TGoaW-31

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==Chapter 31 - The Glow of a Worm inside a Child's Eye==
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Military Success can be tempered by...
...political will. The Combine Conflict saw a number of odd events-the AFFC's success in terms of troop movements, initiative, striking power and the siege of the Dieron District was tempered by cunning moves from Comstar and aggressive, creative strikes from the Capellan Confederation and Free Worlds League, forcing the Federated Suns to back off on the Combine invasion due to facing an aggresive CapCon equipped with two salvaged Riga class Warships 'found' and restored to operational capability, and a Free Worlds League Navy that 'found' one more of their own, and of course, the Combine's reveal of a series of advanced combat dropships built around the almost-universal Mule design, along with a salvaged Aerospace Carrier DCS Samarkand.
Leading things to something of a negotiated draw after three years of combat.
The obvious nature of Comstar's involvement was politely unspoken by Hanse and Melissa Steiner-Davion at the talks held on FedCom captured Dieron itself, leaving the Draconis Combine one district smaller than it was at the start...for the time being.
The obvious problem for the Lyrans, being that they tipped their hand somehow, and early enough that someone who could make a decision got word of their Naval building programme, so the six Sampan-II class Corvettes (a 'stretched' version of the Type 51 Gunboat equipped with a proper compact core) were simply not enough to tip things from "winnable in a near-draw of catastrophic proportions" to 'easily won'.
In general terms, however, the war-goals had been, at least partially achieved. The Combine was smaller, had lost a major industrial sector, and the Federated Commonwealth looked somewhat LESS emaciated in the Terran Corridor region.
Accidents at Galax, Dieron, Necromo, Pandora, Gibbs, and Alarion shortly followed the signing of the armistice, matched by similar accidents at Gibson and Luthien.
Non-local intruders would show up in the Kowloon system in October of 3046, rendering Duke Dinh Ngo into the past-tense, and crippling two of the core forges at Boojum...
However, they missed the three others nearby, and failed completely to guarantee the deaths of his heirs.
Patrick was off to the Nagelring, Henry was in-transit to the Groningen junior school on Coventry...and Elizabeth was with the most dangerous babysitter in a thousand light-years, safely bundled aboard SLS Tabiranth, whose automatics made short work of the rogue pirates that hit the Boojum Yards after-the-fact.
Officially, there would be no survivors from Bronson's Horde. Unofficially, vetted agents of Lohengrin got a small consignment of traumatized, unidentified prisoners minus some of their teeth from the Sithers-Deen and Brantwell collectives in the Kowloon system.
The duke-in-waiting David Ngo, now Kommandant David Ngo of 3 battalion, 26th Lyran Guard, declined to resign his commission, and the Archon had to assign someone as Regent in the Kowloon system.
with Katrina dead, that duty fell to Melissa, who, briefed in on the Tabiranth situation, placed the role of Regency into the hands of one of her husband's trusted men, James Stonecipher of Filtvelt, with guardianship of the youngest Ngo sibling placed in the hands of the Sithers-Deen chairman, Kelli Whyte, to help the young girl adjust to her future as Baroness of Spider Moon (and the outer-system of Kowloon) per her grandfather's will.
The Regency is a temporary post, awaiting the completion of Patrick Ngo's five years of post-Academy service in the AFFC (Due to come to pass in 3055), given that his father all but directly stepped down from the role of Duke.
Kelli Whyte, in turn, placed Her Lordship Elizabeth in the trusted hands of the most trustworthy entity in the Kowloon system-Elizabeth would spend her time aboard SLS Tabiranth, learning the people she would one day represent in the Estates General as Baroness-the Rockjacks and Spacers of the Kowloonese outer system. Half a billion of them.
Almost a duchy in and of itself.
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; Note from Author : Okay, so I didn't show the pivotal battles, I only referenced them off-screen. Here's the Inner Sphere situation as of 3046, after the War of 3040...The Draconis Combine is smaller, and weaker. There's an ongoing insurgency in the former Dieron district, now the Dieron March of the Federated Commonwealth.The Free Worlds League has taken a bite out of the rimwward side of the Lyrans, but Thomas stopped short of more than a minor retaking of territory lost in the previous conflict.On the Federated Suns side of the house, no actual territorial exchange took place-Romano somehow wound up grinding to a halt on the first wave hitting Candace's territory, but that didn't stop her from doing something fairly intelligent-she managed a commerce raiding blockade of key worlds in the Capellan March and Tikonov Free Republic, creating enough chaos to force the Federated Suns to devote major resources to protecting that region, and inflicting heavy space-based losses on AFFS units through jump-point ambushes and interdictions.She didn't try to land ground troops, because after her purges, the Chancellor 'Bloody Romano' didn't have enough forces to LAUNCH invasions. But the 'found' warships and loaned advisors let her wreak enough havoc to cripple the AFFS war effort on the Combine front and saved Luthien.Thus the map isn't THAT much different than it is in the canon. the war started later, there were whole regimental combat teams destroyed, and more worlds were taken, but Theodore's bold strokes saved quite a lot of the Combine when combined with the actions of the Concord.Everyone's licking wounds, except the poor bastards fighting the insurgencies in the Dieron area.Nobody realizes that they still have three more years before something worse than each other is set to arrive...except for Wolf's Dragoons, but then, they could've said something earlier and didn't. 
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