TEFAC Chpt 8

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==Chapter 8 - Time Enough For A Cat - - Exit, Through the Golden Gate of the Elliptic -==
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====Promoting the Kids and Pimping their Rides====
Fort Snowball, Officer's Quarters
Panzyr, Aurigan Coalition
December 8th, 3024
I was annoyed. Our attempt to capture Itrom had ended in failure, and while it had resulted in a pile of loot, that pile of loot wasn't what I was looking at right now. No, what I was looking at were the pilots I'd be promoting to drive said loot.
 
Donnel "Karamov" Lucien, to take the Dragon.
 
Marie "Tsunade" Jakobs, to take the Wyvern.
 
Julia "Sienna" Kerros, to take the Centurion.
 
Paris "Yves" Gallant, to take the Dervish.
 
Literal, actual children- well, okay, sixteen and seventeen year old boys, girls, and in-differences to gender- picking the war machines they'd ride until life or traumatic injury to make them consider retiring to run our engine plants. They weren't bad picks, either. That said, I could at least do them the service of refitting their rides to my definition of "not shit" since they were, well, not green pilots, but not pilots I was comfortable with yet either.
 
First up was the Dragon, which we quickly filleted like a fish. Out came the ten-pack LRM set and the class five autocannon, and in went a pair of LPPCs and an good old Holley six-shooter SRM pack. It couldn't mount Artemis, so we just threw a spare ton of ammo carriage in there for Infernos and slapped a flamer on the punchy arm too. Just in case.
 
The Wyvren was next, with some work getting it Artemis'd up, as well as moving the ten-pack on it to the arm. A pair of medium lasers replaced the six-pack of SRMs on it, the decision made mostly to spare the need to get out even more Artemis computers. Another half ton of armor and a CASE system, and that one was ready to go.
 
While the temptation was there to make a second Centurion the mirror of Mersies', I talked to the builder and decided to make this a more conservative rebuild. The class-ten autocannon stayed, and the rear-mounted medium laser died to let us get CASE and an Artemis IV six-pack missile launcher in. It wouldn't be quite as adapt at murder as my longtime lancemate's, but this was a simple refit that let us produce a more than acceptable machine for the time invested.
 
Then there was the Dervish. That one had the simplest refit, our work being a fast pull-and-go. Out came the twin SRM-2 launchers, in went the Artemis IV systems and DNI cockpit, plus the CASE to save pilot and machine bacon. Yves was a simple pilot like that, and I appreciated the fact they wanted to run dedicated fire support for their lance. Levelheaded pilots lived longest.
 
In the months we'd been gone, though, Camp Snowball had expanded voraciously. The garrison troops had been installing gun turrets and flak positions, and now had enough mech repair facilities to handle up to a dozen mechs in one go- even if they didn't have the techs for it. There was a lot of talk about setting up a First Panzyr regiment of the Restoration Army, and I promised to take their first battalion along when I went to link up with Kamea.
 
Then Kamea showed up with six entire Unions out of nowhere and I promptly started getting ready to excrete bricks.
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====Troubles with the Perphery Princess & the Phone Company====
Fort Snowball, Central Conference Area
Panzyr
December 14th, 3024
"So what you're telling me," I said, groaning, "is that the fucking Bulls are looking at getting their dicks stuck in the war."
 
"It doesn't look likely, but yes," Kamea grumbled. "Once Karosas got news his son bit the dust in my name, he clammed up until he found something for us to do, bitter old man that he is. It turned out he had a smuggling problem, which we took care of. As an added bonus, we got to keep the seized dropships."
 
"And the cargo?" I asked, raising my eyebrows.
 
"Nope. Totally cleaned out."
 
Slowly, my face fell into my hands. "You do realize, you can't even verify if this is actual arms smuggling because you gave Karosas the evidence, right?"
 
"If he's pulling a fast one on me, then that's what the military commissioner there is for, as well as the First Battalion Herotitus is for."
 
Emma chuckled from where she was sitting, cleaning her nails and leaning back in her chair. "We decided to give them a break," she explained, "since they felt so at home there and wanted to integrate some of the locals into the shock units. We've currently got Second Herotitus, First Weldry, First Panzyr, First Smithton, and the Aurigian Royal Guard with us."
 
"A whole-ass regiment of infantry, and a mech company. Sounds like you all been eating well," I said, smiling. "How many are motorized or mechanized?"
 
"They're all motorized- I learned my lesson after Weldry," Arano chuckled.
 
"Good. Then your plan to deal with the potential act of piracy?"
 
Emma stepped in again. "All of them had closed manifests, they all hailed from New Vadenberg, none of them had a listed destination; hell one still had regimental transport numbers on the side. They didn't let us perform a lawful inspection, ran to hide in a starport under Directorate control, and then were guarded by Victoria herself, the little bitch."
 
"What regiment?"
 
"Taurian Lancers, second battalion."
 
"I don't think he knows who Victoria is, Emma," Arano said, grabbing a mug and going to the room's samovar to go make tea.
 
"Annoying little bitch, drives a K2 'cat, backup seemed a little uncoordinated?" I asked, grinning.
 
"Yes…" Arano hissed.
 
"Yeah, she was on Itrom. Bounced my boys a good one, but we got most of the metal and wrecked the battalion she was with and decided to pull out in good order. By the way, do they do anything other than farm on Itrom? I couldn't find any industry I didn't bring with me!"
 
"They've a decent nitrates industry, but other than that, no. Just food," Arano said, before shooting a look at Emma. "When did you fight her?"
 
"Twenty-second of November."
 
"So twenty days of transit, and we fought her on the seventh," Emma muttered. "She'd have had to pushed it all the way, and even then that means she either went to Itrom knowing where we were- in which case why not come for us?- or she learned where we were when she fought you on Itrom, which doesn't work because they don't have an HPG for her to figure it out with!"
 
My mind flashed back to one of those myths from before the Blackout, and a worried look crossed my face. "I need to check something," I muttered, standing up to go. "Does anyone know where Mersies is?"
 
"No, why?" Arano asked. "We just got in."
 
"Because I need her to help me get at this."
 
"Is it about the ears thing? Because honestly, I've figured out at this point not to ask."
 
"It's a little older than the ears thing," Emma started, before I silenced her with a glare that'd put most small lasers to shame.
 
"There are some things not discussed with employers, Emma," I said with a cold anger. "This is one of them."
 
"Piss off, Nyan," Emma said, standing up to try and confront me. "Telling her about the Library isn't going to break the bank."
 
"The Library?"
 
"You know, your giant-ass treasure trove of information on LosTech I'm going to hand out like candy over here once we finish de-ratting this place out? They don't even have the ability to build fusion engines in-house, Nyan. Either we take the time to build it up, or twenty years later Kamea's kids are gonna coup her for peanuts and the Taurians will move in- sorry, Kamea."
 
A 'harumph' from the Periphery Princess, and a low stare from me. "Fine. She can know the Library exists, but that's it. Not what's in it, not how we got it, and certainly not where it came from- understand?"
 
"If you thought I was gonna tell her about that-" Emma began, before cutting off. "-well. Take it from me, that secret stays safe."
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"Good," I muttered, stalking out. Still angry, I finally found Sokoloy, practically dragging him into the Borozoi where we kept the main terminal of what Emma called the Library. Close to a hundred hundred terabytes of data was what we'd pulled from NAIS: the entire contents of the fiction and nonfiction libraries, as well as more than a hundred years of technical work. Blueprints, schedules, CAD diagrams, instructions: we'd grabbed everything. As a degree of security, it required two of us "up-timers" to open it- thus, Sokoloy, who joined me on the parallel terminal to do his own reading. It took time, I'll admit- we must have been at it for the better part of two hours- when finally Sokoloy came up with the information we were looking for.
 
Portable hyper-pulse generators. They existed, they were from the Star League, the rest was academic. If they were part of the phone network, ComStar had them. If ComStar had them, and we were still in the bad old days (a half-hour check to confirm; yes, research and development operations were still eating assassinations left right and center) then that meant they were using them to Subtly Fuck With Us. There were many ways to do that, but the fastest and easiest would be the old Draconis Magic Bushido Hands: just pull a mech formation out of your ass and say "look ma its a Star League cache!"
 
"So," Sokoloy said, breaking the silence with a moment of reserved cynicism. "Why the fuck is the phone company trying to kick us in the dick?"
 
"That's an excellent fucking question," I grumbled. "Normally they save that for Great Houses plots-"
 
"I don't like that sudden cut-off," Sokoloy muttered. "That's the sudden cut-off you do before you get a terrible idea like drunk gay sex or putting wings on your Catapult."
 
"Shut the fuck up the wings are fine," I snapped. "And you liked the sex."
 
"I appreciated the gay sex, which convinced me quite politely that 'a hole is a hole' is both not true and that you scream in entirely the wrong octave to be a turn-on. Completely different thing."
 
"Whatever," I huffed, tabbing up a connection to the secured printer. "I'm printing Lucifer out a basic-bitch primer on ComStar Fuckery and You."
 
"Print me a copy, I need a refresher. So will the girls, come to think of it- not like there was a united ComStar back home."
 
"Point."
 
As the printer got going and I scrounged up some nice three ring binders that read "Classified" on the front cover, Sokoloy hummed to himself quietly. "What do you think Arano and Emma are planning?" he asked.
 
"Something big," I grumbled. "Probably dangerous."
 
"We're mercs, narrow it down."
 
"I suspect they'll tell us when the Argo shows up," I said, mouth pinched. "Arano has a thing with Wyrm- she works with us, but trusts her with the sensitive shit. Something went down she hasn't told us about yet."
 
"That 'something' is gonna be the fuel for the next mission?"
 
"Absolutely."
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====Mission Briefing====
Fort Snowball, Central Conference Area
Panzyr
December 16th, 3024
This was, I decided as I looked over the hall where every single officer in the entire Liberation Army from the lieutenants on up, a great example of The Fuckening. The area was packed to the gills, undercurrents of conversation flowing through like water in a pond.
 
"Attention, everyone!" Arano said from the podium up front in front of the large projector. Oh god. They'd made a PowerPoint. We were all going to die. "We're starting!"
 
Slowly, the officer-blobs congealed into their seats away from the coffee pot and samovar. Sitting down next to Wyrm, I quietly traded her a pair of cookies for half her sandwich, and got my notebook out.
 
"Couldn't this have been an e-mail?" I grumbled.
 
"No."
 
Well, color me shocked at that response.
 
"To preface this briefing," Arano called out, "during operations on Panzyr, we turned up a small Star League era database. After accessing it with tools aboard the Argo, we had to get it decrypted by Lord Karosas. That decryption is now complete."
 
Slide one- a map of the Auregian Reach.
"Currently, the Restoration's front line is centered around Panzyr, Mechdur, and Smithton," Arano said, speaking clearly and carefully. "With the provided resources, we believe the line will hold- raids on Itrom and Mangzhagdian have both produced excellent results in limiting the enemy fighting forces. We have what our intelligence services believe to be a six-month window where the enemy cannot conduct offensive operations. To that end, working with the planetary forces of Bringdam, Fjadlr, Ichlangis, and Zangul, we are planning an unprecedented offensive series of operations."
 
Slide two- a campaign map. At this point, Emma took over.
"The data cache we found revealed a small stockpile of Star League supplies on Artru, primarily dedicated to protecting a system or device referred to as 'Locura'. Our plan is to beat a fast campaign to Artru, retrieve the Locura and contents of this cache, before pulling back to our pre-operation lines. Once we have integrated the Star League cache's resources into our army, we may see about conducting an operational advance to Coromidir, and ending this damn war once and for all."
 
Taking the mic back, Arano stepped up again. "Detailed briefing packets will be distributed this week, but right now our overview is as follows. First Weldry and First Panzyr will be conducting operations on Mangzhangdian, with a focus on capturing enemy stockpiles of supply. You're our backstop, and if you can transition from a raid to a possible planetary capture, do so. Every company they send there is another one not being sent to Smithon. Second Herotitus, First Smithon: you'll be landing and raiding on Katinka. Your mission is to lock down the enemy starport, with a secondary focus on stealing any shipment-ready salvage from the SLDF depots there. Harvest Blades, the Auregian Royal Guard, and Markham's Marauders will make the final jump to Artru, before securing the Star League cache and transporting it to the Argo. Once that is complete, we're going to backfill around the same route as previous, using the JumpShips from the initial maneuvers to create a pseudo- Command Circuit to get the loot home, as well as allowing charge time to overlap with time to reach the jumpers."
 
Now, it was Emma's turn to finish it off. "Currently, our timeline is to finish pre-operational prep in one week, and to have all JumpShips in position in two weeks. All battalions are expected to be at the nadir jump point in twelve days now, prepared for engagement. Current preliminary order packets will be available in four hours."
 
"Everyone is dismissed, but the room's booked out for another hour," Arano finally finished. "There will be a lunch service delivered in thirty minutes, so it is my sincere advice everyone takes the time to make sure they have familiarized themselves with partner unit officers for this operation. Unity is what drives the Restoration- you have all seen what its lack does to the enemy."
 
And with that, the worst of it was done. Looking over at Wyrm, you raised an eyebrow.
 
"I can see why this would not in fact be an e-mail," I muttered. "Explains why you were separate from Arano's trip in too."
 
"Yeah, it's been a bit of a fucking month," Wyrm grumbled. "Go inspect the dropships! Go fight through the Directorate lances protecting the Dropships! Go take a swing at my crazy vizer-cousin who's sitting on top of the dropships! Repair time? What's that?"
 
"Bad ops schedule?"
 
"Terrible ops schedule. We were flying the wings off my Leopard for a while, and everyone was sleeping in their mech cockpits for a bit."
 
"Was it worth it, though?"
 
"Well, once we fixed up a few dozen of those 'battle armor' things y'all threw out for being busted? Yeah," Wyrm said with a smirk. "It paid off. Only had to blow up one dropship, and the rest fell into line."
 
I nodded, before raising an eyebrow at Wyrm. "You grabbed the junked out Battle Armor I pitched?"
 
"Nyan, I was literally shoveling garbage into my Leopard to get deadweight in the Argo's cargo bay. I have room for fifty-seven thousand tons of whatever the fuck I want- and more importantly, I can manufacture spare parts in situ."
 
"Hell of a thing," I muttered. "Hell of a thing."
 
"I don't have a country backing me up," Wyrm said with a shrug. "So I do what I can to get by."
 
"Amen to that."
 
After the meeting, it was the usual sort of millequetoast panic that came from any decent operation. Mechs and tanks were rushed through inspection, infantry drilled and loaded into dropships, traitorous clerks were shot; the usual. Soon enough, though, the full of the Harvest Blades was loaded into their dropships, and sent out.
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====Tripping Traps and Finding Loot====
Artru planetary Orbit
Aurigan Coalition
January 21st, 3025
I won't lie: the ambitious plan to get us to Artru was fraught with peril, and general complexity that I disliked on principle. It was a Young Woman's Good Idea, but for some damn reason it worked- even the short hop through an unknown system that the Star League had mapped out and never done anything with was going straight and normal. Now we were just puttering around in orbit, waiting for the Marauders to crack the cache open. Groundside teams had been going at it hammer and tongs, but upstairs we were just sitting and waiting.
 
That is, until something jumped in at the Nadir Jump Point.
 
Artru was a fucking backwater system. This place was a dump. Nobody came here, nobody saw here, and most importantly nobody left here. Naturally, we gussied up the telescopes at it, caught the drive signatures, and then started swearing while calling the Argo to double-check. Argo came back with her own conclusions, and then we stopped swearing and started screaming.
There was a Fortress-class dropship coming in hot: 1.2g acceleration, sustained. My orders were immediate: land the dropships, and get the Argo burning out-of-plane to buy time in case that Fortress was looking to take prisoners. As the Borozoi came in to land, I called Arano, trying to keep my calm.
 
"Arano," I said, when she finally answered the comms. "What's the status downstairs?"
 
"We've accidentally triggered three responses from the drone garrison, but we're getting in now. The door motors failed, so we're manually heaving the damn things open."
 
"Great. That's great," I muttered. "Listen, we've got an issue. You know anyone who owns a Fortress-class dropper and has a grudge?"
 
"Let me talk to Lucifer…" Arano trailed off. Ten minutes of waiting later, and you got your answer. "It's uh, probably the Taurians."
 
"See, this is why we don't fucking commit piracy," I grumbled. "Piracy never pays."
 
"A few lost deniable asset Unions shouldn't make this much of a response though!" Arano snapped. "Unless-"
 
"Unless what?"
 
"So, did you check the news while we were in Mechdur?"
 
I growled. "Was a little busy coordinating this ten-jumper circus, Arano. Get to the point, please." 
 
"So there was a chemical weapons attack on Perdition, about eleven thousand dead. Formally speaking, the Taurians are blaming the Federated Suns, the Suns are denying everything, and, er, I don't know how to say this."
 
"I'm a professional, spit it out."
 
"They're not formally blaming you, but they're blaming you," Arano said, raising my hackles. "Half-Capellan. Seen tearing out of New Avalon like someone set your pubes on fire. Blatant disregard for Taurian culture-"
 
"You call a motherfucker a homoerotic cowboy one time, they never forget it," I grumbled.
 
"-working for me, an illegitimate she-devil brat who started a civil war," Arano said with a hint of sardonic mirth, "who has conducted numerous activities of high illegality against a 'dear ally of the Taurian state', and oh by the way to put a wing-nut on it we're a front for the Evil Capellan Weapons Dealers on Ward."
 
"Okay, so Taurian Fantasy Me gets a bunch of chemical weapons, slips over the border, and then what? Just get a bunch of pesticide sprayers and nail a few apartment blocks?"
 
"A skyscraper, actually, but yeah. Load a few canisters of cyanide gas into the central air, pull the pins, leave. Got some pretty important people using the restaurants with this apparently, including some cousins of the Proctor."
 
"Glad to see Fantasy Nyan is a better saboteur than the real one," I grumbled. "So we have means, motive, and a fucking Fortress coming at us. You said you popped the doors, though?"
 
"Yeah, we're in, and holy shit is this place big," Arano said. "I gotta go in to check something- mind if I hand you off to Lucifer?"
 
"Go ahead."
 
Some radio crackling, and then it was Lucifer on the line. "So uh, we might have found the motherload," Lucifer said, her voice nearly peaking the mic. "First room we popped the hatch on, we found a fucking reinforced company of Royal metal."
 
"Excuse me?"
 
"Two Atlases, four Spiders, two Highlanders, two Catapults, two Griffins, two Black Knights, and two Lancelots. All of which are Royal."
 
"And suddenly, this whole adventure paid for itself," I said, breathing out in a gasp. "This is- holy shit, Lucifer."
 
"Oh no, that's not the best part," Lucifer said, her voice giddy. "No, the best part? That's the first door. There's more."
 
"Christ the Buddha. If this is what the SLDF was willing to leave here, then what was the Locura?"
 
"I don't know," Lucifer admitted, her voice lowering. "But personally? I think it might be worth more than all the metal in this cache. And hey- if we don't find it, then we still struck it rich."
 
"Amen, Lucifer. Amen."
 
Once we hit the ground, I rode a truck into the Castle Nautilus, and I was amazed. The halls were tall enough to march a mech through, and not uncomfortably either. When I finally met up with Arano and Lucifer, though, both were holding on to each other, trying to keep the shakes down.
 
"Alright," I said, trying to keep my own giddy nature under control. "We're obviously moving everything in. Have we found all the doors?"
 
"Found three so far," Lucifer said, eyes wide open with a hint of madness. "I was literally sprinting around doing my best disco ball impersonation to find them all- one even leads out to an area we think was a starport, even if it's now buried under ten meters of snow."
 
"Nothing that hovering a Mule over won't fix," I said, pulling out a noteputer and drafting the 'move the boat' memo at the speed of light. "Hell, Wyrm probably still has mech-scale snow shovels, the absolute packrat."
 
"Fuck you!" Wyrm called out from what looked like her standing next to me in the scale of the cavern, even though she was at least forty meters away. "I heard that!"
 
"You still got 'em though!" I called back.
 
"Fuck yoooou!"
 
"Yeah, she's still got 'em," Arano chuckled. "So: Lucifer, Nyan, what mechs do you want from the cache? I know I can't use all of 'em, so…"
 
"Would if I could," Lucifer said, smiling lightly, but she shook her head. "But I can't. That's the issue with the ears- you're on one mech, forever."
 
"We nominally can transfer rides," I corrected. "It just needs a six month plus 'no pilot' timer, and we have to completely rip out the old cockpit and put in a new one."
 
"Ah, I see," Kamea said, shrugging. "No competition for me to take the Atlas, then."
 
I smirked. "You're sure about that?"
 
"Yes." Periphery Princess responded
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====Salvage Operations in the shadows of potential doom====
Castle Nautilus
Artru, Aurigan Coalition
November 22nd, 3024
"Jokes on you, I would be out here doing this anyway!" Kamea called out over the radio as her Atlas kept clearing off the buried aerodyne runway.
 
"Hah hah, keep shoveling please, Kamea." I said, finally unbending enough to use my employer's first name. It was a little weird, but after two days in a tiny little base camp on the top floor of this Star League built facility, I'd warmed up to it. The entire facility was still a cavernous nightmare to navigate on even the first level- and so far we'd discovered three. I didn't know what was down there, but our exploration teams had confirmed nearly the whole cave system was mech-traversable, as well as riddled with interior baffles with weapons stations. Even if the uppermost floor or the 'ground' floor got breached, every mech-scale 'street' was capped at both ends by massive armored bunkers packing more firepower than God- and most of the infantry-capable streets had the same.
 
That said, we were still trying and failing to get into the control tower, so things like 'central heating' and 'central power' were still a myth. Right now, our 'mechs were all idling up in the base camp for power and heat, trying and failing to keep a relatively small section of the base warm. We'd at least gotten a main lift running, though, so we could start carting loot down to the Borozoi down in the short spaceport down at the foot of the mountain. We'd already turned up the better part of a company of Maxims, which had brought up discussions of loot sharing.
 
The truth was, even with the Argo's holds and the Borozoi to transport, Kamea couldn't actually use all the loot in this place. So, we'd worked out a deal: If I saw something I wanted, I could bid on it and the nominal roll-off-the-lot sticker price would get taken out of my bill. Considering said bill for the campaign was already nearing four billion c-bills due to ops tempo and support details (I had something like 30% combat losses recompense, and I'd lost a lot of BA over this campaign) it was quickly agreed that "yes let's pay Nyan in salvage" was a good idea, especially since Emma was very quickly starting to get attached to her peer and good friend in Kamea.
 
Incidentally, I was also getting full and unabridged salvage rights on anything Taurian from this point forward in the campaign, because we all knew that Fortress was coming in hot with a combined arms battalion I'd have to throw down with. Considering the amount of weapons here, I wasn't worried: the problem would be getting everything operational and everyone deployed properly. While most people would consider a highly-dispersed strategy to handle the artillery on the Fortress, my plan was simpler: everyone hides in the Castle Nautilus until we find where the Iberia lands, and then we pop up out the nearest sally tunnel and give them a douche of battle armor to the ship, possibly with extra airstrikes. With a little luck we'd capture the dropper, then we could pick the mechs off at our leisure. If that didn't work, we'd then bait them into the top floor of the Castle Nautilus, and use the automated defenses we'd had Dr. Murad get local control over to swarm anything coming in with light and angry hovercraft.
 
Until that dropper came down, though, we got Kamea's people into new metal and training, found more parts of the Castle Nautilus, and tried not to focus on the upcoming doom. It was hard, since we managed to get our way into enough of the computer systems to be able to track the fusion torch by eye. Fortunately for us, they weren't tracking for the Argo. Unfortunately, it didn't matter: we still had to win here.
-----
====Defense of Artu: Stage One====
 Castle Nautilus - Top Floor Staging Ground
Artru, Aurigan Coalition
January 25th, 3025: 0945
"Alright everyone, places!" I snapped into the mic, my ass firmly in the cockpit of my Catapult as everyone started mounting up. "Current estimated time of arrival is two hours out! I want everyone ready to give 'em a good Canopus welcome, with the whores and the hounds out front and center! Mersies, status on the BA companies?"
 
Mersies, still griping about being made to coordinate in the HQ area we'd set up, sighed. "I still want to be out there with you. The BA teams are mounted on the Maxims, though, and are ready to go."
 
"The only reason I'm going out is because I jump good," I said, giving the canards on my Catapult a wiggle. "Sokoloy, how's the automatic base defenses looking?"
 
"Well, we got coverage back on the spaceport, so the droppers are safe. They're all on search/track mode- I have to authorize the fires."
"Good. Don't want to accidentally smack one of our guys," I chuckled. "Howler, you and the kids are on backup defense in case they get around us. Remember, don't choke up on the door. They might try and take it out with the Long Tom."
 
"Relax, we're staying as near to the base camp as we can," Howler chuckled. "Go out and get 'em, recon-boy."
"I'm not the recon, the Stingers are the recon," I grumbled. "I'm the guy who makes sure a Griffin or Shadow Hawk doesn't eat the recon."
 
"Sure, sure," Howler chuckled.
 
"Clear comms!" Kamea snapped. "We're getting hailed, finally."
 
<<"Attention, forces of the Arano Restoration!">> the radio snapped, with a few other people getting video. <<"I am Commodore Samuel Ostergaard of the Concord Navy. You are surrounded by a battalion of the Taurian Concordat's most decorated MechWarriors. On behalf of our allies in the Aurigan Directorate, I demand your immediate and unconditional surrender.">>
 
"Self-confident asshole, ain't he." Howler muttered.
 
<<"But I know you won't stand down, Lady Arano. You're The Sword of Restoration - you have a reputation to uphold. And that's good. I wouldn't have it any other way.">> Ostergaard kept going, proving once and again you couldn't get a Taurian to shut up once they got on their soapbox. <<"I'm going to enjoy painting the ice red with your blood.">>
 
"To, Commodore Samuel Ostergaard," Kamea replied, smirking over the narrow video feed I had of her in front of her Atlas kneeling down for the cheesy propaganda shoot we'd done yesterday in a fit of boredom. "One of us is a long way from home on a gods-forsaken ice ball with snow demons. The other one is safe and sound in an operational SLDF facility with enough defenses to stop a division of the Concordat's best and brightest. If you want to fight, I'll be welcome to parol you in the care of a neutral third power in this conflict- perhaps the Federated Suns?"
 
<<"So that rumor was right,">> Ostergaard growled. <<"Fine, then. When you see your father in Hell, tell him who sent you.">>
-----
====Defense of Artu: Stage Two====
 Castle Nautilus - Scree Slope west of Door Seven
Artru, Aurigan Coalition
January 25th, 3025: 1230
"Steady, everyone," I hissed. It was about three hundred meters between each element of this skirmish line, and I wanted nobody to take chances. "Remember, we're just finding out what their progress on unloading is looking like and getting a good picture of what their defenses are."
 
"We get you, Gramps!" one of the younger Stinger pilots joked. "We've pulled recon before!"
 
"You've pulled recon against second rate Periphery house troops and militias," I corrected. "We have a rough list of Taurian deployments from our friends in low places; this is liable to be Taurian Lancers, either their second or third battalions. They're not seasoned up yet, but they'll have metal to spare."
 
"We'll be fine!"
 
Frantically grabbing a set of ozou beads I kept in the cockpit for this exact purpose, I muttered a few obscene words under my breath. "Never assume that, kid."
 
"Shut up, everyone," one of the other Stingers called out. "I found a little ridge, and I can see to that Dropship."
 
"What are we looking at?" I asked.
 
"They landed in that weird ice stalagmite forest. First lance looks like a, uh, some mark of Atlas, an Awesome, a Marauder, and a Thud. Vehicles are rolling out, we've got a Manticore pair, some Bulldogs, a Schrek, shitload of Vedettes. They're still coming. Second lance is forming up; one Quickdraw, one Ostol, one Warhammer, and an Archer."
 
"Good work, I'm beaming this back to base," I said, breathing deeply. This would be hard, but manageable.
 
"Third lance is coming out, and I think they're done unloading after that. We've got a Shadow Hawk, a Griffin, and two fucks in a Locust and Stinger."
 
"Ain't we in Stingers?" one of the other Stinger pilots said. I commemorated for one-quarter second, then tapped my transmit button twice. Everyone shut up after that.
 
"Alright, we got what we needed," I said, breathing deeply. "Everyone, start getting back to base-"
 
In the distance, a clear, catastrophic, powerful thud sounded, and I flinched hard enough to make my Cat take a knee.
 
"Major?" the serious one asked.
 "That was the Fortress' Long Tom opening up," I said, shaking my head and trying to clear it. "You don't see 'em much any more because they're finicky and like to break a lot, but they can shell God off the face of the earth without blinking. Damn things can shoot out to thirty klicks or so, and by the time you eat the first shell there's four more in the air…"
 
Something, something stuck in my mind. Something critical, that I'd learned a long time ago. Trying to tease it loose, I kept listening to nothing- then it clicked.
 
"There's no other shots."
 
"Excuse me?" one of the other Stingers said.
 
"Fuck fuck fuck there's no other shots!" I yelled. "You fire off Long Tom ammo by the ton! Except there's only a single shell that takes up a ton, and that's because it's a fucking nuke!"
 
"Great, the Major's gone 'round the bend," one of the pilots grumbled, still walking towards the door. The door of the Castle Nautilus. The door of the very small Castle Brian. The exact kind of fortification that the Bulls had one single radioactive answer to because they couldn't beat the SLDF in a fair fight on the ground.
 
"Run, people, run!" I snapped, pushing my Catapult as hard as I could away from the door to Castle Nautilus as I could. Slamming my transmitters open all the way, loud as I could, I made a call to the world.
 
"NUKE INCOMING-"
and then there was death, the destroyer of worlds.
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