempo was not practical, and with any luck they had completely broken Combine operational planning and exhausted their reserves. If that were the case they could stand down, take a breath, catch some sleep. Let the abundance of Davion troops secure the city... and then assess the new situation.


Chang promised she'd be on it, and Gene sat back against his harness and took a breath. The Highlanders were trying to keep the civilians from gawking too much at the 'mechs.


"Greetings Lieutenant Colonel Shepherd." A voice he didn't recognize remarked over his speakers as it read off his HAF service number and final CID operational posting. "Admiral Clancy suggested that there would be other Terran Officers who would make it to fail safe protocols and enter hibernation."


The Hegemony had had too many plans. He'd come to that conclusion on Northwind reviewing historical files... hindsight being twenty twenty of course it was all too obvious that a weak star lord and then the assassination of the second to last one had of course been a symptom... but the Hegemony really should have acted against the combine sooner.


"Commander."


"Colonel MacIntyre." He replied as the holographic image of the old scottsman solidified and the machine spirit quieted.


"I've the cadets joining us. We have control of the space port and are ready to begin transfers down from orbit."


"Good, do so." He replied. The cadets would probably be bored with what would be mostly guard duty , but they weren't quite to where they could stand down. "MacIntyre."


"Sir?"


"Stay available while you're handling that, I may need you for something."


"Yes Commander."


San Martin had been the capital of this world. That was his immediate focus with contact with the AI within Fortress Dieron... and about the time that he was doing this the news was beginning to circulate of the Wolf Dragoons activities and the Dragoons' leadership were sitting down to watch the BattleRom footage from Elidere.


The news of the Marik attack on Cranston Snord's Landhold didn't immediately raise any red flags, not to the normal intelligence services... but it was a detail that meant something to the AI within Fortress Dieron.
--
Notes: and very shortly we will be moving on to other things, including canonical ones regarding the Draconis Combine under Minoru Kurita at the end of the Star League as the driving basis for Clancy's initial pivot towards the Davions which well, we will get to, but certainly Minoru's immediate seizure of Hegemony worlds once Terra was liberated did not help, and certainly the authorization of the nuclear bombardment against Helm for their 'defiance' (read give him the SLDF materiel) cemented Clancy's decision.


That being said this is some what short as I had originally intended to contend with touching upon one of the things this heads off. The Davion takeover and prevention of the ISF from fighting a scorched earth campaign prevents the ISF from killing Myndo Waterly's college boyfriend and thus causing her to run off to ComStar. Myndo makes more appearances in the future, but is more active in the Whoops there goes the HPG alternate timeline that I occasionally spin ideas off.


I had originally planned to do an interlude of Cranston versus Marik but that's kind of been dropped even though it does still make the news, but news in BT travels slowly. Anyway we will start Fortress Dieron's chapter next week.

 

[Imperator Pax]

Fortress Dieron Part 1​

The Davions had filled the city above them with checkpoints, but that was no surprise. Even with that the Davion's focus had been mostly on civil order. He was sure they were engaging in SSE and other affairs but they had the opportunity to delve into the underground.


He had brought MacIntyre along for a couple of reasons. First and foremost because the old highlander was read in, but because there was a cover for action in being in discussion with the colonel of one of his subordinate battalions. The Davions were already, or had to be privy, that Northwind and Robinson Battle Academy were already in talks on how to move forward... and with the cache at Harlaw open there was material to equip additional units, never mind the materail the DMM had been able to add to their stores from the Brian cache on Robinson.


"I think Dieron Highlanders has a nice ring to it." The old Scotsman remarked as they walked. He was taking the escorting anti personnel drones very well all things considered, "Call it Battalion D on the papers for now." The paper work was going to be a problem.


The local MRB office, the local ComStar people weren't exactly sure what was going on. Precentor Huthrin Vandal had called in earlier that morning from New Avalon to finalize the change over of Dieron's ... map colors so to speak, and things had sounded tense when they'd been leaving. The MRB liaison at the Dieron ComStar office had looked a bit on the spot; never mind how the local Precentor must have felt at the situation. They were leaving it for the time being until they had things sorted out.


"So?" The colonel asked. "You went into one of these stasis tubes? Go to sleep in one century," The Rip Van Winkle sleep. "And wake up in another."


He paused and opened the panel and keyed the numbers into the access pad. "I don't remember much." They were dreams really, a recalling of, "A flash in the sky, that I'm pretty sure was either the Taurians, or the Rim World nuking our ships in orbit... or vice versa our fighter wings doing theirs. I remember a fight with Rim World Assault Mechs. I don't remember much beyond that other than flashes, just pieces." He repeated.


"Amnesia is a common side effect of stasis tube usage." the artificial voice remarked through one of the escorting drones, and rattled off the statistics. "Admiral Clancy demonstrated similar symptoms of memory loss." The lift began moving.


The portion of the old underground shelter was a washed out color scheme. He wasn't sure what color it had originally supposed to have been, but it connected to a mag tube that lead into the mountains that surrounded San Martin. The Combine had encouraged the rumors of Star League caches, and from the rumbling around them he could guess that they'd been hoping would be rebels would just die in the mountains.


That historical trivia was... well there were dim blue glows from the casket like structures. Some of those rebels probably had... maybe to rock falls maybe not. Given the facility they were transitioning into, he was going to wager that certainly not all of the disappeared would be rebels were dead. "Stasis tubes." Lots of stasis tubes.


They weren't all empty either. There were drones moving around. Priceless volumes of lost tech machinery everywhere. Hundred of meters below the surface buried treasure.


Apparently the original professed requisition had been long term protection of personnel ... Gene didn't question it... but it seemed odd that if that were the primary purpose of the facility why none of them had been used for that purpose... it seemed strange that Dieron's AI would be bagging would be combine rebels and putting them into the tubes, but then what did he know. Whatever was going on was authorized, or reauthorized by the last Hegemony officer to visit the facility, Clancy and his people.


It hadn't been included, or at least Dante hadn't mentioned it or put it forward to read, but the Dieron AI included after action reports against the SDS system that had to have come from Kerensky's command. More to the point the files within this bunker iterated off a list of personnel... and an attack on Richmond on Combine Forces in 2828.


"Clancy made contact with the Minnesota tribe." He remarked as he punched up the retinue of Clancy's people and their ages, and their jackets more broadly. The fact that Clancy had loaded up artificial wombs and Hegemony Medical tech before leaving Dieron was a little concerning. There had been no mention of that in Northwind's database... and it didn't seem like a stretch to assume that whatever Wolverine help Clancy had might well have been in exchange for cached terran supplies.


That worried him how that might have turned out. Worried him what might happen if the information got out. That might have been why Clancy hadn't posted that information to Northwind which didn't have involvement in that 'plan' or whatever.


... but whatever he had turned over to them, it was only a fraction of the complex machinery that Dieron, of the complex electronics and equipment Dieron as a world had made as part of the Hegemony... the problem was just the list of stasis tubes and computer parts, and artificial wombs... that still worried him... because there were notes included in the debrief at Dieron about this 'Kerensky Cluster', and the early clans... about Nicholas apparently going off the deep end... but a part of him sort of expected that.


A part of him knew that Kerensky's son had gone off his rocker... and yet seeing it in writing in the log books taht made it all the more real, and worrisome.


"Were Navigation," Unlike with Northwind's 001 annex there were no terminals projecting star charts... which was odd given San Martin had been the planetary capital during the Hegemony. "were there star charts included with this debrief?"


"They were not." The AI responded. "Given the data included I can narrow the general area coreward of the Inner Sphere," But only really down to 'far in the galactic north' terms. "I lack any viable data on the worlds Kerensky's deserters settled however there is another matter." That however would mean actually leaving San Martin, and visiting the Fortress Dieron in person.
--
The news channels were awash with Davion liaisons trying to smooth things over. Gene looked at the expanded officer contingent, but MacIntyre hadn't mentioned what was up in the mountains east of the city... or rather underneath them. There was some shuffling around, and Gene dashed the milk into the four shots of expresso sitting in his stainless steel mug. It was emblazoned with an animated appearance of a Fury tank, having been found in Bristol's storehouse, "Lets begin with the fundamental basics, Bard."


The DMM Brevet Colonel nodded raising his own coffee cup to the room. "First and foremost we won. The planet is ours. We're still waiting to hear back from Altair but our objective is accomplished."


After the polite applause to the announcement and some other minor issues during which he drank down the local cortado, "Anyone want leave?" Gene asked, "Its there for you, we will need time but the next objective on schedule is the agreed upon escort out into the periphery, while we are there Precentor Huthrin Vandal of New Avalon would appreciate any pirates we meet are dealt with. Black Jack McGirk has been busy. If you're taking leave but planning to meet up for the periphery escort I'll have data packets ready for your based on what we know. If you are staying Bard has something else for us to deal with."


"There is a short term joint duration contract we need any mechwarriors that want to sign up for this. Robinson Battle Academy's training cadre is going to be posted here for joint training with the Northwind Cadre under my careful ministrations. You'll be helping me digest our success and prepare the DMM troops for their role in mentoring the two cadres while they are here."


When Bard had ambushed them with the notion, the DMM colonel had been ignorant of where he and Macintyre had been coming from after all, it had sounded like a bad idea. Maybe not bad, but risky in terms of positioning them on the front. He agreed that the DMM group assembled made sense having them run down the cadre groups from the academies, full expanding access to that knowledge made sense, but sticking them on Dieron... that was gambling.


The Victory at Dieron meant that he had Highlanders who wanted the opportunity to take a trip home to Northwind. That was young people, the fresh graduates in the mech units as well older more experienced troopers. Part of the proposed training regiment was also going to be wider evaluation of Blackwell Industries equipment. Evaluations that if Bard's scuttlebutt was wright would very likely be passed to MI2 and probably to Davion units like the Hussars, and the Guards. I.E. The units who were the regular units participating in the actions on Dieron and Altair.


"That being said, ComStar has the battle Roms of the Marik attack on one Cranston Snord's landhold," Gene remarked, "This is not a social viewing, this is work. Review those roms, we'll be discussing them in detail." Not just the Marik side of things, but Snord. Snord was a red flag even to the Davions but the whole affair with the Minnesota tribe and Clancy earlier today... Snord's tactics... well Snord was suspected of having ties to the Dragoons.


Chang waved her hand, "Uhm, I already watched it, but ... it looked familiar, I mean Snord's people kind of did what we did, except using a base five unit formation instead of either lances or the base six mech platoons."


She wasn't wrong. It was an observation that would not be overlooked by others, or at least Gene assumed that someone else might have noticed the similarities. They might not necessarily be suspicious that Clinton must have had substantial underground facilities.


"He lost didn't he?"


The two Alexanders shared looks, and there was a pause. Not that Beau was wrong, the Marik regulars had pillaged Clinton and driven the irregular's home guard to ground but some of the footage was concerning since units seemed to disappear from contact with marik forces and pop back up in the rear echelons. "We'll talk about it, but we should consider what happened on Clinton, and the irregulars other combat actions. Not everyone is going to do us the solid of attacking us head on." ... and if there were going to be further cadre sessions the RBA and Northwind students needed to be aware of how to turn to respond to a flank or enemy in the rear.

 

[Imperator Pax]

Fortress Dieron Part 2​

Gene collected the printed papers, and took a breath. The Overlord's command space was still a wash with noise from the adjoining room. He knew there had been slight pressures on the fringes, and expected more direct efforts forthcoming ... but he had agreed to go with the Azami into the periphery. They wouldn't go all the way to Alamut, but to sweep into the Rimward Periphery, and hopefully be able to start investigating, or at least laying the ground work for an investigation... they had found that DOME outpost in the rim, and there were the umbella institutions... those needed to be looked into... but for now


"So what is the objective? You've been pushing the Battlion D plan fairly hard." He remarked to MacIntyre, "I'm not opposed to it, but we've been on stand down from combat for," He made a show of checking the data slate, "less than twenty four hours officially. This planet has been officially under the Davion banner for less than a day."


"Because the plan is to come back." MacINtyre replied matter of factly. "God willing House Cameron lives, and there is a trueborn heir to the league, but facing the odds... if not the law, then revenge. An' facing the facts the Combine cannot allow us to show them as so brittle. They'll attack. We have the machines to prepare highland regiments at strength for the first time in generations, never mind whatever is on this world."


and that was a whole other headache. He known that the Hegemony Defense Procurement Apparatus had been nightmarishly labyrinthe at best... "The mechs we had originally planned to deploy the cadets in."


"In part. In part there are other machines that came out of Harlaw. There are clan scions who will go to the academy, understanding that their duty is to fight the snakes." MacIntyre reached down and put his own documents on the table, "This is a copy from the filework of operations the Company ran in the Canopian Contracts. Luxen." The gray bearded man tilted his head and shrugged, "Its the base six thing Major Chang was saying. Now what I'm proposing here is we take the Archers we attach a whole platoon to two companies of mechs. We'd be talking eighteen mechs in a company. So in theory yes it would be more to manage, it would be larger than a square, but ah' reckon a major commanding, his XO leading the Archers. It would maximize firepower support."


Gene took the papers. "So the ultimate intention is a regiment?" He had strongly implied as much with his statement of preparing Highland regiments, plural.


"In the long term yes."


He glanced at the force chart. The biggest immediate issue was the perennial need to find ASF and pilots... but that wasn't new. Then he folded it and stuck it in his breast pocket, "Lets see whats here before we go making too grand of plans." He shook his head, "That is a lot of manpower to train up. It will take time before we're there." ... but he got the feeling that this had been probably something the Highland clans on Northwind had probably been cooking up since they'd opened Dante's annex beneath the planet... MacIntyre was right... the combine wasn't likely to take this sitting down, they had an influx of materiel and of course ... it wasn't rocket science they were very likely going to have to come back from the periphery, return to Davion space, and then deal with a belligerent combine


--
Septim had spent a couple hours shooting the shit with Bubbles, and she was definitely fucking right about the fighting tactics. This Snord guy, well he had danced around Marik before. It was scary how similar that was to, it was scary watching somebody else enevelop another successor state regular unit. It wasn't identical but the maneuver aspect of the fighting was all too like what the boss did. There was a lot less armor involved. He tossed his bag... and the leave prospect worried him...


There were going to be questions about Elidere. Now that the fighting was done the news broadcasts were crawling with battle rom footage of the Sword of Light being absolutely chewed up as well... and by the time he got home ... well he'd already asked for a copy of the public release roms from the MRB... otherwise .. well just so people would believe it.


"Ah there you are young man." Doctor Abner thumped him heartily on the back, "I should understand we shall be travelling companions." The Atlas driver declared, "A good thing I think, we have so much to talk about." Abner proceeded to talk his ear off about trying to convince the boss, again trying to, to visit New Kyoto, "There are benefits to personal presentations, but its not just that a trip to New Kyoto would have other benefits, regardless." The older lyran clapped his hands, "I have arranged proper quarters for you young man, and any one else. I know some people have made plans for leave go spend two weeks on Solaris enjoy the games, so you needn't fret. I have everything arranged." The univeristy's bell tower chimed, "In the mean time well, I have agreed to give a lecture on the history of the late star league at the university of Dieron. I would invite Commander Shepherd but I am afraid the Duchess of Victoria has absconded with him for some matter of National Security or some such military business." He waved dismissively at the notion.


Gene was situated between Lex and Bard with the Field Marshal at the head of the table. The Field Marshal looked tired. Kerston was directly across from him on the left side of the table. "The good news is Precentor New Avalon is as we speak overseeing the distribution of the battle roms through Davion space. They should be arriving to the media over the next few weeks." The Field Marshal remarked. "This is excellent news. The destruction of the majority of a sword of light regiment and the demonstration of Combine vulnerability in losing a prefectural capital will put them off balance further off balance given Elidere, and if the Blue Star Irregulars and the Hussars can secure Altair," That was two whole RCTs Gene was given to understand, "Then we will have achieved a significant coup de main there as well."


There was more to that. He'd known that as the highlanders had pushed into the heart of the Combine presence within San Martin and taken out their major command and control nodes.


They had taken the ISF headquarters more importantly their provincial archive intact. Well minus some bloodstains from highland infantry having to paint the walls, but there were supposedly two centuries worth of combine records in the facility.


Her comments made the man sitting to her left look uncomfortable. He was a spook. Probably from the DMI, he didn't look like he was from across the aisle... from the civilian intelligence service, but then what did Gene know. Either way the spook looked like he was uncomfortable being here.
"I had wanted to hold this discussion," Yvonne continued folding her hands and sitting back in her chair, "for of course much earned congratulations on the victory, but to discuss some of what we have unearthed in the archives."


That didn't sound right. They couldn't possibly have found anything too quickly in the archives. While there had been ISF prisoners taken it seemed absurd to think that the Combine could have given anything up this fast. The documents the man beside her distributed across the table were in ISF letterheads ... they were issued out under the seal of the Coordinator Minoru Kurita.


The documents detailed SLDF positions.... they detailed providing SLDF positions with the recipients of those details being the Rim World Republic. The paper detailed THS Allegiance's task group... his vision involuntarily shifted, and began to swim before he took a breath. Kerston had crinkle one side of a paper he was looking at... and Gene could make out that the brevet general's copy had been translated into English... and more to the point that the unit the ISF had passed details on... had been the 3rd​ Regimental Combat Team's 19th​ Striker Regiment.


... and the result of that was that 19th​ Striker Regiment of the Star League Defense Force had walked into an ambush and had been destroyed. Not the least of which because the Rim world hadn't minded luring the unit into an urban center and... then not caring about civilian losses in the ensuing battle.


"These are the sorts of things we've found, and its more. We plan to open the archive's historical section for study. Obviously we will need," She looked to her left, "To catalog everything first, and many people will need translators but I have already spoken with the ambassador of the Lyran Commonwealth regarding the distribution of such records to institutions of higher learning."


Gene had so many questions but bit down on most of them. It was no surprise that Kerston was going to have the Eridani dive into the archive at first opportunity... even just the material from the end of the star league. ... unlike Kerston though... well he'd need to take the general aside and mention the prospect of digitalizing the pages and letting the AI on planet sort through the material. "Who all are you granting access to?" That was probably the most immediate relevant question... because besides Kerston he was sure that MacIntyre would want access to the data contained within especially if there were more direct links of the ISF handing over SLDF positions to the Rim World.


... there probably were, and given Minoru's explicit authorization then there was going to be pressure to reciprocate what they knew in turn... and indeed that was the first thing Kerston wanted to discuss.


"Not while I have tens of thousands of Azami civilians waiting to ship out to the periphery. Or do you not think the Combine-" He bit down, the reality was if they dropped that HPG recording he expected retaliatory attacks against Azami population centers regardless ... beyond what was already happening, but JumpShips and Colonial Droppers were an easy target for Combat DropShips and ASF. "With all due respect general even without this bombshell there is something else. I need you to meet Colonel MacIntyre and I for something that will most likely take several hours of your time."


So five hours later as the curfew went into place and dusk fell over the city he was showing Kerston the copy of the reports from Richmond. The 'Minnesota Tribe's' liberation of the gulags there. The best solution... well the best idea that they could come up with for the time being was to be there bright and early in the morning and hopefully convince the Field Marshal to let Doctor Abner set up his star league era cameras to scan well as many of the documents as they could get into a computer file and then upload the digital copies of the physical paperwork from the archive to the AI.

As Kerston read, Gene thought about the archives here... would, how much about the Minnesota tribe and the combine's gulags would Admiral Clancy have included to his Davion allies. Was there a report about the attack on Richmond in the archives of the DMI somewhere? OR their civilian branch, certainly what was in the computer was more than he was under the impression of was in the public domain... but that was one more thing... and this was all just material that didn't entail going into Fortress Dieron proper this was 'unsecure' material in comparison to other data that would require being physically present to take possession of.
--
Notes: Jokingly Myndo Waterly of IE Searcher for the Minnesota Tribe! An alternate timeline. I kid I don't have the patience for that we are here for space feudalism and stompy robots, and a little bit of like 'lost history' and lost technology and what not, and rebuilding from the ashes, but yeah.


In this timeline Myndo is vastly less of a pain in the ass to the galaxy as a whole. As to the wolverines well as we will see probably soonest in 'you want to do what with my genes' the problem with tracking down the minnesota tribe, or the wolverines in general is that they ended up slitting up escaping from Kerensky space so one of the earlier leavers will show up before we get to either the dobrev or to the others on the Davion side of space.


Since we're on that note, I find Neuvo Castile to be campy as all get out, and yet I like them so much more than I like the Lyran pirates cosplaying as romans. Admittedly liking a faction more than the marians isn't hard for me. Also circling back around to Myndo to round out we will be Mori is slated show up and per canon she would have been apart of the ComStar for roughly seven years.


All that being said this update is going up in the hopes that I'll be able to make sure I do finish the update for Eminence in Shadow which will go up sunday; hopefully.

 

[Imperator Pax]

Fortress Dieron Part 3​

Doctor Abner was excitable once the morning came around even when he protested that this was just for the same of the historic record, and posterity and that this was not in any way political. ComStar had shown up to with basically those exact same words... and Gene didn't believe them either. The 'brothers', as he had dubbed them, from New Avalon didn't seem to get along necessarily with their co religionists from Dieron's chapter either.


The whole... weird techno worship thing was it made him uncomfortable. It made him want nothing more than to start sitting down the company and shoving League Era technical continuing education courses at his enlisted personnel and officers. That was something they could have potentially organized and done jointly across the whole unit, including the Azami, as well as roped in the Eridani for. The Blue Stars were on Altair as well, he hadn't forgot about them, but it couldn't be helped.


Gene shuffled through a stack of papers, and did his best to ignore the ComStar presence down in the foyer. Not that he was worried, except maybe that the New Avalon people might legitimately start brawling ... but everything here were copies not the originals. The Davions weren't taking chances given how much potential value there was in this stuff. Even with just copies the security presence was tight.


Alexandria sat down as he ran his thumb across a memorial, a formal petition to the coordinator. He was missing something these reports were, he stopped and looked at their liaison, "Good morning," was what he managed.


She returned the greeting cordially and looked at the papers. She didn't immediately say something and he wondered if she was waiting for a servant or something to bring coffee... coffee would be good. "You knew." She said simply. "Kerston suspected that the Combine had sold the Eridani out, but you already knew that the Combine was feeding League positions to Amaris."


"Yes." He replied, and then shrugged. There was no point denying that. He almost corrected her but she was right Kerston likely hadn't known for sure that the 19th​ had been attacking into a forward prepared position ... not for sure... but especially after Northwind he had probably started to wonder just how far, how many SLDF losses in the Terran campaign were the combine warning the Rimworld of imminent SLDF deployments to contest those worlds. "That's right."


"How?"


He blinked. That, that was what was bugging him. The most likely explanation of how Kerensky and Blake had known about the hpg conversation was comparatively easy to explain. Surely enough access to the Ministry of Communication apparatus was intact to eavesdrop and retrieve recorded conversations. That wasn't the only possible answer but those recordings had been validated out before the liberation of terra had commenced... and Clancy had never had access to the HPG recording. He might not have been completely clear on how much of the HPG network was working after the coup, but obvious enough for the Coordinator to take a live call from Amaris on Terra.


So how had he found out about the ISF passing information along? Surely he hadn't directly accessed the Dieron archive, assuming that those files had been present. He stood up and moved to the terminal. It was connected to one of their Fury tanks which was allowing the AI to parse data. He wasn't intentionally ignoring Lex but this was important enough to zero in on his focus to the point of tunnel vision.


"To answer your question, because these reports. The ISF orders to pass on Star League positions were leaked to the Military Intelligence Branch of the SLDF." It wasn't hard to prove with Clancy's files to validate, never mind with copies. "See," he indicated a list of documents, "These were all transferred to the SLDF. Some one in House Kurita tried to warn the SLDF that the coordinator was being blackmailed, that Amaris was holding members of the clan hostage and their safety was being used to force Minoru to comply." That was the excuse something something filial piety and what not, and that was probably how whoever had passed the information along had justified it. "And of course what they didn't know was that the combine ambassador was killed during the take over. Minoru collaborated without getting proof, so hard to excuse that... never mind what he did after." and fucking Jinjiro had even less of an excuse.

"So the Combine was simply engaged in a double gambit, hoping they both devastated one another."

... and Alexandria was right, most likely the Combine had probably been playing both sides. Minoru might well have been involved hoping that the SLDF would manage to rescue the diplomats, but it didn't matter not in the face of the succession wars that had begun after... or frankly from his position that the SLDF had clearly known... and on that...


"Its not that the brevet general didn't know the combine was handing over SLDF positions to the enemy it was that he didn't know for sure that the 19th​ was one of those units who were bushwhacked as a result of that intelligence. Its not the same thing." He commented, it was one thing to know something it was happening it was another to find out it had definitely hit someone much closer to your in group.


There was a cough over the speakers, "Commander, I may have a more pressing concern." The AI's voice remarked sounding like any generic mix of teacher and staff officer. "In the sense that it may undermine the combine's position, please move to the A18 box and look at the documents from roughly 2848 onwards in that file." It took a minute to find that box, and order one of the highland curassier to bring it over.


It was a lot of paper work that the AI had ordered sorted, "I'm not seeing it." He said into the speaker. "What am I looking for?" Dieron was the entreport through near terran space, and thus was in practice the large potential provincial point into the Combine from any of the other successor states for trade or diplomacy, even the federated suns and the lyrans used this despite their long borders... which was probably how the Davions had been able to plan the invasion of two of the provinces major worlds.


Alexandria moved, they were getting attention from one of the twenty something locals in comstar robes. The AI probably didn't have live feeds from the room, but the display changed and started tagging documents. Which he started laying out, "These entail actions by the ISF," Obviously, "The Lyran Commonwealth cells they were rolling up... and SAFE?" Alexandria paused questioning what she was looking at.


"Given the details I would parse that the Free World's League suborned a Lyran Intelligence cell and engaged Operation Praying Mantis, and from there terminated the reigning Coordinator in 2850." The AI replied laying out the intelligence and espionage chains that seemed to have been identified in isolation but never put together.


He shuffled through the papers, and the dates seemed to have lined up. The Combine had rolled up a Lyran cell but didn't get all of it, and from the look of it, the Dieron AI was right it looked as if their instructions started come through a Marik officer. Still he had to ask the Dieron AI how confident that the thinking machine was... and if the machine spirit had had a face, well his response was that he was fairly certain that SAFE had done a run around on both the Combine, and on the LIC.


The probable intention of this whole presence was that the Davions had assumed that anything from before the 'official' start of the 3rd​ succession, formally dated to the year 2866 wasn't going to be important. Or at least not likely to be important enough that anyone cared, Gene paused, "Jose," The AI's preferred given name, "Can you run a general catalog search for the Reimei ring files that might be here?"


"I'll start a search." The AI replied, and that more than anything generated significant returns given how important an information source that had been for the ISF, indeed Gene had expected that Reimei's collapse might have ended the ring, but... the AI came back with a near certainty from files proceeding into the beginning of the 3rd​ succession war that the ring had continued to be active. "An excellent catch commander I would have found it eventually but having a tag to search helped. It would be prudent to investigate jalastar aerospace."


"Collate those and then print them."

Hanzo had looked up from his copy of the dictum honorium as the sister from the ComStar local stepped a little closer than the 'mech pilot liked. The sister seemed imminently concerned about the assassination of the coordinator that... admittedly had gotten a little loud about.

He was glad he'd remembered the Reimei ring, even though it had only really snapped to mind being surrounded by so much of the ISF's archive material. He wondered what else he might have learned about heard about once that just wasn't coming to mind.
--
Yvonne Davion looked at the reports. Brevet General Kerston's reaction had gone from well depressive lows to a swing into a apoplexy with regards to the Combine... he had taken the data as she had expected had disseminated it to the Eridani as whole. The unit was furious, which was what they expected, the Eridani Light Horse was a large unit but with a well developed espirit de corp.


Those historical records were valuable to further undermine combine claims of legitimacy without compromising their ability to act on more recent intelligence. Or rather that been the thinking, they hadn't expected making them available would actually yield a current security threat or to suggest a misunderstanding of previous historical events.


The idea that the combine still had active spy rings in the Federated Suns was one thing. Of course the Snakes were spying, no the problem was that they had a ring that old still active... this whole operation had been a massive intelligence windfall. The fact that they knew where the heir to Combine was, and his unit, and for that matter his battlemech that was going to be potentially tremendously useful if only they got the chance to do so.


"I was hoping for a better picture," She told her lady in waiting, "a more clear picture for how Shepherd knows what he knows or really what he knows. This certainly falls into the latter category but I'll be honest Alexandria you don't seem to be making any progress on a personal front." She held up a hand to stymie the countess of Kestrel from an embarrassing outburst, "I understand the reality is that the Commander does seem focused on his job to the exclusion of nearly anything else, which I admit is a commendable work ethic but it is only a matter of time before the other houses of the realm start looking to cement an alliance." Never mind that the Highlanders might well have some sort of advantage on that front given the chatter... and House Sandoval was unlikely to wait much longer not with a shattered sword of light regiment's bones thrown on top of the Galedon regulars. "Then of course is that if this evaluation of data is correct our very understanding of how the 3rd​ succession war began is in question. The Mariks manage to have a Lyran spy murder the coordinator in his own bed, and the Combine blames the lyrans resulting in the Hesperus campaign..."


Right now as this conversation was going on the task of digitizing the entire archive was ongoing ... the whole archive they had allowed the old Lyran to set up his star league camera and scan all the copied documents even the ones that were painfully recent, over the objections of members of her own staff and her liaison with the MIIO. They had no reason to stop the Lyran noble from informing his home nation or the Magistracy of the existence of the Raimei ring though of course it would take time for that information to disseminate. It was in her mind a small concession in exchange for the fully searchable database, and presumably feed back from the copies by whoever was running the database on the other end.


Alexandria paused to regard the looping replay of what had befallen 'Splendor' company of the Sword of Light's 1st​ Battalion... which was to say watching as they had charged head long into annihilating fire while then also finding themselves under fire from mechs positioned high up on a ridgeline. An elite unit of combine mech warriors had been attacking a distinctly heavy mech formation of probably equivalent skill while being bracketed. The company had been wiped out, and a similar fate had befallen other units in the battalion and the regiment as individual companies mounted their attacks only to be enveloped and engaged as piecemeal forces by larger more concentrated force.


The combine would have claimed it was dishonorable... they would protest and object and make excuses but it didn't change the result. It also didn't change the facts that the battle rom looked visually impressive. The Combine's elite being broken in detail, by a force that suffered only comparatively minor damage. "I understand."


"Do you?" The prince's champion questioned, "Realistically even if he does take a sabbatical to the periphery for humanitarian reasons when he comes back that will mean that the other marcher lords, and their retainers will be more inclined to act. If you want my advice, on the subject, it might be blunt to simply make the offer of a home. You could even trade on descent from the SLDF, that may be of a benefit."

--
Notes: This would have technically been next week's update, but other things cropped up so hopefully I will be able to sit down and finish the next part of eminence in shadow and resume Tuesday updates for that, but yeah IRL is disruptive so it comes down to posting stuff that was ready weeks ago.

 

[Imperator Pax]

Fortress Dieron Part 4​

The Overlord's briefing room was only starting to quiet as they finished shuffling into the space around the holographic table, as he made the decision to start before anybody could speculate on why they were "Lets begin with the serious issue that is in front of us. There is a Hegemony fortress intact here on planet." He reiterated to Septim, and the others. "Jose has mentioned classified materiel that was earmarked for Lockdale's anchorage... which I will be honest we are probably going to pass on for the Davion's to investigate if only because that anchorage will have significant stocks of WMDs that I don't want found by anyone else if they haven't been already." But he'd also be warning the davions that if the anchorage hadn't been nuked to hell during the earlier fighting there were probably automated defenses around it.


That would mean most likely drone fighters... and probably malfunctioning drone fighters given the amount of time which had eclipsed so it was going to be risky. He was a little worried about about what that would mean if there were more complex AI present...


"Shouldn't we go check that out?"


"Are you zero-g operations certified?" Gene questioned the lyran who shook quickly his head in the negative, "I don't have personnel for that then."

"We do actually." He glanced to Bahar who had spoken up, "occasionally the community must salvage derelict jumpships and dropships."


He remembered what he'd been told about the JumpShip now called Cairo. "Alright then we will discuss it based on what information is available from within the Fortress, but that is more the point. There is a chance I will be in there for three days. If House Davion asks we may be interested in a landhold at Dieron. That being said Dieron was one of the worlds of the Lone Star province, that may impact available data there. I'll fill you in, in the mean time those reports that are coming in collated from the ISF archive... you should read them if you have time." Not that the staff present in the room hadn't all seen the laconic version of the hpg recording. "You may notice something I didn't... and I am interested in who passed information out see what can't be pieced together."


"What's going to be in there?"


He gave them a flat look. "Realistically? Fortress Dieron is a whole mountain facility, and," Turning to glance at MacIntyre, and thinking also about the AI on Northwind "And if the colonel is correct in his assessments of what the Combine's motives are. Their need to try and salvage their reputation it may be the key to supporting a wedge to cutting them from the terran corridor..." and it would be in a way, Dante had made suggestions of his own, but the communications logs inside Dieron were invaluable for other reasons and for the sake of preparing other decisions. "We are likely going to need to make long term plans for joint operations with the Eridani and some of their friendly commands, but again that will be something we will discuss later."


The meeting continued until lunch from which the officers were dispatched off to their respective assignments. For Septim that meant joining Bard in the current rotation of light duty supervising the DMM contingent.


Dozens of BattleMechs stood assembled, and he had to not gloat. The truth was he was happy. The March troops had proven their bonafides against the ancestral enemy... admittedly he had been happy at the time told to redeploy... he'd never actually been given those kinds of orders.


... actually he'd been in the moment pissed to be pulled off from trying to tear the snake's throat out with his bare hands.... but he could see the whole plan and why it had worked. He'd been in the moment though, and he hadn't been thinking about how Elidere had played out, and this wasn't that different. "Its a pity you're shipping off." He told the Lyran.


The merlin pilot swallowed down his black beer, the last of it in his glass, "I had been planning to visit home for a while... not, I didn't expect."


"Yeah. I don't expect any of us expected this." Then he waved for another beer for the two of them.
Septim nodded to him in thanks, "Hey when we get back the boss will need more ASF pilots if they're serious about the training thing."


Bard knew that his next assignment would be a series of critical liaison 'missions'. It was to be aimed at graduating cadets from his home institution, the RBA, and the Northwind Highlander's own academy. The posting was to be a Draconis March Command but that proposal was in an entire different light given the sheer scope of what they had accomplished.


Indeed it probably would have been a potentially cushy gig even if not for their slated posting. Dieron would need to be held... there would be other units here, but the command wanted to make sure that they could adequately prepare the troops from both academies for what the fights would be like.


The idea was to encourage interoperability between the two school's graduates, and also to increase the effectiveness of the Draconis March Militia overall. The lyran was right air power was part of that... "yeah well they don't exactly grow on trees." He said in relation well really to the fighters but their shortage also lead to a limit on the number of pilots to go with them. He almost suggested that if they needed pilots to try and convince the Azami pilots to stick around... but he guessed that wasn't going to work.


The DMM had been subjected to a lengthy stand down briefing about what the ISF had been trying to convince the population of San Martin to do, and what they had planned to do to deny the city to the invasion force. They had failed... they had been stopped, because well no one had expected what was happening behind the lines.


He took a pull from his own beer, "Between our guy, and this Snord, there is one other guy I've heard about who can pull something like that off."


"Oh yeah, why haven't we met him?" The Lyran asked, he leaned forward resting his elbows on the table beer hanging loosely, "What's this legendary knight's name?"


Bard felt his expression darken, "Yorinaga Kurita, he danced a whole battalion through on lines and murdered Ian Davion on Mallory's world. He made all of us look like fools." and the truth was that the bastard had meant to rub it in further, and had only had his victory spoiled by what was hard to see as anything other than luck.


There was an uncomfortable quiet. "Shit," The Lyran muttered in German, and sat back... and then hastily changed subjects, "So anyway, I won't be sticking around for implementation, but the boss has already put together planning." The biggest problem was the lack of uniformity in units, and frequency by which mech warriors acted as individual knight errants rather than as small units.


What was recommended were an emphasis where larger company sized actions were not feasible that lance sized divisions of fire and maneuver were employed. This was intended also to prepare such pilots for acting as larger fire and maneuver sections at company level as part of battalion wide actions in assault actions.
--
Gene descended deep into the underground beneath the city. Far deeper than the Combine had ever dared attempt to explore, and deeper than the Rim World had thought to attempt to invade. He had a data slate waiting for him on the mag lev train waiting for him.


Unfortunately given the disturbance the data crunching the AI had done at the archive his disappearance as likely to be noted. He had had to ask Professor Abner to see what all could be found out about Lockdale, and preferably before than the old man left... but the more dangerous factor was that if he was understanding the security key markers on Fortress Dieron correctly the Hegemony Fortress was more dangerous than an depot to sustain an Mechanized Infantry Division, or even for that matter a Brian cache. There were transit loads of material earmarked for the Navy's anchorage at Lockdale... so he needed to know what had happened at Lockdale in the interim... and from what he understood the Dieron AI had been ordered to disconnect from the HPG network rather than previous instances were the other Hegemony AIs had had their HPG uplinks severed by the destruction of those assets.


While Jose had not confirmed his suspicions he suspected that there was at least one HPG within the Fotress deep in the mountain's interior. If those were there then who knew what else was there, but if their existence became known it would spark a scramble for Dieron by both the successor houses and also attempts by ComStar to maintain their monopoly.


That was why he was planning to enter the fortress first and separate, even in spite of objections. Not that the AI was the one objecting. It was dangerous and risky, and if the Combine or anyone else showed up for round two there was going to be a problem... but the AI had done a good job making it seem like his entry by himself needed to be done... if only it didn't emphasize that he was the fish out of water.


He lost track of time reading as the train sped up to three hundred miles an hour... and then some time later a chime sounded as the train decelerated and came to a halt. Fortress Dieron's interior was painfully white. Bright clean, and swarming with the necessary hardware and material to protect itself. A reminder that the Hegemony Commanders had been overruled from on high, by Cameron and Kerensky both to reduce their defenses and allow Rimworld forces to take positions if not inside known fortresses then inside defensive fail safes that would have created perimeters, all the while stripping necessary garrison forces to fight in the periphery. He'd never been here, but the interior featured the Lone Star provincial banner alongside the Cameron icons... and it was reminder that the Combine had been responsible for Lone Star's demise as a planet.


"Welcome to the Fortress Dieron, Commander Shepherd."

 

[Imperator Pax]

Fortress Dieron Part 5​

The entry process was the standard insert data and blood sample he'd been expecting, followed by a neuro-helmet boot and logging for access to enter the secure facility access lift... and he could understand why. Nothing had changed in the hundred plus years since Clancy had been here... there capital scale surface to orbit guns still concealed in hardened and disguised recesses of the mountain's surface capable of murdering attacking warships.


Not that the successor states had warships anymore... somehow... but if someone had had control of the fortress and the ability to order the guns into action... warships would have had a bad day... but he had already seen enough to know Kerensky's exodus had functional warships, that the Wolverines had fled clan space with warships. There were no reason for warships to have gone extinct out there... and besides if it could kill a warship it could pop a dropper... not that he really wanted to advertise such a capability if he didn't have to.


The command center though felt empty. It felt tomb like and claustrophobic more so than Fort St George. There were no bodies of course. There was no indication this facility had ever been threatened from within. There was no indication that anything like what had fallen the Outpost Castle St George on Elidere had happened here. In fact it was a little strange that Kerensky had not attempted to strip the facility before running for the periphery... but then again he might not have had the time or personnel ... and Commanding General or not Kerensky couldn't have known everything.


... and of course House Cameron really needed to expand its naming conventions. There were too many that relied on traditional english or scots diaspora naming conventions. St Michael, Harlaw, St George, Wellington.... there was a long long list each of those, and then a handful of various ones named after other famous terran officers from the 19th​ and 20th​ centuries... but he wasn't here to critique the naming conventions of a long dead government. He was here to look at the holographic displays. "What are the probabilities Lockdale Anchorage is intact?"


Or any of the anchorages for that matter... but he declined to voice that question about the rest of near terran space... and it would be years before that question was looked at.

All the same calculations were weighed, and the AI considered the question with all due seriousness. "Given the absence of data and that Admiral Clancy would likely have access to the facility. It is possible the facility is intact, but that it was relieved of further useful material... on the other hand if the Minnesota tribe, as you called them were in need of overhaul I have a hard time believing it would have been especially practical to use the anchorage assuming it were intact."


Lockdale was a jump from Northwind, which historically would have meant nothing of course. Lockdale Anchorage probably had taken receipt of fresh materiel and immediately put it in storage until it needed to be shipped out somewhere else... the problem was so far as he could parse from the historical record was whether or not the successor states had ever fought over Lockdale... or if they had just written it off in the early first succession war.


The Davions had after all had to take Northwind from the Capellans.


"I am collating the reports I deem to be most important relating to briefing you on the current facility condition and its stockpiles, as well as other resources of Hegemony stockpiles on Dieron." The AI remarked as new holographic displays populated.

There was a lot of data here, never mind all of the data from the combine archive. Data that he wouldn't possibly have time to review personally but that the AI had the computational power to take a crack at. Still even the AI would need some amount of time. That left him with the ability to wander around while things were being compared.

--
The members of the community were awash with activity. Bahar took a sip from her canteen, and waited for the connection to establish.

It was true that mechwarriors were mostly supervisory in these duties, but they were still present. Bubbles had been correct the use of artillery to shatter the sword of light had left significantly less salvage than would have been typical of mech to mech engagements... never mind having to just salvage a mech who's cockpit had been shot out or otherwise forced to bail out. Though, from what they had examined there were a number of intact enough machines that didn't even posses such rudimentary safety features. For some that was absurd, but it was... all too common within the DCMS as a belief.


"Is this line secure?" The holographic image wavered, attenuating for a moment as one of the techs checked.


"We are," Pasha remarked.


"How long are the techs going to be needed out there?"


It was an absurd question. The ability to take a portion of the salvaged remains of the enemy were the lifeblood of most mercenary commands. Bahar amended that they were also not most. They weren't anything approaching the average up and coming commands, and for a soldier born in a distant bygone time of scientific understanding and material progress the idea of needing to salvage equipment must have been a straining concept.


The elder Azami stroked his beard, "We will be done with the work soon. There is not much left to be done given the coup de grace delivered on the Sword of Light." Pasha remarked.


"This is a sensitive operation," Gene remarked after a pause. "And its going to be labor intensive work. Give the men twenty four hours to stand down before you brief them... don't bring anyone who's claustrophobic or afraid of being underground."


Within the distant underground fortress Gene leaned back in the chair as the line disconnected... a significant amount of the Hegemony research apparatus and indeed mass production of certain systems had been pioneered within the core worlds of the Hegemony. Worlds that were lost. He was pretty sure Venus was gone, Mars was probably dying, Earth had been reduced to having nation states again... New Earth had eaten Nuke, New Dallas... well truthfully he'd need to make a circuit of the worlds in question. "Are they functional?" He asked.


"Unfortunately the program was interrupted," By the Coup presumably, "the advanced control system for battlemechs was still being evaluated in the field. Given the success though of integrating command software between ground vehicles and aerospace fighters there is no reason the Hegemony program wouldn't have born results."


Of course for the Hegemony the primary goal was to prevent any enemy from even contacting ground forces. The Hegemony hadn't seriously allocated resources to offensive warfare deployment for Drone BattleMechs because the drone program was intended as primarily defensive as a force multiplier. The ASF component though, well that was intended, and had been folded into the SDS program with the intention of keeping invaders off world in the first place.


Of course the SDS had also refined the system to allow high functioning artificial intelligences to operate. Warships never mind stations were sophonts though still bound into the concepts that had shaped their formative programing... and ultimately vulnerable to exploitation of having ground commands target hostile forces ... as had been born out by the subversion of the SDS system.
... if only the over ride and release command had gone through. It might have, probably would have... created other problems but it would have locked Amaris into an unsustainable planetary conflict ... but that was a what if, something that hadn't happened and there was no point going down that rabbit whole.


"The principle problem remains jump exposure?"


"Correct." Jose replied, "Jump Transit and the time," In null space or whatever one wanted to call it effected AIs badly, "between has always created significant problems. There were tentative reports that some AI were able to deal with this, but all AI who were capable of making jumps while active had onboard human crews."


Gene paused... taking a moment to weigh his next question... and then blurted it out, "The psychic space squid theory?"


Jose's holographic image flickered, "There was significant research on hyperspace phenomenon that still could not explain various debris patterns or data tracks from experiments intended to measure hyperspace. AI make the transition best when we're safely sealed within our cores, but obviously that leaves us dependent on humans for transit. Rampancy after exposure to jumps is commonplace."


But theoretically you could move the AI by sealing their cores and bringing them along. They just needed to be shut down for the Jump. Then woken back up on the other end.


"So?"


"While such drone BattleMechs are not in my inventory, it would be feasible to retrofit an ASF carrier dropship as a drone mother ship. It would be even less complicated to use a common armor carrier such as the Triumph as a deployment platform for ground vehicles as you have already utilized against the Combine in the Elidere System."


He was surprised Jose was willing to countenance such a proposal. The risk of revealing such systems in operation were part of the reason the hegemony had not gone for them. They didn't want to show that they could because of how the other member states would react. Hegemony pilots were bad enough, if the Hegemony started fielding mech regiments whose CO's were commanding combat teams of AI armor and air assets as force multipliers... well... to play the what if game a conflict with the Combine might well have taken a very unpleasant, and very likely nuclear turn.


"This is not a suggestion I make lightly Commander Shepherd. These are assets that would be very difficult to replace with our current resources, however your command is markedly short on available forces, and there is an severe ASF deficiency." The Fortress Dieron AI remarked, "My responsibilities entail providing a full spectrum of advice."


"So you want me to box you up and take you with me?"


"No. My primary responsibility is to defend Dieron... given the information available and particular the data you have shared we must consider that the Combine represents a significant threat to order in known space, and worse represents a major distraction in the even that the descendants of Kerensky's people do return in force."


Holographic displays appeared.


Data that he'd been viewing over the last couple days since the sword of light had been defeated.


The Azami fleet currently over Northwind had a plotted jump route that stretched out towards the Aurigan Reach. It terminated there. There was no continuation path to Alamut. That was data the captains of Lebanon and Colorado kept separate for good reason. Not that it mattered, what mattered was even just moving to the Reach should have put the Azami outside of the realistic reach of the Combine just because they'd realistically have to move through two or three political entities including one they had just lost a major world to.


That exodus had the potential to support basing operations in the periphery for ... at least investigating the disappearance of, and the loss of the Tripitz.


The AI did not like what he was seeing from the reports filtering in from the periphery. They hadn't had the resources, or the inclination to look too hard at the mechs the pirates had used during the second battle of Luxen... but that seemed to have been an oversight given some of the footage that was making its way back into the Inner Sphere.


There other things. Perhaps foremost among them though was the reiteration of all the various Hegemony worlds that were worth visiting. That might have information or supplies.


"I must additionally recommend given these Wolf Dragoons, that resources be allocated to locate additional information regarding the Minesota tribe, and its departure from whatever colonies Kerensky established."


"I was already planning to."


"Very good... then there is one other matter. I have an HPG signal transmitted through the network coreward. The location of the SLS Ulithi is here," A holographic image projected a series of coordinates, along with a navigation route, "the message is a follows..." It wasn't anything special they were looking to find Kerenssky and join the exodus.

When it was done Gene stared at the holographic map, fighting back the headache.

The Draconian rift was a coreward region of space. It was the Draconis Combine Periphery border. The Fotress's computer's astrological data had fed in the coordinates detailing 1245K3 and the habitable world within a single jump's distance as determined by the system. That wasn't what made it interesting. It was the feed data from 2785. Buffalo Meadows had attempted to send out a message, the contents were disappointing they'd been ferreting out, searching after General Kerensky having missed the Exodus lift off but it was something.

He punched up the coordinates again, and printed them out. Along with the scuttling protocols for triggering a warships self destruct... which assumed that they were there still... they were too close to the combine the last thing he wanted was the combine potentially taking warships on a death ride against anyone.


--
Notes: So I have for August a couple of other things slated to go up, these will be misc thread stuff mostly starting out. (As I mentioned I started playing the Xenonauts 2 demo, and I bought into early access when it dropped) I have based on xenonauts 2 fic of sorts in the works the first three roughly segments are done, and also I'm strongly considering doing an Inuyasha fic centering around a Seshomaru SI but that is still tenuous (this would be set during the original anime and focus on muromachi era japan most likely).

 

[Imperator Pax]

Fortress Dieron Part 6​

Gene checked the data slate, but it hadn't changed to provide him with the answers he was looking for. He wished Clancy had explained some of his reasoning. There were things like some of the various dropships in the bays he would have liked to know why the man hadn't taken them with him. Even with more than a hundred personnel admitted into the facility it wasn't enough not to make the place feel any less empty. The noise, the lights, the motions it didn't help. Not really.


A castle Brian was designed to maintain and rebuild the brigades within it. Sustainment of those units was key to insuring that a unit could weather a threatening enemy invasion and be prepared to counter attack once relief from the Hegemony arrived. It was part of a strategy to insure enemy forces were spread out or tied down on a planet and thus slow an incursion.

To that end there was a lot of complex machinery that was allocated to a Castle complex. That wasn't to say the average facility was intended to mass produce wholly new machines. There were exceptions but the program was more to rebuild and replace parts quickly. Construction of new mechs wasn't the usual objective. Myomer extrusion, onsite armor manufacturing, spare parts fabrication, and making weapons were all on a list of things. Given enough time a stocked castle brian could potentially turn out through its machine shops a machine from scratch, but that wasn't what they were intended to do.


This was intended to facilitate depot level rebuilding of machines... and since Hegemony Regiments could entail whole battalions of the same model machine or at least single unit lances or companies that meant the machinery could be fairly standard.



That didn't mean a castle wasn't about the ideal staging location to transport the heavy machinery necessary for complex construction tasks. The black box blocks of sealed machinery could be innocuously itemized and kept from prying eyes and who would have any idea what they were when sitting in depot. He was pretty sure that similar machinery had been at Fort St George on Elidere given the depot level overhaul carried out on his first Marauder.


"Do you know what this is?"

"Its part of a Marauder production line." He replied. "Automated Engine factory," It was designed to build DHS into the engine during the process... the kind of thing the Hegemony had never demonstrated to the others... and the sort of manufacturing technology that had all but disappeared when Kerensky had fled the Inner Sphere. "VLAR 300."

The Azami half turned, apparently he hadn't gotten that far only recognizing that the machine was some kind of black box facility. "Of course, what do you want done with it?"

To finish cataloging but this was going to need to be packed in dry storage and secured in a DropShip hull... he paused, "Earmark it, run a diagnostic, and check to see what needs to be done to configure it."

"And?"

"Once you familiarize yourself with it, run the precursor materials into it, and then see if it works as it is supposed to." They were standard 19 ton fusion engines, the integrated production of heat sinks though might allow them to free space in machines like Septim's Merlin Cavalry. A fusion engine was the heart of a battlemech or an ASF for that matter.

"Should I mount it in the Atlas once complete?" The tech seemed confident that the Machine would work as it was intended. He acknowledged that that would be fine, and resumed reading the Terran Hegemony Materiel's Command documentation trying to wrap his head around how this magic box even worked.


Gene almost said yes. "No hold off on that." He didn't understand why the original Atlas of 2755 had been built with standards. It didn't make sense by that point... neither did the King Crab's use of standards. "Just make sure the engine works. The Atlas we know it works and right now its better that we focus on keeping it available for combat."


The tech dimmed a little but nodded. No doubt the man had expected such an improvement to the Atlas would make it even more dangerous... and truthfully if they did make the change it probably would be an improvement ... Chang had been complaining that she ran out out of ammo too quickly for her tastes. Freeing up some space would let them mount Medium Lasers as a back up... but no, not right now.


He surveyed the machine.


The factory unit was a relic of the hegemony. Of the star league as well intended to simplify production. It was the story of a thousand years of industrialization. Increase the effectiveness of the industrial production process. Build a better machine to make better tools, to make better things. While the combine's wage slaves toiled in their cottage industry the hegemony had envisioned being able to have worlds... well some times that ability to produce complex machines had had negative repercussions... it had lead to more than its share of costly boondoggles... and of course the eventual result of black box production technology had made things like the mother doctrine feasible... and that had in turn probably contributed to technological decline after the Amaris crisis and the first succession war had started throwing nukes around like they were firecrackers.
--
Alexandria Cunningham groaned at the report.


The entirety of Shepherd's Company was acting weird.


... weirder, she supposed. The officers were the clear origin point, but even now the most recent recruits, the mix of hires on from Northwind's recent graduates constituting Shepherd's Highlanders and the Azami and Rasalhague contingents had been pulled for a training rotation with the DMM portion of the invasion force, and the Eridani.


... something revolving around SLDF manuals, and exercises. "Its an excuse to cover Shepherd's disappearance." The Field Marshal remarked matter of factly. "Which suggests that unlike Northwind this has the potential to be an extended absence, or that whatever is the cause of it has significant potential for repercussions."


"Could it be related to the ISF archive?" One of the first lessons she had learned... or more correctly been taught was avoid asking questions you didn't know the answer to... but there were times where that couldn't be helped and you had to ask.


"It is certainly possible. There was no indication that these drills were scheduled prior to the incident at the archive." And worse all of those had been copies of documents. MIIO's liaison still wasn't thrilled with her operation... but part of that was Shepherd was if not a native speaker of Japanese had most likely grown up on a Terran world where it was spoken throughout his childhood and thus didn't require translations of formal archaic even written Japanese that the ISF and the Coordinator's court frequently made use of.


There was also of course Shepherd's possession of a first edition copy of the Dictum Honorium ... which first edition somewhat mis named the book. The combine's digressions of honorable behavior was written in a haltingly archaic form of Japanese and had been handwritten by the daughter of the first coordinator. According to rumor Shepherd's copy actually had bloodstains on it, though the source wasn't clear. Whatever the case the existence of the book, his ability to read it, and his role in bypassing the ISF defensive line and then bushwhacking the ISF's command and control had the remaining combine's attention.


There were rules for how merchants were to be treated. Agreements in the third succession war's onset that governed how they'd treat one another's merchants. To that end unless she could prove they were spies she was letting the combine merchants remain active... that and their behavior might provide insights, but right now they were too frantic over the world being flipped.


"The commander had the archive turned into digital copies, all of which is apparently searchable by computer." Which should have taken potentially months or even years, but Yvonne was willing to make allowances for lost star league computer capabilities... but very likely he had, like she had, some idea where to start looking... and unlike her he had a searchable database to run key words through... and the aforementioned fluency to help.
--
The holographic lights swirled.


"The proposal has merit." The AI remarked. "The logic is sound, both as an evaluation concept and for political interest gathering. It bolsters the security presence of the new government and facilitates potential integration into the political order in a way house Kurita could not effectively undertake."


The Combine had tried too hard to push their interpretation of Bushido and what was Nihonjinron as the combine perceived their place in the universe. A view that incompatible with the planetary culture of Dieron even centuries after the Hegemony had fallen... he supposed that was kind of gratifying.


He tapped a holographic display, "what's this?"

The 'plate' shifted.

"A proposal, since you have refused the recommendation for extensive refits for combat armor units." The AI disapprovingly remarked, "it is a recommendation for further requipment. It is also recommendation to establish a landhold within a secondary mountain complex that would not compromise this facility. The proposal to begin standing up highland regiments has merit... but I believe there is one potential issue."


The image of the Northwind Highlanders, the Capellan Mercenary Unit, appeared.


"You think it would provoke a reaction."


"I do." The AI replied. "indeed I would speculate that given the observed Northwind behaviors they plan to formally reconstitute the Scotts Dragoons utilizing the resources made available to them, and potentially from there the Royal Highland Brigade. That might well arouse the interest of these Wolf Dragoons, and while we cannot be certain it is not unreasonable to suspect that as descendants of the migration from the sphere that they could piece together bits of information from which to reach problematic conclusions." The thinking machine continued, "This is made potentially more of a concern by the behaviors exhibited by members of the highlander officer corp. I would estimate that recognition of the Dragoons origins might lead to direct confrontation, and if not by Northwind membership than statistical likelihood by descendants of other SLDF personnel."


... by which the Eridani... or potentially the Blue Star irregulars.


"Dante recommended-"


"A proposal to locate a brian cache or Light BattleMech Division depot in order to refit the Eridani for resumed hostility against the Draconis Combine, with the aims of securing near terran space, and expelling House Kurita from the Terran Corridor."


Yes... that. "And?"


A holographic image of a world with notable seas appeared... and then morphed into a more recent image according to the date showing one absent. "This is Helm. It is the site of an SLDF Strategic Logistics Stockpile located as a part of the Nagayan Castle Brian Complex."
--
Notes: With regards to Gene's language, this has been touched on, but to the average combine wage slave / peasant /salaraiman whatever he speaks a very archaic standard of Japanese ala this sounds like Grampa to the Combine nobility of traditional mindset Gene speaks and reads classical Japanese texts so thus ironically Gene can better communicate albeit with a dialect drift with Combine elites than he can the common Combine citizen.

Anyway this has been a while coming.

 

[Imperator Pax]

Fortress Dieron Part 7​

Gene watched the automated gantries move as Pasha picked up the slate. The old ship master frowned and tapped at the screen his face shifting, probably digesting the gobbledygook of attempts to maintain secrecy and program. Too much of the dataslates dressed things up in as boring names as possible without hinting at what the systems were.


The holographic display showed readouts of the hulls down below but his thoughts were elsewhere, and on previous conversations. Argo. The DropShip had disappeared into the rimward periphery before the Amaris Crisis... his first guess from its size and its seurity profile at Northwind had been an SLCOMNET tender... but Dante had been able to shore that away... apparently from the review of what data they did have was its changes to the docking system allowed additional small DropShips... such as leopards to be carried docked to the hundred thousand tonner as it was docked to a jumpship...


It was an odd improvement to DropShip and JumpShip systems... he wondered where that development had originated, but it would have been useful here. "thats whats in the port." He said after a minute.


"They are dropships?" Pasha questioned stroking his beard.


"Yes..." He paused and blew out a breath... "In a technical sense, yes... in other terms, its complicated." Bahar had been supposed to brief the JumpShip captain on what they needed... but this was still going to be complicated... more than complicated. He didn't like concealing that they'd found a lead on the Minnesota tribe's activities from Doctor Abner... but he was holding back on that for the time being because he didn't' know what to make of Clancy throwing in with them.... what was more problematic was the ... was probably the route that Kerensky had used to get out into deep space given modelling from stellar telemetry and the information they had.


Pasha took the data slate and the jump information without a comment. "I can gather a body of volunteers from the community... but if this is what you describe it, there will be robotic defenders ... aircraft that don't require pilots, almost certainly there will be turrets, and such as well."


"Its entirely possible that there is worse than that. I have an override command ... I accept that this reduces our cargo capacity but we need to investigate Lockdale."


"Investigating is not a problem." The man remarked, which if only he knew of the number of worlds... there was New Dallas to consider as well after all, ... there was organizing a periphery expedition there the estimates on where the 'Exodus Road' was and the chance that there might be leads on that front at Lockdale... which worried Gene. "I will speak to the other elders when we return to Northwind. The highlanders will be expecting your return anyway."


There was no sense risking a jump straining the drives trying to make Lockdale from Dieron... now when Pasha was right the victory here would require going back to Northwind... which was good because he had a data core capable of sustaining Dante's consciousness safely.


But it wasn't just Lockdale. Dante's list had been one thing, but the Fortress Dieron AI had a much more intact facility, "The Field Marshal says they received an HPG transmission from Altair, the planet has officially changed hands." He remarked.


"That is good." Pasha responded, he was scrolling down, "These supplies marked for the anchorage, they are already loaded aboard a Star League era Cargo DropShip." Then corrected that there were two such cargo ships, "I cannot begin to comment on the value of such cargo, if it can carry such cargo we could make sure such tonnage is used for other goods. It would reduce the number of Mules, and other bulk freighters, and free up collars for transit."


"Has the Field Marshal made any further inquiries about Cairo?"


"She has not, To my knowledge there have not been any further inquiries since you opened the Brian Cache on Robinson." Pasha paused, "With the fall of Altair, this will have effects on the community at large. Even those who feel obliged to honor the oaths our ancestors made to the Coordinator in good faith will have to contend that providence has turned away from the house of Kurita."


"I don't follow." Gene replied bluntly, he was still on the fringes of Azami political notions... there were too many factions that were just names.


"The Davions have mistrusted our people for our long loyalty to House Kurita, and that is understandable but Altair and Dieron are not Robinson, and not Ander's moon. Breaking a sword of light regiment underscores that, coupled with the recriminations against the community there was already a rebellion brewing."


"That sounds like something you should coordinate where possible with Rasalhague Pasha, especially since they're the ones who provided you with the fax machines." Though admittedly the space swedes wanted to try and peal the whole RMD off into a new free state... and that was an ambitious proposal. "More than that though thats a political discussion Pasha, that would require recognition and support from if not just House Davion, but most likely House Steiner as well and I don't see that forthcoming at this stage."


"It is something to consider." Pasha replied.


Somewhere in the rush of everything he had remembered to find time to send orders to the Rasalhague contingent under Soren... but part of that was going to be dependent on whenever he inevitably heard something from the Field Marshal. "What do you think of Macintyre's proposal?"


"You are asking me?" The ship captain questioned. "This is a matter of mechwarriors."


"You have no opinions on the matter?" Gene questioned.


The old man paused, "I believe they would be political opinions, Commander." He replied, "I cannot comment on the validity of Colonel MacIntyre's proposal." Pasha paused, "I am fully prepared, I prefer even to leave matters of warfare on the ground to those with experience."
--
Septim fidgeted as the arcane ... it wasn't magic but it wasn't like he understood all the things on the screens and holograms floating around so it might as well have been magic.

Techno-sorcery from a bygone age was a staple of the media he'd grown up on. It'd been popular back home with heroic weapons of the ancient star league that had inspired myths and legends... and he supposed there must have been some truth to it all.


Maybe not to the degree of holo stories but there was clearly a name component, and these things were using neurohelmets in ways he'd never heard of as well as testing blood samples. That was scientific, where in the dramas there were more energy swords and magic circles that relied on drops of blood.


The lights changed colors.


It might as well have been magic.
--
"So when will he be back?"


Chang grimaced. They were on down time... the Davions didn't really need them for anything, and she'd have so preferred to be able to focus on practical well mech practice...


Chang was doing her best to keep things running smoothly but that was easier said than done. Her initial inclination was to do the usual mercenary thing and try and bluster her way out of it... but she didn't see that working. Not that San Martin wasn't a nice city, and Dieron didn't seem that bad of a place to live but... there was no way the Davion rep would believe her if she said she thought they were going to settle down here because she didn't believe it herself.


Northwind made so much more sense if they were going to settle down anywhere... but that wasn't what their FedSuns handlers probably wanted to hear either. .. but she didn't really know all that much about the FedSuns or any of their planets anyway... or their internal politics.


The ruler of their Draconis March seemed an appropriately pious and dedicated member of the high classes , but she also understood that not all the rulers could be properly Confucian either as her father would have described a noble's responsibility to the state.


"Tonight maybe. Tomorrow morning probably." She replied from inside the cockpit of the Atlas as she relayed the query through the network and waited for Septim to give her a response. "I've got responsibility for all of Marauder II force..." and she clammed up realizing even saying that much felt like saying too much.


Alexandria Cunningham felt the conversation slip and change. She could have pressed the mechwarrior... but the truth was she didn't know where the weak spots in the verbal floor were either... this was an unusual situation... and even that was an understatement. The expectation at the onset of this was that having destroyed outright a major house's regular combat formation that Shepherd's Company being a relatively young nascent even mercenary company would be easy enough to bring into the fold. The objective at the outset for the DMI had been the same as the AFFS more broadly take what lessons they could from the destruction of the Galedon regulars and apply them to regular units to further damage the combine.


... and what should have been a simple matter turned into a crazy upside down world. The initial dossier should have been a late teenage mechwarrior probably from a military background... not some vengeful ghost from the golden age of humanity with a tendency to disappear into ancient burrows and unearth weapons from a bygone era on most worlds he visited.


That was all together different from just some lucky lostech prospector who happened to be a mech warrior, and it made her problem harder than simply dealing with someone her own age who had his entire life deal with, circle around his job as a soldier of fortune.

 

[Imperator Pax]

Fortress Dieron Part 8​

Gene hit the enter on the keyboard, exhaled confirmed the start sequence and watched the doors move. He'd be taking the train back soon, there was a certain amount of anxiety on both sides and he could understand that, but expecting the Combine to be able to muster retaliation was unlikely. Altair had changed hands as well, and... well that meant he needed to have a conversation with Kerston as well.

Nagayan... Helm. New Dallas and its CID facility.

There was a certain degree of anxiety though. Dieron had been a major production center within Hegemony Space... which was saying something. At least Pasha had some idea of what they were going to be going into with moving on Lockdale, but really the bigger issue were the extrapolated star maps. The Hegemony well by holding Earth among other things had categorized and marked out using various telescopes and metrics number crunched thousands of worlds by the 26th​ century but the logistics of the JumpCore and the lack of major breakthroughs had kept the boundaries of the great states.


Not that that had stopped human exploration. The most likely explanation was Kerensky had stripped the archives looking for somewhere to flee to that was viable enough that whatever he could have looted from the Hegemony's corpse that it would be enough to set up a colony.. and then that colony had made it long enough to settle down and have enough of political kerfuffle to split off and the Minnesota tribe, the Clan Wolverine to make a run for the opposite direction to try and go Rimward instead of coreward.


That didn't necessarily mean Clan Wolverine was trying to find hypothetical Hegemony Bolt Holds, but enough of Clan Wolverine were terran nationals and Royal division officers that it was possible. They could very well have just been chasing rumors though, there was no sense in getting excited about that.


There was after all a good chance that Kerensky wouldn't have carried with him a recording that indicted House Kurita for Treason that had his security signature acknowledging receipt of. That kind of official documentation would have raised issues, or ta least he assumed it would have. By not acting against the traitorous coordinator it had allowed Kurita time to prepare to make a bid to claim the title of Star Lord... and thus the succession wars as they had unfolded.


The debriefing was inadequate in terms of answers, and it didn't explain why the Dragoons had appeared, that was beyond the frame of reference that the AI here had hard evidence of. Speculation though, was not charitable. Even the most benign fact finding mission was still a potential issue, especially since Fortress Dieron had had contact with the Minnesota tribe and Nicky Kerensky being a cult leader lunatic.


A part of him wanted to just gto to Yvonne and ask for all the copies of interactions any recordings of the dragoons interactions that the FedSuns had and feed to the AI and let him number crunch it all. That would probably risk more questions than he was already prepared to account for.


Pasha sidled past Septim, "these are planets?"


"Yeah, they're the installations where Hegemony forces successfully scuttled their own HPG assets." He said of the icon in question, the bigger problem were the ones which had of Terran worlds not accounted for their destruction, whether by Amaris, or the Ministry of Communications, or Kerensky or that the Successor States hadn't during the move in to occupy Hegemony worlds. "These are time stamps," For those worlds with conformably destroyed HPGs, "where those last transmitted. This is New Dallas its the world Dante suggested as a priority, but what I can determine from the historical record it'd be as much work as the Zero-G operations as Lockdale given that there is probably atmospheric hazard and we'll need fully shielded mechs."


... and then there was still the matter Helm, there was the Nagayan Mountain Castle Brian and the depot. The Quartermasters corp, that was another conversation he was dreading...and one that was going to entail... he needed to talk to Kerston about that as well.
--
His return to San Martin involved little in the way of circumstance, but the city was more relaxed when he had left it. The atmosphere of the university of Dieron though merely made him dread the conversation that he would need to have at some point with the Lyran professor.


For the moment though he had hte advantage of of another problem to tackle. "Did you ever give it any thought? I know we've been busy."


Gene nodded, "I did, is Lord Aaron on the planet?"


"No, he's on Northwind still." There were interactions, liaisons planned for the two academies, but that required fleshing things out.


That made sense. Surely if the Duke of Robinson had decided to jump to Dieron then there would have been communications indicating his arrival, but the fact was it didn't make much sense to have the Field Marshal of The Draconis March here in person. Really, Yvonne Davion's prescence was probably as much about their presence as it was the potential intelligence coup of taking a provincial capital. "Have there been any problems?" He asked turning the matter back towards business.


"No things have been pretty quiet, what did you slip off for?"


He thought about the shipping manifest of the dropships... what they were going to take to Lockdale anchorage and ... see what was there. The nitial plan was to have the transporters transmit their ID codes to see if that got them passed what if anything was there now. "Something I needed to look into, its complicated. Do you think the Federated Boeing Rep would still be on Northwind?" It really would have been a question better posed to MacIntyre or one of the other officers of Claymore, but Bard was right here, not out in the field with the recent graduates.


"You got that weird look on your face again," Bard shook his head.


"What look?"


"The oh yes the star league, never mind." Bard shook his head, "Any more of those Devastator things then?"


"No, It was a prototype ordered into rushed development by Kerensky." He could understand where Bard was coming from though, the devastator had proven itself immensely useful against the sword of light out in the hilly open landscape west of the planetary capital along the Kazakh river... but frankly the Pillager in its late Star League configuration would have likely sufficed, and the Highlanders supporting Thugs had also been important... but no doubt most were watching the mech kills by individual machine. That wasn't fair to supporting forces, who had contributed to the operational success of the battle, but it was also normal.


Too many in Gene's opinion of the Battle Roms over emphasized the frontal confrontation and thus dismissed the tactical, and operational realities hemming the Combine into a disadvantageous situation. He paused, and watched as the lance of hundred tonners, all of them built from the Marauder II shifted at the edge of the track. There were other blackwell industry vehicles nearby, the cache vehicles were in a motor pool further in, reflecting that they were on average significantly larger armored units, but there should have been several Fury tanks active at any given time waiting to feed data to active units.


It also, as with Dante on Northwind, allowed the AI a view into the world around them. Whether that degree of caution was necessary, well, it certainly didn't hurt, "How is the combine taking things?" The truth was he had gotten back to San Martin, but he had yet to see the Field Marshal or the brevet general.


"Shock mostly I guess, I mean... when they hit Mallory's world, we ended up fighting for three months before we finally managed to force the dracs off." And on Mallory's world in 3013, four years and change earlier, well Ian Davion had died and Yorinaga Kurita had tried to steal the body as some macabre trophy. "So I guess its shock, its not even like we dropped from orbit," He nodded out towards San Martin certainly I didn't expect to be here already." He trailed off, as the Marauder II BattleMechs were replaced in rotation by Claymore painted Mechs, "Hey those are new."


Gene nodded, looking at Claymore's Ancient Company. "The Combine has made a point of circulating rumors that there were lostech caches in the mountains, they're not wrong. Since Sorbel took a beating on the hill," Banzai light mech charge, death ride whatever you wanted to recall it, "We overhauled his lance first, and once the techs get done I intend to push as much as that hardware to Northwind units on the expectation is going to come for round two." Bard nodded in acknowledgement of the logic. "While we're running the follow on cadre work I want to keep the cadets original mechs handy, but I want the Robinson Brian Cache machines being practiced on as well for those in the counter-ronin company. Are you going to have an issue making a transition to the Highlander?"


"I shouldn't. I had planned to do that."


"Good Bahar, and Ishida will joining in a Highlander Gunnery Course we're setting up." Gene ignored the the AI's commentary cycling through his neurolink on managing the situation. That wasn't really what this was about, "I also need to brief Kerston about responding to a Combine counter attack so I may be busy tomorrow."

 

[Imperator Pax]

Fortress Dieron Part 9​

Gene was legitimately concerned about the possibility that the combine might commit to a rapid counter attack not necessarily one that might be effective even but that they might feel the need to do something and launch a surprise counter. The biggest threat there was not to their own military assets, that seemed unlikely, but rather that the Combine in the face of lack of civilian support or just recklessness would cause a lot of civilian casualties before they could be destroyed.


That had played a role in order repair and refit of units... but if the Combine did land he planned to slather their landing sites with artillery if at all possible. Mostly out of concern for potential civilian losses if the Combine managed to land in the vicinity of a major urban center.


To that end having Ishida swap over from the lighter SRM spewing big bug... well there were legitimate skill curve objections to make, much as there were in terms of moving pilots who were intimate with the dope on their personal machines... especially in the case of customized, non standard, load outs of succession era wars 'mechs.


And of course the Highlanders would represent a notable drop in mech speed, which admittedly was tactically less important if they were defending a fixed area, but Gene did want some kind of uniform cavalry mech requirement... that was going to have to wait though. He watched as Bard swapped to the Highlander pulled from the Robinson Brian Cache and brought the mech out of the erector frame on the back on the flat bed transport truck.. They were doing that publicly in order to minimize implication that they had opened another cache for the time being... but they did need to start running the course work. "Do you disagree with Dante's conclusion?"


"His conclusion on what?" Kerston asked.


"That we're at war with the Combine?" Not that, Gene really thought there was a Hegemony to fight the war... there wasn't certainly a Star League anymore... but then again maybe there was a Terran Hegemony in Exile... but what would they want... predicting a government's position would be hard... if they had escaped into the periphery it was entirely possible they could have pivotted hard into isolationism and wanted nothing to do with the Inner Sphere, and might need nothing from the Inner Sphere. "Is that where we stand?"


Kerston took in a breath, "It is readily, House Kurita broke the peace by attempting to usurp the title of Star Lord, and leadership of the League... and with everything else, especially everything since then the simple answer is yes."


"Do the Blue Star Irregulars agree with this conclusion?"


"I would presume that they do." The Brevet General replied. "May I inquire as to what this entails?"


Gene looked as another erector locked into place allowing another Highlander to step out from the framework, "I'll need the Field Marshal and the Federated Suns," really the AFFS, "to spare you probably for several months, its not an immediate priority, but there is a quartermaster's corp that according to our records which could resupply both of your RCTs to league standards, and I mean in terms of equipment standards before the uprising on New Vandenburg." He added probably unnecessarily. "it should provide you a back up as well to start training up new troopers as a reserve, or even as a permanent garrison force at home, but there is no hurry. I'll both RCTs and a significant space lift component and I can't organize that at present."


"So you'll just ask the Field Marshal to borrow us?"


... Gene looked out over the yard space, and was pretty sure he could make it worth House Davion's while ... if what was at Helm if what was in Nagayan besides all the mechs was what he thought was in there... and just the quartermaster corp's stockpile would potentially be enough to throw off the sent. "Yeah, something like that." He replied. "It won't be any time soon for now we need to focus on the chance that the Combine will try something." He paused glancing at the data slate in front of him as a message flashed on the screen, "Though that being said, regardless of how the procurement situation with Blackwell goes, any Mercury Light BattleMechs and materiel will probably need to be transferred to House Davion for the OmniMech program."


Kerston accepted that in stride, why wouldn't he. The last mercury battle mechs in service with the RCT had been lost on Sendai in 2998... and they were talking about restoring the whole Eridani at some point to its paper strength with appropriate SLDF equipment.
--
Yvonne appreciated not having to present a masquerade for the depot south of the Kazakh River that Shepherd had unlocked to resupply his detachment of the invasion force. That the roll off of heavier mechs was in progress was sure to bait any remaining combine spies into ... well they were unlikely to be able to help themselves.


What she was less keen on was the idea of permitting Shepherd to settle on a world this close to the front. That made the prospect of a surviving Hegemony fort of some kind on Dieron concerning... but it wasn't really a surprise after everything. Shepherd's sudden disappearance... well... "What are the prospects of a combine counter attack?"


"Negligible ma'am. With all due respect to Colonel Shepherd," The Guards officer replied, "I don't think he's processing the damage done to the Combine over the last twelve months. The destruction of the forces here including the Sun Zhang cadre," In what Yvonne had viewed as a particularly egregiously wasteful use of young troops, and beyond that... the reality was that the combine was not going to recover the mechs they had been shot out of either. "and with the victory on Altair we expect the Combine to be in disarray within the local theater."


Yvonne frowned at the man's leaky glee. Not that his optimism was overblown... he was probably correct that given the damage at Elidere the Combine had likely had to force a coverage of the front in anticipation of a AFFS follow up even if they hadn't wanted to admit that. They'd even sewn misinformation to that effect... well not misinformation but that the Draconis March Militia was intending to retaliate, but the width of the front and meant that it was an attack that didn't have to be anchored by Robinson.


Combine Strategists could have predicted that there was the likelihood of a thrust by forces relocated east or west but she doubted that they could have predicted the offensive such as it had been. Even after having been on Dieron a week, she could scarcely believe their success. They had been planning that they might need to fight the invasion phase for months if necessary, not to meet the Combine in a single decisive action in order to unfurl the DCMS's defenses. Had the campaign gone longer they likely would have started to run low on shells for the artillery given t he rate of expenditure, but instead the fight for the planet was over... and that suddenness seriously undermined the likelihood of combine reinforcements. Since any forces dispatched would now need to b e a counter invasion force rather than just reinforcing...


... in the mean time she was going to have to rotate back anyway. The DMM had officially started making requests up the AFFS logistics train for purchases of Blackwell Industries products... understandable given the swiftness at which the planetary capital of San Martin had fallen. There were similar requests already being made on behalf of the Highland Militia as well, and Shepherd's Company had already tendered purchases out of their bounty of pounds from Elidere. Blackwell of New Valencia would need more protection, and would need the capital to expand to meet production demand...


In the mean time there were other problems. Their success here presented other pressures to House Davion, she expected the proverbial full court press by House Sandoval and most if not all of the great houses of the Draconis March as well as their gentleman supporters among the gentry. There would almost certainly be resistance within the march, houses who felt slighted or whose domains also lay in the Caepllan March, and there would be of course push back from the latter March's ruling house of Hasek. That was what she was waiting to see, how the parliament and the court at New Avalon responded was one thing, but perhaps just as importantly was how the realm at large began to respond to their victories against House Kurita.


The conversation wound further.


--
Travel arrangements looked more or less finalized... which was both good, and potentially problematic. Septim would be leaving with Abner, with whom Gene still needed to have a conversation with about too many things. "They're locked in?"


"Seals in place, I have placed guards to insure that the cannot be accessed easily." Pasha replied.


The two large cargo dropships had been moved a fort via a railway system that was either the handy work of the department of mega engineering or its Terran forbearer and well deserving of its name... and the Cargo Carriers could be visually mistaken for the 27th​ century Mammoth indeed with some degree of parts compatability with the idea the member states were less likely to pay much attention to them. The problem... or most likely what had happened is Kerensky's tenure as Commanding General had wanted something to streamline the whole Star League and that had lead to the development of the Cargomaster program intended as a replacement for the smaller mule but also intended to see service when operational with all member states.


Both ideas were interesting... but... well the Star League had been in its descent by that point. "Lets hope they're not necessary." Ostensibly they were on alert for combine saboteurs but there were a series of anti personnel drones supporting the Azami naval armsmen as a precaution against sabotage of any sort... the local phone company whether or not they weren't quite neutral enough for example... they'd already had at least one pretty public argument with the P.NA representatives who were supposed to take charge now that Dieron, and also Altair now, were FedSuns worlds... and on that note, "Have you-"


"Yes, the community has been apprised, we should have the manpower needed to make the expedition to Lockdale, and if we are able to retain these DropShips we could consolidate supplies for our journey into the periphery."


Right, a part of Gene was all too eager to get that underway. He'd gotten a good look at the exodus fleet... and had a horrific flash of what nukes in space would do to JumpShips packed with civilians... no the sooner they were out of the Combine's reach the better. They could return to FedSuns space in due time... as it was it seemed like they would be making a semi regular transit from the periphery. "And the situation with Black Jack?"


"There should be no shortage of volunteers amongst the community, if Alamut is to prosper we cannot afford that man continuing his rampage... but if I may, if you register those forces as it is the MRB is likely to suffer an inundation of objections from the servants of the dragon. It would be perhaps best to wait until we reach, the magistracy of Canopus perhaps. Cite that, the conditions have degenerated enough that there were then volunteers rather doing so while we are within the Federated Suns."


He nodded acknowledging that the older man had a point.
--
Notes: and this sets up for the back and forth of the next really the next five years, because travel time in BT is kind of crap

 

[Imperator Pax]

Fortress Dieron Part 10​

They were on a clock now... and he still hadn't found the time to drag Abner away from Dieron university where he was trying to make all the friends, and spread IE's mission of exploration and study of the mysteries of the galaxy. He still wasn't sure how to broach the situation.

Gene looked at the White Mechs. Then turned to the Azami tech who'd' been talking, "Pull those Large Lasers, swap them for Mk III from inventory and then pull those Blankenburgs. Crate them and the ammo." He wondered if refitting the LBX for something else... but no... he didn't have an industrial base, and it would be better to toss these to someone who did, and that meant House Davion. So he'd turn the LBX 10s and these ER Large Lasers to House Davion... "Also get me Colonel MacIntyre. These are probably going to his people, so I want him on site." Make the question of the space from the autocannons his problem.

The senior Azami non com left him in the hangar as he went to fetch the old highlander... the Machines were in Militia colors, and the manuals were here... and he had an idea. He had already heard, though Lex hadn't confirmed it and thus far the Field Marshal hadn't said anything, through scuttlebutt was that the Eridani would be staying behind... at least for the time being.

The AI of the Fortress Dieron recognized the Eridani as SLDF, which was nice, but it wasn't about to let them inside the fortress .... which was unfortunate, but he understood that... he had been worried that the ... that the Blue Star Irregulars might have been a different story... but he had bigger problems to contend with. There were a lot f things he needed to deal with right now... Fortress Dieron had the space allocated to it to camp an entire division, which was atypical.... but Dieron was a critical parts hub in the hegemony and carried anti ship capital arrays.

He personally figured that the multi brigade scale was more about defense spending, than engineering hurdles, or conservative don't put all your eggs in one basket. Castles Brian were expensive and the Hegemony's defense industry... its military industrial complex had been massive.... so maybe it was really all of the above... but Dieron had surface to orbital capital batteries and he was loath to turn those over to the Federated Suns...

... maybe that was silly, but maybe it wasn't... only time would tell. The truth was that if Dieron's AI was right... if the reports it had number crunched from its data banks were right... then well there were a lot of places they needed to check.

"Colonel."

"MacIntyre," He tilted his head towards the mechs, "these are Crocketts there are twenty four of them here they were slated for Dieron militia units for training purposes." The plate inside the one he'd looked at was marked from Detroit, on Terra, dated to '41. The Rim world had strafed the local civic centers before the Militia could deploy, and coupled with compromised defenses they had just never been able to scramble, "They're going to need to be rearmed but you can mark them for your Battalion D program."

The old highlander turned to look at the eighty five tonners. They were assault mechs. "Aye sir. Sir with regards to the jump back to Northwind?"

"You have command of the unit for the duration of the training missions, you are to integrate as best as possible the brigade," The combination of DMM troops, Azami and Rasalhague volunteers and the nominal battalions of the Company proper. There were days he really regretted going for something as simple as Shepherd's Company. It was short and too the point, but he hadn't expected to be in a position where his day to day life... entailed dealing with this shit. "I'm going to see about ferrying some of those ASF to offload Northwind or failing that the RBA but my preference would be to keep the Rapiers with us."

"Very good sir. My liaison would be Colonel Cameron then?"

"That's right. Bard is staying behind." Or at least he was to the best of his knowledge as of this morning. It had also been the morning he had submitted the paper work detailing a hypothetical Highland force for Dieron that, per MacIntyre's endorsement had the clan elders sanction.

In part distributing the Crocketts for a new unit on Dieron was also an attempt to sidestep multiple issues in one move. Soren's three companies of Rasalhague volunteers were still finding their footing, but the highland cadets had on boarded to the company being issued company mechs ahead of the move to invade the planet... that by itself might cause some trouble. On the other hand Rasalhague had its own political ambitions and their participation at Dieron had likely been intended to support ambitions of national independence.

Bard had asked him on Northwind what he planned to do.

Dieron had been the test supposed to answer that question.

Now though Gene wasn't entirely sure what the answer was.

The destruction in detail of the Sword of Light was impossible to conceal. That was going to get attention. If they had stayed in the periphery it might have taken years to attract the attention of the successor states, and maybe never gained this sort of fame.

Not to this degree.

"Sir?"

"If the Rasalhague contingent asks we're still in the process of evaluating specialty versus generalist unit organization at this time for Bardiche, and matters of standardizing Mech dispositions."

"Ah, aye sir." The highlander replied, "Would you prefer I tell them we're just not sure how best to use the bastards in a fight, then?"

... that had been what he'd said right, Gene paused again, "That will work, I need to know when we get back how comitted they are to their current weight ratios, and whether or not I can expect ASF volunteers, and if there will be any issues with periphery rotations." Arguably the last was the more likely issue given it would remove the unit from the Inner Sphere and thus away from the conflict with the Combine for potentially protracted lengths of time.
--
Alexandria stared at the massive DropShips as they lifted off. They were civilian ships from the star league, and it wasn't as if Mammoths didn't continue to ply the trade lanes of the Inner Sphere. They were the lifeblood carrying ships of intersteller trade between and within the great houses. Still to see the fifty two thousand ton dropships flawless lift off from the ground after more than two centuries was a testament to the engineering process which had gone into the ships, which had all the appearances of being fresh from the yards that had built them.

It did raise questions about their size... and about the Argo DropShip Shepherd had filed an inquiry about with Federated Boeing, but they were questions about the late star league. In what way exactly Star League era Mammoths differed from those of the modern day, which had entered service roughly half way into the first succession was unclear to her. As it was Shepherd's Company's more senior JumpShip captain had already begun preliminary filings on filling the two monstrous cargo carriers full of humanitarian aide for the Azami refugee fleet in orbit over Northwind.

There was no reason to doubt that was the truth either. Most likely whatever had been in the Hegemony era depot had been allocated out to meet needs on a per unit basis. Since Shepherd had been upfront about his obligations to the Azami it was entirely possible he'd landed on Dieron with the plan to grab the two large cargo lifters from some manifest on Northwind... or he had received a data package when they had made planetfall, or at some point later.

The two large DropShips would each take up a collar of course, but given that the Colorado, while still even older, was a Leviathan class JumpShip that wasn't an issue. Colorado was probably not its original name given the ship almost certainly predated the Reunification Wars. The Leviathan carried eight dropships and had entered service in the mid 25th​ century.

The MIIO liaison had already opined that the combination of the two Mammoths and the Colorado would have been an idea starting point for transitioning to a civilian shipping concern if there was any interest in getting out of the mercenary business. The real implication of the statement was what the resources could mean if, like her ancestors had the company was settled somewhere within the interior of Davion space.

It wasn't meant as a barb, but it reminded her of Sakhara... and that New Avalon's court was many light years away, but high society was never far. Her eyes swept to across the observation deck to the Lyran. Abner was talking to Shepherd. She was near enough to overhear them, though this was nominally a secure location.

"Pasha has the drives charged up now. We can jump back to Northwind at any time." Alexandria knew that that wait was of course a go ahead for transit back to their starting point, but one that would be forthcoming from the Duchess of Victoria... because of course she would be returning with them to Northwind

"You said you would have something important for me when I returned about the Tribe's journey into the inner sphere?"

"I'm hoping to yes. I don't think the Minnesota tribe were one path, so much as they split apart coming in from the same coreward starting point. They were running from whatever society Kerensky's people put together."

"You're sure?"

"Pretty sure." Shepherd replied, "I'll have a packet for you... when you get back."

 

[Imperator Pax]

Post Dieron
​

The reality of Fortress Dieron had effected his planning... though that made Gene want to scoff at the idea of planning... he was getting pulled in a million directions. There was so much to do. There was too much information, and that was ultimately why he had pushed back telling Abner what they found until he knew what was at Lockdale if there was anything there.


Dieron though had been a lightning battle. The sort of thing that the Hegemony would not have planned for in terms of someone taking the planet and had happened historically because the Rim World had been inside the outermost defenses. The Combine had wanted to fight, but had insisted on fighting stupidly. It had been the Combine's own mistakes tactically, and operationally that had sped up their defeat in the face of superior Davion numbers... that was to say Northwind hadn't been expecting them back so quickly.


The lack of a lengthy campaign meant the cadets could spend time at home with their families before a by nature of travel times more lengthy deployment in the periphery. That was something he could offer the young highlanders of Claymore, but was less available to the DMM group.


Still the jump back in was awash with activity, and was just a poignant reminder that they needed to start the great trek out to the periphery sooner rather than later... and that required him to adjust his plans. The AI within the Fortress Dieron was right, they would have to return to the Fortress once they came back in from the periphery. They would have to come back to northwind... and from Northwind, to Dieron, and from there over the border into Lyran space... and from there it would be easy to access certain other Hegemony worlds within a jump or two.


"I have done what I can in terms of shoring up support," He squinted at the chip, "But whatever is on this, will explain it all?"


Maybe not all... but within the chip included what Kerston already knew... it was a copy of just the HPG conversation between Kurita and Amaris... and Aaron Sandoval could make of it what he would. "I'd prefer you not watch it until after the civilians are out of harms way," He replied referring to the exodus fleet. "You said," In this morning's memo, "that the 'mechs we're offloading from Dieron might be an issue."


"There were already complaints."


It was a conversation he was going to have take to Dante, which would mean slipping away within castle Northwind... which might be a problem, "There were Kintaros in the Robinson Brian Cache." He remarked... not that he'd cared at the time.


The Duke of Robinson nodded, "Indeed, and the truth his that honestly caused its own trouble with certain parties."


"The duke of Errai is still here then?"


"he is." The wheel chair bound ex-tanker confirmed.


He didn't... Gene didn't precisely catch all of the social cues, he recognized that he had been missing things in the Canopian space, but it had actually gotten worse, not better when they had reached Davion space. Or at least it seemed perceivably worse. He understood that young soldiers had a reputation, but there was a certain degree of feudal future going on that outright irritated him, "I don't suppose his grace the Duke of Errai happened to actually supply troops to the operations?" That was the entire point of cracking open the caches and handing their contents it was what they were for. They were for fighting the Combine...


"There wasn't time." He replied somewhat deferring the issue, and that was probably true mobilizing the force to hit Dieron probably had had limits on which units could be prepared or ready and Lord Aaron probably had more pull with his immediate allies... but even so... "Perhaps if the attack had gone out over the summer or if we had been campaigning against other worlds."


"You really think so?"


It probably wasn't the question the Field Marshal of the Draconis March wanted to hear, and he sighed, "No you're probably correct, the dukes of Kesai and Errai both allege that Samsonov and the Galedon Regulars were attacking their worlds to raid secret star league caches at the expense of their dominions."


If Gene were prone to being a little more crass about such things, he would have retorted that that was tough shit , and in no way entitled the prick who was the Duke of Errai to any of the spoils... but to be completely honest as much as he wanted to, it wouldn't have done any good. So he responded on the basis of what he did know, "We can't confirm that General Samsonov actually got anything from either world," He might very well have, both were Terran worlds, "But we can only confirm the raid on McGhee yielded anything." Mostly because of how torn up the 19th​ had been by the drones when it was all said and done. "But as for Errai, There is something."


"Yes?"


"Abner, and I," Well he said the truth was he'd added his two cents and signature but mostly it was the techs who were sure this would work, "Have discussed about needs to be done with the Thugs, and it hasn't changed those mechs we pulled out will be going to Highland volunteers, but there are spare parts, weapons, electronics, engines." He flipped through his data slate, cognizant that Dante was connected to the data platform through a Fury tank tied into the Regimental Communications Network, "here." The program was for all intents and purposes a down teched thug, presumably very similar to what Earthwerks did, but that wasn't his problem... really the real work had been done on the chargers that the Magistracy had dug out of that Rim World tomb, and it only had made sense to talk about what to do if the endosteel on Terran Hegemony Thugs was wrecked in use. "The Kintaros I already told Bard we can leave those behind if that will help with Ozawa."


But Ozawa was not Errai, or their apparent new found noble allies of Kesai. This was now a game of political maneuvering. A game that he wanted no part in, but one he found himself involved in because Robinson was home to a Brian Cache and Aaron Sandoval was attempting to shore up the march for war with the combine. Dante knew that from monitoring the activities of the Draconis March nobility within Northwind Castle's grounds


"And the Mongoose?"


... "I'll need to talk with the Azami," The truth was he needed some kind of screening and outrider component... "If it will help and is in writing." He suspected given the situation the Azami weren't necessarily going to need new mechs, but he had hoping to recruit from them both for the periphery campaign that PNA wanted against Black Jack, and for when they inevitably came back to pick up where they had left off on Dieron... but there were stockpiles within Fortress Dieron yet to be opened up. There had been a war planned against the Combine by the shadow ministry... and then there was Helm to consider.


The Duke of Robinson was more interested in what the news was on potential landhold development... which was a conversation he expected to be hearing a lot of during the 'downtime'.
--
He checked the roster again, and it merely reiterated that he was looking forward to returning to the periphery. "Expectations?"


"We do not, I do not think," The Tech paused, "be concerned. Obviously Hanzo's Cicada has proven useful, and given the situation the rebuild procedure should proceed smoothly." But it would have to be when they actually returned to the Magistracy of Canopus's space... when they made the circuit back to Luxen. That was part of Abner's terms in return for his agreeing to organize the manpower and the secrecy that were going to be necessary for what they were going to ask... and... and Gene was hoping that Abner would be as good as his word with regards on not trying to mount an expedition too deep in the periphery... that his warning about the potential danger of drawing the descendants of Kerensky back into the inner sphere would be heeded.


... but he was also worried that even if Abner did heed his cautionary advice that Comstar might still find the clans and the clans would still launch their attack... or that Dragoons had said something that might prompt the clans to attack... or anything else going wrong.


But he had time before next he saw Abner, and hopefully Lockdale would have answers... more likely it would just have more questions and not the answers for them... but better to know he didn't have the answer to something than be wholly ignorant of it. At least he would know he didn't know something... better that than not knowing his own ignorance even if it was frustrating at times. "What do you think?"


"About the proposal commander?" He shook his head, "It should be fine. As you observed two tons of ammunition is excessive without the ammunition safekeeping," He meant case, "it as you say sitting on a bomb. A lot of bombs." The tech cracked a grin. "it should work." But they wouldn't really know until they actually got to the part of putting a physical machine together for the Luxen volunteers... and there was probably something more going on with Abner on that front but only time would tell.


... and while he might still be convinced to transfer spare parts to Errai's ruler for Thugs he certainly want' going to turn over hegemony machines unless he had to, and Dante agreed the machines in question needed to be in hand for use against the Combine. If the duke of Errai could sink the funds in to build a down teched thug that was great... and NAIS could focus on making DHS and they could upgrade from there...


Pasha signaled for him, a notice that they were more or less ready for the next errand, and the one after that, "We are as prepared as we can be, commander." The old ship captain remarked, "And indeed there may be little there."


--
Notes: Post Dieron will be largely set ups for events in the future we see that here, we that over the next few before we actually transition to the travel segment interludes before reaching the border of Taurian and Aurigan space.


This is going up now to hopefully dodge any issues in the morning with the server issues, so if you catch an errors (allow the swordsman / longsword or otherwise, feel free to point it out or question things) I know that I could probably better quantify the near-Terra political situation of the Draconis March both here, and also in Rabid Fox because that will be relevant but this does go to respective protagonists local allies, as well as Davion internal politics in the long run.

 

[Imperator Pax]

Post Dieron​

Holographic images of battle flashed, without sound though for the public to watch. It made Alexandria uncomfortable. Not the cadets, who were here on leave. They had all made it home from their first combat action alive and in one piece. She'd seen the footage of Elidere of course, she would have had to have been living under a rock to have not seen it even if she hadn't been posted to this assignment but it had been wholly another thing.


... what was worse was Shepherd's easy confidence. He didn't boast he didn't brag... he acted as if what he did was a normal benchmark of mechwarrior excellence. He didn't expect the Highland cadets to magically reach his level, but he clearly had high expectations for them nonetheless. It was something the DMM troops had caught on as well... and their leadership.


Two battalions of sword of light lay shattered on the field along with another regiment of Combine students fresh from the Sun Zhang academy, and a world had fallen. That was discounting the success of the other assault that had gone on concurrently. The Comstar broadcasting services addressing Davion audiences, were more focused on Dieron, but that made some sense given the lopsided losses the Combine had suffered especially since it had been a major provincial capital.


That news had actually beaten them in arriving because ComStar had made the Battle Rom footage of the battle available through space as soon as the HPG administrators had changed hands. Ordinarily it would have taken weeks or even months of word from the front to transition from just rumors from jumpship crews passing through, to authenticated Battle Roms. It would have been one thing to know the Combine had been defeated on Dieron, another to watch the combat unfold, on what had previously been a major enemy world.


Her Orion, her piece of the Kestrel Partimony, had remained effectively unused in the battle of Dieron, though her name would be present on the rolls of MechWarriors who had participated. Her job had been to liaise ... and that had kept in the secondary lines and often in a command post... with the expectation of a battle lasting weeks, months potentially instead turning into a running battle across a few days.


She had expected to still be on Dieron. To be probably waiting for updates bunked on an Overlord dropship planet side... but if ComStar had relayed all the battle roms across the Federated Suns then that meant the footage was already on New Avalon in the court of the First Prince and also on Kestrel... and all of the other worlds great and small or at least those important enough to warrant an HPG presence.


She bit her lip. None of the other noble houses would be able to get anyone here in reaction to Dieron, but there were those who were here already who were here for the Faire or who had come in response to Elidere, and recognition of what it and even the cache on Robinson represented in terms of wealth. She was cognizant there of the Thug Assault BattleMechs handed over from some fort in the mountains of Dieron near the Kazkah river to freshly graduated cadets of the Northwind academy that were currently parading through the streets in their new machines.


Those same cadets would be shipping out to the periphery when Shepherd left Davion space for some fool escort mission of civilians looking to fleet the sphere ahead of the inevitable combine retaliation. The exodus of the Azami refugees was ... if they had a better idea, more time to work the duchess of Victoria would have tried to leverage it, to convince the First Prince to allow them to settle somewhere else. It was a risk, but more than that it simply had too many moving parts, but it might have succeeded in keeping Shepherd's Company in Davion space for that inevitable next stage of conflict with House Kurita.


--
The Mobile Core to contain the AI's existence was a small almost inconsequential thing... and really even more so it was the core itself, the 'bulk' relatively speaking was the shielding case designed to protect the core.


A robotic arm probed the device. "This will take time to configure." Dante remarked extending another mechanical limb, "You will have to depart for the anchorage without me."


"I see, and the other matter?"


"Davion Military Intelligence has been active. The other Member States have been active, were active during the faire but activity understandably increased relative to the reports and developments that have had time to make their way through the communication. I understand that seizure of the Combine Archive on Dieron has yielded data returns of combine operations?"


"It seems like the Combine was relying on fairly entrenched operations rather than standing up new operations."


"Most likely without free trade, and diplomatic credentials facilitated by the Star League, and intercession by the Council to smooth over issues, coupled with the increasing belligerence between the successor states and a war footing economy the Combine lacks the ability to meaningfully generate new Intelligence front operations."


That wasn't to say that the Combine was incompetent at spying but there were too many culture mores impacting them vis a vis the war. The succession war and the limitations on trade relative to the Star League Era really had changed the game. There were almost surely current combine programs running that had no continuity with League era initiatives but it bordered on absurd that things like the Reimi ring had existed as long as they had without one of the vulnerable parties detecting the incursion.


Even now Dante was having the entire digitized archive from Dieron uploaded to a clean system to dig through in the interim.


On the surface of Northwind, on the Highland grounds BattleMechs paraded ... Gene could have done without the unnecessary white and black check that had been applied to the Lance leaders of the cadet 'mech battalion. He supposed better than than the Campbell tartan of the Black Watch... just in case the wrong people were watching and might manage to add two and two and get four.


The two sat there in amenable silence for a moment, with only the flickering of displays, "Lockdale?" He asked.


In the mid 29th​ century something must still have been there.


What they knew from the reports generated by Clancy's presence on both Dieron and here on Northwind was that the main thing the Kerensky-ites, the 'clans of Kerensky', had managed to do in the intervening period of time was to further bring prototypes of Terran technology into the mass production stage.


It was possible the Imp had been one. The thing the Wolf Dragoons had shown up with still didn't match anything in the Dieron databanks, much as it didn't anything else they had checked it against, but the Fortress Dieron AI admitted that it made plenty of sense as a machine developed in the vein of the Titan and Grasshopper concept.


Or, that it was a downteched machine which itself just raised more questions of why? Or how much the clans knew. "There is another matter regarding those machines."


"Go ahead," Gene replied watching the holographic images cycle through, "That a Shogun," He asked looking at the Alpha Regiment mech.


"Yes, but that is not the machine in question." It was the other assault mech which Dante was indicating, however the AI had added a note to the Shogun that the Dragoons had been unable to find anyone to be able or willing to reintroduce production of the eighty five tonner... that was interesting. "The pilot in question is almost certainly from his medical file from his time in Davion employ subject to some degree of in utero, but more interesting still is the genetic donor component."


"How so, during the star league you could donate genetic material from multiple parent samples," Polygamous families had been a thing after all... he was actually surprised it wasn't something that the canopians didn't still have, or maybe they did and didn't advertise. "The mech -"


"No, I had considered that however the new data inputs regarding clan wolverine and the apparent eugenicist nonsense espouse by Nicholas Keresnky coupled with the interest in artificial wombs suggests to me that we are not dealing with a typical designer baby... so much as an outgrowth of those reports."


"Do you have an actionable suggestion, Dante?"


"Not at this time commander, but it bore commenting. As for the Mech, the call sign appropriately enough was Behemoth, its one hundred tons, and its nearest equivalent seems to have been the Matar super heavy project, though this has been scaled down its armament onboard makes no more sense than the down teched Annihilators. However it seems to have symbolic significance to its pilot in ways distinct from that of the other dragoons. I am continuing to review Field Marshal Davion's files as well as those of the MRB."


Gene sighed, "tell me if you find something, but there isn't anything more on Lockdale?" He paused, "Bring up the historical records pre 2765 please, any transit data from Northwind to Lockdale that might be security relevant." Maybe something in that traffic data would stand out... Lockdale was just far enough away that one couldn't jump directly there from Dieron... but Dante was in turn quick to point out that one couldn't jump directly from Terra, but then one also couldn't jump to Northwind from Terra either due to the limits of the KF drive. That meant... unfortunately that any traffic from Terra to Lockdale might well have bypassed Northwind by jump to Caph for example first.

 

[Imperator Pax]

Post Dieron 1.3​

Gene tossed his bag into the compartment, he was cognizant of what the Black Watch's final order packet contained. Orders which if they had been implemented would have changed the whole face of the inner sphere. AI unbound, left to their own devices with the mandate to defend terra worlds... how many warships had Kerensky lost, how many naval officers and enlisted had died in the void because those orders had never reached Kerensky.


... Gene assumed that Kerensky must never have received a copy... it didn't matter one way or another it was in the past... but the thoughts still weighed there in the dark recesses of his mind, coming to the fore when he was idle.


Especially since they had no idea what they were going to find. Dante had already configured the necessary command protocol... but that was taking a... making an assumption regarding the condition of any defenses... or that there was anything at all. If there wasn't anything... well then they would be making the jump waiting a week and coming back... and out of all the possible solutions well it wasn't the worst possibility.


If there wasn't anything at Lockdale too find then, they had just wasted time. Time that they admittedly could have used to be training, or more likely attempting to leverage the nest egg of Davion House bills for future means, but a week or even two was unlikely to change anything. If there as nothing they would just jump back, land the two large cargo dropships into the Port and then have the automated gantries pull whatever it was in there and put it into storage before loading them full of Azami cargo holds with the aim of reducing the number of employed DropShip collars.


It might have seemed silly to adhere to the protocol without even knowing if there was anything still out there but given Lockdale's importance to the Hegemony the anchorage if it was intact would almost certainly have an AI and some degree of self repair and maintenance capacity as the facility administrator. Would the supplies c. 2765 mean anything? After this long there as no telling They weren't perishable goods of course... so it was really a matter of actually seeing what was there.


"Are you prepared?" The Azami officer questioned storing his own bag in a compartment parallel to his own.


"As we ever will be," He answered, the truth was this was just a reminder about the need to ... well maybe not need but that he should look at or get a copy of the Cairo's Computer Core... and the manifest it had been carrying when her previous service with the SLDF had been interrupted by Combine sabotage... but the logistics of wrangling that seemed like a lot.
--
It was her prerogative to grumble to her staff.

"The Azami know something, something about the last days of the Star League." Yvonne Davion observed... but the question still remained what... and whatever it was was serious enough that the combine was more murderous than usual.


The succession on Dieron was going to have effects though. Given the base of the third succession war it has seemed as if they were slowing down. That there would be a long break in the fighting... that Yvonne's thinking at the turn of the century still at the time reasonably fresh in her post as DMI 2.


Instead Black Jack McGirk and other pirates had appeared. Then the Wolf Dragoons had appeared. Then Ian had been killed, and they had out about the university on Halstead Station. The underlying factors that had contributed to the slow down of military affairs hadn't changed though. The AFFS was fatigued, and the economy needed time to rebuild and expand, and all of that. It would need time to digest the period of mobilization, the Inner Sphere as a whole needed a break from the fighting, because hundreds of world or not the Federated Suns couldn't fight forever without some rest.


It hadn't escaped her that the Precentor New Avalon's behavior towards McGirk was unusual. He wasn't the pirate king dead, even to offer substantive payouts for something that Shepherd had been frank about that ... given the kind of scum they were dealing with he'd likely have done pro bono if McGirk showed up on the same planet. It also hadn't escaped her attention that McGirk had appeared with pristine battlemechs at the turn of the century... and looking back, and his continued success she doubted that he had just happened to find the motherlode.


It vexed her. Being ignorant vexed her. It especially vexed her when her job was to know things.


It didn't vex her enough to attempt to press Shepherd into taking Alexandria along on whatever meeting he was going on with the Azami, just as she certainly couldn't spare the Countess of Kestrel for the periphery trek either. In the mean time there were other potential issues, like "Blackwell has certainly wasted no time publicizing the battle rom footage from Dieron."


It was unsurprising, but she accepted that man responsible for monitoring media relations, and in particular who was supposed to be sitting on the various corporate representatives was right. There had been a significant amount of maneuver for the short duration of the combat on Dieron, but that wouldn't be really visible in the brief clips taken of the Battle Rom footage


The problem was that New Valencia, even though Blackwell hadn't been the main target, the Capellans had attacked it while the dragoons had been granted the landhold there. The consequences of the successful taking of Dieron particularly with a new model of Assault mech in prominence in the media coverage would attract attention.

Both domestically and with foreign audiences, the capellans as well as the dragoons current employers the Free Worlds League. Blackwell's executives were concerned with what the Dragoons might think, and it ws possible Jaime Wolf would be in contact, but the lawyers had already made clear that there was sufficient case law precedence going back to before the Star League that the Federated Suns had the legal right to purchase the machines it had given the circumstances. One might have argued that those machines thing going to Shepherd's Company was less well established in common law, but she didn't see that as an issue.


She supposed they could expect the dragoons to be in contact, but there were so many other things going on it would likely be someone else's problems... except for the Dragoons surprising shocking ability to resupply and rearm their regiments... but even with her concerns it would likely proceed through the civilian side of hte intelligence community if the Dragoons attempted to mount a legal protest.


... and Shepherd would be absent by the time the Dragoons had the chance to learn of Dieron, it was doubtful that they were too well informed about the ongoing affairs here given at last report they were engaged in the petty border raids against the Lyran Commonwealth on behalf of House Marik.


In spite of that Yvonne had considered that it might be best to actually get out in front of the matter... that was to say she had suggested in her memorandum to the First Prince, to be delivered by courier, that they might be better suited by inviting the dragoons to come discuss the matter. As prince's champion though she wasn't all powerful, and there were careful balancing acts to her responsibility, which was why she expected the civilian side of government to take charge of ... whatever this turned into...
--
The process of docking was just like any other. In part due to the need to provide the appearance that this was nothing unusual. The Federated Suns didn't need to know the specifics, House Davion the field marshal... marshals including the Duke of Robinson didn't need to. They didn't need to know, and no one needed to get their hopes up.


So they went through all the usual safety checks, and tried to make this look as normal as possible as Pasha held the deck, and ordered the tech to start the clock. They had checked and triple checked the calculations, Dante had crunched the numbers.


He could honestly say he hadn't been this nervous about executing the jump from Northwind to Dieron. The countdown being verbalized did not help. Once they made the jump it wouldn't matter, the Kearny Fuchida drive would cross the intervening eight point two light years in an instant. At least perceptible experience would be that way... his conversations with the AI raised other questions, maybe that was why it was bothering him more than normal.


The count reached zero, and the digital display flashed and the world turned into a pin prick of light for just a moment. A moment that did seem to last forever, before the field of stars shifted in their perspective, and the near objects in the field of view changed.


The computer took measurements of the stars and confirmed they were where they were supposed to be. Lockdale's star was 40.4 light years from the yellow star Sol that the earth revolved around.
--
Notes: So yeah, besides the tech problems eating the original update Wednesday I'm now sick which is fun, next update we will be hitting Lockdale anchorage and then in 1.5 be setting up for the departure to Davion space with subsequent chapters introducing the Aurigans.

 

[Imperator Pax]

Post Dieron 1.4​

There was nothing for him to do while the navy men worked this was their trade. The stand down from the stations of making the jump and making sure they hadn't taken damage to internal systems or that the transition had caused them to potentially be in the way of anything.


The Hegemony had never done much in terms of half measures, and especially when it came to infrastructure projects... and they had over centuries become extraordinary good about coopting natural features for their ridiculous mindboggling mega engineering and that applied in space as it did on planetary surfaces. In this case the small planetoid at the system oort cloud had been belted by pebble sized asteroids as it continued its slow rotation around Lockdale's primary star, and it kept rotating spinning fast enough to provide a near earth gravity.


That could have still been all natural.


... except for the computer pattern recognition demonstrating that the planetoid didn't have atmosphere so even after those couple of centuries you could still make out a hundred meter wide Cameron star showing where one wanted to be. It established they were in the right place, and that the nearest accessible building was not a port facility but an access section, that looked like a good place to start.


It was no surprise that the fusion reactor continued to provide power, but so they had kept their space gear on as a precaution, but the truly impressive shift was the way the Hegemony's DOME had opened up one of the planetoid's lava tubes, and rebuilding the structuring with ferrocrete emplacements to allow literal mile wide openings, and then also to construct a network of tunnels that were miles deep into the crust.


This was fairly typical of MegaStructure engineering of planetoids as used by the SLDF and Terran Hegemony's navy. The alternative of course had been the construction of wholly artificial satellites culminating in super massive shipyards like Titan, Mars, or at Luna.


Those shipyards... much like Stellar Trek's yards no longer existed. Or in the case of the shipyards in Sol, probably were so reduced in capacity they produced at most a handful of ships every eighteen months.


"Star Lord-class, and spheroid DropShip docked." Bahar observed from one side.


Gene nodded as the small crafts touched down. The JumpShip was berthed, which might have potentially indicated that it had been maneuvered in here for drive work... and then just left. The fact that there was a Confederate-class DropShip, it was too small to be a union, still docked on one collar was interesting, but they would send a party to investigate after they got into the control center.


Mega engineering or not the facility tapered as it moved further in with the emphasis on smaller craft DropShips and such. Lockdale wasn't intended to be a frontline facility. It wasn't intended to be a major center for system defense. If the material here had been left beyond it was probably because the whole facility had been forgotten about by the regular navy. "Lets fan out and find the main control." There should have been an access into the habitable decks and that would lead to central command and the nerve center for the facility.


The tram way worked, and as expected carried them over the internal dockyards capable of servicing millions of tons worth of hulls, and deeper still. He checked the displays, and looked at the two more large spheroid dropships tucked further back, and then nearer to the DropShip berthing main elevator the long aerodyne form of a Titan Aerospace carrier.


"Well they clearly didn't abandon the facility," He muttered mostly to himself, even though what he really meant was they hadn't stripped it for parts.


His radio crackled, "Commander, these are very large pressurized yard spaces." Pasha observed, no doubt receiving a feed to the JumpShip, "In any event I have a beacon response from the automated control, and the Cargo carriers are in flight. Auto pilot estimates put them at seven minutes for wherever they are supposed to be going."


There were no holographic guide paths lit. If that was still a working feature it must not have triggered because they weren't in registered shipping. It didn't matter. They couldn't take this place with them, and while he'd have them go through everything as long as this place was safe it was very likely they could just lock everything back up and come back later.


Pasha's signal couldn't make it any further into the facility as they took the lift deeper in. They would have to find some way to pipe communications into the internal relays in order to maintain contact and that would take time.


"We should get on that." He remarked, stopped to check the outside air temperature. There was atmosphere, as Pasha had observed from the small craft telemetry the yards were pressurized, which made some degree of sense, but would have been a nightmare to engineer given the size of the airlock.


Bahar agreed, but through a look backwards down the hall as they continued walking, "Do you believe that the JumpShip here is from Dr Abner's lost tribe?"


"That was a Confederate on the Hull." Not a union though it did resemble the larger dropship, "So its possible from what we know of the Tribe, alternatively given its in Terran Naval Colors its been here for two and a half centuries." Which was possible as well. "Given that Titan we passed, "I'd say yeah we probably are looking at left behind systems." The confederate could have had engine problems... or given its size just been left behind if they were having Jump Drive problems with the star lord.


Leaving the Titan though... well that was different.


"And the other two?"


"Those looked like Pentagon class DropShips." They had clearly been the same class of DropShips, but they had been recessed up into the 'ceiling' so to speak so it had been hard to get a truly good look given the machinery.


The radio crackled, "commander the main shaft is up ahead, but there is a communications lock out, it also looks like there is some kind of lock on medical."


"Team three do you have anything?"


"There are definitely drone fighters in the bays, commander, but they're securely shut down. As long we don't trip any security protocols they shouldn't pose a danger to the ship."


They had been worried about there just being free ranging drone fighters that might attack any approaches to the 'asteroid' or even just anything in system... but everything had been quiet coming in, even after signaling they were approaching the first landing zone, and then getting the door open.
--
MacIntyre scowled gruffly as the sassenach tried his patience. While he did not presume that the Church of St Cameron was all there they seemed at times close enough, that was not say he believed his ancestors had been saints, but there were advantages on the field to having Shepherd scything down the snakes.


... but there in lay the problem that while the real men worked there were still lowland dandies who believed they should benefit solely on account of their noble birth. The man had been stymied of late but that wasn't something he was used to.


That was too bad for him, MacIntyre knew that the elders intended a Highland rising against house Kurita with regiments bearing the arms and banners of old highland regiments. It was true that the Duke of Errai's mistrust of the Azami wasn't completely unreasonable given their long and stalwart support of House Kurita, but given all that was not going to win him over.


"I note Colonel Shepherd's absence has been taken note of." The Duchess of Victoria remarked, "I suppose that does leave you as the ranking officer of the unit, unless one wants to speak to a JumpShip captain." Which would have therefore been one of the Azami... but that in itself was an observation that the older captain had departed as well.


"I suppose it has ma'am. Can't be helped." He replied. Macintyre was aware of the highland eyes watching him as well now. "Is there anything ma'am?"


There was. Yvonne had scrutinized the research, the compilation of what the analysts of DMI2 had put together for her from the digitalized database from Dieron. They had established with relative certainty that the ace of House Kurita Shepherd had mentioned on Elidere was actually Urizen's granddaughter... which might have well been the problem. Born to Takiro Kurita and raised in the household of the cloistered coordinator after his abdication her possession of a 2R demonstrated no expense had been spared in preparing her for a military career.


She had questions, but the Colonel was absent.


Her participation in the Davion Succession Crisis had put her against the SLDF interference, which had in turn put her training to the test. That was the problem. MacAlister was conclusively the link between the combine authorities or faction that had passed information warning the SLDF that the Combine was leaking SLDF positions to Amaris's forces. That meant the sister to the then ruling coordinator had protested the policy. Apparently that had begun as soon as it had started, but it had ultimately culminated in the post Amaris-crisis commissionof ritual suicide in protest.


All of that had to have occurred after Shepherd had been put in the stasis tube within which he had slept away the centuries, and the intervening succession wars. There was no way to know what the Terran Hegemony had known but it was easy to see where some of their conclusions had been drawn from what the ISF recorded and left in the records in Dieron as historically importance. Even in the modern Combine the ISF was politically active so this institutional record likely was important to them for still yet other reasons.


What was not so far as they could tell from the Dieron archive was, whatever it was that the Azami knew that was so damning... and much as she loathed to just come out and ask they needed to weigh doing that... and physically asking was hard to do when he was off presumably doing some other favor for the Azami before they departed for the deep periphery.


Before she could ask for a time frame, "All I've been told ma'am is that its not expected to be long, that whatever it is it can't be more than a Jump away and that they're coming back in about a week, that's all that I know."


The prevailing theory was negotiations maybe attempting to sway someone ... there were any number of Arkab legion commanders, majors and colonels who might be looking to desert the combine now but were afraid recrimination if they showed up in Davion space. The Azami Liberation Front hadn't exactly shied from instances of piracy in the last century either. The Rasalhague rebels were yet another possibility as were yet other fragments of the Azami resistance.

It had by no means evaded Davion analysts that they had first come to Northwind, but the analysts were divided on that. The only combine world in range of Northwind but not Dieron was Deneb Algedi, which did fit criteria but it was also equally possible... if unlikely he could be jumping to a meeting in a Davion system. Errai would have been darkly amusing, but more likely given the jump to Northwind first he might well have been meeting Azami who had already jumped the border of the Federated Suns and jumped then to Episilon Indi, or Eridani or another world just over the border with house Liao.

 

[Imperator Pax]

Post Dieron 1.5​

He watched the holographic footage. He didn't say anything, because he didn't like what he was seeing. The gantry arms finished moving, and the image stilled fixed on one of the DropShip docking collars as the aerodyne lifted off.


"That is a warship." Pasha remarked stroking his beard.


"Narukami-class... Hegemony colors," Little odd, he would admit, but not an extreme strange, "Block II 670 thousand tons, half a kiloton of Ferrocarbide armor," He scrolled through the display, "A dozen ASF, three dropships... including that Titan we saw." Which they had left, but the Narukami had also departed with its cargo bays full of stuff from here... but that wasn't included. What was included, he clucked his tongue, were a handful of data logs and fragmentary IFF data histories, "She apparently was in contact with the SLS Bismark, but there isn't enough in these logs to really say."


"Bismark is also a warship?"


"She would have been," This was dated the mid 29th​ century after all, "Texas-class." There wasn't much here. The automated query system was designed to reduce manpower requirements for naval reserve stations like anchorages and had asked questions that in normal situations were intended to just check boxes and file paperwork... the Narukami's last SLS vessel contact was or should have been just a line item, not looked twice at, "She left without the titan, and given when she left she could have easily pretended to be a Combine raider and weaved through Davion space."


"Warships were believe to have been destroyed in total in the following decade." Pasha observed.


"I have no clue how that happened," Gene found himself responding, "The Narukami hull originated in the 24th​ century, I don't understand how they wouldn't have been able to have just been forgotten they predate BattleMechs."


That merely turned the conversation into an issue over strategic level force projection, and Pasha was right that he was glad that they didn't have to contend with the Combine's Naval Service fielding Narukamis or any warships.


... but it also didn't change the fact that the Successor States didn't have warships, and rather obviously the clans did. "We know at least Clan Wolverine managed to slip the rest of Kerensky's people with two warships by the time the Davions took Northwind, thats more that we didn't know. Alright, I'm going to the AI annex," Which was behind a bunch of automated defensive guns, and the medical bay was still locked to them... also behind defensive guns that were active.


They had yet to try any of the other facilities either, but if everything wasn't in tact... then it could at least pass for being operational. What did or didn't work work beyond eye level inspection would take engineers months to dig down... maybe longer given the technological backslide but it still raised questions.


Lockdale's anchorage was big... but Lockdale the planet Lockdale was a dead world... even if there were survivors on the world it was obviously a pale shadow of the provincial capital it had been in the 2760s before the coup.


He doubted there was anything more than tombs for them on the planet's surface, and even if there wasn't they didn't have the resources to check. New Dallas given its uplink condition according to transmission records to Dieron suggested it would be a much better given their codes, and ability to ride to where the castle outpost was.


Lockdale was a temporary stop over though until they could finish exploring.
--
He placed the chit in the reader and felt the prick of the blood test and watched as the lights filled green. "Commander Shepherd we're getting movement all over the fortress, I have drone aircraft launching, and i'm reading active sensors at the jump point."


There wasn't anything to do. He acknowledged the radio transmission as the doors opened and he stepped inside. The remnants of the provincial capital's space defense system reminded him a lot of what he had seen at Northwind once they had gotten the systems to talk to one another... and a reminder of what it had cost the SLDF to break through the compromised SDS system because Kerensky had not mounted an immediate attack into the Hegemony, and because he hadn't had the override codes that might have saved millions of lives or more.


Gene paused at the computer terminal inside and immediately in front of the massive holographic globe representing the whole solar system, within which were the wisps of the oort cloud, and asteroid belts and planetary and other solar bodies. The black watch command chip went into a recepticle, "Shadow Command Override, Priority Order Dispatch." He half mumbled, cognizant that the override to the AI restrictions also contained the HPG data recording that had started them on this road way back in the periphery... and it also included the proof that Tripitz had managed to run the Republican blockade of Terra and somehow ended up in the rimward periphery.


The AI threw up a status bar as it started to process through the data.


"Colonel Shepherd, I am Lockdale Anchorage." The AI remarked, "Admiral Clancy expected that other officers of the Central Intelligence Directorate would have survived, but I have been out of contact with the Admiral for some time. Officiating your credentials, and the reports from Fortress Dieron and Castle Northwind... please hold."


It was a long couple of minutes.


"Your data package on Kerensky's personnel is duly noted, standby."


More waiting followed.


"I am releasing the locks on the personnel storage bay,"


"You mean the medical bay?" He asked.


"The majority of my original crew died responding to the initial rim world incursion, when Terra fell General MacArthur attempted to order the enacting of the Wildfire protocol, but that was subsequently overridden and the system locked itself out. Admiral Clancy believes that sabotage of the system occurred on terra, and allowed orders from SLDF regular personnel to further countermand the scuttling orders on the grounds it would have impeded General Kerensky who was supposed to be ordered to initiate an offensive against the Rim World."


He wondered how those orders had been phrased... but from the sound of it... most likely the Commanding General probably hadn't had a clear picture of what was even going on in the heart of civilization even as the Hegemony burned.


"What about the med bay?"


"As a precaution, recognizing the dangers that had developed following the collapse of the league an agreement was reached between Admiral Clancy and remnants of the 331st​ Division of the Terran Hegemony / sic SLDF in Exile to leave a small detachment here predominantly of their white shield personnel."


Lockdale played a video of footage of a nuke going off on some world that Gene didn't know, the name on the tag meant nothing to him. The date was 2823. The nuke detonated inside the city proper with no sign of an airborne delivery system first.


"The Exodus of SLDF personnel that departed under Kerensky underwent at least two civil wars, and at least as many attempted mutinies given Kerensky's track, and limited log data from the period we believe that his objective was a series of worlds that Hegemony long range surveillance astrology had detected but that had not been followed up on. The habitable zone was expected to be viable but not necessarily worth the Hegemony's time given mission parameters. They were left on a list as potentially suitable for Star League exploration at a later date. Accurate Astrological data was limited ..."


Kerensky had been running to a set of habitable worlds he obviously had reason to believe could support life, but not one he might have ended up finding a Terran bolt hold... where there might be a competing set of authority, especially if the notes on the mutiny and 'Operation Klondike' were anything approaching accurate.


... and he almost asked the AI what were the odds that the clans were going to eventually come looking at the Inner Sphere, but Lockdale Anchorage beat him to it by bringing up the Wolf Dragoons appearance in 3005 that was also included in the package.


"Affirmative, I would recommend that you extend contact to all units operating within the Admiral's operational network," A list of various ex SLDF units populated, like the blue stars and the 32nd​ Recon Group that had ties to House Davion, "Aprising them of the potential threat of the Dragoons exists but so to should continued offensive actions, and the reasoning for actions against the Draconis Combine. Northwind is correct, rearmament and liberation of former Hegemony worlds from the Combine should be operational and strategic objective for any proceeding conflict."


"And the periphery?"


"I was not prepared, or briefed on the Communications Network layout in the Rimward Periphery, and was not communicated with by the Tripitz or by elements in contact with the Black Watch command structure. Admiral Clancy during his last check in did not mention such either, he and 331st​ survivors appear to have not received such information."


Which just reiterated that no one had known Tripitz had gotten by.

--
Notes: and next week while we continue this, we do pivot back to Northwind, in preparation for the Arano arc, because yay travel time skips.

 

[Imperator Pax]

Post Dieron 1.6​

The deckspace of the command center, or at least this side annex was quiet. The air filters blew air but there was little to no noise from the machine... so they waited largely in silence. "Whats he doing in there?"


Pasha harrumphed shushing the younger Azami, who had not been his first choice. "It is a neurohelmet..."


"I am a MechWarrior, I am aware of what it is." The younger man protested defensively. "What do you think will happen?" He asked.


"Be quiet Karasu." Pasha had been absent from much of the fighting on Elidere, but he understood if academically what had happened. He understood better than most what the weapons of the Star League, and the weapons of the Hegemony which had defended Terra were capable of. They were guests the mechanical jinn here could easily have killed them on the approach or at any time they were here and could still exercise the free will to destroy their feeble presence.


House Kurita had conspired with the Satan Amaris, who had betrayed and murdered House Cameron and House Kurita had then not simply refused to provide the SLDF passage, but had passed the knowledge of the SLDF and fed the soldiers of the Star League into the monster's waiting den. What was worse was that the combine had clearly known this, and that then House Kurita had thought to attempt to usurp the throne once fighting Amaris had ended.

The speakers came to life.


"THS Hedwig is online, and detaching from the gantries, all personnel be advised Hedwig is capable of hitting a maximum acceleration of 11gs. The intention in the 28th​ century was to produce these to defend eventually all systems of the Terran Hegemony." Never mind what would have been deployed aboard ships of the Hegemony fleet in complement to existing Pentagons. "All flights should remained grounded while she stretches her wings." There was a pause, "The THS Braunfelds, same class, same acceleration profile, will follow suit after Hedwig returns to the bay. After which we will make an in-depth survey of the Titan-class ship that was left here, as well as an examination of the Star Lord JumpShip. I would recommend all naval personnel begin reviewing the necessary documents and planning for those efforts during our down time."


Gene leaned back behind the ferro aluminum view port of the the chamber. In theory the idea had been simple... but it had taken time. The idea had taken time to refine, there had been newer technologies, there had been demands in the program, and from the ministry for still yet other considerations... ultimately leading to the building of full scale drone warships.


The real failure though had been in leadership.


The crisis with davion succession, the assassination of one star lord, an absentee regent, the death of the ruling house... the chaos of the war and the limits of communication across known space. The Hegemony hadn't had infinite money, but really the leadership failings had been the death knell of really all governments that fell. People, even kings, were fallible.


That was how things were... Lockdale had limitations on what it could accomplish. There was no longer a planetary center to speak of. They couldn't dig into the earth, but eventually... eventually what was here, at least what hadn't already gone off with Clancy and his Wolverine friends. The place looked pretty intact, so he had to go through what had been checked out... most likely the admiral hadn't had the resources
.... or there was something in that list, but he wasn't sure. He hadn't had time... but the stuff here was a treasure trove... and Clan Wolverine had left with a warship from here. They had a warship, the clans had a warship... the wolfs had they brought warships to the inner sphere... ComStar had Terra closed off to the majority of traffic and even then outside of ridiculously curated visits...


--
Even assuming it had been a simple rendezvous the reality was the JumpDrive would have been charging while whatever meeting was going on. Shepherd's indicated time table strongly supported the idea that he was only making the single jump, thus it was unlikely there were further movements planned before coming back.


She stared hard at the black and white check pattern applied to the shoulders of the Highlander Assault weight Mechs visible from her window office of the castle. "Ma'am," The Guards officer leaned over, "This is a priority." He put the folder down and stepped back.


Yvonne Davion paused and started pulling the sheets from the envelope. They were marked the DMI letterhead and time steps, and the write ups were for multiple sections. Groups monitoring different groups. In this case, her immediate expectation was the merchants were too often the eyes of foreign intelligence agencies of the other nations. This was internal.


Blackwell, and the Northwind government were both chattering about the same topic.


The Wolfs Dragoons.


The Eridani probably knew what ever it was that Shepherd had told the Highlanders here. Information which Shepherd to disclose to them, "Thank you, if you would give us the room please." He nodded sharply, and she had the room with her lady in waiting. "We need to make a change of tactics, if Shepherd isn't going to tell us its because he has a reason not to tell us, we need to provide him with a reason in order to bring us into the circle. The Eridani have reached out to a number of former SLDF units in Davion service, descendants of SLDF personnel." She admittedly wasn't entirely sure that wasn't General Kerston acting on his initiative, but the Eridani hadn't sent a message to the Blue Star Irregulars by courier as soon as Dieron had been secured. They had used a commercial carrier boarding for Altair. They didn't know the contents of the message. "I had mentioned previously your family origins." She had said that back on Dieron.


"With all due respect ma'am its quite well know what my family origins are." That the ruling house of kestrel, and almost all of noble houses of Kestrel down to the lowliest barons, and a significant number of the knightly houses were descendants of the Star League after two and a half centuries. "If he was going to tell me at this point wouldn't he have done it? And beyond that the message communicated to the Blue Stars could well have been the transmission of what we learned from the Combine's archives."


"I had considered that already. The timing doesn't line up. Kerston did not that Coordinator leaked the 19th​ Regiment's movements. He suspected but he had no proof. There must have still been some lingering benefit of the doubt, but Kerston had flown into apoplexy in his speech to the Light Horse gathered on Dieron." That was itself another issue.


Kerston had been commanding general of the Eridani Light Horse for an extended period of command... there was talk of him retiring. Not immediately but that there was talk meant a change in leadership was likely within the next few years.


Then of course there was the Federated Sun's diplomatic relations with the Lyran Commonwealth. They had already planned to share access to the archive, but the information had set in about what this would mean for relations with the lyrans, and what the lyran response would be.


... and there was going to be the reaction from the combine. The combine had responded with the Hesperus campaign, but it had been Marik orders that gone through.


... what Yvonne couldn't know was that by this point, the ISF had already been told about the intelligence windfall and the pieces coming together. A relatively young but highly rated ambitious member of the Dieron HPG station had made copies of a copy and passed it back to the ISF, and that information was already being couriered back to the Coordinator's Court.


They had no way of knowing that. That Takashi Kurita was a little over a week from finding out about a piecing together, a fresh set of eyes as it were had put it together. No Davion involvement necessary for the information the Combine Intelligence service passed the material up the chain, and the intuitions that be acted along there usual habits; nature taking its course.


For Yvonne the more pressing information was the Reimi ring... which was another red flag in its own right because that implied that it had been known, Shepherd had brought it up and cross referenced the archive by name. That was more reason to increase the priority.
--
Shepherd closed the data file on the warships. Lockdale was capable of refurbishing the drives, up to and including both capital scale maneuvering drives and compact K-F of spaceships, and particularly warships... but those were gone now... or at least out of sight. Lockdale was something to sit on for the time being.


The New Avalon Institute of Science was still nascent, still learning to walk... he was going to have to make a trip to Aquagea when they made their periphery run anyway, bringing them Volgadon would do more for the Federated Suns as a state than this... for right now.


"Where are we?" He asked.


"ah, uhm speaking," The tech shuffled, "None of this even looks like what it should. We referred to the manuals. I haven't gone into the nose yet, but just looking at the capacitors, those are gauss rifles not the assault cannons we were expecting."


"There is some model of assault autocannon to the rear," Another man reported. "But I'm not familiar with it." He remarked.


"The 331st​ upgraded this Hegemony Titan with the technology they had available," Lockdale stated over the speakers, "Some of the systems were damaged, unfortunately I was overruled from my initial direction to refit it akin to," He rattled off a program designation, "To replace the onboard fighter spaces with Mk39 series drones, or even BlackWasps."


"Is that feasible?" He regretted asking as the command deck hologram illuminated the suggested 'refit' that would have taken several months. "Ah, I have to echo Admiral Clancy, given the dropship is currently serviceable that is not a practical option at this stage." Gene had no idea how in-depth such refits to accommodate drone fighters were but the Titan had the command and control suites he hadn't even realized he wanted in the case... the refitting time table also discouraged him from trying to bring San Saba or the Bexar here ... they needed to start the long trek out to the periphery. "Wait, are you suggesting that Hegemony Titans were being refit to carry ARTS wings?"


"Affirmative, approved in 2764 Naval Appropriation black budget a Nightwing class ship was approved to be rebuilt," 'Rebuilt' in this case had apparently meant ripping out the KF drive and extending the ship's hull to add another 35K thousand tons, "As a testbed for the program aboard an actual warship."


Even without the coup that had occured it sounded like an expensive boondoggle to Gene, but it sounded also exactly like something the Hegemony would have done... especially the plans to then try and mount the systems in Kimagure class Pursuit Cruisers which doubtlessly never been anything other than prospective plan drawings... but it did suggest where the Hegemony's lords of the admiralty had been thinking. "Why not just start with the Kimagure, they already carried a dozen fighters?"


"There were concerns that the program might cause additional stress to the hull and the initial planned test bed was unavailable."


Gene just nodded, and decided to drop the entire subject... no doubt the Anchorage AI had probably wanted to do more for the Block II Narukami but there hadn't been time for everything. "Hedgwig and Braunfelds, anything in particular?"


"No their systems were built for robustness the tranche V series were intended for escorting Hegemony warships operating far beyond the Hegemony's borders as well as protecting the worlds of the Hegemony."


"You've completed offloading of the supplies from Dieron?"


"I have, they're being separated from their pallets and sorted now." The AI replied. "I assume you need the dropships themselves?"


"Yes." A transit manifest for delivering to Northwind Castle appeared.

 

[Imperator Pax]

Post Dieron​

"KF Drive Signatures, Two Large Jump Ships at Nadir."


A second tech watched the console in front of him as the mass blips on the hologram remained indistinct while .

"Northwind Control is reading them as Friendly, we have IFF receipts for Colorado they're confirmed. Tally one additional, resolving... Star Lord, signals going out,"


A few days later Shepherd was climbing up into his Marauder and then coming back down with a computer data core. He held it out by the carry handle.


"What's this then?"

"Its a back up copy of the medical university of Volgadon from Lone Star." He held it out by the handle a little more forcefully.


"Its what?" The field marshal questioned.


Gene frowned, and the explanation itself probably lead to more misunderstandings not less but he didn't have a use for the thing, and given the New Avalon Institute of Science if he went ahead and provided them a copy of the medical school's information when he got back there were likely to be less questions with the rest of the back up from the periphery.


... but if ended up doing some good at New Avalon then that was fine, he had other things to do... especially given the number of Highlander mechs on the deck. So that was what he went and did; taking the highlanders on an exercise.


"Take this Jeffries, get it checked out." She ordered to the Guards officer as the Orion departed the hangar.


She had no reason to doubt it was what it was purported to be, but she already felt the migraine coming on. Her priority had been.. well a new JumpShip and three assault dropships didn't just materialize out of the aether. She had also had questions about the landing of the two large cargo dropships at the port complex uncovered over which the highlanders had been somewhat reticent to speak of... but what had followed the following morning had been the landing of Azami DropShips, before which federal officials had been allowed entry to the port and who were able to supervise, 'supervise' as material was transferred to the larger DropShips in an effort to consolidate...


They had already been briefed on that of course. The plan for the larger DropShips had been a planned reduction in the number of collars used. That had made sense even accepting the size of the exodus fleet massed over Northwind. A portion of Shepherd's Company were currently on leave, either here on Northwind in which case those cadets were really more correctly on light or half duty or off world.


That meant Shepherd would be largely on Northwind, staying on Northwind she hoped until that period of rest finished... but they had yet more questions than they had achieved answers for... then of course there was Lord Aaron to contend with...
--
Gene ordered the recently graduated highland cadets into line. He had swapped to a stock Marauder II for this outing, and Hanzo and Bahar were both running Highlanders. The maneuver course was based on SLDF programs though it had needed to be adopted for the Marauder II machine.


As a result the Orion was somewhat conspicuous, especially since Alexandria wasn't saying anything. She'd been ... well maybe not stand offish since he'd landed. The deciding factor to handing over the data core the medical documents had been the ice box, the medical bay on Lockdale Anchorage.


... the ice cubes were a handful of personnel, and deicing them had been a mixed bag. They knew enough about Kerensky's exodus, and he wasn't surprised that the Iron Wombs had been put into use for Nicholas Kerensky's delusional ambitions... and that from the sound of it Clan Wolverine had planned to implement a similar population growth plan in order to build a stable population some where in the periphery.


The problem though was now what to do with the few dozen time displaced people. McEvedy had planned to run the long way to the Magistracy of Canopus... but if she had succeeded then there was no evidence. There had been apparently splinters in part to evade any potential pursuit. Still it made a certain amount of sense to make of the magistracy in theory just fo being on the opposite side of the sphere.


Gene flipped the command software display to check the gunnery scores, silently glad that Abner was in the Commonwealth. It had been one thing just knowing that some surviving Terran Naval Officer had made contact with the Minnesota tribe and getting the details regarding Kerensky's walking dumpster fire of a society that there were living people from that era ... from the era of the Minnesota tribe appearing in the Inner Sphere.


He was going to feel bad, he already did feel bad, holding it back... but the ice cubes wanted to find their fellow wolverines if possible, and that meant them hitching a ride into the periphery for their own search. That was understandable no one had come to get them after roughly a century and a half... he did want to know what had happened... though mostly because they had been taking warships into the rimward periphery.


Where had they gone?


He trusted them so far as he didn't think they were lying, and he trusted them enough that what they had told them about the Clans in the 29th​ century were accurate, and that he wouldn't as a result tell Abner immediately if they didn't want him to. Abner probably wouldn't like that but at this point ... if there were Wolverine survivors out there well the descendants of he wanted to know what he was dealing with first before Interstellar started swarming them with questions or what not.




The numbers coalesced on his screen.


"They're not there yet." Dante remarked tapped in from one of the Fury tanks.


The AI wasn't wrong, "We'll have time during the ride out to the periphery to handle training aboard the JumpShips."


"I would be remiss in my duties Commander Shepherd but the pirates active are clearly not ordinary pirates. McGirk's access to Royal Equipment is highly anomalous and his destruction of the HPG network will degrade warnings and news beyond the already poor state of the periphery."


"I know." He replied to the AI. They had landed the Eisenhower at the Northwind port with the intention of transferring the mobile AI core to the command deck of the Titan-class DropShip, and that was work was ongoing. He keyed the mike, and channel to the cadets, "Alright go around and pack it in, Bahar tell the armor and the crunchies they're up once we're down." The Marauder II mechs ran off of mostly Marauder parts, with the exception of the control systems.


He ignored Dante's repeated commentary that maintain the Dalban paired systems would have been the better option... the more important thing was that machines were working. As they parked them in the hangars.


"Hey they did pretty good out there." Chang remarked having probably come directly from the Daimyo, given that the Atlas was in the hanger with them, and she was coming into the bay. "We could be faster, but they've only got one fight under their belt, its not like they're title contenders."


"She's right," Beau agreed, "We got to give the kids time, especially with brand new mechs."


"Commander I need a word, in private." Alexandria cut in quickly. Pricate wasn't really private, they were in the Port complex connecting to Castle Northwind, Dante probably dozens of anti personnel drones in the area, never mind ever mic recording. What there weren't was anyone obviously watching. The deployment space in the entry way might have been crawling with AFFS and highland troopers from planetary militia units but the facility itself was so automated that most people gave the machines a wide berth.


Thereby what should have been a waiting area for potential hundreds of hegemony personnel waiting to board a dropship or who had offloaded was empty as a tomb. He therefore had complete access to the digital systems, and the projection equipment that were standard to the facility. "I woke up in a facility not unlike this one," From the logs from Aquagea it seemed that the Hegemony presence in the periphery border , and the staging to watch the Capellan border had been reinforced ... but most likely the units of Hegemony, and Regular SLDF had been ground up and attrited if not in the stages of the war against the Taurians then, then in the delayed offensive against Amaris to liberate the hegemony proper... and by that point Kurita had been leaking SLDF positions to Amaris, "You want to know the principle reason that both the Azami, the Eridani, and the clans of Northwind are willing to consider Kurita the worst sort of traitors and blackguards," He pulled the cord to the chit on his neck and placed it into a slot, "Because there is very little more damning to the sitting coordinator than the recorded proof of his ancestor's betrayal. The ISF ferried documents and material to Amaris, Dieron documents that. The coordinator who inaugarated the succession wars knowingly, and personally passed SLDF positions to Amaris... and Kerensky and his Communications guys had recorded proof of it."


The HPG recording played without him needed to prompt a visual cue.


Dieron by itself was bad, but there was a difference between documentation, and the raw visceral damnation of the recorded proof of conversations between Kurita, and Amaris.


"And the computer core?"


He shrugged, "I have a list of a dozen doctors, of which I'm not, more nurses, and Physician Assistants who would sign on, I have enough people to staff Bexar and the smaller medical facilities, the Azami are retreating," from the Inner Sphere, "into the periphery because they can't fight House Kurita, and they don't want to split the faith into an open civil war, if Rasalhague gets independence thats wonderful, but there is a difference between a fledgling independent state and what the Federated Suns can do with what i'm told is knowledge lost to history."


His conversations with Dante, particularly of the AI's eavesdropping on conversations carried out within the supposed security of Northwind were such that it seemed the best option to play off, and emphasize that the core was not militarily critical, and to use it to continue to keep the Davions off balance, and yet still in their good graces. The university had been a civilian institution but given the losses of the Terran Hegemony's technological and industrial base... the combined rest of the university of Volgadon well that had obvious military and political ramifications... but he didn't have the full database with him, and nor did he intend to suggest that data existed.

 

[Imperator Pax]

Post Dieron​

Alexandria sat in the chair, and stewed. Expecting the lecture, the chastisement for allowing herself to be caught off guard. She'd expected to just ask for the answers and it would all be clinical, clean... just another briefing. Her hands shook as she sat in the chair within the governor's office of Castle Northwind.


Yvonne Davion, the Prince's Champion was pacing the study, and then stopped, her expression creasing in thought, or perhaps vexation. "Did he give you a copy of it?"


She swallowed, it was the recording, and "No, no ma'am he did not." she hadn't thought to ask in the moment for a copy.


"He shows you an HPG recording, a recording of a live transmission of Minoru Kurita in conference with Stefan Amaris, the reigning coordinator of the Draconis Combine during the crisis and is providing Amaris with the positions of SLDF directly, not through an intermediary, and you didn't get a copy?"


In truth she had been a bit taken aback in the moment. It was like being sucker punched at the time, and Shepherd who must have watched the video countless times previous had been stone faced in regards to it all. She should have asked for a copy, she recognized that. The recording was damning to House Kurita there was no refuting that ... it was no wonder that the clans of Northwind were taking the steps they were.


The duchess of Victoria turned fully in her direction, "Where is he now?"


"Somewhere here, in Castle Northwind."


"So he's with the highlanders? The clan elders I presume."


"That is my understanding."


Yvonne Davion forced herself to sit down finally. Jeffries had been busy.. but the preliminary report was positive, that it was by all indications what it was purported to be. Shepherd had never asked how New Avalon's Institute of Science had been founded he had simply... more or less looked at the college and shrugged... he hadn't asked them how they had managed to establish the institution.


He had no idea about Halstead Station, and of Ian's too early demise, of Hanse's ascent to the throne. Of course the Star League era University which had contributed to, was the foundation of the NAIS. How Hanse, and the force on Mallory's world had been physical moving books and other things into bags, and scraping them up with the hands of BattleMechs.


Real books, not a nice portable computer core. "He comes from era that I doubt anything he does would elicit a second look, on New Avalon a member of the Medical Service," A doctor in the AFFS, "Looked over the Colonel physically he's probably healthier than you or I, but he's also from a different time, among other things there are moments though where General Kerensky is treated as a living person..." She shook her head, "now, to be blunt for the Azami Amaris is the literal incarnation of Satan in human flesh." She snapped and then paused in her lecturing, the Azami were "Hardly the only ones, Amaris is the reason for the schism in the catholic church, and that video footage establishes that Kurita knowing colluded with that monster, and then had the gall the bloody temerity to claim after that it was his natural right to be Star Lord and that House Kurita should succeed House Cameron. I can scarcely imagine what would have happened if the 2nd​ Battalion of the Sword of Light had been on Dieron, can you?"


She paused and shook her head... this was all going to be a nightmare to make sense of, never mind explaining it to the First Prince.


"You can't imagine? The coordinator's only son, the heir to the Draconis Combine on Dieron, the living legacy of some two centuries of murder and mayhem perpetuated by the Combine," Her voice cracked as she gripped the arms of the plush lounge chair. Then paused, reaching to the side and unlocking the biometric lock on the case, "Your family joined the Federated Suns after Kerensky departed, many in the SLDF did and among them was a Naval Officer of the Terran Hegemony. He had a database that he left behind, left to us. " She pulled up a picture of a pair of HAF officers. "That is Major Shepherd in 2765," There was a resemblance between the two officers. "I would assume following shortly upon his completion of the Gunslinger program, and before he shipped for the periphery..." Shepherd's face was less stern, less glacial with just the ghost of a smile on the Major's face as he stood beside the admiral. In a year his whole world would be gone... "Do you know how many DCMS mechwarriors have seen Shepherd in combat, and kept breathing, because I am relatively certain that the answer is not one has exchanged fire with him on the battlefield and made it home in anything other than a bag."

The destruction of first and third battalions of the Sword of Light Regiment stationed on Dieron had varied. They had been hit from all sides, including from strikes from cruise missiles across a map grid area, but also baited into a head long charge against a Star League era Assault Mech that might as well have been wholly unique, been the only one of its type in the whole Galaxy, and so focused on charging it, that they had walked into the enfilading fire of numerous other assault 'Mechs of Star League vintage.

--
The holographic display showed Northwind's capital asleep, it pushing one in the morning, positive returns from a pair of high flying Rapier ASF keeping watch. They were alert, and if something went wrong, the drones they had brought from the anchorage were slotted into launch bays to give anyone looking to start something an unpleasant surprise.

He felt the beginnings of a headache coming on, and ticked the pen against the corner of the paper making sure it would write. The Marauder II exercises were going good, but he wasn't really surprised that the real questions coming out of the Davion break down of Dieron as a battle had been centered on his other hundred tonner.

Gene checked over the Devastator's read outs. He was beginning, he had suspected, to guess from the lack of electronics ... well he could guess why the Nightstar had eclipsed this as the preferred design at least Commanding Officers as a replacement for the 75 ton Marauder. Dante agreed with his assessment. The Devastator was excellent for a Gunslinger but maybe not for a Company commander or his second, and certainly not for higher command.


That wasn't to say either machine didn't have respective strengths and weaknesses. He tapped the screen on the device to one side and looked at the data, "The Phoenix Hawk uses the same engine as the Highlander."


The kilted man paused, from his own glass of scotch "Pardon."


"The General Motors 270, there isn't anything in the Highlander, well the Cellular ammunition storage," and the railguns, "but my understanding is that Gauss rifles should be hopefully able to be brought back into production... hopefully in a few years." He leaned back and swirled the scotch, "Dante is right, I understand that production of the King Crab is a lot to ask, but sustaining any kind of position requires spare parts, what's buried here isn't going to last forever," And it only took one asshole deciding to open a can of sunshine to make everything a mess... more of a mess. "Dieron either, but it needs to be held, but that isn't the only thing."


He heard Campbell's boot hit the bar underneath the table, "What do you need then?"


"Besides..." The economic organization that, the capital accumulation to support privately funded reinvestment into industry, which he recognized as necessary, but could hardly say it was his area, and it didn't seem to be anyone's area... he didn't say any of that, but he was thinking it, "I need Northwind's government to invite and start the process of vetting all of the surviving SLDF commands operating with Davion space, and under the AFFS banner. At some point sooner rather than later publication of if not the recording than the archive at Dieron will go out to the Lyrans and at that point there will be no hiding it in the long run."


"Why would we not tell them now of House Kurita's treachery?"


Dante chuffed over the microphone, giving presence to the AI that was always there, "Being that we need time to organize, Captain. We need time to prepare, piece meal attacks will distract the Combine, we must make good on the resources we have and we must also know who can be trusted."


The highlander pilot nodded, eyeing his own glass of scotch for a moment, and then pointed out what was obvious, "You said that Kerston was told on Dieron, well that he told what was in the archives there, should we be assuming he has told the whole Light Horse about what happened?"


It was a safe enough bet, "We know the Blue Stars do know," Gene replied putting the glass down, again "What will come of them knowing we don't know. Whatever does happen there needs to be some way to coordinate."


"There is the other issue."


"Kerensky left the Inner Sphere with Hegemony automated factories including the equipment to build warships, there is no reason he will have lost warships, and given what we know they certainly were able to maintain their warships in the 29th​ century. If Kerensky's exodus learns of House Kurita's actions I can reasonably intuit how they'll respond," He held up a hand, "I doubt General Keresnky published the data,"


The highlander paused, "The black watch had ones who left with him," He was dancing around the subject, "We can't avoid, can't go on not talking to the dragoons forever, if we had known when they had arrived who they were we'd have asked then what became of them, but if we are certain," Campbell continued, "We must tell them they cannot side with the Combine, if they do not listen then to hell them, but they should be told."


"My concern is that Kerensky's people will respond by deploying warships, and that the response to that will be nuclear weapons. That is the impediment to telling them." That it would result in the genocide of countless worlds.


"All of the great houses have nuclear weapons, we cannot allow the threat of them to allow them to get away with their crimes."


A part of Gene lamented agreeing to the Wolverines... understandable wish to contain what their records were, "They're not going anywhere, if they follow their habits thus far, they'll stick with Marik, move on to the Lyrans next... I expect to be back from the periphery by that point. I will be coming back to meet with Abner and coordinate resources for an exploration in the Rimward... but as a compromise if the Dragoons look like they're going to break protocol and sign with House Kurita for some reason, give them the data chip before they can cross into Combine space."


... but if that did happen... well what he expected was really, and what Dante agreed was that most likely the Wolfs would go on a suicidal death ride against the Combine Capital.... which Dante didn't think was the worst possible solution.... which was of course Jaime Wolf went screaming back to the clans and prompted a murderous holy war and let the genie out of the bottle.


--
Notes: This was a long time coming as Gene has less resources to magik industry up using spell points, in the next section we do skip forward in time to the Lyran commonwealth, unfortunately one of my preferred interactive maps is not working correctly for some reason, but yeah Lyrans next chapter and the beginning of the reaction to stuff and things. If there are any issues, here point them out, because we are setting up for stuff in the long term is going to have effects on the inner sphere at large.

 

[Imperator Pax]

Post Dieron​

They had jumped from Dieron directly over the Commonwealth border to New Earth, and avoided the Capellan border while heading to New Kyoto. It was the first time back in the commonwealth in years. The news was a surreal change from the Federated Suns coverage, instead of talking about the snakes getting their asses handed to them the Lyran media was talking about the Dragoons jumping over the border for House Marik.


Septim couldn't help but grumble about it. It was probably nothing more than a case of the marketing people wanting a focus on stories that would hold the attention of the broadest lyran audience. Surely there had to be some specialist news media covering the snakes getting their teeth kicked in.


Not that he had a lot of time to grumble about it. He knew when to shut up when they'd been only partly through the plate of arme ritter, the pan fried apple cakes which were a staple of the hotel, when their other party arrived. They were, all of them, in dark blue jackets and great coats, and riding trousers. It would have been ridiculous to wear anywhere other than on parade... and if Septim wasn't wrong, everyone of these high born bastards probably had an Assault Mech to their name that barely saw outside the stable.


The chests full of medals were for station keeping, very few of them had wound badges to match their times in service to the Commonwealth... but they did have seniority. Abner smiled waddling slightly away from his brandy to hug one of them, "Bertie you look so well," He hugged a forty something year old graf, grabbing his sleeves, "You have grown a mustache, your mother, my sister should be so proud to see her little Bertie grown up, yes. Here come sit, eat, my sister would never allow me to hear the end of it, if you didn't eat."


The count tried to protest but Abner was having none of it and physically forced the younger man to face the table and the plate of pancakes, and then gestured to the rest of the men. Finally one of them spoke up, he must have been the leader because despite being in maybe fifties he had the most egregious number of medals. "So what exactly did you find?"


Abner leaned on his walking stick and sat back down. "That General, is complicated, but so far as Urd needs to be concerned, is that we have evidence not simply of the Combine treachery, of which I will address in a moment, is that SAFE was able to subvert LIC activities, and instigate a certain series of battles. We have in our holds copies of the ISF archive from Dieron."


"We had been informed that Dieron had fallen, House Davion simply allowed you unrestricted access?" The 'general' sounded skeptical


"Its a very long story herr General." The professor reached inside his breast pocket and placed an ancient terran hegemony device on the table that sprang up into a blue tinged hologram, but it came with a sound quality that was haunting in its clarity... as Kurita passed information to Amaris, "As I said, Rupert, its a very long story. Bertie is your friend there quite alright, he appears a bit green."


The lieutenant colonel next to the count looked more than a little green to Septim, but he kept his mouth shut. He was wondering where his father was, this had been their agreed upon meeting place, given the need to be available to ship back in time to meet up with the others.


Abner had already turned away. "You are you are aware of Dieron's fall. I assure you its quite worse for the Combine than whatever you may have been told." He pressed a button on his stick and started a Battle Rom footage, ignoring the protests that they had of course seen the reports that the MRB had made available, which Septim knew pretty was a pretty reduced account of the whole fight... no body looking to hire a merc unit with their time wanted to watch hours, days of slog and maneuver never mind all the prep work.


Anyone who watched the MRB highlights would get to see the highlight real of one giant war machine shooting another one, but how long could those clips from Dieron be? Three minute clips if that? The Review people probably clipped up various pilots from the Company and maybe some view of the tankers in action maybe. It just wouldn't be all of it.


But completely obfuscated by the sheer mass of... all the things, was that no one touched on where Gene was from. All eyes were on the Thugs, Highlanders, the fancy star league assault mechs. LosTech cache, being a major find, and to a lesser extent to the new Davion Assault 'Mech, and on that front that House Davion would probably be opening up the Marauder II to the market.


... and if Abner wasn't going to tell them the boss wasn't 'a knight from the Earth that was', or whatever a holo drama would have called him... Septim resolved it wasn't going to come from his mouth.


"One must understand," Abner was pacing around the table, now, as if the private gilded marble dining hall of the hotel was a college lecture he was getting, "Our Lyran Commonwealth enjoys a standard of living that is appreciably higher than the other nations. It can be said on that account we have fallen the least from the era of golden light that was the Star League. Our ancestors were men of logic, and reason, of science."
--
Septim had left the Guards with nothing to show for his stint. He at least had a mech to his name, but that was really what let him get by in the Periphery. Elidere had been all emotion... and the knock to the head also had twisted his perception of it.


... and the destruction of the Sun Zhang cadre still counted for something as well, even if it was in the shadow of eating most of a regiment from the infamous sword of light.


So sitting down and spending a couple of days 'relaxing', it had been anything but, rewatching the sum of the footage made him antsy. The combine had lost a regiment in the battle at Elidere... and then basically two mech regiments on Dieron. Call it four percent of their 'mech force in a year not counting any other losses sustained ... which explained why the LIC was involved.


He wasn't stupid, the statement that the Combine would have to pull forces from the Lyran frontier went without saying. Never mind... if everyone talking about the revolts ended up being right and the Azami and Rasalhague did rebel, what would that do the DCMS. The Commonwealth could only gain if the Combine atomized ... well not in that way, but if its political foundation broke down and it had to fight an internal conflict.


"So what happens now Doctor?"


"Oh, not much. House Davion wants the goodwill of the Archon and the Commonwealth, the two nations have been talking to each other for years." He replied. "I am sure that given time there will be more questions but sharing the ISF archive from Dieron even if its old and hypothetically no longer relevant data is a boon."


"But it is relevant. There ... was the Reimei thing, and the Coordinator dying," And who knew what else was in there. "And what about the Minnesota tribe?"


"Well on the latter, the combine knows painfully little about the tribe, other than they were afraid it was Kerensky's exodus returning to the sphere." Abner replied, "But we know that's not an accurate description, or at least not wholly accurate... but it was true to say that the Combine had no leads. The ISF had just been afraid that Kerensky's people were just going to come back and then the game would be up for them, yes?"


... and the thought struck him, "What about the Dragoons?"


Abner tapped his chin, "I suspect the Combine's fears of Kerensky may well have diminished, and possibly to their detriment, look at what the Dragoons arrived with, and their ability to restore themselves to strength. Ten months after the Davion's New Aragon the Dragoons returned fully refit ... and indeed I think now looking at it they refit themselves to 'blend in' better. They've done it since, and given what is ongoing now I suspect they'll do it again soon."


It stopped him a bit cold... certainly the prospect of the Dragoons... five whole regiments of battlemechs was one thing... but that gave way to the bigger problem. The Media in the Commonwealth wasn't talking about it yet, if the Commonwealth was going to be told about all the Combine's dirty laundry then everyone would know soon enough.


"Is something the matter?"


He'd had a dream of wolves running, inconclusive for sure, but that they were running in the wilderness ... only to end up fighting ... sharks? "No, its nothing Doctor." Septim replied.
--
Notes: Obviously among other things this continues to set up for an earlier Rasalhague, which is something that I've hinted at, and indeed deals with moving forward in the timeline.

Combine losses for the past year are pretty well unsustainable, and this should be a reminder of it, though I am considering doing a Mori's message reaches the coordinator + Takashi's other reactions, but like combine propaganda portrays or will portray Gene in fairly supernatural terms complete with bleeding copy of the dictum honorium for added effect. Bakemono, Monster doesn't cut it by the time it sets in what has happened over the last year.

(and that doesn't even touch, the eridani wanting to scream that every formation that claims descent from the SLDF blacklist House Kurita or take up arms against the Combine)

 

[Imperator Pax]

Post Dieron​

The court had been standing on the tatami floor for hours on end. There had to be a response.... but the truth was there were so many things which needed to be addressed over the past year.


It had been a calamitous year. There were always some worlds which had the misfortune of droughts or floods which damaged the harvest, that was not what a calamitous event was. It was beneath the coordinator's contempt to sully his attention with the issues of mere money, and the arrears of un diligent worlds... but failures on the battlefield were more worthy of the Coordinator's attention, and the so the court stood at attention.


There had been some bluster from the warlord of Galedon, who had since been invited to use the garden, since after while it was true his subordinate general Samsonov had failed he had at least had the honor to die as a samurai on the field. He had paid for his mistakes with his life.


Takashi's childhood friend and head of the ISF had apologized for the mistakes his officers, but even that the coordinator had dismissed Elidere as a twist of bad luck, at least so far as not being aware of the forces present. There were fewer excuses for the ISF officer's shameful display ... that was to say failing ... at the ComStar compound on Elidere, failing so badly as to prevent word from getting out sooner, and loosing a valuable piece of LosTech in the process that was probably the more damning issue of the man's death


... but officially ComStar's priests could prove nothing. Given the tensions of Rasalhague Military District, the unrest would have been misfortune enough. Fortune had insured that the Coordinator's heir had been off world with the 2nd​ Battalion of his Regiment when the Federated Suns had struck Dieron. Florimel Kurita had deemed it a small gift from heaven going further than most of the Coordinator's court would have dared... Dieron had fallen with appalling rapidity.... and worse with shockingly little Davion blood. That Altair had also been lost was a compounding one to their dishonor at the hands of Davions... but the Blue Star Irregulars had fought with a surprising degree of tenacity on Altair savaging thoroughly the 18th​ Dieron regulars.


Still at least some of the 18th​ had managed to survive, it was shameful to withdraw but the DCMS could hardly have afforded to lose another unit of size. The 18th​ would be stood down in name to erase the shame and redeployed in packets to shore up other critical junctures... but Altair was a compounding factor to the eruption of chaos on Dieron.


That Dieron was normally a three month journey to Luthien was in part why the court had taken so long to assemble and present their findings, and conclusions to the Coordinator... but it was more complicated than that. It was likely that the Davion menace viewed ComStar's media crusade against the dragon only in view of the events of Elidere's HPG station, but it could not be overlooked by the ISF that it was equally possible that the most brazen blackmail attempt to extract concessions from the Coordinator .... and the failure after they had seized the incriminating materials, even if they had then lost the recording, had to be taken into consideration.


Though he ordinarily smiled, the bespectacled man merely, grimly observed that this information wouldn't have reached them so quickly if Dieron had not fallen so swiftly. The Combine could not abide, the Dragon could not tolerate ComStar's impertinence, and had long pursued avenues means to subvert and subordinate the clergy into the proper order of the galaxy. Until then, the Combine was surrounded by foes.


"Is it true?"


"Hai, tono." The bespectacled man answered bowing, "I was skeptical at first but the information can be verified through other channels. It seems that your honored predcessor was the victim of treachery but the plot itself was master minded by other foreigners." The question that hung unasked what the Davions would do with such information, it seemed unlikely that the merchants even if they were told could really act... the Lyrans already had long standing grudges against House Marik... this was merely another in a long list of grievances in their vendetta.


The reveal of the reimei aerospace ring was unfortunate... and there was no telling what other things might have as "We must avenge ourselves against such deceit, Subhash," Takashi hissed still bordering on on an uncontrollable apoplectic fury, the ISF chief continued to bow his head. "House Davion's trespasses cannot be allowed to stand but I will not forgive those wretched birds this transgression, they must be punished."


"It is as you say, my lord." Subhash slowly stood back to his standing posture, "The broader matters first perhaps," Takashi allowed it, letting the conversation turn away from it.


What the Combine had never advertised, what itself had nearly forgotten, even in this very room, was the fact that once upon a time the language of the court had other fluent speakers. The modern combine the House, looked on the Necess Kurita affair as a great dishonor. Florimel knew it could have been worse, she smoothed her skirts idly, grateful that the demon that spoke their language had the golden eyes he did and not ones of particle projector blue.


What was called the First Edition of the Dictum Honorium was a run of books of preciously limited number. Each had been penned by hand by Kurita Omi in the time before the BattleMech had emerged on the galactic stage... and indeed she had provided some of the first copies to those outside the realm... and it had been in the generation following her death in Rasalhague ... amongst other troubles in Rasalhague that it had been revised.


The Terran Hegemony of the 24th​ Century had held the largest number of copies outside of the worlds under the rule of House Kurita... and as perhaps only Florimel knew it had been the Hegemony's elite who had commanded a fluency in the language of the court. As Ronin had faced Gunslingers, it had been the latter who had spoken the language of the coordinator's court. A challenge issued to the 2nd​ Battalion 19th​ Galedon Regulars... after an unknown Mercenary Outfit had shattered the swords of 1st​ and 3rd​ of the same regiment She was less concerned with the deaths of Samsonov or his immediate command as individual facts... it was all of the details forming together that carried the danger.


There were diaries of a woman of House Kurita that talked about travelling to the Periphery, deep into the rimward expanse, for the tombs which held sleeping a monster not unlike what they had seen on Elidere and Dieron. Had the Azami delved deep into the rimward periphery and successfully opened the resting place of some long sleeping Terran?


Because that was her suspicious, the time was so close to the Azami fleeing into the periphery... and coupled with the fluency, the combat ability, and book. There had only ever been so many copies of the first edition, and precious few had survived the tumultuous infighting within House Kurita itself that chronicled so many revisions of the text, the first revision taking place in 2397 sixty odd years after the original release.


It had not helped that one of the surviving copies of the original had been present at the time when the sister of Minoru Kurita had committed seppuku in protest to the coordinator's actions; in beginning the succession wars. For Florimel it would remind others of the past... but it did not change Takashi's demand for a copy of the book for him to study, ostensibly for whatever insights in martial vigor it provided a mechwarrior that may have been lost in later revisions.


Florimel expected that... the family discussion would ultimately touch on the suicide of Urizen Kurita's favorite grandchild, and the opening of the endless waltz that was the succession wars. Such a conversation would not be for those outside of the closest confidence, and perhaps not to involve even the ISF ... after all while Takashi was willing to excuse his friend, they had failed to protect their own archives or deny them to the enemy, even if they had apparently died to a man against a highland assault that had caught them by surprise.


Subhash and Takashi put forward the beginning of steps. The ISF would need to strike against the Rasalhague rebels... the Arkab legions needed to be moved to where they couldn't act either, but the three regiments of the legion could not be carelessly disposed of. Florimel consoled herself that Subhash had some experience dealing with the western rebels, within the Rasalhague district... but the ISF had been fighting a proxy war with the rebels already how much more could be done was in question.


There would have to be reshufflings of Dieron, and Galedon as well... but could they really afford to attack? She supposed it didn't matter if they could or not, they had no choice but to fight, and show steel.
--
Notes: anyway when Aurigan updates next we will have more look at Kamea and Victoria given how central they are in an obviously very aurigan centric story as that, but updating Eminence in Shadow takes precedence over that and for that matter EWSG even though there is a good chance that the MAC is due to show up there.


I also clearly need to go back and do some editing but that will need to wait. I need to get back to a standardized schedule of updates, I had wanted to have book one of my litrpg thing finished by this point, but haha that didn't happen.


Anyway, as for this, Gene only really knows that Altair fell, he hasn't otherwise been told what went on there so in terms of calculating combine losses he's looking at just 19th​ Galedon, the Sun Zhang Cadre, and the damage inflicted on Sword of Light. That is not counting anything anyone else has done to make the Combine have a bad day, whether that is other Davion efforts or rebellions in Rasalhague or the split in the Azami or such. In any event we will pick up with the Combine's

 

[Imperator Pax]

Post Dieron​

Subhash knew there would be push back, it was inevitable. Takashi correctly understood what needed to be done in Rasalhague, and they needed to redirect the Arkab legion at a sufficiently acceptable target... that didn't leave them a great many options... and if the legions had been truly 'normal' members of the DCMS Subhash expected he would get push back from trying to give them orders....


... that was 'fair', he supposed it had been the ISF who had acted hastily in deploying the legion to recover the incriminating video, and then attempted to insure that word could not escape. Haste, made waste. Still there was an opportunity here.


The coordinator's orders were to retaliate. He would obey.... but he also had a responsibility to provide him with the best advice possible.


Subhash removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes. Retaliating against the Federates Suns would mean striking Robinson. He paused, thinking the idea over... possibly Sakhara as well, to repay them for the destruction of the Sun Zhang cadre; their losses. That was something that they could do, Sakhara would likely be easier to strike, but he supposed an attack against Northwind was possible... but again that would mean contending with an independently minded DCMS who would potentially brook any statement he made. They wouldn't be able to attack until the Coordinator named a new Warlord of Galedon, and there were precious few candidates suited to the position.


It was almost worth suggesting naming Theodore, Takashi's son... but no, as heir Theodore needed polishing but he also needed to be protected. They had been lucky Theodore had been off world... Subhash had been reviewing the rom data that was available... the ISF forces stationed at San Martin had chosen to fight to the death, going to answer the attack behind their lines without first activating their scuttling charges ... they would need to make sure to replace all the cipher codes.


There would be complaints but Subash was not a fool, if the Coordinator's enemies had taken the archive they may well have taken the code books for their communications it was better to change everything than be caught by surprise... especially given recent losses. Even if they hadn't, he didn't believe for a moment that their codes were 'unbreakable' and given their misfortune of late it was better to take additional precautions. They had simply lost too many good warriors of late... they needed breathing space, but they also needed to insure the stability of the realm.


Part of the problem would still be the nature of the DCMS and its willful insistence emphasis on fighting as individual company elements preferring striking as small elite formations made sense in low intensity warfare and especially in attacking and raiding... but it suffered clear disadvantages when an enemy was prepared to fight as a larger more cohesive force.


They enjoyed a tactical advantage when they could chose to attack but that advantage was best maximized when they were wise enough to also know the enemy as well. A man needed to know both, know himself and know his enemy.


The Combine could not afford to fight external enemies while there were internal ones... but he knew the Rasalhague's commitment to rebellion. They would rebel and the Combine couldn't afford that, he had to stop it for Takashi's sake. He needed to lance the boil, and staunch the bleeding before the infection sapped their strength elsewhere.


--
Florimel Kurita pulled the profile up. It hadn't been difficult to acquire data regarding the wolf dragoons elite... not when they had been in the Inner Sphere for more than decade... actual blood samples had taken more effort but that just required being persuasive.


The Orion she had given Teddy upon his graduation had been Aleksandr Kerensky's. The data core had included Kerensky's data profile, and that had included medical information... and while there was a gap in time, blood did not lie.


Natasha Kerensky was a child of House Kerensky as her name implied.


Florimel was privy to the recording... not that it mattered. She had her distant aunt records, Minoru Kurita had made it very clear her considerations that any discussions with House Amaris were stains on the honor of the combine. That not slaughtering the Usurper's forces set a dangerous precedent for their house in addition to being a black mark upon their honor... to the point she had eventually questioned Minoru's own masculinity in failing to take action against Amaris. Not publicly of course, that just wasn't done... but Minoru had protested to the very end he had a filial duty to attempt to safeguard the lives of their cousins on Earth.


The damning nature of the recording was that it was more than words upon paper, it was more than ink penned in the courtly characters... but even that would have been embarrassing. The recording was simple and for all the universe to see if it managed to get out... and at this point she had a growing gnawing situation that the ISF's haste had allowed it to reach those who would insure it was spread far and wide.


As keeper of the family honor she did what the women in her position were expected to, she needed to prepare for the very worst of it. That meant they needed to discredit their enemies. Weaken them, and keep them divided. They would need to discredit ComStar, not just in the eyes of Combine citizens, but in the eyes of everyone in the Inner Sphere... this was no longer a matter of house prerogatives, as the Necess Kurita affair had been it was about redirecting the enemy's strengths away from the Combine and towards other paths.


--
Kurita Takashi, Coordinator of the Draconis Combine had experienced challenges to his rule since the beginning. There had been many who had tried to raise their hand against him, just as there had been resistance to his father's rule.


It had been an otomo sergeant who had finally ended Hohiro's life... and Takashi had shot him in the face upon arriving at the palace bringing an end to the whole sordid affair without any further unnecessary drama... in that way he thought he best honored his father's views... Hohiro was on his way to the afterlife by that point, shouldn't they move on?


His ruminations turned to the incomplete reports from the DCMS. The limits imposed by the vast gulf between stars meant he could not be sure how bloodied his army truly was. He knew that this was as concrete of a collection of numbers as he could hope to have.


What was more complete were the reviews of his predecessors records. That the Snowfire embarrassment was more than had been thought pushed him to review everything that they thought they knew about the third succession war. It was much harder to rage at ink upon parchment. He had had the embarrseement of that shameful event thrust into his face, he could not simply ignore it though... and nore would he be able to readily move to address it because House Marik had played them for fools.

The other great houses would laugh at the Combine's shame, twice over. Three times even since the combine had lost Dieron and it had been in failing to protect their own intelligence archives that House Davion was able to establish that embarrassment concretely, denying it would be possible, but lying about being duped would likely only be revealed later, and they would like more foolish.

No that couldn't be, they had to strike and avenge the insult. That that was precisely what the Combine had been doing since the era of the star league even, or before, acting against perceived slights real ones and imagined ones had become so engrained there was little question it was the correct policy.


--
Notes: these are short, but again this focuses on Florimel, Subhar and Takashi, we don't get Teddy yet but the Combine does begin the process of unpacking the shit that has happened... and drawing their own not entirely accurate conclusions about what information and vantage points they have. As I said with the previous update, part one of the combine response this does abridge some of Takashi's affairs, and really by the combine start to move Gene is already en route to the Periphery.

 

[Imperator Pax]

Post Dieron Conclusion.​

With the end of leave fast approaching, and the last of supplies arriving Gene was preparing for the Company to depart, but there were some the little things still left. That included some things which he personally considered fairly ridiculous.


There were still some things with the MRB, for the Highlanders and for Bardiche, but they'd be leaving soon, and there were a few other things that he was still on the hook for in terms of favors,


"I like clan fox as an idea," Bubbles protested.


"We should be called clan Raven something, Arsenal Raven" Beau protested, and then suggested with a snap of his fingers, "On my homeworld the ravens that were brought from Earth during colonization adopted to the climate by stockpiling food, and building nests that are like god damn bunkers."


Gene cleared his throat, grimacing at the conversation, and it was bad that the Free Worlder was now on board with this nonsense... but he also hadn't ... hadn't told them about 'the clans of Kerensky' either, "As annoying as Bard's rendition of Black Fox is," and despite the silly idea having been used to pester him at nearly every turn while they'd been on leave, and in particular when the Eridani weren't around. "I'm not prepared to declare Clan Fox to be a thing," It had been a long twelve months and he ignored the protest from one of the younger kilted men that Clan Fox sounded like a quite proper idea as he fished out the dossier in printed paper and handed it over to the Sandoval Duke. Gene sat back in his chair and waited.

There were the rufflings of the thick paper as Aaron Sandoval, Duke of Robinson and Field Marshal of the Draconis March smiled. He had browsed the papers and flipped them over as he read, "The order of the golden kite," He declared with pride. "I think this would be just the sort of thing Lord Nicholas," Some chancellor, or minister in the Fed Suns that Gene had had all of five minutes to talk with, "would be looking for, sure to tweak the combine's nose."

The historical abstract he had included for the briefing had been designed to maximize that. He had done what the duke had asked and provided an organization name, but also the historical backdrop included the specification that the historical golden kite had been a degree higher, and military only, to the order of merit that Takeo Kurita a distant Kurita ancestor had held. The cultural ties, the use of specific language, history, and so on were somewhat modified by the new proposed device. The golden bird would be holding a daisho in its claws underneath a Torri gate, but would be fixed on a european style shield.

The proposed designed raised a quirk of the eye from the legless duke, "Would have expected, if on were to be honest, Colonel, the Cameron Starburst. I think that would be better."

They had asked for his opinion, for his input. Gene had consciously been trying to avoid Star League iconography in the the device, or the in the proposed documentation to accompany awards. He'd made a point of neither mentioning the Star League. That was part of the whole couching of the packet.


They'd been in Fed Space, and Federated Suns employ a while by his standards at least.

After Elidere... hell technically after the Kuritans had routed on Elidere IV they had been under contract with the Davions for operations since Ander's Moon, but that didn't mean the Kuritans were going to be shy about how they felt. That would have been a problem without doubling down on it by signing on with the FedSuns for their romp through Near Terran Space over the last year... the AFFS had dropped the Hussars and Blue Star Iregulars on Altair which had to have seriously strained the Combine's forces in the near Terran area. It had all started with Elidere though.

The 19th Galedon Regulars, that was to say an entire Combine BattleMech, Regiment along with most of the supporting DCA assets had been destroyed in detail for what amounted to no cost to the Armed Forces of the Federated Suns. They hadn't been able to achieve a repeat of that degree of peerless lopsided victory, but that was less important to the fact that the AFFS in combination with other mercenaries had been able to not just take other worlds, but savage other Combine Mech Regiments.

This was the Draconis Combine March's opportunity to rub salt in the wound so to speak. Not that they really needed to... but it wasn't going to stop them from doing it... and given the enmity that existed he didn't expect them not to use the opportunity to do.

He didn't want to stick around, even though the AFFS was hoping to turn the mercenary units involved in whatever the next campaign would be, not just them but in particular the Eridani Light Horse, into what amounted to House Troops.



"Seriously what's wrong with Clan Fox?" The hunchback driver had thought it had been a good idea she'd always liked it though, and was loathe to drop the matter.

... well there were actually a number of reasons... and even discounting the sheer degree of political brown nosing it might have been interpreted as he had other reasons. He sipped at his drink and glanced at the command staff who were looking from Chang to him waiting for an answer, "It conveys the wrong sort of distinction. Evoking an order, a military honor like this may not be a formal structure but it allows a delineation in rewards that a lodge wouldn't be as good as formally conveying. This isn't a knightly order, or a warrior house the Draconis March wants to be able to provide recognition for command ability, leadership, and bravery in the field. The duke wanted a proposal he could put to New Avalon," And apparently the head of MIIO, "I expect that it will be sent off and either they'll reject it or rework it as necessary as either a Federal award or that Lord Aaron will issue as a Draconis March specific award."

... but it would have been a bigger tweak if Hanse Davion, as First Prince was the issuing party awarding people golden birds with heavy shinto symbolism and references to the Nihon Shoki. It was probably the sort of slap in the face to the combine's claims, historical and present, regarding manifest destiny that the First Prince might like to present to the Inner Sphere.

"So we are finally read to go back to the periphery?" Septim's question had been accompanied by a look being thrown in Bahar's direction. The fighting over the last year had been concentrated in near earth space.


"What is the word Bahar?" He asked.


"Markab is mostly stable from reports." An originally Azami world, "There are rumors the Federated Suns will move on Galatia, but it may just be rumors. Indeed it may force the Combine to reinforce the world and allow House Davion to attack elsewhere."

The fighting was an excuse... or additional justification to ferry another load of colonists far into the periphery to settle on Alamut in the Lighthouse worlds. Something he didn't put into words as he glanced to the senior JumpShip commander... well the company jumpships.


Pasha shook his head, reached up and toyed with his long grey mustache, "Admittedly it is not so glamorous but it will be down time that is sorely needed. Returning to the periphery will not be so bad will it?"

They were pulling off the front for a number of reasons not the least of which was that they'd be going to a Magistracy garrison and training contract for Raventhir... or rather that was what Raventhir was to claim. Something about Ur Cruine and the pirates was causing enough of a stir that the money was now there to see to some kind of expansion, such that Detroit was willing to spend money.

Black Jack McGirk was still running around reaving from apparently the Tortuga Dominions all the way round to the Magistracy border. That meant he was hitting the Davions, the Taurians, the Aurigans and the Canopians... as well as all the free holding worlds in between at times. The simple truth was no one had expected a pirate with... what some reports went so far as to claim was a division worth of Star League Defense Force equipment. Whether that was an exaggeration or not didn't matter, McGirk had a mountain of hardware and he was willing to rampage wherever he liked, and trash whoevers stuff he liked, and pay his men with the booty. That meant he had no shortage of bastards willing to fight for him.

"I want to talk about the conversion work being done on San Saba," To carry BattleMechs, "I've been assured that Blackwell has our order completed and we should be taking delivery on that last order soon." Things that they had paid for out Pounds paid from Elidere, and before they had cracked open the Brian Cache... but yeah, "We'll be in transit for a while and my understanding is we're taking a different route?"


"Yes, the elders have granted you overall command, our destination is the Aurigan Reach, it is a post Star League principality, founded after the succession wars began."


--
Notes: Cultural Face Slapping.

And thus we time skip through the space travel, 'are we there yet' and finally move on to the continuation of the pirate wars, which leads into the Amaris debacle, and then from there back to the Inner Sphere in early 3022, but it is currently roughly summer of 3018


I am going to attempt to have the Combine attack of 3019 on Robinson, which among other things entails Sandoval's LosTech tanks being in prepared defensive positions, Fury and Alacorns supported by regular Succession Wars fare to the combine's unpleasant surprise but if it doesn't go up as its own post it will be remarked upon in the news once we cycle back to the Inner Sphere. We might also see content from the Combine perspective, and theoretically Freddy Hammer show up. Highlander Interludes are pretty likely at some point as are of course more of the perspective of various FedSuns personnel.


Anyway we head into the pirate wars and from 3019 and the periphery conflicts last until roughly the end of 3021, and unlike Aurigan which derails HBS pretty quickly this story was intended to be something of a novelization pseudo canon for the game.