IWTTD Chpt 8

==If We Turn To Dust - Chapter 8 -==
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===Aftermath of Victory===
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The first ship to arrive for the occupation of Terra was a MIIO-owned Invader at the Sol-Terra L1 point; LIC's ship waited another ten minutes to give the Federated Suns jumpship time to clear the point - and then missed its target. The hulk would be salvageable for materials, but having randomly-sized sections of the jump field equally-randomly rearranged was only survivable for the very lucky who were in a section larger than they were.
 
Seven survivors out of nearly five thousand specialists crammed into the dropships docked to the Lyran-flagged ship was painful - agonizing for their branch of service. But it wasn't crippling for the nation, at least in part because, well...
 
There was a reason pirate jumps like that were a last resort of the desperately hurried, and LIC had planned ahead rather than betting everything on that single ship and single jump. So, an hour and a half of rescue and tugboat work from the hastily called back MIIO boats later, the backup ship jumped in, and this time, hit the target zone bang on.
 
Ten minutes after that the entire six-dropship flotilla was on its way again, putting them - and all their security and data recovery specialists - on the ground within ten hours of ComStar's formal surrender. They joined the security battalions that had been riding aboard LCS Athena and FSS Pleiades in the process of frantically running around trying to get all of ComStar's gear and records secured and under lock and key before it could be destroyed or worse, 'vanish'.
Some, of course, would do that no matter what we did, but we had to at least try to limit it.
 
The actual occupation forces, the troops who'd be handling most of the system's security and actually getting shot at by escaped fanatics, had jumped to the zenith and nadir points. Five Federated Suns Regimental Combat Teams, three of our own Field Action Forces and four Federal Garrison Forces, and three battlemech, seven armored, and twenty infantry regiments assembled from the Free Worlds League - along with a permanent commitment of one of their Vengeance battlegroups. All nice and roughly equal, and burning in-system to arrive in a week or so.
 
Once they arrived, Terra would be the most securely held planet in the Inner Sphere, leaving aside that the damaged Warships weren't going anywhere until they'd had their turn in the shipyards at Titan or Luna's L5 points.
 
The O'Neil Stellar Shipyards were the more public of the two shipyard facilities in Sol; they were the only shipyard in the entire Inner Sphere to build all five of the standard civilian Jumpship classes - Scout, Merchant, Invader, Star Lord, and Monolith - and had been responsible for the ComStar Explorer Service's custom Magellans.
 
Titan, though. Titan had been a Star League military facility. There were no 'civilian' population centers around Saturn, none of the myriad eyes of Terra watching. Titan built civilian Jumpships, and Behemoths and other dropships... And the Titan complex's drydocks had built the Dantes and the Faslane class yardships that supported the Explorer Corps.
 
One of the latter was pulled open in the biggest drydock the Titan complex had, and would be for another several months at least. Aside from being in pieces, there was nothing in particular wrong with the former CSV Dover - she'd just been in for the inevitable routine maintenance when the Combine's intelligence services tricked her masters into doing something ultimately suicidal.
 
The Explorer Corps in general had been a bright spot. They hadn't been shock-stunned zombies like most of the rank and file, they hadn't been edgy and eyeing the nearest throat and the nearest exit in equal measure like the Com Guards - and they hadn't needed squashing like most of ROM and the occasional True Believers. Instead, the Explorer Corps had just quietly passed out a new set of orders and started neatly packing their operations up to turn over to the nearest authorities, lock, stock, and jumpship.
 
As Precentor Sumire Hiyama, the Terran-Japanese head of the Corps had explained, there was no group in ComStar more dedicated to expanding the new knowledge available to the human race, and no greater anathema than that to the arch-conservatives like Myndo Waterly's would-be followers. An agreement to mix her people with more trusted personnel and basically have them keep up their survey work had been one of the easiest negotiations in the giant pile of them that Duggan Marik and Candace Liao and I had been buried in basically since we'd walked out of that meeting with the First Circuit.
 
Less straightforward, but still on the 'easy' side of the ledger, had been deciding what to do with the mostly underused industrial capacity of the Sol system. All three of our nations wanted more mechs and tanks and aerospace fighters from Terran factories - but, as I'd pointed out, all three of us had even more need for access to the sophisticated microchips and other micromanufacturing products that no other world in the entire Inner Sphere could produce in bulk. So the existing military production lines would stay open, but aside from reactivating the ones that had been mothballed, nothing new would be built in Sol.
 
The ultimate economic effect of those high-precision chips and parts becoming available would be hard to overstate, even if the volume was a relative trickle compared to the scale of a Successor State. Having them made it orders of magnitude easier to build your own plants to produce their equivalents - having the tools to make the tools - and would lead in turn to a geometric progression and an economic revolution.
 
And, personally, it would take the limitations on my own Renaissance Development Corporation's efforts to repair damaged terraforming systems across the Inner Sphere and blow the goddamn roof off. Even at the Star League's height, only the top few percent of terraforming candidates had been touched, at least outside of Mars and Venus. Going from that to starting new projects could ultimately double or even triple the amount of habitable real estate in any given set of borders.
 
No, the colossal pain in the ass was what to do with the shipyards, once the warship repairs from the Ninth Battle of Sol had been finished - and more, what to do with the vast array of mothballed warships they were key to supporting.
I'll spare you the hours worth of play by play and summarize: Everybody, at the end of the day, ended up with three ancient and creaking Aegis-class cruisers, one battleship, two battle-cruisers, and two of the Explorer Corps' Faslanes. The League had six frigates and four destroyers past that, while the share I'd taken for the Commonwealth added a Newgrange, the Faslanes' big brother, a pair of the Aegis's successor, the Avatar-class, seventeen destroyers and thirteen corvettes, and all four of the stored Sovetskii Soyuz-class cruisers plus the already operational Athena.
 
Now, I can hear those who've studied the Star League's ship classes but not the LCN's refit program blinking at that last. The Star League Defense Force's specification for the Sovetskii Soyuz had placed a lot more emphasis on flexibility of role than it had on direct firepower or peak acceleration. The ship the SLDF had actually got was more of a siamese-twinned destroyer and transport in the same hull than a cruiser - or if you wanted to look at it from the other angle, a really big and kind of undergunned frigate.
 
But there was never anything wrong with the hulls themselves, and when Kerensky's cultists of madness had updated Athena from the Star League specification for the Sovetskii Soyuz, they'd added a fifth docking collar. Which meant that, examining several of the older variant alongside Athena, our scientists and engineers could know what was individual variation within the class and what was relevant to that extra collar.
 
In an era where the Loxley's jump dynamics had literally been copied wholesale from the Invader jumpship, that was critical knowledge, and worth passing up our chance at one of the Black Lions.
 
The Federated Suns, meanwhile, had made off with a Potemkin Troop Cruiser - a cruiser's firepower, a battleship's hull, and more docking collars than anything else before or since - the other Newgrange, a pair each of cruisers and battlecruisers, seventeen destroyers of their own, and four corvettes.
 
So, overall? A hair under fifty ships for us, forty ships for the Feddies, and twenty for the League, almost all of them in mothballs and awaiting restoration.
 
And the Clans had left with four hundred. I tried not to think about that part.
The O'Neil yards would be taken from 'barely ticking over' to full production, going from one or two jumpships in a year to a couple of dozen. Part of the reason they hadn't been doing that already was just ComStar's determination to own all of their production outright rather than via loan financing, and their unwillingness to compromise other operations to free up cash and resources.
 
Another part was classic cartel-style artificial scarcity.
 
Neither reason applied to the Successor States; while there were limits to the availability of cash or their ability to print it, and germanium ores needed to be found, mined, and refined… Jumpships were very important, and any and all of us would have happily found anything needed to run the yards at capacity for decades to come.
 
As far as it went, that wasn't hard, but the Titan yards were warship capable. Agreeing who had priority for them when it came to restoring the mothballed ships from the boneyards, and repairing active ones, had been enough of an argument, but we'd spent eight hours getting to the agreement that new warship construction would only happen with the explicit consent of all three parties.
 
In practice, this meant that until and unless the Clans showed themselves, Titan wouldn't be producing any warships, unless the Federated Suns were willing to agree to a one-to-one share with the League. They had a lot less at stake in rebuilding warship numbers than we did, and it was obvious they'd hold out for other concessions for their cooperation, anything or everything from favorable trade deals to cheaper work from RDC to bringing them all the way into LIC's efforts to monitor and infiltrate the Clans' space, despite the immense distances and time lag involved.
 
That wouldn't be a terrible idea for other reasons; if nothing else, we'd had an object lesson in just how effective the combination of the Maskirovka's trouble-incitement expertise and MIIO's resources could be.
 
Background. When the Capellan Confederation had been an independent nation, before Candace Liao surrendered a decade back, it had had a single unified intelligence and internal security service - the Maskirovka. As such things went, they'd been middling-low at counterintelligence and direct information gathering, but past masters at keeping the boot on rebellions - not a skill Davion was institutionally or constitutionally set up to really take advantage of - and at finding ambitious men in places of power on the far side of their borders… and giving them just enough rope and resources to cause real problems for their enemies.
 
Duke Michael Hasek-Davion, the single most powerful of Davion's March Lords of the day, had spent a decade hovering on the ragged edge of outright rebellion. Captain-General Janos Marik's own brother had led an outright civil war against him, backed by Capellan arms, money, and mercenaries.
 
The Federated Suns Ministry of Information, Intelligence, and Operations, meanwhile, was very good at getting its own people into places their enemies would rather they weren't, but not so practiced at the subversion game.
 
In combination?
 
They'd planted dozens of operatives into the Draconis Combine Mustered Soldiery's Galedon Regulars… and then arranged to have one of them promoted to the personal staff of the Warlord of the Galedon Military District, Grieg Samsonov.
 
Samsonov had been an ambitious man to start with, and the intense pressures Takashi Kurita had put on his subordinates to get with the program and Prepare For The Davion Menace had sharpened a keen awareness in the Warlord that at any moment, his life might be forfeit.
 
And then the former-Maskirovka operative in his own staff had taken him up to the figurative mountain top and whispered the possibility of 'Grieg Samsonov, Despot of the Empire of New Samarkand' in his ear.
 
Candace had less than complete information on the plotting Samsonov had carried out after that point, but it was obvious that he'd succeeded in suborning almost all of the commanding officers of the units stationed within Galedon - and of if not coopting then neutralizing most of the nuclear armed 'Ryuken' that Takashi had deployed as a deterrent.
 
At that, he'd had only partial success. A full third of the forces stationed in Galedon had vanished in nuclear fire as traitors and fanatics turned against each other in an orgy of violence and confusion - but as the fallout started to settle, all of the ten divisions still intact were ready to answer to Grieg Samsonov alone.
 
Worse still for the Draconis Combine, the five strikes that had gone off in Galedon hadn't been the only Ryuken Samsonov's actions had triggered. They'd lost another five divisions in Benjamin, including on Paris, a planet on the short list of 'demonstration' attacks the Suns were making to keep pressure off of their main thrusts against Proserpina and Al Na'ir.
===Plans and a Unexpected Wedding===
FEDERATED SUNS SHIP PLEIADES, LOW ORBIT
TERRA, SOL
NOVEMBER 1st, 3027
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Docking a small craft aboard a dropship or warship wasn't a matter of just hooking up the hatches or parking it on a handy bit of tarmac. Having inertia smash a shuttle against the walls of its bay every time the mothership maneuvered would be bad. So, long before the Star League, a system of locking pins had been invented - the small craft was maneuvered into about the right spot, and then armatures were extended straight out from recesses in defined places to lock into equally defined hardpoints.
Say what you will about their fall, the Terran Alliance hadn't messed around about setting things up.
 
After all that was done, the bay was pressurized, the hatch opened, and I got blasted in the face with a brass band. I said something polite and diplomatic to the Pleiades' captain, I honestly don't remember what, because at that precise moment I was busy getting run over by the freight train of revelation.
 
Something Federated Suns and Lyran Commonwealth ships had in common, despite any institutional differences, were the two things displayed for visitors to pay respects to - a national seal, and a portrait of the reigning monarch. So, when I was going through the 'welcome aboard' ceremony, I was staring right at Hanse Davion's face - looking far more Stern and Appropriately Dignified than I ever remembered him in person, and ringing some kind of increasingly urgent bell of familiarity. I'd seen that jawline someplace else, someplace more recent.
 
"Oh, what the fuck?" I said, interrupting the ceremony as the relay closed.
 
And then I promptly apologised to the Pleiades' captain for the swearing, but I'd been forcibly reminded of something I needed to discuss with the Duchess of Sian immediately, best wishes, all regrets for the discourtesy, etc. etc.
 
I spent the entire trip through the warship to Candace Liao's personal suite vibrating in place and pulling up two file photographs on my datapad. Names, fortunately, attached. By the time the little tram-thing that spun people up to enter the gravity carousel from the 'bottom' had steadied and opened, I was ready.
 
I swept into the room as my bodyguards ducked out from their check to join the Feddies already guarding the doors - my own set borrowed from Katrina, since there I'd been using military security on Vega and my usual ones hadn't been able to catch up yet - and dropped into the first available chair without asking permission. I pulled the pad back out and tossed it more or less gently at the man who was apparently just Candace's secretary.
 
Even if I hadn't seen the reports of her quiet marriage, I knew perfectly well that Justin Allard-Liao was both her most trusted confidant, Hanse Davion's insurance of her loyalty in every possible sense, and, so far as the League March had intelligence operations separate from the larger doings of DMI and MIIO, her chief spymaster.
 
"Tell me you fucking told Wolf, at least." I asked.
 
Justin looked down at the pad while his wife gave me an offended look that if I were less irritated would have put me in mind of the fact that she'd grown up with a reasonable expectation of inheriting a court executioner. He had a hellaciously good poker face, but his eyes widened slightly anyway.
 
"They didn't tell you, either." I concluded.
 
"Tell us what?" Candace demanded.
 
"We had no need to know." Justin said, setting the pad down on the table next to him.
 
"'Captain Gars', the brilliant and cautious, decided to send his only heir undercover as an observer with the 5th Royals." I said.
 
"Sense is something you're currently not making." Candace said.
 
"Gustavus Adolphus Rex Sueciae, or Gustav II Adolf, was a European king in the first third of the seventeenth century." I explained. "He's one of the only monarchs who are historically confirmed to have run around pretending to be anonymous commoners. 'Captain Gars' was the pseudonym he used, and it's also the pseudonym that Hanse Davion used when he was going out in person to check the results of the first really clever plot of his reign as First Prince.
 
"He'd activated a retirement-age asset in Combine intelligence to plant data that would get the Third Sword of Light onto the same planet with one of the Eridani Light Horse's regiments - and about another regiment of random mercenaries. Including an over-her-head kid -" I rested a hand on my bosom "- filling her first ever contract."
 
"I recognized him and asked him what the hell he was doing without his bodyguards and where I could call them to get them on hand so anything that happened wouldn't be my responsibility. He got very 'I'm the First Prince, I do what I want', so I kicked his legs out from under him and twisted his arm while my XO found somebody to take charge of their idiot." Explaining that incident to the few people who could safely know usually brought my mood up, but there were limits.
 
I leaned back in my seat in the half-G and scrubbed at my eyes. I could hear Candace snicker quietly, and Allard seemed as amused as he could get at his monarch's expense. "Yes, yes, it's hilarious." I said. "But the battalion Morgan is attached to is currently cut off behind Combine lines, and while I'd usually be content to let the chips of someone else's stupid and pointless risk fall where they may, I'm less than enthralled to have it happen on my nation's watch and with no warning."
 
Justin opened his mouth, probably to start an explanation of either the character benefits or the political benefits of the Davion family habit of leading from the front and taking the same risks as anybody else, but I waved a hand. "And yes, yes, I know, eternal shame for the cowardice of not facing the enemy, et cetera, et cetera. Katrina would have mentioned it to me if she knew; and the fact she didn't means that he was in our territory, his life our responsibility, and we didn't even know. That is a problem."
 
There was a long moment of silence before Candace Liao said, "I am remarkably glad that you were never in charge of any negotiation on St. Ives. The war never would have ended."
 
I laughed blackly. "Yeah, I'm not at my best right now." I agreed, then rubbed at my face again before I looked her in the eyes. "As soon as we've got the diplomacy shit settled enough to pass off to minions, I'm going to be heading to Dieron myself. My wife is in that battalion, and if there isn't enough official force to justify breaking them out, I can afford to hire it privately. And have."
 
Leave aside Katrina Steiner herself volunteering to act as my agent, a thought at which the mind quailed.
 
"If he's still breathing when I find them, we'll ship him home and leave anything else to calmer heads than mine," I went on.
 
"...Under the circumstances, then, I think that any further negotiations can be handled through less senior channels," Candace said - and then, smiled a little. "I see no need to report your exact words to the First Prince."
 
"He's heard worse from me in person, but thank you." I said, standing up and going to collect my pad. There wasn't anything on it that was particularly classified, but no sense being sloppy. "I figure that I won't be jumping for another twelve to fifteen hours, just out of the need to organize matters, so I can field anything last minute right up until then."
 
"As well as the original topic of this meeting," Candace prompted.
 
"As well as." I said. "That being, and why I wanted Mister Allard-Liao present-" I nodded to him. "-a proposal for how to handle the security on ROM's records after the misjump left us shorthanded. Most of the records we've found are on chip, or if they are hardcopy, boxed for long-term storage, correct? It would be good to get them sorted as quickly as possible, but for the time being, making sure nothing happens is enough."
 
"Agreed," Justin said, making a 'go ahead' gesture. Or possibly 'get on with it', the difference could easily be academic.
"We'd slated LIC and DMI personnel for the guard work as well as the processing because their skillsets would give them a better awareness of the kind of threats we could expect from rogue ROM." And, I was pretty sure, because both organizations were empire-building with great energy and enthusiasm. "But most of the basic points, like access control, can be handled more simply. We have several battalions of troops whose clearances and reliability, individually, are at least as high as anything LIC had on hand. Unless you've got an objection, the Commonwealth would like to assign them to handle basic site security - perimeter and so on - so that the security specialists we have left have…"
 
I paused, picking the next word after a moment's thought. "An achievable workload."
 
The Liaos traded a look. Justin cleared his throat. "The Federated Suns have no objection to this proposal." he said delicately.
 
Well. I supposed he must have been on the 'we don't need to have it all be weasels' side of the original argument. "Excellent," I said. "I'll cut the orders and have the Generalleutnant send over the details by flunkie. What did you have for me, in turn?"
 
"We need to know how and how deeply Samsonov's so-called 'Directorate of New Samarkand' changes your plans," Candace said.
 
I thought about that for a bit, then sighed. "That depends on whether or not the Directorate manages to survive," I said, "and that's got a lot more variables of its own. If Samsonov manages to dodge DEST and everything else and makes it work, then that directly torpedoes our own plans for Rasalhague - we'd intended to persuade Tyr and whatever they end up calling their respectable and official successors to invite us in. But they've got about as many troops as Samsonov does and a lot more in the way of tax base and civilian resources; if he can make it, so can they.
 
"To make it work, he needs one or more of: A lot of luck. Takashi letting Akuma throw good money after bad trying to 'save' Dieron and Al Na'ir…" I cut off, then raised an eyebrow at Candace. "We've been presuming that y'all're just waiting to see how much the Combine draws down the forces there and at Proserpina before you move."
 
She blinked, but no more than that. Excellent poker face on the woman. "We… all were intending much that approach," she agreed, and I reminded myself yet again to stick to modern English. "Now that we know that Comstar has not created a sphere-wide Interdiction in response to the fall of Terra, however, the political pressure from House Sandoval has become… insupportable. I believe that the forces in question are already in motion to their jump points. Those movements will be used to increase pressure for a diplomatic cession of territory - Al Na'ir and neighboring worlds, then systems within two jumps of the border in Ashio and Proserpina Prefectures, and one jump in Irurzun around the Galtor Thumb."
 
"Given the effectiveness of the Commonwealth's deal with Tyr, it's likely that a few regiments of the AFFS's less favored mechs designs will be used as the reward for a one-jump advancement in Galedon, as well," Justin said.
 
"And the knowledge that even moderate raiding from your side would ruin Samsonov's prospects utterly as the threat," I said. "Barring a complete collapse of all resistance from the DCMS, our own plans called for an entirely military one-jump advance. If your 'diplomatic' approach works, the Commonwealth will probably require a recognition of Rasalhaugian independence first. If they seem particularly weak, or if we somehow manage to eliminate literally every division Akuma has, we have backup plans for Dieron that could be stretched as far as Rukbat and Nashira but no further."
 
"If such a thing as a complete collapse of the Draconis Combine were to occur…" Candace said, glancing at her husband and holding a short conversation entirely with expressions, "...then the Federated Suns would be concentrating on coreward movements, towards Algedi and the Benjamin system. Rukbat, Shitara, and Nashira would be… an acceptable border, in that case."
 
"It would." I agreed. "Though… We have advised the First Prince of certain reasons we have for finding a complete collapse of the Draconis Combine undesirable; has he chosen to share them with you?"
 
Both of them blinked in a 'the fuck is this bitch smoking?' kind of way. "He has not," Candace said.
 
I made a face. "In short, then, Kerensky's army settled a considerable distance to coreward of the Inner Sphere, and have both advanced their weapons technology considerably and developed into a metastatic cultural cancer that makes the Combine look like paragons of moral decency and neighborly conduct. With messianic delusions of returning in glory to purge the barbarians who destroyed the Star League." I gestured to include everyone in the room, and by implication, the entire Inner Sphere. "We think the Combine would make a sufficiently useful meat shield and tar pit to be worth the hassle in the meantime."
 
"Why Rasalhague, then?" Candace asked. "And, more broadly, why… all this?"
 
I shrugged. "It shuts Kelswa up." I said. "And given the state of the LCAF, we really and truly needed to hammer any bugs out before the real show."
 
Justin Allard-Liao whistled softly. "You've reduced the entire Draconis Combine Mustered Soldiery to nothing but a whetstone." he said.
 
"For the times," I quoted, "they are a' changin'."
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===Hired Men for a Mission===
MERCENARY DROPSHIP RAGAMUFFIN, NADIR POINT
DIERON, DIERON MILITARY DISTRICT, DRACONIS COMBINE
NOVEMBER 2nd, 3027
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Despite my impatience, I waited until I had the go-ahead nod from my detail before I kicked myself into the little conference room aboard Carlyle's Commandos' flagship.
 
Three men were waiting for me, all surprising for different reasons. Colonel Durant Carlyle did have a son named Grayson D, though he wouldn't be going on this mission, since the Commandos had more experienced pilots for all of their eleven mechs. Ragamuffin was a Union, but her sister Vagrant was a Mule cargo carrier modified with the slots for a full battalion of light armor - in combination, making the Commandos the scouting element of our impromptu force.
 
Colonel Alois Hammer's name had made me double-take. Buckaroo Banzai, I'd known to expect. Char Aznable, yes, really, had ended up in the Lyran Foreign Legion with the rest of the Wolf Dragoons. So why not Hammer's Slammers? It's not like the universe was obligated to make sense. He'd apparently made his own transport arrangements to the tune of an Overlord, a Triumph, and a Condor.
 
Major Mikhail Dessau's Night Heat owned another Union and a Gazelle tank carrier; digging up a private Fortress to handle his unit's remaining mech and tank companies couldn't have been easy for Katrina's people, but the reason he surprised me was that I'd actually met him before, on Fianna, ten years before.
 
"Major Dessau," I said. "Colonel Carlyle, Colonel Hammer. Thank you all for coming."
 
"Wait," Dessau said. "You're 'Lady Johnson'?"
 
Dammit, Katrina. I bet you think you're funny. Out loud, I said, "It's probably for the best if I continue to be, yes."
 
"I presume that our mission is to break a strongpoint in the Cauldron of Dieron," Hammer said.
 
I raised an eyebrow and hooked a loop to bring myself to a halt in conversational distance. "Is that what they're calling it? Apt. So, in a manner of speaking. We will be relieving a Lyran battalion that has been cut off behind Combine lines; your pay will be per head rescued. There are two persons of interest in the battalion; they represent, individually, one third each of your final pay. There will be bonuses for damage done to Combine forces, as well, but it's not our primary objective."
 
"'Our' objective?" Carlyle asked.
 
"I'll be dropping with you, along with three medium and one heavy battlemech companies, and four heavy armor companies," I said.
 
Dessau blinked. "What do you need us for?" he asked.
 
"I'm in a hurry, and Dieron is a hellhole right now." I said. "At last report, there are six divisions of Combine troops on Dieron that have sustained less than one-third casualties, as well as four more that are between one and two-thirds. LIC thinks that they've folded the remnants of the Sun Zhang Academy Cadre that was present into other formations"
 
Carlyle swallowed.
 
"Blood and martyrs," Hammer whispered. "How many more are there in that district?"
 
"Eleven divisions at or near full strength, one at less than a third," I said. "We won't have to worry about them."
 
"Oh, of course not," Carlyle said. "They'll just stay home and let us do whatever we like!"
 
"Seven of those divisions are going to have other problems," I said, then smiled. "And we know that the other five only have the dropships to combat load about one regiment of aerospace fighters between them. Unless they make a pirate jump in the next week, they're not making it to Dieron."
 
"Define 'other problems'," Hammer said, half order and half request.
 
"Davion." I said simply.
 
"How certain is it that they're going for it?" Dessau asked.
 
"From the horse's mouth," I said.
 
"What?"
 
I sighed. "I, personally, was told by one of the Federated Suns' March Ministers," I clarified. "It's certain."
 
Carlyle's eyes widened, while Hammer looked at me thoughtfully. After a moment, the latter said, "The contract specified replacement of combat-lost units, but not details."
 
"We'll be providing Chameleons to replace light, medium, and heavy battlemechs," I said, "with an option to take a one-in-four ratio of Hatchetmen. Assault mechs we'll exchange with Zeuses, and any and all armor with Pattons."
 
"Arcori's Chameleons don't have a good reputation," he observed, trying for neutral over the curious poking.
 
"The LCAF wanted their mechs right away, even if they had to tune them themselves," I said. "That's their privilege, but it's not the intended factory finish, and it's not what you'll be getting."
 
Carlyle looked puzzled for a split second - then choked on air, staring at me. "You're -" he started to say.
 
"Lady Johnson, please," I said. "The less rumors spread for Combine ears, the better. Consider it part of your mission requirements."
 
I could see his brain racing. "That… explains some of the package we have for you." he said.
 
I blinked. "Package?"
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===Message from a Friend===
MERCENARY DROPSHIP VAGRANT, UNDER WAY
DIERON, DIERON MILITARY DISTRICT, DRACONIS COMBINE
NOVEMBER 2nd, 3027
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Crouched under a webwork of tie-downs in Vagrant's still-extensive cargo bay, it was obvious what kind of battlemech I was looking at, from the shoulders and arms to the extra lenses in the center torso. The elderly tech who limped over from his inspection of one of the ankle actuators only confirmed it. His nametag said KRISHNAMURTI.
 
"Boss Lady Pirate thought you could use a loaner," he said. "Her Sweetie here's a Warhammer seven-anton, prettiest ride I ever had the pleasure of workin' on, and me and my boys'll keep her running for ya."
 
Katrina Steiner tended to use 'Pirate' as her personal call-sign when she was in the field; I'd seen her do so at Solaris, a decade ago. And yes, she tended to favor the Warhammer, so it made sense that she'd have a WHM-7A reserved for her. The name, "Sweet Memory", fit too, given how early she had lost her husband, Melissa's father.
 
"I'll try not to make a mess of her for you." I said. I patted around in a pocket for a second, then came out with a memory chip that I'd taken to carrying to offer to him. "I saved my presets when I lost mine, if that helps."
 
He took it. "I'll have 'em in in real shortly." he promised.
 
I looked over the pristine, parade-ground First Royals paint scheme - jewel blue and snow white blazing with saturated intensity even in the subdued lighting of the filled cargo bay, then sighed and smiled a little apologetically. "I do have some bad news for you, though," I said.
 
Krishnamurti chuckled. "You'll want battlefield paint." he said.
 
"I'll want battlefield paint," I confirmed. "LCAF is using Measure Six for our op area, as I understand it."
 
"Little tricky with the tiedowns but no scaffold," he allowed, "but we'll have it done by turnover."
 
"No need to rush," I said. "We're not going anywhere until planetfall either way. Honestly, aside from updating contingency plans, I don't think anything is going to happen until planetfall."
 
"It'll keep my boys on their toes," Krishnamurti said, then gave me a conspiratorial look rich in good humor. "Though… if you wanted to go up to the hot seat and get a feel for our Sweetie, while I got your chip in, it shouldn't take more'n a few minutes. You were a Marauder driver, right?"
 
"A first-generation Three-Romeo, yes." I said, checking my watch. "I have about twenty more minutes, so I think I'll take you up on that."
 
The climb to a Warhammer's cockpit was very different from the route up to a Marauder's. When put to rest, No. 2 had squatted with its legs bent double and its long, narrow torso tilted down, which put the cockpit, at the very front of the fuselage-like torso, only about ten feet above the ground.
 
Sweet Memory knelt, calves flat to the ground and thighs angled a bit upwards and the torso only about ten or fifteen degrees off from vertical. Rather than a short collapsing ladder, the Warhammer gave you a choice of a chain of rock-climber handholds or a Gundam-style retracting stirrup rig. I rode the latter up and swung myself carefully over the cockpit lip to settle back into the command couch - it was indecently comfortable, even at the same time I could tell it had been shaped for someone taller (common) and slimmer (not so much) than I was.
 
I'd never bothered to get a custom seat for No. 2, but clearly Katrina had.
 
The EXT POW light - external power source - was live, so after several seconds of hunting I flipped the MAIN POW hard switch to OFF and brought the computers up with a thumb on the start button. That combination should… well, boot the computers in safe mode, basically. Bring the machine to enough awareness and activity to enable Krishnamurti's work, but without activating sensors or weapons or actuators, or letting me access the programming.
 
Instead, all the screens came to life, a full shoreside start-up, as the button read my verigraph and enabled… well, basically everything that the mech could do without neurohelmet authorization.
 
One of the console screens brought up a video of Katrina, shot from what I was pretty sure was the exact same camera pointed at my face that very second.
 
//"Asha. You've been very patient with my demands for more and more of your time, and I have to apologise for making them. I wouldn't have gotten away with it with Selvin or Margaret, but at this point there's nothing left that can't be handled by the Foreign Office - or Melissa. It's a little early for her to be taking her first steps into diplomacy, but she's ready, and the moment is right otherwise."\\
 
She sighed and shook her head, smiling slightly. //"I've gotten Melissa's letter about her conversation with you, and her experiences before the invasion of Dieron. It obviously does some of my hopes little good, but I'm willing to see if the match lasts."\\
 
In spite of myself, I laughed a little. Obviously this message and my latest letter to Katrina had crossed each other in transit. Katrina Steiner had been rightly called many things, but 'quitter' was never one of them. Years ago, the first time I'd blown into her life like a much prettier version of the malignant Ghost of Christmas Future, one of the things I'd told her had been a timeline for a marriage between Melissa and Hanse Davion, where the personal union of the Lyran Commonwealth and Federated Suns had spiraled back into civil war and separation.
 
Katrina, though, hadn't given up on the idea of unifying the two nations, or a Davion match for her daughter. She'd merely started planning ways to address those foreseen problems in light of the new information - initiating a decade-long secret negotiation of every detail and symbol of the combined government ahead of the match, down to the colors to put on the maps, and switching her suggestion from the First Prince, closer to being Katrina's contemporary than her daughter's, to the twenty-something heir of the Federated Suns.
 
Morgan Hasek-Davion.
 
If not for the danger the man was in, his and Melissa's anonymous fairy-tale romance would have been an enormous boon, like drawing the last card of a straight flush.
 
//"As for where you're headed now… Well. While as Archon I understand your point about your goal of shaping the Rift into a realm with no need of a prince, I'm less than sanguine of the risks you're charging towards. So I've made some modest arrangements."\\
 
'Modest arrangements.' The mind boggled.
 
//"The Night Heat have handled six contracts with the Lyran Commonwealth in the last ten years, including two back-to-back garrison assignments along the Donegal-League border and a distinguished role in the invasion of Circinus. They've given good performances in raiding and independent operations away from support; you may remember them from doing exactly that in League employ on Fianna, and they're typically successful at it, particularly given the quality of their technical staff."\\
 
//"Carlyle's Commandos are a less experienced unit, but their commander and most of their troops are Lyran."\\ Even in a private message, Katrina didn't so much as hint at what I'd told her about the Gray Death Legion of another universe. //"They've been extremely committed to their contracts in the past, and at least half of the unit retains significant patriotic feeling. They can be relied on entirely."\\
 
//"Finally, the last and largest of the formed units are Hammer's Slammers; a four-battalion elite combined arms regiment with a dual specialization in set-piece ground battles and anti-insurgency. They were initially raised from the planetary militia of the Federated Suns world of Freisland nineteen years ago, and they've been in half the Inner Sphere's fiercest hotspots ever since. Their contract cost more than the command circuit from Fianna for your personal guards, but I'm confident they'll be worth the cost."\\
 
//"In addition to that, I know that your personal lance is down to two, so I've found some good ones for you; Krish will be able to introduce you, since they've all shipped with the Commandos."\\
 
Katrina's manner had been slightly humorous, indulging a lightheartedness she could hardly afford to let anyone but her closest friends see, but after that, she sobered, leaning towards the pickup.
 
//"With all that said, though, I think there's something that I need to tell you as your friend rather than your Archon."\\
 
//"Asha, it's about goddamn time you took care of yourself, for once. That disregard for yourself and your own needs is something you and Sophitia both share, and it's doing neither of you any good - from either of you. Even by the standards of those ancient ethics of yours, self care is essential to maintaining you in a state that's capable of your duties. Emotional compromise doesn't just apply on the battlefield, and you're smart enough to know it."\\
 
//"So stop being an idiot and go find your wife."\\
 
The recording cut out, leaving me sitting alone in the cockpit, and I huffed as I realized that I was smiling. I wasn't any less worried about Soph, but despite that my heart felt lighter.
 
I had the bit in my teeth and a clear road in front of me.
----
===Unexpected Guest===
LYRAN COMMONWEALTH DROPSHIP ISE, UNDER WAY
DIERON, DIERON MILITARY DISTRICT, DRACONIS COMBINE
NOVEMBER 5th, 3027
----
I'd expected to wake up out of a sound sleep; we were coming up on turnover during my sleep shift. Even without the sudden loss of gravity, the klaxons and alarms that would be resonating through the Overlord's very bones.
 
I had not, though, expected the wakeup call to be the battle stations alarm. With a velocity measured in thousands of kilometers per second relative to the plane of the Dieron system's ecliptic, any combative interaction with a threat not on all but the same trajectory would have led to me and everyone else blinking up at the Pearly Gates wondering what, pray-tell, the fuck. The closest thing to a match was the Warship Beowulf, and she was well-separated from our little flotilla and slowly pulling away as her course headed for Dieron's main pirate point rather than the world itself.
 
Her arrival, four days hence, would complete the effective Warship blockade of the Dieron system - Thresher and Nelson at the Zenith point, Loxley and Vespasian at the Nadir - and leave little practical way for a would-be relief force to reach the Combine defenders on the ground.
 
I rolled out of my bunk - we were still under way, there was gravity, or at least acceleration - and pulled on a shipsuit before I headed to the bridge, joining the latter stages of the flood of crewmen running hither and yon to their own posts.
 
When I got there I didn't make any demands for the captain's time, just headed to and strapped into the 'flag section' chair - which was identical to the observer's seat on the opposite side of the captain's station, since Overlords weren't exactly known for their fancy arrangements.
 
Ise's captain was a woman named Ingrid Josephson; she had a nice estate on one of Finmark's larger islands these days and had built an increasingly successful fishing industry out of the best of the local harbors. Or rather, she'd found a good manager to do so for her, while she kept up her day job exactly as she had when she was commanding Ise for me during our mercenary days. "How's your spaceside display reading these days, Boss?" she asked in an undertone as I sat down. The rest of the compartment was watching either personal plots or the main tank with fixed intensity, broken only by the sensor specialists reading out new data from time to time.
 
"Better than it was, still not great." I replied. "Somebody's misjumping into the pirate point?" I remembered that violent day-glow pink being associated with misjumps, anyway.
 
"Several someones," Josephson said. "We have a cold spot - an attempted jump that didn't manage to leave its origin system. Someone tried to force a quick-charge and got it wrong. We've also got a rash of microspikes, you can see it plotted as a vector on the display."
 
A needle-pointed cone starting at the pirate point and extending all the way out to the usual jump limit. The area that a Kearny-Fuchida drive vessel would jump into started to emit infrared radiation, heat, a certain amount of time before the actual ship arrived. Usually the duration was short, but even I could tell that the cone had been showing longer than it should have.
 
She went on, "That is one of the failure modes for missing a pirate point - the ship comes apart in hyperspace and each component arrives independently, distributed outwards from the arrival point."
 
"Including the dropships?" I asked.
 
"It varies. Sometimes they'll be… smeared… as well, other times they'll arrive intact but scattered halfway to the jump limit." The hand gesture that accompanied the explanation was eloquent.
 
"There's the jump," one of the sensor ops said, as the main display flashed and updated.
 
Josephson studied the new data thoughtfully, then nodded. "In any case, it looks like the Combine have managed to get reinforcements in despite everything."
 
"It won't do them any good, in the long run," I said, "but it may make our job more complicated. Dammit."
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