TTWTWT Chpt 15

==Tell The World That We Tried - Chapter 15==
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AND I FOR ONE, AND YOU FOR TWO…
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===Pillow Talk===
Hospital, Temporary Base Camp - Ward, Capellan Confederation, 3017
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Wise people, experienced people, said that it was impossible to run a regiment from the side of somebody else’s hospital bed.
 
To which I said: watch me.
 
It helped that I had a lot less ‘running’ to do than I’d become used to; with only a cross-section third of a brigade ‘in reach’ to need my direct input on, I was at about a quarter of the workload I’d had to live with recently. It also helped that my people were… understanding about the circumstances, and making an effort to keep the inevitable troubles and complications from reaching me.
 
I wasn’t sure whether it was out of affection or fear that I’d resort to draconian measures to get myself back on watch quicker, but either way I’d take it.
 
Sophitia herself wouldn’t, of course. She tried to chase me away whenever she was awake and feeling energetic enough to be self-sacrificing, but I was happy to blithely ignore that.
 
With that distraction on my mind, I didn’t spare as much attention as usual to the complications of the garrison work, or to the RCT next door being called away to put out a fire on Victoria. I know I dealt with them - I later got a nice framed commendation from Davion high command saying how pleased they were with my work, which I’m pretty sure means I at least didn’t make anything worse while I was fretting - but all my memories of that period are of that hospital room.
 
Even the pleasant one, where Doctor Tiber was finally willing to confirm that the injury hadn’t interfered with her ability to have children.
 
“I was… worried,” Sophitia admitted after Doctor Tiber left us alone again. “I know it’s a little weird, but I’ve always wanted children.”
 
“It wouldn’t have stopped us,” I pointed out, but I squeezed her hand, too. “It’d just mean you’d be Daddy.”
 
“What?” she asked, giving me an appalled look.
 
I laughed. “Well, if you couldn’t carry our kids, that’d mean that I would, right?”
 
In the back of my head, older-me paused awkwardly and went ‘...um.’ I ignored the ambivalence and went on, “And definitionally, that’d make me the mother and you-”
 
She reached up and hit me on the arm. “Also the mother,” she said, then made an odd face. “Wait, you want kids?”
 
I sighed and settled back into the chair I’d pushed into place. “Yeah,” I said. “I think I do. I miss my, Older-Me’s, niece. I do regret that they won’t have a chance to know any of the grandparents on my side-” all four of them, ahem, “-but… I want to see them grow up, I want to put part of the future into the future, and make sure it’s happy.”
 
Sophitia lay back against her pillow. “I’d thought that you’d have trouble with the idea of finding an actual father for the kids.”
 
“You know I’m better adapted than that,” I said. “Besides. Turkey basters are a thing.” I gestured to mime what probably wasn’t how the procedure would actually work, and she hit me on the arm again, laughing through her appalled expression. “But no, seriously, I’ve checked and Canopian fertility clinics can splice two eggs.”
 
The Magistracy of Canopus was one of the ‘big three’ Periphery states, with the Taurian Concordat and my own native Outworlds Alliance. The Magistracy lacked the OWA’s slow circling of the economic drain and/or top-grade military training, but it also lacked the extensive Taurian heavy industry and military complex.
 
What it did have, besides a matriarchal culture that had always struck older-me as some game writer with no fucking clue what feminism actually entailed just mirroring things as a Cautionary Tale, and younger-me thought was a medium-kinky myth…
 
That got away from me.
 
Point is, the Magistracy had the best and most complete medical establishment left in known space. Running on a master-apprentice system and carefully handmade everything, true, but they could pull off eighty to ninety percent of what the Star League’s best doctors had been capable of. Combining two otherwise normal reproductive DNA chains manually was well within their range, and from there it was artificial insemination techniques that had been well established during Older-me’s lifetime.
 
She stared at me from where she was laying back against her pillow. “They can do that?”
 
“Well, yeah,” I said. “They can. Probably even without us needing to go there; frozen ova can stay viable, so we could ship them if we wanted to as don’t.”
 
“That is so strange.”
 
“It’s just biology.” I said.
 
Sophitia giggled. “Not that. Hearing you switch from archaism to scientific jargon and back in the same sentence.”
 
My expression expanded her giggles to an outright laugh. “Anyway,” I said. “Once we’re done with this contract, we’ve, y’know, talked about settling down someplace. What do you think would be nice for where?”
 
“Someplace on a hill, looking over a forest,” she said. “A big house with wings that spread out, and decorative gardens to go with enough yard for - for our children to play in. Not out in the wilderness, but… a ways from any city. Enough that people didn’t come by too often. A few servants, so we could know them. A cook, a housekeeper, a nurse to help with the children, a groundskeeper. A medium-sized family, six or seven children… What’s that look for?”
 
“I’d have called ‘medium sized’ two or three,” I said weakly, then shook it off. “More seriously, I… can live with that. As long as we’re not wrecking your health with a kid every year, anyway.”
 
“Separating children too widely isn’t good for them, though.” she said, had an obvious thought - I suspected something about switching off, which I would need to think about - then visibly decided not to mention it and instead said, “What were you thinking of for settling down?”
 
“I… hmm,” I said, thinking and willing to let her change the subject back. “Well, if we’re talking just our fantasies here, I want a castle.”
 
“What?” she laughed.
 
“A castle! Not, y’know, one of the ridiculous mech-scale fortresses like on Tharkad or New Avalon, or a fairy-tale confection, but-”
 
I wasn’t sure how to explain David MaCaulay’s books to someone who hadn’t read them. “-um, a keep the size of an actual house, with walls and so on around it. Stone outside, and cozy wood and carpet and fireplaces inside. At a clifftop, looking over a fjord, so we can look down at the snow and waves and know that we can stay safe and comfy inside where it’s warm.”
 
“Oh, now I see,” she teased. “This entire fantasy is about cuddling.”
 
“There’s nothing wrong with that,” I said, gathering my dignity around me like a comfy blanket.
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===Hunt for the Lair of the Argo===
Rimward region of periphery, 3017
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The permanent garrison that arrived to replace us on Ward ended up amounting to a battalion of tracked combat vehicles, two regiments of mechanized infantry, and a monster aerodyne dropship of a type I didn’t recognize and Older-Me had never heard mentioned in the Battletech game. Rather than at the spaceport, that landed in the open ocean on a calm day, and floated a quartet of wet-navy destroyers out of massive holds obviously designed for just that purpose.
 
A polite handshake and one last Comstar-certified receipt, and our contract with Davion was over on March 20, 3020.
 
Three days later, we were lifted and on our way to join the rest of the unit at Ward’s Zenith Jump Point - furthest from Davion’s centers of power in our area, Ward was the last of our assigned garrisons to be handed over, so we really were free.
 
Free to jump to the Kimi system, though given our mission and the fact that we had Helm and its publicly known results - the spare parts, the Battlemechs, the big, obvious, hard-to-hide stuff - in our past… and given that Kimi II and III were ruled by the theocratic New Salvationist Order who outright worshipped the SLDF and forbade any nonbelievers from setting foot in the old bases in their system on pain of death-for-heresy…
 
Yeah, I wasn’t sure how that would turn out but most of the options weren’t good. We spent the entire charge period just hanging at their zenith point and watching the scopes to see if they’d send anything out at us - which they didn’t. Or peep a word of communication, for that matter.
 
After that, it was Wyeth’s Glory, which did have a planet that had been inhabited, once, and which could now set off Geiger counters all the way out to the jump points.
 
The jump points in the system of Cluff’s Stand were close enough in that we could have sent at least some of our droppers in-system for a couple days of leave, but a police state megapolis offered enough opportunity for trouble that I was perfectly willing to substitute a couple of days of goofing off aboard ship.
 
Besides, the next jump after that was Alloway.
 
Alloway had a world-continent with a band of three small, separated oceans filling the low basin that ringed the equator. South of them, several high, jagged mountain ranges crushed the moisture from any air that tried to blow south to water that hemisphere. North of them, an uplifted highland covered pretty much that entire hemisphere, too high for more than token amounts of rain around the edges. In the middle, steamy jungles crowded from water’s edge to treeline.
 
Most of the population either lived in smallish towns hacked out of the jungle by the shorelines, or smallish towns in the southern foothills, or smallish towns in the high northern scrublands. But there were enough people there to build their own boats and bush planes, and to have tourists - and resort towns to take them.
 
We’d put together a lottery system - random selection from a decreasing pool of options, less a small percentage of ‘reward tickets’ - to determine who’d get the leave time, and made a deal with one of the three local nations for a reservation in the southern deserts to set up a groundside base on while those of our dropships that carried ASFs got to work on charting all the moons the first four of the system’s eight gas giants.
 
Turns out that, while Axylus was a real moon with a real name registered on charts since the Star League, there was, locally… some doubt as to exactly which of the dozen-plus candidates it applied to, even in Allowayan textbooks and charts. So, we had to send ships or fighters out to do a mapping job thorough enough to find a crashed Dropship two hundred meters long, which was… time consuming. The possibility we’d have to do so had been accounted for; LIC had packed us the photographic gear we needed, and we’d dug it out of the piles of stuff aboard the Nicaragua, our Aqueduct Cargo DropShip, while we were en route, so that wasn’t a problem, but the pictures still needed to be taken and examined, then potential anomalies checked with lower overflights.
 
We found her on the third of June.
 
Going down with a full two-regiment landing to cover the two battalions of space-rated infantry turned out to be a complete waste of time. There was a small pirate base built up around the crashed Argo, with walls twice as tall as a Battlemech made from chunks of laser-cut stone. Apparently that was a standard pirate technique, or something.
 
The radar towers and turret network I remembered from the computer game weren’t present; we were at least five years early, and Grim Sibyl was not the name associated with local piracy, so I suspected that they were things she’d installed after taking over from…
 
Well, from whoever had bugged out at the first sign of what we were bringing in on their heads.
 
I ducked No. 2 through the gate (about where there’d been a breach in the walls in the game, no points for guessing a connection there) and out into the claustrophobic courtyard. The height of the walls, and the looming bulk of the Argo, closed the space in, and it was already filled with pressure tents and ‘temporary’ housing even before adding some of our Battlemechs and hostile-environment rovers. I slowed to a (dismounted) walking pace and kept an eye on the ground monitors as I maneuvered into a parking space, then powered down.
 
Swapping my neurohelmet for a pressure helmet to go with the suit I was wearing - I’d have needed to keep ironclad control over my heat levels if there’d been any kind of shooting while I was in transit, for lack of cooling jacket - I triple checked all of its seals before I cracked the cockpit.
 
Five seconds, ten, and the idiot lights along the bottom edge of my vision stayed green. I swung carefully out onto the latter and climbed down. In Axylus’s low gravity, I might even have jumped, but that would have been reckless and stupid. The pebbles on the ground here were sharp and jagged, not weather-worn, and could easily puncture a suit.
 
I walked up the shallow ramp, past a pair of saluting and thoroughly superfluous suited guards, and into the command post that had been set up to explore the wreck. The pirates had kept the compartment pressurized, and the passages linking it to several other areas and buildings in the tangled mess of their ‘base’, but the shipwrights we’d brought along from Skye’s Shipil yards had taken one look at the mess, turned grey, and ordered the entire thing depressurized before a blowout killed several different someones.
 
Doctor (and no one who valued their life should forget it) Jozefina Lenox was the head of that team, and the woman who’d asked me to come by in person. Despite how difficult and sullen she’d been in the preceding year, with nothing to do but run the engineering department aboard an Aqueduct-class bulk carrier, now she was animated and energetic, if not cheerful.
 
‘Outraged’ was more like it.
 
“If I thought we’d have time I’d be encouraging you to chase down that pack of loathsome jackals to bring them to justice.” was how she greeted me, and waved a banana-sized component under my faceplated nose. “Do you see this?”
 
I studied the whatsit for a moment. “Yeeeesss,” I said, “some kind of plasma regulator, right?”
 
She blinked. “I didn’t expect you to know that.” she admitted.
 
“I’ve been studying to finish my degree,” I said. “Fusion Power Engineering.”
 
“Huh,” she said. “Well, aye, this is from one of the reaction control motors. Star League special, twice the tolerances and capacity of anything made today. Those pigs were using it as a door prop.”
 
I looked around the compartment. The trash and refuse had been picked up, but the darker stains that I hoped weren’t blood were still there, partially overlapped with a lighter blotch that had probably been vomit. “I can buy that,” I said. “So, what does the total come down to?”
 
“Anybody that lifted this ship as-is would have to be a mad genius or a desperate idiot,” she said, and waved for me to follow her. I followed her up one ladder and into a long, slightly sloped passageway that had been an elevator shaft and was now more or less a hallway.
 
The shape of the hull would have accounted for that sloping, but not for the way the entire length was visibly wavy. Lenox waved illustratively towards the bow. “When she fell over,” she said, “the entire hull flexed, and half of the joins in the main structural beams parted.”
 
“You’re certain she did fall, rather than crashing this way?”
 
“Oh, yes,” she said. “We’ve found the blast scarring and the scree slope where the rock outcrop they brought her down on collapsed. I’d’ve liked to shake her pilot’s hand. They deleted the landing gear when they converted her from a Behemoth, he must have set her down too light to jostle a feather.”
 
I felt like a parrot, but… “None of the information I saw said anything about ‘conversions’.” I prompted.
 
“Mmm. I don’t think the actual hull was literally a conversion,” she said, “though we could easy enough at Shipil. But the bow and stern sections are fairly obvious reuse of the existing design. It’s fair clear they just cut out a couple of the cargo decks and slapped that carousel in their place to start. Though I don’t see why they’d bother.”
 
“Don’t think of her as a cargo dropper,” I told her. “Think of her as a mobile space station, a base for other craft to operate from. Resupply, basic repair work, a hospital… and Rec areas for the entire lot.”
 
“Seems a waste,” she said.
 
I shrugged, harder than it sounds in a pressure suit. “That’s the Star League for you.” I said.
 
We’d been walking as we talked, and we finally came to a ladder leading up to a hole in the ‘ceiling’ that had been intended to be elevator doors out into…
 
At the top I stopped and gaped, looking around the vast dark cavern my helmet light could only hint at illuminating.
 
“I’ll be goddamned.” I said.
 
Overhead, I could see the Argo’s spine, a triangular truss strung with cables and piping that must have run the whole length of the ship. I could see it, because the entire bow section was one giant open space, interrupted only by that and the lesser spokes that rayed out to link it to the walls. I was reminded of pictures I’d seen of Zeppelins under construction, but in person the effect was awesome in the most somber sense of the word.
 
Doctor Lenox waited until I managed to tear my eyes away from the sight before she said, “It’s not the most practical way they could’ve laid out the cargo bay, but I almost wonder if they weren’t trying to hit people with… that. All my people have reacted the same way to the first time they see it.”
 
I puffed my cheeks out with a huff of air. My breath left a momentary spot of fog on the faceplate. “Well, good for them if it was. Wow.”
 
We stood looking up at the man-made cavern for a minute, then Lenox shook herself and took out a tightbeam light to point along the spine. “Anyway. I wanted to show you this, in particular.”
 
As the light swept slowly along the Argo’s keel, at first I had no idea what she was trying to point out - and then I saw it. “The entire truss buckled?” I asked.
 
“Not… quite,” she said. “The welds holding the structural members together parted as it flexed, but the cabling and pipe runs held together a bit better. Of course, since then the bloody pigs have been strip mining those same cables, but there’s still enough there for us to eventually get the lot fixed. That’s the good news; the bad is that it’ll be at least six months work. I know I wasn’t told it all, but what I did hear’s enough that I figure you don’t want to wait that long.”
 
“There’s good reasons our mutual boss lady would rather not delay things any longer than we must,” I said. “But depending what you found and have been drawing out mentioning in the computers. I’ll probably end up leaving your crew in place with one of the Invaders and a battalion or two of security.”
 
“...You’d do that?” Lenox said, looking startled through the reflections off her faceplate.
 
“We might be after bigger game still, but the Argo’s not a small prize.” I said reassuringly. “I just need to know how many different places we need to be at once before I decide what we can afford to save for you.”
 
Through the clear bowl of her visor, I could see her take a breath and let it out, before she reached into a pocket and pulled out a small round spool with two plugs sticking out of one side - she stuck one jack in a port in her own suit, and then handed the thing over, wire trailing out of it as it unwound, for me to fit into the matching port on the back of my own forearm.
 
A click from the helmet speakers and an idiot line confirmed that our radios were off.
 
“That good, then?” I said, once we were in private.
 
“We’ve found a complete, SLDF-use map of the entire Periphery Military Region, including full Tier Five classification. Every base, listening post, and research station in the Outworlds, Concordat, Magistracy, and Rim Worlds Republic, as well as unorganized territory.”
 
Her voice was odd, caught between flat and reverent.
 
I let my breath out carefully. It was a relief and a triumph to know that that much of expectation had panned out, and that map would have paid for our trip even if nothing else had been involved. “Excellent.” I said.
 
“In the area included in our prep files, we have four sites that don’t show up in the LIC database of known LosTech finds,” she said. “One in this system, on one of the moons of the ninth planet, marked as Intelligence Command. Artru and Castle Nautilus, purpose redacted and at the highest classification levels. One in Kimi, Quartermaster Command. And one more, same as Nautilus but in deep space near the Capellan border.”
 
“In, what, one sixteenth of the known Periphery of the day?” I said.
 
“I doubt all four sites will pan out,” she said, fighting to ward off the universe’s malignant punishment of overconfidence, “But… yes.”
 
Both of us could do that math; she didn’t ask why I whistled. “All right,” I said. “Obviously, we’re gonna need to refine things as time goes by, but for now, here’s the plan…”
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===Plan of Action===
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The first two steps were the easiest. Doctor Lenox already needed to generate an estimate of how much time it would take to get the Argo back into flying condition, just as part of the project. Add up the individual tasks, add a percentage for inefficiency and unforeseen contingencies… Straightforward enough.
 
The other thing was sending a dropship or three to check out the coordinates for the other site in the Alloway system. What we found there was a gas giant just big enough to have not frozen, despite being further out than Sol’s Kuiper Belt from a smaller star, with one big moon whose surface never got above about minus two-hundred-ten Celsius. Not a great place to live, but the database coordinates led us to several centuries-old debris fields, scattered across the ice, that had probably been fighters or small shuttles before meeting their fate, and an unmarked pressure dome of the same vintage, still bearing the holes that some unknown agent’s weapons fire had ripped open.
 
Cutting graves in rock-solid nitrogen ice wasn’t trivial, but my people didn’t even ask before they started collecting the bodies where they’d fallen and putting together a graveyard. One of the old Fiannan hands turned out to be a fully frocked priest who consecrated the space. I was proud of them, and later I’d be sure to tell them so.
 
As was, I was shadowing the techs as they went through the ghosted dome. We’d seen the antennas, set in the ice outside and long weathered by micrometeorite impacts, stretching out for several kilometers, but careful examination and sampling where a rockslide had broken one showed that it was basically just a cooled germanium wire in a protective casing. Nothing that even a modern shipyard couldn’t turn out in job lots, at need.
 
The real mystery, and its explanation, was inside the dome.
 
I was, not least to my own surprise, the first to figure out what we were looking at. “Son of a fucking bitch,” I said. “It’s a DFM.”
 
“A what?” Lu Clair asked, his expression as puzzled as his voice.
 
Doctor Raven looked up at the map being projected on the wall, studied it for a few seconds, then said, thoughtfully, “...Huh.”
 
“A Direct Field Monitor,” I said. “Um… Despite what a lot of people think, fusion engines don’t actually get most of their power balance from atomic fusion as such. They only run purely on smashing atoms together for a second or so when they’re starting up. After that, they’re using the fusing plasma and its containment fields to generate and stabilize a nano-scale hyperspace aperture, smaller compared to an HPG punchthrough than that is compared to a jumpship’s KF drive. And, since hyperspace is more energy dense than normal space, that generates power. Kearny and Fuchida got famous for discovering that application - they never expected anyone to succeed in turning their work into an FTL drive.
 
“There’s a few different ways of monitoring that reaction - radiation sensors, magfield monitoring, and other indirect ones are most common these days, because they’re technically simple and good enough. Big municipal reactors, that need to be relatively precise to match their output to grid-load, are about the only place you still see DFMs these days. They can directly pick up KF fluctuations. But the actual pickup heads are tiny, maybe a few millimeters. One this size would be…”
 
“Able to see eighteen light years,” Raven said. “that’s the ratio in the math. In practice I’d believe anything between ten and twenty, probably closest to fifteen. Signal gain would be a problem, even so. If I weren’t looking at this in a Star League listening post, I’d say that jump flares would still be too faint to pick up at that range… And if they turn out to have been able to detect HPG transmissions, I’ll convert to Cameronism, because the Star League was run by witches.”
 
I blew a breath out and shook my head. “I’m really tempted to just blow off Artru entirely.” I said.
 
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===An Unexpected Stand Off===
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We didn’t, of course. No matter how big the prizes we’d found in Alloway were, they weren’t what we’d come here for. The Star League’s habit of concentrating big databases - like university libraries - into single mega-drives rather than the cloud arrays that had been ‘in vogue’ in the 21st century came with the need to index and read those drives, those memory cores, and the specialized hardware to do that.
 
Because future of the Eighties, go fuck yourself, those cores and their readers weren’t solid state. They had moving parts, including the extremely sensitive, sophisticated, fiddly reader-heads. Which inevitably wore out, usually long before everything else in the mechanism. In headier days, they’d been the most common spare part… but also the most needed.
 
The entire resources of a Successor State could club together and come up with maybe three or four partially-functional heads… And a certain now-dead fool hadn’t realized how hard it would be to replace the mechanism shattered by his eraser-sized ‘warning charge’. Which is one of the reasons that stripping data out of the core was taking so long - the ‘marginal’ reader heads had a much lower bandwidth than the fully functional ones.
 
Maybe some company on Terra could have built new components, but, given ComStar… that had certain obvious difficulties. For all I knew, LIC was trying to pull it off anyway, but none of us wanted to count on it.
 
Anyway. Most of the things that were major problems and obstacles in the computer game didn’t really register for us. Showing up with one heavy lance and a single mad genius for tech support was a different thing from showing up with a regiment or three and several dozen hand-picked specialists. Knowing SLDF security procedures made it a lot easier to get the code pass right on the first try, and as much as everybody involved was holding their breath, we managed it.
 
What we found inside was… Well, at one point, Castle Nautilus had been home to at least a division of SLDF troops and a research staff nearly as large. Almost all of the military hardware was gone - the four mechs Kamea and Yang had pulled from the base in the game came out of only five Royals we found, the last being another Highlander whose reactor still carried the SLDF maintenance crew's downcheck - and the staff quarters had clearly been shut down in a bit of a hurry. Personal items were gone, but a lot of the fittings hadn’t been cleared out.
 
Logs, safely stored in the base command center, showed that the order to evacuate to more secure ‘concentration points’ had arrived on December 30, 2766, literally three days after Stefan Amaris shot First Lord Richard Cameron and openly seized power in the Terran Hegemony.
 
Yyyeaaahh.
 
Anyway, it turns out that the other half of Castle Nautilus’s purpose, besides the semi-public one of being a base for operations in the officially-not-occupied Taurian Concordat, was research. The Terran Hegemony had decided to bet a big chunk of its defenses on the Space Defense System concept, integrated networks combining ground stations, fighter craft, dropships, base stations, and even jump-capable Warships… All of them automated. Only the ground stations had any actual human beings involved at all; the space-side units in the system were completely robotic.
 
This naturally gave the Hegemony a very strong interest in perpetually improving the stability and effectiveness of their expert systems, particularly after what were reported as tragic and embarrassing IFF issues with the early M-2 drone DropShips.
 
Which, it turns out, was a coverup. When my cyber people found the library core that had been abandoned in place, with all the research data still locked up and encrypted aboard it, they pulled every single file and archive off into their own drives, safely separate and physically unable to communicate with any other computer before they tried to open them.
 
This was a good idea for obvious reasons, given what else had happened in the game, but when they got to the key archive, the M-2 project, we found out why it had been abandoned.
 
The Locura code wasn’t a virus; it was the complete stored code, the ‘mind’, of an M-2. Commentary and supplementary files explained the sudden abandonment that would have puzzled Doctor Murad. The Hegemony’s cyberneticists had abandoned the M-2 code because they finally got the thing to talk to them rather than just running amok, and, uh, Harlan Ellison? Eat your heart out.
 
After I read the logs of that conversation, I went and found Sophitia to hug for an hour or two.
 
Anyway. That did a lot to explain why the later marks of the M-series were, well, dumber. Not that the M-2 was actually all that bright, by human standards, but the decision to start over from the ground up with a new software architecture and a serious time crunch to get the enormously expensive SDS hardware working somewhere in spitting distance of ‘on time’ meant that they had to concentrate on the basic functions and hope to make up the difference with either human input via the ground stations or later software patches.
 
And Nautilus, safely well away from pretty much anything in those days, was where those patches were to be developed. In its heyday, the Castle had been the home of the Hegemony’s most skilled and trusted AI and robotics researchers, and the library core we’d come for, and its reader, had been put in place to hold their work and reference materials. It held literally everything that the Terran Hegemony had known about artificial intelligence and expert systems, along with a wide range of less-involved study material for SLDF officers and troopers working on their own degrees.
 
Most of the K-F Theory files were identical to the ones we’d pulled from Helm, which I supposed told us where Major Keller had started in trying to gather his database - the standard SLDF ‘self-improvement for promotion-seekers’ library.
 
Best of all, there’d been a few crates of spare electronics left in place, including a pack of extra reader heads for the library. All in all, everything was coming up roses.
 
Naturally shit had to go wrong.
 
We started speeding our work up at the arrival of nine jumpships at Artru’s nadir jump point, but the nature and scale of the problem didn’t come clear until the resulting dropship wave was close enough to identify, and communicate with.
 
One Overlord, eleven Unions, eighteen Leopards. We knew what that count meant, and the incoming transmission just confirmed it.
 
The full-video showed two women and five men, all seated in a row at the same table, richly dressed and with heraldic banners hung from the wall behind them.
House Arano’s cormorant was front and center, over a round-faced man somewhere in his middle years. <<“Mercenary commander,”>> he said, <<“I am Tamati Arano the Second, High Lord of the Aurigan Coalition and Protector of Coromodir. In deference to the current transmission lag and the scale of what I require of you, I will be brief. You are engaged in salvage operations which violate Aurigan sovereignty, and this will not be tolerated. If and only if you and your troops are prepared to lift from Artru and withdraw from the system will your acts to this time be let pass. If not… Then we shall see you shattered on the field of battle, and your survivors brought to trial under our laws as raiders without flag. You have until my force’s arrival in orbit to comply.”>>
 
Not what I’d hoped to hear, but one of the things I had a script prepared for.
 
I took a deep breath to brace myself, then hit record. “Your Highness, I am Commander Asha Blackwing, of Blackwing Military Solutions and Services. We are operating under sealed contract for Comstar Escrow Account-” I read off the number, “-verifiable via that organization. Our employer currently wishes to remain anonymous for other operational reasons, but I am advised that reparation negotiations will be extended when those constraints relax.
 
“I am also advised that collection of all mobile materiel is a primary contract objective, up to and including verified Combat Insurance policies adequate to replace my entire force. Given that, and my responsibility to the lives of my men, I must advise you of my intention to interdict via aerospace fighter any landings within one thousand kilometers of Castle Nautilus. Your Highness, we didn’t come here to do any damage to the Aurigan Coalition or its people. I beg you, do not escalate this matter further; it would serve no one’s interests.”
 
Four days from landing to the Aurigan jumpships showing up. Four and a half more until they were in communication range.
 
Thirty seven hours after that, without a peep to us directly but with LIC codebreakers turning up a very enlightening conversation between the Aurigan force and Artru’s HPG station, I sat in No. 2’s cockpit, watching those thirty dropships race across the display in their low orbit, safely out of weapon’s range for the four wings of fighters Io Sasagawa had taken up to meet them.
 
I was regretting leaving two wings on Axylus; at the time I’d been more concerned about fending off any pokes from the Free Worlds League, Magistracy, or excessively ambitious Capellan splinters, but I hadn’t considered that the Aurigans might push things to an actual fight. There were good strategic reasons they shouldn’t - the two regiments or so they were bringing in represented just under half of the mechs they had, and almost all of their combat dropships and aerospace fighters - but I’d just been assuming that what I remembered as a ‘hero faction’ wouldn’t cause problems.
 
Yes, I’m well aware that that was idiotic.
 
With only four wings on our side, rather than the full two regiments, trying to interdict the landing during reentry would be bloody as hell, and certainly less than completely successful against that many targets and that many escorts.
 
If the Aurigans stayed in orbit, or started de-orbiting before or after the window that would bring them down inside the exclusion zone I’d declared, Sasagawa’s people would just pace them on their way down, steering a parallel course just close enough to make it obvious they were being monitored.
 
If they came in in it… Well, we weren’t bluffing.
 
I had no idea what Arano - and more to the point, the other lords who’d come with him at the heads of their own household contingents - was thinking. Which way the votes in their council would go.
 
On the screen, the ‘warning window’ was a swatch of yellow that the dropships’ projected course ran through, with a much thinner red band that would imply a direct on-our-heads combat drop. I realized I was running one thumbnail nervously up and down the side of that index finger, waiting to see which way they’d break.
 
The course line brightened, started to flash, and… bent. Downwards.
 
I let all the breath huff out of my lungs in relief, slumping back against my pilot’s seat.
 
“Is it really good that they’re coming down all in one piece?” Sophitia asked over a private channel.
 
“It is,” I said. “Because now they have to march here.”
 
Castle Nautilus was in a mountainous region, old, weathered hills that had been eroded to a tangled mess, choked in snow and ice and the occasional birthing glacier. Even for battlemechs, with their fusion powerplants and ability to handle bad ground, the thousand kilometer distance from the landing site that course would produce would be more like twice that on the ground - assuming they didn’t have any proper assault mechs along, thirty-two or so hours of actual travel time. Including the fact that the Aurigans would need to sleep, that was probably closer to four days than to two.
 
“If they’re willing to walk into a fight dead tired, they could be here in three days,” I went on. “And at this rate, we’ll be done and ready to lift about then. More likely, since they’ve already soft-sold things, they won’t push it that hard… And you bet your sweet bippy that we’ll push the breakdown more than we have been. Not talking to us lets them save face by not, umn, capitulating, and not risk pissing me off by blustering. So I’d say? This means that we won’t have a battle.”
 
Thank fucking god.
 
“And if you’re wrong?” she asked. “If we get delayed?”
 
“The way the ridges run, there’re two layers of passes that they’ll have to go through to reach the Castle,” I said. “That’s why I had the infantry set watchposts and run landlines over them. If we needed a lot of time, we’d probably set up to move into place just past whatever of the first set of passes they picked. Pin ‘em just for a little bit, so they bunch up in the pass, and then use the watch points as forward observers. Drop the artillery on ‘em while they’re all forced together, maybe get some avalanches if they pick the wrong pass.
 
“The watchpoints are through the entire ridges rather than just on the passes because we don’t really know how many jumping mechs they have, or in what weight. There might well be enough of them to put together a real flanking force. It’d be risky for them, dividing like that when we’ve got them outnumbered, but their making an outright attack is risky in the first place. So who the fuck knows.
 
“Anyway, if that happens obviously we leave just enough dealing with the main force and then turn and smash them in detail, assuming that the artillery doesn’t get them first while they’re still on the mountains.
 
“Also assuming that the amount of time we still need doesn’t let us just pull back and slow them with light harassments, I mean. That’d be better if possible; cheaper, safer.”
 
“Is that why they’re doing it?” Something in Sophitia’s voice nagged at my mind.
 
“Mostly the ‘safer’. If our files are right, we’re seeing every combat dropship the Aurigans have. This is their entire intersellar-mobile force, and two regiments - they only have three or four at all. If they lose what we’ve seen, if we take it out, they can’t even hold off the pirates any more, let alone make the Taurians or Canopians think twice about grabbing their tax base. It’d be stupid of them to risk it.”
 
A thought struck me. “You’re not usually this interested in planning,” I observed, trying not to smile.
 
Sophitia’s giggle over the line made me lose that fight. “You’re cute when you lecture,” she claimed.
 
“...Crap, I’m sorry,” I said. “I know it’s rude-”
 
“Enh-enh! Stop! No apologizing! I said it was cute and I meant it. And knowing you’re in charge, and that you have things handled, is kind of comforting.”
 
I started to think that ‘handled’ was putting it a bit strongly, then stopped and started running down the list of contingencies and options.
 
“...Huh,” I said, staring at nothing in particular.
 
This time Sophitia just outright laughed at me. “You hadn’t noticed you weren’t faking it any more?”
 
“No,” I said. “I really hadn’t.”
----
===An angry discovery===
Late 3020
----
World shaking personal revelations aside, the tactical situation didn’t see any change over the following couple of days. The Aurigans marched closer, with all the caution that would have been appropriate if I’d planned to ambush them, and tech teams worked the clock round by shifts to break down anything and everything the SLDF hadn’t already taken for loading aboard the Nicaragua.
 
I thought about calling Lord Arano and telling him that we were leaving, but in the end, didn’t. Frankly, it wouldn’t have made a difference to anything. A short note, and the maps Nautilus had held of its own corridors and spaces and the surrounding tunnels, we left in a spare packing crate outside the main entrance. His people should be able to get some value out of the base itself, and the maps included a geological workup that showed some ore seams that weren’t being worked, so hopefully he’d get some benefit out of the affair.
 
Six days to the jump point and we were off. A codeworded letter from what I presumed to be survey agents Lyran Intelligence had put into the area said that the Kimi site, the SLDF Quartermaster Command one, was already open and known to the locals, so we diverted to the final rendezvous.
 
August 3020 found the unit all together again, floating in the absolute black of interstellar space.
 
It was easy to think, and fairly accurate to say, that jump points were so far out that there wasn’t any real effective difference for the Jumpship spacers. If the local star was nothing but an arc-welding spark in the far distance, barely able to cast a shadow on the neutrino collecting ‘fabric’ of the jump sail, the human eye couldn’t tell the difference between where we were and the shadowed side of the ship. Certainly the interior spaces shouldn’t have felt any different; they were the same metal everything, familiar and a little alarming to the claustrophobes.
 
Somebody, or a council of somebodies, had turned down the lights. Not all the way, but to ‘cloudy day’ levels rather than the normal Just Indoors. The ground troops and fighter pilots went along in their normal routine of simulator work and physical training, but the card games were quieter, the movie nights were less raucous… and everybody, but everybody, spent at least some of their off time filing into one or another of the observation decks available, turning the lights out, and just… watching the stars.
 
It felt different.
 
A few people were uneasy at the emptiness, the tracklessness, and I was sure that if we lingered for too long then that proportion would grow into a real problem. The subconscious expectation of exposure and agoraphobia would drive up stress levels, cause fights.
 
But at first, there was only the silent awe of it, of a perfect gallery seat to a splendor that even the most low-tech planet’s moon and aurorae started to wash out.
 
Even the ship crews had marked out an hour or two to sit and watch the stars, and they had a hell of a lot of work to do.
 
It had been well over two hundred years. Finding the base or whatever that had been marked on that map was no trivial task. We were at the specified coordinates - but centuries of drift, and the sheer vastness of the void, meant that the actual volume of space where our target could be was enormous.
 
Infrared was the first thing to try. Dropships had fairly decent scanners for that part of the spectrum; it was good for picking up incoming drive plumes. Against the chill of interstellar space, the heat signature of even an idling fusion engine would have been obvious - and also unlikely, given atomic hydrogen’s habit of escaping any and every attempt at confining it. Even the most advanced tanks for it leaked madly, and aside from a truly vast tank farm, two centuries of operation would have run through whatever supply was provided anyway.
 
But no, everything was cold.
 
The second thing we tried was transmitting and trying to get a response. Even the blackest of black sites should’ve responded to the codes we sent with ‘bugger off, you’re not authorized’, if there’d been a charged battery attached to a radio.
 
As expected, bupkis.
 
That left doing it the proverbial hard way.
 
Each of our twenty dropships had a slightly different radar set and capability, a different range at which they could be expected to pick something up in active mode. But those ranges were known, calculable, and we had twelve thousand tons of spare hydrogen aboard the Nicaragua and enough navigational computers to cover many sins.
 
So, after those first few days, every dropper punched off and started to do a slowly spiraling expansion, sweeping empty space looking for… anything.
 
Two weeks later, we found it. All hundred and forty-five meters and hundred and twenty thousand tons of it. And it found us, too. Stolen Will’s nose armor had nearly boiled through when the naval lasers fired, and the damaged Union would need to be watched carefully until we were home, or at least someplace where we could do real repairs. I’d given the helmsman a six-month bonus for getting the dropper back out of weapons range mostly intact, and been happy to have the chance.
 
We hadn’t been able to see any heat from a reactor, because that had been cold - but that didn’t mean that the drifting warship’s capacitors didn’t have a charge, enough of one for a few shots from its main weapons and to wake its reactor again.
The images and signatures we’d been able to get without approaching too closely, where we could be targeted, had our warbooks saying that we were looking at a Baron-class destroyer. Context, where and how we’d found it, its activity and complete indifference to any security codes we sent, made it obvious that that was wrong.
 
I heard one of the space ops troopers packed into the carry can whistle. “Regardez donc…” he breathed.
 
I shifted, the borrowed Stingers already cramped cockpit made tinier by my spacesuit. It was one of the quartet of mechs we’d captured years ago and a lifetime away, just starting out in the Outworlds and facing pirates intent on hijacking. They’d modified it with reaction control thrusters like an aerospace fighters, and for this mission, we’d bolted on external reaction mass tanks along with the carry can across the shoulders. If the situation had been less serious, I’d’ve been making Gundam jokes and enjoying everyone else’s confusion.
 
“It’s an M-4, all right,” I said, concentrating on thinking and feeling like an inoffensive piece of space debris. We’d tested that our sensors still couldn’t see me in a ‘spacemech’, and that carrying the cargo can extended the same effect over it. There was every reason to think that an AI, with no natural eyes to depend on, would be completely blind to my presence until the marines started cutting their way in, if then.
 
There was also every reason to think that if that guess was wrong, it’d erase us all with no more thought than a killbot’s version of an orgasm.
 
The fact that, unlike the later M-5s, this ship was a conversion, with its original name still painted on the hull, just drove that point home. Mech-sized lettering reading DD-566 SLS Locura was not a comforting sight.
 
Parallax and helpful position indicators from the cloud of Dropships watching nervously from a safe distance told me exactly how much distance remained to touchdown on the effectively motionless warship’s hull. That was good; I might or might not have been able to get away with using my own sensors in active mode, and I had absolutely no intention of testing the question.
 
I tapped the forward jets as the estimated-range counter ticked down, bleeding off closing speed. There was no need to hurry; we had days of oxygen reserve, hooked from tanks in the can to our suits, and plenty of water. The plumbing connections wouldn’t be any fun to use, but that wouldn’t kill us.
 
The big targeting scanner arrays, massive radars capable of cooking a man at twice the distance we were at, swept over us. That wasn’t, necessarily, an indicator that we were suspected or spotted. Now that it was awake, that it knew there was something around that it might have a chance to K҉̵̧͞I͏͟͝͠L̴͘L̷̡̛͟͠, (KILL) the AI was swiping its look-and-see beams randomly around itself, hoping to catch something sneaking up on it just like we were. The timing was almost certainly pure coincidence.
 
I froze in my seat and stopped breathing anyway, with a helplessly unconscious little whining noise in the back of my throat. Somewhere to the right of my head, a breaker threw itself with a heavy KLIK, the Stinger’s radar receivers safing themselves rather than burn out like they were staring into the sun.
 
After an instant or two that felt like only four or five eternities, the monster scan-beam swept away again. I took a ragged breath, turned my head, and looked up to flip the breaker back on so I my ride could see its guiding lights again. It only took three tries.
 
 At a hundred and fifty meters out from the hull, a relatively long burst from the RCS thrusters brought the closing rate down to a meter a second or so. Another burst at a hundred had us at half that, then a third at thirty down to a crawl that made those last few meters take nearly ten minutes.
 
I spent that time trying to get our crosswise motion down; there wasn’t much in the way of drift, but there was some, and with only visual indicators and starlight scopes, and the fact that space ops were not something I was exactly experienced at, eliminating them was a real fight. The final moment of truth, when I brought the waldo rig that controlled the Stinger’s arms alive and reached out to ‘catch’ its weight and movement with the limpet magnets that had been strapped to its palms, came with a bit of a screech of metal through the mech’s bones as the last motion dragged one hand a dozen or so centimeters across the hull.
 
I froze, holding my breath again. Oddly, maybe, this time my mind was filled with the memory of Sophitia kissing me goodbye before I climbed into the Stinger for this mission; despite the good-natured catcalls from the bay crew and also-boarding marines, tears had been building and pooling around her eyes, unable to fall in zero gravity.
 
You’ll be married, dumbass, part of me said to the rest. You need to stop doing this shit.
 
Yeah, I agreed, I do.
 
Ten or fifteen seconds of frozen fear, and nothing happened. We were not smote by the fist of an angry warship or other god-facsimile. I let my breath out in a huff, fogging my faceplace for a second before its fans cleared it again, and started to ‘walk’ hand over hand along the M-4’s hull, carefully heading for the airlock closest to where Nautilus’s files showed the AI’s computer core should be.
 
“All right, guys, this is your stop. Everybody outta the bus.” I said over the intercom to the transport can.
 
<<“Thanks for the lift, Nutcracker,”>> Orlov, the platoon’s CO, said, <<“Give us a second to set the bread crumbs and we’ll be on our way.”>>
 
“My dance card’s clear,” I replied, knowing that both of us were fighting to sound much calmer than we were. “I can wait all day.”
 
<<“Probably not that long.”>> he said, and I could hear the thunk of a hatch unseating both over the line and transmitted through the Stinger’s bones as the cargo can unlocked to let him and his men out.
 
The ‘bread crumbs’ were a set of specialized transmitters - I hadn’t caught the details - that would let the sections of wire they’d leave behind them pass signals through closed blast doors and pressure hatches, keeping them linked to me, outside their entry lock, and via outbound tightbeam and indiscriminate broadcast back, to everyone waiting aboard the dropship fleet.
 
The tension of listening in on that line as they made their way through the corridors was a little like being in combat myself, the stakes and investment of it, and a little like watching a horror movie, the second guessing and so on.
 
I’d never liked horror movies.
 
This one was a bit of a slow burn, too; comments passed on a large splotch of what was probably long-aged blood at one point, a flicker of motion that turned out to be a hammer, abandoned spinning in the middle of a compartment god knows how many years ago. Once, and only once, early on, a blast door triggered with somebody under it, leading to an explosion of shouting and swearing as he tried to dive out of the way, his buddies tried to drag or knock him out of the way, and they all piled up safely halfway down the corridor by the time the thing slammed home.
 
In another context, it’d’ve been hilarious, but with the door closed and sealing off half the team, no bread crumb set, and all the swearing, I had no idea what was going on and nearly had a panic attack.
 
After that, they made sure to use the manual overrides on every door they went through, and things went much smoother.
 
Fortunately, there was no singing as they reached the computer center and started disconnecting things. I don’t think I could have taken a rendition of ‘Daisy, Daisy’ right then.
 
“Doctor Lenox?” Orlov said, as that wrapped up, relaying through me to the Argo. “I think we have a full-ship diagnostic screen here. Umm… P-R-I-A-R-M, primary armament, maybe? Showing disabled, smaller tag ‘Tert OK’. S-E-C-arm, the same. Radar, active. Re-mass, three percent. Jump, disabled. Lots of other stuff.”
 
“‘Ave you got a command line?”
 
“Yes, Ma’am.”
 
“Yesssss,” she hissed softly, not caring that she was still on the line, then said, “Right then. Type in Jump T-S-T an’ tell me what it says on the second-to-last line of what it spits out at you.”
 
“C-R space H-D, semicolon, P-R space H-D, semicolon, H-E-L, the ‘e’ is lowercase, semicolon O-K, and then it goes to the next line.”
 
Her whoop of triumph about blew out her microphone, and made me flinch and jump as it blasted out of my earpieces.
 
“Doctor?” I said. “I take it that that’s good news.”
“C-R, control run, P-R, power run, H-D, hardware disconnect. He, Helium, L, low. They disconnected all the wires to the jump drive, and at least some of its coolant’s boiled off since then, but the important thing is, all the self-tests on the drive itself are showing it’s all right. She might not be ready to jump now, but she will be someday. If we drain a little sip from each of the Jumpships, we can probably even get her ready to go ourselves.”
 
“...Ah,” I said. “All right. Let’s get started on disconnecting all the wires to the weapons, so we can get your crews aboard to confirm that, shall we?”
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…AIN’T GOT THE TIME FOR OUTSIDE…​​
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