IWTTD Chpt 6

==If We Turn To Dust - Chapter 6 -==
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===The Fury of a Ice Cold Steiner===
LYRAN DROPSHIP CROWN OF ICE, NADIR POINT
SUMMER, FEDERATION OF SKYE, LYRAN COMMONWEALTH
OCTOBER 8TH, 3027
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I'd planned to open the conversation with a demand, if a polite one, but the sight of Katrina Steiner's face, worried and drawn, changed my mind. I ignored the grab-bar I'd planned to stop myself with and threw my arms around her, burying my face in the shoulder of her blue jacket and squeezing desperately.
 
She swayed under the impact, bleeding my momentum through where she'd hooked her feet under another grab bar, and returned the hug, patting me on the back and waiting out the storm while I wailed.
 
When my sniffles had subsided enough to listen properly, she said, "I have an agent recruiting on Galatea for you, and organizing what he can find into a working field force. I need you to know that before the rest."
 
I turned loose and scrubbed at my eyes - without shame, thank you. I think I had cause. "You've got another job for me?" I said, around the knot in my throat and the resentment in my stomach.
 
"Margaret is in critical condition," she said, "and Selvin is meeting Tyr's Diamond, and I'm stuck here in Summer cleaning up after Aldo fucking Lestrade. I need you to handle Terra."
 
"Boss…" I said, looking for an appropriate way to warn her of the obvious - that I was riding the ragged edge of a breakdown.
 
"And if you do it with an axe and a bulldozer to be done faster, all the better. I have had enough of them."
 
Well. That was different than if she'd needed me to be subtle.
 
I sighed. "Okay," I said. "I'll hold you to that. I've been more or less out of touch while I was in transit. I'll guess you have somebody to catch me up?"
 
"I'll do it myself," she replied, and nodded down a passageway, her safely-constrained braid floating in the zero-G.
 
I nudged myself after her with a toe, both of us drifting through the hatchway behind her close guards. "What happened to Margaret? How is she, exactly?"
 
Margaret Aten had been Duchess of Skye, one of my two peers at the second tier of the Lyran Commonwealth's system of feudal vassalage and thereby the noble responsible for the most economically productive of the Commonwealth's member states. She'd also been only four years older than I was, which combined with the mention of her own vassal Aldo Lestrade, a known but not proven patricide…
 
"She's on full life support as we speak; the doctors aren't confident. A DEST unit managed to get to Skye without being detected," Katrina replied grimly. "They bombed the nearest garrison posts and stole the mechs there."
 
"And then," I concluded grimly, "they shot up the palace and everything else they could reach." The Draconis Elite Strike Teams were exactly what the expanded version of their name sounded like - the Draconis Combine's special operations command, literal space ninja trained in battlemech operation alongside stealth, infiltration, and more personal forms of violence. With as desperate as the Combine had to be, they wouldn't be in a restrained mood.
 
"We confirmed that none of them made it out," she said. "And then we started backtracking, and found that they'd arrived on Skye with Summer papers."
 
"...I'm surprised that Lestrade came that far out in the open." I admitted.
 
"It looks like they inserted themselves," she replied, catching a railing by the corner of a branch in the passageway and looking back at me. "But the forensic teams found that the access logs on their files in the Summer database had been edited… But not the federal-keyed backups."
 
"Lestrade found them," I guessed, "decided to say nothing, and covered his tracks."
 
"We're still not sure there," Katrina said. "But it was enough to write a warrant for the rest of his files, and those most certainly were enough to hang the bastard."
 
"Not worth the price." I said.
 
"No, no it wasn't."
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===Plotting to slay the hidden Tyrant===
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In another place and era, Crown of Ice would have been called Air Force One. A completely unique thirty-thousand-ton design brought back into service thanks to the new tech boom, it had been built to accept only minimal armor and armament, because the designers of the late Star League wanted to save room for luxuries like a mobile Archonal throne room, and for more practical tools of rule like rank after rank of offices for the same kind of mobile bureaucracy I kept aboard my own Argo.
 
One of the more extravagant of those practical tools was a strategic holotank three-quarters the size of the one in the Triad on Tharkad, set to project around a series of catwalks that let users walk or drift into and around the projection.
 
"We got the report from The Edge only a couple of hours before you jumped in." Katrina said. "Which makes it a clean sweep of the followup engagements in Rasalhague. The only forces they have left are on Kirchbach and Kufstein. The 11th Rasalhague Regulars seem to have escaped Trolloc Prime with their battlemech forces still intact, and a bit over half of their support, and the 2nd Dieron Regulars managed much the same from Alnasi - they've jumped to Kaus Borealis."
 
Centuries ago, long before the Star League had unified humanity - however imperfectly - and before the Hyper Pulse Generators that the Star League Ministry of Communications, and its successor, Comstar, had used to send data across the stars, the Terran Hegemony had had a completely different form of FTL communications. During an incognito adventure of her misspent youth, Katrina had personally recovered a working sample of the 'Black Box' devices they'd used to do it - and after becoming Archon, had directed its duplication and propagation all across the Lyran Commonwealth.
 
Having Comstar place us under Interdiction, and block off all access to its HPG stations, was economically painful, and militarily inconvenient given that their signals propagated faster than the Black Boxes' did… But unlike any other state in the Inner Sphere, it was not enough to cripple us.
 
"And towards the concentration point at Kaus Media." I speculated, since that was where the Combine forces retreating from both Vega and Kessel had gone.
 
"Likely, since the 2nd Legion of Vega's survivors have gone to Kaus Australis," she said, then sighed. "That's almost a pity. Their commander led the battlemechs in the rearguard on Konstance - with the prisoners we've taken, their casualties could be as low as two or three hundred. I think I'd've liked to meet that man."
 
I was discreetly silent about my indifference to any supposed virtues of a Combine officer, martial or otherwise, and after a glance at my nonexpression, she smiled slightly and pulled herself further down the map's border. "Dyev was a turkey shoot," she said, "but the 36th Dieron managed to pull up stakes and leave the system before we landed on Athenry."
 
"So the only points of resistance still active on the border are Kirchbach, Kufstein, the Kaus cluster," I said. "...And Dieron."
Katrina hit a button on the controller she'd strapped to her wrist, and the holotank swirled with light for a moment as it zoomed in and turned into an astronaut's-eye-view of Dieron IV. "We know that Sophitia hasn't been captured, because Warlord Akuma has taken to broadcasting video of the executions of anyone and everyone his forces catch," she said.
 
Another control brought up lines and icons in blue and red, showing the positions of the forces. "We've been concentrating on envelopment and moving the action away from the civilian and industrial centers. They've already moved an additional four of their divisions onto Dieron, including the 5th Sword of Light, and the Haruspex network has shown that they're assembling a command circuit through Nirasaki and Al Na'ir. Judging by the capacity it sees, we could be looking at as many as six more divisions."
 
Haruspex was the code name for my own contribution of unsuspected technology of elder days. The Star League's intelligence agencies had managed to scale up sensors used to monitor the hyperspatial breaches that happened in our poorly-named 'fusion' engines to a level that let them detect jump drives in operation from more than a dozen light years away.
 
The Lyran Intelligence Corps had gotten their hands on as many of the pocket-sized Scout-class jumpships as they could find and modified them for long deployments, including replacing their small-craft bays with artificial gravity carousels, then woven the hundreds of meters of pickup wire the jump detectors needed into their jump sails. Seeded into deep space in the first thirty-to-forty-five light years of Combine territory, they let us see exactly where their jumpships were going.
 
I raised an eyebrow. "Don't the Davions have something like a dozen RCTs within two jumps of Al Na'ir?"
 
"Including formations that would be in position to strike at supporting systems like Markab and Murchison?" Katrina said. "Fourteen. With what Akuma has already pulled out, the Combine has nine that meet the same standard. If I thought that the man was that smart, I'd say that Akuma was calculating Takashi was slightly less likely to execute him for losing Al Na'ir than Dieron, but this smells more like panic to me."
 
I frowned. "If he's panicking…" I said slowly.
 
"He has the Ryuken in the field," she said. "But so far, we haven't seen any strikes from them. Dispatches we've captured indicate Takashi has been explicit about reserving the authorization for their use for himself. Perhaps more importantly to you, Akuma…" she pointed out an area where the Combine lines followed a river valley, with highlands on both sides. "...hasn't chosen to devote the effort needed to root out the forces cut off when he occupied the Shana valley."
 
"Including Soph's company." I concluded.
 
"Including the third battalion of the Fifth Royals, yes," Katrina said. "They are sending strikes after any radio transmissions, so contact is intermittent at best, but Wolf reports that there has been some."
 
I took a breath and let it out through my nose. "And rescuing her isn't important enough to anyone but me to do without breaking years of progress."
 
Far too much of the Lyran nobility would have taken their right to redirect the entire military campaign to their personal goals as a given, and breaking them of the habit was too much of an ongoing project to risk setting back.
 
Dammit.
 
"I have an option or two in mind," Katrina said, turning to face me and obviously reading along with my own thoughts. "But…"
 
"But," I grumbled, without disagreeing. "I presume that we're scraping up reinforcements of our own?"
 
"We are. I've told Morgan to head to Dieron via Sabik and Dyev, along the garrison from Rigel Kentarus. There's a little shuffling out of the interior to cover what that opens up, but it's not impossible. If Akuma really is grabbing every unit he can, then our others in that area will end up following the redirection of the Kaus cluster fallbacks. When they arrive, Wolf will have a freer hand… assuming that you don't beat them there with the command circuits being hired."
 
I did raise an eyebrow at her, though. "You're sure, though, that this is the right time to move against the Robes?"
 
She scowled, eyes glittering palely in the light of the giant hologram in a way that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. "Comstar," she said, "started the Second Succession War. Every Lyran death, every lost world, every wasted Kroner, is on their account. Not content with that, they've gone on to murder our best, our brightest, our future - for decades. For every child they have fed, ten have starved and a hundred more were never born, and they've done it by pure treachery. I will be damned if I leave those vipers' fangs lodged in the Commonwealth for a moment longer than necessary. They've escaped the costs of their acts of war by stealth, and deception, and our ignorance.
 
"And now the Commonwealth is ignorant no longer. Yes, the time is right to collect on the debts they owe our people - and if there are costs for that, we can afford them."
 
"As far as it goes," I said, more coolly than her fury but not in a way I thought any of Comstar's First Circuit would have been glad to hear, "good. I take it that the League's been quiet?"
 
"'Quiet'," she said, the finger-quotes audible if not visible. "We saw a dozen or so raids as the offensive launched-" which had been expected "-mostly in battalion strength. Two or three larger operations, which we sent off with their ears boxed. They had settled in to wait and see by the time you landed on Vega, once they'd satisfied themselves that we hadn't stripped the border."
 
"Because despite his determination to make you wonder," I said, "Janos Marik is not actually a fool."
 
She let out a bark of laughter. "Yes. He'll be waiting to see what happens."
 
"Even with the Interdiction?" I asked.
 
"I expect we'll see another probe or three, but we're prepared for that. Once he sees that we still have faster than light communications, it will end. He can't afford a full offensive, not without stripping another theatre." A sharp gesture brought a rush of vertigo as the holotank zoomed back out to the grand scale, and a button brought up both the golden icons of known Armed Forces of the Federated Suns positions - which were quite complete, since they'd told us, just as we'd told them almost all of ours - and the vivid purple ones of Free Worlds League Militia units.
 
The latter were rather fewer - and not just because there were some known to exist whose position LIC didn't even have a guess at. The FWLM had, we were pretty sure, no more than about half the total force of the AFFS, despite everything they'd done to grow their reserves. Most of the latter's troops were on the Combine border, given the long and passionate bilateral hatreds present there, but the densest concentration was on their border with Dieron - the same fourteen regimental combat teams that could threaten Al Na'ir were only a handful of jumps from the League's territory. At the moment, the League actually had more troops on that border…
 
But with the way we, the Lyran Commonwealth, had gutted their border with us, the Combine would be forced to pull troops from their border with the Suns, and having the AFFS units that freed up show up in a shooting mood would ruin the League's whole day.
 
"Would he take your word about Holy Shroud?" I wondered.
 
Katrina looked at me. "What do you mean?" she asked.
 
"If the full hand we're playing against Comstar gets revealed, Janos Marik is going to shit himself." I said. "He'll have to expect a dramatic escalation, and start thinking about his own strategic answers. Even just taking Sol will come right up to the edge of that, never mind the rest of it. But if he has a better idea of our strategic thinking, he's less likely to think that he has to act now or forever lose his chance."
 
She considered the idea. "I'll talk to the Diplomatic Office and get their impressions," she said. "It's at least worth a look."
 
I nodded. "Let me know either way, if there's time," I said, then changed the subject. "And speaking of diplomacy… Selvin?"
 
"You know he can be quite charming, in person," Katrina said, her lips twitching. "And I have prepared the offers to be ones he can accept, as well as Tyr. And of course, he knows what's on the horizon as well as we do."
 
"Selvin Kelswa's an idiot." I said sourly, knowing I wasn't being quite fair and not caring - especially when our mutual boss was openly snickering about my attitude.
 
"The deal is that we'll move on Kirchbach and Kufstein, and recognize an independent Principality of Rasalhague after Tyr rises in rebellion, in return for their guarantee to neutralize the Ryuken, and for plebiscites on all former Tamar Pact worlds in five years' time. The larger Commonwealth's share of the bribes Selvin's planning for those populations will be dear, but we can afford it," she said.
 
The last five years or so had represented a nearly complete overhaul of the Lyran Commonwealth Armed Forces, standardizing, organizing, and upgrading. But the chaos and desperation of the Succession Wars had long since disordered any sane semblance of logistics in favor of a desperate scrabble of whatever could be found that worked and any and every bodge that would keep it that way.
 
We'd doubled down on the most common types, the ones we actually built or had plenty of, and relegated the more frequent outliers to militia roles in the interior of the nation…
 
And the rest, almost seven regiments worth of battlemechs and two regiments of aerospace fighters, we'd given to Tyr, the militant - not to say terrorist - arm of the Rasalhaguian independence movement, in the confident expectation that they would make great honkin' problems for the Combine.
 
"That… might work," I admitted. "Can they deliver on their side?"
 
She shrugged. "We have agents on the ground to report success or failure before heading in-system, so the risks are acceptable."
 
"Radio transmitters?" Black Boxes worked for surface-to-jump-point comms, but suitcase sized or not, having them in the hands of infiltrators would be a heck of a risk of getting one captured.
 
"Of course," Katrina said.
 
"That'll work." I said, and turned to look at the three white stars at the center of the Inner Sphere. "Do we know any more about what they have?"
 
Katrina followed my eyes. "We've confirmed three active warships that they cycle between their bases - one at Ross, one at Luyten, and one at Titan. Based on the size of the jump signatures, probably the three Dante class Frigates. Analysis has gone back and forth over which if any of the Camerons they have active. It's… still not completely sure which assets we'll have to deal with them."
 
I blinked. "Wait, what?"
 
"You've been outside the warship compartment since bringing the Locura in, correct?"
 
I nodded. "At least officially. I don't think anyone but me could have put Snord's in-joke on the day I swore allegiance together to realize that we had the Dragoons' ships, too."
 
Katrina looked both startled and a bit nettled. "You've stolen most of my thunder, then. But we've recovered and repaired three hulls that could be gotten to a combat-ready state. The jump drives are… questionable, for the most part, so they've been jumping with the bare minimum crewing and running checks after each one."
 
I understood. "And that, of course, takes time. All right. A couple of cruisers and four smaller ships, including the Locura?"
 
"Five." No other word for it; Katrina let herself look smug for a moment. "We've built a new corvette around the sublight drive we removed from the Argo."
 
Nice to know that swapping a Behemoth drive into my mobile capitol had gotten us more than just research data. "Rather than refitting the drives on the troublesome trio?" I asked.
 
"The project started before we had found any of them. Loxley has an Invader's collars, and she's equipped as a regiment-strength aerospace carrier, even if we haven't been able to fit her with any capital weapons. You'll have a bit of time to familiarize yourself with the full specifications, the fleet still has several days of charging to complete before they can move, and the AFFS component has one jump still to make."
 
"Glad to hear they weren't waiting up for me," I said. "What are the Suns bringing?"
 
Katrina looked at me for a moment, puzzled, then got it and said, "Davion seems to have assigned Candace Liao as your counterpart in their expedition. Militarily, they say they've equipped one of their regimental combat teams for fighting in tunnels and vacuum, and eight for occupying Terra. Their own Warship program has four hulls; two on a variant of the Loxley design and two recovered."
 
My eyebrows went up. "Where did they find the drives?" I asked. "Mothballed at Galax?" Where the Argo had first been built for the SLDF. "Or have they got it back online?"
 
"That's a work in progress, though our technical assistance people are estimating another five years at most. Faster than our own duplication efforts at Shipil, but not by a great deal. They're using paired drives from scrapped Behemoths.
 
"Their recovered hulls are an SLDF Avatar class Cruiser, the Arjuna, and one of their own New Syrtis ships, the Pleiades."
 
That last name rang a bell. "She was their last, wasn't she? Structural failure after a bad jump."
 
"Yes," Katrina confirmed. "Besides the fact that she was their most intact wreck, it was politically necessary."
 
"...Right," I said, once it was clear she wasn't going to expand further. "Anyway, I hope we have an actual admiral to handle the shooting? Given how Vega went where I understood the business, I really don't think we want me trying to sling around a warship fleet."
 
"There's a military chain of command in place," she said, frowning slightly. "Admiral Vargas is a decorated veteran of our assault dropship corps, as are most of his captains - aside from the three who had served as command officers with the Wolf's Dragoons."
 
Former Clanners who had commanded Warships before in their careers, quite possibly in action. I tended to suspect that the reason for having a Lyran admiral in overall command had more to do with trust than ability… Though no doubt he had plenty of the latter, as well.
 
"More importantly," she said, "I'm quite content with the results of Vega."
 
I gave her an incredulous look. "Boss, are you sure about that?" I asked. "Leaving aside letting myself get shot up by Kerensky, getting past that canyon was a clusterfuck."
 
"Theodore Kurita is dead, neither of the Legions of Vega that were present are in any state to be reconstructed let alone used, and while the casualties are painful, they're ones that the Commonwealth can sustain." Katrina said bluntly. "Yes, there are things you could have done differently, and perhaps if I hadn't sent you in in the full knowledge that you were emotionally compromised, you would have - but I was the one who sent you, and I was well aware of that."
 
I sighed. "'The Buck Stops Here'." I said.
 
"What?"
 
"'Passing the buck' was an expression for pushing off an unwanted responsibility," I told her. "One of the Presidents of the United States famously had a sign on his desk saying that the buck stopped there - that he had to accept ultimate responsibility."
 
From the way Katrina laughed, I suspected that her own desk would soon see a new addition. "Exactly," she said. "Put it on my shoulders if it needs to be somewhere."
 
"...I'll do my best," I said.
 
"Good," she said briskly. "Go deal with Comstar. I'll have a force waiting for you when you get to Dieron - you don't have to worry about any of the details, from the budget to her mother and back again."
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===Reunion of a Aunt and Niece===
LYRAN WARSHIP ATHENA, ZENITH POINT
RED DWARF LFS-019, FEDERATION OF SKYE, LYRAN COMMONWEALTH
OCTOBER 10th, 3027
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LCS Loxley was named for the Loxley system, in the Protectorate of Donegal, and if she hadn't been the first Warship the Commonwealth had built in centuries, I'd've almost wondered if the inhabitants of Loxley might have been a little insulted by the comparison. She was a crude and unlovely ship, an untapered cylinder of a main hull studded with almost random-looking bulges and pylons, with a distended ring around her middle like a python that had somehow managed to swallow a car tire. The gaping chutes of launch and recovery bays for her fighters ringed that central housing for her gravity carousels, but she had a lot of them. She'd be more than capable of housing her brood, which was fortunate since she'd have to rely on them to do almost all of her fighting for her.
 
The one-time Clan Wolf Ship Mars had lost her warship's fangs in favor of similar launch facilities, though the Locura and the Darius and Nelson, the two Lola III-class destroyers, had kept their big guns when they received their own aero regiments. The Dragoons' Aegis-class cruiser, Alexander, and the Congress-class frigate Beowulf, had received not one but two regiments of fighters each, and the Sovetskii Soyuz-class Heavy Cruiser, Athena, the flagship of the lot, had gotten not only two fighter regiments but also all of the big guns removed from Mars.
The result was a mess by any rationally organized standard, and nothing on the list had even a fraction of the speed and maneuverability of Comstar's Dantes, but more than six hundred and fifty fighters carried aboard the warships alone - plus whatever came along aboard the frigate and cruisers' dropship collars - should be a good equalizer.
 
Of course, finding an entire small military's worth of aerospace fighters had been its own adventure, but a slight change of priorities had honestly made it surprisingly straightforward.
 
Since long before the Succession Wars, Lockheed-CBM and the Lyran Commonwealth Aerospace Forces' obsession with firepower at any cost had combined to foist possibly the worst medium aerospace fighter in the Inner Sphere off on the Commonwealth's long-suffering pilots. The Lucifer was a shambling mess of gripes and technical failures flying (slowly) in formation, without the benefit of an ejection seat and with everything that should have been armor ripped out in favor of yet more guns.
 
The original plan, years back right after the Battle of Solaris had convinced even her worst detractors that Katrina was, if not a military genius, then the closest thing to sit on the Archon's throne in living memory, had just been to scrap the things. Other factories in the Commonwealth built the faster and better armored medium, the Hellcat, or the faster and better armored heavy fighter, the Eagle. Inactive plants for the (yet again) faster and better-armored Rapier had come online, and the equal-speed but larger and more heavily armed Chippewa had received a vast increase in protection from the implementation of double-capacity heat sinks.
 
With all of those other options, the awkward child was unneeded, and its risk to its pilots could be dispensed with.
But instead, Katrina had assigned Lockheed's engineers to a top-secret project, a bottom-to-top refit program for those mothballed Lucifers that would update and improve and iron out every flaw… and add ejection seats.
 
The result was still not very quick, but it was tough and well-armed and had more endurance than most fighters. Massed in their hundreds, they would serve at least well enough for one or two battles - and one way or the other, that was all that we'd get.
 
The dropship contingent was more uniform, and much newer. With fourteen dropship collars to work with - four on Alexander, five on Athena, two on Beowulf, and three on Loxley - we'd be bringing two squadrons of Muninn assault dropships and a pair of Titans. I hadn't even really been aware that the LCAF had two squadrons of the former, yet, but apparently the second batch of seven had been rushed out of the yards in the last couple of months. Jumpships carried two more sixpacks of dropships, Seeker-class ships that had been modified for this mission. That was a risk to the jumpships, of course, but one that we really couldn't avoid.
 
So, the big formal get-to-know-the-political-heavy dinner Admiral Vargas had thrown to introduce me to his skippers was not a small party; Me, Vargas and his Chief of Staff, the eight Warship captains, the six Jumpship captains, and then the twenty Dropship commanders… One of whom, the captain of the Lyran Commonwealth DropShip Leutnant Asima Brigham, had brought his executive officer. Thirty-eight people was a large party to cram into a Warship's wardroom, but Vargas was exactly as senior and skilled at his job as you'd expect someone handpicked to direct literally every capital ship in his navy into battle to be. Which, given we were talking about the Lyran Commonwealth Navy with its sad history of political games and patronage, meant that he could gladhand and manage with the best of them.
 
The mood in the room was good, helped by the cognac and the close quarters, and by the end of the evening I was confident that every one of them knew what their role was and could carry it off, and they were confident that their mission was real, and serious, and happening for good reasons. This late in the game there was little to no reason not to fill a select group like this in on Comstar and why they had to go, and I'd done just that.
 
Rather than making a late night of it, the way most Social Generals would have, Vargas pulled the plug on the evening relatively early, and left me to retire to my cabin with my own political deputy.
 
I flopped into my desk chair - thankful that I rated a cabin in one of the gravity carousels, rather than having to sleep in microgravity like the common crewmen - and looked at her suspiciously. She was seventeen years old and, after ending up in command of Leutnant Asima Brigham in mid-battle, a decorated combat veteran, but at the moment, she looked remarkably like my oldest daughter in the process of working up her courage to fess up to some childish misdeed.
 
"Liss, what did you do?" I asked tiredly.
 
Melissa Steiner smiled at me sheepishly. "Fell in love?" she offered.
 
I closed my eyes and slumped even further. "Tell me you're not pregnant," I demanded. Of all the people to have acting like a teenaged idiot…
 
"I'm not pregnant," she said obediently, and when I cracked an eye to stare at her judgmentally, hurried to add, "I'm not! I, um, worried a little, but I've had my cycle since then."
 
"Gott Sei dank." I muttered, one of the few bits of German that came instinctively rather than needing deliberately chosen. I took a moment to recruit my patience, then sat up properly and looked her in the eyes. "All right. Start from the top."
 
She started at the top, explaining the way Jaime Wolf had set up an 'incognito' ball for the officers of the three brigades under his command - blanked out name-tags, uniforms worn without insignia or decorations, and apparently little domino masks. There had been assigned seating, but it had been deliberately randomized rather than organized by unit or rank. She'd ended up next to a handsome, carrot-topped man in a Davion mechwarrior's dress uniform, and started to try to draw him out when she noticed that he was drinking more heavily and talking less than those around him.
 
She waxed, frankly, rather poetic about his eyes and ponytail and broad shoulders; I didn't cut the gushing off, partly because I was tired and partly because I was keeping track of the details to try and get an impression of the man she was talking about. Assuming accurate representation, his reaction to his parent's treason was a positive sign of personal integrity and loyalty to the Federated Suns - which, admittedly, wasn't loyalty to our own Lyran Commonwealth no matter the terms of secret alliances, but beat opportunism and power-hunger wholesale.
 
She'd responded by commiserating about her own incompatibility with neurohelmets, and from there they'd moved into chatting about this or that, anecdotes of their childhood, their training, their experiences. She also started to gush about the course the evening had taken, but her enthusiasm combined with the fact that she'd felt the need to check her cycles afterwards were enough to tell me everything I needed to know, so I stopped her.
 
Sexual shenanigans should be private.
 
I will say this for Melissa, though. She managed to make the embarrassed blush look adorable. "Anyway," she said. "I tracked him down in our files afterwards. It wasn't hard; only eleven of the observers the AFFS sent were mechwarriors… And that's… why I wanted to talk to you."
 
"What you wanted my help with," I judged, after considering the logic for a moment. While she and I certainly got along, we just didn't interact often enough or deeply enough for me to make sense as a first choice of confidants.
 
Unless she was angling towards a goal.
 
"Well… Yes?" she admitted, resting her hands on her crossed knees and trying on her most charming smile. I gave her the flattest look I could, and she laughed, then sobered. "His name is Donovan Jospin, he's a Leftenant… and he's in trouble."
 
A niggling feeling that I'd been missing a detail clicked into place, and I got up and moved to the cabin's terminal, and called up the record in question. As described, the man in the file photo had reddish-blond hair worn pulled back and an AFFS Leftenant's uniform. I mumbled to myself as I read: "Time in grade… a good bit, good performance reviews… Probably his last assignment before his promotion board. And they gave him a Poleaxe, which says good things about his field skills."
 
Handsome fellow, too, if in a way that nagged at the back of my mind.
 
More importantly, though, knowing where he was assigned gave me the other half of an earlier story. I debated for a second about whether or not I should tell her that - and thereby, encourage the attachment - before my conscience decided the matter. "The good news is," I said, "is that he likes you right back."
 
Melissa gave me a funny look, confused and slightly annoyed like she thought I wasn't taking things seriously.
 
I closed the file and went back to sit across from her. "As you know perfectly well, young lady, he was the liaison assigned to Soph's battalion - and they put him in her company. But Soph was including news and so on about her company in her letters to me, and she mentioned that he, in turn, had been looking for the woman he met that night."
 
Her expression was delighted. "He was?"
 
"In a thoroughly romantic and impractical way, yes," I said, then relented. "And yes, if he's still alive, I'll pull him out at the same time. There's no guarantee of that-"
 
My throat closed, choking on the rest of the sentence as it took me too close to confronting the knowledge, the fear, that I'd been hiding from.
 
"That either of them are still alive." Melissa said gently. She looked at my expression, then got up and came over to hug me, kneeling next to my seat to do it.
 
"Dammit," I muttered into her shoulder as I clung to her in return. "God fucking dammit."
 
We stayed like that for a long time before I could bring myself to let go and say, "Sorry for crying on you like that." My smile was pretty wan, but it was better than nothing at least.
 
Melissa was looking back at me, when I left off staring blankly at the grey-painted metal wall of the compartment, with an expression that was partly concerned and partly confused, like I was a puzzle that worried her. "Aunt Asha…" she said slowly, "I don't have any gentle way to ask this, but… If you do still care so much, why are you here? Why not go directly to Dieron? Mother has reasons to want you for the Terra mission, but she wouldn't really fight you if you weren't willing."
 
I closed my eyes. "Personal isn't the same as important." I told her. Which was a double-edged sword at the best of time, as Pratchett had been subtly pointing out throughout all the Watch books, but that was neither here nor there.
 
It took several seconds before she replied, "You know, I don't think I'd ever really believed that you were from the Twentieth Century before now."
 
That didn't make any sense. "What?" I asked, giving her exactly the kind of look you think I was.
 
"Those few centuries, from the World Wars to the fall of the Terran Alliance… That's really the only time you saw people trying to organize society on principles rather than bonds. Everything we do is important because it's personal," she told me. "Everything all of human society does is ultimately personal - because of the debts we feel, the ambitions we have, the families we care for. A landholder's loyalty to his duke, the duke's loyalty to you - and yours to mother…"
 
Melissa trailed off as a thought occurred to her. "And you don't think like that." she said, in a tone of dark realization.
 
"I don't," I said. "That doesn't mean I'm immune to it, so if it happened it wouldn't happen easily - but yes, there are principles I hold ahead of my duty to the Commonwealth. Not many, and I think that they're largely things that Katrina would rather I kept close; if she ordered me to burn Terra, for instance, it wouldn't happen."
 
Her face had gone placid, adopting her version of her mother's diplomatic mask. "And the support you give your dukes and landgraves…"
 
"Is for their people's benefit, because they need it," I said. In any other conversation, I'd've pitched it as though I was pointing out the obvious. Instead, I went on, "I'd thought that they knew that, and I'm still certain that your mother does."
 
"Does Aunt Sophitia?" Melissa asked.
 
I started to answer automatically, then stopped and really thought about it. "I think she does," I said. "But we've never talked about it directly."
 
We sat silently, both of us locked into our thoughts, before she said, tentatively, "I think she probably did. It makes… some of the things she had told me make more sense. But… As much as I know that it's because of how small you think you are - it can't help hurting her, that she's that small in your eyes."
 
"...Oh." I said.
 
'Oh', indeed. I felt like I'd been stabbed in the chest. That would explain a lot about… Why she'd never been willing to put her foot down, before everything boiled over.
 
Melissa let me chew on that for a few moments, then said, gently, "You said that she's been writing you. Have you been writing back?"
 
"Yes," I said. "Yeah, I've been writing her. Not as much to say as I'd like, I'm not… actually good at letters. But I've written her every few days."
 
"Okay. Then, as soon as we're done with Comstar, you know what you need to do, right?" She was leading me, but I smiled as much as I could anyway.
 
"Exactly what I was going to do anyway. Go to Dieron and rescue her." That wasn't a hard question. "Your mother put some people on finding units on Galatea to contract for bodyguards, and I sent messages of my own at the same time."
 
Melissa nodded. "So, we just have to trust that they can last a month until we get there."
 
"Five days to charge and coordinate after the first jump, then seven days insystem to Terra." I said.
 
"One and a half gravities the whole way?" she asked, looking a bit alarmed.
 
"Then… however long the negotiations take, and either a few hours or another week to jump directly to Dieron," I said. "And the rest of what I've ordered should be ready to jump from Tau Ceti by then."
 
"A few… a pirate point?"
 
"If you wave enough money at a tramp trader, they'll chance something like the Sol-Terra point." I agreed. "I don't intend to let any grass grow under my feet. But I'd recommend doing some planning of your own."
 
She blinked at me, warned by something in my tone of voice. "Oh?"
"I'm not the one who's explaining this to your mother, Liss."
----
===Out of the Frying Pan...===
LYRAN WARSHIP ATHENA, ZENITH POINT
RED DWARF LFS-019, FEDERATION OF SKYE, LYRAN COMMONWEALTH
OCTOBER 12th, 3027
----
Two days later, the last thing we were waiting for finally arrived. A Merchant-class Jumpship arrived, showing a Free Worlds League transponder, and not a moment before time. The delay while its passenger was ferried over by a small craft chafed, and I spent it on the Athena's flag bridge, staring at the mission clock.
 
Half an hour, almost to the minute, after his ship jumped in, the man the entire mission had been waiting for swam into the flag bridge, saluted Admiral Vargas, and then turned to me. "Thank you for having me, Warden. The Marik and the Free Worlds League appreciate the Lyran Commonwealth's commitment to the stability of the Inner Sphere under these circumstances."
 
"You may dispense with the pleasantries, Force Commander." I said. "You're here to assure your leaders that our actions are in keeping with what we've said we wanted, and to make sure that they get enough of a slice of the technological pie to maintain the status quo. In the case of the League, at least, that's acceptable, and I, personally, don't have the time or the patience to do the usual arguing about it. You'll have equal access to all captured ComStar technical databases and files."
 
Davinder Singh's complexion wasn't the best suited to showing fear via circulation, but he was noticeably paler than his file photo. "And the Warships?" he asked.
 
"You have just as many wrecks in your borders as we do," I answered. "And I'm sure you keep track of them. As for Comstar's fleet - if you can board it, you can keep it."
 
"Very generous, when you've already arranged a fleet of modified Seekers for your own attempts." Singh replied.
 
"Time is thirteen hundred hours estimated Universal Time Coordinated," announced one of the uniformed minions of Vargas' staff. "Captain Tilman is beginning jump procedures."
 
"Charge status of Kearny-Fuchida Drive Bus Anton is full," a different rating said; I was pretty sure that the first was part of the communications 'department', while the other was assigned to monitor the status of the flagship. "Charge status of Kearny-Fuchida Drive Bus Bruno is full."
 
An eerie, tooth-grating siren sounded, and I twisted from where I'd been floating next to Singh and buckled myself into my own observer's seat. He followed and took the one next to me; a necessity, since there were only two not filled by one or another staffer. A corner of my mind absently noted that the siren was the exact same sound civilian and mercenary ships used to warn their inhabitants of an impending jump. I wondered if it was just ancient tradition, inertia by another name, or if it was deliberate standardization.
 
The main holo display, showing the fleet as it drifted here in this empty and worthless system, grew an overlay of a digital clock, counting down by seconds from thirty. "Helm has confirmed Kearny-Fuchida Drive circuit enabled to Bus Bruno and initiated jump countdown. Jump in twenty five seconds from… mark."
 
"Fleet is confirming jumps in five second intervals," the communication rating said, glancing at Vargas' chief of staff and receiving a nod to go ahead. "Destination coordinates are verified and locked. Crew stations are reporting ready for high-acceleration maneuvers."
 
I ignored Davinder Singh's nerves and not-quite fidgeting next to me in favor of watching the countdown timer. His awareness of the kind of shit the Commonwealth's command of even a small fleet of warships placed his nation in was only tangentially my problem.
 
A jump-capable warship could be built larger, more heavily, than any dropship a KF Field Boom could protect. They could be fitted with weapons more powerful, and longer ranged, be sheathed in entire cubic kilometers of Whipple-shield spaced armor, operate for far longer than any dropship. Only two real answers had ever been found to a hostile warship, and one of them was another warship of your own.
 
The other was massed assaults by nuclear-armed aerospace fighters - and while the weapons for them to carry were still easy enough to supply, the fighters had become even rarer than battlemechs under the long scourge of the Third Succession War. They were just as hard for the lessened technology of the day, the technology that was still all the Free Worlds League had, to build. They used the same grade of electronics, the same structural materials, the same fusion reactors, but where a destroyed battlemech left a salvageable wreck, a destroyed ASF tended to end up spread across several hundred square kilometers in pieces small enough to pack up in a lunchbox.
 
The League could probably put together enough nuclear strike squadrons to destroy the ships Singh had already seen, and given that a warship could reduce any countermission against a kinetic strike's runup to a dead letter, they would have to any time they faced them… But the casualties for those strikes would be ruinous. Any warship they killed would be a Pyrrhic victory, that left their operations uncovered against the Commonwealth's own aerospace fighters.
 
Not that it would be any piece of cake for us to write any of these ships off; they were too rare - and we'd need them too badly in the future.
 
"Hyperspatial jump in five… four…" the technical rating announced.
 
I looked down and checked my harness.
 
"Three… two… one… Jump!"
 
Space and time stretched in a way that language, attempting to describe the experience, really didn't. The panels and segments of the built space of the flag bridge separated, letting in the black light of the void, a void filled not with the distant points of the stars, but with close horizons of their photospheres, churning and flaming in great prominences all around us and in every color of the rainbow. The moving panels and flames passed through the ghostly images of the other people in the compartment, frozen in time.
 
A white suited man in a panama hat stepped through one looping arch of flame, grinned and winked at me, and then stepped back out of view through another flare as everything crashed back to normal reality with a suddenness that made me retch every goddamn time.
 
More ships followed Athena, at their expected intervals. Locura and Loxley, Mars, Darius, and Nelson, and the others… More importantly, our target hung in the holotank, an ugly asteroid ringed in kilometers-long pylons that held the shapes of quiescent mothballed warships tethered and resting against them. The whole scene was lit in the wan, ruddy light of the distant red dwarf called Luyten, and for several minutes there was only the quiet chatter of the staff as dropships undocked and the fleet shook down into formation.
 
Singh and I both watched quietly, for our different reasons preferring to keep our attention on the events.
The pitch of the murmurs changed as two shapes undocked from the asteroid station ahead of us. After only a few moments, the Athena's computers had identified the larger as a Cameron-class battlecruiser, though with its transponders silent there was no telling if it was Invisible Truth or StarSword. The smaller, they didn't recognize, so it took several seconds for the tag to change to call it a Dante-class frigate. They were flying in company, burning away from the station at the fifteen meters per second squared that was the Cameron's top speed.
 
"Infrared flare!" a sensor tech announced. "Jump incoming! Source one estimate two hundred kilotons mass, source two estimate seven hundred kilotons, source three estimate nine hundred kilotons."
 
Unlike the Comstar ships, ours were running their identification transponders. LCS Vespasian announced herself immediately. Lola III-class. Five seconds later, LCS Thresher followed the example. Mako-class.
 
Five seconds later, the last and largest flash of the three slowpokes.
LCS Invincible. Tharkad-class Battlecruiser.
 
"You were pointing out, Force Commander, that leaving you to play catch up in a game you didn't realize was happening is unsporting," I said, turning to look at him. "But the plain truth of the matter is...
 
"We're not here for you."
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