TTWTWT Chpt 12

==Tell The World That We Tried - Chapter 12==
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<<Previous Chapter - Return to Story Index - Next Chapter>>
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FILL THE SKIES WITH SCREAMS AND CRIES...​
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===Unexpected Question from a Legendary figure===
Banquet - Solaris VII, Lyran Commonwealth, 3016
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I don’t remember much about the award ceremony itself. Bits and flashes, yes. The way the spotlight placement stabbed one of the highbeams right into my eyes during Katrina Steiner’s opening speech. Thinking how glad I was that I’d gone with the miniskirt option when we were throwing together the dress uniform design, because of the way it kept my legs cool. Being momentarily blinded by the reflection off the literal twenty-pound hammer of solid sterling silver handed to the major who’d ended up running the artillery park for the battle.
 
Tying the shimmering black eagle feather to the staff of our equally-hasty regimental flag, and feeling the hammer of my people’s cheers.
 
But honestly? Most of my attention was on not messing up, and stayed that way through most of the party afterwards. I’d been jittery and out of sorts all day, the hair on the back of my neck standing up perpetually.
 
Given that I ended up getting literal proof that that was necessary, and that with Older-Me’s habit of freezing and going blank when confronted too sharply picked a miserable time to remind me that it wasn’t entirely gone, I needed all that attention. And needed rescuing, though fortunately Sophitia was happy to volunteer.
 
Around the time I calculated we could finally make an early night of it, an Archonal Security Detail goon slipped by and whispered that My Presence Was Requested. Sophitia waved off my apologies and leaned against the wall next to the door guards, and I went through the frisk and inside to find Her Highness standing, not quite squared off, with a man I didn’t recognize.
 
Tall, underweight, great big beak of a nose, hair and beard alike uncut. He was dressed in a set of aggressively plain - actually, I think they may have been outright Plain Dress - slacks and white shirt, a bit large for him, and an open leather jacket with the double-breasted cut fashionable for Lyran Mechwarriors, which was really too big for him. I thought he was probably somewhere in his forties.
I knew what he saw looking back - a pretty coed, short, grey eyes, black hair back in a ponytail, in the low boots, leggings, miniskirt, double-breasted jacket and duelist’s cape I’d settled on for the unit’s uniform. When I’d flat-refused to add enough gold braid for the designer’s taste, he’d turned around and suggested that the ‘general officer’ version reverse the basic color scheme. Sophitia’s happy agreement had doomed me to wear white with a black shirt, rather than the other way around.
 
When our eyes met, there was… I don’t even know how to describe it. A sense of mutual awareness, of measuring, and the threat of lethal violence held just slightly in the wings.
 
I realized, belatedly, that I’d fallen into a ready stance, feet spread, hands up - with the little cape tossed back over that elbow.
 
“It is you.” he said.
 
“The hell?” I asked.
 
Katrina turned so that she could look at both of us. “Asha Blackwing,” she said, gesturing first to me, then to him. “Morgan Kell.”
 
...oh.
 
I straightened, lowering my hands, and gave the right side a little tug to get the cape to fall right. “A pleasure to meet you, Colonel Kell.” I said.
 
“Likewise,” he said, and extended a hand to shake. “A pleasure, General-Major Blackwing.”
 
I accepted the handshake, of course. And, since I didn’t feel like explaining that I’d set up ranks I’d never expected to use as part of a Battlestar Galactica reference, or what Battlestar Galactica was, I didn’t correct him about the rank.
 
Even as obviously wrecked as he was, Kell was still stronger than I was just on the basis of sheer size, so it was fortunate that he wasn’t a knuckle-crusher. Not that I’d’ve expected him to be, from what I knew of the man.
 
Kell didn’t wait for Katrina to make whatever followup to the introductions she’d planned on. He leaned forward, expression desperate. “How do you stand it?” he asked.
 
I blinked at him. “Huh?”
 
He whirled away in frustration, pacing back towards the conference table that dominated the room. Off to the side, I could see Katrina giving him a look that mingled concern and irritation. “Knowing!” he said. He paused, rubbing his hands up and down the opposite upper arms for a moment like he was freezing cold, then turned back to see my expression still blank. “We’re not warriors any more,” he said. “What we can do, what we are. We push our souls out into the world and rip away life. No contest, no challenge, no justice. Just murder. Monsters.”
 
Well, that made more sense as a concern, at least. I glanced at Katrina out of the corner of my eye, but didn’t ask permission before I sat down, sighing. “Colonel Kell, war is murder.” I said.
 
“Not like this!” he snapped desperately, and started to go on, then stopped, closed his eyes, and instead said, “Not with the entire universe going to sand under my feet. Fairy tales turning real, reality turning fairy tale…”
 
I sighed again. “I don’t have an answer that will help you,” I admitted. “Because my world went crazy years before I ever set foot on Fianna. Finding out I had psychic powers on top of that wasn’t a big deal, after I’d already had to deal with that.”
 
“I haven’t briefed him yet,” Katrina said, “but I’m planning to.”
 
Morgan took a step forward. “Please. At least tell me how you dealt with that.” he - there was no other word for it - begged.
 
I thought for a second about how to put it. “I read a story once,” I started. “About a student who goes to a buddhist monastery seeking enlightenment. Before too long, he meets a monk carrying a yoke of water and asks him if he’s had any success in seeking enlightenment. Monk says he reached enlightenment two years ago. Excited, the student asks how he did it-”
 
“Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.” Morgan said softly when I paused to remember the exact phrasing I was looking for. “After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.”
 
Ah, he knew that one. “Yeah,” I agreed. “I kept my mind on other things, practical and urgent and distracting ones, until the back of my brain could process things.”
 
Morgan Kell looked flatly terrified at the thought, but nodded. “I… suppose that that’s what I’ll have to try.” he said.
 
“I’m glad to hear that, Morgan,” Katrina broke in, making both of us look over at her. “Because I have a job for both of you.”
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===New Contract, New Employer===
Monarch Class DropShip, Polar Express - Drop Port - New Avalon, Federated Suns, 3019
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Eight months and a shedload of hyper jumps later, First Prince Hanse Davion looked around my little office aboard the Polar Express thoughtfully, taking in the mess of papers, noteputers, and two-week-old New Years 3017 decorations, then accepted the seat I offered him at the table I’d had set up. “And now,” he said, “come the parts of the contract negotiations you think would be better kept secret.”
 
Setting this meeting up was, of course, the job that Katrina had had for me. She’d had her minions manufacture a new identity for what was left of her old friend - you couldn’t top ‘Owning the real records’ for fake ID purposes - and had a different set cook up a batch of fake intelligence and signposts thereof that could justify my running to ‘sell’ directly to the First Prince himself.
 
I stayed standing, and gestured to the third of the four people in the compartment, who had waited until Hanse sat to follow suit. “Actually, this is for his benefit - and yours. Captain Gars, please permit me to properly introduce Commander Morgan Kell-”
 
Hanse’s bodyguard, standing ready next to the hatchway, stiffened. As well he might, given that Morgan had been going by Till Solih basically since his arrival on Solaris.
 
I kept talking as smoothly as I could. “-Ambassador Plenipotentiary of the Lyran Commonwealth.”
 
Hanse went still.
 
I picked up the manila envelope on my desk and handed it to the guard. “And, having performed that introduction and handed over his formal credentials, my role is done.”
 
I turned and bowed. “With your permission, your highness?”
 
A wave of his fingers sent me out, and for lack of anything more productive to do, I went to get a coffee.
 
As a Monarch class, Polar Express had started life as a second-tier passenger liner, the spacegoing, long-haul equivalent of a twenty-first century airliner. Even before being converted to hold several regiments of infantry she hadn’t been the first height of luxury, but the fact that her passengers were expected to live aboard for weeks or months - and were paying passengers, rather than animate military cargo - meant that she’d had to be at least comfortable to start with. My office was in what had been First Class, along with the rest of our permanent administrative stuff, using the left over cabins after most of her single-occupancy rooms had been converted to hold infantry squads.
 
I kind of missed Norway’s Greatest Son. She’d had less space for me to set up in, and there was no question that she’d been less practically useful, but she’d felt a bit more spiritually comfortable. And, of course, I’d become enough of a Mechwarrior to prefer to have No. 2 close at hand rather than in bulk cargo…
 
Meh. We’d sold the Leopard months before; it had been too late before we left Solaris, much less now after landing on New Avalon.
 
The small ‘breakfast nook’ attached to First Class had become the Admin Country mess, but at this time of day I’d expected it to be empty.
 
Instead, I found Suzuki sitting at one of the tables - they had bucket seats on arms, and were supported by two rotating axles at their ends. Grounded on New Avalon, those arms emerged from the rear wall - the floor, when in transit. Even the heads were like that, which was miles more elegant than the workarounds I’d seen on other aerodyne dropships.
 
She looked up from pushing her last few natto beans around in the bowl she’d been staring at and nodded. “My Lady.” she said.
 
“Colonel,” I replied, and headed for the coffeemaker in its cabinet. “Coffee?”
 
She said yes and I got both our mugs, and a bowl of cereal with my fiancee’s face on it, and sat down across from her.
 
“There’s something on your mind.” I said, dosing mine from the tray I’d grabbed at the same time.
 
It wasn’t hard to guess, given her expression, and the fact that she was sitting out here rather than in her office or with her regiment.
 
“...I didn’t think I had any… kind feelings left for, for the Combine,” she said after a few moments’ struggle.
 
Ah. “But in the long run, an alliance between the Suns and Lyrans…”
 
“And with everything else we’ve already handed the Commonwealth,” she agreed. “...We’re going to destroy my home.”
 
I took a sip of my coffee. “What did you think of New Kyoto?” I asked. We’d bought a shipment of parts and the like from there while we were on Solaris, and she’d volunteered to lead the ‘mission’.
 
She stared at me for a couple of seconds. New Kyoto was a Lyran world in about the same area as Solaris, which had originally been set up by a cooperative of Japanese companies and citizen groups, with plenty of assistance from what had been left of the Japanese national government at that time. Which was plenty, given that that had only been in the twenty-third century.
 
New Kyoto’s planetary culture was a more direct, and in most ways purer, outgrowth of actual Japan than the Imperial Japan imitation the Combine used.
 
“Hen da yo,” Suzuki said - ‘it was weird’.
 
“Bad weird, good weird, uncanny valley weird, other?” I prompted, and had a biteful of scratchy wheat flakes and desiccated marshmallows.
 
“‘Uncanny valley?’” she asked.
 
“Psychological thing,” I said, and sketched a rising curve with my hands. “The more a depiction of a person looks like a person, the better people like it… To a point. And then, when it looks a lot like a person but some of the details are off, so your instincts say ‘This is a person, but they’re diseased somehow’ the appeal drops-” I dipped my hands “-before it goes back up when you’re finally looking at, well, people.”
 
“Oh,” she said, and looked down at the table. “...Consciously, if I look at… at the individual differences, most of them are good. Not the idols and porn shops, but having shops, and police that are there to give directions, not… But at the same time, that feels ‘uncanny valley’ in a way that Galatea or wherever don’t.”
 
I had some more cereal, mostly to try and hide the fact that I had no idea what to say.
 
“You’re thinking of New Kyoto as a model for the entire Combine, aren’t you?” she asked.
 
“Never invade someplace you don’t have a plan to rebuild. If we can pull it off.” I said. “That’s by no means guaranteed.”
 
Suzuki smiled, a little wanly. “In this life, what is?”
 
“Death and taxes are the traditional ones.” I said.
 
She thought for a bit. I had some more terrible cereal.
 
“What about the Kuritas?” she asked.
 
I shrugged. “Depends what we need to pull off the other.”
 
“...Then I guess it can’t be helped.” she said, and smiled in a way that frankly kind of scared me. I was about to hide in my coffee when a cleared throat interrupted.
 
One of Hanse’s uniformed bodyguards bowed. “His Highness requests the Commander’s presence,” he said, clipped FedSuns accent clear.
 
I glanced at Suzuki; she nodded, so I nodded back and stood up to follow the attack dog back to my own office.
 
Morgan was on his way out as I arrived; he didn’t answer my questioning look with anything so obvious as a thumbs up, but he seemed relieved enough for me to count the results as positive.
 
I didn’t realize that Hanse had started to wave me at the other guest chair until I was halfway to behind my desk. He looked puzzled when I froze for a second or two, then laughed. “Muscle memory,” I said, and kicked the desk chair free of its latches to move out from behind the thing. “Also, this is the most comfortable chair here.”
That made him laugh, too. “Privilege of owning the office.” The moment of levity was still dancing in his eyes when he added, “Though if you were looking for an even nicer office…”
 
I shook my head. “Under other circumstances, I wouldn’t hesitate,” I said. “But while that contract is sealed and secret - it is signed.”
 
“So, you’re not just loaning out cover to ‘Commander Solih’,” he concluded. “You’ve sworn to the Commonwealth outright.”
 
“I have,” I confirmed explicitly, for only the third time ever. “That said, Archon Katrina’s order sending us here was to act fully as mercenaries, up to and including authorization to take contract against the Commonwealth.”
 
That surprised him, as well it might. After a moment, his lips quirked up. “So if I sent you to Hesperus…?”
 
“I’d take two steps away from my landing site and end up right where I started,” I said, “but that’s because anything else would be stupid, not because of my oaths. Besides, while Her Highness didn’t share any of her plans with me-”
 
True, as far as it went. She hadn’t told me what she intended to keep or what she intended to change.
 
“-I’d be very surprised if she went to all this trouble to say something that’d make you decide Hesperus would be better off wrecked.”
 
Hanse laughed. “At that, you have a point.” he admitted. “No, what I’m thinking instead is… how do you feel about Tortuga?”
 
“Fuck ‘em with a rake,” I said promptly, and had the distinct pleasure of startling a laugh out of him.
 
“More precisely, then,” he said, once he had the sniggers under control, “how do you feel about a contract to occupy them?”
 
“That’s…” I started to say, then stopped. Started, stopped. Thinking the entire time. Remembering the idiocy of the Iraq invasion of another world entirely.
 
Eventually: “Just punching pirate tickets is… Not pointless, but the next best thing. Aspirin for a broken leg. Smash what’s there, you’ll have new bands operating out of the same region in a decade - more likely, in a year. Run a short term or unplanned occupation - go in without an idea of who or what kind of person we want to have in charge there in the end, and how we’re going to get them there, and the only difference is that we’ll get more people killed than just wiping out the current crop of scum.
“That said, Tortuga is a cesspool and actually cleaning it up would be doing everyone a favor.” I finished. “If you want us to take point on starting that process, we’re happy to. I’m confident that that’s one thing all my people can agree on.”
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===Facing off with Lady Death===
Tortuga Dominions, 3017
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It wasn’t just my people who could all agree on the battle cry of ‘Fuck Tortuga’.
 
Five months more after landing on New Avalon, I looked around at the other commanders of the ballooned final mission. Morgan Kell, in disguise as Commander Till Solih of the unit’s second brigade. Armed Forces of the Federated Suns' Major Boyden Wallace, our Liason Officer. Outworlds Alliance Military Corps Director Yuuki Riegel, who had the AMC wing that they’d sent to support the op. His opposite number, the Taurian Concordat’s Colonel Samuel Ostergaard, with the space-ops battalion they’d brought to the table.
 
 I was pretty sure that I’d managed not to show how much that last name threw me for a loop. There was no doubt it was the same man, eerie vocal resemblance to Adam Jensen and all. Despite the disturbing vision of a potential future, he’d proved completely personable and quite a professional, with little of the anti-Davion sniping I’d have expected from a Taurian.
 
After all. Fuck Tortuga.
 
“That jump alarm was the Gloria Day,” I said, naming the last of the FedSuns Scout class JumpShips that had brought our outrider forces to their targets. “I imagine that means Major Wallace has a report for us.”
The AFFS man’s sphinx-like poker face broke into a fierce grin. “They jumped out.”
 
Ostergaard’s satisfaction was less obvious, but his gloved hand closed into a fist on the conference table. “Good. Comptroller-” He was looking at me. “The Electra can be ready to jump inside the hour.”
 
Riegel nodded. “Truth and Reconciliation will be prepared at least as quickly.”
 
I glanced at Kell. “We’ll need more than that,” he said, “but not a lot more. Two hours should be plenty. We’ve all been waiting for this.”
 
“Then, gentlemen, we are go.” I said, and rapped sharply on the table. “Back to your people, get ready. We jump on the hour at 1600.” That was nearly three hours away, more than enough time. “Don’t hesitate to bring anything to me as it comes up; we have at least three days’ leeway, and I don’t want to risk an avoidable screwup for the sake of a few minutes.”
 
I was the youngest person in the room by at least fifteen years, but they all nodded.
 
Murphy didn’t. A snarl in the bola-carousel retraction gear on one of our Invaders added forty-five minutes to Kell’s estimate, but that possibility was why I’d set the schedule I did. It took a lot of swearing, a lot of sweating, and a work crew on the outside of the Sandringham’s hull pulling the cables in by hand while the dropship attached to their docking locks eased slowly in on RCS thrusters, but in the end we jumped on schedule.
 
As the interference and disorientation that accompanied every hyperspace jump faded, I struggled to read the spaceside tactical displays. If our intel estimates were wrong…
 
But the fact that we’d arrived safely at the planetary L1 jump point between Tortuga the star and its third planet, rather than dying in a puff of bad logic, argued that they weren’t.
 
Eventually, I got my eyes uncrossed enough to read the data I was looking for, and let the air rush out of my lungs in pure relief.
 
The pirates of the Tortuga Dominions had access to fifteen working JumpShips, as far as any of the intelligence agencies of the three neighboring realms knew. Every time anyone had tried to raid their territory, the ships and the scum they carried had all fled, jumping into the formally un-surveyed system at the heart of their domain, whose cometary shell was so far in it shared space with the standard zenith and nadir points, making them too dangerous to use by the standards of the day and leaving only the so-called ‘pirate’ points open.
 
Sharing the jump point with our own nine ships were a Tramp, six Invaders, and seven Merchants, leaving only one Invader-class unaccounted for. Fourteen to nine might have been decent odds for the pirates, if not for the fact that all of their collars were empty, and ours were full of combat dropships more than capable of destroying any of them.
 
The standard laws of war prohibited that, of course. With less than twenty new JumpShipss built in any given year, and less than five thousand existing in the entire Inner Sphere, wrecking even one of the precious sinews of interstellar travel was a taboo on the level of eating one’s own children.
 
But there was damage, and there was damage. A skilled aerospace fighter pilot could put a hole in the liquid helium coolant tanks and piping that let the KF drive do its superconducting magic, and once the damage had been patched and the coolant replaced the ship would be none the worse for wear. A commando team using fragmenting rounds or medium-intensity lasers could spray fire all over a JumpShips’s interior and crew without jeopardizing the hardware around them.
 
The Outworlds AMC fighters were in space within seconds of completing the jump, arrowing out towards the most active pirates with the three Fighter Carrier Leopards that had brought them hot on their heels. Slightly modified relatives of those dropships punched free of the Taurian JumpShips almost as quickly, hundred-fifty-ton Tigress cutters bolting from their carry bays and swinging around to orient on different targets.
 
An echoing BANG vibrated through Polar Express’s bones as the dropship cut free of its own carrier and started to burn for a central position, ready to wait as a reserve. With several regiments of regular infantry aboard she was utter overkill for the job, but the best of several bad options - and on the screen, Cruel Sea, our Condor class Dropship, separated from her JumpShips and swung around towards the last pirate one.
 
Smaller icons were spawning by the dozen, the unit’s fighters following the Outworlds ones into the black and sorting into ranks as they readied to take on the tiny handful of fighters that the pirate Jumpships could have fit into their onboard bays - if they were able to scramble before the boarding teams arrived.
 
The combat chatter piped from the bridge made it seem unlikely. By the sound of it, most of the pirates were just sitting there. A handful of others were trying frantically to reel their sails in so they could maneuver, one more had apparently run its reactor all the way up, and a last had abandoned its sail entirely and was burning its slow way away.
 
 Riegel’s voice came over the line. ({“Blackwing Actual, Nightmare Actual. Request permission for strike on the escapees, over.”})
 
 I could hear several of the crewmen around me draw in shocked breaths.
 
 “Nightmare, Blackwing. Permission granted, over.” I said. I didn’t bother adding anything fatuous about shooting to disable - he and his people knew that, and had a better idea than me on how to do it.
 
({“Thanks, we’ll trip ‘em up and tie a bow on for Ostergaard’s people. Nightmare, out.”})
 
“Commander…” one of the techs said, obviously a spacer born and visibly disturbed.
 
“The AMC has a lot of experience crippling pirate JumpShipss without leaving them unrepairable,” I said, my voice tense mostly with the effort of speaking under two and a half gravities of full burn. “Trust that, and the fact that losing them is better for civilization than leaving them in the hands of pirates.”
 
Obviously, that didn’t comfort him. Equally obviously, he didn’t have a logical argument to change it. Neither fact did anything to reduce the tension as we watched the strike go in on the display. A soft sigh rippled around the compartment as a squadron flashed past the running JumpShips, its icon going yellow in their wake. A second squadron, aimed at the slightly more distant one with the blazing radiators showing in the zoom window, veered away on overthrust as its icon went…
 
“Pink?” I asked, because it was, a vivid, screaming neon pink.
 
“Beginning jump,” the same technician who’d spoken out against trying to disable the thing said.
 
“They shouldn’t have charge for that yet.” I said instinctively, though I knew it was imbecilic.
 
“They don’t.”
 
In the zoom, the fleeing JumpShips came apart, separating into a cloud of components that moved away from each other like the removed panels of a cross-section view, then started to rotate in opposing rings before they twisted in ways that looked like they had to be optical illusions and the screen went black, a little line of text at the top right reading INPUT OVERLOAD.
 
“Misjump.” someone said.
 
We got the first surrender offer right after that, and, with pre-authorization to guarantee the lives if not the freedom of pirates who surrendered, only ended up needing to storm about a quarter of the ships.
In a strategic sense, that meant it was all over but the shouting. With a grand total of one JumpShips left to their name, the Tortuga Pirates’ ability to terrorize the periphery was reduced to nil. But there was no sense in leaving the operation half-done once we’d gone through all the trouble and expense of heading out here, flushing them, and having Davion funnel the massive bribe needed to get the jump point through Outworlds Alliance Intelligence.
 
Leaving the Nightmares and Taurians to keep the prize crews company and their prisoners honest, we headed for Tortuga III, and several days later, I leaned into my microphone and spoke, radio transmitters on our dropships rebroadcasting down out of orbit with enough intensity to blanket every receiver on the planet. “People of Tortuga, the life you knew is over. Whether you have lived in bondage, and now greet your liberation day, or you have stolen and murdered and now at last face justice, nothing from this moment forward will ever be the same.
 
“Those of you who call yourself ‘Brothers’ have a choice to make.” The noble, piratical caste of Tortugan society referred to themselves as the brotherhoods, anyway, and everyone else as slaves. Everyone else. “If you are wise, you will surrender, laying down your arms. You will be given a new name, and a new place in the Lyran Foreign Legion, there to serve in battle for fifteen years - and, at the end, to see the past wiped away. If you are not wise, you will face two brigades, and, behind them, a court sat by three judges - of the Outworlds Alliance, the Taurian Concordat, and the Federated Suns.
 
“I’m sure you can work out which set of odds is worse for you on your own.” I finished. “You have… Well. Until the first shots. Choose carefully.”
 
I let my thumb off the push-to-talk button and sat back in Marauder No. 2’s control couch - as much as I could ‘sit back’ when strapped to it in zero G.
Gravity - or acceleration, rather - came back as the time-clock ticked over and the formation started to de-orbit. Tied down in Polar Express’s cargo bay, there was even less to see than in a normal combat drop - the Monarch didn’t have the data hookups to feed sensor inputs to units in storage the way combat dropships could to units in their bays. I could only go over the reports from the four mechs right there - my No. 2, Sophitia’s Aspis, Reyes’ Deus Volt, and Rora Motochika’s Agincourt, the Archer that had replaced Setsuka Carter’s Atlas when we finally had a proper assault element to fit her into.
“Do you think the speech will work?” Sophitia asked over a private line.
 
“Not really,” I admitted. “But it’s worth a try.”
 
“For pirates?”
 
I laughed. “Nah, fuck’em. But even at these ratios we’ll lose people taking the fuckers out, and that I’d rather avoid.”
 
“Oh,” she said, sounding pleased. A few seconds passed. “Will you actually give them to the Legion?”
 
“Oh, yes.” I said. “I know what Archon Katrina’s planning to use the Legion for, after all. I don’t mind giving them those odds of surviving. Or, if they scuz up first, letting the Legion’s MPs handle it.”
 
The Wolf's Dragoons had made their reputation on all-out assaults and pitched heavy fighting, and the Lyran Commonwealth could get a lot of mileage out of shock troops like that that didn’t need to be conserved as heavily as normal regulars. Pirates that took the offer I’d just sent wouldn’t quite be making a fool’s bargain, but the odds would definitely be against their managing to live out their full terms of service to take advantage of the Commonwealth-backed fresh start. I wouldn’t have bet on any given Dragoon making it, for that matter, and they were on the whole much better warriors.
 
A klaxon echoed through the cargo bay; an alert that we were on final approach and about to land. ((“Game faces on,”)) Sophitia said. ((“I love you.”))
 
“Love you right back.” I said, and let the channel close.
 
Battletech’s tabletop rules had claimed that aerodyne, winged, dropships had multiple main drives and that handling them in vertical takeoff and landing ops was straightforward. Neither was true, especially for a civilian-origin ship like Polar Express. Military aerodynes had overbuilt reaction control systems that could flip and maneuver them quite quickly, and were incidentally capable of managing to hold the ship in a hover for a few seconds. Civilian ones? Not so much. We’d assigned the Monarch the best dropship handler we had, because what he needed to do to get it down in a zero-roll landing was spine-chilling.
 
The compass in my cockpit had started reading properly as we bored into the atmosphere; now it wheeled wildly, in time with my inner ear, as the pilot twisted Polar Express a hundred and eighty degrees, so that the five-thousand ton ship was coasting tail first, then flared nose-up and opened the main drive throttle all the way. Fusion thunder blotted out all other sound, and the fat man sitting on my chest was back as the pilot kept the ship balanced on a needle so that all the competing vectors of movement stayed within the narrow cone the main drive’s magnetic-gimballing mechanisms could cover, balancing the ship on her tail. It went on and on for a subjective eternity - then died with a clunk and a whine and the hissss of maneuvering jets trying to hold the ship from falling too fast, interrupted by the thump and jolt of the main wheels touching down.
More roaring started up; the clunks and whine had been the servo-actuated thrust reverser on the main drive overclosing on the bottom side and half-closing on the top. That wasn’t a designed function, but a bit of modification had made it possible, so that the thruster plume went on its uncontrolled way straight vertically up. This was, in general, useless - but with the rear main landing gear on the ground and a need to keep the nose from flopping down hard enough to break something, it let the pilot control the rate of tilt without overloading the RCS thrusters.
I sat there and tried to get my breathing and heart rate under control again while the ground outside cooled enough for unloading, assisted by the release of several tons of water aimed at the worst hotspots. Loading crews rushed out, undoing the tie-downs that webbed No. 2 in place like Gulliver, and the main doors that opened up onto the cargo bay started to lever open, letting in the blinding blaze of outside day.
 
I checked my strategic display. 1st and 8th Regiments, the battlemech ones, were already on the ground and unloading in a hurry. 2nd and 9th, the tanks, weren’t on the ground yet, much less unloading, but they wouldn’t be long. All told, things were going well, which made my neck itch.
 
The shoe dropped.
 
<<“Greetings to our - new Brothers, who have found this refuge of Tortuga.”>> came over the radio. <<“As others before, you’ve followed the signs and walked the path, an’ come recruitin’ for the one as holds your sword, an’ that challenge has its own precedents.”>>
 
It was a man’s voice, aged and speaking with utter formality despite the heavy accent. <<“Come to the challenge arena, an’ test your strength to claim the right as first among Brothers… If you can win. Or lose, an’ serve the strongest, as all must.”>>
 
<<“Turn your back on the challenge, an’ be known as a coward, with every hand turned against you.”>>
 
({“Pete, you fucking traitor!”}) snarled a different voice, a woman’s. Lady Death. ({“I told you we weren’t gonna do this shit!”})
 
<<“It’s the Code, Trevaline. None of us are anything without it.”>>
 
Instinctively, I flipped my own channel open to reply. “All right,” I said. “I’ll play ball, ‘Brothers’.” I couldn’t keep the hint of a sneer out of my voice. “Where’s the arena?”
 
In the end, they sent a leader-car - not just a truck with a lightbar welded to the top, but an enormous double-decker bus thing in, and I swear I am not making this up, freakin’ pirate cosplay. A quick pinbeam conversation about what you’d call terms and conditions made it clear that by local custom, a challenger was expected to show up with the smaller of ‘everything they had’ and ‘what would fit’. An equally-quick exchange with Kell sent the 8th’s heavy battalion in with me, including our actual proper assault mech company of mostly Stalkers.
 
The slow walking tour of Raider’s Roost mostly left me sick to my stomach. I was no stranger to the signs of economic depression and urban decay; both of my lives had grown up in the middle of areas that were circling the drain, one urban and the other rural. Hoff had been a nowhere; Galatea was one giant trashy strip mall, and the Succession Wars had done Fianna’s Saint Cabrini no favors. Solaris was infamously an industrial slum outside the battlemech arenas, and so on.
 
Tortuga made them all seem like shining jewels of civilization. It reminded me of pictures I’d seen of Brazilian favelas or the Walled City of Kowloon, but without the dedicated sanitation services or building code enforcement. The city sprawled more, too, and was the worse for it - it made it easier to see what the place was like.
 
-<“Blake save us.”>- Motochika muttered; he was in the number two position in the column, in front of me and behind Sophitia. I could see him shuffle his steps a little to be sure he was stepping over a human corpse left to rot in the middle of the road.
 
I did the same - without zooming in to see how old the thing was. My nightmares didn’t need the details.
 
“Somebody should,” I agreed. “And I don’t see anybody but us getting nominated, do you?”
 
“...I’d been wondering about doing this at cost, Ma’am. I was wrong to.” he said.
 
I smiled. “Oh, we’ll do a bit better than that.” I said.
 
The ‘Circle of Brothers’ reminded me of Mad Max versus the Steiner Coliseum - seemingly assembled of slabs of scavenged dropship armor, it had physical stands, level with the cockpits of the mechs on the open oval of dirt, and protected only by vertical slabs of transparisteel, already battered and scarred. Despite how little I’d’ve liked to bet on their protection, the stands were mostly full.
 
I’ll give the place this, though - it was big. The Coliseum wouldn’t have had room for a company in its end-of-field dead zones, and the Circle’s end zones took a full battalion with only a little crowding, even when the second-lightest mechs present, after Sophitia’s Centurion, were the two Riflemen.
On our end, anyway.
 
Fourteen of the twenty-six mechs waiting opposite us were bugmechs, a motley and undistinguished mix of Wasps, Stingers, and Locusts. The ‘assault lance’ that was ready to answer our Stalkers had an Awesome, a Battlemaster, and a Banshee - and a sixty-five ton Thunderbolt to round them out.
 
One of the Stingers tried to shuffle behind a Clint, and an entire panel’s worth of armor fell off of its forearm with the movement.
 
Outworlds Alliance Intelligence, Taurian Ministry of Intelligence, and both of the Davion agencies - all of them were more or less in agreement that Trevaline’s two companies of ‘household’ troops represented about a quarter of the mech forces left in the Tortuga Dominions after the Dragoons had stormed through in the thirty-aughts.
 
A Stinger and a Wasp from Trevaline’s bunch circled the edges of the arena clockwise; a pair of our Flashmen did the same counterclockwise, the contrast in mass and power blatantly obvious as they passed each other.
 
Assured that no assassins with sniper rifles or other weapons laid in wait with access to the arena, the gruesomely decorated Banshee started to advance at the same moment that I urged No. 2 out of line.
 
“I’m Paula Trevaline, Dame Murdress Extraordinaire of the Tortuga Dominion!” her voice thundered out of the Banshee’s speakers, flanged and distorted by their poor repair and the way she was pushing them to their limits - and shouting into her mike. “I’m the queen of mean, the Lady Death herself! I’ve ripped my way back and forth across the entire Periphery, and no one - No! One! Can stop me! I’m the fastest, I’m the strongest, I’m the meanest! I’m gonna rip your head off and shit down your neck!”
 
I didn’t raise my voice in the slightest - but No. 2’s sound system was enough better that my broadcast was at least as loud as hers had been, and crystal clear.
 
“I am Asha, daughter of Clarice. I am a Blackwing, bred to peace.”
 
When I’d realized that the Johnite sect my mother had been raised in - not quite as pacifist as the Omniss, and without the Luddite bent, but just as determined - used that formulation, I wasn’t sure whether to let my inner Star Trek fan squee, or just to facepalm.
 
“I was the wedge that broke the lines of the Third Sword of Light on Hoff.” I went on. “I am the barrier that stopped the Juggernaut forever on Helm. I am the anvil that broke the Wolf's Dragoons on Solaris. And if you could match any of those, you wouldn’t be hiding here, like a coward in a hole.”
 
I smiled contemptuously, and let it show in my voice. “But feel free to try.”
I didn’t expect to be able to provoke her into firing on me - the ‘etiquette’ of the challenge put that part of the initiative in her hands, expecting me to match her if she chose to fight dismounted - but apparently her temper was less controlled than I’d expected. PPC and autocannon fire alike erupted from the Banshee and hammered into No 2’s main glacis.
 
Immobile, it was easy to ride out the impact and gyro instability and return fire into her as she tried to accelerate into motion. Then I opened the throttle, swinging into motion and letting her follow-ups blaze uselessly by behind me.
 
Despite the boasting I’d done, and despite her depravity, Paula Trevaline was a skilled mechwarrior. On an even playing field she’d probably have roasted me - but fair fights were for suckers, and I liked to think I wasn’t that.
 
As it was? She could barely even see me, and as much as Banshees ran ice-cold, putting freezers into No. 2 meant that so did I - and I had a whole extra PPC to play with.
By the third or fourth exchange of fire - and the third or fourth time she’d missed me completely - the hints of desperation were starting to be obvious in the way her increasingly battered Banshee moved. One more failed assault, and the first proper breach my fire managed to open in her armor, seemed to decide her.
 
She swung around, aimed all ninety-five tons of her mech my way, and charged.
 
Given the size of the mech she was using, and the gruesome (and spikey) mods she’d had made to it, it was actually intimidating. I concentrated on getting out of the way, and didn’t bother firing until I was sure I’d done that.
 
That worked once.
 
The second time, she managed to get ahead of my ability to evade completely - so instead I went with shooting, opening up in a full alpha strike for the first time of the day and making myself stand my ground until right before she could trample me. An outstretched arm caught No. 2 in the side torso, making the mech stagger and rock around me, but I managed, just barely, to catch the feedback before it could finish knocking me down.
Trevaline skidded to a halt, turning as she fought to arrest her monster machine’s momentum, and I fired again, dropping a PPC but leaving the lasers in, and both of those smaller weapons tracked across the Banshee’s near leg - and its hip actuator.
 
I throttled up and started trying to extend the range again; that bit of damage would slow her and give me the advantage I’d need to keep away for the rest of the battle, and from the speaker-broadcast shriek of rage that accompanied the pair of shots that missed wildly ahead of me, Lady Death knew it.
 
I bent my course a little to the left, torso-twisted all the way over, and gave her both three main guns right back.
 
 A blatted alarm called my attention to the pirate backfield, and the way the Battlemaster there was straightening and starting to advance. The other, smaller mechs around it were either staying put, though, or milling uncertainly.
 
So much for pirate honor.
 
Not that that was a surprise. Major Kaplan, the CO of the battalion Till had sent with me, already knew what to do if something like this happened, and she didn’t waste any time asking for approval. The assault company started to push forwards, Setsuka Carter’s bloodthirsty eagerness pushing the skull-faced mass of her Atlas forward into the vanguard, and the two accompanying companies of heavies swinging out on their wings.
 
One of the pirate Wasps turned and bolted for the now blocked entrance it and its fellows had entered through.
 
Trevaline turned, an autocannon burst reaching out at long range and chewing across the light’s rear armor, a moment before the fragmented explosion of a PPC hit sprayed from the dropship armor covering the wall next to it.
 
I fired at her again, for a wonder and for the first time that day hitting with all three main guns and making the towering Banshee stagger.
 
The Battlemaster - now that it was closer, I could see how it had been modified, it didn’t have the standard one-shoulder box launcher but bulkier housings on both sides of the cockpit - swung around to try and orient on me, then exploded in contrails, smaller and smokier and much more numerous than any proper missile launcher. I swerved hard, trying to evade, but they spread out so much - they were so inaccurate to start with, and utterly unguided - that they didn’t aim at me so much as saturate the area, leaving nothing to do but ride out the battering.
 
Rocket launchers? I wondered. Were those actually rocket launchers this early? Technically there was no reason why not, but…
 
While I was wondering that, every LRM carrier on my side of the backfield targeted that one mech and opened up, something like a thousand contrails rising up and then crashing down again like a curtain or a waterfall pouring over the Battlemaster and the poor stupid bastard piloting it.
 
I left the interference to his fate and tried to hit Trevaline again, and as though the universe was mocking me for my good fortune earlier, missed completely.
She twisted towards me, as though planning to fire back, then reconsidered and turned her guns on one of the pair of Riflemen mixed into the heavy battalion. I could only guess that she was determined to do some kind of damage before the inevitable caught up with her, but the mech she’d chosen to attack was by no means as fragile as the stock model. We’d modified all of our Riflemen by pulling the 8cm lasers in favor of 5cm ones that weighed a fifth as much, and turned the freed-up tonnage into a doubled magazine, increased thermal capacity, and literally as much armor as the chassis could sanely carry. A strike that would have left a stock RFL-3N hurting badly barely made our version blink, and its pilot didn’t hesitate to return fire.
 
His cannon fire crisscrossed with mine, stitching across the increasing ragged armor of Trevaline’s mech, and just as he’d been ordered to do he immediately tried to break contact, zigzagging behind the protective bulk of one of the Flashmen next to him.
 
A Clint in the pirate group started to advance, ignoring the way several of the mechs near it visibly shrank away as though afraid of being caught in the splash radius, then came apart as the Awesome turned all three beam cannons on its rear armor.
 
Lady Death was ordering her men to attack me, and clearly, most of them were having none of it. I fired at her again, finally sawing one of the Banshee’s arms off.
 
The other pirate mechs were still, aside from the Stinger that carefully raised both arms over its head like a bank robber being covered by the cops.
 
Trevaline tried to charge me again, quite reasonably judging that it had been her most successful tactic to date; I fired once more, and got an explosion from what was left of her autocannon ammunition.
 
One armed and half-senseless, she tried to pick herself back up, but I had all the time in the world to carefully settle the crosshairs on her almost motionless cockpit and wait for them to steady before firing.
----
===Can't Run Regiment like a Battalion===
Tortuga Dominions, 3017
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With Lady Death, well, dead, it would be easy to write my part of the business in Tortuga as all being over but the shouting. It’d be wrong, but easy. There was a lot of shouting involved, and quite a few hangings.
 
Not all of them pirates, either. Some of the slaves took revenge more openly than we could look away from and still keep the rule of law and order as a thing, and that.. Had to be stamped out. And as much as my people were under orders and under discipline, there were slips of various levels of ugliness, and those needed to be stamped out publicly and with extreme prejudice to keep them from spreading. I counted myself lucky that, in his first life as a young Colonel of the Lyran Commonwealth Armed Forces named Morgan Kell, Till had had cause to learn to appreciate proper Military Police - and that he’d made sure we had them before we needed them. Without him, I’d’ve been playing catch up and things would have gotten uglier.
 
Keeping a lid on a boiling septic tank of a society wasn’t exactly the most fun thing I’d ever done in my life, to indulge in an understatement, but at least it did have the virtue of being something that would have a distinct ending, a light at the end of the tunnel coming when the mercenary unit that Hanse had found to take final responsibility for the place finished their existing contract and relocated. With both the Outworlds and the Taurians willing to agree to chip in, he’d offered a blatantly generous contract to the 15th Dracon Regiment, a two-battalion operation famous for investing major chunks of their income into the areas they were stationed in. Usually they did that via whoever the local officials were, but with that kind of institutional culture, and the long-standing reputation it gave them, they’d be about a thousand-fold improvement over what had passed in the past for Tortugan government.
 
With Taurian and Outworlds money in the contract, as well as Davion, they could also be counted as… well, less likely to double-cross one or two factions of their employers in favor of one or another of the others, and the duty-free import and export options would be an economic boon to the Taurians, in particular - who had a lot of heavy industry but not enough markets for the goods that that produced.
 
Match all that to scholarships for enterprising young Tortugans, or at least ones with cleanish records, and what in a less depressed economic condition would have been a modest reserve of investment money, and the prognosis was… no worse than the rest of the Periphery. That light at the end of the tunnel was one that everyone could feel had better than even odds of not being a train.
 
The conversation I was coming up on didn’t have that, though.
 
Ludovic Clair, now a Colonel, walked into my office casually - then checked and stiffened as he saw the look on my face.
 
I didn’t have any intention of threatening him, but I wasn’t looking forward to this and I knew it showed. I waved him towards the guest chair and tried not to feel too tired.
 
“What’s wrong, Boss?” he asked.
 
I took a breath to brace myself and said, “Lu, I’ve been going through the battalion and company reports, and we’ve got a problem.”
 
“What are we missing?”
 
“You can’t run a regiment like a battalion, Lu,” I said, and I could see the ‘oh, shit’ wash across his face. “Three battalion COs, nine company COs - all trying to report directly rather than chaining through each other the way they should, and they couldn’t track you down. Because you were trying to do everything in person rather than by com, and because you weren’t letting the Majors run their parts of it themselves.”
 
He swallowed. “I… gotta admit I’ve been having more trouble getting on top of things than I’d expected. But it’s been getting better.”
 
I couldn’t stop myself from sighing. “You are,” I agreed. “But if we’d been up against something more serious than a rabble in Battlemechs, we’d’ve lost people because of that confusion. We can’t afford that.”
 
‘Oh shit’, his face said again. “So… What does that mean, Boss?” Lu was obviously bracing himself for the worst.
 
“I see… three options,” I said. “Option one; I write you a reference letter and you stick around here until the Drakons show. It’s pretty certain they’ll be raising a new battalion, as much as they’ll be getting paid. Option two; we move you back down to battalion command here. Or, option three, you and Till and I live in each other’s pockets from now until the next op. It shouldn’t be any bigger than this one, and no more likely to blow up… And if we can get everything working smooth, that’ll be that.”
“And if I don’t shape up,” Lu said grimly, “then it’s out.”
 
“Yeah,” I agreed.
 
He took a breath, held it, let it out again. “I didn’t get this far by backin’ down from challenges,” he said. “So, if you and Commander Solih will take me under wing, I’m ready to learn.”
 
I nodded. “OK,” I said. “We’ll do what we can.”
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..AND BATHE IN FIERY ANSWERS...
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