GblaRCS Chpt 12

==Guided by the light of a (Red) Cameron Star - Chapter 12 -==
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"As soon as Jenna Romanov started the tune playing on the radio, the dropship captain had it piped into the mech bays and the old geezers from the 295th started singing along. Then some of the kits joined in as well, I guess they must have learned the lyrics from their parents and grandparents who fought for the SLDF against Amaris. By the time we hit atmo at Algenib everyone was singing it, and I'm told it was happening on the other Dropships too. After that it became a tradition to always sing it before we went into battle, or even just a small skirmish, the other tradition we kept after Algenib being to always bring a battery of two of Vali's and at least one squadron of Stukas because those things chew up entrenched defensive positions and spit them out."Major Karin Kumar - 2849CE'''
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===Descendants of Enemies===
NAS Ian Cameron – JP-P-815 System Nadir Point – 2829
The first Star Lord class JumpShip in the transport fleet to be re-named, and then adorned with the Red Cameron Star that Niops had recently adopted as its military crest, the Niops Association Ship Ian Cameron had set out for this operation ahead of the others. This wasn't just because she was named for the first man to rule the Star League, it was because the paint wasn't even dry yet on the NAS Nicholas Cameron, and the other Star Lords in the fleet weren't even that far along in the process.
Massing over a quarter-of-a-million tons, and capable of hauling half-a-dozen Dropships along with her, the Ian Cameron was running with empty docking collars and had been since it left the Niops system, although that situation should be changing imminently.
She had arrived at the uninhabited JP-P-815 system eight days ago, along with her companion and escort ship for the journey, this being the Congress Class Frigate, SLS Rickenbacker which unlike the Ian Cameron was in fact carrying Dropships on her own two collars. At least according to her IFF and external markings she wasn't the Rickenbacker however, she was the SLS James Sever, and there was a story to that.
While operating out of Camelot Command they had found the battered hulk of the James Sever drifting in high orbit around a star in what had once been the Finmark Province of the Rim Worlds Republic. From the looks of her she had been caught without anti-fighter escort by at least a couple of Rim Words Republic Navy corvettes supported by multiple aerospace fighters and had lost the fight, badly.
So notoriously weak against fighter threats that the Pentagon assault dropship was developed specifically to defend the Congress class against them, why the James Sever seemed to have been running without any escort was a mystery. What was known upon her rediscovery in 2826 however was that she had been so thoroughly pummeled and blasted that she was completely beyond repair.
After being stripped of anything still worth salvaging in terms of spare parts, which wasn't much, the SLS James Sever was shunted into a rapidly decaying orbit that would soon dump her into the star and her sister ship the SLS Rickenbacker, would get to pretend to be her. This gave Rickenbacker more utility to Niops than she would have had otherwise as, unlike several other vessels in the fleet, it now wouldn't be a catastrophe if she was seen by outsiders.
For this operation Rickenbacker/James Sever still lacked a Pentagon, but the Titan fighter carrier dropship she was hauling more than made up for it. The Titan had herself been salvaged from the former site of another battle that took place during the Amaris War then repaired at Camelot, and she was currently embarking three squadrons of aerospace fighters that were normally assigned to Zughoffer Weir. The Intruder dropship on the frigate's other docking collar wouldn't be as much help against fighters, though she was perhaps still better equipped to deal with them them than an unescorted Congress, and was there to transport a company of marines.
On arrival at JP-P-815, both Ian Cameron and 'James Sever' had deployed their jump-sails and began charging their Kearny-Fuchida Drives for their final jumps onto Algenib once the rest of the spacecraft assigned to the expedition caught up with them. With jump-drives now recharged, and jumpsails being drawn back in, if everything was going according to plan then another Star Lord, most likely the aforementioned Nicholas Cameron, should arrive any time now to transfer over her Dropships.
Like the vast majority of stars JP-P-815 only appeared on specialist maps used by JumpShip navigators who couldn't always plot routes where every stop along the way was a colonised system, or else on the stellar atlases of astronomers. Most people were only interested in the locations of places worth going, these being inhabited worlds with populations large enough to warrant at least an occasional visit by a merchant JumpShip, but in galactic terms these were few and far between. Of course, it didn't help that three-quarters of stars were Red Dwarfs and what kind of weirdos chose to live around one of those dull and depressing things?
Even in the 'densely populated' Inner Sphere of systems, those within five-hundred light-years of Terra, less than one percent of stars had planets with anyone living on them and once you headed out into the periphery that percentage dropped off fast. In the Magistracy of Canopus or the Taurian Concordat it was more like one system in a thousand, and by Deep Periphery standards even those star-nations were positively teeming with colonised worlds.
The Ian Cameron had jumped out of the Niops system six weeks ago, while the Dropships she was about to receive had left there only yesterday. This was the kind of operation you carried out when you didn't want to deploy your ground troops away from home for too long, but you also had more starlift than you knew what to do with. A week after Ian Cameron set out another Star Lord would have done so, then a week later a third would have followed and so on until there was a line of JumpShip queued up, each about thirty light-years behind the next, that now stretched from JP-P-815 all the way back to Niops itself. The navy called it a Command Circuit, informally it was called a 'Pony Express', but how it worked was that a JumpShip would ferry its Dropships to a star system where another JumpShip was waiting to collect them. If the second JumpShip had its own K-F drive already charged and ready then as soon as the Dropships were docked it could jump to the next system, where yet another JumpShip was waiting to receive the Dropships and so on, and so on.
Normally a long interstellar trip took several weeks or even months, each jump followed by six or more days of re-charging the drive ready for the next, but if you had the JumpShip to spare, the time to set it all up beforehand, and had a few Dropships needing to get somewhere fast, then a Pony Express style Dropship hand-off was the way to go.
Before the fall of the Start League the SLDF used to do this sort of thing frequently, even some of the member states did occasionally, but that was back when JumpShip were more common. So many had been lost in the Amaris War, and then the Succession War, that Command Circuits were now more of a novelty than a not completely uncommon means of getting from System A to System G (via B, C, D, E and F) in a day rather than a month-and-a-half.
Sensors reported an inbound JumpShip and judging by its apparent mass it was Nicholas Cameron right on time, this being confirmed by the appearance of the Star Lord in question along with the Dropships she was hauling.
If it hadn't been the expected vessel, well that would have been for the Rickenbacker and her batteries of naval autocannon to deal with, but as it was IFF signals were confirmed, hails were sent and received, Dropships detached from one Star Lord and started heading across to the other, and the captain of the Ian Cameron looked forwards to the arrival of not one but two generals aboard his ship.
Both flag officers arrived on his bridge and were breathing down his neck only minutes after the pair of Overlord Dropships they were aboard had docked, this taking place within an hour after Nicholas Cameron jumped in. At least Admiral Bremman had stayed back home, having him along too would have been almost too much to bear, the ship's captain grimly.
Maybe I should have stayed as XO on Saratoga rather than accept promotion and being handed my own ship, the captain of the Ian Cameron thought to himself. It was, after all, only an unarmed transport that would rarely if ever see much action, not a prestigious warship with a chance at glory. Then he remembered those nightmarish evenings on Saratoga where he had to put up with performances by that god-awful Mariachi Band which Captain Merino had permitted the crew to form, and being a mere JumpShip captain living a mostly dull, repetitive existence suddenly didn't seem as bad a fate after all.
Seriously, how the hell did they get hold of those sombreros anyway?
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Almost as soon as pleasantries were exchanged and hands were shaken on the bridge of the Ian Cameron, Jenna Romanov was on the ship's intercom. Her words carried onto the Dropships by the internal wiring that connected up via the docking collars so everyone could hear her.
"Alright boys and girls, this is it." she began. "Once we make the next jump we're in bandit territory and I expect you all to stay sharp and keep your wits about you" she instructed everyone. "Remember that these ****** aren't your typical cowardly and inept pirate scum" she continued. "They're an entirely different kind of scum and we shouldn't expect them to be pushovers" she warned. "General Hallis, if you would" she bade her second-in-command to take over, handing him the microphone.
"Listen up, kits" Hallis began, "and non-kits" he added, inwardly chuckling at Romanov's eye-roll at his use of the Wolverine's informal descriptor of themselves. "This is your final reminder of who the enemy are, why we can't take them lightly, and why they deserve all the violent mayhem and destruction we can wreak upon them" he stated seriously. "Once we determined that the pirates operating in this region of space were the Blood Rain we knew two things for certain; firstly that we couldn't allow them to continue to prey unchallenged upon periphery worlds from the Illyrian Palatinate to the Magistracy of Canopus, and secondly that it was high time that they faced a reckoning for their past sins as well as their recent ones" he continued. "They might call themselves the Blood Rain now, but they're still the same bunch of murderous war-criminals that they were when they called themselves the 141st Amaris Dragoons. This is the Rim Worlds Republic regiment that brutally suppressed civilian uprisings against the traitor's rule on Terra, butchering their way across the American Southwest to do it, and they were the troops used to keep the other Amaris regiments toeing the line. The hardest of the hard liners, Amaris loyalists to their rotten core" he said, fighting back the urge to spit on the deck. "After the liberation they stayed true to themselves, turning pirate and looting and pillaging their way through the Inner Sphere while the Successor States were too busy slugging it out with each other to stop them, but when the fighting petered-out they headed out to the periphery where it was safe, or so they thought. That's how they ended up in our neck-of-the-woods and boy is that going to cost them" Hallis vowed. "They're going to rue the day they came within two-hundred light-years of Niops and we'll make them wish they had taken on the armies of the Successor States instead" he said with a distinct growl, passing the microphone back to Romanov.
"Remember, we could be facing two battalions of these bastards" Romanov added for herself. "Hopefully understrength and with worn-out equipment, but we can't count on that. We know for certain they've seen plenty of action in the last few years, more than the 295th for sure, and that their senior officers are men and women that went up against the SLDF at its height, so don't go thinking they're only fit for bullying farmers in the periphery. If they've kept even some of their old skills and professionalism then they're going to go down hard, which is why we're bringing three battalions of mechs, a combined arms battalion, artillery, and enough air support to block out the ****** sun" she declared. "This will be the first time the 295th and 331st have fought in a real battle side-by-side since we booted these self-same ****** and their friends out of the Terran Hegemony, and it'll the first time we've gone into battle wearing the Red Cameron Star of our new home painted on our machines, so let's make Niops proud and continue to uphold the traditions of the Eleventh Army."
Franklin Hallis unconsciously touched the spot on his fatigues which had once born the insignia of the 331st and Clan Wolverine, but now held fabric patches depicting the Niops Star and the medieval gauntlet-and-sword insignia of the Eleventh Army of the SLDF which both divisions had belonged to.
"They'll know us by our reputation, just like we know them from theirs" Romanov continued to talk to the troops. "The Eleventh Army spearheaded the landings on Apollo, their own capital world, and we raised the Cameron Star flag over their homes while they despoiled ours. We went up against their very best in battles waged from the periphery all the way to Terra itself and it wasn't them who held the ground afterwards" she continued. "Mark my words, we will raise the Red Cameron Star over Algenib and finish the job we started on Apollo" she declared. "Romanov out" she added before switching off the microphone.
"You know there's still Von Strang's groupies living up in the former Rim Worlds Republic, the Blood Rain aren't really the last of the Amaris Loyalists out there" Hallis pointed out.
"They're a tribute act led by a war-criminal's cousin, and the Eleventh Army already dealt with that ****** when the 146th Royals pounded Gunthar Von Strang's Eighteenth Amaris Chasseurs into scrap just outside New York" Romanov replied, smiling as she still vividly recalled hearing the welcome news decades before. "The Blood Rain are what's left of the original band" she added, continuing the metaphor.
Oddly enough it wasn't the case that they had ended up in this situation because they had gone out looking for a fight. They had gone out looking, that was certainly true, but because of curiosity and a desire to explore, not so much an urge to flex some military muscle. Using their trio of lithium-fusion-battery equipped Tramp JumpShip as fast scouts had enabled the SLDF on Niops to not only explore and patrol an ever-increasing expanse of the periphery, but to do so quickly and safely. If a Tramp transport carrying a Pentagon assault-dropship for protection jumped into a system and found trouble it couldn't handle, or someone they didn't want to talk to, it could just jump right back out using its L-F batteries. During these increasingly routine reconnaissance and survey missions it had become apparent that there was a pirate band operating too close to Niops for comfort, and after making clandestine contact with settlements who had been unfortunate enough to be visited by these miscreants their identity had been soon established.
If it had been most any other group of pirates the SLDF on Niops might not have experienced such an overwhelming gut reaction to go hammer them , and would have likely not advocated to the High Associator with such passion that it was time to clean house in their region of the periphery, but in this case it was the 'Blood Rain', the ****** formerly known as the 141st Amaris Dragoons, and they definitely had it coming. Pirates were legally and by tradition hostis humani generis, enemies of all mankind, anyway and any military unit that encountered them would enthusiastically seek battle at the first opportunity, but these particular guys were a special kind of ****** deserving of a special kind of treatment. Fortunately, the High Associator and the ruling council had not required too much encouragement to approve military action, at least not after being shown images of the methods used by Amaris Dragoons regiments to pacify areas where civilians had risen in rebellion. Given that a favourite tool of the 141st Amaris Dragoons for such operations was the liberal employment of flamethrowers, or their habit of firing flechette and cannister rounds into crowds of demonstrators to break them up, the High Associator's willingness to let his isolationist instincts temporarily slide a little was understandable.
Just about the only other mechwarriors in the entire Inner Sphere that Jenna Romanov would have wanted a piece of more were the mercenary regiment Raymond's Redcoats, and that was because they had been pretending to be part of the 295th for over twenty years before the real deal secretly arrived back in the Inner Sphere. Who the Redcoat's actually were she didn't know of course but given their efforts to hide their true identity it was reasonable to assume they were former pirates themselves, or perhaps more leftover Amaris goons with a rep from the war that would get them killed.
With the Redcoats annoyingly out of reach, they were on the payroll of the Lyran Commonwealth at present and well respected by the Archon for their combat skills apparently, and the real 295th still operating incognito, Romanov would just have to vent her frustration on other people instead. Unfortunately for the Blood Rain, bludgeoning them to death seemed like it would be both justified and very cathartic.
Realistically most of the Blood Rain were likely the children, or even grandchildren of the 141st Amaris Dragoons by now, with only the oldest of them directly responsible for the massacres the regiment had perpetrated on Terra in the name of Stefan Amaris, but since they chose to stick with their ****** forebears and live the outlaw life that wouldn't earn them much leeway. Jenna Romanov had issued instructions that civilians were to be spared, and that none of the enemy combatants who surrendered should be summarily executed, but she wasn't going to offer generous terms to encourage any of them to lay down arms. It would be unconditional surrender or death, and surrender would mean hard labor in a mine on Alphard until the government of Niops felt in a merciful mood.
The majority of the people on Niops having had lost relatives, or at least pre-war friends and acquaintances, to Amaris and his bloody dreams of empire, mercy would likely be a long time coming.
Jenna Romanov looked thoughtful as the two generals headed back to their respective Overlord Dropships so they could get underway as soon as the jump was made. She would be directly commanding one battlemech battalion, Hallis another, while Colonel Jax Benedict still aboard his own Overlord led the third. The combined-arms battalion under Colonel Rory Fallstaff was loaded on their single Fortress dropship while Colonel Daniel Hammerick had a Triumph loaded with additional combat vehicles, artillery and plenty of ammunition for it. Their sixth dropship was another Titan, bringing three additional squadrons of aerospace fighters to ensure air superiority over the planet. "You know I haven't done this for about half-a-century" Romanov pointed out to Hallis before smiling. "Thanks for letting me and the rest of the old farts pilot the lion's share of the heavies and assaults, our reaction times aren't up to sprinting around in a Hussar or Hermes anymore."
"Pity we had to run this op before the Ulithi delivered all your mechs." Hallis observed.
"Eh, the ones we're borrowing from you are generally better anyway, at least until we can get ours upgraded with your improved weaponry" Romanov replied. "Got to say, a few of my people are stoked that they're finally getting to drive a Royal, getting that title back was the dream of the 295th ever since some damn fools lost it."
"Just as long as they give them back in one piece." Hallis replied, smiling.
"Good thing you had a spare Nightstar I could take out, I'd be lost trying to command in the field without it." Romanov admitted. "I still remember when my own arrived to replace my old Marauder, that was just before Operation Chieftain kicked off. It took me a while to get used to all the extra comms gear and the battle-management system but once I did I couldn't believe I'd ever done without it."
"I just wish I could take out my Pulverizer instead of a Highlander." Hallis replied glumly.
"The Highlander is a decent command mech itself… and it doesn't matter if someone sees one" Romanov reminded him.
"Yeah, I know, it's just that I was so stoked when I got it. You know I actually rode a Shadow-Griffin for years before that." Hallis recalled.
Romanov frowned. "What the hell is a…" she began, "oh, let me guess, half a Shadow Hawk and half a Griffin bolted together."
"More like two-thirds of a Shadow Hawk, but the PPC on the Griffin arm came in handy" Hallis told her. "I mean it was ugly as hell, a real Frankenmech of a machine, but it had character."
"But not enough character to be sad when you upgraded your ride to an assault with a new-fangled ER PPC that could blow another mechs head clean off" Romanov surmised as they reached the point in the corridor running along the spine of the JumpShip where they would part ways to head for their own Dropships.
"Maybe a little sad" Hallis admitted. "Especially when they stripped my old Shadow-Griffin down for spare parts" he said with a sigh. "See you in person again down on Algenib when we raise the Cameron Star over the bastard's corpses" he bade her farewell.
"If any of my geriatrics under your command for this one cause you any strife tell them I'll take away their walking-sticks" Romanov joked.
"Same goes for any of my juveniles under your command, just threaten them with a time-out." Hallis replied, grinning. All three battlemech battalions were made up of a mix of lances from the 331st and 295th because while the latter had plenty of experience, they were, in a word, rusty.
The combined-arms battalion however was almost one-hundred-percent Wolverine, with a token single lance of mechs and one of tanks from the Niops Militia who wanted to show what they could do. Even with their Terran Hegemony anti-agathic treatments men and women who were now mostly in their seventies, eighties and even nineties don't make for the best infantry, humping around with rifle, pack, helmet and body-armour was a young person's game.
An L-F Tramp sent to scout ahead, arriving at Algenib too far out for its emergence wave to be detected, had confirmed from signal monitoring that the Blood Rain were still present. Their Dropships still down on the ground at their base on Algenib and their JumpShip at the zenith point around the star. They seemed to follow a pattern of behaviour, go on a campaign of raiding for a few months then return to their current home in the ass-in of nowhere until supplies ran low again.
The Amaris Dragoons turned pirates operated three JumpShip. The smallest was a Merchant Class they had picked up somewhere, the second a Star Lord of their very own, but the third was something special and was the main reason the Rickenbacker had tagged along for this operation.
The Royalty class JumpShip had been produced in fair number for the military of the Rim Worlds Republic, though most had been destroyed by the SLDF during the Amaris War. Despite being about the same size as a Star Lord it could only carry four Dropships to a Star Lords six, with the spare mass and volume devoted to fairly heavy armament and armour for a non-warship instead. It also had internal flight-bays large enough to hold at least two squadrons of aerospace fighters as well as shuttlecraft for boarding actions.
A Royalty was no match for an actual warship, not as long as the warship had enough fighter support anyway, but it would eviscerate most any other transport JumpShip and the thing had likely been the Blood Rains ace-in-the-hole in the years since they fled Terra ahead of several divisions of angry SLDF soldiers.
If the armed JumpShip decided to try and make a fight of it the Rickenbacker was under orders not to pussyfoot around trying to take it intact, just to pound the damn thing with large calibre naval guns until it surrendered or was reduced to a debris field. Meanwhile assault shuttles full of SLDF marines, supported by aerospace fighters from the Titan, would be dispatched to take control of the pirate transports.
While Rickenbacker and her two Dropships jumped to the zenith point of Algenib to capture or destroy the opposition JumpShip, Ian Cameron would instead jump to a Lagrange 'Pirate-point' closer to the target planet, the nickname for such non-standard jump-points being amusingly ironic for this particular operation. By greatly reducing the enemy's opportunity to prepare for the assault it was hoped friendly casualties could be reduced still further, particularly as the Blood Rain would clearly not be expecting someone to suddenly drop in on them all guns blazing all the way out here.
If it wasn't for the fact that the pirates were known to take slaves from the worlds they raided Romanov might have been tempted to have the navy simply obliterate them from space with an orbital bombardment. If you accepted the deaths of innocents as acceptable collateral damage however then you were on a slippery slope to being little better than a foe you despised, it was important to minimise your own losses but of what value was your life if you couldn't live with yourself?
If all went well, then as far as the rest of the galaxy was aware the Blood Rain would have just inexplicably vanished one day, never to be seen again. Not that anyone would mourn them. That was the disadvantage of them hiding way out in the boonies, it meant that someone else also trying to avoid the undue attention of the more powerful factions had the opportunity to crush them underfoot, and without leaving boot-prints behind that someone was likely to find and be curious about.
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===Regrouping and preparing for raiders===
When Romanov issued the go order the Rickenbacker jumped first, arriving at the Zenith Point of the Algenib system shortly before the Ian Cameron arrived at the L2 Lagrange point of its only inhabitable planet. Since the ships arrived hundreds of millions of miles away from each other, and light isn't that fast when you're working on that kind of scale, the Ian Cameron was already in the process of launching its dropships before a signal from Rickenbacker reached them confirming that it too had arrived safely and was now moving to engage the pirate JumpShips.
By the time the half-dozen dropships offloaded by Ian Cameron had formed up into an impromptu squadron, and then began accelerating towards the planet, a subsequent signal from Rickenbacker advised them that the enemy Star Lord and Merchant JumpShips had wisely surrendered, with marines soon be dispatched to board them. Meanwhile, the captain of the Royalty class ship had been less prudent, his vessel had suffered battle damage during a short exchange of fire that 'wasn't just going to buff out' and a few aerospace fighters that the Royalty had launched before Rickenbacker's guns could be brought to bear upon her were now having to be rounded up by fighters launched by Rickenbacker and her dropships to do so.
As had been expected the pirate JumpShips had managed to get off a distress signal to their compatriots down on the planet, Rickenbacker had jumped in just too far away from them to effectively jam the transmissions, but it wasn't like Romanov hadn't intended to loudly advertise the presence of the Eleventh Army anyway once they neared their objective.
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Down on the planet Stefani Marcus, once a captain (and brevet major) in the 141st Amaris Dragoons and now the self-styled Pirate Queen of the Blood Rain, though that affectation was mainly intended just to spook cowardly periphery chuckleheads, was wondering what the hell was going on. Her duty officer had woken her from a pleasant sleep to tell her that a 'warship' had attacked her JumpShips at zenith, and that a Star Lord's worth of dropships was inbound fast from the L2 pirate point. Once she determined that she was actually awake, wasn't having a nightmare, and it wasn't a practical joke being played upon her she issued orders for the regiment to stand to for action and started pulling on her uniform.
It said a lot for how professional and well-trained the Blood Rain still actually was that they managed to get themselves ready for battle quite as fast as they did, although the number of her mechwarriors and pilots who were hungover after the previous nights partying, or in some cases were still drunk, was less than ideal.
The Blood Rain fought hard and they played hard, the latter being the reason that they generally only attacked settlements in the afternoon by preference. Her immediate predecessor as commander of the unit had run a slightly tighter ship, but that was when they occasionally still raided into the Capellan Confederation and the Free Worlds League which meant tougher opposition and battles that might last more than a couple of hours.
As her company and battalion commanders hurried to put their units together into a cohesive force that could take the field Stefani Marcus was trying to learn more about the opposition. If they really had a warship, and given that her Royalty had apparently been knocked out of the fight pretty fast that was plausible, then that really narrowed down who it might be.
In this corner of space, only the Free Worlds League still definitely maintained warships, although the Magistracy of Canopus might also still have some too since at one point before the Periphery Uprising they had a couple of dozen, albeit mostly Pinto class corvettes either purchased directly from the Rim Worlds Republic or of licensed local manufacture. The Magistracy was probably more motivated to go after the Blood Rain of late, Marcus had made sure not to poke the Mariks since they stopped fighting their neighbors, but it didn't really matter who was coming, only that she beat them.
If she could defeat the enemy ground forces and take plenty of POWs she might be able to exchange them and any battlefield salvage for the return of her JumpShips. If they didn't want to play ball initially just start executing prisoners one at a time until they were willing to negotiate.
One thing was for certain, they wouldn't be expecting to face the machines she could put up against them. When raiding the Blood Rain had always kept back their best BattleMechs, saving them for what her old commander jokingly called a 'bloodrainy day' because they were irreplaceable, but it was sure as shit raining now. Raining dropships.
As the inbound dropships neared the atmosphere they began transmitting a high-powered, wide-band signal. After listening to it a while Stefani Marcus took it as an indication that they must be one of the former Star League regiments that had stayed behind and turned mercenary after Kerensky went AWOL. Some of them, the Eridani Light Horse for example, still affected to be an SLDF unit and acted like they were, although nearly half-a-century after the fall of the Star League they were really just cosplaying at this point.
She had to admit though, the singing on the radio really brought back some old memories of being a young Rim Worlds Army officer in Europe on Terra when Kerensky's divisions arrived.
"Oh we'll rally round the flag, boys, we'll rally once again,
Shouting the battle cry of freedom
And we'll rally from the sphere, we'll gather from the rim,
Shouting the battle cry of freedom
The Star League forever, hurrah! boys, hurrah!
Down with Amaris, up with the star
While we rally round the flag, boys, we rally once again,
Shouting the battle cry of freedom"
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==Chapter Notes==
*;Notes from the Author : JP-P-815 is an uninhabited system used by jumpships heading to Algenib because the latter is more than 30LY from the nearest other habitable system (the use of such places as waypoints is typical in the periphery where systems appearing on the standard maps can be quite far apart. It takes two jumps to get from Niops to Alphard 48LY away for example).The Niops Association is re-naming its Star Lord jumpships after the various First Lords of the Star League, starting with Ian Cameron. They couldn't exactly operate under their original names and it helps with their efforts to project themselves as the continuation of the Star League/Terran Hegemony.The two-hundred or so Congress class frigates produced, including the SLS James Sever and the SLS Rickenbacker, had a lot of trouble dealing with attacks by aerospace fighters which resulted in the Pentagon class dropship being created to defend them. An alternative to hauling along a Pentagon to protect your Congress was to bring a Titan, or ideally a Vengeance class carrier-dropship along instead (the 295th/331st don't have a Vengeance unfortunately). The six dropships being carried by the NAS Ian Cameron are three Overlord class, one Fortress class, one Triumph class and another Titan for air-support.A Command Circuit, or 'Pony Express', is a way to get around a lot faster than the typical 30LY per week (or 60LY if you have a Lithium-Fusion Battery equipped vessel) but you need a lot of pre-positioned jumpships to do it.The Blood Rain pirate band, formerly the 141st Amaris Dragoons, managed to escape Terra in 2778 just before the SLDF closed the noose. The 141st raided Spica in the Capellan Confederation for supplies while fleeing the death throes of the Amaris Empire and found their skills as a bunch of war-criminals transferred very well to piracy. It is not an exaggeration to say that Jenna Romanov would very much want a piece of them, ideally hanging on the wall above her mantleplace.To help you get your bearings here's a quick map for you, by the way. You'll note that the L-F equipped Tramp jumpships out exploring the region for Niops haven't chosen the same name for some of the systems that the Marian Hegemony would have (Copernicus instead of Suetonius, Galileo instead of Pompey, Kepler instead of Horatius, Herschel instead of Marius Tears). For scale, as mentioned above it's 48LY from Niops to Alphard.
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