3031, Summer and the Goddess's return.
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Lord Of Flames
I write good, sometimes.
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July, 3031. Gawain Keep.
The spring green gives way to summer yellows as the rains die off, leaving the open fields and forests of your homeland to shift, the animals migrating from the open but drying out grasslands for the shade and hidden bounty of the forest. The predators that live in your lands move with them, following their prey along in these regular migrations.
Your people plant, irrigate, and harvest their crops as they come due, while your dropships do their best to sell their goods at markets a field, to limited success.
For your part, you have been entertaining yourself by asking your squire benign questions, hypothetical, and a variety of other things just to see how he reacts. Without the threat of Gladwell breathing down your neck, and with the Pirates absent this year by all appearances, you find yourself with a soldier's worst enemy.
Boredom.
You do not do well with boredom, needing to stretch your legs, use your muscles and exercise the mind, but here you remain at your desk, posing odd questions to your squire as you scan another report.
Oh, good, the first of the dams in the mountains has finished construction, and the turbines are starting to turn as they bleed off water through the system. Now you just need to build a power grid that can actually carry that somewhere useful.
"I think I would stand and fight, Master Elric." Your squire says after a few minutes of thinking.
"Oh?" You say, laying the report down as you lean forward on your desk, looking to where your squire has a few books of his own open in front of him. "You think you'd stand and fight if you were confronted by a pack of bullies?"
"Yes, Sir." He nods. "If they're about my age, I have the advantage of practice on them, and you said that one man always breaks when a situation goes against them. That means that in a group of three or four, I can earn back some advantage if I hit them hard and quick. The biggest may be the leader, but if I knock him down or bloody his nose, his friends will think twice."
The words are odd to hear from the mouth of a twelve-year-old boy, but you find yourself impressed with his valor, if not his sense. "And should your intimidation fail, what then? You're still surrounded by three or four boys your age or older. Don't tell me that you'd brawl them and be the last man standing?"
Your squire blushes at that, before shaking his head. "I… The attempt must be made," he hedges. "But if seizing the initiative doesn't work, then I suppose I would run." He doesn't meet your eye for a moment, but when he does he finds you watching him with a considering look.
"Smart." You declare, and the boy is almost taken aback by your simple praise. You rise from your chair, signaling your squire to stay seated as you stretch your legs after an hour's paperwork. "Against bullies, they seek to hold an overwhelming advantage over prey they see as incapable of resisting their aggression. By showing you have teeth, and bloodying one of them, you might well scare off the others, but unlike another squire I know of, you have the good sense to know that if the situation goes wrong, retreat is your best option."
"I didn't know you had another squire, Master Elric." You give the boy a sidelong glance, before you shake your head.
"Oh, He's not a squire any more, and has a great deal more responsibility than when he had a punch out with other squires around your age."
"I didn't know Sir Alistair was like that." You can't hide your laugh as the boy makes the obvious, if wrong conclusion.
"Oh no, Sir Alistair was the boy that leapt to my aid when I bit off more than I could chew that day." You say, to the boy's surprise. "We spent the next two weeks scouring every piece of armor in the keep, statues and all. My hands smelled like polish and dirt for another month, though my sister will say I was imagining that." A friendship had started that day, and not for the last time did one of you come to the defense of the other.
You bring your hand to your pocket, pulling free the watch fob within and flicking it open, idly watching the hands tick. "It is twenty past one, Alex. Why don't you run down to the kitchens and get yourself something to eat. Don't worry about me, I'll find my way down there soon enough." At the prospect of warm food and treats, your squire stands quickly, giving you a short bow before he's off, and though you hear no laughter, you can imagine the smile on his face as he runs.
Yes, the presence of children in the Keep presents its own challenges, but you don't know you'd give it up for anything.
~
> Go talk to Allistair. His Keep house is done, he has his own lands to govern, the last harvest was Bountiful. What's the hold up?
~
You take your time heading to the kitchen after your squire, taking a long detour that leads you into the knight's barracks and then past that, to the guest rooms for visiting lords or their representatives. Several of these rooms have offices attached to them so that they can write correspondence or enjoy a private meeting without having to sit on their mattress rather than a nice pair of chairs.
You knock on one door, and on the occupant's answer step inside, closing the door behind you.
It feels strange to think that it has been almost a year and a half since Alistair became a lord, when it feels like yesterday you and he were two knights doing their best to honor liege lord and family. Your old friend looks up at you, laying down the pen in this hand as he looks down at another scrap of paper covered in words you cannot read, before he scrunches it up, and throws it to join a small pile of them filling his office's waste basket.
"Elric, I wasn't expecting you." You give him a shake of your head and take a seat opposite him before he can rise.
"This is a conversation where I think the two of us will appreciate ten square feet of solid maple between us, Alistair." His face furrows at your words, but you continue apace.
"Lord Tristain, you are a good friend, and welcome to enjoy the hospitality of my house for as long as you need. That being said," You don't miss the small wince when you address him formally. "We've both received the reports that your keep, the place you will rule from, has finished construction. The first harvests are in, and if the numbers from Gawain lands are any indication, it is a bountiful one, which will bring good wealth to you and others once the Artemis makes its round trip once more, ignoring the wealth you already have from your prize share of the dropships and battlemechs we've captured."
It was a fraction of a percent of the value of their traditional value, but for a serving knight's son that had never had more than a thousand crowns to his name at any one time, it was a small fortune. He could easily leverage it into expanding his keep, upgrading its defenses, or expanding the refinery facility he had on his lands.
He nods along to your words, acknowledging them as fact. Whether or not he's seen those same reports from his lands is largely irrelevant.
"So I ask as both brother and Heir to my house, I ask as your friend, what are your intentions with my sister?" His eyes go wide at your straight forward question, before he leans back in his chair, eyes fixed to the desk between you.
"I have no intentions for Natasha, Master Gawain." He says the words, but he does not mean them.
You give him a look, one he returns with a flat face, but his eyes give away his thoughts. He is conflicted and watches you carefully as you rise from your seat.
"Natasha is a woman of the finest breeding and pedigree on the planet. She is a capable administrator, steward, and a dab hand with politics that comes from running a household. I have been informed she is quite comely, even beautiful to hear my fellow knights speak, and she shares our mothers broad hips and narrow waist." You watch him carefully as you extol her virtues as you might to another lord, as you had heard Samantha had been propositioned from the Lady herself right before she read your letter. "Is a Gawain bride not good enough for the newly founded House Tristain? Should I find a Sanmon or an Armmore cousin for the young vassal?"
"Master Gawain, I said I have no designs on the lady, why do you persist?" Lord Tristain repeats, his eyes narrowing.
"I persist because you wander my keep like a lovesick puppy, Alistair." He stands as you make your claim, and you're proven right that the desk between you keeps this calm for a moment longer.
"Elric, you go too far." he declares in turn, leaning over the desk with balled hands. Gone is the resignation in his eyes, replaced with the fervor and emotion your friend keeps contained outside the field of battle. "Whatever passes between me and Natasha is our business, not yours."
"I am her brother, heir to her house, of course its my business." You say in return, matching him over the desk, a foot of space between the two of you. "If you will not make your will known, then another will, and then I will happily walk her down the aisle to a man who had the balls-"
You don't know that you expected him to jump the desk, but you meet him all the same as the two of you fall to the ground, limbs swinging.
There is a reason that Alistair was your body man for the years between your coming of age until you became a MechWarrior.
His skill with a sword was one of them, his hands another.
He is eager to demonstrate them as the two of you trade punches, kicks, and grapples. You feel the bruises that will be a bad green by tomorrow evening, but you manage a few of your own even as you are stuck on the defensive.
"Does the thought make you so angry Alistair?" You taunt, even as you have to duck a jab set to rattle your teeth, taking the left he throws against your arms.
His attack is less furious, but no less effective as he advances on you, using the small size of the office against you. You can only bear with the blows, ducking some, taking others, and giving a grunt of pain as your back hits the wall right before he knocks the breath from you with a high knee to your gut.
You give him a headbutt in reply, and send him staggering back as the two of you bring your hands up again.
"Come on, talk to me Alistair!" You call, giving him a shove as he comes forward with a heavy handed right, and sending him stumbling back into the corner.
"Say the words, and I'll do my part, but I can do nothing if you won't say it." You mutter through grit teeth as you meet like wrestlers, hands entwined.
He doesn't answer you, only trying to trip you up by shoving his leg between and behind your right, but you know the move well, and use it to twist him to the ground, even as your grip on a hand slips and he hammers your ribs with a pair of blows.
Then you see him slip, a move that comes across as sloppy, and despite your own wear and tear, you give him a crack across the jaw that sees him spin on his heels, leaned over the desk as he catches himself.
"You'd rather just swing at me than admit much of anything, don't you?"
"I hate you, Elric." He mutters as he straightens back up, just in time to catch your gut punch that sends him back unto the desk, your other hand wrapping around his collar.
"Say the words." You command him, and though he thrashes in your grip, he does not get free. Your side smarts with the best of them, but at last you see the raw anger in his face fade, replaced with a more honest expression.
"I love her." He says softly, and you release his shirt, letting him drop back down to the table, papers strewn across the floor form your scuffle. "I would marry her, if she let me."
"Well then. I suppose you have a meeting once you get showered and changed, Lord Tristain." He looks confused a moment before he gets the message.
You reach a hand out to him, just in time for the door to open, your sister standing there, her ledger in hand. "Alistair, I just got back from a meeting with your father and I was wond- What in God's name?"
She looks over the scene for a moment, the ruffled clothes, the bruised knuckles, the scattered papers.
"No. I'm not dealing with this." Your sister does not bother to hide her disappointment in the two of you. "Alistair, when you and Elric are done with… whatever this is, I will be in my office. I expect you to be tidy and cleaned up. Elric-" She begins then stops, taking a deep breath. "I saw your squire in the halls, looking a tad concerned he couldn't find you. I suggest you remedy that. Good day, gentlemen. Damn fools." She mutters the last as she closes the door behind her, leaving the two of you alone in the office once more.
You pull your brother in all but blood from the desk, standing him straight as you step away, working the knuckles on your hand to check them for damage. He does much the same, prodding his ribs and getting grunts of pain as he touches the fresh lavender marks that no doubt decorate the two of you like a garden flowerbed.
"My father does not dislike you, Alistair." You say simple as you do your best to put your clothes to right, retying the belt of fabric around your middle that had pulled loose in the scuffle. "But he respects Natasha too much to listen to me offer her up to anyone, even a boy he's known their entire life. Be honest with him and you'll fare better than you expect." You do a once over of your jacket, thankful that despite the two of you trading blows, none of the buttons appear to have vanished into the ether. Looking back at your friend, you give him a look of pity. "Beware his talk of bride price and dowry, he will take you for everything and your pocket lint if you're not careful."
"Why, thank you for the vote of confidence, Elric."
You leave your friend to put himself back together, giving him a pat on his shoulder before you pass back through the office door and back to yours. Reaching a hand up to your face, you cringe a little as you touch your cheekbone and yank it away, hissing.
"Motherfucker hits like a '20."
Mid-June, 3031. Eastern Laoricia, Test-firing of the P-SLL.
The many hours you spend over the next few months prove to be both enlightening and also incredibly frustrating.
Working beside Master Burrel, you continue to develop a greater understanding of engineering from a practical standpoint, as compared to drawing up your own diagrams, but you do plenty of the latter as the two of you, and occasionally Fred when he peaks his head in from whatever task he's supervising outside the Head Tech's workshop, continue to work on uncovering the secrets of the P-ERLL and the reduced weight properties of the strange weapon.
You had established that they had streamlined the internal wiring by running the loom through the strong but oddly shaped endo-steel structural matrix, but even the weight savings that the endo-steel brings and the wiring adjustment you've already document, you could not account for the way that the P-ERLL manages to maintain its internal form factor. Somehow it only takes up the same amount of space in terms of linkages, capacitor wiring, coolant feeds, and a dozen other small connections that make up the 'under the hood' components of battlemech repair and maintenance, as a standard Large Laser.
You know that for a fact, as you checked at one point and confirmed that every connector into the P-ERLL was of the same number, type, and general design as the industry standard 10-15cm lasers. This did lead you to conclude that calling it a prototype was the proper designation, as the jury-rigged nature of its design did it no favors when it came to cooling. There was simply no way to cycle enough coolant through the remaining Large Laser lines and bleed the waste-heat off fast enough within a single firing cycle.
Thankfully for Master Burell's current project, he doesn't really need to worry about the form factor that eludes you, as he uses you as an extra pair of hands, nearing the end of his investigation and starting to get into more practical matters. You help him work the plasma-welder, carefully taking sections of endo-steel that have been pruned from old salvage and destroyed components, and help him to join them together and create what amounted to the world's fanciest box, or at the least the most expensive.
The lengths of endo-steel formed the rigid skeleton of the weapon, something for everything else to mount to. Fred rejoined the pair of you, and help lift the guts of a large laser out of their previous housing, donated by a long-destroyed Bulldog by the armor you had to peel away, and then carefully slot it back into its new home. Wrenches and grinders were broken out as you examined, marked, modified, and eventually fitted the internals of the laser back into place.
The first test-firing, just to see that Master Burrel had wired it back together correctly, reminded you of the first time you'd seen a laser fire in the storehouse not half a mile distant from this workshop. This time he did not have an ICEngine to provide power for it, but for this test at least, he wouldn't need one.
Today, he'd be linking it into the keep's power grid, which was going through its own teething issues.
~
Your techs were working hard to create a means of regulating a non-standalone Fusion Engine when it was missing half the external supports and coolant linkages it expected to be connected. Their solution for the time being, was to slave it to a BattleMech's detached cockpit unit, skipping the step of having to write new software to talk to the engine when a MechWarrior's displays already featured all the data they'd need in the field.
Honestly it wasn't a great work around, the readout screen still had more red on it than a Draconis flag, but for the moment, it seemed to work and it saved you and your pilots from having to spare a Mechbay purely to run power and computer lines to and from the disembodied engine to where the attached diagnostics could tell the techs what they needed to know.
You considered, as you watched the man connect his datapad through a hardline to the new prototype laser before backing away as he carefully unspooled the line, that you may trust Master Burrel a little too much. True, he was, to your knowledge, the best engineer on the planet, but you also knew, by a report from the Combine Factory, what engineers with a bit too much motivation could get up to.
Thankfully, knowing that he had potentially the entire power of a fusion engine behind it, he had opted to have this test firing happen well outside the workshop and pointed in a safe direction for a dozen miles. Fire-crews were standing by with hoses clamped to the well pumps just in case anything went wrong.
"Prototype Steamlined Large Laser test firing #1, commencing in 3. 2. 1. Firing." He announced, yelling his words for all to hear as he watched his watch tick over to the hour.
Every man wore a pair of welding goggles or a mask to protect their eyes, including your father as he stood on the parapet overlooking your odd group, but even through the tinted shields, it was still very bright.
The air seemed to hum for a moment as the tech hit the button, before the large laser's gimble servos locked in place, freezing as they were with no firing corrections being fed in from a targeting computer, and then a wash of heat flashed into the air as nuclear-fueled electricity was turned from potential into actualization. You had briefly worried about the gamma emissions of the laser as a beam of pulsating blue burned directly from the end of the laser assembly and into a distant rockface, before you remembered raising that exact point to Master Burrel.
The man hadn't dismissed it, instead pondering it for several long minutes before he'd gotten back to you. The solution he'd devised was twofold, part distance and part point of aim. By having every man be at least some fifty yards away, himself included, that should do the part of mitigating it for the average man. Pointing it away from anything of value just reminded you of the first rules of gun safety you had almost drilled into your head in your youth.
Neither of you knew the results of the test firing, so you couldn't well point it at something you'd like to keep.
You can't say if the first solution completely worked or not, but watching as a rockslide was created as the prototype imparted enough energy to slag half a ton of standard armor into a hillside just within optimal range for its type? The second proved quite pertinent.
"Capacitor drain in 3, 2, 1." He called out again, clicking his watch as the beam abruptly died out, no longer linking the steaming assembly to the hillside it's just finished excavating. "Test Fire #1 concluded, with no obvious signs of damage to the assembly, and no unforeseen occurrences during testing." He turned to the tech right behind him, waiting for the lad to finish transcribing his words.
When he was finished, Burrel looked to the crowd of volunteers and interested knights and Lord. "Well, show's over. Lord Gawain," He called up to the parapet, voice carrying despite the distance, "I'll have a report on your desk as soon as I'm sure it won't spontaneously catch fire!"
You see your father nod, giving the engineer a dip of his hat's brim as he takes up his cane and returns to the keep proper, vanishing from your sight. Turning back around to Master Burrel, he looks quite pleased with himself, if not unconcerned as the prototype continues to let off steam like it's a train engine.
"I think this proves its feasible," he'd said to you, still looking down the hill. "And I think we're almost there, but that heat spike bothers me, even if I expected something like it."
"Are you sure it's not just the lack of coolant action? I remember how hot the 6cm got when we test fired it in the warehouse." He nodded as you brought up the earlier test firing, looking pensive.
"You raise a good point, but I'm sure that half the issue is that this one was made by hand, eye, and with shifting design-plans. Now that we've got a working product, it'll still take me months to see it finalized, but I would trust this enough to slap it in one of your BattleMechs." He stops there, before giving you a look over his shoulder.
"Just not the Black Knight." He all but orders, expounding at your raised brow. "The P-ERLL is a fancy enough bit of kit, but there's not much more I can do to keep stuffing things into the Knight's guts, and with that thing a ton light and spiking high, I don't have the room for more heatsinks, Elric."
His mentioning of the heat problems, and the already strained curve of the Knight brings a frown to your face. He's not wrong when he says there is only so much room in the internal spaces of a BattleMech to accommodate the internal linkages, capacitors, the ammunition feed ramps and lifts for weapons, and the Heat Sinks that must be connected into the flush system and the exterior radiators. The Knight's Endo-steel skeleton was unlike the straight 'bones' that made up standard steel-titanium chassis and featured something more like the latticed studs and joists of a building. Naturally, that took up more space in the internals, requiring a MechTech to work extra hard to properly fit new lines, wire-looms, and components around the endo-steel beams.
You could work around the lack of space, but your continued work on the Heatsink Manifold project had hit a wall. You were this close, could even replicate most of the parts you needed to finally test and present the design to Master Burrel for any reworking he thought appropriate. You felt like you'd run for miles in a race, but now you were stuck a mere twenty yards from the finish line unable to even lift your feet. Even Fred had little luck trying to help you out, both of you stuck staring at the errant piece of metal like it had just conjured itself from nothing.
"Understood." You'd said to him at the time, and though you would come back to the Manifold project several times over the next few months, it was always to more stalled progress, even as you felt you were getting closer by the time the summer approached its hottest.
Late-June, 3031. Gawain Keep, Eastern Laoricia.
With the successful test fire of the streamlined large laser, it also proved as a stress test of the Fusion Engine, currently sitting in a basement section that was once used to store wine barrels some fifteen feet high. You have to thank your ancestor for his hobby, or perhaps his alcoholism, as the basement had a loading bay that made getting the engine into the basement far easier than it could have been.
It was a very odd set up, with a battered office chair sitting off to one side of the twenty ton engine, the cockpit displays sitting on a sturdy desk that had been dragged out of storage, a keyboard set up to feed commands into the engine as needed, while a tech's coolant recycler sat off to one side, dark green fluid feeding into it, only for fresher anti-freeze blue to come out the other side and back into the engine proper.
It was still almost 90 degrees in the basement when the engine was running, meaning that any guards you had for it would be on the outside, their heavy armor and clothing making prolonged stays inside very uncomfortable.
Connecting it into the keep's power grid was less troublesome than you might have thought, especially when you were able to go straight into the same connections that the large ICE generators that you already had used. That being said, you're also pretty sure your team of techs and electricians have fixed every breaker and fuse you had in storage into the circuit before it hits the main grid, just to keep everything from going tits up if the keep's wiring is unable to handle the full power of a miniature nuclear fusion reactor.
In terms of fuel, all you had to do was feed it an initial supply of hydrogen-2, and from there top off the separator once a day with distilled water. If you were in a pinch, much like a battlemech, you could make do with a few gallons of fresh water, but using salt or impure water for prolonged periods would lead to technical problems. Less-radiation or not, it wasn't safe for a Tech to climb inside an inactive engine so he could scrub out the salt that had gummed up the electrolysis coils or any of the other sensitive components.
The engine was not the only module you were working on over the course of weeks, as on the opposite side of the keep, sitting close to the top of the keep's center tower and climbing another hundred feet in the air, was a room that looked like an overworked tech's workbench. Half a hundred wires and cables snaked into and out of a cluster of hexagonal, angled plates, connected to a computer core that had sat inside a Warhammer if you weren't mistaken, tiny lights at the end of sensor nodes pulsing with the information it was receiving, before it fed it into the other half of the cockpit displays, showcasing a 360 degree field around the keep.
It even highlighted objects of interest, though given some of the damage and wear it had taken over the years, it was slow to identify things other than battlemechs.
it's funny how dealing with one power related issue seems to cause another to magically appear on your desk, as you've not spent five minutes at your desk before Natasha walks in, greets you politely, places down a new folder, and walks away before you have so much as a chance to say anything in reply.
You find her behavior a little odd, but decide to swing back around to that after you've looked over what she dropped off, only to find the report stating the dams are working as expected, even if they're not currently transmitting any power. Which leads to Natasha's suggestions at the end of the report, which amount to 'Fix that.'
You spare the paperwork you had just finished signing authorizing the use of a few Battlemech-grade weapons, sinks, and a few tons of standard armor to create a proof of concept turret now that the keep was using Fusion power, before you rise from your desk, new report in hand.
You had a lot of work left to do before you could take a jog in the Knight.
To your surprise, it doesn't take long for you to find someone to talk to about this, or to get a map laid out infront of you, army tokens placed out on it to mark townships and keeps.
"As you can see, the population is rather spread out over the whole territory," The electrician explained. "But with access to power more available than private generators, we can incentivize movement by having more available utilities closer to the keeps, towers, and rail-stations."
"And this would make the grid harder to hit, because if you wanted to cripple the whole, you'd have to come through the Lord's and their machines." You state confidently, trialing your finger over the map and the man's imagined substations.
"Exactly." He agrees. It's honestly a simple choice, though you have to reexamine a few books the library hosts on proper development and layout for this sort of thing. It wouldn't do to create a wide spanning network, and then neglecting it for half a century until a few stations going down would black out the entire grid.
That sort of thinking is what got the Inner Sphere in trouble.
Finding Natasha is not a difficult thing, considering her office is in the family wing, just a few doors down from your own. The door is unlocked, but you still knock as a courtesy, waiting until she speaks to step inside.
Befitting siblings, the way you decorate isn't too far apart, though her tastes run to paintings of vibrant flowers and fields over your own more military decorations. She even has a few flowers just as bright sitting on her windowsill, leaning towards the warm glass as the summer light glows past it.
Looking up from her desk, your sister's face is flat, lacking the smile you're so used to seeing there, her eyes not crisp in anger, but neither are they soft like they were just the other day.
"Can I help you Elric, or should I run down to the yard for padding?" You cringe a little at the accusation but take a seat across from her all the same.
"I wish you hadn't seen that. That was a situation that got out of both our controls." The excuse is poor, and Natasha doesn't even bother with it giving you a disappointed stare.
"If you've not come here to discuss something specific, Elric, I'm afraid I'm rather busy." She starts, looking down at her many papers.
"I would explain myself and Alistair." You say aloud, and though she doesn't lift her head, you know she's listening. "Alistair and I have had our disagreements in life, as all friends do. I've never known him to favor his hands over his words, and as much as I like a good scrap, you know I'm much the same. This last argument of ours got out of hand."
"And that excuses the two of you beating each other bloody?" She quips, shuffling a set of pages.
"No, it doesn't." You say instead, finally drawing her eyes back to you. "I pressed hard on a wound I knew was starting to fester. I knew that it would draw a response from him. When the two of us were done, I had helped him to realize something he already knew."
"What, that he can take a punch with the best of them? That he can deal it back out twice as hard?"
The words stick in your throat, as you consider what to say.
"That he was being a thick-headed idiot, and that if he didn't act, opportunities would pass him by." You state with confidence, before reaching a hand up to your jaw, where the barest bits of green bruising still linger along the bone. "Anything else he needs to say, He'll say."
Natasha is not pleased with your evasion, but honestly, you owed it to her and Alistair to make the best of this. "And should I just accept that? To know that my brother and his oldest friend can spring from an argument over life, philosophy, into beating each other's teeth in?"
You can't help but laugh at the image, the two of you dressed like ancient philosophers before stepping into a boxing ring to settle your disputes about the social sciences. Your mirth draws a thin frown from your sister, but you can't help it.
"No," you say at last. "You shouldn't accept that, but what you can accept is that the matter is settled, and I've made my peace with it. He is still my friend and I his, you are still my sister, the walls still stand, and fate is what we make it."
Your sister is about to speak, only for another knock to come from the door behind you. For a split second, Natasha is as surprised as you, but she schools her face fast enough, you'd have dismissed it as a trick of the light.
"As you can see, I am quite busy." She works her jaw the same way she has for years when she's pondering something, before she waves a hand at you. "Please, show yourself out, and send in my next guest."
You rise, as requested, and give her a short bow. Stepping to the door, you open it, only to find Alistair standing there, wearing the nicest shirt and jacket you've ever seen on him. You blink, he blinks, and then you slide through the half-opened door, hiding him from sight for a moment longer.
Neither of you speak, no need between friends of so long an acquaintance, but you do give him a nod.
You step past him and looking back manage to catch a glimpse of your sister's face as the subject of your discussion steps into her office, a small smile pulling at her lips.
Then the door closes shut, and you head back down the corridor, humming a tune that sounds a bit like wedding bells.
The Aquila Rift, the main nebula hindering expansion to the Galactic West of the Inner Sphere.
Despite the seemingly regularity you go into space, it has yet to lose its luster. The glitter of the stars, the nebula that slowly fades into view as you pass from the atmosphere and into high orbit, all of them still delight your senses as you look through a window along the main armor belt of the Odysseus.
Your trip into high orbit was not made alone, with all three of your operational dropships climbing together, before each would go their own way as they headed for their own assigned sectors. Collectively, this survey was intended to search the debris belt situated well above Freirehalt, which at a glance consisted of nothing but shiny chunks and fragments of metal, blasted off of God knows what hundreds of years ago.
You were not so certain that was all there was.
Having found the remnants of an Endo-Steel production unit, you made the logical leap that if a fragment that large survived being blasted free and then managed reentry, what else could have survived the destruction of the station? One need only look at BattleMechs to see that Humanity has long favored rugged reliability and nigh-impossible fortitude over delicate systems that were impossible to repair, especially when their parts were made 500 light years distant.
You had honestly not expected much, considering that the belt lay tens of thousands of miles above the planet, and stretched some four or five times that about the gravitational disk. In layman's terms, like you'd had explained to you by one of the astrophysicists when you asked, you were looking for a select few needles in a haystack the size of the planet, where every piece of scrap, chaff, and wreckage was magnetic, and would naturally glow under the same condition as the needle to the dropship's sensors.
With that imagine in your head, you worked with your dropship captains, drawn from the ranks of veteran crewmembers of the Artemis and Quiver that had chosen to retire from the cyclical route, to determine the points where the metallic cloud was densest, thereby letting your dropships and crews examine the greatest amount of material in as little time as was reasonable. It was not a foolproof plan, but without sensors that could pick apart the difference in material between metals, it was likely the best you could do.
It still takes the better part of a day to burn out the ring itself, and there is almost no indication that you've gotten closer to it until the Odysseus's captain announces your arrival. Looking through the windows, the glitter of the stars has been overcome by the density of the belt, the distant lights hidden by the showed metal. The shiny finish that flashes as the dropship's searchlight illuminates the band puts certainty to the contents of it, with hundreds among unseen millions of small pieces of tubing, plating, wiring floating in the black, pulled gently by gravity's weight.
To fully catalogue the belt would be next to impossible, given that it stretches over millions of miles, spinning gently in the void. Were it much closer, space travel from Freirehalt would become very hazardous, as any attempt would be shredded as a hail of particles and shards moving faster than the speed of sound orbited into it, like sandpaper scouring down a length of lumber.
Granted, if you waited another millennium, enough of the belt would wind its way into the atmosphere, burning up, and opening the planet back up for space exploration.
As it stood, the scrap was locked close to being geosynchronous with the planet below, its massive orbit compensating for its speed, and allowing your Dropship to almost spin with it, only firing its maneuvering thrusters to take you closer to any detected amalgamations of metal.
Most of them are just collections of scrap metal that has smashed together and all but fused from the speed and friction, spinning aimlessly after impact and eventually being recaptured with the rest of the cloud well distant from where either had started. While they might be worth something in terms of face value, trying to transit this back down planet side, try to strip it apart and smelt the remainder into a more useable form would be, to be blunt, a waste of your dropship's time. You note their locations in the cloud, add a note of the relative orbit of the individual chunk, and move on to the next.
Hours you spend like this, moving from collection to collection, increasingly annoyed as you find nothing but useless scrap floating out in space. It may be the lack of gravity getting to you, and even the impromptu training you've done does little to assuage the vertigo that thrums in your ears as the dropship gives a rather sharp turn, thrusters firing as it reorientates, when you see something out in the black.
"Captain, Hold this current rotation. I've got a large mass floating outside the," You look up at the paired numbers over the window, denoting its angle relative to the nose of the dropship, then the angle as based on the primary cargo ramp. "85-120-degree window. Shape is unclear but looks more intact than the last several chunks."
"Copy, Master Gawain. Moving spotlights, give a burst when they're pointed the right way." You wait as the cones of light slide over the debris, until they almost converge on the object, the light revealing it to be a more intact station segment. It takes a bit for the dropship to shove itself deeper into the belt to get to it, but your boarding party, yourself among them, are soon clad in bulky hardsuits, each able to take a glancing blow from any violent piece of floating scrap, and cross the hundred-meter gap between the Odysseus and the segment unharmed.
Cataloguing the segment does not wait until you are inside, as the more detail-oriented members of your party are soon giving a play-by-play commentary as they slowly float along the outside, the myomer-mesh of their retrieval lines connecting back to the dropship like an umbilical.
"This would appear to be the remains of a Factory Station section, uh, surviving exterior markings indicate weapons production. The outer plating is dented and worn, but- No, scrap that, I've got a hole punched clean into the interior. Give me one- Daniels, climb up behind me and get your shoulder-lamp into this hole from-Yeah you got it. I don't see any damage to the interior section except for the exit wound on the opposite face, mark 30 through 120 I think."
You would guess that the hole had been made by a naval autocannon because it's easily a meter across, but not an exceptionally large one. If it had been much larger or based on an upscaled energy weapon, the hole would not be a through and through, and would either have torn the segment from the station all together through concussive force, or converted the end that was hit into slag and volatile gasses. You head to the 'rear' of the segment, where it would have been fixed to the rest of the station, and see a considerable amount of damage, but if anything, there are more bits attached to this segment than there should be.
You'd suppose that the largely immobile station had taken a number of shots, including the smaller NAC round though this factory unit, before a larger hit slammed into the center column, and sent this poor unit flying free with its moor-mountings still fixed to the end. Something similar might have happened to the Endo-Steel segment you recovered earlier in the year, or it might have been ejected as a desperate attempt to save the incredibly valuable mill unit from total destruction.
You finally navigate inside through a trusty service hatch, revealing a line of massive size, complete with a series of belts sitting idle and restraining arms floating limply without power. A few of the claw tipped manipulators are still locked in the position they were at the time of detachment, holding a truly colossal gun to the belt as another unit is frozen in place, a heavy chunk of metal like a magazine well locked a foot or so from its target.
An autocannon is easy to recognize, especially so for one sized for a BattleMech, so when you see one you can tell what it is, but you are not so certain of the exact make or why it would have been constructed in space. That confusion lasts until you spy a several pallets secured to one side, one of them with half of the plastic torn away by shrapnel. On it are stacked ten autocannon slugs, each easily the length of your torso, with an odd base to them and a sabot-like tip. It takes you a moment to float closer to them, giving a more detailed once over as you lift a single shell from the pallet, a feat only made possible by the Zero-G conditions you're in.
Engraved at the bottom of the slug, around a brass rim that you can't help but compare to a shotgun shell's, you spy words and numbers stamped into the base of it;
'CLASS-10-LB. T-HEG PATENT#250023013 LISC. CLUSTER MUNITION.'
Cluster Munitions? Now that's different.
Putting aside what exactly this place made, the thing that surprises you most is how intact everything still is. The manufacturing units that were fed raw materials and churned out finished components are just sitting up here, untouched, unharmed, floating in the vacuum like they fell asleep and are just waiting for a burst of power to resume operation. Hell, as far as you can tell, the only damage to the line is the fact that one of the mechanical arms that move and shift the in-production weapon had fallen off its rail, likely torn free when the whole section was ejected from the damaged station.
This is a marvelous find, and unless there's something you're not seeing, there's no reason that you couldn't bring this segment back to Freirehalt, get it hooked into your nascent power grid, and use the large amount of feed stock still sitting in their sealed bins at the far end of the unit to resume construction of the autocannons, bringing domestic production of BattleMech-grade weapons to Frierehalt. Hell, combined with whatever your cousin brings back from the sphere, you might see your technological renaissance made real.
The only thing that truly bothers you is that you can't take it now. The station section, though small in comparison to what it'd been attached to, is still far too large for you to bring down in the Odysseus, easily three or four times the size of its cargo bays. You doubt you could stand the Black Knight in this module, but something smaller, like a Locust would be able to walk right down the belt. The Mule and its cavernous bays would likely have an easier time managing all of this, even if you might have to carefully shear off the exterior sections that only protect the components from slow moving dust and radiation.
"Master Elric," You're drawn from your thoughts as your radio chimes, and you give a quick two tap burst of static to signify your attention, even as you float towards the steel-paneled boxes that hold finished Autocannons opposite the ammunition pallets. "Our sensors are being distorted by proximity to the debris field, but we have just picked up a K-F event at the Jump Point."
"Do you have a size range?" Though the science behind the K-F Drive that allows a Jumpship to move from one star to the next has largely been lost, or relegated to the most secure vaults of the Inner Sphere, somethings are still known. Things such as a Jumpship or a fleet of Jumpships producing a detectable wake before they arrive that you can extrapolate to determine the size of the ships and any limpets attached.
"Our numbers are still rough, but the distribution of markers and radiation flare indicate a 250 to 300 thousand ton object. With the speed of the Electro-magnetic pulse and light, the Jumpship is already here." The captain's voice is calm, but you can tell he's waiting for further instructions.
"Well, we have some time yet before I want us planetside just in case." You mull it over a moment, before you give clearer orders. "We will salvage what arms we can from this unit, marking its location for future retrieval. This factory produced Class-10 Autocannons, and I know that some of our combat vehicles could use guns that don't have thousands of rounds through them."
"Understood, Master Elric. Bay door 2 is open, and salvage cranes are on standby."
~
Let's see if your other Dropships found anything interesting.
> The Unchained Lady has very little luck, and almost loses a few members of the crew when a wave of fast moving debris threatens to sever their umbilicals. The Menelaus has better luck, and manages to recover *something*.
The Menelaus has managed to recover the larger portion of a work-preparation area from whatever station once existed out here. Inside was a collection of lockers, and of more interest, Wall storage units containing Hardsuits.
More space suits are always useful when you can't make your own, but upon closer examination, these are not normal Hardsuits, instead featuring the beginnings of an exoskeletal unit. This would greatly increase the endurance and strength of any workers operating in space, though due to the odd-nature of the units, they would either need to be tied by an umbilical cord or arm, or have fuel cells installed through an exterior backpack.
>Found 19 Prototype-AstroEngineering Exoskeletons
Early-July, 3031. Gawain Keep, Eastern Laoricia.
Seeing your cousin's family reunited brings a smile to your face, the man marveling at the parade group of Battlemechs and your finest troops to receive him even as he hugs his son, and lifts his daughter to his hip.
Two lances of mechs stand in a line on either side of the cargo bay ramp once the landing pad has cooled from the Quiver's landing. Over 400 tons of metal cast a shadow over them, but these fine machines in their fresh parade-ready paintjobs, the Black Knight's sword lifted in a duelist salute while the rest cross their right arm or barrelfist over the thick plastron of their torso, all bear the Gawain crest or that of their vassals, and mean him no harm.
He meets with your father, exchanging the ritual words, before clasping his now standing lord about the hand and shoulder in a fond gesture. The display of power is perhaps unnecessary with such a well respected member of the family, but it is not for his benefit that you do this, rather it is for the observers and spies from the other houses, come to see what wares he has brought from the Inner Sphere.
The number of civilians on the space port ground is limited, and the areas they are allowed to explore equally so, and aside from a few that either got legitimately lost or were politely escorted back to the public grounds, all goes rather well for his return.
Thaddeus is a showman, and has been for almost as long as you've known him, as he steps aside and starts to list the many finds and purchases he's made in the Inner Sphere, parading them past the merchants who salivate at them and then your father, who stands there stoically.
You see shelves of books, manuals, crates of ammunition, weapons, and tons of armor. A set of heavy-class limbs are carried forth, lacking hand actuators but looking like boxed in metal bones all the same. Fine clothes and bolts of fabric that are difficult to find on Freirehalt, jewelry and well built furniture studded with exotic metals. All of these glimmer and glow in the sunlight as they are moved past everyone.
The true treasures are not shown to the public, instead set aside and moved to more private hangars, and include machine tools, blueprints in digital recordings and copied designs that sit in scroll cases. Four massive heatsinks sit with a tarp over them, their size impossible to hide.
Your Cousin has had a good trip, and now he shares the spoils with the rest of your family.
As you regale your cousin with the story of the pirate raid, he goes from incredulous, to concerned, confused, and a bevy of other emotions until he sits there at the dinner table, all but stunned. Raids are often double edged swords, seeing one house rise over another as they claim the salvage of mechs that wounded the lesser, or simply watch as their rivals are attacked and damaged, while their lands remain untouched.
During the last raid, you were not content to sit idly by and let the raid play out, or see your fellow nobles sally out to face them alone. You pressed the attack, jumping from site to site until you had crushed the last of the pirate machines under your armored boot-tread, including the leader of the band altogether.
He would not believe you had killed him in single combat, if not for the head of the Banshee sitting outside the newly expanded hangar, though it now has a few weeds and flowers growing along the 'jaw' of it.
When you explain the ploy you used to capture the pirate jumpship, the very same that had given the Artemis a fright when it arrived in system, his incredulity was exchanged for honest fear. Your seizing of the Athena put proof to the idea that Civilian Jumpships are extremely vulnerable in the Inner Sphere, with almost all of them jumping without any compliment of marines to defend the ship from attack. If you had led that same attack against the Artemis, you'd have likely taken even fewer casualties than you did the pirates, considering that almost all of its crew are unarmed.
You watch as he visibly relaxes when you mention wanting to station your new space marines on all of your space-faring vessels, spreading them out among the seven berths you have working for you at the moment. Roughly thirty men, a platoon-sized element, for each was not a lot, but against a force of equal size as you took against the pirates, they would certainly put up a far better fight. With the defenders advantage, they might even prevent a total takeover, turning any attempt to capture your vessels into a siege.
When you finish telling about the raid, the conversation shifts, as you father starts to tell him about the happenings since then, and your attention is drawn to your younger cousin, the young man lost as he tries to follow what your fathers are saying about price indexes, market forces ebbing and flowing, and a dozen other things that you can barely follow with your tutoring from your father on matters of stewardship.
The young man idolizes his father, speaking to him for all of five minutes would make that clear to almost anyone. He's just a year or so shy of Natasha, meaning that if he were anyone else he'd be beginning an apprenticeship right around now, but with his father just returned, and the family business in being the outgoing face of your family in the Sphere proper, you imagine that he'll be stuck to the man's side for the next few months, learning as much as he can while carefully pestering the man to take his heir with him.
Getting to know Benjamin can only bring rewards in the future, as both your father and Thaddeus get older and older. You even imagine that if Ben shows enough promise and gets some experience under his belt, his father may well retire and stay back here rather than race to the Sphere 9 months out of the year.
When you ask your elder cousin about his journeys through the Inner Sphere, you don't know that you've seen anyone look as focused as his son does as he speaks.
"The Inner Sphere is a varied place. If you were to go from Laoricia to Mulstadia, you still speak the same language, have similar laws in place, and a consistent, if slightly varied feudal structure. If I go from Skye to Tharkad, I enter a whole new mess of laws, obligations, tariffs and taxes. I've met men that only speak their Gaelic tongues, and those who's Germanic accents are so thick I've resorted to just learning the language so I can trade in the Commonwealth's heartlands. For the most part, the people are just like you or me, but the nobility… Well, to be honest, I've met jackass's less stubborn than a noble convinced I was cheating him." He shakes his head at that, before leaning into your sister and act-whispering. "And I was, but only so I could give him a good discount and seal the deal." He gives her a wink, and your sister is quick to grab a glass to hide her chuckling.
You can already see the wheels turning in his son's head, and in a lull of the conversation you mention that the library has several books on the Lyran Commonwealth's second language. When you next turn to your cousin, you ask how far he's traveled in the Inner Sphere.
"I've been as far inland as Terra." He answers, earning a raised brow and a look of confusion from the younger members of the family. "When your Father first made contact with the banks, they had very few offices where people had the authority to make the deals we needed, and so I and the Artemis jumped all the way to Terra in order to visit their headquarters there. Lovely planet, though it still bears a great number of scars from the war." So synonymous is Amaris with Terra that calling it the 'war' makes clear what he means. "It was there that we made our contacts in our agriculture companies, using the upfront payment to purchase good stock in both. I've never been further than Skye since then, and only rarely."
You can understand that, considering that Skye is already quite close to the Lyran-Drac border, only a jump or two from the front lines. Still, it makes for a good staging ground, and being the capital of its duchy means that it commands a great collection of wealth and power, making it a tempting target for merchants and ambitious raider commanders alike.
"Is it true that the Archon is guarded by a pair of BattleMechs?"
"I wouldn't know, but I have seen the Royal Guard as they do one of their parade patrols around the palace. If it is true, that room must have vaulted ceilings twenty meters high."
You can well imagine, the hangar where your techs do work on your BattleMechs already a tall structure. You ask him what is the single most interesting thing he's seen in the Inner Sphere, and that seems to stump him for a moment. When he does speak, it's with an almost solemn expression.
"I watched an Aerospace pilot have to choose between a dropship, or the civilians watching the air show. Something had gone wrong, I'm not sure what, but it was clear that the pilot had lost a lot of her control over the fighter. I couldn't tell you what went through her mind, but I watched as they banked in the air, choosing the dropship by all appearances.
But as they cleared the stands, they pulled as hard as they could on the stick and started firing the dummy rounds in the autocannon mounted in the nose, using the recoil for something I expect. When the third round fired, she yanked the stick the other way and only clipped one of the communications antennae on the top of the Dropship. It cost her the plane, but she managed to eject as the wing gave out and went its own way, before the rest of the fighter turned into a fireball in the distant field."
When you ask after the pilot, he can only shake his head. "I have no idea what happened to her, but I like to think she got yelled at, and then profusely thanked. I wouldn't want to be the one that crashed an aerospace fighter full speed into a Wolf's Dragoon's Dropship."
Turning your attention from Thaddeus to his son, you engage the boy in simple conversation. He is almost shy as you ask the questions, clearly not expecting his increasingly prestigious cousin to ask after a boy that hasn't accomplished much in his life. Still, you press on, and get a few answers out of him with a reassuring smile, and a few embarrassing anecdotes of your own.
You don't like the smug look your sister shoots you after she overhears you tell the story of how you cheated in one of your early races and got pelted with apples by your sister when she finally reached your tree. Oh well, you'll embarrass her at her wedding by bringing up the first time your parents let her have wine.
You liked that doublet. You burned that doublet.
"A hobby?" Benjamin asks, and you nod. "I've started to sketch when I find the time. The ranch is large enough there's always work to do, but I can find little pockets here and there to find a good fence post and just start trying to sketch the landscape. Just don't ask me to do anything alive, they end up looking like the world's strangest sick figures."
You walk the topic on from there, asking after life on the ranch itself, and find that while they host a large herd of cattle that they move between the massive paddocks, his preferred animal is actually the small herd of horses they raise. By and large they're plow-horses, and between their attitudes and size, they know that if they don't want to do it, almost no one can get them to do it.
The exception being Benjamin evidently.
If he's the one that is directing or working with one of their dogs to move the horses, they obey with little trouble. Any other hand, and they'd fear for their life if the horses were in a bad mood.
Thirty years ago, his preternatural ability with animals would have seen him rise as a mounted knight quickly, especially if he was able to extend that level of calm and control to his fellow knight's destriers and chargers. As it stood today, it was a fascinating quirk, but not one that would see a great deal of use if he decided to follow in his father's footsteps.
The spring green gives way to summer yellows as the rains die off, leaving the open fields and forests of your homeland to shift, the animals migrating from the open but drying out grasslands for the shade and hidden bounty of the forest. The predators that live in your lands move with them, following their prey along in these regular migrations.
Your people plant, irrigate, and harvest their crops as they come due, while your dropships do their best to sell their goods at markets a field, to limited success.
For your part, you have been entertaining yourself by asking your squire benign questions, hypothetical, and a variety of other things just to see how he reacts. Without the threat of Gladwell breathing down your neck, and with the Pirates absent this year by all appearances, you find yourself with a soldier's worst enemy.
Boredom.
You do not do well with boredom, needing to stretch your legs, use your muscles and exercise the mind, but here you remain at your desk, posing odd questions to your squire as you scan another report.
Oh, good, the first of the dams in the mountains has finished construction, and the turbines are starting to turn as they bleed off water through the system. Now you just need to build a power grid that can actually carry that somewhere useful.
"I think I would stand and fight, Master Elric." Your squire says after a few minutes of thinking.
"Oh?" You say, laying the report down as you lean forward on your desk, looking to where your squire has a few books of his own open in front of him. "You think you'd stand and fight if you were confronted by a pack of bullies?"
"Yes, Sir." He nods. "If they're about my age, I have the advantage of practice on them, and you said that one man always breaks when a situation goes against them. That means that in a group of three or four, I can earn back some advantage if I hit them hard and quick. The biggest may be the leader, but if I knock him down or bloody his nose, his friends will think twice."
The words are odd to hear from the mouth of a twelve-year-old boy, but you find yourself impressed with his valor, if not his sense. "And should your intimidation fail, what then? You're still surrounded by three or four boys your age or older. Don't tell me that you'd brawl them and be the last man standing?"
Your squire blushes at that, before shaking his head. "I… The attempt must be made," he hedges. "But if seizing the initiative doesn't work, then I suppose I would run." He doesn't meet your eye for a moment, but when he does he finds you watching him with a considering look.
"Smart." You declare, and the boy is almost taken aback by your simple praise. You rise from your chair, signaling your squire to stay seated as you stretch your legs after an hour's paperwork. "Against bullies, they seek to hold an overwhelming advantage over prey they see as incapable of resisting their aggression. By showing you have teeth, and bloodying one of them, you might well scare off the others, but unlike another squire I know of, you have the good sense to know that if the situation goes wrong, retreat is your best option."
"I didn't know you had another squire, Master Elric." You give the boy a sidelong glance, before you shake your head.
"Oh, He's not a squire any more, and has a great deal more responsibility than when he had a punch out with other squires around your age."
"I didn't know Sir Alistair was like that." You can't hide your laugh as the boy makes the obvious, if wrong conclusion.
"Oh no, Sir Alistair was the boy that leapt to my aid when I bit off more than I could chew that day." You say, to the boy's surprise. "We spent the next two weeks scouring every piece of armor in the keep, statues and all. My hands smelled like polish and dirt for another month, though my sister will say I was imagining that." A friendship had started that day, and not for the last time did one of you come to the defense of the other.
You bring your hand to your pocket, pulling free the watch fob within and flicking it open, idly watching the hands tick. "It is twenty past one, Alex. Why don't you run down to the kitchens and get yourself something to eat. Don't worry about me, I'll find my way down there soon enough." At the prospect of warm food and treats, your squire stands quickly, giving you a short bow before he's off, and though you hear no laughter, you can imagine the smile on his face as he runs.
Yes, the presence of children in the Keep presents its own challenges, but you don't know you'd give it up for anything.
~
> Go talk to Allistair. His Keep house is done, he has his own lands to govern, the last harvest was Bountiful. What's the hold up?
~
You take your time heading to the kitchen after your squire, taking a long detour that leads you into the knight's barracks and then past that, to the guest rooms for visiting lords or their representatives. Several of these rooms have offices attached to them so that they can write correspondence or enjoy a private meeting without having to sit on their mattress rather than a nice pair of chairs.
You knock on one door, and on the occupant's answer step inside, closing the door behind you.
It feels strange to think that it has been almost a year and a half since Alistair became a lord, when it feels like yesterday you and he were two knights doing their best to honor liege lord and family. Your old friend looks up at you, laying down the pen in this hand as he looks down at another scrap of paper covered in words you cannot read, before he scrunches it up, and throws it to join a small pile of them filling his office's waste basket.
"Elric, I wasn't expecting you." You give him a shake of your head and take a seat opposite him before he can rise.
"This is a conversation where I think the two of us will appreciate ten square feet of solid maple between us, Alistair." His face furrows at your words, but you continue apace.
"Lord Tristain, you are a good friend, and welcome to enjoy the hospitality of my house for as long as you need. That being said," You don't miss the small wince when you address him formally. "We've both received the reports that your keep, the place you will rule from, has finished construction. The first harvests are in, and if the numbers from Gawain lands are any indication, it is a bountiful one, which will bring good wealth to you and others once the Artemis makes its round trip once more, ignoring the wealth you already have from your prize share of the dropships and battlemechs we've captured."
It was a fraction of a percent of the value of their traditional value, but for a serving knight's son that had never had more than a thousand crowns to his name at any one time, it was a small fortune. He could easily leverage it into expanding his keep, upgrading its defenses, or expanding the refinery facility he had on his lands.
He nods along to your words, acknowledging them as fact. Whether or not he's seen those same reports from his lands is largely irrelevant.
"So I ask as both brother and Heir to my house, I ask as your friend, what are your intentions with my sister?" His eyes go wide at your straight forward question, before he leans back in his chair, eyes fixed to the desk between you.
"I have no intentions for Natasha, Master Gawain." He says the words, but he does not mean them.
You give him a look, one he returns with a flat face, but his eyes give away his thoughts. He is conflicted and watches you carefully as you rise from your seat.
"Natasha is a woman of the finest breeding and pedigree on the planet. She is a capable administrator, steward, and a dab hand with politics that comes from running a household. I have been informed she is quite comely, even beautiful to hear my fellow knights speak, and she shares our mothers broad hips and narrow waist." You watch him carefully as you extol her virtues as you might to another lord, as you had heard Samantha had been propositioned from the Lady herself right before she read your letter. "Is a Gawain bride not good enough for the newly founded House Tristain? Should I find a Sanmon or an Armmore cousin for the young vassal?"
"Master Gawain, I said I have no designs on the lady, why do you persist?" Lord Tristain repeats, his eyes narrowing.
"I persist because you wander my keep like a lovesick puppy, Alistair." He stands as you make your claim, and you're proven right that the desk between you keeps this calm for a moment longer.
"Elric, you go too far." he declares in turn, leaning over the desk with balled hands. Gone is the resignation in his eyes, replaced with the fervor and emotion your friend keeps contained outside the field of battle. "Whatever passes between me and Natasha is our business, not yours."
"I am her brother, heir to her house, of course its my business." You say in return, matching him over the desk, a foot of space between the two of you. "If you will not make your will known, then another will, and then I will happily walk her down the aisle to a man who had the balls-"
You don't know that you expected him to jump the desk, but you meet him all the same as the two of you fall to the ground, limbs swinging.
There is a reason that Alistair was your body man for the years between your coming of age until you became a MechWarrior.
His skill with a sword was one of them, his hands another.
He is eager to demonstrate them as the two of you trade punches, kicks, and grapples. You feel the bruises that will be a bad green by tomorrow evening, but you manage a few of your own even as you are stuck on the defensive.
"Does the thought make you so angry Alistair?" You taunt, even as you have to duck a jab set to rattle your teeth, taking the left he throws against your arms.
His attack is less furious, but no less effective as he advances on you, using the small size of the office against you. You can only bear with the blows, ducking some, taking others, and giving a grunt of pain as your back hits the wall right before he knocks the breath from you with a high knee to your gut.
You give him a headbutt in reply, and send him staggering back as the two of you bring your hands up again.
"Come on, talk to me Alistair!" You call, giving him a shove as he comes forward with a heavy handed right, and sending him stumbling back into the corner.
"Say the words, and I'll do my part, but I can do nothing if you won't say it." You mutter through grit teeth as you meet like wrestlers, hands entwined.
He doesn't answer you, only trying to trip you up by shoving his leg between and behind your right, but you know the move well, and use it to twist him to the ground, even as your grip on a hand slips and he hammers your ribs with a pair of blows.
Then you see him slip, a move that comes across as sloppy, and despite your own wear and tear, you give him a crack across the jaw that sees him spin on his heels, leaned over the desk as he catches himself.
"You'd rather just swing at me than admit much of anything, don't you?"
"I hate you, Elric." He mutters as he straightens back up, just in time to catch your gut punch that sends him back unto the desk, your other hand wrapping around his collar.
"Say the words." You command him, and though he thrashes in your grip, he does not get free. Your side smarts with the best of them, but at last you see the raw anger in his face fade, replaced with a more honest expression.
"I love her." He says softly, and you release his shirt, letting him drop back down to the table, papers strewn across the floor form your scuffle. "I would marry her, if she let me."
"Well then. I suppose you have a meeting once you get showered and changed, Lord Tristain." He looks confused a moment before he gets the message.
You reach a hand out to him, just in time for the door to open, your sister standing there, her ledger in hand. "Alistair, I just got back from a meeting with your father and I was wond- What in God's name?"
She looks over the scene for a moment, the ruffled clothes, the bruised knuckles, the scattered papers.
"No. I'm not dealing with this." Your sister does not bother to hide her disappointment in the two of you. "Alistair, when you and Elric are done with… whatever this is, I will be in my office. I expect you to be tidy and cleaned up. Elric-" She begins then stops, taking a deep breath. "I saw your squire in the halls, looking a tad concerned he couldn't find you. I suggest you remedy that. Good day, gentlemen. Damn fools." She mutters the last as she closes the door behind her, leaving the two of you alone in the office once more.
You pull your brother in all but blood from the desk, standing him straight as you step away, working the knuckles on your hand to check them for damage. He does much the same, prodding his ribs and getting grunts of pain as he touches the fresh lavender marks that no doubt decorate the two of you like a garden flowerbed.
"My father does not dislike you, Alistair." You say simple as you do your best to put your clothes to right, retying the belt of fabric around your middle that had pulled loose in the scuffle. "But he respects Natasha too much to listen to me offer her up to anyone, even a boy he's known their entire life. Be honest with him and you'll fare better than you expect." You do a once over of your jacket, thankful that despite the two of you trading blows, none of the buttons appear to have vanished into the ether. Looking back at your friend, you give him a look of pity. "Beware his talk of bride price and dowry, he will take you for everything and your pocket lint if you're not careful."
"Why, thank you for the vote of confidence, Elric."
You leave your friend to put himself back together, giving him a pat on his shoulder before you pass back through the office door and back to yours. Reaching a hand up to your face, you cringe a little as you touch your cheekbone and yank it away, hissing.
"Motherfucker hits like a '20."
Mid-June, 3031. Eastern Laoricia, Test-firing of the P-SLL.
The many hours you spend over the next few months prove to be both enlightening and also incredibly frustrating.
Working beside Master Burrel, you continue to develop a greater understanding of engineering from a practical standpoint, as compared to drawing up your own diagrams, but you do plenty of the latter as the two of you, and occasionally Fred when he peaks his head in from whatever task he's supervising outside the Head Tech's workshop, continue to work on uncovering the secrets of the P-ERLL and the reduced weight properties of the strange weapon.
You had established that they had streamlined the internal wiring by running the loom through the strong but oddly shaped endo-steel structural matrix, but even the weight savings that the endo-steel brings and the wiring adjustment you've already document, you could not account for the way that the P-ERLL manages to maintain its internal form factor. Somehow it only takes up the same amount of space in terms of linkages, capacitor wiring, coolant feeds, and a dozen other small connections that make up the 'under the hood' components of battlemech repair and maintenance, as a standard Large Laser.
You know that for a fact, as you checked at one point and confirmed that every connector into the P-ERLL was of the same number, type, and general design as the industry standard 10-15cm lasers. This did lead you to conclude that calling it a prototype was the proper designation, as the jury-rigged nature of its design did it no favors when it came to cooling. There was simply no way to cycle enough coolant through the remaining Large Laser lines and bleed the waste-heat off fast enough within a single firing cycle.
Thankfully for Master Burell's current project, he doesn't really need to worry about the form factor that eludes you, as he uses you as an extra pair of hands, nearing the end of his investigation and starting to get into more practical matters. You help him work the plasma-welder, carefully taking sections of endo-steel that have been pruned from old salvage and destroyed components, and help him to join them together and create what amounted to the world's fanciest box, or at the least the most expensive.
The lengths of endo-steel formed the rigid skeleton of the weapon, something for everything else to mount to. Fred rejoined the pair of you, and help lift the guts of a large laser out of their previous housing, donated by a long-destroyed Bulldog by the armor you had to peel away, and then carefully slot it back into its new home. Wrenches and grinders were broken out as you examined, marked, modified, and eventually fitted the internals of the laser back into place.
The first test-firing, just to see that Master Burrel had wired it back together correctly, reminded you of the first time you'd seen a laser fire in the storehouse not half a mile distant from this workshop. This time he did not have an ICEngine to provide power for it, but for this test at least, he wouldn't need one.
Today, he'd be linking it into the keep's power grid, which was going through its own teething issues.
~
Your techs were working hard to create a means of regulating a non-standalone Fusion Engine when it was missing half the external supports and coolant linkages it expected to be connected. Their solution for the time being, was to slave it to a BattleMech's detached cockpit unit, skipping the step of having to write new software to talk to the engine when a MechWarrior's displays already featured all the data they'd need in the field.
Honestly it wasn't a great work around, the readout screen still had more red on it than a Draconis flag, but for the moment, it seemed to work and it saved you and your pilots from having to spare a Mechbay purely to run power and computer lines to and from the disembodied engine to where the attached diagnostics could tell the techs what they needed to know.
You considered, as you watched the man connect his datapad through a hardline to the new prototype laser before backing away as he carefully unspooled the line, that you may trust Master Burrel a little too much. True, he was, to your knowledge, the best engineer on the planet, but you also knew, by a report from the Combine Factory, what engineers with a bit too much motivation could get up to.
Thankfully, knowing that he had potentially the entire power of a fusion engine behind it, he had opted to have this test firing happen well outside the workshop and pointed in a safe direction for a dozen miles. Fire-crews were standing by with hoses clamped to the well pumps just in case anything went wrong.
"Prototype Steamlined Large Laser test firing #1, commencing in 3. 2. 1. Firing." He announced, yelling his words for all to hear as he watched his watch tick over to the hour.
Every man wore a pair of welding goggles or a mask to protect their eyes, including your father as he stood on the parapet overlooking your odd group, but even through the tinted shields, it was still very bright.
The air seemed to hum for a moment as the tech hit the button, before the large laser's gimble servos locked in place, freezing as they were with no firing corrections being fed in from a targeting computer, and then a wash of heat flashed into the air as nuclear-fueled electricity was turned from potential into actualization. You had briefly worried about the gamma emissions of the laser as a beam of pulsating blue burned directly from the end of the laser assembly and into a distant rockface, before you remembered raising that exact point to Master Burrel.
The man hadn't dismissed it, instead pondering it for several long minutes before he'd gotten back to you. The solution he'd devised was twofold, part distance and part point of aim. By having every man be at least some fifty yards away, himself included, that should do the part of mitigating it for the average man. Pointing it away from anything of value just reminded you of the first rules of gun safety you had almost drilled into your head in your youth.
Neither of you knew the results of the test firing, so you couldn't well point it at something you'd like to keep.
You can't say if the first solution completely worked or not, but watching as a rockslide was created as the prototype imparted enough energy to slag half a ton of standard armor into a hillside just within optimal range for its type? The second proved quite pertinent.
"Capacitor drain in 3, 2, 1." He called out again, clicking his watch as the beam abruptly died out, no longer linking the steaming assembly to the hillside it's just finished excavating. "Test Fire #1 concluded, with no obvious signs of damage to the assembly, and no unforeseen occurrences during testing." He turned to the tech right behind him, waiting for the lad to finish transcribing his words.
When he was finished, Burrel looked to the crowd of volunteers and interested knights and Lord. "Well, show's over. Lord Gawain," He called up to the parapet, voice carrying despite the distance, "I'll have a report on your desk as soon as I'm sure it won't spontaneously catch fire!"
You see your father nod, giving the engineer a dip of his hat's brim as he takes up his cane and returns to the keep proper, vanishing from your sight. Turning back around to Master Burrel, he looks quite pleased with himself, if not unconcerned as the prototype continues to let off steam like it's a train engine.
"I think this proves its feasible," he'd said to you, still looking down the hill. "And I think we're almost there, but that heat spike bothers me, even if I expected something like it."
"Are you sure it's not just the lack of coolant action? I remember how hot the 6cm got when we test fired it in the warehouse." He nodded as you brought up the earlier test firing, looking pensive.
"You raise a good point, but I'm sure that half the issue is that this one was made by hand, eye, and with shifting design-plans. Now that we've got a working product, it'll still take me months to see it finalized, but I would trust this enough to slap it in one of your BattleMechs." He stops there, before giving you a look over his shoulder.
"Just not the Black Knight." He all but orders, expounding at your raised brow. "The P-ERLL is a fancy enough bit of kit, but there's not much more I can do to keep stuffing things into the Knight's guts, and with that thing a ton light and spiking high, I don't have the room for more heatsinks, Elric."
His mentioning of the heat problems, and the already strained curve of the Knight brings a frown to your face. He's not wrong when he says there is only so much room in the internal spaces of a BattleMech to accommodate the internal linkages, capacitors, the ammunition feed ramps and lifts for weapons, and the Heat Sinks that must be connected into the flush system and the exterior radiators. The Knight's Endo-steel skeleton was unlike the straight 'bones' that made up standard steel-titanium chassis and featured something more like the latticed studs and joists of a building. Naturally, that took up more space in the internals, requiring a MechTech to work extra hard to properly fit new lines, wire-looms, and components around the endo-steel beams.
You could work around the lack of space, but your continued work on the Heatsink Manifold project had hit a wall. You were this close, could even replicate most of the parts you needed to finally test and present the design to Master Burrel for any reworking he thought appropriate. You felt like you'd run for miles in a race, but now you were stuck a mere twenty yards from the finish line unable to even lift your feet. Even Fred had little luck trying to help you out, both of you stuck staring at the errant piece of metal like it had just conjured itself from nothing.
"Understood." You'd said to him at the time, and though you would come back to the Manifold project several times over the next few months, it was always to more stalled progress, even as you felt you were getting closer by the time the summer approached its hottest.
Late-June, 3031. Gawain Keep, Eastern Laoricia.
With the successful test fire of the streamlined large laser, it also proved as a stress test of the Fusion Engine, currently sitting in a basement section that was once used to store wine barrels some fifteen feet high. You have to thank your ancestor for his hobby, or perhaps his alcoholism, as the basement had a loading bay that made getting the engine into the basement far easier than it could have been.
It was a very odd set up, with a battered office chair sitting off to one side of the twenty ton engine, the cockpit displays sitting on a sturdy desk that had been dragged out of storage, a keyboard set up to feed commands into the engine as needed, while a tech's coolant recycler sat off to one side, dark green fluid feeding into it, only for fresher anti-freeze blue to come out the other side and back into the engine proper.
It was still almost 90 degrees in the basement when the engine was running, meaning that any guards you had for it would be on the outside, their heavy armor and clothing making prolonged stays inside very uncomfortable.
Connecting it into the keep's power grid was less troublesome than you might have thought, especially when you were able to go straight into the same connections that the large ICE generators that you already had used. That being said, you're also pretty sure your team of techs and electricians have fixed every breaker and fuse you had in storage into the circuit before it hits the main grid, just to keep everything from going tits up if the keep's wiring is unable to handle the full power of a miniature nuclear fusion reactor.
In terms of fuel, all you had to do was feed it an initial supply of hydrogen-2, and from there top off the separator once a day with distilled water. If you were in a pinch, much like a battlemech, you could make do with a few gallons of fresh water, but using salt or impure water for prolonged periods would lead to technical problems. Less-radiation or not, it wasn't safe for a Tech to climb inside an inactive engine so he could scrub out the salt that had gummed up the electrolysis coils or any of the other sensitive components.
The engine was not the only module you were working on over the course of weeks, as on the opposite side of the keep, sitting close to the top of the keep's center tower and climbing another hundred feet in the air, was a room that looked like an overworked tech's workbench. Half a hundred wires and cables snaked into and out of a cluster of hexagonal, angled plates, connected to a computer core that had sat inside a Warhammer if you weren't mistaken, tiny lights at the end of sensor nodes pulsing with the information it was receiving, before it fed it into the other half of the cockpit displays, showcasing a 360 degree field around the keep.
It even highlighted objects of interest, though given some of the damage and wear it had taken over the years, it was slow to identify things other than battlemechs.
it's funny how dealing with one power related issue seems to cause another to magically appear on your desk, as you've not spent five minutes at your desk before Natasha walks in, greets you politely, places down a new folder, and walks away before you have so much as a chance to say anything in reply.
You find her behavior a little odd, but decide to swing back around to that after you've looked over what she dropped off, only to find the report stating the dams are working as expected, even if they're not currently transmitting any power. Which leads to Natasha's suggestions at the end of the report, which amount to 'Fix that.'
You spare the paperwork you had just finished signing authorizing the use of a few Battlemech-grade weapons, sinks, and a few tons of standard armor to create a proof of concept turret now that the keep was using Fusion power, before you rise from your desk, new report in hand.
You had a lot of work left to do before you could take a jog in the Knight.
To your surprise, it doesn't take long for you to find someone to talk to about this, or to get a map laid out infront of you, army tokens placed out on it to mark townships and keeps.
"As you can see, the population is rather spread out over the whole territory," The electrician explained. "But with access to power more available than private generators, we can incentivize movement by having more available utilities closer to the keeps, towers, and rail-stations."
"And this would make the grid harder to hit, because if you wanted to cripple the whole, you'd have to come through the Lord's and their machines." You state confidently, trialing your finger over the map and the man's imagined substations.
"Exactly." He agrees. It's honestly a simple choice, though you have to reexamine a few books the library hosts on proper development and layout for this sort of thing. It wouldn't do to create a wide spanning network, and then neglecting it for half a century until a few stations going down would black out the entire grid.
That sort of thinking is what got the Inner Sphere in trouble.
Finding Natasha is not a difficult thing, considering her office is in the family wing, just a few doors down from your own. The door is unlocked, but you still knock as a courtesy, waiting until she speaks to step inside.
Befitting siblings, the way you decorate isn't too far apart, though her tastes run to paintings of vibrant flowers and fields over your own more military decorations. She even has a few flowers just as bright sitting on her windowsill, leaning towards the warm glass as the summer light glows past it.
Looking up from her desk, your sister's face is flat, lacking the smile you're so used to seeing there, her eyes not crisp in anger, but neither are they soft like they were just the other day.
"Can I help you Elric, or should I run down to the yard for padding?" You cringe a little at the accusation but take a seat across from her all the same.
"I wish you hadn't seen that. That was a situation that got out of both our controls." The excuse is poor, and Natasha doesn't even bother with it giving you a disappointed stare.
"If you've not come here to discuss something specific, Elric, I'm afraid I'm rather busy." She starts, looking down at her many papers.
"I would explain myself and Alistair." You say aloud, and though she doesn't lift her head, you know she's listening. "Alistair and I have had our disagreements in life, as all friends do. I've never known him to favor his hands over his words, and as much as I like a good scrap, you know I'm much the same. This last argument of ours got out of hand."
"And that excuses the two of you beating each other bloody?" She quips, shuffling a set of pages.
"No, it doesn't." You say instead, finally drawing her eyes back to you. "I pressed hard on a wound I knew was starting to fester. I knew that it would draw a response from him. When the two of us were done, I had helped him to realize something he already knew."
"What, that he can take a punch with the best of them? That he can deal it back out twice as hard?"
The words stick in your throat, as you consider what to say.
"That he was being a thick-headed idiot, and that if he didn't act, opportunities would pass him by." You state with confidence, before reaching a hand up to your jaw, where the barest bits of green bruising still linger along the bone. "Anything else he needs to say, He'll say."
Natasha is not pleased with your evasion, but honestly, you owed it to her and Alistair to make the best of this. "And should I just accept that? To know that my brother and his oldest friend can spring from an argument over life, philosophy, into beating each other's teeth in?"
You can't help but laugh at the image, the two of you dressed like ancient philosophers before stepping into a boxing ring to settle your disputes about the social sciences. Your mirth draws a thin frown from your sister, but you can't help it.
"No," you say at last. "You shouldn't accept that, but what you can accept is that the matter is settled, and I've made my peace with it. He is still my friend and I his, you are still my sister, the walls still stand, and fate is what we make it."
Your sister is about to speak, only for another knock to come from the door behind you. For a split second, Natasha is as surprised as you, but she schools her face fast enough, you'd have dismissed it as a trick of the light.
"As you can see, I am quite busy." She works her jaw the same way she has for years when she's pondering something, before she waves a hand at you. "Please, show yourself out, and send in my next guest."
You rise, as requested, and give her a short bow. Stepping to the door, you open it, only to find Alistair standing there, wearing the nicest shirt and jacket you've ever seen on him. You blink, he blinks, and then you slide through the half-opened door, hiding him from sight for a moment longer.
Neither of you speak, no need between friends of so long an acquaintance, but you do give him a nod.
You step past him and looking back manage to catch a glimpse of your sister's face as the subject of your discussion steps into her office, a small smile pulling at her lips.
Then the door closes shut, and you head back down the corridor, humming a tune that sounds a bit like wedding bells.
The Aquila Rift, the main nebula hindering expansion to the Galactic West of the Inner Sphere.
Despite the seemingly regularity you go into space, it has yet to lose its luster. The glitter of the stars, the nebula that slowly fades into view as you pass from the atmosphere and into high orbit, all of them still delight your senses as you look through a window along the main armor belt of the Odysseus.
Your trip into high orbit was not made alone, with all three of your operational dropships climbing together, before each would go their own way as they headed for their own assigned sectors. Collectively, this survey was intended to search the debris belt situated well above Freirehalt, which at a glance consisted of nothing but shiny chunks and fragments of metal, blasted off of God knows what hundreds of years ago.
You were not so certain that was all there was.
Having found the remnants of an Endo-Steel production unit, you made the logical leap that if a fragment that large survived being blasted free and then managed reentry, what else could have survived the destruction of the station? One need only look at BattleMechs to see that Humanity has long favored rugged reliability and nigh-impossible fortitude over delicate systems that were impossible to repair, especially when their parts were made 500 light years distant.
You had honestly not expected much, considering that the belt lay tens of thousands of miles above the planet, and stretched some four or five times that about the gravitational disk. In layman's terms, like you'd had explained to you by one of the astrophysicists when you asked, you were looking for a select few needles in a haystack the size of the planet, where every piece of scrap, chaff, and wreckage was magnetic, and would naturally glow under the same condition as the needle to the dropship's sensors.
With that imagine in your head, you worked with your dropship captains, drawn from the ranks of veteran crewmembers of the Artemis and Quiver that had chosen to retire from the cyclical route, to determine the points where the metallic cloud was densest, thereby letting your dropships and crews examine the greatest amount of material in as little time as was reasonable. It was not a foolproof plan, but without sensors that could pick apart the difference in material between metals, it was likely the best you could do.
It still takes the better part of a day to burn out the ring itself, and there is almost no indication that you've gotten closer to it until the Odysseus's captain announces your arrival. Looking through the windows, the glitter of the stars has been overcome by the density of the belt, the distant lights hidden by the showed metal. The shiny finish that flashes as the dropship's searchlight illuminates the band puts certainty to the contents of it, with hundreds among unseen millions of small pieces of tubing, plating, wiring floating in the black, pulled gently by gravity's weight.
To fully catalogue the belt would be next to impossible, given that it stretches over millions of miles, spinning gently in the void. Were it much closer, space travel from Freirehalt would become very hazardous, as any attempt would be shredded as a hail of particles and shards moving faster than the speed of sound orbited into it, like sandpaper scouring down a length of lumber.
Granted, if you waited another millennium, enough of the belt would wind its way into the atmosphere, burning up, and opening the planet back up for space exploration.
As it stood, the scrap was locked close to being geosynchronous with the planet below, its massive orbit compensating for its speed, and allowing your Dropship to almost spin with it, only firing its maneuvering thrusters to take you closer to any detected amalgamations of metal.
Most of them are just collections of scrap metal that has smashed together and all but fused from the speed and friction, spinning aimlessly after impact and eventually being recaptured with the rest of the cloud well distant from where either had started. While they might be worth something in terms of face value, trying to transit this back down planet side, try to strip it apart and smelt the remainder into a more useable form would be, to be blunt, a waste of your dropship's time. You note their locations in the cloud, add a note of the relative orbit of the individual chunk, and move on to the next.
Hours you spend like this, moving from collection to collection, increasingly annoyed as you find nothing but useless scrap floating out in space. It may be the lack of gravity getting to you, and even the impromptu training you've done does little to assuage the vertigo that thrums in your ears as the dropship gives a rather sharp turn, thrusters firing as it reorientates, when you see something out in the black.
"Captain, Hold this current rotation. I've got a large mass floating outside the," You look up at the paired numbers over the window, denoting its angle relative to the nose of the dropship, then the angle as based on the primary cargo ramp. "85-120-degree window. Shape is unclear but looks more intact than the last several chunks."
"Copy, Master Gawain. Moving spotlights, give a burst when they're pointed the right way." You wait as the cones of light slide over the debris, until they almost converge on the object, the light revealing it to be a more intact station segment. It takes a bit for the dropship to shove itself deeper into the belt to get to it, but your boarding party, yourself among them, are soon clad in bulky hardsuits, each able to take a glancing blow from any violent piece of floating scrap, and cross the hundred-meter gap between the Odysseus and the segment unharmed.
Cataloguing the segment does not wait until you are inside, as the more detail-oriented members of your party are soon giving a play-by-play commentary as they slowly float along the outside, the myomer-mesh of their retrieval lines connecting back to the dropship like an umbilical.
"This would appear to be the remains of a Factory Station section, uh, surviving exterior markings indicate weapons production. The outer plating is dented and worn, but- No, scrap that, I've got a hole punched clean into the interior. Give me one- Daniels, climb up behind me and get your shoulder-lamp into this hole from-Yeah you got it. I don't see any damage to the interior section except for the exit wound on the opposite face, mark 30 through 120 I think."
You would guess that the hole had been made by a naval autocannon because it's easily a meter across, but not an exceptionally large one. If it had been much larger or based on an upscaled energy weapon, the hole would not be a through and through, and would either have torn the segment from the station all together through concussive force, or converted the end that was hit into slag and volatile gasses. You head to the 'rear' of the segment, where it would have been fixed to the rest of the station, and see a considerable amount of damage, but if anything, there are more bits attached to this segment than there should be.
You'd suppose that the largely immobile station had taken a number of shots, including the smaller NAC round though this factory unit, before a larger hit slammed into the center column, and sent this poor unit flying free with its moor-mountings still fixed to the end. Something similar might have happened to the Endo-Steel segment you recovered earlier in the year, or it might have been ejected as a desperate attempt to save the incredibly valuable mill unit from total destruction.
You finally navigate inside through a trusty service hatch, revealing a line of massive size, complete with a series of belts sitting idle and restraining arms floating limply without power. A few of the claw tipped manipulators are still locked in the position they were at the time of detachment, holding a truly colossal gun to the belt as another unit is frozen in place, a heavy chunk of metal like a magazine well locked a foot or so from its target.
An autocannon is easy to recognize, especially so for one sized for a BattleMech, so when you see one you can tell what it is, but you are not so certain of the exact make or why it would have been constructed in space. That confusion lasts until you spy a several pallets secured to one side, one of them with half of the plastic torn away by shrapnel. On it are stacked ten autocannon slugs, each easily the length of your torso, with an odd base to them and a sabot-like tip. It takes you a moment to float closer to them, giving a more detailed once over as you lift a single shell from the pallet, a feat only made possible by the Zero-G conditions you're in.
Engraved at the bottom of the slug, around a brass rim that you can't help but compare to a shotgun shell's, you spy words and numbers stamped into the base of it;
'CLASS-10-LB. T-HEG PATENT#250023013 LISC. CLUSTER MUNITION.'
Cluster Munitions? Now that's different.
Putting aside what exactly this place made, the thing that surprises you most is how intact everything still is. The manufacturing units that were fed raw materials and churned out finished components are just sitting up here, untouched, unharmed, floating in the vacuum like they fell asleep and are just waiting for a burst of power to resume operation. Hell, as far as you can tell, the only damage to the line is the fact that one of the mechanical arms that move and shift the in-production weapon had fallen off its rail, likely torn free when the whole section was ejected from the damaged station.
This is a marvelous find, and unless there's something you're not seeing, there's no reason that you couldn't bring this segment back to Freirehalt, get it hooked into your nascent power grid, and use the large amount of feed stock still sitting in their sealed bins at the far end of the unit to resume construction of the autocannons, bringing domestic production of BattleMech-grade weapons to Frierehalt. Hell, combined with whatever your cousin brings back from the sphere, you might see your technological renaissance made real.
The only thing that truly bothers you is that you can't take it now. The station section, though small in comparison to what it'd been attached to, is still far too large for you to bring down in the Odysseus, easily three or four times the size of its cargo bays. You doubt you could stand the Black Knight in this module, but something smaller, like a Locust would be able to walk right down the belt. The Mule and its cavernous bays would likely have an easier time managing all of this, even if you might have to carefully shear off the exterior sections that only protect the components from slow moving dust and radiation.
"Master Elric," You're drawn from your thoughts as your radio chimes, and you give a quick two tap burst of static to signify your attention, even as you float towards the steel-paneled boxes that hold finished Autocannons opposite the ammunition pallets. "Our sensors are being distorted by proximity to the debris field, but we have just picked up a K-F event at the Jump Point."
"Do you have a size range?" Though the science behind the K-F Drive that allows a Jumpship to move from one star to the next has largely been lost, or relegated to the most secure vaults of the Inner Sphere, somethings are still known. Things such as a Jumpship or a fleet of Jumpships producing a detectable wake before they arrive that you can extrapolate to determine the size of the ships and any limpets attached.
"Our numbers are still rough, but the distribution of markers and radiation flare indicate a 250 to 300 thousand ton object. With the speed of the Electro-magnetic pulse and light, the Jumpship is already here." The captain's voice is calm, but you can tell he's waiting for further instructions.
"Well, we have some time yet before I want us planetside just in case." You mull it over a moment, before you give clearer orders. "We will salvage what arms we can from this unit, marking its location for future retrieval. This factory produced Class-10 Autocannons, and I know that some of our combat vehicles could use guns that don't have thousands of rounds through them."
"Understood, Master Elric. Bay door 2 is open, and salvage cranes are on standby."
~
Let's see if your other Dropships found anything interesting.
> The Unchained Lady has very little luck, and almost loses a few members of the crew when a wave of fast moving debris threatens to sever their umbilicals. The Menelaus has better luck, and manages to recover *something*.
The Menelaus has managed to recover the larger portion of a work-preparation area from whatever station once existed out here. Inside was a collection of lockers, and of more interest, Wall storage units containing Hardsuits.
More space suits are always useful when you can't make your own, but upon closer examination, these are not normal Hardsuits, instead featuring the beginnings of an exoskeletal unit. This would greatly increase the endurance and strength of any workers operating in space, though due to the odd-nature of the units, they would either need to be tied by an umbilical cord or arm, or have fuel cells installed through an exterior backpack.
>Found 19 Prototype-AstroEngineering Exoskeletons
Early-July, 3031. Gawain Keep, Eastern Laoricia.
Seeing your cousin's family reunited brings a smile to your face, the man marveling at the parade group of Battlemechs and your finest troops to receive him even as he hugs his son, and lifts his daughter to his hip.
Two lances of mechs stand in a line on either side of the cargo bay ramp once the landing pad has cooled from the Quiver's landing. Over 400 tons of metal cast a shadow over them, but these fine machines in their fresh parade-ready paintjobs, the Black Knight's sword lifted in a duelist salute while the rest cross their right arm or barrelfist over the thick plastron of their torso, all bear the Gawain crest or that of their vassals, and mean him no harm.
He meets with your father, exchanging the ritual words, before clasping his now standing lord about the hand and shoulder in a fond gesture. The display of power is perhaps unnecessary with such a well respected member of the family, but it is not for his benefit that you do this, rather it is for the observers and spies from the other houses, come to see what wares he has brought from the Inner Sphere.
The number of civilians on the space port ground is limited, and the areas they are allowed to explore equally so, and aside from a few that either got legitimately lost or were politely escorted back to the public grounds, all goes rather well for his return.
Thaddeus is a showman, and has been for almost as long as you've known him, as he steps aside and starts to list the many finds and purchases he's made in the Inner Sphere, parading them past the merchants who salivate at them and then your father, who stands there stoically.
You see shelves of books, manuals, crates of ammunition, weapons, and tons of armor. A set of heavy-class limbs are carried forth, lacking hand actuators but looking like boxed in metal bones all the same. Fine clothes and bolts of fabric that are difficult to find on Freirehalt, jewelry and well built furniture studded with exotic metals. All of these glimmer and glow in the sunlight as they are moved past everyone.
The true treasures are not shown to the public, instead set aside and moved to more private hangars, and include machine tools, blueprints in digital recordings and copied designs that sit in scroll cases. Four massive heatsinks sit with a tarp over them, their size impossible to hide.
Your Cousin has had a good trip, and now he shares the spoils with the rest of your family.
As you regale your cousin with the story of the pirate raid, he goes from incredulous, to concerned, confused, and a bevy of other emotions until he sits there at the dinner table, all but stunned. Raids are often double edged swords, seeing one house rise over another as they claim the salvage of mechs that wounded the lesser, or simply watch as their rivals are attacked and damaged, while their lands remain untouched.
During the last raid, you were not content to sit idly by and let the raid play out, or see your fellow nobles sally out to face them alone. You pressed the attack, jumping from site to site until you had crushed the last of the pirate machines under your armored boot-tread, including the leader of the band altogether.
He would not believe you had killed him in single combat, if not for the head of the Banshee sitting outside the newly expanded hangar, though it now has a few weeds and flowers growing along the 'jaw' of it.
When you explain the ploy you used to capture the pirate jumpship, the very same that had given the Artemis a fright when it arrived in system, his incredulity was exchanged for honest fear. Your seizing of the Athena put proof to the idea that Civilian Jumpships are extremely vulnerable in the Inner Sphere, with almost all of them jumping without any compliment of marines to defend the ship from attack. If you had led that same attack against the Artemis, you'd have likely taken even fewer casualties than you did the pirates, considering that almost all of its crew are unarmed.
You watch as he visibly relaxes when you mention wanting to station your new space marines on all of your space-faring vessels, spreading them out among the seven berths you have working for you at the moment. Roughly thirty men, a platoon-sized element, for each was not a lot, but against a force of equal size as you took against the pirates, they would certainly put up a far better fight. With the defenders advantage, they might even prevent a total takeover, turning any attempt to capture your vessels into a siege.
When you finish telling about the raid, the conversation shifts, as you father starts to tell him about the happenings since then, and your attention is drawn to your younger cousin, the young man lost as he tries to follow what your fathers are saying about price indexes, market forces ebbing and flowing, and a dozen other things that you can barely follow with your tutoring from your father on matters of stewardship.
The young man idolizes his father, speaking to him for all of five minutes would make that clear to almost anyone. He's just a year or so shy of Natasha, meaning that if he were anyone else he'd be beginning an apprenticeship right around now, but with his father just returned, and the family business in being the outgoing face of your family in the Sphere proper, you imagine that he'll be stuck to the man's side for the next few months, learning as much as he can while carefully pestering the man to take his heir with him.
Getting to know Benjamin can only bring rewards in the future, as both your father and Thaddeus get older and older. You even imagine that if Ben shows enough promise and gets some experience under his belt, his father may well retire and stay back here rather than race to the Sphere 9 months out of the year.
When you ask your elder cousin about his journeys through the Inner Sphere, you don't know that you've seen anyone look as focused as his son does as he speaks.
"The Inner Sphere is a varied place. If you were to go from Laoricia to Mulstadia, you still speak the same language, have similar laws in place, and a consistent, if slightly varied feudal structure. If I go from Skye to Tharkad, I enter a whole new mess of laws, obligations, tariffs and taxes. I've met men that only speak their Gaelic tongues, and those who's Germanic accents are so thick I've resorted to just learning the language so I can trade in the Commonwealth's heartlands. For the most part, the people are just like you or me, but the nobility… Well, to be honest, I've met jackass's less stubborn than a noble convinced I was cheating him." He shakes his head at that, before leaning into your sister and act-whispering. "And I was, but only so I could give him a good discount and seal the deal." He gives her a wink, and your sister is quick to grab a glass to hide her chuckling.
You can already see the wheels turning in his son's head, and in a lull of the conversation you mention that the library has several books on the Lyran Commonwealth's second language. When you next turn to your cousin, you ask how far he's traveled in the Inner Sphere.
"I've been as far inland as Terra." He answers, earning a raised brow and a look of confusion from the younger members of the family. "When your Father first made contact with the banks, they had very few offices where people had the authority to make the deals we needed, and so I and the Artemis jumped all the way to Terra in order to visit their headquarters there. Lovely planet, though it still bears a great number of scars from the war." So synonymous is Amaris with Terra that calling it the 'war' makes clear what he means. "It was there that we made our contacts in our agriculture companies, using the upfront payment to purchase good stock in both. I've never been further than Skye since then, and only rarely."
You can understand that, considering that Skye is already quite close to the Lyran-Drac border, only a jump or two from the front lines. Still, it makes for a good staging ground, and being the capital of its duchy means that it commands a great collection of wealth and power, making it a tempting target for merchants and ambitious raider commanders alike.
"Is it true that the Archon is guarded by a pair of BattleMechs?"
"I wouldn't know, but I have seen the Royal Guard as they do one of their parade patrols around the palace. If it is true, that room must have vaulted ceilings twenty meters high."
You can well imagine, the hangar where your techs do work on your BattleMechs already a tall structure. You ask him what is the single most interesting thing he's seen in the Inner Sphere, and that seems to stump him for a moment. When he does speak, it's with an almost solemn expression.
"I watched an Aerospace pilot have to choose between a dropship, or the civilians watching the air show. Something had gone wrong, I'm not sure what, but it was clear that the pilot had lost a lot of her control over the fighter. I couldn't tell you what went through her mind, but I watched as they banked in the air, choosing the dropship by all appearances.
But as they cleared the stands, they pulled as hard as they could on the stick and started firing the dummy rounds in the autocannon mounted in the nose, using the recoil for something I expect. When the third round fired, she yanked the stick the other way and only clipped one of the communications antennae on the top of the Dropship. It cost her the plane, but she managed to eject as the wing gave out and went its own way, before the rest of the fighter turned into a fireball in the distant field."
When you ask after the pilot, he can only shake his head. "I have no idea what happened to her, but I like to think she got yelled at, and then profusely thanked. I wouldn't want to be the one that crashed an aerospace fighter full speed into a Wolf's Dragoon's Dropship."
Turning your attention from Thaddeus to his son, you engage the boy in simple conversation. He is almost shy as you ask the questions, clearly not expecting his increasingly prestigious cousin to ask after a boy that hasn't accomplished much in his life. Still, you press on, and get a few answers out of him with a reassuring smile, and a few embarrassing anecdotes of your own.
You don't like the smug look your sister shoots you after she overhears you tell the story of how you cheated in one of your early races and got pelted with apples by your sister when she finally reached your tree. Oh well, you'll embarrass her at her wedding by bringing up the first time your parents let her have wine.
You liked that doublet. You burned that doublet.
"A hobby?" Benjamin asks, and you nod. "I've started to sketch when I find the time. The ranch is large enough there's always work to do, but I can find little pockets here and there to find a good fence post and just start trying to sketch the landscape. Just don't ask me to do anything alive, they end up looking like the world's strangest sick figures."
You walk the topic on from there, asking after life on the ranch itself, and find that while they host a large herd of cattle that they move between the massive paddocks, his preferred animal is actually the small herd of horses they raise. By and large they're plow-horses, and between their attitudes and size, they know that if they don't want to do it, almost no one can get them to do it.
The exception being Benjamin evidently.
If he's the one that is directing or working with one of their dogs to move the horses, they obey with little trouble. Any other hand, and they'd fear for their life if the horses were in a bad mood.
Thirty years ago, his preternatural ability with animals would have seen him rise as a mounted knight quickly, especially if he was able to extend that level of calm and control to his fellow knight's destriers and chargers. As it stood today, it was a fascinating quirk, but not one that would see a great deal of use if he decided to follow in his father's footsteps.
