GblaRCS Chpt 32

==Guided by the light of a (Red) Cameron Star - Chapter 32 -==
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"After the ComStar War, the Successor States thought of the organisation very differently, having seen what could happen to you if you provoked them. Everyone feared a ComStar interdiction and because of this kissing Raymond Karpov's ass, diplomatically at least, became a leading pastime of many a leader of a Great House.None would admit it publicly of course but they all likely harboured a certain amount of jealousy towards a certain small, but growing, periphery nation that was at best grudgingly polite to ComStar and on occasion treated Karpov like he was something nasty they had stepped in. His backpeddling on his threat to cut off access to the ComStar network to Niops was generally regarded as hilarious in diplomatic circles, mostly because it happened so fast after NHCOMNET contacted Atreus asking if the Free Worlds League might be interested in changing their HPG service provider."Stephen J. Tran, Red Star Rising: A History of Niops 2800-2900 - Niops Press, 2915
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===Alternate means of influnence===
Association Council Building – Niops Association (Niops VII) – 2837
Giles Olson, High Associator of the Niops Associator and de facto Director-General of a reborn Terran Hegemony had been expecting or at least hoping, that his last term in office was going to be largely uneventful but so far it had proven to be anything but.
With the Niops constitution barring him from running for a fourth term he was generally regarded as a 'lame duck' High Associator, one that was no longer able to push any more long-term policy decisions through the council because he wouldn't be there after 2840 to see them get done. In some ways that meant he was forced to act like High Associator's had before the SLDF turned up in 2827, that being as a boring technocrat making short-term decisions concerning routine day-to-day issues.
Admittedly even the routine day-to-day issues were still a great deal more consequential and broader in scope than they used to be. Deciding on whether or not to hire that tiny mercenary outfit that was now supposedly slowly making its way towards Niops across the Inner Sphere, their single dropship hitching a ride on jumpships that happened to be heading this way, was a step up from choosing whether or not to raise the highway speed limits or not as he had done back in 2826 in his first term, but it still paled by comparison to the day he had pointed at several places on a star map and ordered the SLDF to raise the Red Cameron Star over these systems before the end of the year.
Retirement was going to be very boring, Olson thought sadly. The money would likely be better, several companies were itching to give him a seat on their boards of directors to cash in on his name recognition and political contacts, but he wouldn't be the one calling the shots and he knew that he was going to miss that.
His wife was suggesting he should write a book, and with his kids now all grown up with grandchildren to fuss over were probably going to become part of his life soon, but while that would be nice he doubted it would match the heady thrill of the day he ordered General Romanov to take a task force and go kick the shit out of the Blood Rain.
Exercising power was a rush, an addictive one even, which was why it was such a good idea to have term limits and a separation of powers in government. Someone gifted with untrammeled authority for an unlimited time lacking checks and balances was just another Stefan Amaris or Nicholas Kerensky in waiting.
Leaders operating in a system where there were few if any limits on their power were the reasons why this sort of thing happened, Olson thought to himself as he stared at Admiral Bremman in astonishment. "Charles Marik did what?" he asked nonplussed, not for the first time wondering why it was always Jacob Bremman who reported the weird stuff. It wasn't like Romanov and Hallis didn't also take turns coming to his office to answer questions and brief him on events, it was just that the really interesting events never seemed to be happening when they did.
"You heard right the first time, Sir" Bremman replied, wondering why it was always his turn to report to the High Associator when unusual things were afoot. "He had his navy blow up the ComStar facility orbiting Oriente." he repeated himself. "The estimated fatalities lie somewhere between three and four hundred, including both ComStar personnel and visiting civilians, and there are even rumours that his own sister Jeanette might have been aboard. She signed up with ComStar years ago, caused something of a ruckus when she did because she was the heir apparent, not her brother."
Olson blinked. "I'm guessing ComStar took him blowing up their space station badly" he responded wryly after a pause while he got to grips with the information.
"Yes Sir" Bremman confirmed, fairly redundantly. "They've put the whole of the Free Worlds League under interdiction, ordered their people to disable every HPG they have there and then to go to ground. That's the reason our communications with the Inner Sphere suddenly cut out three weeks back because all our external HPG communications route through Marik territory."
"Great. So, we're basically just collateral damage for the whole thing" Olson concluded, groaning. "Why the hell did the Captain-General do something like that anyway?" he reasonably wanted to know. It wasn't like the Phone Company was well-liked politically, although they had been successful in making themselves look reasonable and fair to a lot of regular folks in the Inner Sphere who bought into their propaganda that they were neutral to a fault. Attacking them with warships however went far beyond the usual bitching about their expanding power and influence, their secretive ways, and of course how much they charged for long-distance calls.
"According to the Jumpship we sent to Hednesford to try and find out why we stopped getting HPGs from there, it's because Charles Marik found out somehow that ComStar have been informing the Lyrans and Capellans about where the Free Worlds League Military has been deploying its forces, allowing them to gain the upper hand in recent engagements." Bremman told him. "The League has been using jumpships as message couriers to mitigate the problem of the HPG network down so I guess he wasn't stupid enough to think ComStar would let his retaliation slide and he quietly put a contingency plan in place before he pulled the trigger."
"There's no way that he has enough spare jumpship capacity to make up for the ComStar network surely?" Olson queried, frowning. That would have been barely doable even before the Inner Sphere was littered with the wreckage of jumpships destroyed in the fighting, as it was these days.
"No, Sir. Not even close, probably barely enough to stay in occasional touch with even a relatively important system like Hednesford, and certainly not what he needs to effectively fight a war" Bremman replied. "The longer the interdiction stays in place the less coordinated the Free Worlds military will be, and frankly it'll ****** their civilian economy sideways, excuse my language."
"Cutting your nose off to spite your face." Olson muttered to himself. "Okay, I can see why he'd be pissed at ComStar for ratting him out to his enemies, I sure as hell would be in his place, but I'd hope I'd have the good sense just to send a strongly-worded diplomatic note while I worked out a way to retaliate without ****** my own nation over in the process, language excused" he responded, shaking his head in disbelief.
"On the plus side we know for certain that the Free Worlds is still operating warships now, even if they haven't been throwing them at the other powers quite as much recently." Bremman remarked, thinking that knowledge should be of use to him if anyone started talking about cutting his fleet numbers again. "Drastic overkill against a ComStar space station though, so I guess the Captain-General really wanted to send a message."
"If that message was 'I'm too angry to be calculating and pragmatic about this' then he succeeded stupendously" Olson replied sardonically.
"I suspect that SAFE, his intelligence agency, would have advocated arranging a few 'accidents' for ComStar people instead, and maybe a series of more overt, but still deniable assassinations of Toyama's people that wouldn't stop until the Lyran Commonwealth and the Capellan Confederation stopped being inexplicably well informed of where the Free Worlds League military was deployed" Bremman hypothesised an alternate course of action the Mariks might have taken instead. "Nobody rates SAFE all that highly in the intelligence community but arranging a few unfortunate 'traffic accidents', 'burglaries gone wrong' or whatever should be within their capabilities."
"That all sounds like something that could have come straight from the mouth of the galaxies most terrifying purveyor of fast food" Olson replied, chuckling.
"I've been known to sit in on the occasional lecture she's been giving to our trainee spooks" Bremman admitted, smiling. "I've heard Franklin Hallis bemoan the fact that he didn't have Gloria's résumé to hand when Khan McEvedy assigned him the job of dealing with Kerensky's spies because if he had half the Clan Watch would have ended up mysteriously disappearing, along with Jason Karrige" he said, smiling. "I'll have to disagree with you on Gloria being the galaxies most terrifying purveyor of fast food though, I suspect that the CEO of Triple-F Burgers has a body count that rivals that of Stefan Amaris, albeit coronary heart disease rather than garotte related."
Olson laughed. "You know, a few ranchers on Francas and a couple of businessmen on Comstock contacted us about arranging a loan so they could start a similar burger chain." he told the admiral. "They're saying they want to establish a franchise on every Hegemony world before someone else has the idea."
Bremman thought about that. "Makes a change from people wanting money to build a new armaments factory I suppose" he replied eventually. "I just hope they come up with a better slogan than Triple-F, I mean its accurate but 'Your Local Meat Animal in a Bun' just lacks a certain something."
"Yeah, but if they somehow expanded out here I'd love to try out their branch on McEvedy's Folly selling Mammoth burgers and Thunderbird nuggets." Olson replied. "Of course, all the animals on McEvedy's Folly taste like chicken, even the ones that look like cows."
"Really? That's news to me." Bremman replied quizzically.
"I held a reception for the people we rescued from there, got to chat to them informally for a few hours after I managed to get the press to stop asking them stupid questions." Olson told him. "They're a weird bunch, the tribals from Folly I mean, scientifically literate hunter-gatherers. Integrating them into our society might take a while, at least for the ones born there after they fled Alpheus McEvedy and his vision."
"At least there's only a couple of hundred of them, not like when my people showed up needing a whole new city to be built to house us all" Bremman observed. "You know, when I drive through Arecibo these days it's hard to believe that not much more than ten years ago it was just an empty plain with a river running through it."
Olson nodded. "It's been a busy decade for all of us" he agreed. "I guess we've got no idea how long it'll be before the ComStar interdiction ends. Can we route signals through the Magistracy instead?"
Bremman shook his head apologetically. "Even if we rush getting the HPG station on Francas completed it's still more than fifty light-years from there to Thraxa in the Magistracy so we'd need a relay station between them" he explained. "We've got a Mobile HPG we could use for that if we had to, but do we really want ComStar to know for certain that we have one of those?" he asked rhetorically.
"Perhaps not." Olson considered. The ComStar station on Thraxa would have to be told what system they needed to send HPG's to into order to reach Niops and they would soon realize there was just a temporary relay there not a colony. "Politically it might even be better if we remained cut-off, it'll give us the opportunity to bitch out ComStar royally and give us some ammunition when we start negotiating with them again. I mean they interdicted the Tharkad system once, and now it's a whole Successor State, albeit with better justification this time perhaps, so us being even more stridently opposed to handing over our communications network to Jerome Blake's fan-club shouldn't exactly surprise them under the circumstances."
"Might be useful politically but economically it's going to be a pain-in-the-ass, Sir" Bremman warned. "We were just getting used to how convenient it was to send an HPG to someone to make a deal on getting some industrial plant and machinery delivered and now it's back to sending jumpships on errands that might take months and they might still come back empty if they can't strike a bargain. I'll admit I'm personally annoyed by the timing because we had only just agreed terms with Federated-Boeing on licensing the CargoKing."
"So we may, or may not have paid them for the blueprints and technical data and they may, or may not have tried sending us the first batch via HPG" Olson responded with a sigh. "We may have gotten the plans for less money than I feared they would cost, not that they were exactly cheap by any means, but I guess now we're in a Schrödinger's Production License situation."
"We weren't going to be able to start production until the Alliance station was built anyway, but the longer our engineers have to study the plans before we start making the tooling the smoother it'll likely go" Bremman observed. "Because of the additional complexity of these designs compared to that of dropships we currently operate we're bound to hit some snags even with the university offering technical assistance with regards to the robotic systems."
Olson sighed before something else occurred to him. "This is going to screw the Magistracy and the Illyrians too" he realized. "Most of their external trade is with the Free Worlds League for obvious geographical reasons and they've always been connected to them by HPG so it'll disrupt their economies a lot more than it does ours."
"You're probably right, I mean the size of the Magistracy's internal market, and the fact they can still trade with the Capellans probably gives their economy some resilience but the Palatinate isn't so lucky. Other than what they've been selling us recently, shipping refined metals and ores to the Mariks is basically Illyria's only source of income."
"Right, and if the interdiction goes on for months they're going to be in dire straits" Olson surmised. "I mean unless someone else steps in and supplants the Free Worlds League as their biggest trade partner. This could actually be an opportunity for us as well as an inconvenience" he said deviously. "The merchant families that effectively control the Illyrian Palatinate see the galaxy in terms of profit and trade, rather than power and influence, and if we can get our foot firmly in the door while the Mariks are too distracted to care we could come out of the other side of this in a much stronger position regionally."
"I suspect that if we wanted to pull the Illyrians permanently into our sphere of influence we would need to do more than just continue to trade them our obsolete guns for resources, even though both sides have been doing pretty well out of that arrangement so far." Bremman responded thoughtfully. "I know they've been getting hit by more pirate raids recently than they used to which I guess is why they were happy to barter steel for some old laser cannon, although I wonder if the pirates might decide to prey on the Mariks for a while instead taking advantage of the HPG blackout. They might be looking to expand their militia forces even further though and we can help with that."
"By shipping them a load of more modern military hardware?" Olson guessed. "Stuff we have mothballed?"
"No, we offer to loan them some money, a loan to be paid back over a long time at a very low interest rate, so they can buy military hardware from the Magistracy" Bremman explained. "Then we offer to help them maintain that equipment going forward for free" he said. "I know that Majesty Metals and Manufacturing make a version of the Manticore tank, and our army uses that one too, so that might be what we'll want to suggest because we have people trained to keep those running already."
"So, we score points with the Magistracy and the Palatinate, as well as a hold over the latter because they owe us money and need us to keep their shiny new tanks running" Olson put it together. "Jacob, have you ever considered a career in politics by any chance because that's pretty sharp" he told him appreciatively.
"Politics? No, Sir" Bremman denied. "On an entirely unrelated matter when does your term as High Associator end anyway?" he deadpanned.
"Trust me, you'd hate it." Olson told him sincerely. "I'll have to run this past the Department of Trade and Industry, as well as the Diplomatic Corps of course, but we've definitely got the financial reserves to run with this. The mint has been churning out gold and silver coins for trading with anyone that still doesn't accept C-Bills, so we can even offer hard specie currency to the Palatinate to buy what they usually sell to the Free Worlds League if we have to" he said. "If we start purchasing the bulk of their resource production, then subsequently begin voicing concern to them about their piracy issues, offering the loan to help mitigate the situation, that should sound reasonable" he continued. "After all, we're just making sure our supply of raw materials isn't threatened and being good neighbors as well."
"No ulterior motives whatsoever." Bremman concurred, smirking. The Illyria Palatinate probably was among the best neighbors you could hope for in the Inner Sphere, but if they could steer it towards being a client state not just a friendly one that could serve the interests of Niops very well in the long term.
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===Shuffling Resources in shadow of interstellar politics===
"Returning to the Interdiction issue, if we do rush completion of the Comstock HPG station I assume we can use a Jumpship to transfer messages on from there to Thraxa?" Olson checked.
"Yes Sir, I've already notified one of our three Tramp jumpships, the Tremolino, that we'll likely need to transfer her from her regular duties." Bremman replied. "She's got an L-F battery so she can make it from Comstock to Thraxa to carry urgent messages faster than most anything else we have, although it's right at the limit of her double-jump range. Technically just beyond it to be honest which isn't exactly ideal."
"Beyond it?" Olson queried.
"It's just under sixty light years from Comstock to Thraxa but there isn't a convenient star exactly halfway between them so Tremolino will have to do one jump of just barely under thirty light years and one of just over thirty." Olson explained. "30.48 light-years to be precise which is over the recommended jump limit, if only slightly."
"Isn't that dangerous?" Olson asked, frowning. He knew that while the thirty-light-year limit was technically arbitrary, since it factored in a safety margin of the true limit, there was a reason why jumpships only rarely pushed their drives hard because doing so also meant pushing their luck.
"Any jump over thirty does carry some additional risk but in reality it only gets noticeably dangerous much over thirty-one and insanely dangerous past thirty-three" Bremman explained. "Back when I was just a Lieutenant JG fighting Amaris in the last years of the war, the ship I was on had to carry out a jump from Skye to Mizar, and then a second jump onto Nusakan to deliver urgent supplies. Both jumps were over thirty light-years, nearly thirty-one for Skye to Mizar, but other than there being a lot more praying aboard than usual it went smoothly enough" he said. "I'm choosing Tremolino for the job because her jumpdrive was fully serviced at Camelot Command before we left there, and also because by random chance she's done fewer jumps than the other Tramps since we got to Niops. That should further reduce the chances of a jumpdrive malfunction to an acceptable level."
"Why not jump into interstellar space for the first leg of the journey, that way there wouldn't be any jumps over thirty lightyears?" Olson asked. "I know that's done sometimes."
"It's just standard policy. If your ship suffers a mechanical breakdown in interstellar space, potentially light-years from the nearest star, then you're considerably more screwed than if it happens in a star system, especially one that people know to look for you in if you don't make a planned rendezvous." Olson explained. "If Tremolino was going to have to jump very much further I would actually go with the interstellar jump option as the safer one, but as I noted the math says that a 30.48 lightyear jump isn't particularly risky, it's just riskier than thirty light-years or less."
Olson frowned. "I assume the more times she makes the trip between Comstock and Thraxa the riskier it will become due to putting strain on the drive?" he checked.
"Yes Sir, it's not a long-term solution by any means. For that matter unless the message is considered urgent we'll probably want to do it the slow way. Three shorter jumps or about six-weeks there and back if you prefer."
The High Associator nodded his understanding and agreement. "As regards drive maintenance in the broader sense, if we have to do this a while do you think perhaps we should reconsider completing the jumpship repair bay on the recharge station before constructing the dropship yard, or perhaps the additional orbital factory needed for these fancy new heatsinks?" Olson asked.
"Oddly enough even if it was operation now it wouldn't help matters much." Bremman replied with a shrug. "The repair bay on an Olympus is only big enough to service a regular civilian jumpship like a Merchant or an Invader. You just can't fit something larger than normal like a Tramp or a Star Lord inside the bay. We actually considered completely revising and enlarging the Olympus at one point but it would have delayed both the design work and construction, and at the time we began the project we were hoping to get started on the full-sized shipyard a lot earlier than we intend to now."
There was always something messing up the schedule and biting you on the ass soon enough as a result, Olson thought to himself glumly. "How long would it actually take to build the shipyard itself?" he asked.
"Too long to be worth rushing that instead. Even though it'll be mostly a case of constructing a really large pressure hull and reassembling the shipyard we salvaged from Camelot Command in it, so it's not nearly as big a job as it would be from scratch, the damn thing is still huge and extremely complicated" Bremman replied. "If we threw everything we had at it starting tomorrow morning it would still be a matter of years, not months before it was fully operational" he explained. "Also, since we're planning to build it larger than the Camelot yard originally was, so we can work on something larger than a Black Lion, we're going to need a few custom parts from the Project Workshops which would necessitate putting some of their existing work on hold as well."
"We should have started on the new Project Workshops sooner." Olson said regretfully. Workshop III-B was up and running now, and III-C should be on-line before his term of office expired in 2840 as well, but it would be another twenty years after that until they were all completed and they would largely stop being the industrial bottleneck they were now.
Bremman doubted they could have gone much faster than they did in reality, but nonetheless generally agreed with the sentiment. "As you know the second shipyard we're planning down the road is going to be unpressurised and quite a lot smaller. It'll be for the construction and maintenance of civilian jumpships only, so it won't have to be big enough to fit a McKenna inside, but it'll still take longer to construct than the first one however" he noted. "On a related matter, and since we've been talking about Tremolino, given how useful we've been finding her and his sister ships we might want to consider building ourselves a fourth L-F Tramp before we start producing other types of jumpships for export in the second yard. Between the Lithium-Fusion battery, and the heavier than usual armament for a jumpship, they've really earned their keep because we can use them for jobs that would have otherwise needed a warship."
"You're the expert so I'll trust your opinion on that admiral, but I'll be long out of office by the time we get around to jumpship production so it's not me you'll have to convince" Olson replied.
"Of course, but if you could do me a favour and put something on the record about it being advisable it might make it easier for me to push the idea later." Bremman suggested. "The army will likely point out how many battlemechs they could buy with the same money, but unless we're invaded they'd just gather dust in storage while we'll always have a use for a L-F Tramp."
"Even if it's just acting as a glorified message courier because the damn HPG net was shut down." Olson observed with a chuckle, accepting the man's point.
"Probably not as exciting for the crew as when we send them out to survey distant systems for resources, and they end up tripping over old DoME projects instead, but not every jump is an adventure, sometimes it just means delivering the mail." Bremman replied, smiling. There was a little more at stake here than his just getting his hands on another speedy jumpship though. The new Tramp would, by necessity, require a lithium-fusion battery to be made for her, and after that it should be easier to get a larger L-F battery approved to upgrade Michigan now that they had some experience with that. Of course, since the battlecruiser would have to be placed in a yard to have that battery fitted, it wasn't a small job by any means, why not take the opportunity to make some other relatively minor upgrades at the same time?
Of course, compared to cutting a Black Lion open to install a lithium-fusion battery just about anything was relatively minor, including the weapon refit Bremman wanted for her. Dismounting a few of her Naval Cannon for laser armament more suited for dealing with enemy fighters would give Michigan more utility as a fleet asset, as would the L-F battery of course, and with Bismark mothballed there was already a convenient source of NL-45's and heat-sinks just floating there.
That was a project for the future of course, Bremman knew. "With so many spacers assigned to the salvage mission to Folly, crews that we don't expect to see back until the end of the year at the earliest, we are really pushed for fleet manpower at the moment incidentally" he pointed out. "I'm going to have to pull some crew from Michigan and Buccaneer in order to replace Tremolino on the Copernicus-Francas run with another ship, which will be the old Star Lord we captured from the Blood Rain."
"I thought that wasn't in the best state of repair?" Olson recalled being told that.
"It's jumpdrive is alright, it just needs an overhaul of just about everything else, including a lot of the plumbing in the crew quarters, which particularly sucks because normally crewing a Star Lord is a pretty sweet crew assignment" Bremman told him. "I get the impression that the pirates just crapped in bags and ditched them out the airlock" he added, grimacing. "I've held off on officially renaming her the Richard Cameron until we can make her worthy of bearing the name of a First Lord of the Star Lord."
"Some might consider a crappy ship a suitable name for a crappy First Lord." Olson observed wryly.
"I might be one of those to agree," Bremman admitted, "although I'm sure many would take offence. To be frank his historical reputation benefited greatly from his being shot in the head by Stefan Amaris" he opined, Olson looking like he agreed with the sentiment. "We've still got a couple of Monoliths in reserve in case we need to transport an expeditionary force, plus the warships of course, so our ability to deploy military assets as needed isn't compromised, but if we keep expanding our holdings we might have to get that old Leviathan running again soon."
"Does that thing even still work?" Olson queried.
"Just because it hasn't moved since it carried the Capellan refugees here is no reason to believe it can't still make a jump, but I'd certainly want our maintenance crews to perform a thorough inspection before we tried" Bremman replied. "It might be worth using it for the Niops-AJC run because there's going to be an Olympus at both ends of the trip with engineers to hand to help keep an eye on the old girl, even if she's too big to actually dock in the repair bay. I suspect we'll be increasing using AJC as a trade hub in the long term anyway because she's one jump from Niops, Alphard, Stafford and Copernicus, and the Leviathan being able to haul eight dropships of cargo back to Niops in one hit will be very useful. That's almost as much as three Invaders could manage together."
"When we find we're having to use a Potemkin for that run instead I'll start to think we might have become a little too successful in extracting resources from the colonies." Olson joked, that behemoth of a militarized transport jumpship, officially designated a 'Heavy Cruiser' because of its armament, could carry some twenty-five dropships and had an internal cargo bay the size of a cathedral by all accounts.
"Give me four hundred Iron Wombs to breed the crew, and twenty years for them to grow up while I train them how to crew the thing and we can do it" Bremman replied, amused by the suggestion. "At the moment I'm just trying to recruit new sailors faster than they retire. All the kids want to drive a mech or fly an aerospace fighter and the ones that do volunteer for the navy want to crew a warship not a cargo freighter."
"Four hundred?" Olson repeated the figure, laughing. "I only opened the new factory making them last month, and that'll only be turning out fifty Iron Wombs a year until we can open a second line which could take another five years or more" he said. "For that matter we've already promised the first hundred of the things off the line to Frobisher anyway, and I'm sure the army expect the lion's share of Ironborn after that because the 295th are getting old."
"All too true alas, but we are going to have to make sure that the navy gets enough personal and resources not to have to make any further cuts because we're already stretched way too thin, as the current situation demonstrates." Bremman stated seriously. "We're expanding territory fast and while we started this thing with far more starlift that we had a use for that's not going to be the case forever. I mean, what's happening with the ComStar interdiction and the Folly mission is a temporary shortage, but a few years down the line it'll be the norm and you can't suddenly build new jumpships, or even dropships, in a hurry."
"Point made, Admiral; point made." Olson replied. "At least we don't have to worry about the Free Worlds League invading us for a while."
"No, they're going to be very busy keeping the Lyran's and Capellans from stomping them until ComStar turn the HPG's back on, which won't happen until Charles Marik swallows his pride and makes some serious restitution I imagine." Bremman reasoned. "That's why I'm not as reluctant to transfer crew from our cruisers as I would be normally, his fleet are going to be very preoccupied for a while."
"Indeed. The interdiction might be inconvenient for us, but I'll guess it'll be disastrous for them." Olson surmised. "I hope it doesn't last too long though, I'd like to be the one to tell ComStar 'After what you just did to the Free Worlds League? Are you ****** kidding?' the next time they insist on taking over NHCOMNET."
"If the interdiction lasts until the next election then I doubt the Free Worlds League will even exist as a viable state, but my guess is that ComStar would end it unilaterally as a 'gesture of reconciliation' well before that happens because it's not in their interests for the balance of power in the Inner Sphere to alter that much."
"Always thinking strategically aren't you, Jacob." Olson remarked.
"It's literally my job, Sir." Bremman replied with a shrug. "Assuming that all the Great Powers are self-serving, underhanded and duplicitous is just a result of my paying attention."
==Chapter Notes==
*;Notes from the Author : The ComStar War of 2837-2838 and the Interdiction placed on the entire Free Worlds League likely changed the way an awful lot of people thought about ComStar and its intelligence arm ROM (though it likely changed few minds about SAFE because they weren't thought of very highly already). Captain-General Charles Marik was perhaps being a tad hypocritical because he had no problem with ComStar feeding him intelligence on his foes, but when they did the reverse that was grounds for bringing in warships to blow up the Oriente orbital HPG station (admittedly his own sister Jeanette being involved probably aggrieved him greatly).Lacking HPG communication the ability of the FWL to coordinate their military went to hell, and soon resulted in sweeping gains by the Lyran Commonwealth and Capellan Confederation which hoovered up multiple worlds. The civilian economy of the League fared little better, financial markets crashed and production dropped through the floor.Unfortunately for the Illyrian Palatinate the Free Worlds League was by far their biggest (and closest) trade partner so their economy would have been collateral damage in the ComStar War. The Magistracy of Canopus would have also been hit, but not quite as hard, and their borders go out close enough to the Capellan Confederation to route HPG's that way instead of through the FWL.There are canon examples of jumpships making jumps of (just) over 30LY in battletech but it's not something anyone likes to do. The chances of a misjump, a catastrophic one, go up the further above the safe limit you attempt. Comstock is just about close enough to Thraxa to make it in two jumps, but you certainly wouldn't want to make a habit of it. Unfortunately for the Palatinate their neighbor directly corewards is the Circinus Federation which treats piracy as a means to earn a steady income. They might not have as much worth stealing as the Lyrans and Mariks but they don't have as much military hardware to defend themselves with either.Triple-F Burgers based out of the Federated Suns is a large, interplanetary fast-food chain. Because not every world has the same livestock what you get in your burger varies world-to-world. There are of course rumours that Hanse Davion of the Federated Suns personally preferred Arby's, particularly after a hard day of throttling Capellans.
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