TEFAC Chpt 2

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==Chapter 2 - Time Enough For A Cat - - Learning to Wait -==
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====Trying get the day started====
Canopus, Magestracy of Canopus
(formerly January 25th, 3145) - April 3th, 3022
There was a wonderful feeling about being both hired with a steady job, and having said steady job come with good perks. In this case, the perk was called "being barracked in the Magestrix's palace" in a small studio apartment in the wing of rooms that Emma had claimed as her own for her Ducal Staff- currently consisting of six servants, Myself (Tam "Nyan" Gallowglass) and Mersies (Ti Anne "Mersies" Szeny) as the "Battlemech Pilot Teachers" for Emma Centrella.
 
Yes. That Emma Centrella. The one in the the history books- or well, what were the history books. Turns out, undergoing time travel? Really changed some perspectives. Now the old and canny diplomatic mechwarrior peacenik I was used to reading about was a fourteen-year-old girl who'd just bought her first mech. It was, to put it bluntly? Whiplash incarnate. Still, I had the key tools to overcome it.
 
As the alarm on my bedside table blared, I groaned painfully. I hated hangovers. Alcohol was the first and most critical tool to get over this mental whiplash, after all, and we had spent the days that weren't in critical unloading in a bit of a perpetual buzz- not helped by the fact that the palace had no less than five actual bars situated near entertainments, and Kyalla (the Magestrix herself!) liked holding court in/near them. Our cover from MIM was that we were treasure hunters who'd stumbled across a research facility- thus explaining the "Royal Grade" weapons we'd uncovered- so we were the toast of the court for a while as being Real Canopians who did Real Canopian Things ah ha ha.
 
Really, this was Kyalla's way of making sure we read as local Canopians and not half-Liao mutts. It was a real trial by fire, especially since it was damn near impossible to talk to the rest of my lance without having the rest of the court swarm us. Worse, we were under informal orders to stick to English- a real problem, when our two tank crews were mostly Mandarin speakers, and our two other pilots were a Tikhonov native and a gal from Catte's Hold where there'd been a Capellan outpost in since the '40s. As such, Mersies and I didn't really get a lot of time together, which was a pain since she was my best friend.
 
A position she was really pushing, since we'd been drinking together last night, which had progressed to fooling around together, which had progressed in turn to right now where she was sprawled on top of me smelling like stale sweat and other things while continuously batting me in the nose with an ear twitch.
 
I wasn't up to making the second-most important decision a mechwarrior ever had to make, but damn, was it getting close.
 
Once I had the alarm shut off and got mostly free of Mersies, I grabbed my phone and started dialing- first into a conference call room, second to the rest of my guys.
 
Haozhen "Sokoloy" Argenti was the driver of the heaviest 'mech in our lance, a Tikhonov native, and most importantly for the nature of this call, the one who spoke the least English. His Lao Hu had saved our bacon on numerous occasions, mostly in being a class-twenty autocannon in the pocket that nobody saw coming. I loved the idiot like the little brother I never had, and more importantly trusted him to keep his mouth shut around the ten thousand courtesans of this den of intrigue and sensual desire. Considering the fact he was probably in a fuck-pile with at least six of them at the moment, that was a lot of trust. The man couldn't keep it in his pants, and I'd have to make very certain we actually got the bastard hydrated before he just locked himself away in a den of debauchery.
 
Marie "Howler" Estaze was the other pilot not yet mentioned, and her deal was that she was technically an independent contractor who was an owner-operator of a Vindicator that'd been restored after she'd found the mech hulk as a kid after an ammunition detonation on a near-empty magazine had auto-ejected the pilot. We'd put a lot of time into getting that piece of junk up to shape, and it had been worth every minute- even when we'd discovered that then-Marcus needed to get booked for more than a few medical visits since they'd been born as the wrong gender. That wasn't a problem for most things, except the fact our Leopard didn't have the tools to get cracking on that. The promise of a full Canopian makeover at the end of our tour had gotten her in, though, and I personally planned to make sure we delivered on it.
 
For the armor unit, we had two tanks: a Gauss-equipped Po II, commanded by Jackson "Lucky" Arstor, and a Schrek commanded by Tules "Ganges" Saohai. Both of them had elected to stay glued to their vehicles, though, since they had more LosTech per unit than the rest of us. I didn't blame them. They'd be sitting in, but not saying much: mostly because they'd be translating for their crews.
 
Once everyone was dialed in and we'd gotten the pleasantries out of the way, I got down to brass tacks.
 
"First things first," I said flatly, "I want everyone to get to Major Palas and get themselves a MIM handler. While some of us have a little spycraft practice, we're soldiers first and safety third, which means spies last of all. We will leak shit eventually, probably by accident, and I don't want to have to deal with another round of DEST ninjas trying to steal our shit, or worse, the Mask coming after us. Having the intel weenies on-call means the odds of that happening go way down. Comments?"
 
"How are we hiding that my ride doesn't exist yet?" Sokoloy asked, his words coming across in the ebb-and-flow of someone who'd learned their English from a high-class noble, instead of the 'low-brow' and more technically correct Tikhonov standard.
 
"Right now, my plan is to explain it as a Thunderer-based frankenmech. Odds are, though, if anything happens to it we're gonna have to put the poor girl down: the endo chassis and 375 XLFE ain't gonna be fun to replace."
 
That drew a lot of hisses. "Now hold on, I'm not saying we're doing it soon," I said quickly, trying to draw the heat off. "I'm working on making some calls, and I'll get an order in for a fresh heavyweight battlemech for you out of the Concordat."
 
"You making me ride in some cowboy-ass fuckbucket?"
"No, I'm making you ride around in an Archer I plan on dolling up. We've got Artemis IV systems, we've got a shitload of Light PPCs, and we've got a few XL 270s laying around that we can probably up-rate to 280s."
 
"I still have to retrain my interface system. That's a year where I'm out of the cockpit, not earning battle pay," Solokoy hissed.
 
"If your mech gets blown out enough to need to retrain, I think making sure you're alive is a bigger issue!" I snapped. The call went silent for a second, until Mersies nudged me. "Sorry."
 
"No, I understand," Sokoloy said, before breathing deeply. "It's just- your mech becomes part of you."
 
I laughed. "Yeah, I know."
 
"Moving on from that," Mersies said, sighing, "I've drawn up some new duty schedules. "Howler, you're gonna be riding a desk for the foreseeable future: we need to get a 270 XLFE line set up. Triple-M has a 275 standard line set up for their Shadow Hawks, but the fucks only make ten of 'em a year. If we want backup, we're gonna need to build it ourselves."
 
"That's going to be expensive," Howler warned. "What's our plan to get funding?"
 
"We're selling Light PPCs for it," I explained. "Brand new, not-LosTech weapons? People will come from every corner of the 'sphere. I'm already working on getting a line on a standard PPC manufacturing plant, and once we have that we'll be swimming in the damn things."
 
"I figured we'd be selling Artemis IV kits, not Light PPCs, since the ArtIV is just a fire control unit we can bolt on."
 
"I want to work on that," I said, sighing, "but we can't actually get the receivers to make the missiles for it. If I had a factor in Andurien, we could get the receivers and knock that out of the park."
 
"Are we going to get an Andurien factor?" Sokoloy asked, audibly working his way out of whatever pile of people he was in.
 
"Oh, probably," a fifth voice said, and Mersies and I whipped our heads around to stare at one of the chairs in my apartments. In it, Emma Centrella sat, smiling evilly as she gave us a little finger-wave. "The Magestrix likes your plans, and she's had the idea to work with Dame Humphries for a while. The fact her plans could get a little bigger, well… she doesn't dream small."
 
"Was that the princess?" Howler asked out loud, making me realize that we were still on speaker, since Mersies and I were still in bed. Naked. For obvious reasons related to last night. With a fourteen year old in my rooms somehow- note to self, fix that before getting out of bed- it was not a good place to be discussing the young lady in question.
 
"Duchess, actually, and yes," Emma said. "These two promised to begin mechwarrior training today."
 
Mersies looked at me. I shrugged, and looked at her.
 
"You were, to put it mildly, fairly drunk when I asked," Emma clarified. "I believe the Magestrix invited you into a situation that would result in problematic behavior and intel leaks, so I gave you an out."
 
"Problematic behaviors?"
 
"Either something to do with recreational drugs, an orgy, or both. Possibly both, she was in a good mood last night."
 
Mersies raised a finger. "I am highly concerned for the fact you both know what that starting looks like and want it to not happen to us."
 
Emma laughed, and laughed, and kept laughing for a solid minute to the point where I was starting to honestly get concerned.
 
"So, child-employer that knows far too much aside," I said, trying to get the meeting back on track, "our to-do list until I get everything stowed away shipshape and we can look at recruiting is gonna be getting the little duchess trained up, getting the LPPC production line going, and to look at what it'll take to actually get more war material after we synchronize with the Centrellas' plans. Any questions?"
 
A round of affirmations, and I closed my phone with a sigh. Shooting a look at Emma, I groaned. "Can you, well, go away for a bit? Gotta get ready for the day."
 
"Just pretend I'm not here," the little duchess said with a trollish smirk.
 
I rolled my eyes hard enough they'd see my implants soon. "No."
 
"Come on, at least you're not fucking. Now that, that's kinda annoying."
 
Mersies, kicking in with the grace of an Atlas trying to polka, grinning. "So if we start you'll go away?"
 
Emma laughed. "Oh, hell no. I'll go and get someone to critique you."
 
"You have people for that?!"
 
"I can borrow one of the Magestrix's people for that, and she has lots of people for it."
 
Finally, I hit an idea. "Please leave? For ten minutes, and get some athletic clothes on? You'll need them for today."
 
"Alright."
 
And with that, Emma left, and I could finally start to get ready for the day.
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====Training Day====
The first, and most important, part of a trainee mechwarrior's day was calisthenics. Basic, bare bones exercises to make sure your body didn't literally fall apart when you used it. They sucked. They sucked a lot. And if you were a young woman who'd been making a pain in the neck of herself, they were especially full of suck because they now involved singing.
 
Plus, hidden side effects of severe brain remodeling? It somehow improved our memories, which was why I was blasting out the final chorus to whatever the hell the name of that Ghost Bear Dominion pop song that had been stuck in my head for two months was. If regular musical encouragement was bad, that had nothing on my ability to take a song written in equal parts Sweednese and English out behind the shed and utterly murder it. Emma was already regretting her poor life choices, so naturally I had to trade off with Mercies so she could work over the Top 40 Draconis Charts with a steel chair.
 
By the time we'd finished our nice, sedate, kilometer run of warmup, the trainee looked to be about half dead, so I made sure to get the water bottles and "don't sit down or you'll cramp into a pretzel" lecture out. Still, she hadn't complained too much, so after a half-hour of cooling down by drinking and walking around the hanger, I was ready to actually let Emma sit in a mech cockpit.
 
"This isn't my Phoenix Hawk," Emma noted as I took her over to the trainer we'd requisitioned.
"Yep."
 
"This is a Stinger."
 
"Excellent work identifying the mech, trainee," I said with a smirk. "Care to take a shot in the dark why you get to start on a Stinger?"
 
"Because you hate the concept of fun and were conspiring against me because I kept you from getting into trouble at the Magestrix's party?"
 
Mersies laughed, taking over for me. "Nope. The Phoenix Hawk is actually an expansion on the Stinger, design-wise, so they share a lot of handling similarities, as well as fairly similar cockpits. Want to take another guess?"
 
"The fact my Phoenix Hawk is packed with LosTech?"
 
"True, but no. Come with me."
 
As Mersies led Emma off so that she could go look at the cockpit of her Phoenix Hawk, I got to my Catapult and mounted up. It was a basic precaution: have someone riding on bodyguard detail while the VIP was out training, and Mersies had lost the rock-paper-scissors on "who has to deal with the kid" debate. Aside from serving as the bodyguard, I could also use this as stick time to keep my hands in, as well as a chance to knock down my range time requirements for the week. I had to keep my hand in the whole shooting arrangement, and it wasn't a good idea to try and cram it all in at once. An hour here and an hour there was a lot better.
 
As we walked out to the practice field that was all nice and muddy, I quietly cued myself into the back-band that Mersies was using to teach Emma with. It wasn't that I could hear her thoughts, but I could get a rough idea of what she was thinking.
 
Anticipation, giddy joy, and a mild amount of ass clenching mixed with the taste of cinnamon. Oh. Oh boy. I knew what that meant! Getting into position to get a good look, I made very certain I was taking visual tape separate of my BattleRom at the moment that Mersies handed the controls over to Emma. Carefully, the Stinger took one step.
 
Then it took another.
 
A third step- this kid was good! Then, as if my words had personally cursed her from the depths of hell, Emma mis-stepped and slipped. With a gentle, painless grace, the light Battlemech tipped over sideways, slamming into the soil hard enough to create a splatter of mud that nearly reached my cockpit. Carefully jumping backwards, I looked down with a smile.
 
"So do you need help for self-recovery training, or am I good to hit the range?" I asked the mud pie.
 
"Help please?" Emma asked.
 
Well, ain't nobody said she was dumb. "You still on the yokes?" I asked carefully.
 
"Yeah."
 
"Alright, so here's what you do," I explained gently. "First things first, dumpster your arm mounts. Mersies, please show her how."
 
A moment of silence, and then a hissing, sliding clunk as the medium laser on the Stinger's arm slid back to free up its hand.
 
"Always, always, always de-activate arm or hand mounted weapons before you get up," I said, full teacher mode. "Most weapons mounts are designed to take some unholy stresses, but you don't want to beat your lasers or PPCs to shit just because they're on arm mounts. Most of the time, the armor can take it. Don't assume, though, because assumptions make an ass out of you and me."
 
"Arm mount deactivated. What next?"
 
"Get in your mech's recovery position. For most mechs, this means front torso to the ground. Alright?"
 
"Alright…"
 
Flailing about like a little duckling, Emma got the mech laying down flat on its face. "Assuming recovery position."
 
"Good. Now hand the sticks off to Mersies and let her get you up," I instructed, adding a little steel to my voice. "When it comes to mech recovery, we're going to teach that with a mech that can help with recovery standing by- not with me and my chicken-of-doom."
 
"Thanks, Nyan," Mersies said on comms. "I'll say this, the kid's got guts and a hell of a sense of balance."
 
"I have a name," Emma muttered.
 
"Not in the cockpit you don't!" I kicked in, chipper as hell. "Callsigns only, kid, and that's important. First time you roll out, your Phoenix Hawk is gonna be indistinguishable from God and Country, just another face in the crowd. Use it, and it'll probably save your life, or at least buy us more time to work."
 
A brief moment passed. "Oh."
 
"Until you earn a callsign, you're the Kid. Everyone's the Kid once in their lives, so don't take it personally. Until then? Deal with it gracefully, and we'll make sure not to stick you with something horrible."
 
"Such as?"
 
"My mother, whom you will not ever let hear that I told you this, originally piloted under the callsign 'Red Tide', and there are two versions of how she earned that name. Option one, she was involved in fending off a Charge of the Horde attack by House Kurita. I'm not mentioning Option Two, you're a girl and can figure out the bare bones of it yourself."
 
A moment of silence, and then a secondhand moment of horrified realization from Mersies.
 
"You can't mean-"
 
"I do mean."
 
"Oh, ew, god, no, why did you put that image in my head!" Emma hissed.
 
"As a general reminder to wear every part of your cooling suit every time, no matter what you're doing or why you're doing it if you get in a cockpit. Complacency kills," I said, rapping the side of my cockpit twice. "It's what got my 'da, and I don't want it to be what gets me. If you're lucky like my mother, you'll get an embarrassing nickname forever- but I don't trust luck, and neither should you."
 
"Got it, Nyan." Emma said, and with that I let her keep training.
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====New Mission====
Canopus
September 9, 3022
"So you're telling me the project's having trouble," I said, looking my factor in the eye. Majesty Metals & Manufacturing, the premiere and only Battlemech manufacturer on Canopus IV, had been happy to sell my little mercenary company the remains of a PPC production line they'd had to mothball over the years. When I took possession, I immediately figured out why: the damn thing was trashed. I'd actually stolen tooling ripped off the floor with battlefists that had looked better: specifically tools relieved from Robinson after the Dracs "requisitioned" them. Fortunately, the line was actually old enough it was a Star League rated line, so it didn't require pre-part manufacture: just bring in sheet-stock, and it'd do the rest. Unfortunately, this meant it required specialized workers out the ass.
 
"You have to understand, we're refurbishing equipment close to five hundred years old that was treated like crap for the first hundred years it was around, and then abandoned for the next four hundred," my factor said, looking nervous. "The fact we can build, with extreme craft-fitting, one PPC a month is a miracle- especially considering how much work Triple-M is putting into sniping our workers."
 
"Do we need to move offworld?" I asked, dead serious. "If we need to, I'm perfectly happy to set up shop on Luxen, or maybe Adherlwin."
 
"Luxen would be better," the factor said. "There's no major Triple-M presence there, it's well-protected, and the university means it won't be too hard to get our hands on more skilled workers. That, of course, just leaves us with the other problem."
 
"Yeah, called 'we're not making real PPCs, we're making Light PPCs." I grumbled.
 
"The engineering team prefers to call them 'Carronades' as a means of informal disguise, but yes. We're making strides, of course, but results to date have been problematic."
 
I groaned. "How problematic?"
 
"We're working off a Parti-Kill Heavy Cannon as our base PPC model. That means we've got to take a bleed straight off the mech's reactor, much like how a jumpjet does it. The hard part isn't that- the hard part is making the capacitors and inhibitor fields play nice together long enough to actually fire the shot off, without over-energizing it so that it blows out the control mechanisms in the barrel of the weapon."
 
"So, do we have any workaround solutions or cludges? Engineers always have cludges," I said, tapping my foot.
 
"Lengthen the barrel assembly and strengthen it, while pulling some mass out of the back end of the system and de-tune the ion shapers. Right now, we can have it either run hot, be heavy, or take up too much space. I personally suggest going for the weight- if we're marketing this as a PPC replacement, it'll be peanuts compared to the weight savings on a standard PPC."
 
"We can't go for weight, because this thing only hits as hard as a medium laser," I explained carefully. "Our biggest selling point is we can cram two of these into one PPC's worth of weight and heat- double the shots means double the chances to hit."
 
"That leaves space, then. Setting up guidewires and bracing will be… tricky… for our mass budget, but so far it'll likely be fine."
 
I smirked, slapping the guy on the shoulder. "That's good. Say we take half a year to transplant, then we're selling these things in '23 or '24, right?"
 
"Sounds about right. If we do the first sales call in… April? We should be able to command, eh, five hundred thousand c-bills per?"
 
My jaw dropped. "Excuse me?"
 
"Yeah, better make it four hundred thousand c-bills per. Twice the cost of a standard PPC, because it's half as much of a pain in the ass to mount."
 
That was a full hundred grand over the cost of an ER PPC! Working my jaw carefully, I breathed in deeply. "This thing is gonna be a trouble magnet."
 
"Fortunately, the Magestrix put in a good word for us, and even more fortunately the fact you have a literal hundred demonstration models means we're fairly well-set for business," the factor explained. "I've already secured loans with some of your LosTech as collateral, and while I know the Lyran bankers I'm working with are going to be screaming to get their hands on your guns, that doesn't change the fact they're all busy fighting each other instead of us."
I whistled, before shaking the man's hand. I might never remember his name, but he did damn good work. "Next time you're in town, chief, give me a call. Drinks are on me."
 
"Thanks, but I'll probably be on Luxen for the foreseeable future," he admitted, getting ready to go. "Peace of Blake upon you, Mr. Gallowglass."
 
"And with you, my good, sir." I said affably, before letting him out of the room. Once that was done, I left postehaste, resisting the urge to scrub myself down with pumice soap to strip the layer of utter slime that must have coated me. Everyone agreed: we couldn't out-play Comstar. It was, to put it bluntly, literally impossible. The solution, therefore, was to give them a stalking horse: the Light PPC Project. If we could focus the toaster-fuckers over there to oggle the concept of "advanced technology" then they'd be less interested in going for the far more important projects: specifically, the workshop on Adherlwin trying to build extra-light fusion engines, and the space station over Fanardir that was beating its head on the topic of endo-steel to no avail. Emma was spending money like water to get these projects moving: we had to be willing and able to help.
 
With the LPPC line serving as dedicated phone company bait, our hope was that some 'wisdom of Blake' would fall into their laps to get the project online faster- especially since Luxen was known for its very charitably-minded Precentor who wanted to use his position to encourage rebuilding and charity. Our "orphanage for victims of war" slash private recruitment pool would do the job nicely, and I expected a lot of white-robes going in to give the machines a good ornamental smack before leaving notes on how these things worked Back In The Day. As long as I was willing to praise Blake and pass the ammunition in the war on poverty, it should at very least not end up getting terror-bombed into oblivion.
 
Once I got all that information internalized and the reports from the factor squared away, I reported to the Magestrix posthaste.
 
While Emma might paint a picture of her mother as a lurid debutante, floating from attraction to attraction like a butterfly of social chaos and decadence, my own impression of Kyalla was far more grounded. For every night I saw her in a sheer gown directing the entertainment of the court of Canopus, there was a day in the office with her scribes beating themselves against the endless fountains of paperwork that made up the running of the realm. Kyalla might play hard, but she worked hard too.
 
"Gallowglass," she said, looking me over. "Is the Comstar problem handled?"
 
I winced. I hated being referred to by my last name- it reminded me of my mother, and she was, well, unpleasant. "For the moment, yes. I don't know how long the plan will hold, though."
 
"That's for you to let MIM worry about," she said, cracking her knuckles in a wide-cast spread. "I've gotten to talking to Humphries as per Szeny's suggestions- do you have any detail about what the alternate version of myself had to do to get her to buy into this cockamine scheme?"
 
Shaking my head, I frowned. "None in the faintest. However, if memory serves me correctly, there'd been a bombing on the Captain-General, and that was a major inciting incident to the actual war- and more critically, Steiner's peace proclamation. I'm… fairly certain, although not totally sure, that if a Canopian-Andurien alliance made motions to sign some sort of treaty with the Lyran Commonwealth, that could be parlayed into further agreements with the Federated Commonwealth when that forms up."
 
Kyalla snorted, a most unladylike gesture. "More info than Szeny had, I'll give you that."
 
"Thank you, ma'am."
 
"On to more pressing business, then: how has my daughter been doing in Mechwarriror training?"
 
That got me to smile. "She's headstrong, but adapting to it well. We've been focusing exclusively on piloting for the time being: the Stinger we've been training her on isn't very conductive to the sort of weaponry we've got hanging off her Phoenix Hawk and I don't want to have to retrain her once we get the Direct Neural Interface surgery online."
 
"Completely understandable- and more importantly, something we can work with," Kyalla said, standing up. "I need some fresh air, so walk with me Nyan."
 
Oh thank fuck she remembered my callsign. As we moved out of Kyalla's impressively hard-to-find office, she played with a small silver necklace and frowned slightly. "I've- well, there's no short way to put this. I've received an offer from Hanse Davion."
 
My eyes fell open. "What kind of offer, ma'am?"
 
"You'll recall my service for a service policy, yes?"
 
I was incredibly familiar. Even in my time, Canopian medical missions were flung out to all corners of the Inner Sphere, collecting intelligence and useful persons of interest while improving relations with their host communities, while at the same time teams of skilled engineers made their way back to the Canopian heartland to lend a hand to the assorted industries of my home. "Ma'am," I finally chose to say, "I was deployed on one of those service for a service missions. They are, without a shadow of a doubt, the most well-remembered part of your reign."
 
That earned a small blush, and a smile. "You don't need to be so formal, Nyan. I won't keel over and die if you call me Miss Centrella, or heavens forbid, Kyalla."
 
"Then yes, I'm familiar with the 'service for a service' policy… Kyalla."
 
For this, I got a warm smile, and the Magestrix- my head of state!- taking my arm in hers. "Then you'll understand why I'm concerned when Hanse Davion requests with all formality to receive five hundred doctors and nurses to New Avalon in order to help staff and develop a medical research wing."
 
My mouth dropped. "Did- did I hear that correctly?"
 
"Five hundred, yes. They are allowed and encouraged to bring a company of Mechwarriors as escort, to be quartered at the First Prince's expense, under standard terms of the contract."
 
Which meant in return Hanse could send a company back to sit around here- and if he sent, say, a company of the Davion Heavy Guard, there was fuck and all we could do about it except pretend to be cowboys and plant a nuke under their barracks. Needless to say, that was not going to happen. It was an incredible security risk- but five hundred House Davion technicians was an entire three years of engineering graduates from the majority of the technical campuses around Canopus IV, and would have a very qualitative advantage to boot.
 
It was no secret that, outside of the tech programs needed for the medical industry, tech had Declined. The Star League had very deliberately split up critical industries during the occupation so that no one planet could have any hope of remilitarizing. If you were going to build a Tri-V set, for example, one planet would build the casing while a second did the actual screen and the third did electronics, before it all got shipped somewhere else for final assembly. When the Star League worked, it meant massive economic booms as every planet had a massive degree of secondary industries to support their primary industries of building tiny parts of a dozen major systems. When the Star League didn't work, it meant that same planet had its knees cut out from under it, unable to assemble finished goods for consumer or military purposes, and thereby fell apart. Canopus, as occupied territory, had been hit especially hard. Our modern ultrasound machines (critical for EMS and battlefield wound examination), for example, had an explicit JumpShip loop attached to their production- thirty stops over the course of a year, just to move the parts around before final assembly here on Canopus.
 
With Hanse's help, we could rebuild. My Light PPC concept line, the flagging consumer goods industries, Majesty Metals and Manufacturing's shit-tier Shadow Hawk line… this wasn't a pancea to our woes. It was an immunization against further decay, though, and the House of Davion to me had always been loyal in the operations of our medical missions. Even when Canopus had been at war with them through the Trinity Alliance, our doctors had been safe and the costs to keep them fully operational were paid gladly.
 
I trusted the Davions with this- but this was Hanse. The Arch-Bastard himself, the Ur-plotter, the creator of the most powerful alliance of interests since the Star League, the one who brought two Carrion Lords to their knees and helped birth another two states by complete accident. If there was one Davion who I couldn't trust on reputation alone, it was this one that spawned a dynasty.
 
"This is-" I said, starting and stopping around the concept that had gotten stuck in my throat. "Magestrix-"
 
"For once, I'll let you use that title, since this seems to be about that level of importance."
 
"Thanks."
 
That earned me a Royal Sniff.
 
"Anyway," I said, flushing a little and moving on. "Hanse's offer. I'm going to suggest taking it, for three reasons."
 
"Go on."
 
"First and foremost, our people will be safer than his. While our Battlemech forces aren't up to his, our infantry aren't too far off- and we have a lot more troops we can dual-purpose utilize than him. Our standard contract should have provisions for supporting technicians, so we can hypothetically pack a battalion of "assistants" ready to protect our elements if NAIS gets raided or Hanse tries to stab us in the back. By contrast, even if he sends the Davion Heavy Guard, we can just use creative billeting to make sure they're ideally placed against outside threats- and not internal ones."
 
"Betraying the Fox isn't in the cards, but a valid point."
 
"It bore mentioning," I said, the calculations of war cooling my emotions. "Second, the pure economics of it. See finance ministry stuff."
 
A nod, and I braced myself for the final point. This one… this was gonna be the hard one. This was the discussion of a major affair of state, plus that of a mother and her daughter. Sensing this, Kyalla stopped, looking up at me expectantly- and with a start, I realized I was bigger, if only by a short few centimeters, than the Magestrix.
 
"I won't be offended," Kyalla said gently, putting a hand on my arm with a small smile. "For all you came from a place rife with Liao treachery, you're still Canopian. You're still one of us."
 
I breathed in deeply. "My third point: you can talk Hanse into letting Emma study at the New Avalon Military Academy. It's coterminal with NAIS, it's directly under Hanse's personal guard, and most importantly it's the best school in the Inner Sphere."
 
Looking at the Magestrix, at Kyalla, I heard a soft sigh. "I can understand the thought. I can empathize with the thought. I can even agree with the thought. That doesn't mean I have to like it. She's the last trace I have of my late husband, and a valuable advisor in her own right. I want the best for her, and this- this-"
 
"We have time," I reminded her quietly. "You don't need to rush into this."
 
"No, I do," Kyalla disagreed. "After my mother passed, I had to move fast. I never learned how to slow down, how to think things through properly. Emma is my better half, that way- she's the thinker, like my husband was. Damn Leaguers- taking what was good from me like that."
 
Taking my arm again, Kyalla started moving us around the gardens, the sun starting to dip towards the horizon. "You said my daughter was becoming a fine Mechwarrior?"
 
"Absolutely. We can fit her for her C-DNI system at your convenience now."
 
"Good. If Andurien is serious about their willingness to participate in our hypothetical humbling of the Liaos, then it's time they put their dedication on the line. I'll have to send the Succubus, but that's why we own her. That, plus Andurien droppers…"
 
"The Succubus?" I asked, having completely lost the damn plot halfway through all that.
 
"The secret weapon of the Centrella dynasty: a Merchant-class JumpShip," Kyalla said with a vixen smile, "with a complete map set given to her by Kerensky himself. We know every dead system in the Inner Sphere- and more importantly, have mapped out an emergency route through nearly every Spheroid power without going into inhabited territory. If we jump out of Oriente, there's a route to cut clean through the Confederation without ever being seen.
 
"And it'll give Hanse a well-deserved heart attack when he sees a Canopian jumpship come out of nowhere screaming diplomatic codes in the middle of the Capellan March," I said with a grin.
 
"We just need Andurien to supply the droppers, I've got the jumper, and your troops will serve as the base of my contingent on New Avalon. Would Dr. Szeny or Dr. Gallowglass be better to send as a medical expert to oversee Emma's implants?"
 
"Dr. Szeny- my mother is a doctorate of pharmaceuticals, not the actual brain surgeon."
 
"Very good. She'll lead the intelligence-gathering segment. Meanwhile, your team will be deployed with one job."
 
"Keep Emma safe?"
 
"Yes. Keep my daughter safe, if its the last thing you do."
 
I nodded. "You have my word- Emma will come home."
 
"Good!" Kyalla said with a smile. Looking around, I noticed we were starting into a well-hedged rose garden, with very poor lines of sight in and out. My trap sense was tingling as we sat down on a bench, almost invisible in the greenery. "That said, I want you to come back too."
 
"Thank you," I said gently. "I want to come back, too."
 
"Then let me give you one more reason," Kyalla said gently, before pushing me down as she straddled my lap with a smile. This was quite the lurid pose- and we were in a closed-off rose garden. One with poor lines of sight into or out of.
 
Oh.
 
Ohhhhhhhh.
 
"As much as I would like to-" I said, trying to object, before Kyalla kissed me senseless. It wasn't hard, mind, since I had a things for MILFs, but I still had to object. Coming up for air, I tried to work up an unamused look. "Can I at least call my girlfriend?"
 
There we go, old reliable get-out-of-women-trouble foil deployed, I now had a chance to escape-
 
"Nyan? Hey, Nyan, are you in here?" a voice called out from the roses. It was Mersies? What the hell? "Nyan, I brought lunch like you asked. Pretty nice and romantic spot, I gotta admit!"
 
-fuck. Kyalla's grin was wide and generous. "He's over here!"
 
"Oh, thank you!"
 
Coming around the roses, Mersies finally got her eyes on me, with the Magestrix on my lap, complete with artfully smudged makeup. Dropping the picnic basket dramatically, my lancemate and long term partner in mischief ran up gasping.
 
"Nyan, no you didn't! You should have told me you wanted to!"
 
Kyalla gasped. "You, I didn't realize-"
 
"You should have told me we were going to double up on this, damnit! Otherwise I would have actually worn something fun, instead of leaving my piloting clothes on!"
 
It was at that point I rolled my eyes. Mersies: an unquenchable well of thirst, and more importantly, a critical part of my plans. We were a matched set, us two idiots. Kyalla could have both of us, or ideally neither of us.
 
Then she started licking her lips, and I came to the abrupt realization that oh shit, I was in an area with no witnesses and a lot of horny women. There were two ways that this could go, and I knew for a fact that Mersies was faster than me in a sprint so really, there's only one way that this could go with the addendum of "did I want my lancemate using a leg tackle as foreplay" as an optional.
 
Unfortunately for Kyalla, I was willing to risk the broken shins to get out of this.
 
Unfortunately for me, Mersies was willing to risk my broken shins to keep me in this.
 
Oh well. At least the girls were happy with the outcome.
----
====Off on a very long Trip====
Canopus System, Nadir Jump Point
Mule Dropship "Borzoi", attached to JumpShip Succubus
September 23th, 3022
After getting worked over in the rose garden, I had, for better or worse, surrendered to the pressures of Kyalla and Mersies to make our little menage-a-trois a permanent side activity until it was time to depart for New Avalon. Hanse had taken up the Magestry of the offer to tutor her heir, and we'd be making full speed to Andurien to pick up the rest of the crews that had been sent on ahead for loading into proper mass-transit DropShips. Unfortunately, packaging them all into one Mule wasn't practical, especially once we had it loaded to the gills with the MASH field hospital that would be serving as the operations theater for getting Emma turned into one of us. As such, we were carrying the combat crew only: my lance, an additional Partisan and Manticore to round out our armor lance properly, and a lance donated from the Magistracy Royal Guard to bring us up to the full company allotted to us by agreement. We also had three platoons of infantry crammed into the Mule with us, since infantry were basically free, and they served as useful tripwires for us so we mech pilots never had to stand a Ready 10 watch.
My lance was, aside from the frantic last-minute letters being written for off-planet factors, going balls to the wall stir-crazy. We'd done a bare few months ago a six-month trip across the Inner Sphere, and now we were out to do the whole damn thing all over again- which was not a fun time! Even if this Mule was a far more comfortable accommodation than our Leopard, it still came with problems: such as the constant, constant questions from the Royal Guard about our mechs or the Kid's Phoenix Hawk. Worse, we actually had to teach them how to help service our tech, since they'd be one of the first units to receive the new toys we were bringing online. Fortunately, for all that the bay was crammed to the brim with bits and bobs, there wasn't any actual mech cradles to fuck with the mechs. Sure, getting things fixed up when we got to New Avalon would be a bear and a half, but I'd be willing to put up with it.
 
Now, we were in the waiting phase. Waiting for Emma to finish recovering from her surgery, waiting for the JumpShip's core to charge, waiting for Andurien and Canopus to seal the shadow alliance they'd use to stab the Liaos in the face, waiting for our new tech and LosTech to come online… waiting.
 
That was fine, though. We could afford to wait. Knowing about the clock ticking was the first step. The second was surviving until it rang.
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