GblaRCS Chpt 1

==Guided by the light of a (Red) Cameron Star - Chapter 1 -==
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"To hell with it. We'll make our own Star League with Blackjacks and Hussars"Major-General Jenna Romanov - 2830 CE
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===Unexpected Arrivals===
Militia Headquarters (Niops VII) - Niops Association – 2827
In most inhabited systems being assigned to keep a remote watch over the zenith and nadir points of the star, monitoring for the distinctive electromagnetic signature of an emergence-wave heralding a JumpShip about to arrive, was an important and valued task.
Of course, in those systems JumpShip arrivals were a considerably more frequent occurrence than they were for Niops, which had twice gone more than a decade without so much as a single visitor. 
It might have been an urban legend but there was supposedly one poor son-of-a-bitch that had spent nearly his entire thirty-year career in the Niops Association Militia (NAM) manning the monitoring station who had never once detected an inbound JumpShip signature. By sheer bad luck he hadn't ever been on duty when the sensors registered one but had stubbornly refused a transfer from the posting until he did.
That was not a retired military man whose stories were worth listening to in a bar.
If it wasn't for the fact that a uninvited vessel could be carrying a dropship or two full of pirate raiders the job wouldn't even exist, but because it was a dangerous galaxy and it could be pirates there was always some poor unfortunate non-com sat behind a screen on Niops VII bored out of their mind and praying for a transfer to a better assignment.
On that particular afternoon the poor schmuck watching the screen wasn't one of the usual non-coms who sat in the chair, but a junior officer instead. A sergeant had gone off sick and because Second-Lieutenant Jason Carmichael had done something to get on someone's shit-list, he wasn't entirely sure what, he was temporarily re-assigned to what was likely the most tedious job for at least thirty light-years in any direction.
It wasn't like there was much excitement to be had in any job in the NAM. You could count the number of attempted attacks on the system since the colony was founded on one hand, and none of those had managed to get anywhere close to making landfall. What Niops lacked in numbers of infantry, tanks or battlemechs for the ground-forces it more than made up for in squadrons of old, but still serviceable, aerospace fighters. 
Carmichael had known full well that in signing up to become a mechwarrior he would likely never actually get to see combat in his machine, but at least it was a job that would pay the bills. More to the point he just didn't have the grades to land a gig in the science bureau where the big bucks were to be made and the rock-star astrophysicists had to beat the girls off with a stick. 
Leaning back in his chair, Carmichael took a long swig from a can of carbonated lemonade. It was a little too sweet for his tastes, and the chemist that developed the synthetic lemon flavour had apparently never tasted an actual lemon, but it was the best thing you could get from the vending machine out in the hall.
Barely more than a desk and three large computer display screens, positioned in a room not much larger than a supply closet, the Monitoring Station didn't even have a door because the Major in the office down the hall knew that if it did the man or woman sat at the screens would be inclined to use their time more productively and take a nap.
"Maybe if I pray really hard someone in the Free Worlds League will stumble across an old map of the Star League that has us on it and they'll invade?" Carmichael muttered to himself drily, putting down his can of soda. That possibility had certainly been a real concern when the news (much delayed) had arrived in Niops that the so-called 'Succession War' which had started in 2787, not after the Star League fell, had finally petered out in 2821. If the armies of House Marik weren't tied down fighting the Lyrans and Capellans on their borders they might look out towards the rim again instead, and it wasn't like the NAM could take on the military of a Great Power.
So far, no Free Worlds League though, fortunately for the people of the Niops Association. It could have been even worse than the Mariks of course, having them as your big neighbour was better than enjoying the dubious pleasure of the Draconis Combine or the Capellan Confederation breathing down your neck. The latter state even practiced what was effectively a mild form of slavery, only a proportion of their population being granted citizenship and everyone else being placed into the 'Servitor Class' stuck doing all the crappy and dangerous jobs.
The Drac's under House Kurita didn't have servitors, but their numerous camps full of dissenting political prisoners were certainly demonstrative of a society that you wouldn't want to live in if you were used to a free press and liked to speak your mind.
Carmichael looked around the room, noting the insignias of both the Star League and the Terran Hegemony still emblazoned on everything, instead of the flag of the Niops Association itself. It was likely the Star League Defence Force that had installed all this equipment when the colony was founded over a century before in 2700 and nobody was going to bother replacing any of it it until it completely wore out.
When you got right down to it, in all likelihood Niops was effectively all that was left of the Terran Hegemony after the five big Successor States had divided it up amongst themselves. After all the destruction wreaked upon the Hegemony by the Amaris Coup, and then the fourteen-year-long campaign by the SLDF to take Terra and the other occupied worlds back from the bastard, it had been in no fit state to fight off the new set of invaders, though a few worlds had supposedly tried anyway and paid the price in nuclear fire.
Maybe if most of what was left of the Star League military hadn't opted to follow Kerensky out into the Deep Periphery the Hegemony might have survived, but by that point the SLDF wasn't in a position to take on everybody at once with some vaguely realistic chance of pulling off a win. They still had generally better equipment, that was how the Hegemony had brought everyone to heel in the first place establishing the Star League, but the other major interstellar powers had weight of numbers and each one a fierce desire to reign supreme in the Inner Sphere.
That fierce desire had resulted in them bludgeoning themselves for over thirty years with little to show for it. Well, little to show other than billions of deaths and the ownership of a few more planets, often highly irradiated by this point, that used to fly the Hegemony flag but now bent the knee to some foreign Lord sat on a throne in New Avalon, Luthien, Capella, Atreus or Tharkad.
Say what you like about the High Associator of Niops, effectively the Head of State of what had become a de facto independent nation now that the Hegemony was gone, he might have a really crummy title, but at least he was born on Niops and was chosen by the local populace.
Carmichael yawned and stretched. This job would suit his brother down to the ground, he decided, plenty of time to sketch out that stupid novel he was always talking about writing. The alternate history one where Kerensky is killed in the fighting on Terra just after he took down Amaris, General DeChavilier takes over command of the SLDF and digs in to defend the Hegemony against all comers.
"I should have remembered to bring my noteputer, tried to get a new high-score in Reunification Wars III, or at least been able to check my messages" Carmichael said to himself regretfully before he picked up his soda again, downed what was left of the contents in a couple of gulps and lobbed the empty container into the trashcan. "With an aim like that I'm wasted sitting anywhere but the cockpit of a Highlander."
"You'll be lucky if they let you command a Burke, Lieutenant." a voice from behind interrupted his thoughts. "Remain seated, that's exactly where your ass is supposed to be located" it continued when Carmichael started to rise.
"Major Heath" Carmichael greeted the woman that was his temporary CO while on this, hopefully also temporary, assignment. She had an office down the corridor and spent most of her time reviewing paperwork which likely explained why she often looked on the verge of emptying her service-pistol into the next person that failed to return a request for leave in triplicate. She now stood in the doorway to the Monitoring Station with a soda of her own in her hand, also the lemonade because it really was the best thing in the vending machine.
"Having fun, Lieutenant?" Heath asked wryly.
"Yes, Ma'am." Carmichael replied.
"Strange, it doesn't mention a masochistic streak on your psyche profile." Heath responded. "I've spent a good few hours in the chair myself, makes you totally reassess your definition of what it is to be bored out of your skull."
"Far be it from me to disagree with a superior officer, Ma'am" Carmichael replied flatly. "I've got to ask, why not just get a damn computer to do this job instead?"
"One was supposed to be delivered from Tau Ceti just before the New Vandenberg Uprising began back in '65 and because of that it never got here." Heath explained.
"Then why not just make our own?" Carmichael asked reasonably. Despite being way out in the Periphery, beyond the accepted boundary of the Inner Sphere, Niops wasn't a primitive, barely developed low-tech backwater. They could still make things that were increasingly considered lostech elsewhere, thanks to all the fighting and economic disruption.
Heath shrugged. "Always something higher priority for the Project Workshops and there's always an extra body available to put in the chair in the meantime." she told him. "If nothing important goes wrong and needs replacement parts from the Workshops for a couple of years I guess they'll make us one, but don't get your hopes up."
"If I'm still here in a couple of weeks I'll be considering resigning my commission." Carmichael told her, not entirely in jest. "Why don't they just rotate this duty?"
"Because there's also usually a few people that are either no use for anything else or have done something deserving of punishment." Heath replied. "Assuming you're one of the latter group I also assume you won't do whatever it was again."
"I don't know what I did." Carmichael replied honestly.
"Then it's likely that after you've eventually escaped this tedium that I'll be seeing you again." Heath told him, the seldom-seen smile that had now appeared on her face demonstrating that his personal purgatory had brightened up her whole day. "See you in an hour to make sure you haven't fallen asleep or put your gun in your mouth" she told him. "Have fun, Lieutenant" she added with a chuckle as she walked off.
"I await your next visit with joyful expectation, Major." Carmichael replied sardonically.
"That sarcasm might be the reason you're in the chair, Lieutenant." Heath called back.
Carmichael blinked. Crap, she might be right., he thought to himself, assembling a mental list of higher ranked officers he might have sassed recently.
Before he could think of a third name for the list the central computer screen lit up followed by the other two as numbers and text started to scroll upwards. "Oh shit!" Carmichael quietly swore as the sensors reported an emergence wave at the Zenith Point. "MAJOR, WE HAVE AN INBOUND JUMPSHIP" he called out as he began to run through the checklist of what to do.
"This had better not be you yanking my chain, Lieutenant." Heath replied tersely, shortly before she stuck her head back around the empty doorway. "Guess not" she continued in surprise as she saw what was on the screens and stepped inside to stand over him. "Bring an optical telescope to bear" she ordered. "The star-gazers won't like us re-directing one of their precious orbitals but it's not like the stars won't be there to look at tomorrow."
"Already on it, Ma'am." Carmichael replied, taking remote control of not only one of the dropship-sized telescopes orbiting Niops VII but also sending an alert to all NAM installations of the inbound ship. At least the fighter-jocks would have some fun, getting ready to make an interception if necessary.
One of the inexplicably weird things about the Kearny-Fuchida Jump Drive was that it was demonstrably provable that the emergence wave of a jump actually started to form at the destination before the incoming vessel made the jump. This meant that in one sense Carmichael knew about the JumpShip having made a successful jump before it's crew even did. 
It was often said that if you kept too strong a mental grip on the basic principle of causality then the K-F equations were going to be beyond you because effect demonstrably preceded cause.
Somewhat less weird was that the power of the detectable emergence wave correlated to the mass of the inbound JumpShip, and how far it had jumped. This gave you the opportunity to guess what might be on the way before it appeared. Based on the readings Carmichael was looking at it could be a massive Monolith transport jumping ten light years, but it would be far more likely to be a smaller Invader jumping the safe maximum of thirty.
Thanks to the distances concerned what they were looking at had actually happened minutes earlier, the standard jump-points being located hundreds of millions or even billions of kilometres from the star because jumping in anywhere close to a gravity well was dangerous to the point of being suicidal. When you're dealing with literally astronomical distances light moved inconveniently slow and you spent a lot of time looking into the past even relatively locally.
"It's an Invader class" Carmichael noted, hardly a surprise because nearly half of all JumpShips in the Inner Sphere were Invaders. Despite the menacing name they were actually just civilian transports, although that didn't mean the three dropships she was carrying weren't full of people with guns and hostile intent.
The image of the Invader appeared on one of the screens and most planetary defense forces would kill for a telescope with a resolution which could make a ship that far away look so sharp and clear. One benefit of being a colony originally built for astronomers and astrophysicists was that sensors designed for scientific research worked pretty well in a military application too.
"Incoming tight-beam radio transmission from our guest. Looks like Niops Recognition Codes" Carmichael reported. "Really, really old ones. Also we're receiving a follow-up hail from a Captain Simon Mitchell… isn't that the retired SLDF Navy guy that showed up last year to see if anyone had nuked us yet?"
Heath laughed. "Yeah, that's him." she confirmed. "I was on duty when he jumped in broadcasting codes we hadn't used since before Amaris." she recalled. "I mean they weren't valid but it made us curious enough to ask how the hell he had them."
"Turned out he used to deliver cargo to Niops before the war, right?" Carmichael remembered seeing that on the holovision news. That sort of thing was a big story in a system like Niops where, unlike most of the Inner Sphere, the newscasters weren't reporting how many towns and cities were blasted to rubble that day.
"Yep, basically said it was nice to see we were still here and then asked if Niops was open to accepting refugees from the Terran Hegemony if he could find any" Heath recalled. "The High Associator eventually sent a reply saying we had already taken in more refugees than we could easily handle, but if they were from the former Hegemony worlds we could take a few, as long as they had at least one person with useful technical or scientific skills per family anyway."
Carmichael nodded. "Already got all those Capellans that turned up before I was born to handle the unskilled labour I guess" he observed. It was the arrival of those refugees fleeing the Succession War, bearing personal accounts of the immense scale of the destruction being wrought, that had convinced Niops to remain isolationist and firmly off the grid. Weirdly enough the Capellans were only too enthused to being taken in, despite not being accorded full citizenship rights by the Hegemony descended majority population who were suspicious of outsiders. It turned out they were just happy to get any rights at all, because for most of them that in itself was a big step-up compared to back home.
"We're receiving a follow-up communication from the JumpShip, still text only." Carmichael announced. "Message reads: 'Hope the invite still stands, sorry about interpreting it a little broadly but it's easier to ask for forgiveness than permission. Also, we've been looking and we can't find anywhere else to go'."
"What the hell do you think he means by that?"
"Your guess is as good as mine, Ma'am, probably better, you know the guy and I don't." Carmichael replied with a shrug. "Wait a second, I'm detecting additional emergence waves appearing at the Zenith and Nadir points." he stated, managing to keep his tone level and professional. "We have a large number of inbound JumpShips and if they're all arriving from the same system he did then some of them are very, very large."
"Define large"
"Like that ****** Black Lion Class battlecruiser that just jumped in… and a Texas Class Battleship…and now a freaking McKenna!" Carmichael exclaimed. "Detection System is also showing multiple transport JumpShips now appearing, plus additional warship contacts including at least one more cruiser and several destroyers" he reported then frowned. "This isn't some training simulation you organized to rag on the new guy is it, Ma'am?" thinking he should ask just to be sure.
"No" Heath replied flatly. "No, it is not."
"Now picking up IFF transponders, all vessels showing as belonging to the SLDF Eleventh Army" Carmichael told her, taking the Major at her word. "Do you think Kerensky's people have finally come back?" he asked, it had been over forty years since they vanished but much of the Inner Sphere had been expecting them to return ever since, likely in a bad mood when they saw what had happened to the Terran Hegemony in their absence.
"Who else could it be?" Major Heath replied reasonably, it wasn't like any of the Successor States could have fielded hardware like that even before they lost most of their fleets fighting each other. "I hope you're still keeping all other NAM installations sites appraised" she checked.
"Feeding them everything I have. Aerospace Fighter Command must be crapping themselves" Carmichael reasoned, imagining some poor fighter-jockey being told he might be scrambled to take on a fleet of warships and their own complements of aerospace fighters.
"I'll get on the horn personally to Brigadier Nellis from my office, if the ghost of First Lord Richard Cameron jumps in riding a magic unicorn yell out" Heath told him wryly, shaking her head in disbelief as to what was happening.
"Wait, we're receiving a communication from the battlecruiser. Vessel is claiming to be the SLS Michigan, message reads as coming from a Major-General Jenna Romanov of the 295th Battlemech Division and counter-signed by an Acting Major-General Franklin Hallis of the 331st. They're requesting permission to come down in a dropship to meet the High Associator and the ranking officer of the Niops Association Militia."
"Now I really need to talk to Nellis." Heath responded with a grimace before running out the door.
"I'll keep an eye out for the Spectral First Lord on the Unicorn, Ma'am." Carmichael called after her, grinning as he realized that he was going to have the best story to tell of anyone that had ever sat in this damn chair.
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===Notes from the Author===
*;Notes from the Author : This a reboot of a story I had running over on Battletech Forums and which I realized was wasting its premise and the setting, this version should be inordinately better.If the Battletech Universe is unfamiliar to you then to give you an idea it has been described as 'Game of Thrones with Big Stompy Robots'. After the fall of what was a powerful central government, one led by the Lord of a Great House, the other Great Houses fight over the scraps via any means at their disposal (armies, wealth, spies treachery). Pirates and Mercenaries are a common feature of this setting, the mass slaughter of civilians is common and there are even dragons you can ride (well on one world there are).Battletech is not however 'Game of Thrones with Big Stompy Robots'. Battletech predates the first book of A Song of Ice and Fire being published by over a decade, so therefore in fact Game of Thrones is Battletech without Big Stompy Robots (and Tywin Lannister only wishes he was Hanse Davion of the Federated Suns).That being established the year is now 2827. The Star League fell just over forty years ago, the Terran Hegemony was mostly destroyed by the Successor States fighting over who got to take the biggest chunk of it during the (First) Succession War that raged from 2786 to 2821, after General Aleksandr Kerensky led most of what was left of the Star League Defense Force off to places unknown after winning the Amaris Civil War, and out in the periphery near the edge of the Free Worlds League a tiny single-system polity called the Niops Association tries to ignore the rest of the Inner Sphere as it studies astronomy and astrophysics.Founded by the Terran Hegemony under the auspices of the Star League as a self-sufficient and oversized scientific research project, one intended for a multi-generational study of stellar evolution, Niops survived the Amaris Civil War and the Succession War by making sure not to get noticed in all the commotion. This worked so well that they ended up practically all what was left of the Star League (and the Terran Hegemony) and didn't suffer the catastrophic fall in their tech-base that most everyone else did (it helped that they had a weirdly disproportionate number of very smart people to start with).In canon, the Association continued on like this right through the Second and Third Succession Wars as well, but in canon a ships jump drive failed later than it does here in this AU (all will be explained later, it makes sense, honest). As a result of this mechanical fault a certain group has to take a detour which ultimately results in them running into another group... and well the 295th Battlemech Division under Major-General Jenna Romanov and the 331st Royal Battlemech Division under Acting Major-General Franklin Hallis turn up at Niops looking for a new home, and with a few ideas and plans about the future.Screw the Roman cosplayers of the Marian Hegemony, all those worlds are rightful Niops Association Hegemony clay!
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===Niops Star System Profile===
All the planets are tidally locked to the star except for Niops VII because it's the furthest out. This helps explain why the majority of the population of the Niops Association live on the coldest of the three inhabitable worlds in their system (tidally locked worlds with oceans and an atmosphere enjoy extreme weather as a result).
Niops I, II & III are hot as hell (Niops is only a Red Dwarf but they orbit really close to it). Niops IV is similar to Venus (thick, toxic atmosphere), V, VI & VII are inhabitable but only VII is really hospitable (it's cold but it doesn't have rainfall in some places that resembles a waterfall more than it does a storm).
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Chapter 1