Battletech: The Second Luxen Contracts

Imperator Pax · Dec 13, 2022

31^st Century Periphery
Conclusion
With an acceleration rated in multiple Gees the time to reach the 'safe' JumpPoints at Nadir, or Zenith was largely trivial to modern Drop Ships, not instantaneous by any means they were confined to newtonian physics still, but still a quick safe trip. Fusions drives were safe mature technology that had not disappeared... for which he was very grateful for even a civilian ship just doing one gee of acceleration could make it feasible to reach the safe jump points above or below the elliptical plane.

"It is your JumpShip."

"Technically sure." He replied as he moved through low gravity. "But you're Navy, and I'll leave the helming a ship and the other business to you."

Gene was cognizant of the difference in earnings an invader out here could easily pull down 300k, three hundred thousand c bills, in a weekly haul taking three DropShips. In theory they could make more in terms of value if they accepted payment in the local currency, so having the magistracy pay them in something other than the C Bill... and an Invader was smaller than the Liberty class, and was significantly smaller than the Leviathan in terms of cargo. The Colorado and Lebanon with a total dropship capacity of twelve DropShip or equivalent to the capacity of four Invader-class. It wasn't necessarily that clean cut, but Gene was very aware of how much money Lebanon and Colorado made for the company.

The Azami captain didn't disagree with his point. "The sails are safely retracted and the drives are charged."

"And course?"

"We are going deeper into the periphery, we will pass through a few minor canopian worlds," and worlds that should have been on the maps, but weren't for whatever reason... apparently too poor to warrant it. He knew that worlds Frobisher, and McEvedy's Folly were on the list of worlds that IE had earmarked from the DOME star map they had recovered, and that Abner was interested in going to but this outing was going to Pioche. "There are a few tasks to carry along the way."

Abner didn't really need their Jumpships and the entire logistical footprint being what it was meant that they could afford to leave one of their jumpships to ply the routes. They'd be making less of a profit... but frankly the previous two months was enough to cover salaries for everyone in the company and overhead for a while. They could pull the Leviathan just on the off chance they did find something interesting enough to bring back.

"Actually that was something I wanted to talk about," He paused as they came to a corridor junction, "Bahar do you mind showing them," He nodded to Easy Company who had been trailing along behind, "To the facilities," The two ninety meter grav decks might not have been much, but at least it was better space than the cramped quarters of a Union like the company had been assigned to.

The old naval captain moved to one of the ship's offices ... which looked well neo persian if Gene were being honest but Pasha was the captain he could oversee redecorating as he liked. The door sealed. "What is your will?"

He paused avoiding the reflexive use of starting a sentence with an adverb, like 'so', "Pioche, and I've reviewed what we have, may have been a rim worlds republic hidden facility, factory."

"You are of the opinion that Doctor Abner is correct then, that some one ..." the old man paused, "Strapped a fusion drive to a rock as it were,"

"I consider the odds of that being the case to be unfortunately likely." Of course was it booby trap, or had someone just decided to do it? The latter was an unpleasant possible possibility as well, and one he had to consider. " They moved to sit down and he recounted, at least an abridged format how he had ended up getting to Detroit. Specifically the Germanium.

In the Age of War JumpShips had, as they would be really throughout the Star League , and the succession wars, been fair game. After all they could be replaced. Oh The Ares Convention had placed restrictions on the use of nukes, and on targetting civilian infrastructure... at least among signatories per the capellans but the idea was that at least at that time that it was ludicrous to think of a JumpShip as irreplaceable. Even so JumpShips were ships designed to cross the vast gulf between space and as spaceships had been built to last. Maybe not as fighting ships, JumpShips were not warships but a JumpShip was supposed to be robust enough to serve centuries... and as it turned out those service lifespans, that lack of planned obsolescence had meant that JumpShips from the age of war were still plying the lanes.

"I admit of course," Pasha replied, "That our community is likely searching the known covenant space, -" He stopped to allow him to speak.

"No," That wasn't exactly what he had meant, "I've been perusing the database, the library the Taurians brought with them," The copy of it, "Sure by the standards of the League its primitive, but its still containing JumpDrive manufacturing for JumpShips of the period that the Taurians were able to manufacture. The Taurians knew they were running from wider civilization, that were going far enough that trade wasn't plausible," at the time at least, especially given politics. "Its the information, that could provide the information to make the tooling to manufacture drives in the long term."

... and of course there was nothing to say that they might not be able to salvage abandoned machinery and repurpose it in order to do that from the failed colony. The Alexandrians situation looked to have been internal. They had started shooting at each other, and the abandonment or possibly retreat from their worlds very well had been internal strife... certainly given the lack of orbital fires evidence... well all of the nuclear exchanges had been surface launched, which was still unpleasant to think about but there was nothing to indicate it had been more than a very very messy civil war.
--
Pasha had agreed to relay his realization through to the elders on Alamut... but that would take time. It wasn't that they wouldn't likely have figured out, but the cultural inertia of it all... that some things were just lost might have stymied even as the Azami put the mothballed fleet the Alexandrian Covenant worlds had left behind and forgotten about in order to reestablish trade.

The Azami exodus put them far enough out that they should be able to build that kind of infrastructure without ... as the Capellan raid in 3005 on luxen had shown... one of the great houses coming out to cause trouble...

and frankly as he was standing on the bridge command deck of the JumpShip in conjunction with the others. Yusuf, and the Lebanon would be left to plow the trade routes, and well, they were going to wink out in a flash and start the journey through the rim ward edge of the Canopian borderlands, ferrying a couple of DropShips from Luxen along the way to drop off very valuable supplies, and personnel but otherwise drop those DropShips off and keep moving.

It would take a while to get to Pioche they were talking several hundred light years and that would really that travel time would largely consist of Jumping, spending a week recharging the drive stuck aboard either their DropShips or aboard the Jumpship proper waiting for that charge to be done, before they made the next jump, and repeating the process until they finally got there.

As a precaution of course they would be using the telescopes to confirm things like stellar light emission, radiation emitted from stars and the presence of planets from those measurements confirm that those jump coordinates were correct as they got further out into the rim ward periphery and beyond the modern commonly travelled commercial lanes.

Right now though they were finishing the last of the safety checks and communications lines staying open with the other Jump Ships in order to make sure procedure was followed and that travel was as safe as possible.

There was nothing magical about the K-F drive. You didn't have to make specific chants, wave incense around or conduct prayers to the god in the machine. It was advances physics sure, but it was not magic, and as long as the maintenance was done the machines worked.

Once they had confirmation a start the clock was called, and then shortly there after the venerable Leviathan-class JumpShip blinked out of system.

PeaceMaker03 · Dec 13, 2022

"No," That wasn't exactly what he had meant, "I've been perusing the database, the library the Taurians brought with them," The copy of it, "Sure by the standards of the League its primitive, but its still containing JumpDrive manufacturing for JumpShips of the period that the Taurians were able to manufacture. The Taurians knew they were running from wider civilization, that were going far enough that trade wasn't plausible," at the time at least, especially given politics. "Its the information, that could provide the information to make the tooling to manufacture drives in the long term."
Click to expand...

That information might be worth billions of C-bills, to the periphery nations and even the great houses.

Imperator Pax · Dec 13, 2022

PeaceMaker03 said: ↑

That information might be worth billions of C-bills, to the periphery nations and even the great houses.
Click to expand...

You are correct, like the Taurian data cache from the end of 1st IE even though its frankly a century out of date by the time the Taurians and Canopians ran to the Covenant worlds in the succession war era the kind of information it provides in terms of yeah, JumpShips but just setting up a self sustaining colony is basically priceless. In terms of wrapping your head around a price figure for things that supposedly impossible to practically replace thats cultural inertia keeping you from wrapping your head around. You still need to build the infrastructure but this tells you how to build the tools to make the tools to make the shipyards to make early JumpShips like Liberty or Leviathan that 'modern' KF drives, docking colors etc. Like the Leviathan lost out because it wasn't suited to military actions in the reunification war in you need every jumpship just to keep a modicum of trade running there are in the long term going to be significant changes to the periphery down the road

Put another way: "Mother Doctrine? Holy Shroud, this is my Mother Bear Doctrine."

Silverbullet · Dec 13, 2022

Minor thing from Interstellar players three. There were no nukes launched in the Upheavals.

DAY AND NIGHT
Here is where Covenant history starts to get a bit hazy. Surviving records from this period are incomplete, but our team
was able to extract enough fragments to assemble a rough picture of what transpired between the Covenant’s formation and what is
known as the First Upheaval. Our best guess places the First Upheaval sometime in the early 2700s, during which the Alexandrian Covenant transformed
nearly overnight. Pharos erupted into war, turning the whole planet inside out. Although no weapons of mass destruction
were employed—despite rumors that the original contingent of Taurian expatriates had fled from the Concordat with a stockpile
of nuclear weapons—this conflict rendered the planet nearly unrecognizable. The capital city of Rhakotis lay in ruins. Whole
cities burned. Hundreds of thousands fled into the wilds and were forced to live off the land. The other Covenant worlds likewise
devolved into horrific violence once word of the war reached them. Research estimates perhaps a quarter of the nation’s
population perished during the tragedy.
Click to expand...

THE TIP OF THE SPEAR
Although the Alexandrians are a traumatized, broken, and paranoid people, the Alexandrian Armed Forces remain strong and are always ready for “demonic incursions” or the next inevitable coup. Despite the Covenant’s warring and political dichotomies, the nation’s military displays remarkable patriotism and morale when massed against an exterior threat. The smallest unit of AAF organization is known as the chariot, which is roughly equivalent to a standard armor company and is led by a lieutenant. Five chariots denote a squadron, headed by a captain. Five squadrons form a division, led by a charioteer. Among all chariot divisions, the foremost charioteer holds the title of first charioteer and reports directly to the Protectrix (or Magister, during patriarchal reigns). Under the current matriarchal government, all AAF officers are women, but men—both volunteer and conscripted troops—still form the bulk of the enlisted ranks.

Due to the rapid decline of technology, the AAF’s non-infantry assets are composed solely of light to heavy tanks, conventional fighters and support vehicles. Aside from a few surviving relics, internal combustion engines have replaced fusion engines in nearly all chasses. Ballistic munitions, predominantly light- to medium-caliber autocannon, dominate nearly every offensive profile due to the Covenant’s inability to manufacture most energy-based weapons.

To guard against external threats, the AAF maintains firebases housing crude but effective surface-to-orbit missile silos. Since
these installations form a vital component of Covenant security, they are the only military target that both the ruling and dissident
factions have always agreed are completely off limits.

Since the worlds of the Covenant cannot communicate with each other due to a lack of courier ships, the AAF appears in a similar yet different form on each planet. Subtle variations exist between each system’s AAF iteration—such as differing rank titles or the number of chariots per squadron—but such differences are
largely cosmetic.
Click to expand...

The biggest mystery surrounding the Alexandrian Covenant is what ultimately triggered the First Upheaval. History is, of course, written by the victors, so what few records are available from that period shed very little light on the subject. Our only real method of divining the truth lies in piecing together the fragments we do have and extrapolating a subtext based on the historical shape of the negative space left behind. Thus far, we have developed several working hypotheses as to the nature of the catalyst.

The most probable cause is that the sitting Magister and several Taurian expatriates heading the House of Lords were convicted of supreme corruption. The Protectrix ordered the entire body to be purged and reconstituted after each new member underwent a ruthless vetting process. The House of Lords, exerting the strongest control over Covenant military assets, retaliated and led the nation into all-out war.

Another equally plausible theory posits that the House of Lords uncovered corruption running deep within the House of Dames. When confronted with these allegations, the Protectrix launched a preemptive military strike against the House of Lords and nearly wiped them out. By this point, the allegations were already made public, and those who publicly backed the defunct Lords took the war to the Protectrix’s doorstep.

A thesis with less physical evidence is that a terrorist organization within the Covenant triggered the war by destroying one government House and blaming the attack on
the other. Some undated accounts mention the House of Dames being destroyed by a massive explosion, whereas others from the same time period speak of the House of Lords being the victim of the bombing instead. There is enough evidence to show some political unrest on either side of the fence, but not enough to prove the existence of any underground movement, let alone establish a motive. The newest theory to come to light is perhaps the most farfetched, but it still retains enough credibility to remain plausible.
Our orbital surveys and archaeological investigation of Eros III’s southern continent have uncovered a small, anachronistic settlement that dates back to the 24th or 25th century.

Either the Taurians colonized Eros III far earlier than any extant Covenant records claim—which would invalidate most of their reasons for fleeing the Concordat—or the Taurian settlers had no knowledge of this settlement. The most obvious conclusion is that a third group had colonized the planet and was small enough to escape
notice when the Taurian refugees arrived. The overriding theory is this out-of-place settlement belonged to the scions of the Tikonov Galactic Rangers. After the formation of the Capellan Confederation in 2367, Chancellor Franco Liao purged private armies from his new realm, and the Capellan armed forces chased the Rangers through the Taurian Concordat and the Federated Suns.

The Rangers eventually headed toward the Periphery in stolen Taurian vessels and disappeared, last seen in the Davion system Sanurcha. If this Eros III settlement did indeed belong to the Galactic Rangers remnant, they might have hidden themselves amongst the Taurian expatriates upon the evacuation of the planet. It is then entirely possible these erstwhile Capellans formed an unacknowledged third voice amongst the population and ultimately subverted the Covenant’s political structure for their own ends.
—Anthropology Today: The Alexandrian Covenant, Interstellar
Expeditions Press, 3095

Same guys who got the Davions to shoot at the Bulls thinking they were Cappellans lol.

Tikonov Galactic Rangers/Eros III
Regardless of whether the descendants of the Tikonov Galactic Rangers caused the First Upheaval is moot. Recent archaeological investigation into the mysterious settlement on Eros III has found conclusive evidence that some of the Rangers’ progeny did indeed put down roots there. Due to the Upheavals destroying census data and other sociological records, it is impossible to know which current Alexandrians descended from the Rangers. Thus, archaeologists and historians can only speculate as to what place these ex- Capellans might have in the Covenant’s delicate power structure.
Click to expand...

Imperator Pax · Dec 14, 2022

Silverbullet said: ↑

Minor thing from Interstellar players three. There were no nukes launched in the Upheavals.

The biggest mystery surrounding the Alexandrian Covenant is what ultimately triggered the First Upheaval. History is, of course, written by the victors, so what few records are available from that period shed very little light on the subject. Our only real method of divining the truth lies in piecing together the fragments we do have and extrapolating a subtext based on the historical shape of the negative space left behind. Thus far, we have developed several working hypotheses as to the nature of the catalyst.

The most probable cause is that the sitting Magister and several Taurian expatriates heading the House of Lords were convicted of supreme corruption. The Protectrix ordered the entire body to be purged and reconstituted after each new member underwent a ruthless vetting process. The House of Lords, exerting the strongest control over Covenant military assets, retaliated and led the nation into all-out war.

Another equally plausible theory posits that the House of Lords uncovered corruption running deep within the House of Dames. When confronted with these allegations, the Protectrix launched a preemptive military strike against the House of Lords and nearly wiped them out. By this point, the allegations were already made public, and those who publicly backed the defunct Lords took the war to the Protectrix’s doorstep.

A thesis with less physical evidence is that a terrorist organization within the Covenant triggered the war by destroying one government House and blaming the attack on
the other. Some undated accounts mention the House of Dames being destroyed by a massive explosion, whereas others from the same time period speak of the House of Lords being the victim of the bombing instead. There is enough evidence to show some political unrest on either side of the fence, but not enough to prove the existence of any underground movement, let alone establish a motive. The newest theory to come to light is perhaps the most farfetched, but it still retains enough credibility to remain plausible.
Our orbital surveys and archaeological investigation of Eros III’s southern continent have uncovered a small, anachronistic settlement that dates back to the 24th or 25th century.

Either the Taurians colonized Eros III far earlier than any extant Covenant records claim—which would invalidate most of their reasons for fleeing the Concordat—or the Taurian settlers had no knowledge of this settlement. The most obvious conclusion is that a third group had colonized the planet and was small enough to escape
notice when the Taurian refugees arrived. The overriding theory is this out-of-place settlement belonged to the scions of the Tikonov Galactic Rangers. After the formation of the Capellan Confederation in 2367, Chancellor Franco Liao purged private armies from his new realm, and the Capellan armed forces chased the Rangers through the Taurian Concordat and the Federated Suns.

The Rangers eventually headed toward the Periphery in stolen Taurian vessels and disappeared, last seen in the Davion system Sanurcha. If this Eros III settlement did indeed belong to the Galactic Rangers remnant, they might have hidden themselves amongst the Taurian expatriates upon the evacuation of the planet. It is then entirely possible these erstwhile Capellans formed an unacknowledged third voice amongst the population and ultimately subverted the Covenant’s political structure for their own ends.
—Anthropology Today: The Alexandrian Covenant, Interstellar
Expeditions Press, 3095

Same guys who got the Davions to shoot at the Bulls thinking they were Cappellans lol.
Click to expand...

I guess I was misremembering.and I know why that happened, I was using headcanon from the tabletop rpg game [that I've been playing in.]

Imperator Pax · Dec 20, 2022

Travel Time Interlude
They were two jumps from Luxen now. They were going to run pen and paper work in a couple hours, which would at least give everyone something to do.

Gene reminded himself that the JumpShips needed to be fitted with Mech Simulator pods. It was one of the major military amenities that the University of Luxen had that the Colorado did not. The Leviathan had been built of course at a time that the BattleMech had been walking the Battlefield but sim pods hadn't been aboard... not that he was surprised by that. Whatever the Colorado had been called in Taurian service it had been packed full of supplies and loaded down with DropShips to carry Taurians fearing the inevitable reunification of human space under the Star League that had existed ... back then.

... and of course if there had been any mech pods in the exodus fleet if there had even been battle mechs with the fleet ... if there were they would have been of the generation of the age of war like the Dervish or the like... but from what they had seen of the Alexandrian worlds there didn't seem to be any in regular service.

The Alexandrians... or at least those on Pharos the surviving covenant society besides the worlds that were called Cyrene, which had been the planet that had eaten a nuclear exchange according to the IE / Azami survey, and Sophos which had just been abandoned. He doubted the Azami would attempt to contact the Alexandrians on Pharos ... not when IE had pretty quickly looked at their historical records and how they lived in general and figured it would result in getting missiles fired at anyone for being demons.

Missiles were likely to be well beyond any surviving humans on Pioche... and while it wasn't the objective he hoped if they could confirm a surviving population that the Magistracy might do something proactive about bringing them back into the fold even if they didnt' find some rim world treasure horde.

Idealistic or not that hope contended with the fact it wasn't their job. One could probably make the argument that hte Magistracy probably owed it to the descendants of Pioche's colonists who had been canopian citizens that they should do something... but they probably wouldn't unless there was something on the snowball that made it worth the effort.

His door chimed. "Enter." He ordered.

"Studying are you?" Abner idled into the room, with two more in tow, "that's for the best. A good habit given how long these journeys are. Not that this will be all that long compared to some," The aged lyran rambled on jollily. "Well it is quite a pity Mr Ford is not along. He really does need to be prepared to defend his research in person, and be vigorous about it. Yes."

Her Grace the Duchess Raventhir sighed. "What are you reading?"

He pushed the printed copy of SLDF Medical Commands recommendations for commanders operating in cold weather away. It was fairly dry reading but he doubted anything new had been added to the subject since the 2650s. It probably wasn't the most recent version of the material either... surely the SLDF would have issued an 'updated' version at least once, if not just had some unfortunate captain voluntold to publish a new version... but he'd been looking for advice.

"Recommendations for field officers operating in extreme cold weather environments." He replied deciding that she had seriously been asking the question and not just being polite. Though she probably hadn't been intending to start a book club sort of conversation Raventhir did ask for a copy... to foist on her aide de camp.

He could print a spare copy out from the database. There was so much out of even the curated list of books from the Volgadon University library that he simply hadn't found the time to read. Self study was all well and good, but the library had been intended to turn out well rounded students with the benefit of a university level course of study that involved instruction... and that infrastructure simply no longer existed any more.

"I take it there is something else about Pioche?"

"Or the Canopian ruins more broadly," Abner replied. "A significant portion of the anti spinward rimward Canopian territory just simply falls off within, really a few decades of the Amaris crisis... and the truth is we don't really think that incidental so much as by design." The doctor paused, "Leaving aside that the greater perseus cepheus cloud complex and whether or not there are more life sustaining worlds out there... the reasons we're confident that it wasn't simply the vagaries of fate is that there are surviving documents from the Rim World Republic internal structures ... well its unpleasant to say the least."

"May I see them?"

"Oh, yes, but," There was some ruffling, and the noteputer came out of a satchel. Amaris's scheme had been pretty simple the Taurians were bait. Disposable bait... let them maul the SLDF and if the SLDF didn't wipe them out, then the Rim World Republic planned to do it themselves. Amaris didn't need the Taurians or Canopians for that matter getting any funny ideas about using the factories he had seeded in the periphery to build up the secret army once he was actually sitting on Terra's golden throne... and well Amaris was already looking towards subjugating the rest of the Inner Sphere. "Its not exactly much more than broad designations, presumably to prevent discovery or ... if one of the usurpers underlings decided to attempt to seize power himself at some point. Its likely that Amaris either kept the master list that only he knew... but we do know for sure that by the 2770s there is an abrupt pervasive pattern of both violence, and supposed accidents that begin to take place in the anti-spinward, and that appears to coincide with violence further rimward and spinward on the Taurian frontiers as well."

He certainly wouldn't have put it past the Rim World to do that sort of thing. "So what do we do once we get to Pioche?"

"We will need to set up a base camp, that will mostly be liasing, if there are any active fusion signatures we haven't been able to identify them from orbit. If there were anyway they probably would be concealed from emissions detection by thousands of tones of rock, obviously if Pioche does host a rim world republic installation its also possible its located underwater, which we do not have the resourced to pursue at this juncture." The latter sentence though delivered in the same rambling manner as was normal for him was aimed more at Raventhir than otherwise. "Thankfully we're not sure thats the case , and that we are working from a baseline investigation of looking at the impact sight near one of the old settlements." The planetary map appeared from the Star League era pocket projector showing the planet as it had been in the days it had still be a canopian breadbasket.

There wasn't anything that stood out, but he didn't expect anything to be from even a low level fly over... no they were just going to have to go down there and look themselves.
--
If a BattleMech was almost impossible to put a price tag on for an individual to buy it seemed mind boggling that someone would own personally not one but two JumpShips. For an individual the cost of a Battlemech was very much you didn't go out an buy one. To actually get aboard not just a privately owned DropShip, but then privately owned JumpShips... again plural was insane. These were the things that kept interstellar civilization running.

... and the Sam Houston was a lot more comfortable than her berth on the Union.

"What do you not space travel well?" The Mercenary Bubbles poked her sharply. "There is nothing to it."

"Besides being bored out of our minds." Schiffer snorted. "Its gonna be atleast a month of just sitting. A week to charge the drives. Then we jump. Then we charge the drives and we jump rinse and repeat... and for a snipe hunt. I mean okay we get to drive our mechs around a big snowball." The lyran shrugged shaking his head.

Pioche... the world they were going to was coming out of a small ice age... but it was still covered in significant glaciation where the low lying north seas had frozen over and still hadn't fully melted once the dust in the atmosphere had cleared away and settled.

Why they were going wasn't really clear, either.

... and they didn't have Force Major Seghal along with them either... which of course she been promoted to head the entire Luxen planetary defense after the invasion ... but that just made them shipping off world even more strange.

The doors opened across the room allowing access to the grav deck and some semblance of normal gravity. "Uh oh." Chang remarked.

"Mmhmm." The other merc agreed.

"Safety briefing for pioche. In the event we do get shot at, or otherwise have an emergency."

"Hypothermia?" Lieutenant Short questioned, looking at the lengthy description of what it looked like and how the body shivered in order to stay warm... and in turn how that burned calories.

The cicada pilot was flipping too fast to be doing more than skimming, "Boss, the Rim World wasn't anywhere close to here. I don't see how they could have had a base in Canopian space." Short vaguely recalled that Schiffer was from the Lyran commonwealth.

"Amaris invested heavily in the other periphery states, there were installations used by the Baathists across the periphery as a result. Given Pioche's destruction, its not unreasonable to assume that it could have been caused by a dead man's trap to conceal a rim world base. And if anything, our employer is hoping that facility is intact and can be salvaged."

Even if that wasn't the case... Pioche was a hazardous environment because of the ice age.

--

Imperator Pax · Jan 11, 2023

Pioche Part 1
Glaciation in the polar regions aside the planet really didn't look that bad. The big snow caps were incongruous to the strip of evergreen dominating from the tropics towards the equator. So far, so good in terms of visual inspection at least. It was cold enough you didn't want to be out after dark, but apparently there were thermal signatures indicating a robust adapted ecosystem, including what from drone overflights looked like roving bands of neo Paleolithic humans. Hunter gatherers... which complicated things...

The free worlds league born pilot tossed another down stuffed parka onto the table. When Beau was done he was going to look the stay puft marshmallow man, but the Dervish pilot had made it absolutely clear he did not want to be cold.

"Its really not going to be that bad." Chang tried to tell him. "Weather forecast for where we're going to land doesn't even think we'll get snow for a week."

The big man grumpily informed her he didn't do snow. Whether or not Snow was for Bo didn't matter they were on site, and Pioche showed nothing actively trying to kill them... at least for right now.

Leaving aside that Change meant well, there was a good chance that she was wrong. Pioche didn't look to him to be not that bad as he checked his merino wool base layer. It was ... old fashioned ? Perhaps. None of his cold weather gear was sleekest most modern sports wear it lacked high visibility bright neon colors like Chang's parka did. If Bo was worried about being cold, it was really going to be wind chill he needed to worry about, but that wasn't a real concern because he would be buttoned up inside of his mech.

His instructions had based more around comfort and utility than military ... demeanor perhaps was the word. It was a business expense, and one of the few ones where Luxen's planetary government hadn't objected to paying a clothes expendtirue ... but then again they were shopping at Luxen based clothing vendors... so they were roundabout subsidizing the local economy.

It very well could have been a case of overthinking things... maybe they had just caught the planetary government in a good mood... who knew. Gene leaned against the holo table, and compared the new footage over flight to what they had from previous flights conducted by IE as well as the historical footage. They were restricting their area to the impact crater.

Crater should have been in air quotes of course there wasn't really a crater in the conventional sense so much as what had been the area that had gotten hit by the rock. There was a ring outline left behind by the impact, and the rok's excavation of material... but there wasn't a gaping expanse of a hole like with say an airless moon.

No Pioche had an atmosphere, and wind, and thus dirt and water and ice filled in such things over time especially as the dust clouds had settled back in. They had known though where hte rock had impacted the planet. I.E. Was going to take core samples but that was largely pro forma... he was sure the geologists would find any details riveting but it was not the mission.

The primary mission was so far as he gathered treasure hunting.

It gave them a pretty good CEP to start searching around. If the theory was right and some asshole had strapped a fusion drive to the rock and aimed it.... but that also assumed they had aimed the rock... other than just point at planet... had there been guidance. It wasn't exactly complicated math per se, or it wouldn't have been with Star League era computers ...

It was physics. The mathematical modelling wasn't impossible didn't even require those computers...

Whatever the case it gave them an area to start looking at. Investigating the impact site was also the best chance of confirming or disproving the theory that the tragedy of Pioche had been malicious, not some terrible cosmic accident.

None of the overflights had prompted any kind of anti air indications. Not that that was really expected. There had been no tracking radar returns, certainly not any missiles fired... but they'd have to see.

"I can't believe really people survived."

He half turned to look at the Easy company pilot who had spoken up, a little loudly. They had talked about it, but seeing survivors was another story. They weren't the mission. They'd survived this long without the Magistracy swooping in they could wait a little longer... assuming that the Magistracy would do the right thing and ... he put it out of his mind. What the Magistracy did or didn't do was beyond his ability to control. He grimaced ,and pushed off the holo table, not hard they were still in reduced gravity, he didn't want to send himself across the DropShip's planning room. "Pioche has been separated out from the Magistracy for two hundred years these people, their ancestors, managed to survive an extinction level event and are beginning to recover on their own. If they even know that there are other people its as the barest myths and legends passed down orally about metal birds from the sky and other world islands," Or however they had remembered the exodus from Island Earth, "leaving aside the dropships you'll be in 45 ton war machines, try and consider how their reaction to never having seen a BattleMech to one showing up from great metal bird will be taken. They're the priority. You want something done about it write your representative when we get back from this tour."

He went back to the safety gear checklist, before making sure everyone was familiar with conducting and receiving search and rescue. The locally produced Leopard wasn't anything special, but it was aerodyne it and the Sam Houston and the Sam Houston's small craft would be substantively easier to conduct search and rescue if anyone got lost.
--
There was a slight tremor that transmitted through as they finished the touch down procedure. There was a pretty serious chance of sinkholes as a result of the asteroid impact. He had known that before he touched down, but he was fairly certain his Marauder was going to to start squawking as soon as his seismographic sensors came online.

I.E. Was going to establish a mobile base camp, and start boring for core samples and all that fun geology stuff. He reached up and pressed the switch to bring the computer hardware online. The Sam Houston's roll on roll off forward doors opened letting in sunlight that was harsh from the light of the system's primary bouncing off all the snow and ice of the mountains. He'd seen one of the overflight pictures as the drone had been banking.

Part of a mountainous cliff face had literally broken off and slid down either at the impact or shortly after. They hadn't been able to do a flyby in the dropship but it was scheduled for a few days... but it was an excellent demonstrator of what the Rok had done.

The Marauder connected, and his computer projected a star map using the League Era database and was running down a list of channels. Nothing. Not that he'd been expecting anything either. The only signals appearing were those ones they were broadcasting. No overflight conducted thus far by IE had indicated any electronic emissions.

The Star Map resolved showing their position one hundred fifteen light years rimward of westheimer... and projected a woefully out of data population census from the 2750s.

Gene tapped the down key.

The Magistracy's records suggested that Pioche by 2799 totaled somewhere over two hundred million. There were some quibbles over just how many people had been on world at the time.

Which was small for a breadbasket world, especially one in the periphery. Pioche had always had a small population... which it really shouldn't have. Admittedly it had been colonized in the 26^th century but there still should have been plenty of people rushing to colonize an earth like world that was ideal for farming, just to get away from the massive industrial and strong central governments it had been one of the driving factors of colonization of places far from the Inner Sphere ... the Outworld Alliance certainly came to mind.

Nothing he was seeing added up, he could have overlooked the clearly Francophone original colonists... the new quebecois would have probably been isolationist leaving andurien and according to 28^th century records the nominally largest religion was Catholic, but with heavy swathes of agnostics much like the Magistracy or the Duchy of Anduerien.

There was no indication in League or Canopian records that the planet had been involved in mech construction. The relatively small continental land masses had encouraged domestic maritime trade but that coupled with shallow oceans meant storms were relatively week... of course it also meant that when the rok had hit the planet that they'd frozen over much more quickly.

He eased the Marauder out into the sunlight and looked over the sprawling coniferous forest to the northwest of their landing zone. A quick glance at his temperature gauge showed it was sixty three degrees, Fahrenheit, in the low land plains.

Not bad at all but it was also the warm part of the day, with twenty mile an hour winds it would certainly have felt a bit cooler but nothing compared to the sub freezing temperatures still in the alpine highlands to the north.

The Merlin connected, "We good to go boss?" The Lyran asked.

"One moment." Even though he doubted that they'd find anything he flipped the NBC sensors to active and let the chem sniffers do their job. Nothing hazardous came back of course. Sam Houston's atmospheric sensors would have long since warned them if the atmospheric content was dangerous. "Interesting looks like there was a substantial amount of boron in the soil, naturally occurring." No surprise of course, except it wasn't mentioned in his data packet on the planetary economy, since boron was good for agriculture, but it had other uses. Particularly uses that would have been relevant to the Magistracy's medical machinery industry, "Lets move out, get a view of our surroundings while the diggers play in the dirt." He ordered watching the Leopard deploy McCloud and her contingent of mechs.

A planet named pickaxe with significant boron deposits should have been a mining colony not a farm world...

HellTeddy · Jan 11, 2023

Thank you for the updoot!

Imperator Pax · Jan 18, 2023

Pioche Part 2
The cold front moving in wasn't really a concern. They had packed for snow... and frankly while it was going to drop probably thirty plus degrees over the next couple days there was no guarantee it was going to stay that way. They just didn't know one way or another. It would have been different if they moved further away from the tropics, but that was the interesting thing about how the rock had hit.

Initial forecasts had projected they weren't going to get any serious rain, or snow, so that meant without significant cloud coverage the Sam Houston was capable of deploying the Azami manned small craft and conduct their own flight at basically the lower threshold of the atmosphere looking to take mapping tracks of the entire crate border of the impact site. The idea was to then expand that out and look at how the ash and debris had settled and the surround topographical landscape.

The planet had had two weeks to realize the rock was flying towards them.

What they didn't have from those historical records was proof it had been under power. It might not have been . The acceleration of a fusion drive to aim the rock could have been calculated for a burn on a flight path with only only minimal thrust corrections firing in order to conserve or minimize the needed fuel.

That meant the active fusion signature would have been intermittent. That was a little concerning but it was definitely plausible. Early space colonization technology. 23^rd Century Terra could have built a weapon like that. If Amaris had rigged a dead man's trap then the answer was yes. It was possible.

He flipped the control on the regimental management suite to transmit to air assets, "Alpamys confirm?"

"I confirm Major. Standby for telemetry uplink." It took almost a minute for the holographic globe to provide a fully populated display from almost two days of mapping thus far. "Do you want us to expand?"

"Yes, focus on mapping of the inner crater rim." He was looking for identifying sinkholes. To sink probes in. It was going to be the easiest way for the rock docs to sink their probes into it and see if there were any obvious underground structures.

It would also help them do chemical evidence to ascertain chondritic composition or not. He wasn't sure what the alternative composition made up would be, but since they were here, and he had the resources they were getting paid to coordinate with the researchers.

He swapped channels to the IE mobile dig site and opened the holographic communications suite illuminating Doctor Abner, and the Duchess Raventhir standing in front of their terminal and filled them in on the progress or lack of ... depending on how one wanted to rate the checklist procedure.
--
Lieutenant Short navigated the Vindicator after the Mongoose as descended past another stand of evergreen firs and white pine. They were new growth, probably no more than twenty or thirty years old but were already very tall. They had reached battle mech height.

"Proof of ecological recovery." The Major's voice cut in over the channel, "Most of the white pine probably died out during the ash cloud event and their resurgence has probably taken four or five generations to reach this stage."

"Aren't evergreens not supposed to die during the winter?" Another Vindicator pilot asked.

"There is a difference between severe cold in conventional winter and and the conditions immediately after. The planetary albedo slowing down wouldn't have done any favors to broadleaf plants which is probably why these are the first resettlers we're seeing. Their success may even be stifling the return of deciduous trees in addition to the cold."

They had been out here for a couple of days now. Driving mechs with both sixes, and the broader easy company maneuvering around trees, and looking at the surreal alien landscape of a planet with amazing sunsets. They hadn't been doing much.

She had been subjected to briefing packets talking about shock waves, eject melt, and how the excavation by the rock had blasted tens of billions of tons of material into the atmosphere that had resulted in a two year super winter as one of the scientists had described it.

That had been the defining experience so far.

Getting lectured about obscure scientific facts while they drove mechs around a people less wasteland of a world. They weren't allowed to shoot at anything. There were survivors of the colony who couldn't even be called techno-barbs. They were Neo Paleolithic hunter gatherer bands who largely subsisted off of fishing.

Fish. That was the great survivor of the cataclysm. When the landscape had been scoured and the plant life had died fish had probably been what had allowed the descendants of heavily mechanized farming communities to survive the cataclysm.

They didn't want to spook the stone age people so no weapons practice.

Lady Raventhir would decide what they would do when they returned back to Luxen, or at least were back over the border, within the modern borders of the Magistracy.

A display flashed, and her Ceres built communications suite signaled incoming laser handling. "Bring the platoon to a halt, Lieutenant." The major ordered.

The seventy five ton marauder was standing on a low hill rise about half a klick east along the tree line. She hadn't even seen the machine before it had contacted her own 'mech by laser com... a shake passed through which was probably the same as most of the invaders at Luxen had felt on turning a path on the river bend only to start taking ppcs bolt from that was twenty tons heavier or more.

She'd seen enough of the footage from Luxen... or Detroit for that matter. There was no telling where else.

Her las com registered the other six of vindicators moving to a secondary position designated navpoint beta on her display.

--
Gene looked over the map as he shuffled the feeds. Iridium's presence in the soil sample from the initial core samples... Because they were only talk about two centuries, hah, which was nothing in real geological earth moving terms the burial of material was a result of the crater excavation filling back into the crater. There was some erosion of loose soil, the various rings formed around the site, there were places where sink holes and water tables and what not had all effect topography as the planet had gradually warmed over the last century... but it was all... pardon the pun a glacial process that they were looking at.

There was some skepticism given the shallowness of the planetary seas, and with the resulting drop in sea level due to the glaciation that the Rim World would have relied on an undersea facility near the impact site. That did still assume that the rock had landed where it was supposed to, but not assuming that meant they were in the wrong area entirely as well. Also of course was that the IE team was considering what was in this area, if not deep water ports.

Abner was right... if the DOME had still been around... they could have pretty easily have fixed this. Now admittedly the question that Gene really suspected was, would they have bothered spending the money... but Abner had laid out it would have simply been a matter of automated orbital mirror arrays to speed up, though not too quickly the thawing of the oceans. Obviously there were other things but even that wasn't necessary.

The truth was that if the Magistracy decided to recolonize this planet could support human life. Agriculture would be harder but wheat would likely be possible with some adjustment... and that would just be a short jumpship route to Detroit and its agronomics reserves.

That was wholly coincidental ... a result of what he knew of specialist trades in the rimward periphery and unrelated but there was still something, there were details about Pioche that didn't add up.

Part of it was the sheer then versus now of looking at the planet of his punched up maps... but was there something here? He doubted it was an automated marauder line, which was of course the absolute top of Raventhir's pie in the sky wishlist to unearth after centuries of hidden silence. No, while even the Taurians had been fielding marauders and surely the hidden army had been producing 1R's somehow in 2765 before the coup on Terra there were easily a number of more likely candidates.

The two front runners were the Pheonix and the Rampage but there were certainly age of war mechs like the dervish that wouldn't been that surprising... but was a line like that sufficient to warrant a rock being dropped?

Maybe for Amaris that was plenty of reason... he looked at the projections of the planet and waited for Abner to call him back. In the mean time he pulled up the RMR data packet, but he doubted he would find anything but they were back into a hurry up and wait situation.

He wondered what the CEP for a rock from the asteroid belt was, were they even in the right area for the target? He tapped the console and watched the wind pick up... if the geologists prediction was right, he looked from his current vantage point. There were one or two candidates for a mountain that would have insulated from the impact shockwave in the area and yet still in the ring where they might have been the target.

Imperator Pax · Feb 18, 2023

Pioche Part 3
Beauregard knew he was be watched as adjusted his heater from over the other end of the holographic display. They were getting rain, but the bigger factor at base camp was wind chill not precipitation. Not that knowing that made it any better.

The league native blew out a breath, and looked at the camera. Their ?Employer? Well probably the Lyran noble helping organize the agenda must have been born on a world that was snowy all year round because he seemed to pay no mind to the cold as carried on about stellar colonization and the route that had lead to Pioche being colonized in the 26^th century.

Beau had perked up really when the League had been mentioned. It wasn't difficult to figure out why settlers from the duchy of Andurien would have been making for the periphery at the end of the 26^th century. The Canopians had only established their state towards the beginning of the century and their movement steadily out away from the sphere made sense. The 26^th century, the 2500s, had been a fairly frequent set of brushfire wars over the duchy between the League and House Liao.

It made this contract weird but it meant he wasn't in the League space. He had gotten out in time, but if he went back to Marik space any time soon there were going to be questions. He wanted to avoid any questions by SAFE, questions he didn't have good answers to. The 3^rd Marik was gone there was no going back to that.

He flipped a finger over the console to his machine and looked at the table. It had been a gamble signing on with the scratch company but they'd made it through it and he had thought at the time that it was nice money... but what IE was paying for going to this freezing rock ... that was really nice money... all because the boss had two JumpShips to his name. So what if they were borrowing a DropShip to move part of the unit they had gotten regular pay for travel time. This was the kind of gig that he figured would have required being apart of a bigger more fancy unit... then again thinking of the first class berths aboard the JumpShip they were just a fancy unit.

"Bo, did you get that?' A familar voice asked over the line.

"Yeah." He grunted, "I see it." Even if it was just letters and numbers to him, but yeah he'd gotten it.

The Lyran in his heavy mech shook his head, "Peel off go join up with McCloud and meet up with those ground cars."

"Roger that Septim." He replied pulling on the yoke of the machine and started to turn and walk forward in his Dervish. Commander McCloud was as was typical Impatient. It was an accepted trait of ShadowHawk pilots... always thinking they had somewhere to be. That his Dervish was capable of out jumping a 'Hawk seemed to have been willfully ignored by the Commander.

He was a missile boat she fancied herself a brawler.

McCloud's made sure her platoon knew she wasn't happy. "Right because we're swarming with pirates, and need the reinforcement." She protested over the line with the Marauder Ace.

Beauregard suspected that there was still a certain degree of chip on the shoulder at hand. Shepherd claimed a Major's rank which given that he owned two JumpShips, a tricked out DropShip, owned spare horses, and had armor support... yeah it was appropriate... but he also got that the Lyran kid was also too young to shave. Just speculating, not that it mattered in the slightest one way or another, the kid had probably been shipped off to some Lyran military academy graduated early and then went mercenary. He clearly wasn't related to Septim or the Lyran doc, but McCloud might not have figured that out, all she probably saw was a kid with a 75 ton mech.

Not the MechCommander and not the Devil on the River Bank.

"You are approaching insubordinate Commander." The Major commented in a frankly normal tone, "We are on an unknown periphery world lost to civilization, not only should we not disregard the potential pirate threat, but particularly it is ideal that your platoon be supplemented with a missile boat, further that the Dervish can provide a communications link to our air assets."

Inside his Dervish he flipped his venerable HID 21 Comms system to track the relative position of Alpamys. Keeping track of the small craft's course overhead. He'd kind of skimmed the what to do in the event they started taking fire, but he knew the bird was armed. Anything stupid enough to show up and attack seven mechs would get a nasty surprise.

It was potentially a paranoia decision, but it was nice to have.
--
Gene watched the lake waters tracking the clunky industrial mech sorry ResearchMech and its variety of probes and tools waddle into the water. He didn't know where Abner had found it but it broadcast a DOME signature to his Marauder on handshake. Right now one of the students was taking it out into the frigid sub alpine lake to examine the conditions of the lake bed.

The Leopard nearby was still offloading another worker mech to see about clearing more space for this secondary camp. He didn't know if this was normal procedure, if IE was moving fast, but he assumed that this differed from the Rimward expedition because their efforts were being concentrated on a single planet, and in a comparatively small area.

He knew they were getting a little stir crazy. This wasn't a normal mercenary contract at least strictly speaking. Babysitting a bunch of diggers would have probably done in house, and he got the impression that the rumors circulating around that Abner was in charge and not Raventhir might have been annoying the Magistracy pilots, which probably was compounding McCloud's bulldog tenacity.

He wondered if there was anything to find here. Had anything more complicated than hunter gatherers and trees survived the impact? He flipped another series of setting, searching and scanning for signals that he knew weren't out there. Gene was increasingly growing to dislike this planet... the math didn't add up.

Any brooding had to be put aside as touched base with the cicada pilot. Currently he had his machine's 320 engine revved up and was zipping around in the oversized bug mech seemingly without a care in the world. At least one of them was having fun.

The man's face was set in an easy grin, "Hey boss, not getting anything." He shook his head, "Seriously boss if there is something out here besides snow and trees, we need to spread out. Get in that locust and get a little speed. I can tell you there isn't anything going to tangle with as much metal we have on this rock."

He prepared to disagree, but Raventhir had appeared on the line.

"Your MechWarrior might a point commander," The duchess remarked, she seemed tired. "We need to spread out further. We need to cover more ground if we're going to make any real progress here."

With no real ability to protest... or at least not make a sustainable case for why they shouldn't he nodded, "Understood." He raised a glove hand and went into the regimental management software to tag the communication to go across the whole operational unit. "All right everyone fan out, stay in radio contact but start wide scale patrol, Two hundred meter intervals between your wingmen to start with. We will expand from there."

Bahar's mongoose moved to join him, and the Vindicators began the process of pairing up as the map software showed the 2d grid inside of his cockpit. There were a lot of woodland. Lot of bare hillsides to and a mix in-between.

This would be more effective tomorrow when they could actually pre plan search patterns... maybe they could go over the mountain... but before they went and did that it'd b e best to make sure everyone's mechs had a couple days worth of MREs and survival gear... of course they'd be sleeping buttoned up in their mechs.

--
Notes: and of course unreliable narrator and speculation are in effect, but we are working our way to Ice Castle, which is of course something of a retcon from how these events are portrayed intheir abridged format in the original thread.

Imperator Pax · Feb 1, 2023

Pioche Part 4
The temperature gauge monitoring outside was slowly rising as the sun crept higher into a cloudless sky. The morning frost would start to melt soon.

He pulled the league era data packets up again, and re ran them against the diggers report. There was the possibility of course the rock had been like the one that had fallen on south Africa and that that explained the wealth of minerals, but he was suspicious that was the case. It didn't mesh with what they were seeing. Yes there was iridium, and diamonds from the impact, but other resources ... they'd know more once the core samples came back.

He looked over the messy brown green landscape. Pioche was not a planet he would have called beautiful. It was a stark harsh world as it slowly recovered from the impact. Scrub grasses would supposedly give way to taller grasses and wildflowers and in a hundred years or so maybe this would all be reforested, and a hundred after that the planet would probably have another big warming period and well go through another change... and who knew what the landscape would look like then.

They wouldn't be here for that. Pioche was proving a good example thus far of the Silurian? Paradox... no, hypothesis, he mentally corrected the idea that a catastrophe or just the passage of time could be so significant it literally erased signs of advanced civilization.

Not that he expected looking at the historical record to just trip over a big metal sign proclaiming: Weigel A&M or Whitworth Company, or Krauss Liemann... but the rock falling had done a good job of excavating a big hole and burying things after.

Then there were the manpower limits.

The chime from the console updated the packet of data. 'Capital Armor' was something of a misnomer. What made a warship a warship was a compact a K-F drive, it was what allowed an armed vessel to mount an appreciable volume of weaponry. The structure and armor that allowed it to suffer through attacks, but it wasn't fundamentally a unique feature of warships. They ablated when struck, whether that was weapons fire or protection from micrometeorites at high g. That ablative property was useful because it endured traumatic shock and allowed a bulkhead to survive contact nuclear blasts.

The engineering behind such structural integrity dated back to the early spaceflight era. It was an engineering principle that was at least nominally more than a thousand years old. It had its basis... in protection mundane attacks. Sea going warships of terra's world wars had been armored to the point that a by product that anything other than a direct hit, and really not even a sure thing, could with a damage control crew keep the ship in combat in a nuclear battlescape. That had not been a design requirement, nuclear weapons hadn't been a practical design requirement for protection... but that and bunker design also originally meant against conventional attack had in the age of war resulted in the great epoch of human expansion resulted in the development of protective armor capable of bearing immense loads continuously and also withstanding significant stresses while under load.

Unfortunately said armor wasn't any more readily detectable when buried as anything else. They were sticking probes in the ground on the basis of pictures from orbit of terrain disfigurements... which was probably unhelpful because most likely ... if the Rim World had built a facility here, they'd have bored out a mountain, just like during the cold war on ancient terra.

... and likely it had been facilities like SAC, and Raven's Rook that had inspired the first castles, which had eventually would give way to the Castles Brian. If however such facilities, of a similar pattern had been built, "It'd all be buried." He muttered looking over his scopes. The ash clouds would have buried it all, and in turn shifting earth over the past century particularly as the planet warmed and summer thaws melted ice would have buried any entrances further.

He let his head hit the back rest even as he brought the Marauder up to a higher vantage point to look around. There were no fusion signatures that they could detect on this rock... at least none that weren't there own. No fusion signatures, even ones with ECM active, meant no real way to find industry... the thermal returns they got were so minor as to be irrelevant. The planet had medium sized fauna besides humans... there were some frankly very large fish in the oceans, but there was nothing larger than deer. He suspected that even that had been a near miss, most likely the planets cattle population had died out being unsustainable without human aid, where as the ... sitka might have been some canopian import for hunting reserves that had managed to survive... and even those herds were not very large... and probably at risk of being over whelmed by a recovering human population.

Gene blinked as the Thermal readers zoomed in on a mule deer as something snatched it out of the brush. Only his connection via the MMI allowed him to watch the food chain in action, and he might have assumed it a lynx, but replaying caused him to blink, and transfer the images from the system up to holograms. He hit the comms display, and toggled over to channel 3, "Professor, I'm pretty sure I just watched a juvenile smilodon make a meal out of a mule deer."

"What is a smilodon?" He wasn't sure who was asking maybe it was one of the IE personnel or maybe it was one of the Canopians. It wasn't like he'd been introduced to everyone on this, and he hadn't expected to.

It was a valid question he mused in hindsight. "AN extinct apex predator from North America on Terra. I can find nothing in the historical record that no one," Had been hit by the good idea fairy and decided to play Jurassic park, "Introduced them to the planet." Admittedly he didn't have any records stating that mule deer had been introduced to pioche for the purposes of either farm raised deer meet or as an agronomic method of planetary settlement colonization terraforming or as just a hunting option but any of those or all them were possibly for a colony world... introduction of an extinct species while certainly well within the star league era's capacity for mad science was something he would have expected to at least bear some comment on, "Is there any indication that the magistracy might have done this intentionally some where else?" Were there Canopian planets were there were dinosaurs running, maybe it didn't make the news because everyone knew such and such world had Jurassic park as an attraction...

He didn't exactly have a Canopian tourism bureau directory handy but the point stood out that maybe it was possible, especially given that they had better retained star league era medicine. Whatever the case, however such a large mammalian predator had come to be on Pioche it did not fit with the presence or the claims of Pioche as a farming planet of two hundred million people as it had been before the asteroid had struck. There was obviously more to the planet, an absence that was not detailed in the official historical record.
--
Notes: this is shorter, we notably do not get to the first scene with the pioche natives, or their shrines and great caves, or the matter of language. Part of this is because much like in the original draft I still have an issue putting the folk lore portion into a format that works. So what will most likely happen is the summation being provided of events through translation convention, of a story of ancestral memory of how Pioche's human population survived the end of their world, and how they travel and survive their planet's harsh winters of particularly the 29^th century generations earlier.

Silverbullet · Feb 1, 2023

They get the saber tooth and deer from Project Sagittarius Umbrella, McEvedy's Folly? Because that would explain that but it'd mean they were looking at possible DOME stuff not Hidden Army.

Imperator Pax · Feb 1, 2023

Silverbullet said: ↑

They get the saber tooth and deer from Project Sagittarius Umbrella, McEvedy's Folly? Because that would explain that but it'd mean they were looking at possible DOME stuff not Hidden Army.
Click to expand...

Yes, we will get to that, in the next segment but it bears I think mentioning that Frobisher, and McEvedy's folly, and Pioche are all roughly in the same neck of the backwoods of the rimward periphery

Similarly Project Pisces Ubmrella may or may not be related to all of this, though it may not be in that same area it was I think we can say with certainty known to the Rim World

Imperator Pax · Feb 15, 2023

Pioche Conclusion
The deer encounter and its maybe maybe not saber toothed tiger predator had prompted a revision of how they were moving. Nothing significant turn the thermals on and look at the surrounding area. The eco system wasn't barren, but that made sense. This was a hard scrabble world, but it wasn't a dead world. The results in the meant time were confirmation that sea ward side of the mountains, had been sheltered, not entirely protected from some of the blast and shockwave. The mountains had still shed some material, but mostly the likes loose soil or otherwise already comprised rock face like they had already observed.

No more than anything their presence was about looking at the surrounding eco system. The broader ecosystem. The deer had other predators, specifically, unsurprisingly the remaining native humans who seemed to get by on hunting and gathering, but particularly from a combination of land and sea based fauna.

Nothing that they hadn't in theory already known and recognized.

"Does the name McEvedy mean anything to you major?"

His face scrunched up at the question, and the name, "In the context of prehistoric animals? No, it does not." Gene answered, hoping that Abner wasn't going to ask a follow on.

"He was a member of the DOME in the late star league working in the rimward periphery." Abner paused as he watched the fur wrapped humans over the feed.

At the time the zodiac names meant nothing. Sagittarius, Libra, Pisces. Other than the DOME had been following a naming pattern working in the rimward peirphery. "Skyfog? Right, the gas giant." That had been project Libra Umbrella. He pulled up his star map within his Marauder cockpit and the jump route history, then zoomed out. Luxen to Skyfog had been three jumps, which at the time he really hadn't paid any mind to. Coming 'west' from Luxen to get here, he had to pause looking at teh world on the map labelled Schmitt, but he brushed that off as coincidental. It was probably nothing. "are we revaluating?"

Was this DOME's work? That was in short the question, but no... there was no indication historically the DOME had been interested in Pioche with its well known loamy black soil and easy agriculture. There wouldn't have been much for them to do here if the historical record was to be believed.

"No." It was Raventhir's voice. "We have solid evidence," Funny how she sounded so sure of it now, but he wasn't going to question it... it was plenty of since that the duchess might have been holding something back, "That there was rim world activity on this world." She grated, and he had to wonder what that Evidence was.

He decided he wasn't going to push the issue, and adjusted his feeds to zoom in on the small band of spear armed humans. They were wrapped in furs, and he couldn't make much out. They slunk away and he watched them go. There was little else to do but take pictures at this junction. Gene returned his attention back to the nearest mountain peak, before punching up the thermal data from the overflights. The human population was apparently starting to bounce back, but it was still precarious and overhunting might be a problem in a generation or two, it was simply too hard to move overland.

That wasn't a problem for them given their mechs and vehicles, and it had probably been long enough that these people could have come the long way. He switched feeds back to the pre cataclysm data but it yielded no more answers than it had before.

Five hours later.

"Major Shepherd." He accepted the incoming line gripping the yoke and easing the seventy five ton heavy BattleMech into a turn. "We're finished installing the coffer dam Doctor Abner wants you on site when we finish draininage work." The map displayed a way point, and he acknowledged and started maneuvering.

The dig site?... whatever the technical term was for whatever the IE people were doing. He did a quick check of the outdoor temperature and craned his head to check that his jacket was in the cockpit rather than the space allocated for buttoning up in the field. He had spare pair of boots back there and hiking pack which kept the change of clothes and a couple of freeze dried meals, and several chocolate bars. He'd swept out the coffee he normally had for tea.

The trip took him to an alpine lake, which given the general conditions of Pioche it was one more depression that had filled in with rainwater or the snow melts as the planet warmed. The lake itself had been at a state of equilibrium, not full and not empty.

He saw the ShadowHawk on over watch and maneuvered up opposite of the lighter mech.

With the cofferdam installed the water was being pumped out revealing large fixtures of rock along the shore of the lake. Even as a voluminous amount of water was pumped out, nothing immediately stood out as unusual. Not to his naked eyed, but to the sensor array of his Marauder, well that wasn't the same thing, as the water level receded he started to receive faint contacts of refined metal.

... not iridium, not rare earth metals, refined metal. The kind of thing that didn't happen by cosmic accident, that required human industry. The mech's hand was stretched out, the desert camo distinctive along the arms, but its shoulder were black, badged with a pair of even more distinctive futhark runes. Its legs were sunk deep into the river bed, but other than that it looked in surprisingly good condition.

Gestapo.

State Secret Police.

He had to let out a breath. Then he hit the radio console key, "Alright. Rim World Republic presence confirmed." He said on the master channel, transmitting the image from his machine's gun cameras of the Charger laying on the mud.

It didn't answer any questions, just added more.

By the time it was getting dark he had looked at the rock cracks... apparently you could use them to cut ice, melt it for water... and if you weren't careful you split the rock and cause a landslide. The Mech was fine... the pilot inside, well not so much. The guy's head had serious occipital fracture ... which had probably not only concussed the man but also been fatal due to pressure and bleeding... not telling which had done him in.

The IE med doc was still in the surgery doing the autoposy, but she'd been in there the better part of an hour he really didn't know what she was looking for.

Gene was flipping through his suit. "Its like yours." Beau remarked to Bahar ribbing the other pilot from his heavy jacket.

He grunted vaguely affirmative, as the two lighter mech pilots looked at the harness, and cooling suit. The dead man wasn't carrying a side arm. No pistol, no spare magazines. He had knife, which okay sure, but there was a lot missing. He thought about the lack of a flashlight as well, "As it should Mister Alexander. Its 2750 pattern SLDF Pilot suit, standard issue to the MechWarriors of the Star League." Abner remarked stepping forward. "The RimWorld Republic had full access to Star League Military Equipment."

They had had the greatest access to the technology of the star league.

Still didn't answer the question of how they had known. "Is this the first one you found?"

"You mean a mech?" Abner came to a stop by the examination table, "Yes, this the first time we had a chance to make a good exploration... what we found was a series of corroborating finds. Records, shipments, people who ... who frankly should have been in prison walking free and going..." He paused. "Lyran, the Commonwealth's Intelligence dropped the ball, I'm not afraid to admit it, there were Rim World officers who went to ground... and there was a network. People forgot about in the succession wars, but there was a discovery, a crashed dropship an a Rim World raid on a scientist named McEvedy's, on this drive were references to machinery and transportation, and a rendezvous."

"Pioche." It wasn't really a question. "What do you think happened?"

"We think that Rim World came to Pioche hoping to take possession of whatever was here, and well as I've said, we think that it tripped some kind of safety system..."

... and whoops there went the planet's population. Right. He glanced out the wind, "Then we still have a problem, of where that thing came from." You didn't use a mech for survival and water boiling like that for yourself. You could, but it seemed wasteful.

There was a snap of latex gloves coming off, as the doctor came out of her surgery, "Not the only thing either," her accent was vaguely British, posh... Canopian Posh, "The Pilot doesn't make sense."

"Excuse me, can you clarify what you mean?"

"I estimate he's male, approximately twenty five years of age, post puberty full skeletal fusion in the hands. No medical care." A diet of heavy fish, the list went on. Conclusion, he was most likely a planetary native. Not a Rim World Pilot. Approximate age and the limited computer data they'd pulled from the 'Mech suggested the Charger had gone into the drink forty years after the planet's ice age had begun.

Which still left them with the hypothesis that there was a DOME style underground facility of some kind on the planet, and that their best guess was that it was near the site of the impact.
--
Notes: So I know that in later canon... well fuck its been ten years now but Gestapo in current canon is its a nickname for the unit... we're not going with it, we're going original canon this is Amaris is bad people

Imperator Pax · Feb 22, 2023

Ice Castle Part 1
That night the natives came out of the woods. Not that they'd done much, but it had been a little shocking that it had happened at all. They'd taken one look at a moving 'mech with its roving spotlight and backpedalled back for the wood line but that was significantly closer than they'd done... and either they had gotten really quickly acclimated to their presence, or it was in response to pulling the charger out of the water.

It was the subject that the IE personnel were currently arguing over... and it was monopolizing the comms network. That included the email system where he was CC-ed into as people chattered about timelines, and about the potential anthropological effects of neo techno barbarism and the role being able to operate a battlemech but not understanding the technology might play in otherwise neolitihic hunter gatherers.

It sounded like a recipe for disaster to him.

He was also cognizant that Dropships, and small craft in space at least in near planetary orbit were visible with the naked eye... and JumpShips might potentially be as well given the lack of light pollution from artificial sources... possibly. He couldn't be sure about JumpShips, but artificial moving stars in the heavens was not a facet that they had considered and how primitive societies might react to that kind of change to their environment. He thought about the information they had on the society of the Alexandrian covenant worlds... world... in the case of the sole surviving one as he directed the Marauder up the gap.

His main focus was not on how the natives might have survived per se... it was on how they were eluding their sensors. It wasn't as if they'd been specifically looking for the hunter gatherers specifically, but they had started acting odd, and now it was a security concern.

It was a good thing that the slow planetary albedo meant that the reforestation was a gradual process. The pine trees and limited other trees on this side of the mountain face were comparatively sparse rather than being thick old forest growth... that might have been found on a more typical world with Pioche's soil composition.

The thing about trees, and the process of reforestation is that while there were gaps in natural terrain, particularly over changes in elevation, shallow tree roots allowed trees to take footholds on ridges, and even across relatively thin soil layers. That allowed his seismographic sensors and and his thermal imagers to sweep through...

When the rock had hit it had probably thrown billions of tons of material into the air, which had settled back down and then the slow glacial melting of frozen water into sluice and moving material had brought thousands of gallons water carrying tons of rocks and soil down to redeposit had created a landscape very different than the Pioche topography of what this place had looked like two hundred years ago before the rock had fallen and everyone had died.

There were however certain rules that governed natural erosion principles and while storms could occasionally introduce freak variables, and earthquakes, and sinkholes could loosen and cause landslides erosionary forces tended to eventually wear down hard edges due to the sheer amount of force glacial change exerted. That meant the old map wasn't quite as useless as it might otherwise have been... he assumed that whatever cabal had been involved hadn't gone so far as to blatantly falsify the farming world's data after all... and that meant you needed enough space either for a road system to transport to and from or you needed enough space to land and load offload a fucking dropship... probably an aerodyne but he wasn't ... he didn't have enough data to discount something like a Union or a cargo variant there of.

That at least helped narrow things down.

"Commander?"

"Standby professor," He flipped to the small craft over head. "Okay start comparing the feeds."

This was the monotonous part of the work. Move to a point and run the old data, and the current data from both a fixed ground position, seismographic data, and above low orbital topographical mapping data and compare the footage.

There was chatter in the back end of the feed. There were no active fusion signatures, and it was doubtful that anything other than a reinforced protected pile would have remained functional this long... which suggested that the power was off. That meant if Abner was right, the doors were open... which of course raised questions of why hadn't the facility flooded, but DOME at least would have built flooding protection systems, and control gates that wouldn't have required power to run, gates that would have opened under water pressure from the inside to drain outward.

... though that did raise the question of would DOME's counter flood system have worked as advertised in an ice age. Add that to all the other questions that they didn't' have answer to. Regardless the archaeological measuring continued. They were banking on that there were only so many places that the natives could have gotten to in order to narrow things down, and that they could do these searches while there was daylight. So far they had come up with zilch working their way westward from the alpine lake the charger had been recovered from.

Chargers were relatively tall mechs so that suggested an entry point that would be high enough clearance for the machine to walk in and out of, especially if the natives had been driving the machines. It was a lot of slow moving, and mapping, and number crunching.

"Adjust that..."

"... no go back...."

"Look at the glaciation..."

"... see that rock deformation there."

"That's clearly not natural."

Gene was listening to the background chatter intermittently they weren't really talking to him so much as each other as they went back and forth on various spots. Thermal imagers, and aerial photography were less likely to trigger any kind of protection systems... they hoped, but those systems might trip from the fusion signatures of a battlemech or a small craft in a general holding pattern over the target... so he wasn't sure if they should have tried for more active invasive radar scans... besides the typical seismographic readings of his avionics.

One of the geologists started to talk about sinkholes further back, and how that precluded an entry way in that direction... then that spawned an argument with someone over water flow, and he went back to ignoring the speculation flipping through the the feeds.

Underground would be insulated. Thereby underground structures would reach a higher temperature equilibrium than ground level structures on the mountain's surface... to the point that an underground mine without access to something to reduce the temperature could become an almost tropical level heat and humidity.

"Professor, the natives are neolithic hunter gatherers correct, or at least broadly speaking."

"Broadly speaking yes, that's an apt decision."

"So if they had a protected warm shelter they would most likely use it for food preparation, and probably also as a place of disposal, they would use it to create fires, fires need fuel, they'd need to be able to harvest trees, and that fuel would then have to be brought into an access point."

They probably wouldn't then go to the trouble of disposing of that material outside of the cave... well probably not... which meant that for the most part the main comings and going would be taking goods in, but not out. Into a structure large enough for mech access so thus large enough space that a primitive society was unlikely to fill up the material...

... especially if said people happened to be depositing their waste into a midden that happened to be a flood control system that then ran that waste into an underground river that didn't freeze.

"A probable hypothesis on native behavior."

The hunter gatherers didn't have much in the way of domesticated animals. Whether they still had domesticated dogs was an unknown but domesticated cattle, especially dairy, had presumably died out over the harsh perpetual winter of the 29^th century.
--
Notes: I'm sure that it should be somewhat obvious as to why this content was originally dropped and Pioche was more of an offscreen go and not find something in the original posted version, I wanted to get back to the pirate fighting, and thus mechs, and thus move forward.

Silverbullet · Feb 22, 2023

Be careful of the natives, a sharp piece of flint to the skull can kill as surely as a bullet, and yay they found the underground base and we can end this arc of watching snow and cave people soon. Been a slow burn on the Pioche stuff, but it is laying the groundwork for the other Canopian Ruins stuff.

Imperator Pax said: ↑

Alexandrian covenant worlds... world... in the case of the sole surviving one as he directed the Marauder up the gap.
Click to expand...

There are other worlds still, like Ptolemy. It's just Cyrene and Sophos where they found signs of civilization but no people. The AAF is also apparently primitive but well equipped. CVs according to the tables would be Tiger MBTs, Merkava VII's, Korvins, LRM/SRM/AC Carriers, and maybe LVT-4 Hovertanks or a Condor Hover Tank but those seem a stretch. It mentions fighter craft as well but the only thing that fits their tech level and time period is the old Hurricane used by the Terran Alliance.

ISP3 has this to say on it.

THE TIP OF THE SPEAR
Although the Alexandrians are a traumatized, broken, and paranoid people, the Alexandrian Armed Forces remain strong and are always ready for “demonic incursions” or the next
inevitable coup. Despite the Covenant’s warring and political dichotomies, the nation’s military displays remarkable patriotism and morale when massed against an exterior threat.

The smallest unit of AAF organization is known as the chariot, which is roughly equivalent to a standard armor company and is led by a lieutenant. Five chariots denote a squadron, headed by a captain. Five squadrons form a division, led by a charioteer.

Among all chariot divisions, the foremost charioteer holds the title of First Charioteer and reports directly to the Protectrix (or Magister, during patriarchal reigns). Under the current
matriarchal government, all AAF officers are women, but men—both volunteer and conscripted troops—still form the bulk of the enlisted ranks.

Due to the rapid decline of technology, the AAF’s non-infantry assets are composed solely of light to heavy tanks, conventional fighters and support vehicles. Aside from a few surviving relics, internal combustion engines have replaced fusion engines in nearly all chasses. Ballistic munitions, predominantly light-to medium-caliber autocannon, dominate nearly every offensive profile due to the Covenant’s inability to manufacture most energy-based weapons.

To guard against external threats, the AAF maintains firebases housing crude but effective surface-to-orbit missile silos. Since these installations form a vital component of Covenant security, they are the only military target that both the ruling and dissident factions have always agreed are completely off limits.

Since the worlds of the Covenant cannot communicate with each other due to a lack of courier ships, the AAF appears in a similar yet different form on each planet. Subtle variations exist between each system’s AAF iteration—such as differing rank titles or the number of chariots per squadron—but such differences are largely cosmetic.

Assigning Units
The Alexandrian Armed Forces operate in armored companies called chariots by the locals, though each Alexandrian world typically possesses up to 25 such formations (Pharos and Ptolemy each possess 50), with conventional infantry support. The AAF may field Star League or Reunification War-era vehicles appropriate for the Taurian Concordat or Magistracy of Canopus, but no unit may be fielded that weighs more than 75 tons.

Due to lack of hardware and training, the AAF is strictly limited to combat vehicles and conventional infantry. The AAF cannot field ’Mechs, DropShips, battle armor, or aerospace fighters.

SDS FIREBASES
Each planet in the Alexandrian Covenant maintains at least one firebase capable of Surface-to-Orbit attacks (see pp.109-110, Strategic Operations). These surface-to-orbit batteries are derived from older technology, but perform in gameplay in the same manner as a Barracuda capital missile. Each installation may house up to two capital missile launchers, equipped with 2 missiles each. Alexandrian firebases are considered Hardened Fortresses (see p.117, Tactical Operations) that occupy 3 hexes and stand 10 levels in
elevation. Each firebase has a CF of 150 and an Armor Factor of 150. All firebase crews have a Gunnery Skill of 4 for all Surface-to-Orbit attacks.
Click to expand...

Lost Worlds
At least two currently uninhabited planets have been verified as previous members of the Covenant. The system identified as Cyrene shows signs of past habitation and an extinction-scale level of destruction, yet the estimated date of depopulation does not correspond to any known Upheaval. The deserted planet of Sophos shows extensive Covenant civilization but no overt signs of warfare.

Archaeologists are still attempting to determine how and why the people of Sophos vanished and where they could have gone. Another matter under investigation is the concurrence of events across the Covenant. Despite Pharos being out of communication with other Alexandrian worlds due to lack of interstellar travel, the conflicts and political turnovers on Pharos also occurred near the same time on these neighboring planets. Most working theories involve an underground information trade—such as a black market or secret society—that covertly travels between Covenant worlds by launching DropShips into orbit from uninhabited continents. Thus far, no concrete proof of any such group has been found.
Click to expand...

Imperator Pax · Feb 22, 2023

Yes, and thats part of the reason I more or less skipped Pioche in the main thread I wasn't feeling it.

Once Ice Castle is finished we will pivot back to Luxen proper and set up for the expanded Pirate fight, some of that fallout within Canopian politics, and also the exercises which will more or less finish this period as it did in the main thread in chronological terms.

Basically the end result being, Raventhir finds a pretty hefty return on investment, the Magistracy ends up in a position where the MAF is getting stronger, and of course there is also a clearly developing threat that is pushing into their direction from the spinward periphery

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