GblaRCS Chpt 69

==Guided by the light of a (Red) Cameron Star - Chapter 69 -==
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"We want eight and we won't wait!"Slogan chanted outside government buildings on Niops VII by those demanding an expansion in Hegemony naval strength - 2847CE
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===Silent brooding of the High Associator===
Association Council Building – Niops Association (Niops VII) – 2847
Sat in his office James Murray, High Associator of the Niops Association, de facto, and in in the opinion of most people on Niops also de jure Director-General of the Terran Hegemony, suspected that most leaders in his position had walls thick enough that they couldn't overhear people talking in the waiting room outside.
Not that being able to hear his visitors talking before they came in was necessarily a bad thing, if nothing else it was a good source of gossip and occasionally more useful information, but sometimes it could be a little distracting.
"… so I was looking in the mirror this morning and I realized I actually look older than the son-of-a-bitch now" the easily identifiable voice of Colonel Trish Ebon, his military advisor was saying outside, Murray momentarily wondering if that was really an appropriate description of her commanding officer before remembering that being somewhat foul-mouthed was very much a military affectation. "I used to be his young protégé, the one he was grooming for promotion" Ebon continued, sounding aggrieved. "Now I reckon in a few more years I'll look old enough to be his ****** Mom."
"Good thing you don't look related" the equally familiar voice of Gareth Jeffries of the diplomatic corps responded, sounding amused.
"Yeah, he's kinda pale even for a one-hundred-percent Caucasian guy here on Niops VII." Ebon agreed, her own colorization being much darker thanks to rather different ethnic roots. "I think the English must have had a eugenics program way back aimed at producing pasty-faced people or something. I once told him that if he was any more of a WASP he'd have to trade in his Shadow-Griffin for a bug mech."
Murray smiled. His own family background being originally from the Scottish part of the British Isles, and therefore prone to being even paler than the sassenachs like Hallis were, he had once joked himself that living under a Red Dwarf star was probably a good way to defy natural selection, far less chance of having to deal with skin cancer here than in most places.
"Did you watch the round-table discussion on Niops News last night?" Jeffries asked, his mention of that egregious television spectacle immediately causing any good humor on Murray's part to vanish. "They spent nearly the whole hour talking about Admiral Bremman's interview last week that caused all the commotion" the diplomat continued, Murray grinding his teeth at the mere mention of the man. Annoyingly he couldn't even bring Bremman to task for it because he had personally cleared the admiral doing that interview, allowing him to express his own opinions and hadn't explicitly told him to restrict his answers to matters historical. It hadn't actually been the admiral himself who raised any topics that were potentially fraught with political consequences either, so he couldn't rap his knuckles about deliberately going out of his way to stray from the party line.
It was understandable that public interest in what the press was calling the 'Battle of the Binary Browns' was as great as it was. The Niops Association had been within a whisker of being destroyed by the forces of Stefan Amaris decades ago and had never even known about it it until now, but while this was merely a fascinating piece of history or a glorious tale of courage to some, Bremman had seized onto it as an opportunity to push the navies agenda.
If that agenda wasn't currently at diametrical odds with Murray's dream of constructing the colossal astronomical array of his dreams out in the Deep Periphery past McEvedy's Folly it wouldn't have been a problem, but it was, and at the moment it seemed in the battle of inspiring visions Bremman was the one that had the better grip on the public imagination.
Maybe Bremman wouldn't have so readily skirted the limits of how critical a serving member of the armed forces could be of his political masters if the most senior of them resided in surroundings more conducive to inspiring awe, Murray thought to himself. The halls of power from whence the Great Houses of the Inner Sphere ruled over the Successor States were designed to impress and intimidate. From the throneroom on Tharkad where battlemechs standing guard towered over all present as they paid homage to the Archon, to the Celestial Palace on Sian with its jade columns, everything was theatre, a spectacle to show the ruled the power and influence of the ruler.
The Niops Association meanwhile was an interstellar power with the most powerful navy rimwards of Strana Mechty that was run from what was arguably a rather drab concrete office block in the center of town next to a shopping mall, with the office of the High Associator himself being somewhat less grand and impressive than that of your average CEO of a middling conglomerate in the Inner Sphere.
All things considered it was probably for the best that they didn't allow foreign visitors because they probably wouldn't take the Association as seriously as they should if they did.
When his secretary was on her lunchbreak James Murray answered his own telephone for God's sake, while his own lunch was usually sandwiches he made at home, not some great feast prepared by the finest of chefs and served on silver and gold plates like a noble potentate.
Sometimes while chewing on his BLT and reading some summary report from the Department of Trade and Industry about ball-bearing production or whatever, Murray had to remind himself that despite generally living the life of a somewhat dull bureaucrat for the most part that he literally had the power to pick up his phone and order a planet to be turned into radioactive glass by orbital bombardment.
Not that he really wanted to talk to Bremman on the phone right now, so the Inner Sphere was probably safe.
Perhaps part of the reason for all those palaces was to remind those actually in power of that power too, he pondered, deciding that sending in tanks to break up the librarian's strike would probably be excessive, even if they were being a pain-in-the-ass by demanding a double-digit pay-rise.
That was the problem with full employment and a booming economy, threatening them with dismissal when they could easily get a job doing something else just didn't work as a strongarm tactic and more extreme measures such as you might see employed in labor disputes elsewhere just weren't going to fly in Niops.
In retrospect giving the university lecturers a hefty raise had been a mistake because now everyone else wanted one, and contrary to popular belief the Niops Association did not have more money than it knew what to do with. Only a small proportion of government assets were in the form of liquid capital, most of it had been invested in infrastructure projects, and while there was always the germanium reserves it was becoming increasingly obvious that those were going to be needed for Jumpship production.
In a few years, exports of high-tech manufactured goods to the Free Worlds League and the Magistracy would be bringing in plenty of additional tax revenue, the profit margins on devices that were increasingly scarce and difficult to source outside the Hegemony such as high-end scanalyzers or autonomous robotics should be considerable, but as yet the domestic economy was absorbing most production.
In the shorter term there was at least the income stream from the manufacture and sale of Stasis Tubes to Canopus to look forward to, the Magistrix herself having even stumped up much of the funds needed to rush through reverse-engineering one of them that had arrived at Niops via the Thraxa trade-route. Initially they had simply produced some replacement parts for faulty units in a Project Workshop, but demand was such that an actual production line for the tubes was in the process of being established on Copernicus.
The news about the tubes had even apparently reached beyond the Magistracy as far as the Draconis Combine, with the University of Samarkand recently contacting Niops asking if they could perhaps obtain assistance in maintaining the cryogenic chamber housed in their medical school.
That of course being the very same cryogenic chamber that held the frozen remains of Stefan Amaris that Aleksandr Kerensky had donated to the university because he didn't think the man deserved a proper burial.
James Murray didn't think the bastard deserved a proper burial either and replied personally to the University of Samarkand that if the Magistrix was agreeable, and it proved feasible to ship a stasis tube right across the Inner Sphere, one would be dispatched when available that they could transfer the usurpers corpse into.
Fortunately, because the Free Worlds League and the Draconis Combine tended not to come to blows with each other nearly as much as they did other states it was feasible that Atreus might facilitate, or at least not actively block, the shipment of the device across its territory. This being helped of course by the fact that the name of Stefan Amaris was still a curse most everywhere, and that desecrating his corpse by not letting him rot, was something that was easy to get people in authority everywhere to support.
It was that kind of extremely negative name recognition which had spelled the doom for Karl Von Strang when Archon Claudius Steiner went looking for someone to make an example of. Chopping the head off one of his own nobles in the throne-room on Tharkad would have probably been a step too far, even if scaring the crap out of the members of the Estates General was likely the point of the matter, but if you wanted to decapitate an aristocrat pour encourager les autres then having one to hand with a famous, or infamous surname that would guarantee plenty of press coverage right across the Inner Sphere was certainly convenient.
It wasn't just a name people only knew from the history books either. Thanks to the diaspora of former citizens of the Terran Hegemony there might still potentially be tens of billions of long-lived people within the borders of the Lyran Commonwealth and elsewhere that personally remembered hearing the name Gunthar Von Strang spoken of in horrified tones, as the tales of 'Vampire Von Strang' and his merry band of war criminals in the 18th Amaris Chasseurs spread.
If the Von Strang family hadn't actually gone out of their way to glorify the bastard then Karl paying the price for his forebears' sins would have seemed considerably more unjust, but as it was if you venerate your ****** ancestor, and raise a statue to an even bigger ******, then public sympathy is going to be severely lacking when the literal axe falls.
Alas, Claudius Steiner, some wags were already saying that Caligula might have been a more appropriate name for the man, did not intend to limit himself to only removing Karl Von Strang permanently from the galaxy and had issued demands, demands not requests mind you, of the Niops Association that James Murray was adamant in his unwillingness to accede to.
Murray reached for his intercom after leaving the pair outside waiting there long enough to remind them who was in charge. "Send them in please, Mary." he requested, leaning forward in his chair, hands on his desk, fingers meshed, as the door to his office opened and Jeffries and Ebon entered.
Trish Ebon paused at the doorway to salute the High Associator before closing the door behind them, Murray signalling that they should both take a seat by gesturing towards the chairs in front of his desk.
"I trust that the Diplomatic Corps has made progress on formulating a less strident response to the Archon's demand that we hand over Terrens and Arabella Von Strang to his tender mercies than my initial proposed response, Gareth?" Murray asked, glad that he had been talked down from sending it.
Jeffries smiled. "We're still working on a form of words that reduces the risk of Claudius Steiner becoming infuriated and declaring war while still conveying your strong feelings on the matter, High Associator" the diplomat replied.
"He wants us to hand over an eleven-year-old so he can end the line of the Von Strangs forever." Murray replied. "My reaction of 'tell him he can ****** right off if he thinks we'll do that' might have been diplomatically clumsy, but believe me, it was heartfelt." he said with conviction. "The fact either Claudius or his advisors thought it would smooth things over if they promised to 'only' chemically castrate the boy, not just kill him alongside his aunt, did little to sway my opinion in favour of compliance with these morally obscene Lyran demands."
Reading the man's body language Trish Ebon was gratified that this seemed to be one of those issues that the typically staid and technocratic Murray was emotionally invested in. Astronomy wasn't the only field of human endeavor where you ran the risk of triggering the High Associators berserk button and Claudius Steiner had managed to hit it square-on. The HPG that arrived from Tharkad had been condescending in tone for a start, Murray did not like being talked down to by those he considered his intellectual inferior that being the vast majority of the human race, and by employing phrasing that was contemptuous of the 'minor periphery realm' of Niops while demanding Murray hand over a child the Archon had the High Associator apoplectic with rage.
If Claudius had both been more polite and only requested Arabella's head, literally or figuratively, Murray might have been pragmatic enough to consider it, maintaining good relations with the Lyran Commonwealth being in the interests of the Association, but by being high-handed and demanding the boy as well the new Lyran Archon had guaranteed there was no chance in hell the High Associator would agree. He was rational, or at least he liked to think of himself so, but he was not amoral.
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===A Discussion of Naval Affairs===
"If I might once again note that myself and the rest of the diplomatic corps were surprised that the Archon not only referred to our violation of Lyran sovereignty in his communique, but also mentioned that our task force almost ventured to within a single jump of Tharkad while traversing their territory" Jeffries said, frowning. "It was always a polite diplomatic fiction for both ourselves and the Lyrans that we skirted around the Commonwealth to get to Von Strang's World, one that suited us both to publicly maintain, but Claudius seems to want to leverage the truth against us somehow."
Trish nodded. "Military Intelligence was particularly surprised that he mentioned our flotillas stopover at Hegel directly since he could have only learned that from sources within one of the mercenary units" she interjected. "I mean, it's not like we didn't assume there would be foreign intelligence assets inside the merc regiments anyway, but from his perspective to spill the beans by directly confirming it like that seems a little wasteful of what might have been a valuable long-term intel source."
"Mentioning Hegel did add credence to his claim that Tharkad had been under threat, at least theoretically" Jeffries suggested. "It's not like the Free Worlds League or the Draconis Combine have ever gotten warships that close to the Lyran capital."
"Under threat my ass." Trish responded dismissively. "A Carrack and a Royalty were about as much threat to Tharkad as a single corvette would be to Niops. We know for a fact that there is at least one Lyran capital ship guarding that system and it's a freaking battlecruiser, the LCS Invincible." she pointed out. "You wouldn't put anything less than a Texas or a McKenna up against one of those things if you didn't have to. They're the only warships that any of the Great Houses ever produced domestically which can go up against a Black Lion II like Michigan in a fair fight and have a good chance of winning, other than the Stefan Amaris class battleships anyway and none of those survived the Amaris War."
"Yes, Admiral Bremman said as much during his television interview." Murray responded. "Though I'm not sure how it was entirely relevant to the topic he was actually supposed to be there to comment upon as a subject matter expert."
Trish coughed awkwardly. "It was the interviewer, not the admiral, who raised the hypothetical question of how the navy of today would handle a similar scenario of hostile warships bearing down on us" she replied. "It wasn't hyperbole on his part to state that the most powerful combat units we have that are not currently in mothballs, in dire need of refit, or both, those being Michigan and Buccaneer, don't outclass the most powerful units of the Successor States the way Thorin outclassed the Tadeo Amaris."
"The man was quite clearly trying to strike fear into the hearts of those listening with his graphic descriptions of what experiencing an orbital bombardment would be like" Murray stated with annoyance.
"No, if anything he downplayed just how horrifying it would be, even if the hostile force chose not to employ nuclear, biological or chemical weapons, Sir." Trish told him. "For example, the navy of the Free Worlds League are known to have once fielded multiple mass-driver equipped Soyal class cruisers, which can readily devastate a planet with kinetic strikes alone, and we also know that despite combat losses they still have at least one of them in service and presumably operational because the FWLS Kumbha was recorded as helping to repel a Capellan attack on Andurien and survived the action."
"I assume you are going to contend that these Soyal class ships are also so fearsome as to be able to match the most powerful vessels we have in service like this Lyran battlecruiser?" Murray asked sardonically.
"No, the Soyal is more of a glass cannon, lots of firepower but without the armour to match, so Michigan at least could normally be expected to give one a good shellacking" Trish replied. "However, you could argue that compared to a McKenna like the Thorin, an Aegis like Tadeo Amaris was also something of a glass cannon and it's not like Thorin came out without a scratch. You can't always expect to be fighting an engagement that plays up to your strengths not theirs, I wouldn't like to be in any ship that was unlucky enough to be on the receiving end of a mass driver round from a Soyal, you're basically talking about a metal slug that weighs about as much as a medium battlemech being fired at the target at gauss rifle velocities. That's why Admiral Bremman used the 'meteorite strike' analogy, even if he didn't want to bore the audience with the actual numbers. A Soyal can readily city-bust without lobbing nukes at you, which is almost worse in a way because it means they can be used as very heavy orbital fire support during an invasion. No need to worry about giving your own men on the ground fallout-related radiation sickness if you decide to drop the hammer on some fortification they're struggling to take."
Murray only made a grumbling noise in response. He himself was of the opinion that Bremman had deliberately picked the 'meteorite strike' metaphor for orbital mass driver bombardment because he knew it was a particular attention grabber for a Niops audience, especially after all the extra interest in such things spurred by the recent television documentary about the prehistoric impact on Alphard that had so radically affected the course of evolution there, the one with all the expensive computer-generated special effects that was partially filmed on Alphard itself.
"If we're lucky the Free Worlds League navy may have lost the last of its Atreus class battleships in the same battle over Andurien where the Kumbha was last seen in action." Trish remarked. "Admiral Bremman's nightmare scenario was always a Marik task-force spearheaded by Atreus and Soyal class ships jumping in because with our most powerful ships mothballed that would have necessitated us throwing our destroyers into a fight that should have been reserved for cruisers at the very least. Even if we won it would have been bloody, and we couldn't necessarily guarantee a win."
Murray pursed his lips. "So, are you saying that Admiral Bremman greatly exaggerated the potential naval threat to Niops given that these Atreus class battleships are no longer on the board?" he asked, clearly hoping that this was the case judging by his expression.
"I did say 'may have lost the last' intentionally because honestly, we're just not entirely sure, Sir" Trish replied evenly, having no intention of throwing Jake Bremman under the bus. "Most independent military analysts believed that all of the Atreus class had been lost in action during the First Succession War, the last time any of them had been actually seen in action was way back in 2809, but then, nearly thirty years later, the appearance of the FWLS Majestic over Andurien proved them wrong. While Majestic is herself now a definitely confirmed loss, pieces of her wreckage are still falling into the atmosphere there, it's conceivable that yet another Atreus could have been squirreled away by House Marik somewhere just in case, perhaps to counter the Lyran battlecruiser the LCS Invincible that I mentioned before" she said. "I'll note here that Admiral Bremman was of the opinion that the Free Worlds Navy likely did still have some capital ships in reserve after the First Succession War, which is why he argued that we still needed to keep Michigan and Buccaneer in service, rather than mothballing them alongside our battleships, and he was proven correct."
This was not the answer Murray had wanted and he made no effort to hide his displeasure. "But if the Majestic was in fact the last Marik battleship that would mean Niops was now secure presumably?" he now asked.
"No, sir, not if by 'Niops' we're referring to the hegemony, not the association itself." Trish told him, again not what he wanted to hear. "The ability of the Michigan and the Buccaneer to take on most anything in the Inner Sphere and pound them to scrap doesn't help if a Soyal, for example, jumped into Alphard, Comstock or Copernicus intending on turning our industrial sites there into craters" she continued before pausing momentarily for effect. "Consider that despite each one outgunning any other vessel afloat the Star League itself still constructed nearly three hundred McKenna class battleships, this being because even the most powerful warship in space has a serious limitation, it can't be in several places at once. The fact is that even with a fleet the size of the one the SLDF boasted Niops was lucky that the Thorin intercepted the warships heading this way seventy years ago. Space is very big, as I'm sure you well know" she added, smiling. "When we downsized the fleet during the Olson administration, chiefly to cope with a shortage of personnel, it was with the understanding that at the time we had more warships than we needed to secure the territory we possessed. That's increasingly no longer the case, as I believe you're aware, Sir."
Murray narrowed his eyes at her, clearly annoyed. Bremman had certainly said so, more than once, if not publicly before, telling Murray that the resources and EVA certified personnel required for his astronomical array would greatly harm the ability of the fleet to defend the Hegemony in the medium to long term. The military always exaggerated threats in order to justify their inflated budgets though, the High Associator knew. Even Giles Olson, who had been more accommodating to the armed forces than Murray ever was, had temporarily delayed starting the construction of the naval shipyard in favour of other projects, demonstrating that he understood that as well.
Olson however had never had to put up with the sudden surge of interest into matters naval that Murray was currently facing. The revelation of the discovery of the SLS Thorin and the story of her final battle against the warships of Stefan Amaris had struck the public imagination and it seemed like Bremman had realised he had been gifted with an opportunity to push his agenda and was doing so, albeit in a way that insulated him from accusations of directly interfering with politics.
Putting aside his taking the opportunity to both laud the heroes of the Star League Navy and preach the gospel of Alfred Thayer Mahan from the media pulpit last week while answering questions, Murray sincerely doubted that Jacob Bremman had nothing to do with the Op-Ed which had appeared in yesterday's newspaper, the one written by retired naval officer Captain Simon Mitchell.
Cashing in on his local notoriety as the man who had steered the SLDF remnants to Niops twenty years ago, and who could also claim to have known a couple of officers who had served upon the Thorin personally, Mitchell had managed to get a few thousand words into widely-read print where he castigated the increasingly run-down state of the fleet and pointed the finger of blame firmly at unnamed politicians who were unable to look beyond their own narrow fields of interest.
It all seemed very orchestrated, particularly when you also factored in former High Associator Giles Olson and serving Commodore Mbeki starting that campaign to raise funds for a monument to the crew of the Thorin to be built in front of the planetarium. Olson was good friends with Bremman, the admiral was known to attend social gatherings at his house on occasion, and Murray even wondered if Olson might have quietly pulled a few strings with his media contacts to help the admiral out in pushing his agenda.
Perhaps the part that aggrieved the High Associator most was that initially it had seemed like the entire episode was going to end up putting him in a good light politically. Utter a few platitudes about duty, honour and self-sacrifice in an address to the people, reiterate the Association's position that it was the direct continuation of the Terran Hegemony and the rightful inheritor of the mantle of the Star League, and even win a few points with the electorate by approving a request from the navy for the funding and resources needed to properly lay the crew of the SLS Thorin to rest.
Instead now there seemed to be a rising clamor to salvage the Thorin if possible, while stripping the two enemy ships it had defeated for parts, and pundits were discussing whether the spending priorities of the government were ill-advised. Not only was the Hegemony supposedly facing an imminent critical shortage of merchant shipping capacity did they really have enough warships to defend all the systems they were responsible for? If not, then why were they building orbital telescopes instead of dropships and allowing the battle fleet to degrade when it should really be expanding so it could protect the other colonies too?
The crew of the Thorin hadn't just given their lives to defend Niops after all, they had fought to keep the people of Comstock and Francas safe from harm as well, those worlds and others being now the responsibility of the Niops Association itself.
While salvaging the Thorin might be possible given enough time and resources, it would be easier than building another McKenna entirely from scratch at least according to the experts, the navy itself still wanted to get on with refitting Michigan with a lithium-fusion battery and adding a worthwhile amount of anti-fighter and point-defence weaponry claiming that would deliver the most 'bang for your buck' in terms of increased capability. They also wanted to off-load the Invader class merchant jumpships they operated to the care of civilian crews, ideally recruited from Francas and Comstock, so they could reassign the naval personnel serving on the cargo haulers to warships instead.
They would need those personnel to help crew the minimum of eight large warships, all equipped with lithium-fusion batteries, that they claimed would be needed in commission to adequately defend the Hegemony over the next twenty-five years.
Given the claim of needing eight, Murray assumed they only really needed six and were hoping to settle on that number, trying to look like they were being reasonable in doing so.
Even the full eight was certainly an achievable goal, given adequate funding and the use of a project workshop to assist the refitting the frigate James Sever and the destroyers Protecteur and Cape Bon with L-F batteries would only take a few months each, not years, for a start, but Bremman's dream was to build the core of the fleet around several new-build battlecruisers and constructing those would suck up massive amounts of resources.
Resources that were needed for the High Associators astronomical array, and the thought of being potentially having his arm-twisted into giving up on that dream because of fickle public opinion made Murray visibly angry when he thought about it. He had hoped that throwing the military a bone by letting them go beat up Von Strang and those pirates at Star's End would have placated them for a while, but irritatingly fate had now intervened in their favour.
"If I might return the conversation to the topic at hand, our current diplomatic spat with the Lyran Commonwealth and their volatile new archon." Jeffries interjected, dearly wanting to diffuse the situation given that Murray seemed to be just as peeved about the admiral's public statements as he was rumoured to be judging from his expression and general demeanour. "There may be one avenue by which we could mollify Claudius Steiner somewhat without acceding to his demands to hand over the boy" he suggested. "CNN mentioned he has seemingly developed something of an obsessive interest in the Martin Luther Memorial Hospital on Tharkad, a facility which was provided with Terran Hegemony medical technology during the Star League era as a gesture of good will from House Cameron to House Steiner. Much of that technology seems to have fallen into disrepair because it relied upon Terran expertise and spare parts to maintain it, but if we were to offer to get it operational for him again that might perhaps be enough of an olive branch to placate the man."
"Do we know why he seems to have such an interest in the hospital?" Murray queried, trying to calm himself.
"No, High Associator, only that he has been seen visiting the place so often that a denial had to be issued that he was suffering from some serious ailment." Jeffries replied. "He certainly seems to be in good health, chipper even."
"Maybe when he visits the hospital they give him the good drugs." Trish suggested wryly. "If the place had Terran Hegemony medical equipment it might have stockpiles of Hegemony-only pharmaceuticals as well."
"That's certainly possible I suppose" Jeffries replied. "It's surely worth attempting a conciliatory tone with the archon when we issue our refusal vis-à-vis Terrens Von Strang so as not to antagonise him any more than we need to? Offering our technical assistance in a humanitarian capacity is something we've done before with the plans to the J-U Water Purifier and the Eligus Diagnoser so it should be be easier for us to justify aiding the Lyrans this way without us annoying the other Great Houses in the process as occurred with our supply of particle projector cannon to the Free Worlds League."
"I thought we did pretty well there to be honest." Trish opined. "Redirecting a chunk of the blame at ComStar because we couldn't make purchases with C-Bills during the interdiction I mean."
"To be honest we were kinda lucky there because while Marcus Steiner wasn't happy about being shot at with Niops-branded PPCs, he still remembered getting put under ComStar interdiction himself when he tried to make them pay their taxes, so he was no fan of the phone company and had some sympathy for our position" Jeffries noted.
"And we didn't give a crap what the Capellans thought." Trish added, grinning. "Not that I'm convinced they think much at all, their society is so regimented that if you visit Sian you can make out the clacking sound of them all blinking in unison" she joked.
"Yeah, I think getting the timing right is part of the citizenship test." Jeffries concurred, playing along because he noticed Trish had managed to obtain a smile from Murray for that one. "Blink out of sequence and its servitor class for you."
This time Murray chuckled aloud and was about to respond with the old joke about the blind Capellan astronomer who had burned out his retinas making direct solar observations because the instructions on the telescope had a misprint that left off the 'Do not' before it said 'look directly at the sun' and you had to obey the instructions, when they were interrupted by the intercom on his desk buzzing.
Murray reached for the intercom and pressed the button. "What is it, Mary? I'm in a meeting as you know."
"I'm sorry to interrupt High Associator but we've just received an urgent transmission from the commander of the Zenith Recharge Station regarding an unscheduled jumpship arrival that they say you needed to be made aware of immediately."
"Go on." Murray replied.
"The vessel claims to be carrying Melissa Nin, the widow of Archon Marcus Steiner of the Lyran Commonwealth, she claims to have evidence in her possession that her husband was murdered and is requesting asylum."
James Murray quietly stared at the intercom long enough without blinking that Trish later joked to Franklin Hallis that it would have gotten the High Associator into a lot of trouble on Sian.
Gareth Jeffries was the first to actually speak after an uncomfortably long shocked silence from all present. "If I might respond in my professional capacity as a member of the diplomatic corps" he began. "Shit just got real and I don't think we'll be smoothing this over with Claudius Steiner by offering to fix his MRI machine" he said, grimacing and wondering who exactly might have suggested to Melissa that she should seek sanctuary in the Niops Hegemony.
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==Chapter Notes==
*;Notes from the Author : The 'We want eight and we won't wait!' slogan was shamelessly borrowed from actual history and refers to part of the Great Naval Race between Britain and Germany in the run-up to the First World War. Seeking an expansion in the number of dreadnought battleships under construction for the Royal Navy the then First Lord of the Admiralty, Reginald McKenna (no. I'm not kidding, his name really was McKenna) somewhat exaggerated the number of German battleships under construction in order to get the funding he needed. He was in fact a little too successful in influencing public opinion that the country was under threat because while the navy only wanted six additional dreadnoughts, and only expected to get allocated enough money for four, a massive public campaign he inadvertantly triggered led to the navy getting eight more. Any accusations that Admiral Bremman took advantage of all the interest in the Thorin to push the interests of the navy outside of normal channels cannot, of course, be proven... but it looks bad for Murray's array.Although not a match for the likes of the massive McKenna or Texas class battleships of the SLDF, the Lyran Tharkad class, and Free Worlds Atreus class battlewagons are still pretty fearsome. At this point the last of the Tharkad class, the LCS Invincible is guarding the Lyran capital (and is not in great condition) while an Atreus class, the FWLS Majestic, fought at the battle of Andurien in 2838 so warships are still a thing in the Inner Sphere at this time. The mass-driver armed Soyal class cruiser FWLS Kumbha also fought at Andurien.Claudius Steiner was a great patron of the Martin Luther Memorial Hospital on Tharkad, but his interest in all the lostech medical equipment there mainly revolved around finding inventive ways to use it to torture people.There are no prizes available for anyone that correctly guesses who pointed Melissa Nin in the direction of Niops in order to cause trouble.
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