GblaRCS Chpt 29

==Guided by the light of a (Red) Cameron Star - Chapter 29 -==
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"Genetic engineering is a valuable tool, but it needs to be heavily regulated and closely monitored and if you think otherwise I don't think you've been paying close enough attention." High Associator Giles Olson - 2838CE
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===Training Days===
Reykjanes Island Training Grounds - Niops VII – 2835
Mechwarrior Henry Callahan would have preferred to be in the cockpit of almost any other machine than the one he was right that moment, partially because the Mongoose Battlemech he was piloting had neither the armor nor the armament for taking on the OPFOR Phoenix Hawk that had appeared in front of him, but mostly because piloting a totem mech of Clan Mongoose made his flesh crawl.
It wasn't even one of the MON-66b Royal versions of the Mongoose, that at least would have been packing an Extended-Range Large Laser and the heatsinks to use it, but with only his trio of Medium Lasers to play with Henry couldn't use his speed advantage to open up the range and hope for a few lucky hits.
He could run, but that would allow the opposition Phoenix Hawk to flank Bravo Lance to the west and put shots into their sides and rear making it an unacceptable choice. They themselves were slugging it out with a couple of enemy Dervish mediums and a Flashman heavy so they couldn't come to his aid, and the rest of his own lance had already been knocked out by a strafing run by a trio of Stuka aerospace fighters.
Practically screaming warnings to Bravo Lance over the comms Henry poured on the speed to make himself a more difficult target as he exchanged fire with the Phoenix Hawk. Naturally everyone was using lasers at their low-powered training setting but it still looked spectacular enough in the reddish twilight of early evening on Niops.
The exercise simulated an environment with extremely hard jamming going on, so the computers in the comms system would not let you talk to anyone more than a klick away. This meant Henry couldn't reach either the battalion or regimental commander to warn them that the opposition had realised there was a weak point in the line and they were pushing it hard. All he could do was hope that someone else noticed the developing situation and had advised the senior officers, perhaps one of the pilots contesting for air-superiority above his head was making sure to keep an eye on the ground too because aerial observation was part of their job description.
You never realized how much easier this all was with well-informed command and control from above until you didn't have that, a little voice in the back of Henry's mind observed as he continued to exchange fire with the Phoenix Hawk. It helped you gain a much better appreciation of what Karl von Clausewitz had called the 'Fog of War' when you lacked the near-omniscience you had fighting a battle when all the sensors and electronic displays were working properly, radio comms were crystal clear and you had a senior officer with a fancy battle computer next to him feeding him tactical data automatically sorted in order of importance.
Not that Henry remembered von Clausewitz's book On War all that fondly from having it sections from it read to him as a bedtime story when he was little. It required more concentration than The Art of War by Sun Tzu ever had so it made it more difficult to get to sleep.
Of course, if you wanted nightmares there was always Des Principes de la Guerre by Ferdinand Foch that seemed to argue that with enough moral courage, esprit de corps and personal élan an attacking force could overwhelm any defender through sheer momentum. Given that the repeating rifle, machine gun and quick-fire artillery had all been invented before Foch wrote the book, and trench warfare was already very much a thing, Henry could only wonder as to the man's sanity or intelligence. With the outbreak of Terra's First World War General Foch's theories had run headlong into reality and proved about as successful in practice as you would expect, a bullet doesn't care how brave or skilled you are, it only cares if you're in its way.
As simulated damage built up and the cockpit display started to light up with warnings Henry was still calm enough to register another enemy machine closing in and he started to react to the new threat when a burst from an AC/20 impacted all over the torso of his Mongoose and it was deemed by the computer to have been knocked out with its pilot killed.
Since it was only an exercise not a real battle the AC/20 rounds were flash-bangs rather than the HEAP (High Explosive Armour Piercing) they would have been otherwise, but they were still heavy enough that Henry's light mech had rocked a little with the impact. The Mongoose was only a twenty-five tonner and although the muzzle-velocity of an AC/20 wasn't that high by autocannon standards a shell that was at least 150mm in calibre, the actual size depending on the model of AC/20 in question, had plenty of kinetic energy.
Henry sigh as his mech automatically shut down and he lost the ability to communicate with any 'live' mechs on his own team, dead men don't talk.
The radio switched over to the band 'dead' combatants were on and Henry heard laughter over his headphones. "As Major Prigioni would say, Mechwarrior Callahan sleeps with the fishes." Henry recognised Fred's voice.
"Yeah, and he's dead too." Dave Robertson added for himself, laughing.
"That joke was funnier the first three times you guys said it" Henry growled back at them.
"Hey man, don't date a chick with gills if you can't take a joke." Dave responded, still cackling away.
"At least I'm not going steady with my right hand like you are Robertson" Henry retorted.
"Gross" Katrina's voice interjected. Henry could well imagine her look of distaste he had known the girl his whole life. "You were lucky as hell avoiding that strafing run that got the rest of us Henry" she observed.
"Luck? No, it was pure skill." Henry lied, how his mech had managed to avoid getting tagged by any of the weapons being fired at it during the strafing run was a miracle. A Stuka mounted four Enhanced ER PPCs in the wings and either a Gauss Rifle or an AC/20 in the nose, any of which could bring down a Mongoose with little trouble. Hell, a Stuka with that loadout would give an Atlas assault mech nightmares.
"If we were lucky, Henry, would have been knocked out and you would have still been alive Kat." Frederick suggested. "That Talon you're in might have taken out the Phoenix Hawk Henry was tussling with."
"Maybe if she didn't shoot like a girl." Dave responded.
"I'm a better shot than you are Robertson." Katrina defended herself. That was the main reason they had assigned her the only mech in the lance that mounted an ER PPC, she could get the best use out of the thing at long range.
Which was not to say that any of the former sibcadets were actually bad shots, they were all in fact exceptional marksmen both in and out of a Battlemech, it was just that Katrina had the highest scores of any of them on the range. Henry thought it was because the girl had just a little more patience when it came to lining up her shots before pulling the trigger or pressing the button.
A thought struck Henry that it was actually pretty funny that being objectively some of the most highly skilled Mechwarriors on the planet, if lacking practical experience in combat, their lance had been unceremoniously smeared by a few fighter jocks and they could have done very little about it.
As an object lesson in why combined-arms-warfare was the way to do things it ranked up there with last weeks exercise during which the lance Jennifer was with walked into a simulated minefield and was then virtually plastered by artillery while they tried to pick their way through it.
No doubt about it, Henry decided, never leave home without a few Rifleman mechs to provide air-defence and some combat engineers to sweep for mines. 
The scuttlebutt said that once a few more Project Workshops were up-and-running General Romanov intended to start hand-building small numbers of various machines for niche purposes, and that these would include a few lances of the Rifleman II design that had never made it into mass production by the Star League. The Successor States might not have as many warships as they used to these days, but they still had plenty of aerospace fighters and keeping them off her MechWarriors while they brought their superior firepower to bear on enemy ground forces was not a part of modern warfare to be ignored. Even a big, hundred-ton Stuka would not enjoy coming in on an attack run and being lit up by twin Large Pulse Lasers and a pair of LB-10X autocannons spitting flak while they were trying to line up their shot. Anything smaller would likely hightail it out of there straight away because aerospace fighters don't just shut down when enough internal systems are crippled as happens in a BattleMech, well they do but after that they crash into the ground hard.
Obtaining useful salvage from a knocked-out enemy mech after a battle is very much the norm, finding anything in a wrecked aerospace fighter that remains in one piece after the airframe intersected with the ground at high speed was miraculous.
"Wanna hit the bar later to drown our sorrows?" Fred asked the rest of the lance in a deadpan tone of voice.
"I'd prefer not to get thrown in the glasshouse thanks, Hallis." Henry replied evenly.
"Come on, it'll be fun." Dave said. "We could get T-Shirts made with 'Instant Maniac: Just add alcohol' printed on them" he joked.
"That's not funny, Robertson." Katrina complained.
"To be fair the expression on that cop's face when you body slammed him was pretty hilarious from where I was standing Kat" Frederick disagreed.
"You started that shit, Hallis, all you had to do was go quietly when he wanted to slap the cuffs on you for throwing that poor off-duty NAM schmuck through the bar window but no, you had to yell out 'Wolverines' and then we couldn't not get involved." Henry complained.
"You have free will don't you?" Fred asked rhetorically.
"I think it's now well established that we don't Fred, not really, not unless we're both sober and not under stress" Henry replied flatly. "If that judge hadn't accepted the testimony from those geneticists that that jerk who stuck those modified warrior and fight-or-flight genes in us messed up we would have all been behind bars instead of being sentenced to the army instead."
"We were all going to join the army when we graduated High-School anyway so no harm, no foul" Dave contended.
"I would have liked the choice." Henry muttered. Philomena was a few months into her bio-science degree now and he had considered going to university with her, albeit studying a different subject, when the fall-out from Gamma Sibko's eighteenth birthday celebration the year before had ruled that out completely.
They had always known that the geneticists who spliced them together had tweaked their fight-or-flight instinct, attempting to make the future warriors of Clan Wolverine more closely resemble the temperament of their totem animal that never backed down from an opponent regardless of how much bigger and more powerful it was than them it was. What had not become apparent until they were old enough to drink was that one of those modified genes reacted badly to alcohol, very badly.
All having the same 'birthday', all having been decanted from the Iron Wombs on the same day, and what with the legal age to drink being eighteen on Niops, they had decided to all go to a bar to celebrate. After a few drinks they had all become pretty rowdy but the trigger to what happened next was when one of the off-duty NAM infantry who were drinking at the same bar accidentally jostled Fred, spilling his drink.
Angry words were exchanged, threats made, a punch thrown and then Frederick Hallis went completely mental and threw a man through the bar window.
Several of the NAM people ended up hospitalized before the police arrived mob-handed, the first of them being assaulted by a cute teenage blonde with her hair in braids before electric stun guns and batons were employed to restore order and restrain a bunch of very drunk genetically-engineered lunatics.
They were all just lucky that the judge decided that fines, a few weeks community service and a minimum of thirty years in the army was the appropriate sentence and not jail. What likely swayed her was the argument that since it was Franklin Hallis and his people that had made these ticking time-bombs then he should be the one to have to deal with this shit.
Naturally the judge also ruled that everyone from sibko Gamma, as well as the other younger kits with the same modified genes, was now legally obliged to never touch alcohol for their entire lives. It clearly impaired their higher functions and lowered their inhibitions in such a way as their instincts became unrestrained, and their instincts were not those appropriate to a civilised society.
Just because it was pretty cool to watch a nature documentary where a transplanted Terran Wolverine took on a Ghost Bear several times its size on Strana Mechty, the bear retreating from the sharp teeth, vicious claws and sheer ferocity of the smaller animal, did not mean it was a good idea to let human versions of the things run around free and unfettered.
At least the genetic engineers that made the Ironborn kits had stripped out the genes linked to alcoholism and addictive behavior so it wasn't as difficult to get them to abstain as it might have been otherwise.
"Do you think we'll still get a place on the next cohort being run through the Gunslinger program after this fiasco?" Katrina asked.
"Only if we do a lot better tomorrow. There's a lot of others wanting on the list and they've all got seniority on us, most have seen a little action too" Fred replied glumly. "Face it, until we get to tussle with some pirates ourselves all that talk about how skilled we are is just talk."
"I Know I've said it before but I'm not sure that hammering some third-rate MechWarriors in fourth-rate machines is really the best arbiter of ability" Henry maintained. "If you put the kits from Zeta or Iota sibkos in SLDF Royals I'd bet they'd tear the average pirate command apart and most of them aren't old enough to shave."
"Romanov is old-school, that's why she made us go through basic training and then the trainee MechWarriors course even though we could have taught those classes" Katrina observed.
Dave laughed. "Do you remember the expression on Jennifer's face when that sergeant started showing us how to strip down and clean a rifle?"
"If she had just kept her mouth shut instead of telling him she could do that blindfold when she was eight not eighteen she would have done a lot fewer push-ups that week" Fred recalled, laughing himself.
"Those Drill Instructors didn't like us very much" Katrina remembered.
"They sure-as-shit didn't after you dislocated that one's shoulder Kat" Henry replied flatly.
"He shouldn't have told me to try and break free of his hold, it wasn't my fault I'm stronger and faster than I look and I caught him by surprise getting the leverage before he could counter my move" Katrina replied. "Unarmed Combat Instructor my ass" she muttered to herself just loud enough for the others to hear.
"Exercise should finish soon, if we're quick we can get back to barracks first and hit the showers before the hot water runs out" Dave suggested. That was one benefit of driving a fast, light mech, the guys and gals in larger, slower machines had to eat your dust.
"The hot water doesn't run out here you idiot, they push pump cold water into the ground through one hole and hot water comes out of another hole drilled next to it" Fred told him. "It's unlimited free geothermal energy, didn't you notice all the freaking volcanoes around here?"
"More to the point how did he not notice that the water sometimes smells sulphurous and put two and two together" Henry asked.
"Is that what that smell is? I though it was someone's shitty deodorant" Dave replied.
"Only if there's a brand called 'Dante: The Tenth Level of Fragrance', you bozo" Kat responded curtly. General opinion was that Dave might have gotten saKhan Dwight Robertson's good looks but clearly not his brains, Fred I fact personally theorized one of the other genetic donors concerned might have even been an Ice Hellion somehow because those guys were dense.
When the exercise ended, somehow amazingly their side had apparently won despite their own minimal contribution to the victory, the four of them trudged their mechs back towards barracks for a shower followed by chowtime, Henry thinking more about the fog-of-war and force multipliers.
At the lowest level just having good sensors on your mech mattered a lot. If you ran into an enemy Hunchback then knowing whether it was a HBK-4G with an AC/20 or one of the HBK-4H models being fielded now that swapped the big gun for a longer-ranged but less devastatingly punchy AC/10 could save your life. On that note the recent intelligence briefing that the Beagle Active Probe was no longer being produced by any of the Great Houses was definitely good news for Niops because it meant that the new model Hussar in production that did mount one was even more of a force multiplier now than it had been when approved for production.
If the Inner Sphere was starting to fall behind that far in electronics then it also explained why General Romanov was starting to make noise about not just wanting those Rifleman II mechs for additional air defense capabilities but also a handful of the CP-10-Z model of the Cyclops. It wasn't so much that they needed yet another assault 'mech type in service for fighting it out on the front lines it was that the CP-10-Z was equipped with a Tacticon B-2000 battlecomputer that enabled the senior officer sat in the cockpit to effectively command an entire brigade from their chair, put all the regimental and battalion commanders in a Highlander, or ideally a more modern command mech like the Nightstar if enough of them could be made, and command and control would be greatly enhanced.
Naturally if they were going to be turning out the Rifleman II, Cyclops, and maybe even a short production run of the Nightstar then Franklin Hallis's dream of getting his hands on a few lances of new-built Devastator assaults was going to have to be put on hold. They were at least going to get to field a larger number of the lighter and considerably cheaper Thug assault now instead of course, the license having been brought for a fraction of it's true worth from the poor Maltex Corporation who badly needed any money they could get urgently, but the Thug was no Devastator unfortunately.
Compared to what they had to spend to get the license and technical package for the Blackjack the Thug was actually expensive though. General Motors had been clearly amazed that anyone actually wanted to make the Blackjack again, given the mech's piss-poor reputation, and knowing that any they made themselves just weren't going to sell they let it go for a song.
The fact that GM had fixed all the main problems with the design of the machine decades ago had been no help to the company because its rep was already considered unsalvageable by that point. There had been a lot of lousy BattleMech designs over the years but the early versions of the Blackjack were pretty unique in that most people expected to be handed a brand-new machine that didn't suffer from the armor being too brittle and falling off in chunks when struck by an impact or the feet not being undersized so the thing had problems staying upright on even moderately broken ground.
If you wanted a machine that potential foes would badly underestimate then the Blackjack was a good way to go however. Not only wasn't it going to randomly fall over in Niops service, nor was its armor plate about as useful as cardboard, by replacing the standard AC/2 popguns with an Improved AC/5 designed to look as much like the original armament as possible the Blackjack in use by Planetary Militias in the Niops Hegemony would not be the machine the enemy was expecting.
If the other side underestimated you then the chances of them being sloppy and unprofessional went up sharply and they would pay for that badly once the autocannon rounds started to fly.
At least with ComStar playing nice, at least for now, Niops was able to make diplomatic overtures to the Great Houses and strike deals with companies throughout the Inner Sphere and Near Periphery without having to send jumpships hundreds of lightyears. The High Associator had agreed that Niops would neither offer to sell HPG technology, blueprints or manuals to the powers who had signed up to the Communications Protocol of 2787 in return for access to the ComStar network while further negotiations were ongoing, and presumably ComStar was happy with the opportunity to read Niops's mail.
Most of the Great Houses barely acknowledged Niops coming to them to say hello, with only the Free Worlds League paying too much attention because of their geographical position and the fact they realised now who it was that had brought the rights to the Alphard Trading Corporation operating in that part of space. A FWL flagged jumpship had arrived in Niops to take a look, seemed suitably surprised to run into the Cape Bon and then headed back to Marik territory only to appear again a month later in the Alphard system where it was told that if it wanted to trade then it would have to go through proper channels via Niops.
The High Associator did manage to score some diplomatic points with House Marik when revealing that the Niops military was actually the old 295th Battlemech Division which then led on to them learning that the people pretending to be the old 295th, the mercenary regiment Raymond's Redcoats, were actually the 38th Amaris Fusiliers who had turned pirate as the Cameron's Curse before rebranding again and going legit.
Since Raymonds Redcoats worked for the Lyran Commonwealth it meant that Marik propaganda had some fun attacking their long-term enemy for being the kind of people that would happily employ pirates and war criminals and they actually went so far as to send an HPG to Jenna Romanov asking for her to comment personally.
All Romanov had to say on the matter was that if any of Raymond's Redcoats ever got within three jumps of Niops territory then she would have them seized, put up against a wall and then shot for sullying the good name of her command.
After that everything had soon calmed back down as the entire Inner Sphere, including the Free Worlds League, went back to focusing on the war. It wasn't like these periphery weirdos claiming to be the Star League or the Terran Hegemony reborn or whatever, really mattered in the big scheme of things.
Ongoing contact with the rest of human space wasn't even the lead news item on Niops for all that long. After the re-election of Giles Olson to what would be his final term of office according to the Niops Constitution the next news item of interest was the discovery of large deposits of diamonds and fire opals on Galileo, and then the discovery of another Star League science colony near Frobisher known by the codename 'Project Sagittarius Umbrella'.
The locals called it 'McEvedy's Folly' which is why they freaked when they saw the nametag on one of the SLDF people sent out to investigate further.
It wasn't Jennifer's fault that she apparently had a distant cousin who put Ogbert Farnstrom in the shade when it came to the top-ten rankings of Mad Scientists was it?
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==Chapter Notes==
*;Notes from the Author : Wanting to imitate some of the traits of their totem animal is very much a clan thing and the Wolverines wanting to add a little of the personality and attitude of the mustelid Gulu gulu into their warrior caste while meddling with their DNA strikes me as very plausible. There are in fact several known 'Warrior Genes' the most well known of which relates to MAO-A, but a couple of particularly interesting variants were found during a study of Finnish males in prison for violent crime. It was discovered that if they carried two particular genes they were thirteen times more likely to have a history of repeat violent behavior and that being drunk had a triggering effect (there's another similar 'warrior gene' found in the Māori of New Zealand apparently).The now adult kits of sibko Gamma have a severely borked fight-or-flight response even when sober and their warrior genes go completely off the rails when they're drunk.Still, if you want to see some really crazy genetic engineering then just visit McEvedy's Folly where it makes what the Star League were up to on Frobisher look entirely reasonable!Jenna Romanov hankering for small numbers of the Cyclops as a brigade command mech and the Rifleman II for air defence is a good, rational choice. Her also wanting the heads of Raymond's Redcoats on a stick is more of a personal thing.
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Chapter 29