TTWTWT Chpt 8

==Tell The World That We Tried - Chapter 8==
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<<Previous Chapter - Return to Story Index - Next Chapter>>
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YOU BETTER LEAVE THIS DREAM ALONE...
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===Killing Two birds with one Stone===
In Orbit - Helm, Free Worlds League, 3016
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From inside the mechbay cubicle on Norway’s Greatest Son, all I could see directly was the inside of the massive segmented roll-away door that would eventually let me and my mech step out of the Leopard-class DropShip. I’d tuned all the cockpit screens to the external camera feeds, though, console multifunction displays and the more rarely used max-opacity mode on the Heads Up Displays filling my view with wisps and flows of fire.
 
The sky beyond that veil was black, the faint hints of blue that should have been there washed out by the heat corona of reentry, but the other DropShips of the flotilla - wrapped in their own fireballs and spikes of white fusion engine-blast - were brilliantly visible. Roland was in the top rear position, as befitted a de-facto command ship, and the entire combat drop was spread out in front of us - Max Mustermann, the LIC spook who’d helped us set this ‘contract’ up had found a Fortress, a Monarch, and another Condor to cover the rest of our transport needs, meaning that with the three Unions, Triumph, and Condor we’d already had, we were for the first time able to get all of our people down in one place in one go. The converted Mule that had ferried our extra fighters in was still in orbit, along with our Buccaneer, (obviously) the Behemoth, and all three Mammoths - they wouldn’t need to come down, if at all, until much later in the process - while the fighters themselves were smaller sparks scattered around the falling DropShips.
 
It was a hell of a force to have coming in on a world that both the Free Worlds League and the Stewart Commonality had to regard as practically a net loss.
 
On top of that, our approach was a full hostile-sky combat drop; the DropShips had left enough velocity to hit the outer edges of atmosphere at the very limits of what standard armor could dissipate while staying at ‘acceptable’ levels of erosion - and of the aerodynamically generated G-forces their structures and crews could withstand. An ordinary landing braked at whatever the ‘safe’ speed of that particular Dropship was, usually one-point-five G, fifteen meters per second per second, the technicality of Earth being ‘only’ 0.98 standard gravities having long been lost to everyone but the homeworld’s own inhabitants.
 
Between atmosphere and full burn at the engines, we’d peak at four gravities. With any luck, that would be the second most unpleasant part of the operation.
 
The most unpleasant part, I expected to have been talking Mustermann and his boss into signing off on the raid in the first place. In and of itself, I was fairly confident that that wouldn’t have been too big a problem, but I was I think understandably reluctant to tell them all the details without a contract guaranteeing me a share of the proceeds.
 
I would have, don’t get me wrong. The value of the Helm Core in arresting the technological decline the entire human galaxy was suffering was inestimable, and a moral imperative given the way the non-military technologies would save millions of lives from curable diseases and other avoidable causes…
 
But I wanted to hit at least two more birds with this stone, and giving the data over outright would only have hit one of them. The first was decisively changing the balance of power in the Inner Sphere in a way that fucking Comstar couldn’t counter - as long as the Successor States were closely-enough balanced in power to keep any one from getting a decisive advantage, the endless rounds of war and raid and counter-raid were going to continue. The upcoming Federated Commonwealth alliance - assuming that I hadn’t already butterflied it - would go a long way towards doing that, if I or someone else could butterfly the troubles that had ended the experiment in the game line…
 
But at these stakes, I wanted to load the dice with osmium pips, and the massive technological advantage that Helm could offer would do nicely.
 
The other objective I was after was enough in the way of personal resources to start taking aim at a more-than-incidental preparation for the largely inevitable invasion from Clan space - wealth, yes, but more importantly power and influence. A personal share in Helm would go a long, long way towards making those things happen.
.....
Obviously, I wanted to be rich, too, I’m not a saint. But that wasn’t the main reason. I hadn’t been sure about that, myself, to start with, but among the other topics of that conversation had been an alternate viewpoint I was sure I could trust.
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===Flashback - A Confession to a Lover===
Hospital - Fianna, Lyran Commonwealth, 3016
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“Is there… something you didn’t tell the others?” Sophitia asked, giving me a look that was half concerned about me and half worried about the other shoe dropping.
 
I tried to smile, but it came off as pretty wan even by the standards of ‘sitting in a hospital bed’. “Yeah, pretty much. It’s… things that I owe you, that you deserve to know, but…” I waved at the door that Sasagawa, Raven, Trigger and Suzuki had walked out of. “...Would’ve come with other secrets I couldn’t justify until now.” In spite of myself, I chuckled. “And another thing that… I couldn’t ask you until I’d done that.”
 
That didn’t make her comfortable, but she seemed less worried as she sat on the edge of my bed. I let myself slide against her hip with the mattress’s slump and squeezed her hand as she twisted to take mine.
 
We smiled at each other for a moment, then I took a deep breath and started, “When I said that I’d gotten all of this from… prophetic visions… That was the simplified take on it. What I actually remember is…”
 
I’d rehearsed this explanation in my head literally a hundred times and more. “Imagine if God himself came down and said, ‘I need someone to save these people’... and when you said yes, you woke up… in someone else’s body, in someone else’s life, with their memories in your head.”
 
Sophitia was considerably bigger and stronger, in the plain weightlifting sense, than I was. My hand felt like it was about to grind to powder. “When?”
 
I yelped in pain and confusion, and a moment after realized what she’d thought. “Before we met!” I blurted in a hurry.
 
She let go, looking guilty. “Sorry,” she mumbled.
 
I grabbed her hand right back and gave it a gentle, reassuring squeeze. “I picked a bad way to put it.” I said.
 
Sophitia leaned down to give me a kiss, but I raised a hand to check the motion. “Let me finish the rest of it, first.” I said. “That was… While I was sleeping off New Years Eve, at the very start of 3015. I’m… Assuming I’m not insane, because this sounds just as crazy to me as to anybody else. I’ve been kind of dividing my past into… Younger-me, whose face you know, and older-me, who lived that other life that. I’m pretty sure… this body’s original soul… has taken over and together they make me-me.”
 
She let me have my way and sat back up straight. “How much ‘older’?” she asked.
 
“Thirty-three,” I answered.
 
“That’d make you… thirty-five, now, assuming having two lives doesn’t add together.” Sophitia said. “Still in half-plus-seven, though the other way around.”
 
I hesitated for a second, then had to blink as she started giggling. “What?” I asked.
 
“I just realized why you’ve got such a huge thing about boobs,” she replied. “You were a guy.”
 
...That was it? I’d been worrying about, lying to her about, for more than a year, and all she had to say was...
 
She went from giggles to full on gales of laughter at the face I was making, and this time she did manage to give me a kiss. “In retrospect, it’s obvious enough I should have figured that there was a trip to Canopus in your past,” she said lightly. “So, before you worry anymore: I don’t mind that, and I don’t blame you for not wanting to talk about it.”
 
Despite my lingering indignation, I sat up and gave her a hug. “Thank you.” I mumbled into her shoulder.
 
We stayed like that until my back started to ache, and I slumped back against the pillows.
 
“And the last bit?” Sophitia prompted, before I could say anything.
 
I pouted, again.
 
She laughed, again.
 
I took a deep breath and then took the plunge, trying to explain everything I could about Battletech, and the way I was guessing it connected to the world we lived in.
 
Sophitia stared at me for several seconds.
 
“Ash…” she said slowly.
 
“...Yes?” I answered nervously.
 
“Get rid of the drugs immediately.”
 
I hit her with one of my pillows.
 
“More seriously,” she said, through her giggles as she warded me off with one arm. “I can see why you keep sounding so worried about if you’re crazy or not.”
 
I sighed and laid the pillow on my lap. “...Yeah,” I said. “That’s… one of the reasons I’m so… happy you decided to put up with me. Having you around to… check on me. Y’know?”
 
“We really need to work on your self-esteem, Ash,” she observed.
 
And the rest of the evening is none of your business.
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===Engaging the Natives===
Outskirts of Castle Helmfast - Free Worlds League Helm, 3016
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We got through Max Q without… significant… incident, and landed about fifteen minutes from Castle Helmfast. That was a little closer than I’d call ideal - our infantry contingent would still be disembarking when the mercenary landholders, Cade’s Mounted Cavalry, showed up, unless the latter were exceptionally sluggish - but bringing as many DropShips as we had down, even with all of them being supposedly rough-field capable, took a good amount of open flat space, and Helm as a planet was short of that.
 
On the other hand, since we got the artillery out of their Condor in the first wave, that meant that we had the castle itself in range from the get go.
 
That taken care of, we settled in to unload the rest of our people and material, forming a perimeter out of mechs and tanks alike while a seemingly endless parade of pickup trucks rolled down the ramps of the infantry carriers.
 
Well, I call them that, and they met the technical definitions of the term - engine, cab, and bed in that order on two axles - but I’d have been genuinely shocked to see them on any kind of road in the twentieth century. Even the most blatantly compensatory F-1050 would have stepped to one side and said ‘yes sir’ to these monsters… And from the wear-and-tear visible all over them, every one of them had been an actual working vehicle for longer than I’d been alive, rather than spending its days crouched in a suburban driveway posing macho-ly.
 
Tech base differences are a heck of a drug.
 
It was all going swimmingly, so of course one of the scouts we’d sent out on the first batch of technicals radio’d in.
 
“King, Etienne Sword 2 Alpha, here, at Overlook 4. We have Battlemechs in-sight, estimate battalion-plus strength. Red plaid livery, no unit ID yet. Inbound from the southeast.”
 
Aaand there was the other shoe.
 
“Has to be the Juggernaut,” Reyes contributed over the command lance channel. “Stewart house regiment. Hit-and-run types, cavalry and fast cavalry, played hard - rush in, knock your teeth in, rush out. Most of the time they’re out showing the flag in the greater League, but they got the crap beat out of them over in Anton’s Rebellion. Makes sense that hazing new blood into the lodge’d have them back on Helm. Coming back to their ancestral spawning grounds, like salmon.
 
“Fought them before on… Shit, Second Try, I think? Not fun, but we’re running heavier today.”
 
“That explains why we haven’t seen Cade.” I muttered.
 
“Yeah. Back of my neck is starting to itch.” Reyes confirmed.
 
It took me a moment to figure out what he was worried about. If the Juggernaut was coming up from the far side of where we’d expected Cade’s Mounted Cavalry, it was a sure bet that the two units were planning to hit us from opposite sides at the same time. “Okay,” I said. “I want infantry to go to ground, find any cover you can and assume ambush stations. Tare, form on Joker, we’ll be covering the northwest approach. Dealer, stand by for counterbattery, this is Stewart. Spade Actual, looks like we’re doing it your way; I’ll leave the timing to you. Everybody else, form for action to the southeast.”
 
Marauder No. 2 was safely tucked away in a warehouse on Fianna, still badly damaged, so the mech I was riding today was one of the backups we hadn’t had pilots or room on the standard table of organization for. In honor of that status, it had been christened Benchwarmer. Copying over the whole challenge-response database I’d created was something I’d been careful to do myself, but hadn’t been particularly complicated.
 
<{“Present identification.”}>
 
“Asha Blackwing.”
 
<{“A rhapsody!”}> the computer declared, after a moment of checking my voice and other identifiable patterns. <{“Contestants in disguise!”}>
 
“A nation of desire,” I replied, “but who will win the prize?”
 
<{“Reactor, Online. Sensors, Online. Communication Systems, Online. Armor, Full. Ammunition, Full. Weapons Systems, Online. All functioning systems, nominal.”}>
 
The Juggernauts were just as much fast-movers as I’d heard. They managed to hit the line forming to receive them before the last element - Roger company’s Pumas - could even get into position. The year of practice and experience between now and the battle on Hoff made more of a difference than I was expecting - I wouldn’t say that it was easy, but I could follow the chatter from my side to visualize and keep track of the way the League unit was pushing one battalion forward, dashing in a company at a time to try and reach in among our armor and take them out quickly, cutting down on the firepower coming at them that way.
 
The other battalion was hanging back, keeping long range fire on my people and trying to cover the forward attackers. The only time they waded in was when Lu’s people in Able got too focused on finishing the company that they were chasing and made themselves vulnerable.
 
That got pretty hectic, but by the lull at the end of it. Lu was on the line, saying, “I think I know why they’re holding that battalion back. They folded pretty quick once we concentrated fire, and there’s some weapons missing. I’ll bet you they’ve got unrepaired battle damage.”
 
“That’d make sense,” I replied. “Did you get what Spade needs?”
 
“Yeah, all three of ‘em are dialed all the way in.”
 
“Only three?”
 
“You know that type don’t carry much in the way of armor. If they got handled as rough as it looks like they did, it’d make sense that only a handful of ‘em made it. They aren’t Capellans, we should be seeing another battalion rather than just two overstrength-ish ones. I’ll bet you they reorged just for us,” Clair said.
“Target spotted,” Reyes broke in. “Locust poked up out of the pass for a second.”
 
“You give Spade what she wants and don’t take any silly chances,” I said, waggling a joystick to test the swing of Benchwarmer’s arms one last time. “We can handle ourselves here.”
 
“Affirmative. Good hunting, Boss. Able Club Actual, out.”
 
That Locust driver either realized he’d been spotted or was taking one last preparatory peek; moments after the line closed, an alarm wailed as thirteen BattleMechs brought their combat sensors up to full activity and popped up well inside the usual sensor range.
 
Somebody in one of the Scorpions hull down in the creekbed behind me was praying into the open line. Three lances, one overstrength - a trio of Locusts and a Hermes II hanging back, a Firestarter, Javelin, Phoenix Hawk, and Wasp coming right in, and in the middle a fivepack of three Griffins, a Wolverine, and something that I didn’t recognize.
 
“What is that?” Setsuka asked, even as she was standing her Atlas up out of the copse of trees she’d insisted would be able to hide it. From the way none of the Mounted Cav even paused, her idea hadn’t worked.
 
“I’ll be damned. A Gladiator,” Reyes answered. “Looks like a Four-Romeo. PPC, sixpack missiles, a couple of em-ells.”
 
Fit right in with the rest of the command lance, then. We knew that Cade used a modified Griffin, but that wouldn’t be obvious until he opened fire…
 
Setsuka was the first to open up, long-range missiles machinegunning out of her Atlas’s launcher to fall around the Gladiator. Reyes flushed his missile racks next, and all three Griffins replied before the salvos were flying too thickly to track individually.
 
Well, for me to track. “There, that one!” Sophitia said, breaking into a run as a target designator settled on one of the Griffins. “Five-tube launcher, not a ten, that’s Cade.”
I lumbered after her, aiming for the Firestarter. “Right, all yours, Soph.”
 
The PPC hit, the cannon burst missed. I could see the moment when the Firestarter’s pilot tried to target me in return, the stutter of confusion. I fired again once the heat scale had cooled, missing with both shots this time, and this time he was in range to try and return the favor with the laser dominating his right arm, missing wildly.
 
That was all he wanted; he swerved and bounded up the nearest hill, landing and sprinting for the nearest gully.
The medium lance was pouring all their fire into Setsuka. With the Firestarter and its spraying flamers in retreat, I shifted targets to the Wolverine. PPC, miss, autocannon, hit. A rush of tracers around my cockpit reminded me that there were Locusts in the fight; once the battle was joined they had rushed forwards to try and apply the wolf pack. I aimed my medium lasers at the nearest of the three, and naturally missed.
 
The other two ran afoul of Sophitia; one checked as her main laser burned away most of the armor protecting its torso, while the second had jinked a bit too close and wasn’t able to get away in time when she hit her jump jets, sidestepping - sidejetting? - into reach. She snipped its nearer leg out from under it with one precise sword-swipe, tons of sharpened metal shearing neatly through the smaller mech’s knee joint.
I was into laser range of the Wolverine now; I gave him both of them and the left-arm PPC besides. He was focused on evading Setsuka and Reyes’ missiles and ate all three shots. I glanced at the display. Confection, the Atlas, was down to about half armor but still holding.
I added the autocannon to my own salvo, and missed this time. The next wave of missiles landing on it didn’t blow the right arm off in any kind of dramatic fashion, but they’d obviously crippled something critical near the shoulder; the entire limb, and its 8cm laser, slumped uselessly.
“They’re running,” Reyes said, before I could pinpoint what had changed about the Mounted Cav’s movements.
 
“Don’t worry, I have him,” Sophitia said, firing on the literal run and shooting low, so that almost all of the damage went into the Griffin’s legs.
 
My console blatted as I fired at the Wolverine again. INCOMING ARTILLERY was a poor warning for the way the entire hillside above us erupted. Lesser shells couldn’t have done that; only a Long Tom’s 25cm high explosive could unleash that kind of apocalypse in one shot.
 
I flipped channels. “Dealer, Joker-” I started.
 
((“We saw it, Joker. Calculating counterbattery now.”)) Alevito replied.
“Understood,” I said. “Joker, Out.”
 
I spared a glance at the damage displays for the tanks; they were fine, and the light lance that had tried to make a play for them was being badly battered by the storm of shells they were sending down range.
 
Cade was limping, we could probably get him, but…
 
I opened a general channel. “Colonel Cade, this is Colonel Blackwing,” I said. “We both know how this side of the battle is going to end. If you power down and exit your 'mechs, I’ll guarantee your right to keep them, including downed ones.”
 
<<“How the hell are you doing that targeting spoof?”>> was the answer I got after a moment.
 
“Ask Morgan Kell.” I said.
 
“All I have to do is hang on until the - FUCK!” Even while he was speaking, Sophitia had fired again and wrecked the thigh armor of his Griffin, melting the myomers that supported the machine’s weight and sending it tumbling down to the ground. With a bit of time, he could lock the joint and get it limping on its feet again, but with her already on his case…
 
Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the Javelin go tumbling, one of its arms spinning free as Setsuka brought her autocannon into range and vaporized one of its torso compartments with a 165mm burst.
 
<<“All right! All right, we surrender.”>> Cade said.
 
“Thank you,” I said politely, while the Scorpions stopped firing and Reyes and Sophitia backed off a bit.
 
A moment later, I added, “Setsuka!” in my best Angry Mom Voice, getting her to bring her Atlas to a halt before she could finish stomping on the legless Locust. “Fine,” she said unhappily.
 
I checked the armor states while Cade’s people started dismounting. “Tare, pull out and head to join the rest. Reyes, take charge of the prisoners; Carter, back him up. Soph, with me. Colonel Cade, we’ll speak later.”
 
Despite my best efforts, we only got to the main battle in time to see the endgame. At what I later learned was Sasagawa’s cue, Clair had swung the entire mech battalion forward into an all out assault, forcing both of the Juggernaut battalions to focus all of their attention on him.
The first sign of why the Marik regiment got was one of its Riflemen exploding apocalyptically, and then another. Moments later, the fighters whose autocannons had found their weak rear armor flashed silently by overhead - and a second later, the shattering sonic boom followed them.
 
The Blackjack that was the last surviving air defense mech the Juggernaut had turned and started to reorient its guns, but its pilot was aiming after the two Lightnings, not thinking ahead to what might be following them. The Shilone that hit him with a strike didn’t have the sheer crushing punch of the two gunship fighters, but what it did have was more than enough to put the battered medium down.
 
The rest of the air wing arrived in a mass, like a flock of vultures descending in a rain of laser fire. Strafing wasn’t as dangerous or as effective as the tabletop game made it out to be, but it made a hell of a mess nonetheless, with nearly a company of already damaged mechs falling under the onslaught, and many more staggering as armor slabbed free.
<<“Dealer, weapons free!”>> Clair radioed, and for three or four seconds, there was a lull as the Juggernaut pieced their senses back together and started to reorganize. Then eighteen different places across their formation exploded in almost perfect unison as the battery-wide artillery salvo landed, causing nearly as many casualties as the fighter strike. “At ‘em, Blackwings!”
 
They went at them, and Sophitia and I pushed into a downhill run to follow.
 
Up until that the one-two punch Sasagawa had planned out, the Juggernaut had been holding fairly even; we’d lost four mechs, they’d lost three. Counting our tanks as a half a mech each, that left the odds at 74-72 - very close to even, and, given the higher proportion of experienced people in the Marik ranks, probably to their advantage.
 
But having twenty-six mechs ripped out of their ranks in the space of less than a minute was a serious problem for any unit. If nothing else, they’d have needed time to reorient and reorganize, to figure out who the senior surviving officers were and what assets they had to work with, and Lu Clair’s order meant they weren’t getting it. Worse, the instinct to close ranks and bunch up was at work, and I saw another half a dozen mechs badly damaged as scatters of Sniper and Long Tom artillery shells fell onto defensive clusters.
 
Our artillery crews weren’t all that good, yet, and they knew it just as well as anybody in the rest of the unit. More often than not, the shots were long or wide - they very reasonably figured it was better to miss that way than to hit short and drop a salvo among our own forces - but there were enough of the Juggernaut on the field that all that meant was different Marik mechs losing armor to the shockwaves.
 
It was too much. One moment, we were fighting, maybe winning but making a hard go of it, trying to keep mixed up with them while they tried to withdraw in order. The next, they were breaking, buckling, red-painted mechs falling with every salvo and then what was left was running.
 
Combat Loss Grouping, when all the armor runs out across the entire force, all at once.
 
I put a long-range salvo into the last mech to reach the safety of the far pass, two bolts of man-made lightning and a quarter of my remaining cannon ammo, and saw the Quickdraw stagger and measure its length in the scree when one of the beams hit already-weak leg armor. Flights of missiles from several different Centurions made sure it didn’t get up again.
 
“All companies, count losses and damage and report.” I ordered, slowing Benchwarmer to a halt. Everything that the Juggernaut had had left was faster than all of our units but Dog Company - and those were light mechs that hadn’t liked the rough handling of this fight at all.
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===Debriefing===
Cade's Mounted Cavalry Base, Outskirts of Helmfast - Free Worlds League Helm, 3016
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“Well, you’ve made your rep.” was Cade’s first comment when I dismounted to talk to him. A couple of infantry squads had collected him and brought him back to base, and apparently they’d been gossiping. “Forty mechs down for the Jugs? And another company crippled? Not a bad day’s work.”
 
“Thank you, Captain.” I said, sitting down crosslegged on one of the big camp chairs the infantry had set out - that way, the warm jacket I’d tossed on over my cockpit gear could give some protection against the biting chill of what passed for a Helm summer. I’d called him ‘Colonel’ earlier, because that was the more-or-less standard title for a mercenary commander, but given the size of his unit, I’d since learned he’d been more modest. “It’s not what we came here to do, though, and all else equal I’d rather not have dealt with the trouble.”
 
We’d lost eight mechs and a dozen tanks, plus vast amounts of battle damage that would need to be repaired on the survivors - and about eighty dead, including the infantry platoons that had been found by Juggernaut outriders while I was fighting the Cav.
 
If Cade thought the sight of my petite, pretty self huddling into an oversized coat was odd, he didn’t give any sign of it. For that matter, he was wrapped in a blanket, too.
 
“...You’re cache-hunting?” he guessed dubiously. It wasn’t a hard one, since the mysterious fate of Major Keeler’s depot was so tied to the world’s history.
 
“We are.” I admitted, and leaned forward slightly. “And speaking of, our actual objective in this battle are certain regalia of the Helm landhold. Things that have been passed down from that period.”
 
“A belt, pistol, and map chip?” he asked skeptically, then raised his free hand defensively as I started to glare. “Okay, okay. I keep ‘em in my office safe. Code’s 06-11-29-76.”
 
I wasn’t able to resist giving him an incredulous look. “Your birthday?” I guessed.
 
He looked a little offended. “My ex-wife’s.”
 
I sighed and shook my head as I waved for an aide. Setsuka started to flounce over, ruffles bouncing as she offered Cade a cutesy smile that was just off enough to raise the hair on the back of my neck. “Thank you for your cooperation.” I said.
 
“You’d ask as hard as you had to, wouldn’t you?” he answered. “I wouldn’t gain anything trying to hold back, not when you’ve got a straight flush on the table.”
 
I pulled a post-it pad out of one of my jacket’s inside pockets and scribbled the info Cade had given me onto one, handing it to Setsuka, who bounced off to pass it to Suzuki. She’d take a mixed heavy battalion and one of the infantry regiments to Helmfast to collect our prizes. “I’m grateful not to have to.” I admitted.
 
“Grateful enough to let me see if you can pull it off?” he asked, after a moment.
 
I looked at him while I thought it over. “I’d intended to just release you and yours with a parole not to take contract against the Commonwealth for ten years or so,” I said. “But, if we let you watch while we work, that’d leave you able to sell those stories.”
 
“And Steiner’d rather it didn’t get out?” he finished, then sighed. “What the hell. Our rep is probably fucked anyway. Let me talk to my people, and then we’ll see if you could use another mech company.”
 
Uh, what?
 
“Uh, what?” I said.
 
Cade laughed at me. “Marik’s already going to be pissed off about today. My bowing out won’t make ‘em any happier, and it’ll have our MRB rating right in the toilet, even if I was willing to go back to the poisonous shits on hands and knees. Signing on with another unit wouldn’t be my first pick, but it’s better than scrambling to get to Galatea with all the hounds of Atreus on our heels.”
 
“Probably true,” I admitted. “What would we need to do transport-wise?”
 
“I write to my kid every few weeks anyway. Slip the right code word into a telegram and his mother will know to grab up all the extended family our people’ll need to worry about and get them onto her DropShip. Our jumper’s in Stewart right now anyway, they can latch on and get here quick.”
 
I winced. “That could be a problem. We were planning on being gone by the time our JumpShips were charged again.”
 
He whistled. “You think you can pull off finding the cache that quick?”
 
I started to explain, then caught myself. “Let’s get the signing papers settled and we can lay all our cards down.”
 
Cade smiled. “Let’s get started, then.”
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===The Cave of Wonders===
Major Cade's Office, Cade's Mounted Cavalry - Fianna, Lyran Commonwealth, 3016
The Mounted Cavalry had a Union DropShip and a Merchant JumpShip to their name, the former modified to pull its fighter bays in favor of another two mech cubicles. The Whitworth that would have filled the last one was still back at their base, undergoing complete overhaul to try and fix persistent mechanical problems.
 
“Worst case, then,” I said, “we empty the Leopard and leave it behind. What kind of dropship does your ex own?”
 
“Him marry her for Mule,” Cade’s second informed me in the heaviest Capellan accent I’d ever heard, grinning wickedly.
 
Hence explaining ex-wife, I imagined. “That’s… harder to decide,” I admitted. “Probably Jungle Work, the Buccaneer, if needs must. Do you have a way to direct them to a different rendezvous?”
 
Cade tilted his head. “Whatcha mean?”
 
“Send them into Lyran space rather than having them try to link up with us directly. That’d save a lot of time.”
 
He shook his head. “Not really.”
 
“Damn,” I said, and sighed. “Well, we’ll see.”
 
Suzuki was all but bouncing on her feet like the schoolgirl she looked like, her ponytail bobbing happily behind her with each motion. Her earlier resentment and discontent washed away by the prospect that I had actually been right when I predicted what we’d find here on Helm.
 
I leaned over the table and opened the box she’d pulled from Cade’s safe. Belt, gun, folder of - I flipped through it - fake passports and IDs for him and several different subordinates - small coin collection, and…
 
“Here… we… go…” I breathed reverently, picking the map chip up. It looked remarkably innocuous; the form factor had survived the Succession Wars and I’d handled dozens of the things before, but this one was… “Right. Let’s go,” I said, and turned and hurried towards the waiting Leopard.
 
There was a babble of questions from those that hadn’t already been read in, but Cade and his man Wei followed, along with the squads of ‘bodyguards’ still watching them, Mustermann, and everyone who’d heard my panicked recording - Raven, and Suzuki, Shao the tech, and Sophitia, both of them carrying cameras.
 
I latched onto the grab bar next to one of the Leopard’s few external viewports for the entire flight over, watching the landscape roll by underneath. I was glad we were flying; I’d - Older Me - had grown up in Terra’s Appalachian Mountains, and these were at least as rugged.
 
I had a good view as we landed; the dry riverbed in its valley, the great vertical slab of stone the size of Seneca Rocks…
The bunker.
 
I headed to the airlock and jittered there until the light went green, stepping out into the blazing heat that the Leopard’s vertical landing jets had seared into the now-fused stone and earth below. A breeze came up, whipping through the heat like ice.
 
I realized that, though I was wearing high boots and my jacket, all I had on underneath was my piloting gear, and the list of ‘exposed skin’ still left open to that wind included about four inches of thigh.
 
Well, at least future generations of schoolboys would have zettai ryouiki to console them in the boredom of classes about this.
 
I headed for the bunker, not quite at a run but certainly a brisk powerwalk. Of course, I had the shortest legs there, so I didn’t exactly leave anyone behind, but…
 
Inside. Terminal, input dock, there. On, close the dock… reading…
 
I hurried, actually running this time, back out of the bunker to watch. I don’t know if anybody tried to talk to me; all my attention was on…
 
A neatly rectangular section of the rock wall in front of us shifted, sliding inwards and rotating up out of the way, inches at a time.
 
Beside me, I heard Mustermann mutter something in German; tone told me that it meant ‘Fuuuuck meeee’.
 
“What do you see?” Cade asked from inside the bunker.
 
“...Wonderful things.” I replied, and started towards that giant door.
 
It was a substantial walk, but it didn’t feel like it. The moment didn’t allow anything so petty, any more than it allowed me to care about the goosebumps my thighs were getting.
 
Inside was an echoing cavern that reminded me of an airplane museum - like the USAF Museum in Dayton, or the Uvar-Hazy Center in Washington - rendered in stone, with a surprisingly innocuous little concrete shed next to the mech-sized tunnel that led off into the dark.
 
“Star League Field Library,” Cade read from behind me. “What does that mean?”
 
I walked towards the shed. “It means that Major Keeler had higher ambitions, and darker forebodings, than merely hiding military materiel for later use,” I said. I laid my hand on the powered door button, just as, in another world, Grayson Carlyle would have, and stepped inside, sliding into the chair before the terminal.
 
Fortunately, my already chilled skin didn’t make me actually yelp at how cold the thing was.
 
Unlike Carlyle, I’d brought the map chip with me.
 
“Open sesame.” I whispered.
 
“The Advancement and diffusion of knowledge is the only true guardian of liberty.” -- James Madison
 
“It’s really real,” Doctor Raven breathed from behind us. “The Prometheus database…”
 
“Or at least as good an imitation as Keeler’s people were able to assemble out of what they had available on Helm.” I agreed, and took a deep, careful breath - then got out of the chair, waving him forward. “Doctor Raven, if you’d be so good as to do the honors?”
 
He sat down and immediately started working his way through the interface.
 
I leaned over his shoulder. “Our first priority is a map of the complex.” I said quietly. “So we know where to bring the DropShips down. Second is positive control over the facility self-destruct. Third is how to duplicate the core, and if there are ways to put it into more easily accessed formats - I know it’s coded.”
 
He glanced over at me, then nodded sharply. “I understand.” he said, seriously enough that I knew he really did.
-----
===...there was an attempt===
Star League Field Library - Helm, Free Worlds League - 3016
-----
Three hundred and fifty-one battlemechs. Four hundred sixty-seven tanks and other combat vehicles. A hundred and sixty-eight aerospace fighters. Damn near thirty-seven hundred stands of infantry arms, including personal armor. A hundred and fifty-two thousand four hundred and nineteen tons of munitions, electronics, armor panels, and every other damned thing under the sun, all of it somewhere between valuable and literally priceless.
We’d been on Helm for a week and a half, three times longer than I’d planned, and working like dogs every second of it, but we had every single scrap of the cache loaded safely aboard. A full twenty-four hours after lifting and a quarter of the way to the Jump Point, I was going through the morning paperwork after sleeping for about fourteen hours when Max Mustermann followed a knock into my little cubicle of an office aboard Norway’s Greatest Son.
 
He sat down across from me in the visitor’s chair without asking permission and looking like he hadn’t slept since we first landed on Helm, and considered me thoughtfully. “You knew about the memory core ahead of time.”
 
“I did,” I admitted. “That’s why I set the contract up the way I did, with a handful of ‘first pick items’ - to cover the core and the duplicates we’d need to make for redundancy and safety reasons.”
 
“And the Battlemech share rates were only to get the Commonwealth to buy in while you nabbed the real prize.” Mustermann shook his head and smiled. “Brilliantly done. And now?”
 
“Now, Tharkad,” I said. “Probably we’ll land most of the load on Hesperus or Fianna, first, but the selling the core needs to go through the Archon.”
 
“Not really,” he countered. “I will, I admit, need to contact my superiors for the specific releases, but LIC’s budget can be stretched for a windfall of this magnitude.”
 
I couldn’t help snorting. “That database has Hegemony terraforming technology in it,” I said. “I’d be shocked if the eventual economic value of that is less than half the current gross economy of the entire Commonwealth. The deal I was intending to offer was along the lines of forming a company to disseminate and exploit the core’s data, forty percent each to myself and a Commonwealth sovereign wealth fund, nine percent between the members of the unit, and eleven percent to House Steiner in specific.”
 
“Disseminate?” he hissed, looking horrified. “The coding techniques alone are the greatest single intelligence windfall in centuries! It would be criminally irresponsible to reveal even its existence publicly, let alone spread it! You cannot be serious.”
 
“I’m completely serious,” I said. “Classifying the medical sub-database, for instance, would be indefensible in the face of the humanitarian benefits it would grant. The military hardware sections, on the other hand, we can lock down as tight as we like - there’s no need to treat the entire core as all of a piece.”
 
“‘Humanitarian’,” he grumbled automatically. “You sound like that weakling of an Ar-”
 
Too late, his exhausted brain caught up with his words and snapped his mouth shut.
 
I stared at him silently.
 
He stared at me silently.
 
“Loki, then.” I said quietly.
 
For a moment, he started to deny it, then sighed. “I am a Loki operative, yes,” he said. “Treason from a planetary duke is very much a matter of concern to the true guardians of the Lyran state.”
 
I took a deep, careful breath. Loki agents were, by definition, insane, but… “The question of what to do with the core was very much on my mind from the beginning. I selected the Lyran Commonwealth as my… let’s say favored buyer… largely on the strength of Archon Katrina’s personal character. Even without that limit, though, I think that the largest benefit to the Commonwealth will rely on broad usage of the core’s data.”
 
“How so?” he asked, with a slight tilt of his head.
 
“First, improvements to the quality of life of Lyran citizens will need them to have access to the core’s technology and that tech’s products. Some classes of improvement can be centralized, but others - again, medical tech comes to mind - need to be broadly spread to be effective. Even in those cases where secure central production is possible, like terraforming system components, that’s largely going to be a bad idea. Again, look at the way so many worlds suffered ecological or environmental collapses when the Hegemony’s supply of that same gear was lost. It introduces an unnecessary risk.
 
“Second, the, umm, competitive advantage of the Lyran Commonwealth is its economic efficiency and productivity. That’s another thing that relies on broad sourcing of knowledge, both in terms of startups and refinement of techniques - by all means, do what we can to restrict movement outside the borders, but we can rely on corporate secrets and their procedures to do as much of that as we actually need.
 
“Third, and most direct to military applications, a lot of what’s been lost in the Succession Wars isn’t theoretical knowledge that we can just pull out of the Core and apply, it’s tools, and the tools to build the tools. I, or at least Doctor Raven, could tell you the theory of how the League built fusion engines half the weight of what we have now, but without that… infrastructure, I could never build one. NAIS, or a Tharkad Institute of Technology and Science, maybe could - but they couldn’t build enough to field a company, and we’ll need regiments to settle these fucking wars once and for all.”
He looked at me, and I knew he wasn’t going to go for it. “I appreciate, I genuinely welcome, your desire to adopt the Commonwealth as your new home,” he said gently. “But you’ve missed two things. First, you mistake the effect of Lyran superiority, the wealth of the state, for its cause - the Commonwealth’s success has always and will always rest on the triumph of the will, the will that guards and shapes the peace in which that prosperity grows, protected. Second, you focus far too much on the direct and open movements of military power, regiments and the factories that support them. Real triumph and failure are matters of intelligence, secrets and who learns them, and who is mistaken about what they believe and who has the moral courage to embrace the necessities of the shadows.”
 
He paused for a moment at my cautious expression, then added, “You’ve nothing to fear from me. If you’ve made mistakes, they’re the mistakes of a loyal woman whose background has generated unfortunate biases, not malice or treason. You think in the terms you do because your background hasn’t given you the education to understand, on your own, what is necessary.”
 
I looked back at him, then stood up. “Mister Mustermann, you do realize that you are attempting to encourage me to join you in treason, don’t you?”
 
He bolted to his feet, face flushing red. “Du-”
 
“The final authority and decision to determine the disposition of the Helm Memory Core is the Archon’s,” I said flatly. “Not mine - and not yours.”
 
I stepped around the desk. “Now; since we have duplicate copies of the core but only one reader, this ship, and the reader, and the original, will be going to Tharkad. I would be delighted to have your assistance in ensuring its security en route, but make no mistake that it will not be going walkabout en route.”
 
I didn’t realize why his hand had dipped into his jacket until he had the little holdout pistol on target on my chest. “Sit back down, Miss Blackwing,” he ordered. “Now.”
 
Human reaction time is a funny thing.
 
There are three separate speeds involved there; the slowest is the evaluation and decision loop - the time the brain needs to pick up complicated input (a car losing control in rain and sliding out of its lane) identify the needed response (sudden braking and an evasive swerve), and issue the appropriate orders to the various limbs and vocal cords (stomp, twist, scream). This takes, oh, a couple of seconds for well-known stimuli.
 
The second is responding with a pre-keyed action, like hitting a button on a game controller or swatting at a wasp that you’d seen coming in to land - all of which takes substantially less than a second.
 
And the third is the time the body needs to take actions in response to stimuli that don’t need higher order processing at all, like accidentally putting your hand on a searing hot burner, which is faster still.
 
‘Muscle memory’, in the sense used in martial arts practice, falls in one of the latter two categories. A practitioner who has really internalized the movements needed isn’t reacting to his opponent - his entire conscious mind is occupied deducing what his opposite number’s plan is and feeding the needed responses into his body’s ‘action queue’ before he’s seen them begin.
Obviously, guessing wrong means you lose.
 
But the thing is…
 
Firing a gun is a reaction.
 
I had no doubt that Mustermann was willing to kill me, and that he wouldn’t hesitate once he’d decided to. But he hadn’t decided to, yet, and his body wasn’t primed to take that action. And even if it had been-
 
I took the gun away from him.
 
-I was very practiced.
 
He was no slouch, and probably more accustomed to using his skills for lethal violence rather than competition. He didn’t fight to keep the gun - which I’d already made impossible - he just leaned back and kicked me in the lower ribs with all the substantial force of a very fit adult man. I could feel two of them snap under the impact, even as I started throwing myself back out of reach.
 
He tried to follow; I got the gun seated properly in my hand.
 
His hand was almost on my wrist when I pulled the trigger, and he stopped dead in his tracks.
 
I fired again twice more, putting two more holes through the center of his chest.
 
“...stupid bitch…” he choked through the bloody foam covering his lips. “...the deadman…”
 
I let him crumple and limped for the door - and the intercom next to it.
 
It was screaming by the time I reached the console. “There was a bomb, the core console has been destroyed!” I heard Trigger Shao’s voice say, sounding panicked and on the verge of tears. “It’s gone, wrecked, fucked.”
 
I turned to glance over my shoulder at Mustermann, glaring at me as he died. “...Don’t worry,” I said. “I know where to find another.”
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...TRY TO FIND ANOTHER...
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